For #1600, Movies that Have Made Me Cry
Oct 29 '07
The Bottom Line Watch these at your own risk! (And this essay discusses the endings of many of the movies listed.
"Tearjerker" is a somewhat pejorative label that used to be slapped on movies about women martyred to their fickle men and/or sacrificing themselves for their children. The prototypes -- from the 1930s -- are such "four-hankie women's pictures" with the likes of Barbara Stanwyck ("Stella Dallas"), Marlene Dietrich ("Blonde Venus"), Joan Crawford (title?), May Robson (Lady for a Day), and Olivia de Haviland (later in her Oscar-winning turn in "To Each His Own") sacrificing everything for their children, including the knowledge on the part of the children that the lower-class women were their mothers and "Imitation of Life" in which the daughter (Fredi Washington) passing as white denied the black "mammy" (Louise Beavers) who lived to give the girl everything.
Such movies, and many others showing unconscious -- and, especially, conscious -- cruelty make me wince, but don't make me cry. The movie that opened my floodgates most recently was "Away from Her" with a heretofore very active (cross-country skiing) Canadian of Icelandic descent played by Julie Christie slipping into Alzheimer's as her husband of 44 years (Gordon Pinsent) watches helplessly. The cruelty here is the relentless destruction of the brain and memory and personality by the disease. I could not bear to watch the movie through. In business class on a transcontinental flight, I took it in three doses.
"Away from Her" was particularly difficult for me, because I watched my father's devotion to my mother and desolation that he could no longer manage to provide all the care that she needed himself. She did not descend into senile dementia, though losing most of her short-term memory. Seeing the Alzheimer daycare program in the nursing home where my mother spent her last years, I know that as devastating as "Away from Her" is, the reality was sugar-coated in the movie, with orchestration of the prelude Bach Well-Tempered Klavier that Charles Gounod based his "Ave Maria" on playing (along with the even-less-subtle use of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon"), with Christie looking increasingly blank but never less than radiant and beautiful (no drooling here!), and with a return of lucidity that provided a sort of closure and epiphany that is very rare, if it ever happens at all, for the movie.
In addition to cutting way too close to home, I found "Away from Her" particularly painful because I am totally not ready for Julie Christie to go into Alzheimer oblivion. She is the only blonde I've ever loved. From the age of 15 until I went off to college, I had a picture of her in my bedroom and doted on her, especially in "Far from the Madding Crowd" (where I had less competition for her than in "Doctor Zhivago"), "Heat and Dust," and "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (in which she disappearing into opium oblivion and could not register Warren Beatty's McCabe's death) and would willingly have been corrupted being her "Go-Between." I hope that Ms. Christie wins a second Oscar, 42 years after her first, for "Away from Her," but it makes me shudder in the way Alma Mahler did about her husband tempting fate with "Kindertotenlieder."
Watching -- and not being able to continue watching -- "Away from Her" led to recollecting other movies that made me cry. The emphasis is on "made." Some people seek out occasions to cry, but I have an aversion to crying more out of distaste for the accompanying mucous production than for violating the Code of Masculinity.
I don't know who taught me that Men Don't Cry. This is a rule that I feel but don't believe in. Moreover, I was years away from being a man for some crying at the movies.
There is no doubt that the first movie that reduced me to tears was "Bambi," a re-release of which I saw when I was four or five. Of course, it is when Bambi's mother is shot that I cried. (I was also terrified on cue by the wolves, though the scariest movie I saw as a child was "Oklahoma!".)
The next movie I remember making me cry was "The Miracle Worker," when I was twelve or thirteen. I have not seen the movie since then, but I remember that it was when Anne Bancroft's Annie Sullivan finally gets through to Patty Duke's Helen Keller that did it. That is, this was a sort of cry happy -- or at least crying for release, for Helen Keller's release from oblivion. (Neither "The Wild Child" nor "Kaspar Hauser" had the same effect on me.)
