Ode to a Lost Hat: An Image Essay About Hats in Movies

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

[POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

Two Sundays ago, at a small street fair in midtown Manhattan, I noticed a stand selling a whole bunch of caps at reasonable prices. One particular cap—a brown checkered beret—caught my eye, and I impulsively decided to buy it.

That week, I wore that hat almost every day; in fact, you all saw me wearing it a few posts ago in a photo taken with Philippine director Brillante Mendoza after a Tribeca Film Festival screening at Village East Cinemas. It was only $10. I thought it was—as Family Guy's Peter Griffin might say—a freakin' sweet deal.

Now—only a little over a week after buying that hat—it's gone. I carelessly left it on a NJ Transit bus as I got off at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, and it took me maybe five minutes after I had left the terminal to realize that I was no longer wearing that beret on my head.

The feeling of disappointment in this turn of events was...well, "crushing" is too strong a word. Let's just say, it was weighty.

I know, I know: It's only a hat. Big deal, right? Well, no, I will certainly be the first to admit that it isn't a big deal in the long run. I can always buy another one (there will surely be another street fair in midtown Manhattan in the near future).

But man, I really did come to love that cap, even in just one week. Sure, I liked getting complimented on it, but I myself also liked the way it looked me and the associations wearing the hat provoked in me. Me, I don't think of John Wayne or Che Guevara when thinking of berets; I think of a French artiste like Claude Monet, he of all those gorgeous impressionistic watercolors, including this self-portrait:

Combine that with, say, sunglasses rocked in the Jean-Luc Godard manner seen below...

...and, maybe with a slight adjustment in my usually styleless wardrobe, I could have perfected a pretty cool look for myself, don'tcha think?

But it's not even just about achieving a certain personal style. Hats can be just so darn cool in and of themselves to look at—especially in the movies.

Jean-Pierre Melville knew it.

In Le Samouraï (1967), Jef Costello's hat is about as much a presence as the man himself, with Melville and cinematographer Henri Decaë finding innumerable ways to light and frame Alain Delon with his hat on to suggest the emotional guard his character—a stoic hitman who gets caught up in complicated intrigue after he accidentally gets spotted during a job—puts up throughout. To wit (and really, this represents just a fraction of the film's visual splendors in this regard):

It's telling that, at the end of the film, when he finally gets caught and killed, he isn't wearing his hat.

He has, figuratively speaking, finally lifted his emotional veil, and the implications are numerous and endlessly fascinating.

The Coen Brothers also understood the sense of mystery exuded by hats.

Early on in their great 1990 film Miller's Crossing, Tom Regan (Gabriel Byrne), an adviser to Prohibition-era crime boss Leo (Albert Finney), is seen making a fuss about trying to find his hat after a drunken night out. But while Tom himself never says this explicitly, it's not just about getting back what is rightfully his. Tom is another emotionally reticent creature, and his hat is as much of a symbol of that circumspection as Jef Costello's. For all of its blatant artificiality and black humor, Miller's Crossing is a deeply subtle, tragic picture centering around a man who learns that not even a single act of selfless compassion is enough to make a difference in the amoral world he lives in.

In the end—as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell would do years later in the Coens' No Country for Old Men (2007)—Tom decides to step outside of that world. Thus, the Coens leave him, and us, with his hat on.

He adjusts it so that it covers his eyes...

 ...until a dolly-in reveals the face underneath.

Even then, though, it's difficult to pin down what is going on behind those eyes. Regret? Sadness? A sense of relief? The Coens—to borrow a line from their most recent film, A Serious Man (2009)—accept his mystery, hat and all.

Of course, maybe a hat is really just a hat—or, in the case of movies, a prop given larger-than-life status, as inseparable from an iconic character as...say, a whip?

Even Steven Spielberg understood the iconographic power of hats, especially when it came to Indiana Jones—so much so that, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), he concludes his opening flashback prologue with the image of a man giving a young, humbled Indy (River Phoenix) a hat...

...which cleverly segues, via a hard cut, into an image...

...of the intrepid globe-trotting adventurer he will become later in life.

Cutting as he does from young Indy learning an early lesson about humility to his latest peril—accepted with a smile, no less—as an adult, Spielberg, with the help of editor Michael Kahn, imbues that famous fedora with an extra mythic frisson—the boy first being introduced to a hat becoming the man who has grown into that hat. Really, I don't think there's anything quite like it in the whole series to date.

