In a scene filmed at the Santa Maria Airport, a B-17 piloted by Steve McQueen takes aim at his British airfield’s control tower. McQueen, as a self-destructive airman in The War Lover (1962), seems to me to have been part of a trend—call it the Cult of Toxic Masculinity.

Toxic masculine films seem to have a theme we need bear in mind: Men are often self-destructive.

McQueen does just that himself in The Cincinnati Kid, where his poker gambler upstart is demolished by Edward G. Robinson’s pro, just as Paul Newman’s is demolished by Jackie Gleason, “Minnesota Fats,” in The Hustler.

This occurred to me yesterday while watching The Blue Max, a 1966 film about German fighter pilots. (The title refers to a medal conferred for twenty kills.) The lead, George Peppard, who’d just finishing rescuing Cat from the rain in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is now a self-destructive Toxic Male in this just-above average film. The flying sequences are still thrilling, and Peppard grounds us in every scene in between. He has a charming, empty smile, cares about no one other than himself, which shows in combat, where he shows no mercy. Even in his scenes with the architecturally impossible, for 1918, Ursula Andress (Richthofen’s red Fokker triplane is prettier), he is emotionally empty.

So you wind up wishing they’d killed him 45 minutes into the film.

Not all 1960s toxic males are as euthanizable at McQueen and Peppard in those two films.

McQueen’s Bullitt is a prime example. After the famed car chase that incinerates two mafioso and a bloody gunfight in the presence of Rome-bound nuns the San Francisco Terminal, and exhausted detective comes home to his apartment and—this with Jacqueline Bisset still warm in his bed—he washes his face, as Pilate did his hands—and looks bleakly at himself in his bathroom mirror. He hates what, and whom, he sees.

Toxic males need not be self-loathing to be toxic. The king of the genre, and one of my favorite actors, must be Paul Newman. His charming road-gang convict in Cool Hand Luke—look at that incredible Newman smile in the still below!— charms every inmate, including the oafish George Kennedy, and the hardboiled egg-eating scene is epic, yet Luke doesn’t seem to mind that he’s killed the bloodhounds trailing his escape, run to death, nor does he care much about his convict friends; he abandons them in the end to trying running way just one more time. Luke is as heroic as Hercules but as empty as an amphora run out of oil.

But it was Newman who perfected the Toxic Male in an earlier film, Hud, as a sociopathic Texas rancher who brutalizes his father, his lover, Patricia Neal, who drives a convertible Cadillac, womanizes in Toxic Male ways that enchant his young nephew, played by Brandon de Wilde (whom I could’ve cheerfully strangled for his bleating in Shane), and drinks more hard liquor in a weekend than Dallas does in a fiscal year.

De Wilde, thank god, outgrows Shane and finally learns to become a man by turning on Uncle Hud, so empty and so suddenly weak. He has no more substance than a tumbleweed.

Here, I think is where the great director Peter Bogdanovich and the even-greater writer Larry McMurtry arrive with The Last Picture Show (1971), a film I hated for years until I became a grownup. It’s full of Toxic Males: the oafish Randy McQuaid is an oafish predator whose fondest wish in life is the see Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges’ sometime girlfriend, naked. Bridges is mostly inarticulate yet somehow appealing. He’s a football hero who has forever reached his limits. I think the movie belongs most to Timothy Bottoms, who wants to be a good man but, as a teenager, beds his despondent football coach’s wife (Cloris Leachman, who is, in a performance that won her an Oscar, incredible) but finally pursues, and wins, Cybill Shepherd, the object of every boy’s desire.

She betrays him within five minutes’ screentime.

The film ends with the accidental killing of a special-needs boy, one of Bottoms’s longtime friends, Bottoms unleashes deep reservoirs of anger. It should be a depressing moment, but it isn’t. The character, Sonny Crawford, has suddenly discovered that he deeply cared for someone other than himself. The fact that he’s almost ready to kill for his lost friend means that he’s escaped the toxic masculinity that doomed character like Hud.

