Fecha de vencimiento y amortización de los valores

Travelers in the handful of road films produced during the 1950s also make a journey across the US, and they likewise encounter a culture marked by a show business ethos. However, when protagonists go on the road in the 1950s, in contrast to their 1940s counterparts, more often than not they are now characterized like Deke in Without Reservations: as fans of popular entertainment, not its performers (Hope and Crosby), directors (John L. Sullivan), or writers (Kit Madden). I don’t think it is an oversimplification to say that, when viewed from this perspective, 1950s road films indirectly register the impact of the United States’ postwar transformation from a nation based in production to one increasingly geared towards consuming. This dramatic shift in the nation’s economy coincided with its achievement of global hegemony in the years between 1945 and 1958 (McCormick: 238–9) and its consumption, beginning in 1955, of more energy than it could produce (Oakley: 230). The history of Route 66, stretching across the country from Chicago to New Mexico to Santa Monica Pier (via Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood), is itself emblematic of the resulting transformation of the road’s utopian connection to the nation. Opened in 1926, the famous “Mother Road” of Depression migrants like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was also the route traveled by “all the song writers, all the movie makers, all the writers who came from the Algonquin Hotel in New York to the Garden of Allah in Hollywood” (Dean, “Still”). In 1946, Bobby Troup turned it into a famous popular song, and, in 1960, Stirling Silliphant made it the setting of a popular television series. Eventually, “The Main Street of America,” as Route 66 was also nicknamed, was replaced by the nondescript, high-speed interstates, and then officially decertified and shut down for good in 1984. By 1993, in celebration of its sixty-sixth anniversary, the mythic highway, a nostalgic memento of a bygone populist America – “those days when people gave everyone the time of day and urgent travelers didn’t have to buy gasoline to use the restroom” (Dean, “Still”) – was now being merchandised as “a $195 wristwatch with a revolving dial showing each town mentioned [by Troup’s song]” (Dean, “100 Classic”).

The shift in the road’s meaning in the 1950s is apparent when The Greatest Show on Earth (1953) cites the 1940s Road to series with a guest appearance by Hope and Crosby. The famous entertainers are seen in the audience, eating popcorn while watching Dorothy Lamour sing “Lovely Luawana Lady,” not performing in the show themselves. This equation of showbiz and consumption is not an isolated moment in the DeMille film. The diegetic audience gets almost as much attention as the circus acts, with DeMille routinely cutting away to close-ups of spectators watching the show in rapt attention and literally consuming a seemingly endless supply of popcorn, ice cream, and peanuts. In the plot – its

main conflict arising from the financially threatened circus’s effort to stay on the road for a full season – when the star attraction (Cornel Wilde) cripples his arm in a fall, the aerialist ends up selling balloons to the audience as his means of remaining with the show. That audience, moreover, dominated by children, is characterized within the diegesis and by DeMille’s voice-over as regressive: even adults like Hope and Crosby are shown to be juvenile in their enthusiasm for the “excitement and adventure” of the show. Repeatedly, the circus boss (Charlton Heston) tries to convince the corporate owners not to shut down the tour for the sake of all the children in small towns everywhere across America. Not surprisingly, when the fugitive clown Buttons (James Stewart) is finally apprehended by the police, before leaving the big-top in handcuffs, he hands over his faithful little dog to a child in the audience. Talk about taking home a great souvenir!

The Greatest Show on Earth is essentially a throwback to the road films of the 1940s. Its circus community, joining talented misfits together to form a home on the road, is cast from the same mold as the sideshow act in Saboteur. But Buttons’s presence in the show, with the famous face of James Stewart hidden by clown makeup, like the clown’s own strong identification with the children in the audience, helps to distinguish how this film characterizes the relation of utopian entertainment and its consumers: as Irving Howe warned of mass culture in 1948, “The identification is ultimately with our role of social anonymity” (502). The Greatest Show on Earth celebrates this role as the hallmark of pleasurable consumption, in contrast to the way that fame and the production of entertainment go together hand in hand in Sullivan’s Travels and Without Reservations. Furthermore, after the spectacular train wreck destroys the big top, the show itself becomes stationary; it literally loses its locomotion. With the circus immobilized, the performers have to go into Cedar City in order to bring the anonymous audience to the show, dramatizing the real catastrophe threatening the circus – the postwar rupture between home and the road – which the DeMille film continually tries to negotiate by showing how the utopian ethos of popular entertainment can be achieved through its consumption.

