For me, this week, it was two movies where the servant staff of a big fancy house is a little on the crooked side. I don't know that there's a ton of those.
In brief recap, Fitzwilly focuses on a butler played by Dick Van Dyke, who's smart enough not to play it as English, although the character does use his chimneysweep accent for a couple of scams. He's the majordomo for a nice elderly lady (Edith Evans) who thinks she's a wealthy eccentric, but since her father left her almost nothing she's actually a poor eccentric. Fitzwilly and his crew conduct burglaries in order to bring in the money that she'll be giving away to her pet charities, mostly robbing fully insured department stores. Unfortunately the lady's new secretary (Barbara "99" Feldon) doesn't know about any of this and threatens to throw a monkey into the wrench. Of course she and Van Dyke are falling in love as well.
The movie has a real brightness and charm to it, but it's also strange to watch. It's Hollywood bringing its old tricks into the sixties, where they wouldn't be so welcome in general. Within five years of its 1967 release date it would be the kind of movie "they just don't make anymore." Of course throw in a couple of swears and some early Rod Stewart and it's Wes Anderson, so you'd just need 30 or so years to wait.
Parasite is a different story altogether. The servants in this case are a family, and while they bend and break the law, it's for their own benefit. It kind of has to be, given their circumstances. Their brush with a much wealthier family begins when the son's friend recommends him as a substitute in his tutoring job for a girl he's carrying a torch for. He figures that the son--Kevin--will be safe to leave the girl with. Yeah, that sure works out. Anyway, one by one the family finds cunning and not a little amoral ways to make and fill openings in the household. The sister--Jessica--is terrifyingly brilliant at this.
But there's another twist. After they've gotten the family's gotten the old housekeeper fired she comes back desperate and uncovers a passage to the basement that looks like it leads to a torture chamber. It doesn't, not quite, but this discovery does put the plot on the road to tragedy.
I should also note that the fraud family's mother, the one who takes the now-vacant housekeeper job, looks like she'd speak in a Southern or at least Border State accent if this were an American movie. She is absolutely my type.
2 comments:
For two such very different movies from entirely distinct eras the essential similarity of plots really is an extraordinary coincidence. Fitzwilly is a film we never saw likely because there was so much else going on by then, not just in our lives but movies were changing fast by that point too. The old Hollywood was disappearing fast as the rules were challenged about what could and couldn't be said and shown. Besides American films like, for instance, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate (and many more) that bypassed the old codes by far, there were also the foreign movies that had never been subject to US censorship to begin with - Fellini, Bergman, Godard, even Hitchcock among a great many others.
But I won't offer excuses since I'm pretty sure you'd have made similar choices given the options at the time. Dick Van Dyke was very popular in those days on television as well as in the movies. Fitzwilly, as you describe it, sounds typical of the family friendly movies that kept lots of people going out to the movies over a large portion of the 20th century. Many of the movie theaters were like enormous gilded palaces with curved lushly carpeted stairways, huge mirrored lobbies, carvings, balconies, comfortable seats, ushers, and people who'd sell icecream bars and candy from trays they carried. It was fun going to the movies. Those types of films have pretty much gone the way of the dodo at this point, never mind most of the cinemas where we went to see How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - also known as Dr. Strangelove. That movie really shook me up that night and others besides me were crying at the end.
Ah yes, now we come to Parasite, certainly not a family film as we knew them then. Of course, nowadays everybody in the family watches comic book movies (how far the culture has fallen). We've enjoyed watching most of the Korean movies we've been able to see over the course of the past couple of decades (since they've been available in the West). Park's Oldboy is amazing and the star, Choi Min-sik, is one of our favorite actors. We first saw Song Kang-ho, the father in Parasite in a couple of Park's Vengence movies and we loved him in Host. All the actors were good in their roles but you're right the mother was a great character.
You've described the essentials of the story very well. The movie was hilarious in places early on and became more shocking with each revelation - somebody living in the basement to start with and devolving from there. The director was very clever in the way he engineered the final scenes.. hopelessly hoping. I'm sure Fitzwilly ended differently.
What I'm curious about is how well Fitzwilly was received in its time. For a movie released late in 1967--indeed, pretty hot on the heels of Bonnie and Clyde, and Dr. Strangelove still being absorbed--it was pretty clearly not going to be an era-defining film. Not with where the key audience was at. On the other hand it's quite likable, so I could see it being a family movie for families that trusted their kids' sense of right and wrong. Or conversely, a date movie for some more old-fashioned young couples.
I can see what you mean about the influence of foreign films that hadn't had to jump through the same hoops to be distributed. Godard is a filmmaker I first saw in college and has interested me since. His films have a volatile quality where you never know when he's going to switch track. (Of course his somewhat nihilistic form of leftism has gone from outsider to dirt common in the industry.) Bergman is quite fascinating too, with the unease and alienation woven into his stories.
Those great cathedral-like theatres are something that I've mostly experienced through photographs. You get a hint of it going inside a place like the Avon, which has the architecture even if it doesn't go for the whole ambience. I may have gone to other spaces like that when I was very young, but couldn't really appreciate what I was seeing around me and how rare it was going to become. Streaming and other kinds of post-theatrical distribution are what call the shots now, which has especially become clear in the COVID lockdown era. But it's not as satisfying.
Comics are a visual medium already, one where you can choose your own pace. They serve their own storylines pretty well. When those storylines are adapted en masse to the big screen I'm not sure either medium is being well-served, regardless of the craft that's doubtlessly involved.
But yes, Parasite lives up to the reputation it's already gained. And Song Kang-ho etches an unforgettable performance. He embodies comedy and tragedy in his character, in that he starts off breezy and casually accepting of what his family is doing, but shows a very different side of himself when he begins to become entrapped. Ah dear, his poor too-clever-by-half daughter.
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