When Elizabeth and I drove through dying Maricopa a few weeks ago, I recognized instantly the town McMurtry wrote about. There was an abandoned coffee shop with a barstool counter; you could almost imagine a teenager like Sonny swiveling in his tool, restless from the two teaspoons of sugar in his coffee, until, you hope, he twists his hips suddenly—almost violently—and bolts out the coffee shop door, never to return.

New/not so new favorite shows on KQED-San Francisco. “Finding Your Roots” with Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. The last episode that Elizabeth and I watched featured:

–Christopher Walken, whose father owned a bakery in Astoria, NY. Researchers found his grandfather’s bakery in Germany, captured in a 1912 photo. Walken’s father was an extraordinary man, I think. He immigrated from Germany in 1928, married a beautiful woman and started the bakery when the stock market crashed. “He just figured the Depression leveled the playing field for everybody,” Walken said. The bakery was in business for sixty years.

–Fred Armisen [“Portlandia”], who thought himself 1/4 Japanese and therefore loves Japanese food.. Nope.* Armisens’s grandfather, a dancer who had a brief fling with a German woman that eventually led to Fred, was Korean. And he was a part-time German spy on the side. The grandfather, Kuni, only studied in Japan, but he was such a gifted and influential dancer that a museum is dedicated to him there.


*[My Dad thought his family was Scots. Nope. They were from the coal-dusty English Midlands, not far from Bosworth, where Richard III got himself massacred. When they found the little fellow’s skeleton beneath a parking lot a few years ago, there was a deep postmortem puncture wound in his arse. Despite that indignity, Richard, remains, I think, Shakespeare’s greatest villain.]

–Carly Simon, who loved her grandmother but knew almost nothing about her. DNA testing showed that her grandmother was the descendant of Cuban slaves, and that Carly’s ancestry is 10% African. “You’re the blackest white person we’ve ever tested,” Gates deadpanned. There’s some kind of justice there, I think. The Simon family was very close to an African-American couple who moved into their neighborhood: Jackie and Rachel Robinson.

“Check, Please, Bay Area.” Incredible visuals that make your mouth water. My favorite recent show featured reviews from these three adorable kids who reviewed Japanese, Italian and Burmese restaurants. They were incredibly articulate and they gave the desserts at all three places the attention that they deserved. Yum.

I don’t know. All that “melting pot” stuff kind of rocks. Here’s the “Check Please” episode with the kids. They are delightful. More Melting Pot: The Italian-American girl is an Irish step dancer.

In the summer of 1864, Lee had his men dig a network of trenches around the Petersburg, the city that guarded Richmond. Among the soldier opposing Lee was Corporal Adam Bair, 60th Ohio Infantry, who would settle in the Huasna Valley in the years after the war. From Patriot Graves: Discovering A California Town’s Civil War Heritage.

…Meanwhile, Grant had ordered his men to dig their own trenches. So what followed for Bair and his comrades was nine months of trench warfare, of the scuttling of rats, of infestations of lice called “graybacks,” of mud, which permeated even what soldiers ate, of disease caused by vermin and foul water, of intermittent and lethal sniper fire that claimed any tired solider who lapsed into even a moment of inattention, of intense discomfort felt by soldiers who could never get completely dry in the winter and who baked in the heat and choked in the dust of summer, and all of this amid the treeless moonscape they’d created from constant digging and constant heavy artillery bombardment—all a foretelling of the horrors of the First World War.

That war’s catastrophic 1916 Battle of the Somme would begin with the detonation of a massive mine under German lines—the crater it created remains today, looking like a massive sinkhole amid a patchwork of farm fields. A mine explosion also would mark a surrealistic and shocking moment in the trenches of Petersburg. The crater that explosion left behind was, of course, The Crater, and Adam Bair and the 60th Ohio were eyewitnesses to the tragedy that followed.

Unlike the debacle at Cold Harbor, the assault on Confederate lines in the Battle of the Crater had logic, foresight, and planning. It was the execution of the plan that verged on criminality, and it would finally cost the genial, consistently incompetent Ambrose Burnside, Bair’s IX Corps commander, his job.

