The Bohunk [1] in American Cinema
In the mid-nineteen nineties, Indiana University and its surrounding community of Bloomington described themselves as oases of progressive thought and
action. The University sponsored internationally recognized scholarship, for example at the Kinsey Institute. Lawn signs announced participation in "Bloomington United" a citywide celebration
of diversity. WFIU, Bloomington's National Public Radio affiliate, located on the university campus, was famous for its witty fundraising campaigns. For example, one skit dramatized a takeover of
WFIU by a buffoonish Polish man, who eliminated WFIU's cultural and intellectual programming to broadcast nothing but polkas. Listeners were encouraged to pledge money in order to protect WFIU from
this fate. Station managers reported that this oft-repeated skit had been used for years, had never raised any protest, and that they saw no reason to remove it.
Folklorist Alan Dundes offered a similar analysis: "Lower-class whites are not militant and do not constitute a threat to middle-class white America
... with the Polack [joke] cycle, it is the lower class, not Negroes, which provides the outlet for aggression and means of feeling superior" (Dundes "Study" 202). A Streetcar Named Desire is the 1951 movie version of Tennessee Williams' highly successful play. The play won most of the awards it qualified for; the film received a hefty twelve Academy Award nominations. The New York Film Critics and The New York Times named it the Best Picture of the year. Bosley Crowther, in an atypically gushy review for The Times, wrote, "... comments cannot do justice to the substance and the artistry of this film. You must see it to appreciate it. And that we strongly urge you to do" (Crowther). Many obeyed; the film was a financial as well as critical success. Since then the play, film, and Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski have not lost esteem, but gained mythic stature; each is regarded as a watershed in its field (Manso 219-235; 303-304). Playwright Dennis Reardon has called Streetcar the great American play (Kolin 2). Anthony Quinn, in language appropriate to its referent, said, "The character of Stanley fucked them all ... turned the whole world around ... Everybody started behaving like Brando" (Manso 304). In the opening scenes of the film, Blanche du Bois (Vivien Leigh) arrives in New Orleans for a visit to her sister, Stella. The dramatic tension in the film springs from the confrontation between Blanche du Bois, faded Southern Belle, and her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, crude and brutal Polak. As Crowther put it in his review, the film captures " ... an essentially human conflict ... the last brave, defiant, hopeless struggle of ... Blanche du Bois to hold on to her faded gentility against the heartless badgering of her roughneck ... lowborn brother-in-law" (Crowther). Stella is "thrilled" by Stanley's brutality; Stanley himself is aware of how his wife prizes his animal nature: "... you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt ... I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it ... " The climax of the film is Stanley's betrayal of Blanche's checkered past to Mitch, her suitor, and Stanley's rape of Blanche, after which she, broken, is packed off to an insane asylum. Stanley is spectacularly offensive. He wears a sweat-stained T-shirt and scratches at his nipple; he strips in front of a strange woman; he drinks whiskey from a bottle; smacks his wife on the rump in front of his friends – all this while he is in a good mood. Angered – and it is usually Blanche's efforts to "make enchantment" that anger him – he throws a radio out the window, exposes Blanche in her underwear to a crowd of friends, beats his pregnant wife, cries, repents, carries her lust-prostrate form on his naked back to bed for a taste of animal magnetism so compelling that Stella can't stay away, no matter what he does to her or her sister. Stanley's semi-human state extends to his family; he has a cousin "who could open a bottle of beer with his teeth. He was a human bottle opener. That was all he could do." Stanley is similarly limited. In spite of his ability to enslave women sexually, it would be hard to argue that Stanley has any positive characteristics. In his calculated and flimsily motivated destruction of Blanche, he betrays a theatrical maliciousness comparable to that of Shakespeare's Iago. As Stella puts it, "Stanley's always smashed things." The artistic power of Williams' and Brando's Kowalski is rooted in their exploitation of Bohunk stereotypes. That exploitation begins with the character's name. Stanley is a common Polish given name, Stanislaw being Poland's patron saint. "Kowalski," from "blacksmith," is comparable to the English "Smith." That Stanley's Polishness is not incidental to, but explanatory of, his brutality and his opposition to decency and refinement, is made clear within the first few moments of the movie, and the first few lines of dialogue, and several times thereafter. In the opening scenes, Blanche takes exception to sleeping in a room with only a curtain, not a door, for privacy. "Will it be decent?" she timidly asks her sister. The situation is normal for this house, Stella assures her. "Stanley is Polish, you know." When Stanley is shown to the viewer for the first time, he is bowling and fighting – two low prestige activities commonly