Of course, there are plenty of other instances of iconic hat-donning in cinema that I can't think of/don't have time to explore at this moment. (I haven't even gotten to hats in Westerns or musicals!) But I hope you all get my drift with this brief celebration of movie hats/requiem for my lost hat. Cinema is such a magical medium that it can endow even something as seemingly commonplace as a hat with iconic power. That, and some hats are just so darn cool to look at.

I think Agent Dana Scully might agree!

P.S. Regarding Miller's Crossing: I am definitely not the first to notice the significance of hats in that film. Film critic/blogger Jim Emerson—who considers the film to be the best of the '90s—got there first...and even has this nice video, plus text commentary, to visualize his observations. I'd be remiss if I didn't re-post that here, for easy access. Gotta give credit where credit's due:





P.P.S. And, of course, I'd love to hear any other memorable instances of hats in movies that you can come up with! Comment away...

Overt and Covert Emotions

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Once again, I see that I've fallen somewhat behind in reviewing some of the films I've seen in theaters recently. Allow me to play some catch-up, then!

Cop Out (2010; Dir.: Kevin Smith)

The only truly memorable joke in this film comes right at the beginning, as Tracy Morgan, as he is spewing forth a battery of cop-movie homages amidst an interrogation, yells out "Yippee-kayyay, motherfucker!" and Bruce Willis, standing behind the interrogation room's one-way mirror, smirkily intones, "I've never seen that movie before." Get it? Because Bruce Willis played John McClane in all those Die Hard flicks, and he says that exact catchphrase in all of 'em? Get it?

But seriously, folks, everything you need to know about about this overextended, deliberately aimless and mostly lame riff on 1980s action cop dramas—complete with retro Harold Faltermayer synthesizer score, natch—is contained in that one joke, saving you the trouble of actually having to sit through the whole thing. It goes nowhere fast—probably by design (the film is called Cop Out, after all), but just because I can justify it doesn't mean I have to enjoy it. That said: yes, Kevin Smith, I did pay money to sit through this, if that makes you feel better.

Spring in a Small Town (1948; Dir.: Fei Mu)
The Prowler (1951; Dir.: Joseph Losey)

During the recent Jia Zhang-ke retrospective at MoMA, Spring in a Small Town was paired with Jia's 2008 short Cry Me a River, the reason being that Jia has cited the 1948 Chinese classic as his inspiration for that lovely piece. Naturally, pairing them together invited one to consider their similarities—though ultimately, the only significant quality they share is a mood of contemplative regret over relationships not pursued and emotions kept in check. The Jia short condenses that mood into 20 spare, concentrated minutes (and, as a personal bonus, it features, as an exterior location, a canal in Suzhou on which I myself rode when I went to China two years ago), while Fei Mu's film elaborates on it in 93. Neither is any less affecting than the other; what perhaps deepens the experience of Spring in a Small Town is Fei's empathy for his characters. None of the parties involved in the central love triangle are bad people, by any means; it's just that, in spite of the powerful romantic emotions raging inside all of them—especially the female character played exquisitely by Wei Wei—they all feel bound by traditional notions of marriage and friendship to keep their passions under wraps.

The film's compelling seesaw of emotions is captured in a relatively claustrophobic setting—all of the actions take place within one bombed-out-looking village where it seems these people, a grandfather and the woman's husband's sister are its only inhabitants—with a sense of desolate atmosphere and an eye for expressive visual poetry by cinematographer Li Shengwei. But above all, it's the emotional complexity of Spring in a Small Town that may well be its most beautiful quality of all. It's a romantic melodrama with characters as believably rich and multifaceted as you or I.

Webb Garwood, the anti-hero of Joseph Losey's 1951 noir The Prowler, is obviously not what you would immediately consider a "sympathetic" main character—but, as Van Heflin plays him, with uncompromising honesty and menace, one can get an idea of what drives his ruthless behavior through the course of the film. A former basketball star in college, he is now an ordinary cop frustrated with the lack of direction in his life, as he admits to Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), who herself feels stuck in a passionless marriage. Thinking he has found a kindred spirit in Susan, who is married to a disc jockey who says goodnight to her over the airwaves at the end of every episode, Webb begins to fixate on her—and, interestingly, Susan, for a time, reciprocates, though with palpable conflictedness (most likely contributed by those same traditional notions of faithfulness in marriage that highlights Spring in a Small Town). Their relationship takes a slew of twists and turns, from murder to marriage, all concluding with a secret birth conducted in a windy desert in a finale that is as spiritually expressive as the snow-covered second half of Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952).

