IN THE CHANGING world of behavioural trends and their influence on the arts, a number of human qualities can suddenly seem to vanish, become outdated or unpopular. Certainly, when we look at human behaviour in much visual art, fiction, poetry, and films from the mid-20th Century back, in the light of contemporary values, we will notice the sharp difference between what we accept as popular behavioural values today, and what the arts in past eras represented as current behavioural values back then.

But are we really sure the visual art, fiction, poetry, theatre and films we know of comprise a general view of behavioural trends in the past?

It all depends on what examples of these arts we are using as a judgmental yardstick. For example, is Asian art and culture really serene, formal and other-worldly as some modern artists profess, or is it also Baroquely sensual and sensitively psychedelic, as in antique Indian temple art at Baital Deul, Karnak, Mukteswar, etc?

How about Chinese antique erotic graphics? Is the literature of the UK defined by the decorous topics of Dickens, Austen, George Eliot, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and E.M. Forester, or the quotidian frankness of Lord Byron, Daniel Defoe, Frank Harris, Harriet Marwood, Henry Fielding, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence?

Are the paintings of Turner, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Ingres, David, Velasquez or Goya more representative of European life and culture than that of Rubens, Jordaens, De Houch, Fragonard, Klimt, Matisse or Picasso? And more to the point, are popular Hollywood films like ‘Gone With The Wind’ (1939), ‘Citizen Kane’ (1940), ‘Casablanca’ (1942), ‘The Searchers’ (1956), or ‘Basic Instinct’ (1992) — despite our respect for the public’s demand, and those abridged surveys of ‘the best’ this and that — more perennially valuable to hundreds of millions of lives in and out the USA, in comparison to other perhaps forgotten films like ‘Since You Went Away’ (1944), ‘Pride Of The Marines’ (1945), ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ (1946), ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ (1950), or ‘Giant’ (1956)?

The arts are always caught between demands for their loyalty to specific behavioural trends in the present world, and a more permanent quest to discover and uphold social and individual values which define an optimistic pleasure in our entire life-span.

There is no greater relevant creative process for exploring the importance of this quotidian optimism than focussing on the interaction and influence of humans, male and female, male and male, female and female, on each other.

How do the last five films mentioned here illustrate this point? In ‘Since You Went Away’, are we  to assume that the individual and social strength and kindness of Claudette Colbert, her two daughters (Jennifer Jones and Shirley temple), and their housekeeper, Hattie McDaniel, is only due to the temporary effect of World War II on American homes left to be managed by women, because fathers and sons are abroad? Is a war and male absence from families necessary to produce such social cohesion and altruism? Is the achievement of a social utopia, where everyone has their own house, car, job and happy family a reality today, therefore making the individual simplicity and  social honour of the women in ‘Since You Went Away’ out-dated, irrelevant values in the contemporary world?

The truth of the matter is that the gist of this film exists like an exemplary value of human interaction and concern, which, in the spirit of art, does not need the logical explanation of a specific circumstance (like a wartime crisis, and the loss of male authority and leadership in families) to justify the necessity of exemplary individual and social behavior in our, or any period of time.

The earned respect, importance and social value of Classic Hollywood films as perennial value systems rests on productions like ‘Pride Of The Marines’ of 1945, which should not be categorized as a propagandistic film based on the then Office Of War Information (OWI) morale mottoes.

What makes such a film, like many others of the same decade, still contemporary is its high-quality social values based on interactions between couples, single men and women in various positions in life, and employment. We all know the convention of filmmaking anywhere offers the chance to develop all sorts of stories in which there may be no particular cohesive theme which concerns the facing of basic inescapable human problems produced by the biological attraction between men and women.

Such important individual and social issues often existed in the films of Eleanor Parker, one of the most stunning thematic actresses to emerge from Hollywood in the 1940s. We see this in her major roles in exemplary films like: ‘Pride Of The Marines’ (1945), ‘Never Say Goodbye’ (1946), ‘Caged’ (1950) ‘Scaramouche’ (1952), ‘The Naked Jungle’ (1954), and ‘Madison Avenue’ (1962).

What makes ‘Pride Of The Marines’ (one of Delmer Daves’ long list of precious films) still profoundly valuable today, is not the fact that it is based on the true story of an American marine in World War II, who, in a heroic act, loses his sight, then his love of life, and briefly his respect for the military honour bestowed on him, but Parker’s role as the woman who, throughout the film, is able to separate her romantic feelings for him from her quiet intelligence and  social responsibility as an individual, combining the two when they are  needed  most, so that her sensuality becomes the same as her personal honour.

