THE CHANGE that illustrates the difference between today’s Hollywood and European films and classic films stretching from the 1980s back is a result of the breakthrough that has occurred in social freedom becoming expressed in the arts on the whole. Hard won social freedoms find much reflection in the arts, especially that of cinema. There is nothing wrong with such freedoms, but when applied to film-making, a new position of creative relevance also appears, basing its meaning on explicitly depicting previously forbidden or ignored topics, which, in fact, can replace possibilities of insinuated and thoughtfully implied visual meaning, thereby leaving nothing to intelligent stimulation and the imagination.

The new freedom of explicitness works well in the hands of film directors who understand that it needs to be meaningfully attached to characterizations and social issues. For example, in Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s  recent film, ‘Volver’, about the eccentric and comical attitudes and experiences of a group of contemporary Spanish women in a small town in Spain, Penelope Cruz, after a stressful day, rejects the sexual advances of her crude working-class husband, and he proceeds to masturbate beside her in bed.

We are not explicitly shown the act, but his facial excitement and grunts of pleasure, and Cruz’s silently surprised stare, are sufficiently explicit. Such a scene would never be shown in Hollywood or European film classics until the 1980s at least.

Similarly, one of the best and most controversial films to come out of India in 2005, ‘Page 3’, directed by Madhur Blandarkar and starring Sen Sharma and Atul Kulkani, contains much erotic dancing, drug taking, homosexual encounters, child slavery and pedophilia in its revelation of Mumbai’s social life covered by a female  Indian entertainment reporter.

All such social excesses, even if they already existed in India’s earlier decades, would not have been subject matter for films as explicit as they are today in ‘Page 3’. Yet these sensational details are not the true subject of ‘Page 3’, but rather the female reporter who represents a contemporary woman of honour who journeys through a gamut of emotional outrages at the social cesspool she discovers. Nevertheless, in a truly Indian spiritual fashion, she eventually comes to realise her own ability to identify with the larger  positive side of her professional experience.

To arrive at such a contemporary definition of female honour, we have to hang on to creative opportunity  which film  offers us to be idealistic,  and to feed such idealism back into everyday problems introduced by the inescapable workings of society.

Classic Hollywood built its identity as a ‘dream factory’ on the idealistic difference between creative film and the worn-out, over-familiar nature of real life. It should surprise no thoughtful fan of film culture that in pursuing an idealistic inspiration for the constant rejuvenation of life, actresses are probably the best conveyor of human honour in the arts of creative literature and film.

Values of pleasure and placidity attached to women’s role, and respect in society, from male and female viewpoints, no doubt account for the attraction and popularity of contemporary films where the thematic tradition exploring women of honour continues.

Take a film like ‘Three Colors: Red’, the amazing final film in a trilogy by the outstanding Polish  director, Krzysztof  Kieslowski. Central to the film’s surprising theme of rejuvenation is young Irene Jacob’s gradual realisation that a jaded old magistrate’s honesty (Jean- Louis Trintignant) and her personal and professional insecurities are really emerging routes to a romantic friendship bridging youth and age, erasing the conventional barriers between generations, and subtly evoking the ideal of human honour as a quotidian pleasure.

Similarly, in an exceptional Oscar-winning Hollywood film, ‘Leaving Las Vegas’, Elisabeth Shue’s role as the Las Vegas hooker, resigned to her abused life on the streets, reactivates her dormant self-honour to match the selfless kindness of Nick Cage’s characterisation as a suicidal alcoholic. Shue’s brilliant characterization is of a contemporary woman of honour in a vicious materialistic environment where basic decency and idealism lie submerged even in social outcasts.

It may seem like an exaggeration to suggest a relationship between the Hollywood Classic, ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ of 1950, and the recent ‘Leaving Las Vegas’, but there is a strong similarity between the relationship of honour in the roles of Jean Hagen and Sterling Hayden in the older film, and Elizabeth Shue and Nicholas Cage in the recent one.

It was Classic Hollywood, with its silvery cool and clean black-and-white celluloid tones, which laid down the style which influenced various examples of women of honour in some of the best socially idealistic contemporary films.

Consider Veronica Lake, one of the quintessential behavioral stylists of Classic Hollywood. All her dozen or more film-roles portray her distinctness, but it is ‘The Blue Dahlia’ of 1946 that takes the cake. Nothing is so entrancing, so caring and humane as Lake’s quiet tone of voice, take-charge understanding and mannerisms when, in the pouring rain, she first picks up Alan Ladd in her car and becomes his confidante and alter ego.

