We went to see Promises, Promises the other night which from its title may sound as if it’s in some way related to politics but unless you think a story of adultery and a woman trying to take a man from her husband has something to do with politics, it isn’t really. It is based on the 1960s film, The Apartment, about a fellow trying to work his way up the corporate ladder by letting a number of executives from his business use his apartment for liaisons with women, the main pairing being the head of the department who has promised his latest fling that he will leave his wife. And while the stage production is done tongue and cheek and played mostly for laughs – it is a musical with its feature song, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” – I found the morality of it quite disturbing since the one person who is portrayed to have been the innocent, almost no more than a bystander, was that other woman who knowingly and with malice aforethought took up with a married man and was specifically carried along by his false promise that he was about to leave his wife and children to be with her. She instead ends up with the man who has loved her from the start in a storyline that is intended to be seen as an uplifting finale which only reminds me how our communal moral compass has shifted and the shifting can be traced back, as with the film, to the 1960s.
There was a time when no one who behaved as that woman did would have been seen as anything other than a moral vacuum and not to be trusted under any circumstances. How the world does change. By the way, Shirley Maclaine played that young woman in the original movie version of The Apartment. It’s quite remarkable how similar she looks to Julia Gillard.
…, from its title may sound as if it’s in some way related to politics but unless you think a story of adultery and a woman trying to take a man from her husband has something to do with politics, it isn’t really.
But the personal is political okay thanks ten thousand dollar grant from the Gender studies department will be just fine thanks my thesis in genderqueer studies is practically done already!
TimT
7 Oct 12 at 9:23 am
Breitbart knew that the Left were winning in the cultural arena rather than Washington per se.
He is a huge loss if there is no one else left to fight the insidious persistent unremitting ongoing leftist erosion of the arts, education, universities, entertainment and Hollywood, the media other than news and of course journalism, the political media and lastly the language itself whereby liberqal now means illiberal and progressive actually means regressive and green means red.
The only freedom the left fight for is so-called sexual.
In every other respect over the last 50 years we are less free.
JamesK
7 Oct 12 at 10:03 am
I left out the Left’s corruption of Science
JamesK
7 Oct 12 at 10:03 am
Hey Mr Kates, there are still quite a few women who would think precisely what you said about the woman you describe!
Cath
7 Oct 12 at 10:13 am
So m8uch great art is now impossible because of the demise of good conservative moral values.
The lefties are like a dog chasing a car. For years they mocked conventional morality, wrote films, plays and novels aimed at subvering what they saw as old fashioned hypocrisy. Then one day it came to pass that the lefties caught the car, as conventional morality crumbled. And then they discovered that they didn’t know what to do once they’d got what they wanted. Suddenly, they weren’t trendy and counter-culural anymore. Everyone is now casual, slovenly and bohemian too.
When will these idiots realise that anyone can quietly defy conventional morality. If you try to change the culture you end in turn up being a prissy Victorian yourself, as many leftists are now: decrying racism and sexism on the flimsiest of pretexts. So many lefties are conventionally unconventional, that they are mere carricatures of the bohemians they think they are. The term ‘Bobo’ (bourgoise bohemian)is tailor made for such people.
WS Gilbert was absolutely right when he wrote the immortal line: If everybody’s somebody, then no-one’s anybody.
The two greatest failures of the left are what I call the the Virginnia Woolf complex (ie. that what is fun and easy amongst the upper middle classes is somehow what s needed accross the whole of society), and the zero sum complex whereby our folk marxist friends always assume that if someone does well in society, then someone else is oppressed by that success.
Rococo Liberal
7 Oct 12 at 1:03 pm
Ignore morality, just entertain people and mock nonsense.
.
7 Oct 12 at 1:06 pm
A single woman who takes up with a married man breaks no promise and commits no sin. It is the married man that is in breach of a promise and should be judged poorly. The main failing of the single woman is that she does not judge the man poorly herself and in so doing she shows a lack of discernment regarding the character of those she keeps company with. But then even Jesus hung out with dodgy people.
TerjeP
7 Oct 12 at 1:18 pm
Did Jesus tell them it was cool to break up marriages?
.
7 Oct 12 at 1:31 pm
Jesus said that divorce was akin to adultery so I think he was rather conservative on these matters.
