What’s the opposite of a ‘Hollywood ending’?

BY WARREN BOROSON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

CONFESSIONS OF A MOVIE JUNKIE

A "Hollywood ending" is one in which a movie has a happy, satisfying resolution, but in a somewhat unconvincing way. It's a little like a "deus ex machina" ending in ancient Greek or Roman plays, whereby a tough problem was solved by the intervention of a mechanical god.

The opposite of a Hollywood ending is an unusually sad ending, typically one in which our hero or heroine dies. It might be called:

a Little Nell ending
an Anna Karenina ending
a Hamlet ending
a Hedda Gabler ending

A film I saw recently (and enjoyed) had a classic Hollywood ending.

"Midnight Run" (1988) was about a bounty-hunter (Robert DeNiro) who goes after a perverse accountant and bail-jumper (Charles Grodin), wanted for misappropriating money from a gangster.

DeNiro captures Grodin, but just before turning him in ... lets him go, because he's really such a good guy. He thus forgoes a lavish reward — $100,000. Then, at the last moment, Grodin takes off his shirt, revealing a money belt with $300,000 — which he gives DeNiro to show his gratitude. Virtue is rewarded.

That gesture elicited a disbelieving sneer from me. Who gives away $300,000 like that? But my gut approved.

The Conventional Wisdom is that audiences want to go home happy — and if a film leaves them closer to laughing than weeping, they'll recommend it to their friends. It's only natural.

How would you have felt if Will Kane (Gary Cooper) had been killed by the thug Frank Miller in "High Noon"?

Even in horror movies, it's usually the sexually active youngsters who get assaulted, not the good-looking goody-goodies.

History itself may even be changed, or ignored, in pursuit of a Hollywood ending. The film "Impromptu" (1991) ends with George Sand and Frederic Chopin getting together — and doesn't hint at their later estrangement.

So strong is the pull of a Hollywood ending that when Prokofiev wrote his original ballet score for Romeo and Juliet, he has R and J, still living, pirouette off into the sunset. (He was prevailed upon to retreat to the usual ending.) And in the original ending of Ambrose Thomas' opera, "Hamlet," the Melancholy Dane survives, no doubt preferring to be than not to be.

I'll bet that not many people know that in Giuseppe Verdi's opera about Joan of Arc, Joan lives on, and — if I recall right — marries a soldier.

The ideal situation, of course, is where a film ends happily and yet rather persuasively. Think of "Casablanca," "It's a Wonderful Life," and "On the Waterfront." Then there are films that end ambiguously — "Gone With the Wind," for example, and "The 400 Blows."

Of course, Hollywood endings have their limits. In any movie, Anne Frank cannot survive, nor can Bonnie and Clyde; neither can such noteworthy fictional creations as Little Nell and Sydney Carton.

Still, some movies are out-and-out downers, yet are widely admired — even if they aren't boffo at the box office. Perhaps a disproportionate number of such films are foreign, like the classic "Bicycle Thief" and "Dancer in the Dark." A good website for a list of thoroughly depressing films is

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/25530/10_most_depressing_movie_endings_ev%20%20er.html

Another opposite of a Hollywood ending (besides a sad ending) is a Hollywood beginning — where a film starts out joyfully.

I was thinking of Hollywood beginnings recently because I stopped watching two films that started out depressingly.

One was "Where the Wild Things Are," which begins with a boy being so deeply humiliated that he begins weeping. So persuasive a performance did that kid give that I was moved to turn off the DVD. I didn't rent an animated film to wind up despondent.

Besides, these days renting films is cheap. A rental of an old movie at a videostore in Woodstock, N.Y., may cost $2 a night. So I tend to turn off any movie that doesn't promise, if not bliss, at least equanimity in the very first frames.

Recently I began watching an Australian film called "The Black Balloon," which tells of an autistic child and his brother, a misfit in school. What a discouraging way to start a film! I turned it off. But the acting was superlative, and the story was solid....

I'll have to go back to watching it, acknowledging that Hollywood endings may have spoiled me for deeply serious movie-making.

Warren Boroson runs a film group in Ridgewood.