She took the role clearly into an idealistic zone of personal honour, which many knowledgeable  professional actresses echo today. Perhaps Lake had no distinct claim to such a projected style, which really has nothing to do with her famous hairstyle, and when we see it sometimes manifested in later actresses like the Europeans, Nathalie Baye, Irene Jacob, or Domiziana Giordano, it may be merely a human coincidence, not a professional choice on their part.

However, with contemporary Hollywood actresses like Faye Dunaway, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kim Bassinger, Lake’s style could be more a conscious choice. Not that it is particularly popular or even liked. It is too persistently thematic and self-confident; maybe that was why Lake, helped by her headstrong attitude, lost roles early in her career, and eventually ended up as an aging barmaid in a New York hotel, until a responsible journalist in the 1960s recognised her and gave her back the respect she deserved.

Pfeiffer was one of the best forerunners of a revived Lake style in ‘Tequila Sunrise’, but it was way ahead of its time in post-modern interpretation, and a decade later, Bassinger, in an actual imitation role as Lake in ‘L.A. Confidential’, reaped the Oscar reward for a stylistic progression which Pfeiffer had much earlier tacitly projected.

One of the behavioral trends today which obscures or even damages a clear picture of just how creatively fertile countless Hollywood films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s were, is the stereotypical habit of defining and summarizing them according to their genres: Film Noir, Screwball Comedy, Social Problem film, etc.

This process should be mainly used for categorical inventories. Numerous outstanding films lose their detailed originality, which rely on their actors, actresses, directors and cinematographers, if seen only as various manifestations of predestined archetypes, or vehicles for mere exaggerated plots with the inevitable crime thrown in to fulfill the by now boring and routine idea that THIS is what films as entertainment are supposed to be like.

But on the contrary, what makes many of the best Classic films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, so amazingly ever-fresh, right down to the present, is their ability to escape the stereotypical net of genre definition. For example, some of the best films in the Film Noir category do
not contain ‘femme fatales’.

In a masterpiece like ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ neither Marilyn Monroe nor Jean Hagen are ‘femme fatales’. The crux of the film’s problem is the financial pressures of urban life, contrasted with an ideal non-urban less stressful past. In none of the famous three Film Noirs of Veronica Lake, ‘This Gun For Hire’, ‘The Glass Key’, and ‘The Blue Dahlia’, is she a ‘femme fatale’; that is why they are such outstanding films, because Lake’s cool, cute,  congenial thematic assertions suggest the woman of honour as a deterrent, not an instigation, to criminality.

If such a feminine theme-role is too morally good for the success of today’s film formulas, then film-making could petrify in repetitious mannerisms, rather than continually bear healthy, refreshing social fruit.  Incidentally, Lake’s one profound ‘femme fatale’ role was in the fabulously unique Western, ‘Ramrod’ of 1947, where her female co-star, Arleen Whalen, provided one of the best examples of a mature woman of honour.

In recent Hollywood films, some of the most original and least routine ones, such as ‘Tequila Sunrise’ or ‘Basic Instinct’, are classified as neo-Noir colour films. But their uniqueness arises from an avoidance of categorical clichés. Pfeiffer, in ‘Tequila Sunrise’, apart from her coy charms and vulnerability, has no ulterior motives for sleeping with a detective and his drug suspect who dine at her restaurant.

Director Robert Towne takes Pfeiffer close to the ‘femme fatale’ opportunity, but directs her away from it, and in fact her role ends up projecting feminine honour, acting as an inspiration to a reformed criminal, well played by Mel Gibson. Similarly, director Paul Verhoeven takes Sharon Stone even closer to being a gay ‘femme fatale’ in ‘Basic Instinct’. Yet, the whole originality of the film is his denial of proof that she is the sadistic killer of her male lovers. The ice-pick beneath her bed at the film’s end comes too late, proves nothing credible, because it exists outside the film’s projected conflict between the detective played by Michael Douglas, and his suspect turned his lover.

Sharon Stone’s poetic and emotional brilliance in the film defines her as a woman of honour, despite the last piece of bait that she might have been the sadistic killer. ‘Basic Instinct’ leaves us on the borderline of interpretation, where Stone’s guilt or innocence is nothing more than the audience’s desire to be positive or negative about the film’s potential. Contrary to any consensus that films may be more ‘entertaining’ when they avoid crime-free heroes and heroines, films without such routine characterizations and plots can demonstrate an unorthodox morality where physical and mental satisfaction is achieved by intellectual and imaginative stimulation.