While watching Top Gun Maverick a few days ago, it occurred to me that the notion that “The hero must never die, the good guys must win in the end, and if necessary, create a deus ex machina to get your good guys out of trouble” seems to be a very American-cinema trait.
I haven’t watched a whole lot of foreign films, but are they likelier to kill off good guys or let bad guys win, to make their stories more believable/suspenseful?
I do not know the answer to this question but am interested to find out. So, hi! And I won’t start off the thread by going slightly off topic and talk about movies that were pretty good until the tacked on happy ending ruined them.
…or foreign movies that were pretty good until the tacked-on tragic ending that ruined them
(Stop trying to blend into that hedge, Wages of Fear)
Most of the Italian movies I have seen (spaghetti westerns, sword-and-sandal flicks) have the good guys winning. The heroes may be more morally ambiguous than in an American film, but they usually win.
I’ve only seen a few Spanish films, but offhand, I don’t recall the bad guys winning in any of them.
The Scandinavian films I have seen were mostly highbrow artsy-fartsy films that didn’t have any clear-cut heroes or villains. In The Seventh Seal, everybody dies, good, bad, or indifferent.
Highbrow art films tend not to have clear-cut heroes and villains.
In lowbrow action films, the heroes usually beat the villains. In mysteries, the detective usually solves the case. In gangster films, the heroic cops beat the evil gangsters, or the heroic gangsters beat the corrupt cops, or the good gangsters beat the bad gangsters. They are escapist entertainment, regardless of nationality.
Many Japanese yakuza and samurai films have protagonists, often killers, taking on evil bosses.
In many Euro-films, characters are equally capable of good or bad actions, making any determination of “good” and “bad” problematic.
While American films typically resort to characters who are abstractions of good or evil, there are exceptions where a principled, but (let us say) morally compromised protagonist ends up doing good by taking out a bunch of bad guys.
In general, I don’t think foreign films are necessarily any more likely to kill off good guys or let bad guys win than U.S. films, but they might more often depict a skewed moral landscape that can make it more challenging for the viewer (especially foreign viewers) to identify who is actually “good” or “bad” than is the case with American films.
Do you know what the German word for “happy ending” is „das Happyend“ ?
I had the luck to be in the New York première of Die Herzogin von Chicago (1928). From the very beginning of the show, although the American heroine and the European hero have been quarreling, they’ve also been crazy about each other. In the last scene, the problem is resolved by the intervention of a Hollywood producer. He tells them that he wants to make a movie about them, but that he can’t, because American audiences demand happy endings. Not wishing to offend so exalted a being as a Hollywood producer, they drop their quarrel and get married. In the curtain call, when the chorus girls come out and bow, you can see that the crowns of their top hats read H-A-P-P-Y-E-N-D.
Just anecdotally, it seems to be true in anime. It’s not a guarantee to the point of stereotype (“Oh, great, another Studio Ghibli movie—think it’s going to be a morose people playing chess for two hours in black and white and then dying?”), but the chance of it is greater.
I personally chalk the American film model to be a result of echoes of the Hays Code’s edicts, becoming so entrenched in the medium’s formative decades as to become a familiar convention of narrative fiction, and simple market forces. (“People prefer happy endings to sad endings. More people will pay to see a kind of movie they prefer. We only get paid if people pay to watch our movie. Money tastes good.”)
And the two factors, of course, feeding off and reinforcing each other, it ever tightening circles like a ritual dance around a center.
And to ask what everyone’s been thinking, do you mean this is a release of a classic film into a market in which it was never originally shown, a big-deal remastering or are you very, very, very old?
American film noir often had antiheroes who died at the end (or who were going to jail). Offhand, I can think of Brute Force, Detour, D.O.A, and Double Indemnity.
Going by Die Herzogin von Chicago - Wikipedia, it never appeared in New York City until 1997, though it’s an operetta versus a film. So not quite old as dirt.
I don’t go to many movies, but I have noticed a trend in TV drama for unresolved endings.
The obvious villains get their comeuppance and the protagonists (usually the good guys but you can never be sure) win, but the arch-villain in his Canary Wharf penthouse, or Swiss villa gets away.
This would be tricky to quantify, but at certain periods of time it seems to be anecdotally the case, US cinema was more conservative in some decades. Sometimes due to studio meddling when nobody wanted it, the initial US release of Brazil was a horrible happy ending.
There’s also counterpoints, the novel A Clockwork Orange ends with a chapter where Alex grows out of violence. The US edition cuts off early and has him resist his brainwashing. The film ends the same as the US book (“I was cured, all right!”)
Most famously, Grave of the Fireflies. It’s based on a semi-autobiographical novel, and the author changed it because in real life his sisters died of starvation while he felt some survivor’s guilt, in the anime they both die.
There were three versions of Brazil. It was released in Europe as Terry Gilliam intended it. Gilliam feuded with the head of Universal over getting the film released in the U.S. In the process, Universal’s editors created a very different cut (sometimes called the “love conquers all” version), and Gilliam cut a few minutes, but left the ending intact. It’s that third version that was released in the U.S.; whether the ending is happy is rather debatable. I’ve seen the LCA version once on television; that’s probably what you’re thinking of with the horrible happy ending.
Yes, it was LCA, I’ve never actually seen that one. It looks like they are 142, 132, and 94 minutes.
The American gangster film usually had the protagonist being gunned down at the end: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties, White Heat, etc.
There’s also Night of the Living Dead.
I was in the Manhattan production of Die Herzogin von Chicago in 1997, in fact. Indeed, I believe I added the note in the Wikipedia article. But the show was first done in Vienna in 1928.
But my main point is about different attitudes between the US and the continent.