In July, Union soldiers who had been peacetime coal miners began digging a tunnel over 500 feet long to a point underneath trenchworks held by soldiers from South Carolina. Meanwhile, Burnside decided to use inexperienced troops, but troops that were highly motivated and would be specially trained to move through the tunnel and into the Confederate trenches, once four tons of powder were detonated beneath the South Carolinians. The troops that began training for the assault were African Americans—the nine regiments of U.S. Colored Troops that made up Burnside’s Fourth Division. These were men who understood completely what would happen to them in battle—there would be no quarter for black troops, a precedent that had already been set at Fort Pillow in April, when Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry had attacked and overwhelmed a detachment of black troops in Tennessee and murdered soldiers trying to surrender. The Fourth Division chose “Fort Pillow!” as its battle cry for the day they would go into the coal miners’ tunnel and emerge on the other side. In a letter to his mother two days after the Battle of the Crater, a Union soldier wrote admiringly of the black troops: “they would charge into the city [Petersburg] if the order had been given…They don’t know when to stop.”

The orders seemed clear-cut:

At 3.30 in the morning of the 30th Major-General Burnside will spring his mine and his assaulting columns will immediately move rapidly upon the breach, seize the crest in the rear, and effect a lodgment there. He will be followed by Major-General Ord, who will support him on the right, directing his movement to the crest indicated, and by Major-General Warren, who will support him on the left. Upon the explosion of the mine the artillery of all kinds in battery will open upon those points of the enemy’s works whose fire covers the ground over which our columns must move, care being taken to avoid impeding the progress of our troops. Special instructions respecting the direction of fire will be issued through the chief of artillery.

The detonation of the mine was spectacular. Adam Bair and the 60th Ohio, held in reserve to the left of the planned assault, would have watched in awe when the explosion went off at 5 a.m. on July 30, 1864, and scores of unfortunate South Carolinians were vaporized or blown high into the sky. Eighty-five Union artillery pieces then opened fire on the Confederate lines. It was at that moment that the Union troops charged into the tunnel to follow the shock of the explosion with the shock of a concentrated infantry assault.

The problem for Grant is that they were the wrong troops. George Gordon Meade, Grant’s subordinate and commander of the Army of the Potomac— a command he held uneasily, sharing his ill-defined role with the general-in- chief—at the last moment changed Burnside’s plans. Meade didn’t trust Black troops—unlike the soldier who’d written his mother, Gen. Meade didn’t understand, or didn’t care to understand, their motivation and discipline, and he ordered Burnside to replace them. The assault would be led by White troops.

Burnside became petulant and had his divisional commanders draw straws for the dubious privilege of leading the attack. The winner was Brig. Gen. James H. Ledlie, who was both safe and drunk in his bombproof shelter when his men entered the tunnel. Once they emerged in the crater, they stayed. The black troops had been trained to skirt around the edges of the not to go into it, where they would Subsequent attackers, including the black soldiers, ran into what essentially was a human traffic jam inside the tunnel and in the crater on the other side. The Confederates brought up and began firing into the masses of soldiers below. When they closed with the U.S. Colored regiments, they showed no mercy: wounded soldiers were bayoneted, and soldiers trying to surrender—or soldiers who had surrendered, and were being led to the rear— were shot. A Virginia officer watched, sickened, as two soldiers tormented their Black prisoner, whipping him with a ramrod, shooting him in the hip, and finally killing him with a second shot to the stomach.

Over 400 African American soldiers would be killed and 750 wounded in the four hours of fighting after the mine’s detonation. Generals Burnside and Ledlie were relieved of command and sent home. Other soldiers, like Adam Bair, were condemned to seven more months in the trenches around Petersburg.

By 1957, over 35 million prescriptions for the sedative Miltown had been written, overwhelmingly for American women.