associated with Poles in Polak jokes. Stanley is referred to as "Polish" or as "a Polack" several times, by Stella, Blanche, and Stanley himself. At one point of near overkill, Stanley takes exception to the epithets Blanche has been casting at him: "'Pig-Polack-disgusting-vulgar-greasy!' Them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister's too much around here!" And then, "I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks ... don't ever call me a Polack." Shouted in Stanley's assertive decibels, it would be impossible for anyone seeing this performance to forget that Stanley Kowalski is a Polak, and that his Polak identity is an essential ingredient of his malicious and destructive nature. In case they do forget, Blanche, representative of sensitivity, civilization and refinement, reminds them. When reminding her sister that she, Blanche, stayed by the plantation homestead and attempted to save it from ruin, Blanche reproves her: "Where were you? In there [gestures to bedroom], with your Polack." When explaining that she takes hot baths to soothe her overly sensitive nature, Blanche says to Stanley: "You healthy Polack, without a nerve in your body, of course you don't know what anxiety feels like!" Blanche's characterization of Stanley is terribly close to the stereotype used by American industrialists to justify their brutal treatment of Bohunk immigrants, and of those who opposed immigration: He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something – subhuman – something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is – Stanley Kowalski – survivor of the Stone Age! ... Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella – there has been some progress since then! Such things as art – as poetry and music – such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching ... Don't – don't hang back with the brutes! The foul lure of Polak identity is further driven home through a musical symbol and literary allusion. Part of what cripples Blanche is her grief over the suicide of her husband, a man too sensitive to live, who "wrote poetry but wasn't able to do anything else." This young Apollo shot himself while Blanche was dancing to music which torments her in the form of an auditory hallucination, and which plays on the movie soundtrack during her tortured moments. The music? "The Varsouviana," that is, citizen of Warsaw, a polka. Blanche abandoned her too sensitive husband while acting out her own inner Bohunk, lured by the primitive, as represented in overtly Polish music. Blanche, in explaining her name to Mitch, says that it means "white woods," and is like "an orchard in spring," an orchard in spring being, of course, the central symbol of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard." The famous climax of Chekhov's play features the Slavic son of a serf destroying an aristocrat's beautiful cherry orchard. That Williams knew full well what he was doing with his Bohunk stereotype is further demonstrated by his congratulatory telegram to Brando on the play's immensely successful opening night. Williams wrote Brando that the "greasy Polack" would be Brando's vehicle to stardom (Manso 232). That this exploitation of a stereotype is rarely, if ever, mentioned by critics says much about popular and elite America's unquestioning assimilation of it. In fact, one scholar recently praised Williams' positioning of a Polak in the demographically atypical site of New Orleans; Stanley's ethnicity well captures "parvenu aggression." The scholar chided Williams, though, for his "shocking" under-representation of African Americans. They, after all, have "historical precedence" (Kelly 125). But of course Stanley can't be African American. Elite America has come to allow African Americans eyes and mouths; with these, African Americans implicate greed and injustice. An audience would understand an African American Stanley's desires as something other than unmotivated destruction. Since the Bohunk is denied vision and speech, and is allowed to be only what his elite viewer hates and fears, he can serve as the pure, unmotivated destruction of a Stanley Kowalski. Given that the history of the 1880-1929 Bohunk immigrants is not widely known or discussed, no conventionally educated viewer will be reminded of the exploitation of Bohunk workers, and no viewer need feel implicated by a Polish Stanley. "Real," critics insist; Brando's performance was a watershed in theater and film because of its "realness" (Brodkey 78). To manufacture this "reality" elites worked hard. Brando worked out at a gym; Charles of the Ritz dyed his blond hair dark. Lucinda Ballard, costume designer, was inspired while ogling construction workers. "Their clothes were so dirty ... that they stuck to their bodies. It was sweat, of course ... " she said, of her great discovery. "That's the look I want ... the look of animalness" (Manso 228; emphasis added). To create her "undesigned garb" she had to wash seven pairs of jeans for twenty-four hours, strategically rip and then paint them, dye, rip, and resew t-shirts, which were too baggy and long, and send Brando to a team of Italian tailors for special fittings (Manso 229). If anti-immigrant racists like Madison Grant staged a play representing their ideas, they could not go wrong with "Streetcar." In the racist thought predominant at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Bohunk was threatening because of his sex