Both director Delmer Daves and Parker’s skill at holding the potential of a human character in suspense is what pushes the film over the border of documentary into the value of contemporary human relevance.

When Eleanor Parker, in one scene, runs down a narrow staircase in a humble boarding house to answer her door, holding the edge of her closefitting working clothes so as to manoeuvre her legs, the scene both releases and freezes a raunchy feminine blend of latent availability and reserved honour.

Parker would repeat the same style of simmering feminine patience and criticism of the male ego in ‘The Naked Jungle’ almost ten years later as Charleston Heston’s mail-order bride to the Brazilian Amazon, where, as an already experienced woman, she must provide her body yet protect her honour as an undefiled value from Heston’s crude materialistic evaluations of human value.

Classic Hollywood idealism, optimism, social utopianism — call it any of these grand terms — has become jaded, not only by post-war international atrocities made instantly audible and visible by better communications, but by a silly mundane glorification of ‘realism’  as the best ingredient of art.

The time taken up in today’s films by an obsessive dedication to outward ‘reality’, the more distasteful the better, has eroded and belittled Hollywood’s and European film’s previous emphasis on idealistic feelings, dialogue, and actions. With the normalization of such a scenario today, we could say that much filmmaking itself may contribute to the ‘reality’ that is now the world’s pressing problems.

Such a prospect is the complete opposite of a superb 1946 Frank Capra Hollywood classic like ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, whose worth we should not evaluate as mere entertaining fantasy, but recognise its forever human element which places social happiness and ambition as inner values, despite the old leaky house we must inhabit, or the financial hurdles to jump.

It is here that Donna Reed, as a largely thematic actress portraying Classic Hollywood’s woman of honour, reveals her idealistic and fertile proactive feminism, rather than a reactionary
one in her roles in: ‘They Were Expendable’, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’, ‘From Here To Eternity’, and especially those uniquely feminine oriented Westerns like ‘Backlash’, ‘Hangman’s Knot’, ‘They Rode West’, ‘Gun Fury’, and ‘The Far Horizons’, not forgetting her final film, ‘Beyond Mombasa’ of 1958.

What all these films reveal, not as bland talkative fare but as pragmatic exercises,  is not the domination of flawed reality as a topic, but the reality of film as art superimposed on the given realities of living.

Also, this value of the woman of honour in Classic Hollywood has little to do with some prissy, conventional or conservative idea of ‘honour’. The route to honour in the best of these films is closer to the truth of reality, because it rises above a predefined or servile definition of virtue, and projects it as a value, never lost, but rather waiting for the opportunity to arise in humans.

This is evident in Donna Reed’s Oscar-winning role as the prostitute among servicemen in Hawaiian bars in ‘From Here to Eternity’. She jumps at the opportunity Montgomery Clift’s personality provides for her to transfer her commercialized social charms to another loveless but sensitive individual like herself.

Similarly, in ‘The Far Horizons’, Reed as the Indian squaw who tells Charleston Heston “I am your woman now” after he defends her freedom from a drunken bully, projects honour in the form of frank non-European customs; a coy role Reed clearly liked doing because it subverted the prescribed white woman’s  social etiquette.

It is precisely this intended textual subversion of western mores which necessitated Reed, a white actress, to fill the role of a squaw rather than an actual native Indian actress. This is an example of Classic Hollywood’s daring incorporation and idealization of ‘reality’ seen from the perspective of the ‘other’, whose value system is usually vetoed.

Similarly, when we consider Jean Hagen’s stunningly touching portrayal of Doll, the poor insecure nightclub playgirl befriended by Dix, the burly, tender-hearted country boy-turned-city-gangster, unforgettably played by Sterling Hayden in ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ of 1950, easily one of the best films to ever come out of Hollywood,  Doll’s low lifestyle does not erase the fact that she is a woman of honour.

Doll’s fascination, respect, and dedication to Dix, because of his selfless assistance to her, defines human honour as the supreme value of ‘The Asphalt Jungle’. The film does not glorify a criminal’s lifestyle; it superimposes honourable civilized social behaviour on their waywardness .

When we think about it, this ability of Classic Hollywood to achieve such creative excellence is based on directors like John Huston, whose idealistic yet critical vision portrayed feminine roles like Doll’s as ordinary, yet vital agents of sustained honour in cinematic art.