Today's blog is written by the new on-air host of Saturday Night at the Movies, Thom Ernst. Thom is not-so-new around these parts having served as a researcher/producer/interviewer on the show for over a decade. His knowledge of cinema is encyclopedic, and so when I was wondering which films have largely influenced our perception of the Roma, I knew where to turn....
What I know about the Roma I've unfortunately learned from the movies, and like for many other cinematic fans I’m unable to shake the image of Gypsies that Hollywood has created.
The producers of the Agenda with Steve Paikin must have considered this when inviting me to write a blog on how the Roma are portrayed in movies, but tactfully avoided including me on this evening's panel. And to be fair, in the middle of condemning authorized persecution, do you really want someone like me voicing concern over the coinciding arrival of gypsies to a community with the sudden rise of werewolf curses? It would likely kill the discussion.
Still, many of us have pigeonholed the Roma as we've seen them in such films as The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) and House of Dracula (1945) aka, The Wolf Man's Cure. And despite our more politically and socially aware times, there seems to have been little progress. (Though, curiously, movies do tend to favour female gypsies). In film, the Roma appear as a cinematic shorthand for otherness and even the unholy.
Consider the fate of poor Billy Halleck who accidentally kills a Roma in Stephen King's 1996 thriller, Thinner. And in Drag Me to Hell (2009) Sam Raimi's gruesomely wonderful return to form, a vicious and creepy old Roma woman (Lorna Raver) curses an unsuspecting Alison Lohman for turning down her request for a bank loan. Raver gives an all-out performance as one of cinema's most malicious villains, but it does little to advance the image of Roma culture. Raimi might argue that there are plenty of Roma characters in his film that do not adhere to a traditional stereotype, and there are, but when an image is so firmly embedded in our psyche that its become an archetype, then only one portrayal in that mode is needed to keep to the convention alive.
Even when movies attempt to present a favourable view, the tendency is to err on the side of the mysterious and even the erotically charged. King of the Gypsies (1978) which not only boasts introducing Eric Roberts to the screen, but of presenting a “real” portrait of Roma life is unable to resist the tagline; "They have their own language...Their own codes of sex, honor and vengeance...". Carmen (1984), true to its operatic source, presents a Roma woman as enticing and yet dangerous. Marlene Dietrich's Roma character in Orson Welle's A Touch of Evil (1958) is the epitome of strange, yet very alluring. And the year 2000 saw two of cinema's top leading men going Roma: Johnny Depp as a mystical Gypsy in Choclat and Brad Pitt as an incomprehensible Irish Traveller in Snatch. Back in 1976, Jack Lemmon played a straight-laced bondsman who was no match for Genevieve Bujoid's free-spirited Roma in the off-beat romantic comedy, Alex and the Gypsy. And the title says it all when Franco Nero plays a Gypsy in the 1970 Virgin and the Gypsy.
Perhaps the best film with Roma charcters — and by best I mean the least judgmental — is the classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (whether it's Lon Chaney's 1923 silent version, Charles Laughton's 1939 remake or Disney's 1996 animated musical.) Like the Hunchback Quasimodo, the Roma girl — Esmerelda — is an outsider; but she is kind, good and thoroughly misunderstood. Yet even in that film, we are still offered a Gypsy who wears flowing gowns, hooped earrings and who plays the tambourine.
Yes, most of what I know about the Roma I have gathered from the silver screen. Do I wish to take this information and present it on television? Not on your life. I've seen what can happen when you inadvertently make a Gypsy mad.
Thom Ernst is the host of Saturday Night at the Movies. Watch him Saturdays at 8 p.m. on TVO.