and his land hunger. The image of the uncultured, land-hungry, breed-animal Bohunk had been depicted in popular literature before this (Blejwas), but it entered the American canon with Streetcar. Blanche and Stanley wrangle over access to an American woman's body, and possession of American earth – Belle Reve – "Beautiful Dream" – as in, American Dream. Blanche is that quintessentially American hero, the Southern Belle, whose very raison d'être was resistance against forces erosive to American civilization (Jordan 474, 475). Here she resists, physically as well as spiritually, the efforts of the parvenu Polak to get his hands on her plantation, that most sentimental piece of American real estate. The invasive manual imagery is Williams'; as huge, lowering Stanley and delicate Blanche literally wrestle over her possessions, she says, "Everyone has something they won't let others touch," and, "Belle Reve can finally be this bunch of papers in your big, capable hands." Blanche could not produce children with her refined husband. She conjectures, " ... [Stanley]'s not the type that goes for jasmine and perfume, but maybe he's just what we need to mix with our blood now that we've lost Belle Reve." In Williams' play, Americans have become too soft to breed successfully. Polaks are brought in as stud stock. Thus Streetcar dramatizes the racists' fear of miscegenation, and its twin conviction that America, overwhelmed by an influx of inferior others, was committing "race suicide." Exactly because of Stella's racially suicidal sexual enslavement to the Polak, her use of him as a stud animal, Belle Reve is lost to creditors. The power and pathos of Streetcar's final scene, as Blanche is packed off to an asylum, derive from the portrayal of tradition, refinement and ethnic superiority defeated by the imaginary brute Polak of America's "last respectable bigotry" (Novak 1976). In 1978 director Michael Cimino broke new ground. He made the first serious, artistically ambitious, Hollywood movie to depict combat in Vietnam, The Deer Hunter (Kutler 61-74). In this historic film America's involvement in Vietnam is understood not as the fruit of the machinations of wealthy and powerful Americans. It is not understood as the creation of men with names like "Kennedy," "Johnson," and "McNamara" who are divorced from the concerns of the blue-collar ethnics and other disproportionately poor and marginalized Americans and Third World peasants whose lives they destroy. Rather, the Vietnam War is depicted as the logical outcome of Bohunk culture. In this, The Deer Hunter gave artistic expression to a scholarly and popular press process that became noticeable in the sixties and seventies. Academic, press, and cultural elites came, inaccurately, to pin the social ills of racism and chauvinism on the stereotypically brutal and dumb blue-collar ethnic (Radzialowski 1976, 5; Novak 1975, 74; Hill 1975; Nie, et. al.1974; Hamilton 1972). It is ironic that imaginary Bohunks like Stanley Kowalski, so feared for the hunger that powerlessness brings, were now blamed for abuses of power that they never had. The Deer Hunter won the Best Picture Oscar for 1978. In his New York Times review, Vincent Canby praised the film as, " ... a big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture ... close to being a popular epic," and, " ... its feeling for the time, place, and blue-collar people are genuine, and its vision is that of an original, major new filmmaker" (Canby 1978 a). In a later article, Canby wrote: " ... more honestly rueful, sad, provocative, and finally, frightening than any other movie we've had yet about Vietnam" (Canby 1978 b). The Deer Hunter follows the fates of three friends from a tightly knit Lemko community as they work, love, and go to war. (Lemkos are a Slavic ethnic group who live in what is today Poland and Ukraine.) Work means steel; in the opening scenes the camera explores the almost unbearably bleak industrial face of a steel town, its smokestacks, monstrous, dehumanizing architecture, and soot. Men whose individuality is obscured by heavy protective gear do work that appears literally hellish: they manipulate rivers of molten steel. Later three buddies, clad in flannel shirts and long underwear, retreat to a locker room, where naked co-workers exhort them, "Kill a few for me, too," and wish Steven good luck in his upcoming wedding. With this juxtaposition, the movie parallels Bohunk killing and Bohunk sex as manhood-proving rites. The men tell dirty jokes. "Did you hear about the happy Roman? He was glad he ate her," wrestle, and then steer a white Cadillac through a game of chicken with an eighteen-wheeler. They drive to a dark bar where they play pool, watch football, gamble, and wear black leather. Cross-cut scenes introduce the town's female element. A beautiful young blonde is being beaten and called a "Fucking bitch" by her drunken, fat-gutted father, who is costumed in a stained T-shirt. An obese old woman, dressed all in black, including babushka, beats her son, complains in a Boris Badenoff accent that his bride-to-be is pregnant, and exhorts him to wear a scarf to his wedding, because it is cold. "You don't wear a scarf with a tuxedo!" he is assimilated enough to tell her. Cimino staged a stereotypical Bohunk wedding, at which the de rigueur dancing, drinking, fighting and rutting take place, with a few variations. Stan becomes jealous when a singer fondles his girl; Stan