Mood:  bright

There was a time when black and white movies bothered me for no other reason than being devoid of color.  I felt horrible about it because I knew there were some awesome stories out there that I was missing out on because of my strange aversion to black and white.  I have since gotten over that and, with the help of TCM, have been plumbing the depths of film history to find all the gems that I was born too late to catch -- be they black and white or color. 

It's hard to grow up when I did and not know of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but I realized a while back that I hadn't actually seen very many of their movies.  Enter Carefree, the story of a desperate man who talks his psychiatrist friend into analyzing his girl to figure out why she won't marry him.  

Carefree is yet another old movie starring well known screen legends that  steps merrily over the line of what is good and what is just plain WRONG!  I worry about all of Dr. Tony Flagg's (Fred Astaire) patients.  Not only does he make chauvinistic and stereotypical prejudgments but he does it on a tape machine that he leaves in his office with un-attended patients.  Not only does he use local anesthetics to put patients in dream like states he leaves them un-attended so that they might wander out of the building unsupervised and trot through traffic with the goal of shattering glass on a transport truck.  And even though he seems to being doing his best to romance his patient outside of the office with the precept that it is for her treatment, he doesn't realize that he has fallen just as in love with her as she him.

This brings us to the greatest psychiatric insult in the film--blatant and idiotic hypnotic suggestion.  Although I have read that it's not all that unusual for patients to fall in love with their doctors--called transference, I think--I have never had offered to me the solution of simply implanting an assertion of hate into a patients brain to compensate for their love.  I was aghast.  I was agog.  I was befuddled.  I was watching as, all of a sudden, the psychiatrist who didn't know himself finally realizes that he reciprocates the love of the patient he just hypno-suggested his way out of.  Bring on the crazy antics to get her unconscious once again so that he may remove his meddling.

I can't say any more.  I am at a loss.  This was worse than revisiting all those Elvis movies and discovering how often he played a complete jerk.  But it wasn't quite as bad as Fred Astaire in blackface.