Over the years, there have been other movies that at least make my eyes water, but there are three that have all but blinded me with tears. I know that it happened when I saw Steven Spielberg's 1989 remake of the WWII tearjerker "A Guy Named Joe," "Always." I am a major Holly Hunter fan and well aware at Spielberg's facility at manipulating audience emotion, but I think that it was at least as much living in an epicenter of the AIDS pandemic as anything actually on the screen that accounted for my inability to watch it without breaking down. (The similar dead monitoring the living in "Ghost" the next year did not make me bawl, though I think my eyes were wet.)
The next year (1990) brought a movie centered on the devastation of AIDS that was more than decimating my circles, "Longtime Companion." I suffered along with David (Bruce Davison) through the wasting of his lover Sean (portrayed by Mark Lamos). It was not, however, the poignant losses of identity, dignity, and life that made me cry, or even the scene of David telling Sean it is OK to let go, but the very last scene. That "Someday it will be over" was a hope with no basis in 1990, and even if it ever is, those who perished are not coming back. Willy (Campbell Scott) walking on the Fire Island beach imagines Fuzzy (Stephen Caffrey) and the other characters who have been annihilated by the disease (so much slower than a bullet) restored and celebrating. This totally got me despite the inoculation of many movies over the years in which the viewer sees characters killed off during the course of battles or epidemics again, often going to heaven (the prototype being the 1946 Powell/Pressburger "A Matter of Life and Death," released in America as "Stairway to Heaven.")
Looking over this impromptu list, disease/debilitating disability looms large. The main characters in Chen Kaige's "Bian zou bian chang" ("Life on a String " in English; made in 1991, I did not see it until) are blind, but that is not really what elicited tears from me.
The film is filled with rural cruelty that I don't understand. The young and the old blind musician both hope for a cure, and it may be that my tear ducts were stimulated by the dashing of their hope. I think that the first time I saw "Life on a String" it was not until the final song (a long one that I find very beautiful) that I started crying, continuing through the scene in which a tear slowly descends from the sightless eye of Shítou (Huang Lei) who is now alone and about to be mistreated some more in the final scene. The second time I saw the movie, my tears began when Shítou hears that the Old Master (Liu Zhongyuan) has returned. I hate how Shítou is treated and the destruction of what little he has is heartbreaking to me. Rationally, I know that I've seen people (onscreen and off) with even more wretched existences and losing their families and their lives, but watching "Life on a String" does me in. (Tens years older, Huang Lei played another musician affectingly suffering in "Ye ben" (Fleeing by Night). In between, he was haunted by the ghost of a tragic opera star (Leslie Cheung) in "Ye ban ge sheng" (The Phantom Lover).
The harshness of the training of young performers sold by their impoverished parents in Alex Law's ""Qi qiao fu" ("Painted Faces" in English, 1988) I think also made me cry at some point, as did the girl undergoing similar rigors in Wu Tian-Ming's "Bian Lian" (King of Masks, 1996). Both also touch on surrogate parents dying. I know that I could feel the pain with Leslie Cheung's character throughout Chen Kaige's "Ba wang bie ji" (Farewell, My Concubine, 1993) and may have cried when he finally took the role he had mastered with such difficulty off the stage, and think that I shed a tear or two when the blind girl in Zhou Yimou's "Xingfu shiguang" (Happy Times, 2000) makes it clear that she understands the deceptions being played for/about her.
I make no claims that these are the best tearjerkers, but these are movies that at various stages of life have moved me to tears.
(I have seen "Bambi" as an adult without crying, though not unaffected by what made me cry as a young child. I have not seen "The Miracle Worker" again since I was a preteen, nor "Always" since I saw it in a time I was especially vulnerable to identifying with the Richard Dreyfuss character in it. Just recalling the endings of "Longtime Companion" and "Life on a String" bring tears to my eyes.)