The Prowler obviously goes far darker and deeper with its characters and their suppressed, forbidden desires than the far more tender-feeling Spring in a Small Town does, but the film similarly operates as a fascinating psychological study of anguished characters locked in an emotional tug-of-war, observed by Losey and cinematographer Arthur C. Miller with a surfeit of beautifully wrought long takes. Webb Garwood ultimately gets his in the end (admittedly maybe more of a Hays Code-acceptable type of ending than anything else), but he remains a memorably convincing movie rake, one who disturbs precisely because his desires are, in many ways, universal: a desire to break out of a dead-end life, to move up in class, and the like. You almost want to see him get away with it all, in spite of your better judgment. Ah, film noir: making us contemplate the moral abysses underneath us all!

There's much more to say about this classic film noir...and film critic/video essayist Matt Zoller Seitz offers more food for thought here:



(Spring in a Small Town only available in an out-of-print Cinema Epoch DVD that apparently contains a print of poor quality. Cry Me a River is available as an extra on Cinema Guild's DVD of Jia's most recent feature, 24 City. And The Prowler is unavailable on Region 1 DVD at the moment.)

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010; Dir.: Steve Pink)

Yes, Hot Tub Time Machine more or less reconfigures elements from last year's big comedy hit The Hangover—right down to its scene-stealing third wheel (Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover, Rob Corddry here)—into an '80s nostalgia trip. But I enjoyed this more than The Hangover, a movie that never quite delivered on the delirious craziness its situations promised (and which wasted Mike Tyson to boot). Hot Tub Time Machine, a messier, less carefully structured movie, does eventually work up a steam of comic insanity that explodes at the end in ways that are often more inspired than anything in The Hangover. And, as A.O. Scott eloquently elucidated in his New York Times review of the film, there is a welcome undercurrent of bitter regret, played with conviction by the central quartet of actors, that actually creates some genuine emotional stakes for these seemingly washed-up characters. Hot Tub Time Machine eventually becomes almost poignant in its riotous consideration of middle-age disappointment. That's certainly more than Todd Phillips & co. even attempted for The Hangover.

Le Cercle Rouge (1970; Dir.: Jean-Pierre Melville)

[POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

More adventures in repertory cinema, this time with a Jean-Pierre Melville film I had never seen until three weeks ago at IFC Center. The legendary French New Wave director's spare, beautifully controlled late style—so concentrated, graceful and trance-like—is familiar, but this time his subject isn't one criminal's elusive inner life, as in his 1967 masterpiece Le Samouraï. Le Cercle Rouge's canvas is broader: a consideration of the criminal lifestyle as a whole.

It's telling that the final shot of Le Cercle Rouge is not of any of the criminals (Alain Delon and Gian Maria Volonte playing the two main thieves) involved in the film's justifiably celebrated central jewel heist, but of Mattei (André Bourvil), the police commissioner who is tasked to find and capture these criminals after one of them escapes from his grasp in the film's opening minutes. For me, the character of Mattei—not a major character, but a pivotal marginal one who is palpably unsettled as he is by his superior's authoritatively intoned philosophy that "all men are guilty" and that "They're born innocent, but it doesn't last"—holds the key to the picture's moral depths What drives these criminals to maintain that dangerous lifestyle, even after they have been punished by law for it? Is that possibly the only life they know? Or does something else—most vividly, the possibility of redemption, in the case of tortured former sharpshooter Jansen (Yves Montand)—keep them in the game? Melville, expressing his characters' guarded reticence through his breathtakingly cool style, keeps their motives intriguingly mysterious—but the police chief's misanthropy, and Mattei's troubled reactions to his investigation and whether they validate that point-of-view, casts a mournful pall over the whole film. Even at the end, as the criminals are gunned down by the police, the last shot is a close-up of Mattei's face walking around the crime scene, looking visibly shaken at the wasted lives that have just been taken.

If Le Samouraï was an intimately scaled meditation on a man defined almost exclusively by his actions, Le Cercle Rouge is an epic dirge about men defined almost exclusively by their actions. Amidst the cool gangster poses—and Melville's precise ways of lighting and framing those poses—and his play with noir genre tropes lies a whole troubling moral philosophy. That, of course, is one of the major source of the endless fascination of this master's late gangster pictures.

(Le Cercle Rouge is available on Criterion Collection DVD.)