That the circus, the greatest traveling show on earth, has trouble drawing enough crowds to justify its long tour on the road is perhaps much more significant than the plot of DeMille’s film recognizes. In comparison to the previous decade of wartime social disruption and mobility on the one hand, and postwar demobilization and relocation on the other – a rhythm of social displacement– replacement that also characterizes a road film’s typical structure – the 1950s was a rather sedentary period: few films of this decade, for example, go on the road. “Home” came to mean not the nation as unified by the road, as in wartime, but domesticity as the mainstay of the postwar middle-class family and as evidence of the nation’s great prosperity in contrast with postwar Europe and Asia.7 _{Automobiles, far from}

being seen as a means of transportation or liberation, were sold as commodities and prized as status symbols; their setting was the ranchhouse garage, not the open road. In fact, the automobile industry borrowed from Hollywood in displaying its new product in an annual “motorama” that, whether in a local convention center or an industrial film, looked more like big-screen musical revues than anything else, complete with glitzy, elaborate sets, musical numbers, and chorines. The car itself became part of “a show, an exhibition” (Marling: 146). It is therefore quite fitting that, when Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the stars of television’s I Love Lucy, take to the road in the movies as newlyweds Tacy and Nicky Collini in The Long, Long Trailer (1954), one of the 1950s’ few outright road movies, like turtles they carry their home with them. The Collinis’ shiny yellow trailer – first seen by the couple at a motorama – sports the latest modern kitchen appliances, such as a sleek refrigerator and gas range with a see-through oven door. It even has a sunken living room, and the bedroom is large enough for twin beds. Its cupboards, moreover, are so stocked with dishes and cookware of every size and shape, its closets so stuffed with matching fleece towels and Tacy’s Helen Rose wardrobe, that Nicky cannot find space for his clothes, let alone the golf clubs he tries to bring aboard. All this mobile home needs for its finishing touch, Tacy says more than once, is a deep freeze. She persuades her husband-to-be to buy the trailer, “a little place we could call our own,” because Nicky’s work as a geological engineer will require them to move around the country, but he discovers, to his dismay, that their portable home is actually like “a train” pulling behind their new convertible: “forty feet of train,” to be more exact. As well as resembling the era’s large cars themselves – weighted down with surplus chrome and tail fins, filled from engine to trunk with “the usual power accessories, deep-pile upholstery, padded interiors, coil springs, and bargelike proportions” (Marling: 141) – the trailer uncannily calls to mind DeMille’s voice-over description of the circus in the opening of The Greatest Show on Earth: “A massive machine whose very life depends on discipline, motion, and speed. A mechanized army that rolls over any army in its path.” The whole point of this trailer, once it hits the road and overwhelms every car coming in its path, is to make you forget that you’re on the road.

On the face of it, the road plot of The Long, Long Trailer has nothing to do with either the entertainment industry or Hollywood, but then this film does not need to invoke the trope of showbiz to represent the road as the nation because it literally takes home on the road. Rather than overtly representing the unifying spirit of American popular culture through showbiz, the road in this film provides a seemingly unended series of opportunities for consuming. As they travel cross-country in this home on wheels, Tacy fills up the trailer with boxes of canned fruits and vegetables that she acquires along the way, and, more ominously as it will turn out, rocks from every stop, carefully labeled. “Every one reminds me of some

wonderful place that we’ve been,” Tacy tries to explain, planning to display all these mementos from their honeymoon when they reach Colorado and set up the trailer as their home, suggesting how she intends to place home life and the road side by side. However, anticipating a climb up a narrow mountain road to 8,000 feet, Nicky orders his wife to throw everything out in an effort to reduce the trailer’s considerable weight. Since she cannot bring herself to part with her souvenirs, Tacy hides the rocks throughout the trailer; when Nicky discovers her deceit, he dumps everything out, precipitating their temporary estrangement at the start of the film and his framing voice-over.