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P.S. In an archetypal "chick flick," "Sleepless in Seattle," Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan discuss the difference between "chick flick" heartbreak (typified by Cary Grant realizing that he had been maligning Deborah Kerr in "An Affair to Remember") and "guy flicks" (typified by Jim Brown's final run in "The Dirty Dozen."
Some of the films that make me wince, most often at the cruelty of others are:
love stories He Who Gets Slap (Lon Chaney is the male champion of tearjerking), The Heiress (the adaptation of Henry James's The Heiress in which Olivia de Haviland is treated more brutally by her father (Ralph Richardson) even than by the man she has to recognize is a gold-digger (Montgomery Clift), Max Ophuls's "Letter from an Unknown Woman" (in which Louis Jourdan repeatedly forgets De Haviland's real-life sister, Joan Fontaine), "Room at the Top" (with the sublime Simone Signoret and the ignoble Laurence Harvey),. Bette Davis bravely going up the stairs at the end of "Dark Victory," Joan Crawford's viperish daughter (Anne Blyth) in "Mildred Pierce," Lillian Gish and the sensitive Richard Barthelmess being battered by Donald Crisp in D. W. Griffith's "Broken Blossoms," Judy Garland's anguish about her fading husband in George Cukor's "A Star Is Born," Charles Boyer in Ophuls's "The Earrings of Madame de...", Michael Gambon as the original "Singing Detective," Baz Luhrman's "Moulin Rouge," adaptations of Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" and "The House of Mirth," Edmund Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac," and Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain"; Satyajit Ray "The World of Apu," Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," Chen Kaige's "Farewell, My Concubine," Anthony Minghella's "Truly, Madly, Deeply."
Plus such soldiers' stories as Eytan Fox's "Yossi and Jagger, Kobayashi Masaki's "Seppuku"(Harakiri) and his "Human Condition" trilogy, Kon Ichikawa's grueling "Fires on the Plain" and "Harp of Burman," Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of James Jones's "From Here to Eternity" (especially the very last scene with the two de facto widows on ship, but also Frank Sinatra's death scene), the last scene of "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Full-Metal Jacket" (though Kubrick lightened the Vietnam part from Gus novel Short-Timers), "Platoon," "Born on the 4th of July," "Johnny Got His Gun," "Attack!", Blackhawk Down," "The Sand Pebbles," ""The Sands of Iwo Jima," No Man's Land," "Gallipoli, ;"Steel Helmet," and "Three Kings" (for the civilians, which could branch off to another set headed by "Forbidden Games," "Two Women," "Welcome to Sarajevo," "Hotel Rwanda," "Malèna"...)
And some other sub-genres occur to me.
The children not comprehending the death of a parent, e.g., the Russian "The Return," The Brazilian "Central Station," and the Spanish "Crí a [cuervos]" "and "Pan's Labyrinth," Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sanshö, the Bailiff" (all four recently made available on DVD), the anime "Grave of the Fireflies," various adaptations of James Agee's A Death in the Family, and Brandon de Wilde's incomprehension of Alan Ladd riding off at the end of "Shane";
the reverse, that is, the death of the child(/ren) as in Atom Egoyan's agonizing "The Sweet Hereafter," Sean Penn directing Jack Nicholson in "The Pledge" (and, earlier, in "The Crossing Guard"), the terminally depressed parents in "In the Bedroom," "Ivanovo detstvo," "The House of Sand and Fog," "Don't Look Now," etc.;
and, with affinities to the dying soldiers (dying in what is for gay men the combat zone of a hostile straight world) genre, the fagbashing subgenre, e.g., "Urbania," "Soldier's Girl," and "The Laramie Project." (and the FTM transgender "Boys Don't Cry") and street kids being killed in "City of God" and "Pixote" (both from the mean streets of Rio de Janeiro).
I have also written about some of my favorite "tearjerker" songs (which generally don't incline me to cry but to recognize my good fortune in contrast to the pain rising from hears to being voiced).
© 2007, Stephen O. Murray
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