knocks her out, not him (of course she immediately forgives him). Axle carries off a screaming, flailing, underwear flashing bridesmaid on his shoulders, shouting to her, "Do you want to fuck or fight?" Michael (Robert de Niro) reveals complete sexual inadequacy. He can't even dance with the beautiful Linda (Meryl Streep) and ignores her into social embarrassment. After the wedding and their display of their control of the female population, the men, eating Twinkies dipped in mustard, go hunting. A Slavic men's chorus rings out on the soundtrack as the Bohunks track deer over difficult terrain. They return to the bar, deer over car; and celebrate. In the next scene, fire, smoke, and sparks reminiscent of the opening steel mill shots consume a Vietnamese village. The buddies are captured, imprisoned, and tortured. Thanks to Michael's stoic courage, physical strength, and resolution, the men escape. The rest of the film veers back and forth between Vietnam and their mill town, and the characters' struggle with their physical and emotional scars. In the final scene, the Bohunks comfort themselves and each other with food, alcohol, and by singing "God Bless America." The characters share Stanley Kowalski's gender failure. "I get more pussy than a toilet seat," this film's Stanley announces. Michael, the hero, is not a sexual beast; he is all but a eunuch. He runs from every intimate encounter Linda initiates with him. He never initiates an encounter with a woman. When Linda finally pins him, he falters. Having rejected the Bohunk model offered by both cinematic Stanleys, he has no other role to assume. The Bohunk stereotype that allows him to be a hunter who can down deer with one shot, a soldier who can survive captivity and torture, cripples him in love. What Michael has gained in sympathy over Stanley Kowalski he must trade for sexual dysfunction. As seen from the outside, the Bohunk is a gender failure, one way, or another. It is not the position of this paper that a good movie about Bohunks must portray Bohunks as all good. The problem is more complex. First, there is the problem of the use of distinctive cultural markers to service stereotypes. When movies introduce stereotypical African American criminals who speak accurate Black English, the use of authentic Black English does not make the rest of the depiction any less stereotypical. The Deer Hunter is long; its running time, one hundred eighty three minutes. Most of the action takes place in the mill town, not Vietnam. The movie captures the look and feel of life for many Bohunks. The opening scenes are pregnant with cultural resonance; gazing at the soot, sparks, and flowing, molten steel, any Bohunk might be reminded of a relative killed, maimed, or widowed by such work. The camera lingers rather than is rushed; the footage from the church is almost ethnographic. People say "na zdrowie," and "dziekuje" and perform traditional dances. "Finally," a Bohunk might think during these scenes, "here is a Hollywood movie that realizes that we exist, that accurately reflects Bohunk life, and that won't be painful to watch." In fact, though, these culturally distinctive markers are not there as part of a real portrait of real people, but to buttress a stereotype. There is the simple mathematics of representationality. Are there cinematic Americans of other ethnic groups who beat each other, wear stained clothing, and use weapons? Sure, but there are also representatives of those same groups who don't do any of those things. No film of economic importance or artistic stature comparable to The Deer Hunter has ever portrayed Bohunks with that film's teasing tastes of verisimilitude. The Deer Hunter's unique use of Bohunk cultural markers is combined with grotesque exaggeration that well represents stereotypes, but does not represent real people. That combination serves to strengthen stereotypes that work against the Bohunks and for those who oppose them, from conservative racists to those liberals who have falsely blamed Bohunks and other ethnics for American chauvinism and racism. The problem is also one of subjectivity. Bohunks are not allowed either eyes or mouths in The Deer Hunter. If the film's Bohunks were allowed the ability to see and to speak, that is, to comment on, yes, to implicate the elite culture doing the commenting on them, the fragile, stereotypical artistic underpinnings of The Deer Hunter would crumble. As it is, its characters, blinded and silenced, are impersonated from the outside in. Their shapes conform, not to the expressions of real people's minds and souls, but to bigoted others' stereotypes. They are no more than animated versions of the ethnic dolls sold in roadside tourist stands in exotic locales. The viewer can pity The Deer Hunter's Bohunks, be disgusted or horrified by them, and can easily feel superior to them and blame them for disasters like Vietnam. Were they representational Bohunks, were they allowed subjectivity, it would soon be revealed that they, no less than their ethnic and economic betters, are capable of producing individuals who can critique the elite machinations that lead to Vietnam in the first place. Indeed, a real life American of Slavic descent, Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, presented America with one of its most important critiques of the war (Kovic). Ironically, Kovic implicated Hollywood movies as a major reason that he volunteered to go to