I never watch shows that give a misleading impression of the people they deal with, so naturally I passed up “Death of a Princess” after Saudi Arabia announced that it gave a wrong impression of life in the oil-rich kingdom.
For the same reason, I didn’t go to see Cruising, which, judging from the public demonstrations against it, gave a bad impression of the homosexual life. I am not going to see the new Charlie Chan movie either because, though it hasn’t been made yet, Americans of Chinese origin say Charlie Chan is an affront to Chinese culture.
Unfortunately, I did see some Charlie Chan movies forty years ago, but I was too young to know better. For the same reason, I went to see Hamlet in 1947. However, I have never seen it since, and never intend to, now that Danes have told me it gives a very bad impression of life in Denmark.
I walked out of The Godfather after the first thirty minutes when I realized it was giving a misleading impression of Italian family life, and dropped War and Peace like a ten-pound sack of potatoes after it became obvious that Tolstoy was giving a completely lopsided impression of Napoleonic France.
Does this reflect an undue sensitivity to the feelings of others? It might have seemed so once, but that was before I felt for myself the sting these misleading entertainments can produce. Which brings us to Ralph Bellamy.
I refer, of course, to the movie Ralph Bellamy and not to the stage Bellamy who, as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, swept everything before him with his mighty decency. The movie Ralph Bellamy, as graybeards and late-night TV addicts will remember, never swept anything before him.
In movie after movie Ralph Bellamy was the man who didn’t get the girl in the end. And why? Because Ralph Bellamy was polite and kind and gentle.
It is still embarrassing to confess—such is the grotesque power of movies to make you ashamed of your own culture—but I identified with Ralph Bellamy. I was polite, kind and gentle, too. Not that I wanted to be, mind you. I wanted to be sassy like Clark Gable or sullen like Humphrey Bogart, but my attempts invariably resulted in a punch in the nose. I was forced to take the polite, kind and gentle route as a matter of survival.
Well, the humiliations were constant. As soon as Bellamy walked on the screen and told Irene Dunne, “I have the honeymoon suite on the Berengaria, dear,” the entire audience broke into snickers. Everybody was thinking: “That poor polite, kind and gentle sap—too dumb to realize that Irene is going to be in Cary Grant’s arms when the Berengaria sails tonight.”
I forced a snicker, too, to show I was a regular guy, but it hurt, friends. It hurt. What that movie was saying to me was: “You are the effete product of an inferior culture.”
In one movie Ralph planned to take his mother along on the Berengaria because Ralph, you see, liked his mother. He respected her. He called her “Mother,” not “Mom.” He didn’t refer to her as “the old lady.” She was “Mother.” And everybody laughed. People who had mothers were ridiculous and couldn’t get the girl; that’s what the movie was saying.
Well, you guess right; I had a mother. What’s more, I didn’t call her “the old lady.” I liked my mother. I respected her. I was, in short, a loser. No girl for me at the end. Nothing but the awful loneliness of that honeymoon suite on the Berengaria as Irene and Cary embraced on the dock and my mother asked, “Why in the world did you order all that champagne?” while the audience hooted with delight.
Cary Grant didn’t have a mother. Clark Gable didn’t have a mother. Humphrey Bogart didn’t have a mother. James Cagney, to be sure, had a mother once, but she was a murderous old gunslinger and he called her “Ma,” not “Mother,” and honored her by getting blown up on top of a gas storage tank while screaming, “Top of the world, Ma!”
Ralph Bellamy movies were as commonplace as Charlie Chan movies, and in the terrible fashion of these things, the unfair and distorted stereotype began to affect my behavior. I became politer, kinder and gentler with the passing years, and lost more and more girls in the end.
Politeness, kindness and gentleness became my way of life and the good times passed me by. Politeness, kindness and gentleness are why I never see a show or read a book that anybody doesn’t want me to see or read and why I have to make my own good times playing solitaire and looking for funny names in the telephone directory.