The Long, Long Trailer nonetheless projects the utopian ethos of showbiz onto the road through the well-known television personae of its two stars. In its theatrical trailer, Arnaz’s voice-over repeatedly refers to the characters as “Lucy” and himself, and, even within the film, the fictional names of the couple encourage such conflation of star and television identities with their characters, since “Tacy” and “Nicky” sound too much like “Lucy” and “Ricky” to be accidental (Harvey: 166). Moreover, the year after they made The Long, Long Trailer, Arnaz and Ball took to the road again in their television series, with Lucy and company going to Hollywood in a famous series of episodes spanning two seasons (and airing from 1954 to 1955).8 _{Of course, during her stay in Hollywood, Lucy Ricardo still} wants to break into showbiz. She gets and ruins a walk-on in a motion picture, for example, and, though burnt from too much sunbathing in an effort to look like a star, awkwardly appears in a fashion show with other Hollywood wives; for that matter, the Ricardos and their friends, the Mertzes, put on an amateur show in Ethel’s home town of Albuquerque before they get to LA, and Ricky has gone there to star in a movie himself. But most of the comedy in Lucy’s long, long trip to Hollywood comes from her position as a starstruck fan collecting souvenirs of her trip to bring home, from Richard Widmark’s signature on a grapefruit to John Wayne’s footprints at Grauman’s Chinese theater. When they pack for their return to New York, Ricky complains about the weight of her luggage, which turns out to be crammed full of her mementos from Hollywood (save for Wayne’s cement block, which she almost gets away with).

This long story-arc in the television series illuminates how the road functions in the 1950s to project the utopian value of entertainment through consumption. Given the fact that it followed so closely upon the wheels of The Long, Long Trailer, the television road trip to Hollywood helps to clarify what the road means in this film, too. True, the Collinis’ road trip reverses direction (headed out of Los Angeles on Highway 101 northeast to Colorado), and the film uses the colossal, well-appointed trailer, “an incongruously massive blot on the western landscape,” to satirize “the lure of technology and mobility which possesses a newer, rootless middle class” (Harvey: 168–9). All the same, the road narrative here ends up

just as the television series does: like Lucy, Tacy sees her road trip as an occasion to consume pieces of America as souvenirs of her journey, quite literally so, intending to incorporate the road into the exterior of her home once she and Nicky stop traveling. To be sure, in contrast to Lucy’s trip to Hollywood, popular entertainment does not overtly contextualize the utopian sense of home on the road that Tacy experiences through her consumerism, but it is never entirely absent from The Long, Long Trailer: from the television personae of the two stars, to the film’s many references to director Vincente Minnelli’s “own movie legacy” in its casting and mise-en-scène (Harvey: 168), to the film adaptation of a bestseller that Tacy describes at length to Nicky as they make their tense climb up the mountain.

As Lucy Ricardo’s television road trip confirms, Hollywood is still the capital of show business in the 1950s and, as the final destination of cross-country travel on Route 66, still the end of the road across the US. A road trip to Hollywood made by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in their final film together, Hollywood or Bust (1956), likewise acknowledges the road’s reorientation of showbiz culture around the utopian pleasures of consuming entertainment. Immediately before the credits unroll in Hollywood or Bust, a voice announces: “This motion picture is dedicated to you . . . the American movie fan.” Lewis impersonates first this fan, then similar ones from Britain, Japan, France, Russia, allowing the introduction to conclude: “There are movie fans everywhere, and you can be sure they all want to go . . . Hollywood or Bust.”