Vietnam. Another problem is contextuality. Bohunk behaviors are not understood in context. The Bohunks carry and are expert in the use of weapons; the scene immediately preceding the first battle scene in Vietnam shows them celebrating, with some sentiment, a deer kill. One could draw the conclusion that Cimino is attempting to communicate that the unique macho of Bohunk culture combined with the brutality of American capitalism – symbolized by the smoke, sparks and fire of the mill, which are mirrored in the smoke, sparks and fire of the battle scene – have created a sub-human man who will go to war without conscience or thought. It is true that many Bohunk men, both here and in Europe, do hunt. The film does not explore the reasons for this. The Lemkos came from what was a scene of famine, where places have names like "The Valley of Hunger." Men hunted in Europe to eat. Descendents of Bohunk immigrants today might remember grandfathers who were paid merely enough to feed themselves each day. If sick or injured, they could not work and received no salary. Hunting and foraging, where possible, were necessary to supplement diets. Other cultures, too, have their outlets for male predatory feelings. Oliver Stone's northwestern European father was a Wall Street trader. Stone did not cross-cut scenes of aggressive takeovers with scenes of killing in his autobiographical Vietnam movie "Platoon," however. Again, culturally distinct markers are used to buttress stereotypical perceptions. Slavic men's choral singing rings on the soundtrack during hunting scenes. When Michael finally succumbs to Linda, and the two enjoy moments of awkward tenderness, instead of playing tender Slavic love songs, the soundtrack switches to American, mainstream guitar music. This music, which jars the ear after so much Bohunkiania, is only played during tender or thoughtful moments. To experience tenderness or thought, the film's characters must depart from their culture, and become ethnically mainstream Americans. No matter what shattering experiences the Bohunks of this film go through, Cimino refuses them sight or speech. The ethnically mainstream filmgoer, ideally sharing Cimino's assessment of Bohunks, will never learn the Bohunk assessment of anything, certainly not of him, the filmgoer. The filmgoer is thus protected from the kind of confrontations with self that make for great art. As Canby wrote, "The big answers elude [the film's characters], as do the big questions" (Canby 1978 a). "The characters can express feelings only in second-rate sentiment ... " (Canby 1978 b). This is for the best, asserted Canby; this picture of Bohunks as incapable of sight or speech is part of the film's laudable genuineness. The film is "at its worst", he insisted, when it attributes any kind of insight to its characters at all (Canby 1978, c). Cinematic successes have been made that portray low class Slavic peasants wearing T-shirts, engaging in fisticuffs, etc. Three classics of world cinema might serve as examples: the 1965 Czechoslovak film, The Shop on Main Street, Andrzej Wajda's 1972 The Wedding and his 1977 Man of Marble, both made in Poland. The heroes of these films have, superficially, much in common with the Bohunks in American cinema. They wear T-shirts, do manual labor, engage in fisticuffs, and fail at life. The Wedding portrays a rambunctious event that would make Cimino's fantasy wedding pale by comparison. As in The Deer Hunter, characters in these movies become the pawns of historic forces far beyond them: Nazism, Stalinism, and colonization. But these characters' creators are not expressing an anti-Bohunk stereotype, and, thus, are not threatened by their characters' subjectivity. T-shirted failures in these films are allowed to see Nazism, Stalinism, and colonization, to see their own puny place in history, and comment on it. Thus, these films are less about stereotypes meant to comfort an elite into believing that it is not responsible for racism, chauvinism or the Vietnam War. These films, rather, create complex portraits of three-dimensional human beings with whom the viewer can identify, no matter how alien their experience, rather than caricatures the viewer automatically feels superior to. The art of these films forces viewers to confront the place of man – any man, of any ethnicity – in the face of oppressive overwhelming historical tides. Ironically, Canby, who insisted on wrongly identifying the characters in The Deer Hunter as "Russian," once praised The Deer Hunter's genuineness in an article about artistic truth. Cultural arbiter Canby argued forcefully for his own disregard of poetic truth in movies about cultures he doesn't care about. Canby then insisted that he could not accept the artistic merits of a movie that flubbed details of the tensions between old and new money, tensions with which he is familiar (Canby1978, b). In a further irony, The Deer Hunter has been criticized by many as "racist." One viewer protested, "The movie is 'a lie' in which all the non-Americans are 'sweaty, crazy, vicious, and debauched.'" The protesters were not concerned with the film's portrayal of Bohunks, but of Asians (Harmentz 1979; see also Kutler 1996, 61-74). One mainstream author rooted in working class and white ethnic life has voiced his objections to The Deer Hunter. In 1999, Pulitzer Prize winning author Studs Terkel wrote:
The Fugitive was that rare thing: a movie that dominated the year's box office receipts as wells as critics' praise. Janet Maslin's review is an atypical, for the Times, cascade of superlatives. "A smashing success," she stated. "A juggernaut of an action-adventure saga ... directed sensationally," the principals act with "steely perfection" the supporting cast is "flawless"; the screenplay is "clever, inventive"; in fact "every element conspires to sustain crisp intelligence and a relentless pace." "To put it simply, this is a home run" (Maslin). The movie, like the television series on which it was based, consists of one long chase. A highly successful surgeon falsely accused of killing his wife runs from the law while trying to find the real killer. This contrived story gains force from the nightmarish fear that one wrong move could result in a man's losing his family, home, status, income; and the character-testing question: could a man who was at the top triumph if thrust to the bottom? The film chronicles Dr. Kimble's (Harrison Ford) desperate plummet from a man who had everything to an escaped convict who must function in a world he was probably never exposed to before: prison, cheap basement apartments, mean streets. Dr. Kimble's descent is also dramatized by the debased ethnicities with whom he must suddenly rub shoulders. Once convicted, Kimble shares space with African American prisoners, but they are intelligent and dignified. One could conclude that they are prisoners because of racial injustice rather than because of any crimes they may have committed. Further, the crack law-enforcement team chasing Dr. Kimble, headed up by Tommy Lee Jones, is integrated. Jones' character, Sam Gerard, is a WASP male, of course, but he leads a politically correct team. Gerard has a Jew and a very competent African American woman working for him. Will political correctness result in a vitiated film? No. The obvious choice is to exploit an ethnicity that is coded low class, and that is considered fair game. The film plays the Bohunk card. The Bohunks in this film are on screen very briefly; the very brevity of their appearance, combined with the certainty of their ethnicity and their function, indicates how very strong the stereotype is. Kimble, running from the law, must vacate his airy, enviable high-rent apartment and enter the world of dreary basement rooms [2]. He was formerly shown in a tuxedo, rubbing elbows with the svelte and glamorous, but now the viewer has an idea of the gravity of Kimble's situation: his landlady is Polish. She speaks Polish repeatedly; a shoddy knock-off of Poland's revered Black Madonna hangs over Kimble's rented bed. The landlady herself conforms to the dictates of stereotypical Bohunk gender failure: she is ugly and expressionless, except for a vague, stupid hostility; her body is block-like. In case the viewer has missed how grim and low this state of affairs is for the hero, police raid the residence. An affirmative action team of cops, including an African American man, arrest the landlady's fat, balding, ugly son for "Stringing out twelve year old girls." The African American cop leads the Polak prisoner away. In the police station the ugly Polak criminal, apparently bought out by the treats he is stuffing into his mouth, betrays Kimble's location. As with his mother, no thought or emotion flickers on his balloon-like face. "Relax," this scene reassures mainstream America. "Yes, African Americans will advance, but they won't advance at your expense. A WASP male still leads the team. As a bonus, you, the viewer, can feel righteous watching an African American cop leading away a white bad guy. You can feel safe as well as righteous, because the bad guy isn't really white like you. He's a Polak. Yes there are bad, ugly, distasteful ethnic others in this world, people so perversely, stupidly hostile and possessed of such bad taste that they deserve our fear, disgust, and the rough treatment of our police. We can use them as shorthand for danger, perverse hostility, crime and ugliness in our art. The Bohunks." The Apartment is treated out of chronological order because it represents a significant departure from the norm in its exploitation of the Bohunk stereotype. The Apartment won the best picture Oscar of 1960; Oscars also went to Billy Wilder for his direction and Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond for their screenplay. Bosley Crowther called it a " ... gleeful, tender, and even sentimental film," and praised its "ingenious" direction, "splendid" performances, and "action and dialogue tumbling with wit" (Crowther 1960). The New York Times named it one of the year's top ten. The Apartment opens with a crisp aerial view of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In a voice-over, Jack Lemmon, as the movie's hero, C. C. Baxter, recites statistics, for example: if all the citizens of New York were laid end to end they would reach Karachi. The narrator knows things like this because he crunches numbers for an insurance company. The camera cuts to Baxter's desk, one of hundreds in a starkly lit office, beehive-like in its uniformity and buzz. We soon discover what sets Baxter apart in this dizzying series of images of an imperial, dehumanizing, gray flannel America: he allows higher-ups to conduct illicit sexual liaisons in his one-bedroom bachelor apartment. This boy is going places. In exchange for his compliance, Baxter's superiors put in a good word for him with the