Being a History Guy, and knowing that, it startled me in the midst of watching a 1956 Hitchcock film I otherwise enjoy. This one:

The film scene that brought me up short happens in a Marrakech hotel room, when James Stewart’s Dr. Ben Makenna must disclose to his wife, Doris Day’s Jo, that their young son has been kidnaped. This is how Dr. Ben breaks the news, with the help of Modern Pharmaceuticals:

To her credit, it’s Jo who finally realizes that the man Ben is looking for in London—the lead to their missing son— is not a man named Ambrose Chapell, but a church called Ambrose Chapel. While she runs to the phone to summon the authorities, Ben gets into a manly fight inside the chapel and is cold-cocked by blackjack. Later, in the Albert Hall, Jo gets to scream, throwing off an assassin’s aim, while Ben gets into a manly fight with said assassin, who falls, kerplop! to his death, making a new hole in the Albert Hall. [Sorry. Arcane Beatles reference.]

This scene reminded another 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which Dr. Miles J. Bennett, played by Kevin McCarthy (Not the funny one. He’s still the House Minority leader.) repeatedly urges his beloved, Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), amid all the poddage, “TAKE TWO OF THESE!” Sometimes they seem to be Miltown or Librium; in one scene I think they’re dexedrine—so Becky can run faster, I suppose. They don’t do her any good—nor Dr. Miles J. Bennett. Becky becomes a 112-pound snow pea. Bennett winds up loony alongside the 101.

A kind of Female Learned Helplessness theme can be seen throughout Fifties films. Creature from the Black Lagoon’s Julie Adams (1956) gets to swim fetchingly and faint a lot, but only the boys have access to the cool stuff, like the lever-action Winchester and what appears to be a Jumbo Economy Size Spear Gun.

The same holds true for the 1954 classic and I think one of the best scifi/horror films ever made, Them! It’s established pretty early on that Joan Weldon’s Dr. Patricia Medford is by far James Arness’s (FBI agent James Graham) intellectual superior, but who goes wandering absent-mindedly through a desert dense with drooling Atomic Ants the size of RVs? Yup, The girl.

Arness somehow manages to discourage the ravenous ant with a snub-nosed Detective .38 Special, which I find not convincing at all.

But does Dr. Patricia Medford get to use any weapons? Especially the flamethrowers? Nosirreebob. Those are left to Arness and the unfortunate James Whitmore, who gets squished by Ant Mandibles. Medford gets a half-hug from James Arness.

[Are you beginning to see why I liked Alien’s Ripley so much?]

The one film where the female lead gets something close to Equality in Pluckiness would be in another favorite, 1958’s The Blob, where Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsault get to rush around what seems to be an incredibly obtuse San Joaquin Valley town. Even for the San Joaquin Valley. They’re trying to convince their elders that a huge ball of Olallieberry Jam from Space has eaten an old man, but not his dog, the town doctor and, alas, his nurse and the most of the Class of 1960 at the movie theater. They get a lot of “Crazy kids!” and “They’re just teenagers!” but Aneta doesn’t panic, does her own fair share of rescuing, and just as the Blob is about to eat the diner she and McQueen are sheltering in (Warning to future Blobs: The sheer volume of cheese, hamburger meat and onions stockpiled in a typical 1958 diner is enough to kill most alien life forms), she doesn’t get gypped out of any cool weaponry. McQueen figures out that Blobs don’t like cold and he spritzes it with a fire extinguisher.

Sensibly, Corsault moved from the San Joaquin Valley to Mayberry, North Carolina, where she changed her name to Helen Crump, took a teaching job, and began dating Sheriff Andy Taylor. They will go steady in a noncommittal way for what seems like twenty years until, one season, Miss Crump just up and disappears. I bet she left behind a drawerful of ungraded social studies reports about Our Latin American Neighbors. Except for Paraguay. Nobody ever wants to do a report on Paraguay.

One of Corsault’s contemporary actresses, Nancy Kwan, starred in 1961’s Flower Drum Song, a Rodgers and Hammerstein film so condescending that it reminds me of Quint from Jaws dragging his fingernails down the chalkboard, but for two hours.

She sang a song called “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”

I can’t imagine why.