A Plea for Eros

becomes fabulously wealthy. At the end of the movie he is happily ensconced in his mansion, where his formerly abusive family now dotes on him. Fields makes a contented exit. He is off to the Black Pussy Cat Cafe as of old. His family declares him “a changed man,”
    Fenced in, stuck on a rung of the social ladder, the Pang-bornian man has no appetite for change. Like most children he prefers sameness, routine, consistency. This, too, I understand. Repetition is the essence of meaning. Without it we are lost. But taken to its extreme, a love of system becomes absurd. Franklin Pangborn played a man who worshipped the system in which he found himself, a system ruled by that Manichaean American divinity, its God and its Satan: money. Money haunts Pangborns character in most of his movies. He does not have much of it himself, but he is victim to its charms, part of its overriding machinery, and overly impressed by its power. The quintessential manager, he’s a dupe of the rich. In another Preston Sturges film,
Christmas in July,
Pangborn plays the manager of a department store, eager to please the hero and his girlfriend, who falsely think themselves newly rich and go on a shopping spree. The manager shows them a bed, a piece of furniture outfitted with an elaborate mechanism that will afford them every convenience at the touch of a button. Pangborn unfolds this wonder of American consumerism, and then in a voice at once elevated, proper, and obsequious he says, “And then on the morrow , …” He presses the proverbial button and the bed collapses back into itseif.
    I realize that it is not only the character of Pangborn that I am attached to but the fact that he appeared in Hollywood movies during an era when dialogue still played a prominent role in the making of films, when the archaic expression “on the morrow” could be written for a laugh, when W.C, Fields could throw away a line in homage to Little Dorrit, when a Weenie King could soliloquize on his love for dirt, cyclones, and disease. It is rare now that a studio movie gives us much dialogue of any sort, and when it does, it is inevitably a language without much history, a language afraid of reference lest its audience not understand, a language deadened by the politics of the committee and the test screening. And as I bemoan this, I know full well that studios ran then and run now on an idea that is populist at heart; to get the largest number of people into the theater to see a movie that will please all or almost all—eggheads and curmudgeons excluded. But even in bad movies of the Pangborn period, talk played a larger role than it does now. I miss talk in the movies.
    And the fact is that when I leave my house in Brooklyn and I listen to people in the streets, to their locutions and their diction, to their phrases and sentences, they bear little resemblance to what 1 hear on-screen in “big” movies. People in my neighborhood are prey to all kinds of grandiose expressions, to malapropisms, and to flourishes of the tongue. The other day I heard a woman say to another woman, “He’s nothing but a little,” she paused, “a little blurb.” A man sitting outside the Korean grocery in my neighborhood was musing aloud about the
word humanism.
“You call that humanism, humanistic, human beingness,” he roared at anyone who would listen. Years ago, an old man sat in the Fifty-ninth Street subway station and sang out a sequence of beautiful words: “Cop-pelia. Episcopalian, echolalia . …” He had a resonant, stentorian voice that still rings in my ears. Once in La Bagel Delight, a local deli, I garbled my words and asked the man behind the counter for a cinnamon
Reagan
bagel. He looked at me and said, “We don’t have any of those, but I’ll give you a pumper-Nixon.” Wit and wonder live on in everyday speech. They merely go untapped in Hollywood.
    The truth is that the world and our fantasies often overlap. Franklin Pangborn’s character, that meticulous, preening stuffed shirt, is not only a fiction of the screen. Once, with my own eyes, I saw his reincarnation. Several years ago, my husband and I were in Paris. He had some business there, and we were put up in a grand old hotel near the Louvre. It happened that the French actor Gerard Depardieu had taken it into his head to meet my husband, and a rendezvous was arranged in the hotel lobby. Depardieu’s name had well before then become synonymous with French movies. It seemed to me that