PLAGUE DIARY 14: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947)
-was apparently a drama until MGM decided to turn it into a musical vehicle for Betty Grable and Dick Haymes. Betty Grable was the World War II pin-up girl who —though she is not Judy Garland (she replaced her in There’s No Business Like Show Business) — is pretty damn pretty, and pretty damn good. Dick Haymes is unobjectionable. What’s fascinating about this film is that in terms of sexual politics, it hasn’t aged as much as one might expect. Believe it or not it’s a movie about the first female typist in 1874, and sadly, for her fans, Grable wears period costumes and rarely shows off her legs. The film has some wit due to George Seaton the writer/director, but mainly due to the fabulous and very irreverent Ira Gershwin (who along with George Gershwin himself) wrote the songs. My favourite moment is when Grable meets her new female flatmate after she first moves to Boston. Grable settles in a boarding house for outcasts (I’ve lived in many, have you? The first boarding house for outcasts that I ever lived in, was also home to Beverly D’Angelo — though I never met her, and we were both practically infants!). Anyway, this woman is ‘rewriting the dictionary,’ and Betty Grable asks why. Grable’s landlady explains that the dictionary lady believes words should ‘sound like what they mean.’ For instance the dictionary lady would say ‘that bag is valoom’ instead of ‘that bag is full. ‘I find this whole concept oddly Shakespearean, and somewhat post-structuralist. And the movie features yet another linguistic oddity. Everyone calls Betty Grable a ‘typewriter’. Yes, it’s very disconcerting. I’m not sure why, had they never heard of the word typist in 1947? Or was it for some reason too suggestive? It’s very surrealistic, like Salvador Dali dancing with a lobster, to hear people say to Betty Grable “Oh hello, you’re the new typewriter’ when she doesn’t look anything like a typewriter at all. But to speak to the modernity of this film, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim is about an conundrum which has still not been solved — women in the workplace. And it does manage ultimately to come down on the right side of things. It certainly wouldn’t satisfy the #Metoo gang, but it’s certainly trying, and I think the film is somewhat wiser that #Metoo (now don’t bite my head off!) if only because it has a sense of humour. (And yes the movie is fundamentally sexist in so many ways, I know.) On the one hand Betty Grable is spouting all these radical feminist views, which would even have been radical when the movie was released in 1947 (but remember the war radicalised people - well I hope the present ‘war’ does too!): “You don’t get equality from brass bands and speeches” says Grable “Women have to earn equality by doing men’s work. They have to go into other fields and compete with men there too.” Which is not bad, feminism-wise. And finally, when Dick Haymes demands she give up her job after they get married (um, doesn’t that still happen today?) she says “Why is it always the women that have to give up their way of working and thinking?” And in the end, Dick Haymes does marry her, even though she runs a typing school. Okay that’s the good stuff. But then there’s all the office guys ogling Bette Grable’s ankles when she reaches to get something on a high shelf. And when they first become romantically involved and Dick Haymes is her boss — they show a headline after they kiss: “Better feeling established between management and labour.” Haha. When it comes to #Metoo, what I think this movie makes clear, and what I think is still the case, is that women and men in the workplace — well we just don’t know what we’re doing, because it’s never happened before — not the way it is now — never ever in human history? And that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen. But probably what made me really angry about this movie is that it is part of a long tradition of American movies that encourage people to be different and speak up against authority — for, well, for what? When I was a kid I went to see Mame with my Dad in summer stock in upstate New York. (It was nice of my Dad to try and share my enthusiasm for theatre —sigh!). And there’s that great Jerry Herman song ‘Open A New Window’ which has the lyric: “Travel a new highway / That's never been tried before / Before you find you're a dull fellow / Punching the same clock/ Walking the same tight rope / As everyone on the block.” When I saw that musical with my Dad I loved that song so much. It spoke to me directly. Jerry Herman was gay, and that lyric is as gay as anything you’ll find in La Cage Aux Folles. In The Shocking Miss Pilgrim Betty Grable talks about “stepping out in the face of criticism to do something constructive.” Yes, and every old American movie I ever loved expressed this sentiment; that it was not only okay to be different, it was your duty to speak out even when it was unpopular to do so. And yet when I became someone different — that is specifically when I became a flaming faggot — my very American family rejected me. And all I can say is, and I’m appealing to you here, are we not losing the right to speak out, maybe forever? I know there is Coronavirus and I know it is a very real and present danger — you don’t have to tell me because I keep telling you over and over again that I am a  friggin’ prime target of the disease — as I am an old man — but but but — “Give me liberty or give me death" to quote Patrick Henry in 1775. Perhaps you don’t think it’s liberty to go to a bar or go to a gym. But I’ll tell you what is liberty. The right to expressing a contrary opinion without being demonized or jailed. Which is exactly what Betty Grable is doing in this film. “I’m a woman in 1874 but I can be a typist if I want to!” And similarly, I’m saying: “maybe this method of dealing with Coronavirus is not the right method? Perhaps we are being hysterical? Perhaps the ‘herd’ theory of letting the virus take its toll makes some sense, and is working, in perhaps, Sweden? Perhaps sending children home from school to live with their aged grandparents was not a good idea, medically? Perhaps asking the poor and the mentally ill to just sit at home and enjoy their families is going to cause more medical problems than Coronavirus?” But no, I’m not allowed to say anything of that, in fact I am shamed if I do so. Well I’m just going to repeat Ira Gershwin’s lyrics from the best song in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, because it’s the screed I’ve been living by all my life  — and as a child I learned it from American musicals like this, and I’ve never forgotten it, so here it is. Say it the next time you and your favourite funnybunny decide to run outside and break quarantine:
“I thought we wouldn’t
Or couldn’t
Certainly shouldn’t
But aren’t you kinda glad we did?”