powerful Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). Sheldrake, when promoting Baxter, puts an end to the other men's shenanigans, only to reserve Baxter's apartment for his affair with Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine; "Kubelik" is a Czech name) an elevator operator. A series of alternately melancholy, comic, and near tragic scenes follow, centering on Baxter's brokering of his apartment for professional advancement, and the erosive effect this has on his humanity. Fran, depressed by her affair with Sheldrake, attempts suicide in the apartment; Baxter nurses her. A neighbor, Dr. Dreyfus, helps Baxter rescue Fran. Cabby Karl Matushka [3], Fran's brother-in-law, arrives to punch Baxter out. Eventually Fran and Baxter come to understand that they love each other, and unite, happily, leaving Sheldrake and the rat race behind them. Fran Kubelik and Karl Matushka bear certain superficial similarities to the Bohunks described so far. They do blue-collar work; they abjure socially coded displays meant to impress as intelligence. Their physicality, in the form of Fran's sexual surrender and Matushka's violence, is essential to their characters. There is a world of difference, though, between the Bohunks of The Apartment and of the three previously discussed films. Many Bohunks did work with their bodies, live in poverty, lack education, and sense that they were different and despised. That sense contributed to a discomfort that outsiders often read as irrational hostility or anti-cultural clannishness (Novak Guns xv, xvi). As we have seen, writers, producers and directors may, in getting these surface ethnographic details right, get the inner men and women wrong. Fran Kubelik and Karl Matushka, however, communicate to the attentive viewer that the circumstances of their lives do not define them, and that their manifest traits are their best option for dealing with the world as it has been presented to them, rather than evidence of inferior blood. Further, Fran, Matushka, and the Jewish Doctor Dreyfus are allowed eyes and mouths. They are allowed subjectivity. They are allowed to see and comment on the others who see and comment on them; they are allowed to implicate those they see and those who see them. Thus, they are as human as the viewer; it is possible to identify with them. Matushka, Fran and Dr. Dreyfus are allowed to present the very qualities Baxter's slice of America needs to save its own soul. Fran disparages her own intelligence. She announces that she wanted to be a white-collar worker, a typist, but, "I flunked the typing test. I can't spell." Fran, though, is not as dumb as she protests, and one suspects that on some level she knows that, and knows that she is presenting the face that she needs to in order to survive her fate. In working her miserable job she shows a graciousness and dignity the white-collar workers lack; Baxter crosses hierarchical lines in order to point this out to her. While dealing with the wondering hands of executive Mr. Kirkibee in no uncertain terms, Fran brandishes a rapier wit that defuses what might otherwise be a precarious situation for a woman in her relatively powerless position. She identifies herself as a "happy idiot" to Sheldrake during a painful moment, communicating that she knows more about what's really going on than he does, but that she is powerless to make Sheldrake, the powerful one, understand; therefore, it is to her temporary strategic advantage to play the role assigned her. When she has finally gained the insight she needs to break free from Sheldrake's power, she tells him, "I'd spell it out for you, only I can't spell." With this sentence she rejects the cold profit-and-loss logic of Sheldrake's world and acknowledges the superiority of her kind of Bohunk logic, in which an unemployed shnook like Baxter is a better match for her than a wealthy and newly divorced executive like Sheldrake. Matushka advertises his low intellectual status through his job: cabby, and his non-standard speech: "My sister-in-law she runs ... ", and, " ... on account of ... ", flat vowels and dropping of "R's." Matushka's broad shoulders, athletic stance, and slight stoop offer an obvious visual contrast when he enters a glass-walled office of unmuscled, suited executives. He wears a hip-length leather jacket and leather gloves; other than his rugged, angry face, no humanizing flesh is revealed. Executives immediately size this man up as a threat and sic him on Baxter to avenge Baxter's revoking of their apartment privileges. When he arrives at the apartment, Matushka's mere presence agitates Baxter into a comic tailspin of faux macho, expressed in the only form available to him: self-incriminatory verbosity. He, in shirt and tie, prattles on and on, while Matushka glares at him, arms crossed, silent, his sheer physicality statement enough. When he doesn't like what he thinks he sees, Matushka punches Baxter to the ground. In this scene, Matushka's expression of his physicality is his direction of his intelligence. As he watches Baxter silently, menacingly, he radiates the presence not of a man who can't speak, but who disdains the feeble verbal efforts at self-aggrandizement and female-disparaging male bonding that Baxter produces as if they were Madison Avenue jingles. Matushka looks like a working man who's been lied to before, who knows when he's being lied to, and who will use what power he has, his body, to