TerjeP
7 Oct 12 at 1:56 pm
Her failure in judgement may also be due to the things she holds dear: her feminist beliefs in individualism above familial ties, in marriage as something akin to prostitution, and in her right to do as she pleases without thoughts of others, especially children. So if she is influenced in this way, she is not exactly an innocent bystander merely attracted to the wrong sort of guy.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
7 Oct 12 at 2:23 pm
She’s just a girl who can’t say ‘no’…
Gab
7 Oct 12 at 2:27 pm
Am I missing the point ,or the obvious parallel to a certain kanga ,public persona!
blind freddy
7 Oct 12 at 2:32 pm
Ranga
blind freddy
7 Oct 12 at 2:34 pm
Terje P, I’m surprised at you. If a aingle woman sleeps with a married man it is both fornication (sin) and being complicit in adultery (sin). Same as if a single man sleeps with a married woman. Both partners are very naughty. Yes to forgiveness, but no to excusing. And no to patronising views of the intelligence of women also …
Cath
7 Oct 12 at 4:13 pm
I saw Promises, Promises on opening night. I was booked to see it on Broadway in 2010 but it closed early due to lack of interest — and I’m not surprised. Apart from the 11 o’clock number (What do you get…) most of the tunes sound much the same.
An important lesson for The Production Company: in future don’t ask a film director to direct a stage show. It is not a transferrable skill. For example, that annoying mime business with the apartment door. It just grated. A simple practical door was badly needed there. This is what was done in The Producers and it worked perfectly.
There’s no doubt the cast were enthusiastic but the costumes (those awful white shoes!), set design, staging, and the odd position of the orchestra all took the edge of a show that doesn’t have much going for it in the first place.
As always with The Production Company the program booklet was first rate — and gratis.
Walter Plinge
7 Oct 12 at 4:20 pm
Terje said no such thing about men breaking up marriages and you can only say so if you presume that he thinks women are inferior.
You, should be ashamed of yourself for peaking in life as an internet troll.
.
7 Oct 12 at 4:33 pm
I think Cath’s criticism was perfectly valid.
That’s not to say I necessarily agree but she clearly is no troll.
What is it with you and your bromance with perennial libertarian twit Terje?
By the way have you and Terje seen intellectual heavyweight Gary Johnson’s latest nutter tv ad for president?
JamesK
7 Oct 12 at 4:52 pm
Don’t agree with this bit
At the very least she is an idiot. Particularly in this case as she believes the man will leave his wife.
Agree with this bit though
And I don’t think Jesus said anything like this at all:
I think he said something like “let he that is without sin throw the first stone”. And to the woman he would have said “go and sin no more”
Entropy
7 Oct 12 at 5:17 pm
JamesK you said:
Even there, the so-called freedom is actually a new form of slavery (Orwell, “1984″, reversed) – to “performance”. And the so-called sexual revolution is actually a disaster.
John A
7 Oct 12 at 7:33 pm
Entropy, you claimed:
Check: Matthew 5:28
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
and
Matthew 19:7-9 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.
I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
John A
7 Oct 12 at 7:44 pm
JamesK – I agree, that Gary Johnson advertisement sucks big time. It certainly isn’t intellectual and as an emotive piece it fails.
TerjeP
7 Oct 12 at 9:05 pm
I shouldn’t have called you ‘twit’ Terje.
I apologise
I was tryin’ to irritate dot and you were collateral damage.
JamesK
7 Oct 12 at 9:40 pm
As you observe, Promises was based on the Billy Wilder movie The Apartment. Wilder’s moral outlook was formed in prewar Austria, not 1960s America. He carried it with him to America and it only deepened with time, and the steadily loosening standards of what you could put onscreen. Avanti! and Kiss Me Stupid (both based on earlier plays) treat adultery as a therapeutic good. The earlier films had to resort to contortions to pass the censor (like the ‘happy’ ending of The Apartment), but by the time he made Buddy Buddy (1981) – one of the blackest ‘comedies’ ever made – he could show a world in which marriage is inevitably ravaged by sexual cynicism, and only a naive fool would bother complaining about it. So for once we can’t put all the blame on the 60s.
Cuckoo
8 Oct 12 at 9:03 am