Within the diegesis, Lewis plays Malcom Smith, a movie fan so avid in his consumption of Hollywood that he not only sees a film repeatedly, but can cite even the most minor details from its credits. Malcom pairs up with gambler Steve Wiley (Martin) when the two win a red convertible in a movie theater giveaway and immediately head for the West Coast. For Malcolm, much as for Lucy Ricardo, the road will lead him to the “land of stardust, land of glamour,” as the title song exclaims, so it simply marks a transition: from going to the movies in New York City to running riot in a Hollywood studio in his effort to meet his favorite actress, Anita Ekberg. For Steve, it is a means of escaping gambling debts, since he plans to sell the car as soon as they hit LA. More significantly, and in contrast with Without Reservations, the road in Hollywood or Bust may follow Route 66 sign for sign but the nation Malcom and Steve cross with companion Teri Roberts (Patricia Crowley) has all the regional specificity of a studio backlot, despite the insertion of second-unit location footage. No chance of meeting the Ortegas here! As the three travelers drive from state to state singing about the attractions of the west, all they have to do to signal the regional difference of each locale in this musical number is change their hats, in effect turning the road into a hunt for souvenirs much as Lucy and Tacy do. When Malcolm finally gets to Hollywood, the film capital then reinforces his status as a consumer of showbiz, the ultimate, childlike fan. While would-be-singer Teri gets a job performing in the movies, the one who becomes the real star

in pictures is Malcolm’s dog, characterized on the trip through his voracious appetite for hamburgers, who ends up co-starring with Ekberg in The Lady and the Great Dane.

Contrasting the glamour and the capital expenditure of show business with the banality of the country between New York City and Los Angeles, Hollywood or Bust considerably differs from Without Reservations and the other 1940s films I have examined: this film uses the road to juxtapose the nation and show business. In those 1940s films, the road is utopian because of its association with the production of entertainment; showbiz represents Americanness everywhere and effaces the nation’s diversity, which the war had made much more visible. Taking a road trip is thus almost like being at home, as in Sullivan’s Travels and Saboteur, even when the road ends up turning that utopian feeling inside out, as in Detour. Instead of using show business to characterize the nation’s uniformity by reproducing the utopian feeling of USO shows, so vividly represented in the Hope and Crosby series, the 1950s films work it into the texture of their road trips in order to celebrate the consumption of entertainment, which, with the advent of television, will ultimately find a more suitable venue in the home and not on the road. As a result, the difference between showbiz and

Plate 5.4 Jerry Lewis, Patricia Crowley, and Dean Martin sing about the attractions

of the West, with some added canine accompaniment, in Hollywood or Bust.

“home,” rather than their equivalence, as in the 1940s road films, comes to motivate the traveler’s position on the road as a consumer of entertainment in the 1950s.

At that historical juncture, when interstates and shopping malls were not yet as common or as integrated into the economy of traveling as they are today, the nation itself was ambivalent about the uniformity of the mass culture that would become much more pronounced in later decades, further changing what the road means in films from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider to Natural Born Killers (1994) and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995). Although To Wong Foo in particular tries very hard, by evoking the same set of showbiz tropes, to recall the utopian past of those earlier movie trips to Hollywood, this film’s three drag queens get stalled on their road almost as soon as they set out for the movie capital, just as the film itself gets mired in ideological contradictions about gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism.9 _{By contast, when the USO took its} camp shows on tour in the 1940s, showbiz had a very different function in unifying and giving coherence to the nation’s homogeneous identity by projecting a utopian ethos onto the road, one which, in the 1990s, To Wong Foo tries to reinflect as queer style and Natural Born Killers to deconstruct as tabloid television. But it was already becoming clear in the 1950s that the road movie could no longer support the utopian associations of the nation with “home” and showbiz that it had so powerfully carried in the 1940s, when America’s roads