articulately and efficiently say what needs to be said when he needs to say it. His aware and communicative silence, apparently, says much to the better-educated, white-collar Baxter; it is what drives Baxter into his verbal tailspin. Unlike Stanley Kowalski, who affects elite speech when trying to coax ownership of Belle Reve, Matushka is too intelligent, dignified and self-satisfied to ape the vocabulary of another class. Rather, Matushka's very silence and physicality present the world through his eyes, and his class superiors as they look to him – that is, inferior. The sexual exploitation of Fran's working class, Bohunk body by an upper class WASP, her own self-deprecation of her mind, could render a woman who is only her physicality. We are told in so many words, however, that Fran is the decent one. While higher ups carouse at a Christmas party, Fran is shown sober, dignified, and apart. Fran resists the rush and anonymity of elevator traffic to take note of Baxter's elevator courtesies. She gives him a flower for his lapel on an important day; she gently requests that Baxter not speak indiscreetly of her to other men in the office. Fran's body is sturdy like Stanley Kowalski's and other Bohunks': "I never catch colds." But she is self-aware and witty about this: "If the average New Yorker catches two and a half colds a year and I don't catch any, some poor slob is getting five!" Her genuine love for Sheldrake, combined with the disempowered's wistful, wishful ability to see the reality she needs rather than the harsh, hopeless truth that confronts her, are what make the affair possible for her. Even so, she is never seen unclothed while with her married lover; she never kisses or embraces him; she attempts to end the affair and only continues because of his calculated seduction. Like Baxter, she temporarily trades the commodity over which she has power to a cold, powerful WASP's empty promises. Fran feels deep grief and disgust when her fantasy weakens and reality becomes evident. She persists in using a mirror broken during a fight with Sheldrake. "It makes me look the way I feel." Even Fran and Matushka's relative poverty are positively valued. Baxter moves and lives in a frigid, amoral vacuum, where he can do what he wants because nobody cares. The poorer Fran, by contrast, must live in the same domestic arrangement as Blanche du Bois: with her sister and brother-in-law. This domestic setting is not a prelude to degradation and rape but to caring and protection of honor. Matushka goes to Fran's workplace to check on her when she doesn't come home; he travels to Baxter's apartment, collects her, and punishes the man whom he believes hurt her. In fact, it is Baxter's world, a WASP one of hypocrisy, anomie, and pointless dog-eat-dog competition, which must change. It is in the eyes of Bohunks and Jews that Baxter is informed that there is something wrong with his life. Protesting suspicious goings on in Baxter's apartment, Jewish neighbor Dr. Dreyfus [4] warns Baxter that he won't live long, and exhorts him to become a "mensch." In Fran's broken mirror Baxter sees the painful ridiculousness of his splintered reflection, as he models his newly-purchased bowler, the power hat he had bought to celebrate his hard-earned promotion. It is at that moment that he confronts the compromises he and others make to achieve "success." Baxter's moment of truth, when he finally takes a stand for himself and for what he is discovering he believes, is made clear by Fran's irrational Bohunk sentiment and inspired by love for Fran. For the first time in nearly two hours of acting like a compromised doormat, Baxter says a firm "No" to a demand for his apartment. He takes this stand because he knows that Sheldrake wants to bring Fran there. When Sheldrake threatens to fire him for this, Baxter says, "I'm just following Doctor's orders. I've decided to become a mensch. The old payola won't work anymore." The necessary ingredients for Baxter's redemption, and, by extension, his glass-and-steel America, are Ashkenazi philosophy and Bohunk love. In a baton-passing gesture, Baxter pauses in his escape to place his power hat atop the head of an African American janitor. Neither Fran nor Matushka are worthy of a two hour movie centered on themselves. Matushka's concerns and struggle are too marginal to the American narrative. Fran is too romantic, giving, self-deprecating; she needs anchoring by a young WASP on the move like Baxter; her indiscriminate Bohunk love needs countering by the more calculating WASP Baxter's intelligent engagement in mainstream culture. But this is a complex and sympathetic portrayal of Bohunks; how did it come about? Billy Wilder, producer, director, and co-author of The Apartment, is an immigrant. A Jew from Sucha, Poland, his portrayal of Fran conforms with a tradition of some Ashkenazi Jews writing fondly of Bohunk women as earthy, beautiful sources of redemptive love. Fran Kubelik's cinematic older sister is Sugar Kowalczyk, the sweet, sexy, conniving but self-advertised dumb blonde played by Marilyn Monroe in Wilder's 1959 hit, "Some Like it Hot." The most prominent author in this tradition would be Noble Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, through whose works parade a series of such Bohunk heroines: Wanda in The Slave, Jadwiga in Enemies, a Love Story, and Tekla, in Shosha of whom Singer wrote:
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