small-town melodrama

As you've probably guessed from my Stegner House posts, I am a lover of small town mythology. Small towns are fertile ground for conflict; behind a façade of normalcy lurks a rot so fetid that only a huge blow-out can clear the air. (At least, in the movies.) Hollywood may be prone to exaggeration, but that is the name of the game with melodrama; perhaps that is why that particular genre is so well-suited to the small town setting.

Here are some conventions of the genre: everyone knows everyone, and their business too; the young ones are dying to get out and the old ones are waiting to die; there is an unshakable power structure in place, with the town’s richest family at the top of the pyramid; there is no sanctity of marriage—everyone cheats on everyone; not only is difference not tolerated, it is actively sought and destroyed; and most importantly, no one is who they pretend to be.

Here are a few of my favourite small-town melodramas:

The Chase (1966)

Directed by Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) and starring Marlon Brando, Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, this film chronicles a day in the life of a rip-roaring Texas town, where local bad boy Charlie "Bubber" Reeves is headed after he breaks out of jail. The sheriff, played by Brando, tries to convince the convict's wife (who is engaged in a tryst with his best friend) to get him to surrender, but a vigilante mob is out for blood, and forces a fiery climax that ends well for no one. This gripping film is an under-appreciated classic and a quintessential small-town melodrama.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

Released at a time when psychedelia was in full swing, this quiet, black-and-white film feels like a reaction against the hippie radicals of New Hollywood. Operating in the classical mode of studio masters like Hawks and Ford, it’s less of a melodrama and more of an archetypal character piece, or as Sight and Sound’s James Bell describes it, “en elegy at once for a period in history, for a time in one’s life, for small-town America.” Whatever it is, it’s one of my all-time favourites.

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

The most recent incarnation of the genre that I've seen, this film is brutal and misogynistic, yet somehow still enjoyable. Based on the 1952 pulp fiction novel by Jim Thompson, it suffers from a too-straight adaptation; sexually-deviant sheriff Lou Ford’s story is heavily reliant on a web of relationships too sprawling to fit into a movie. Casey Affleck is deliciously creepy as the twisted anti-hero, and all conventions of the small-town melodrama are present in the extreme, yet it’s still missing something. Director Michael Winterbottom, being British, was perhaps ill-prepared for this deeply American yarn (David Lynch, with his effortless undercurrent of weirdness, could have made it an instant classic). Nevertheless, there are more than enough good performances, cool cars and million-dollar music cues to make it worth watching.

Blue Velvet (1986)

David Lynch is the undisputed champion. The opening sequence of this movie alone sums it all up: to the sound of Bobby Vinton’s golden voice, azure skies and ruby roses gradually give way to an extreme close-up of larvae writhing disgustingly under the surface of an emerald lawn--the small town melodrama in a nutshell! By the way, this was the last film ever to be shot in glorious, three-strip Technicolor; if someday you get the chance to see it on 35mm, drop what you are doing and go. There is nothing like it.

If you're into the genre, here are few others that I love: Splendor in the Grass (1961), Hud (1963), In the Heat of the Night (1967). Watch for mini-reviews in my upcoming "summer viewing" post (if summer ever decides to stick around, that is).