The Movie Projector

Eva (1962)

2012-02-13T00:00:00.001-08:00

***
Country: France-Italy
Director: Joseph Losey

Last week in a post on The Criminal I discussed David Thomson's idea that the early films of Joseph Losey combine the contrary qualities of hysteria and subtlety. None of his early work I've seen, though, contains such extremes of those two qualities as his 1962 film Eva (originally released in the US in a truncated version called Eve). Moreover, while in Losey's early work these two opposites tend to be fully synthesized, here they remain curiously separate, the element of hysteria pretty well confined to the movie's plot, the element of subtlety found largely in Losey's impressive direction. It's almost as though he realized that the events of the film were so outlandish that only a subdued presentation had any chance of putting them over successfully. The nearly schizophrenic result is one of Losey's most restrained jobs of directing in one of his most dramatically excessive pictures.

The film opens in Venice during the film festival there. A writer, Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker), who has just had a big success with his first novel, is attending because the book has been adapted into a movie that is being exhibited at the festival. When his fiancée Francesca (Virna Lisi), a production assistant to the film's director, has to travel to Rome for a production conference, he returns to his house on Torcello to find that a mysterious woman, Eva Olivier (Jeanne Moreau), has broken into the house and is occupying his bed. The aloof Eva teases him, tempts him, rejects him, then finally seduces him. This is only the beginning of a relationship in which this pattern of heartless treatment by Eva continues with complete unpredictability, even after Tyvian and Francesca have married, until she has wrecked his marriage, his self-esteem, his mental equanimity, in short his entire life—all apparently just for the hell of it.

As played by Stanley Baker, Tyvian, a former Welsh coal miner, is a confident, ultra-masculine man, a working-class intellectual with a brutish streak who drinks too much and is not above pushing people around to get his way. He seems genuinely to love Francesca, but the arrival of Eva in his life creates a situation in which he finds himself pulled in opposing directions. On the one hand, the gentle Francesca inspires in him the striving toward a more noble and sensitive nature than, aside from Francesca, others perceive in him. On the other hand, the sudden presence of Eva in his life begins to strip away his self-control and his civilized veneer. Under her corrosive influence he becomes a self-centered, id-driven man blindly willing to destroy in order to satisfy urges he cannot withstand. Worse, she causes him to strip off the mask he presents to others and confront what he has successfully concealed from everyone else—that he is in truth an impostor, a fraud passing off the writing of someone else as his own.

Jeanne Moreau plays Eva with ferocious intensity, pulling out all the stops to portray the most wantonly predatory temptress seen on the screen since Dietrich's Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel. She acts like a dangerous drug on Tyvian—irresistible, addictive, and ultimately destructive. She manipulates him, lies to him, and humiliates him. Her one object seems to be to control him. Why she does this and why she focuses her toxic attention on Tyvian and not someone else is never explained. The most that can be said is that if she is his addiction, then her power over him is her own addiction.

The motivation of her actions may be enigmatic, but her dedication to purpose and the disastrous effect of those actions are plain. On the moral level, the film is a tale of the competition for a man's soul, with the benign influence of Francesca losing out to the corrupting influence of Eva. Once she has him under her control, she does not stop until she has razed his soul. Tyvian may appear too well-armored a personality to be vulnerable to Eva, but she senses the chinks in that armor and is able to get inside, to find his weaknesses and exploit them to cast him out of his Venetian Paradise. With her seductive poses and magnificent face—her huge eyes, swollen lips, and nearly immobile expression—Moreau makes an imposing presence, dominating the screen like a glacial goddess of destruction.

Losey almost seems to use the film as an opportunity to pay homage to the two men who were at the time the supreme masters of Italian cinema—Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. He combines the narrative histrionics and character eccentricities of Fellini with the cool, precise, deliberately paced visual style of Antonioni. He is aided in this by his cinematographer, Gianni di Venanzo, who photographed some of the greatest films of those two masters. (The camera operator is the soon-to-be renowned Pasqualino de Santis, and the great New Wave cinematographer Henri Decaë did uncredited additional photography, the film festival scenes early in the picture.) The film is a visual treat, each sequence planned in painstaking detail and executed with remarkable but unshowy artistry.

One sequence that especially stands out for me takes place near the end of the picture when Tyvian follows the drunken Eva home from the casino in Venice after she has ignored him there. He lurks outside her building and when she comes home watches her as she moves through her second-storey flat. Losey films this sequence from Tyvian's point of view, the camera in the street outside, level with the windows. As Eva enters the darkened flat, the camera follows her, tracking laterally and framing her in the windows as she progresses from one room to the next, turning on the lights in each room as she enters it. The effect is to transform her flat into the equivalent of a theater stage set. It's a masterful blend of lighting, movement, and voyeurism that ends with Tyvian climbing into the flat from the balcony and the outraged Eve pushing him through the window onto a heap of garbage in the street below.

David Thomson is hugely enthusiastic about Eva, calling it "one of the great lost films of all time." I wouldn't go that far myself. It is at times quite melodramatic, a touch too obvious in its Biblical parallels, and rather simplistic in its moral alternatives. But it certainly is something to behold, with such a virile presence as Baker so thoroughly unmanned by the malignant Moreau, whose Eva must be included among those signature performances of the late fifties and early sixties that form the basis of her cinema legacy.

You might also like:
• The Lovers (1958)
• Bay of Angels (1963)
• The Criminal (1960)
• These Are the Damned (1963)

Note: The copy of Eva I got from Netflix, released by Kino, contained both the theatrical release version and the longer director's version, which is the one I watched. Both the picture quality and the sound quality were only fair. The picture was on the fuzzy side and the outdoor scenes often appeared washed out. The DVD transfer was apparently made from a Swedish copy, because I could find no way to turn off the Swedish subtitles. This was a minor annoyance during the occasional brief conversation in Italian, which was translated into Swedish in the subtitles. The only help for Anglophones was that the subject of these conversations was sometimes alluded to in the English-language dialogue.

The Criminal (1960)

2012-02-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

***^½
Country: UK
Director: Joseph Losey

In a recent post on They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), I cited that film as a rare British example of American-style film noir. Joseph Losey's 1960 picture The Criminal (released in the US two years later under the rather misleading title The Concrete Jungle) is another example of a film noir made in Britain with genuine fidelity to the conventions of the genre, although with some updating—it's more lurid and more sexually explicit than earlier American examples of the genre—that brings it closer to the spirit of the then-emerging Swinging Sixties. Losey was, of course, actually an American with previous experience directing Hollywood noirs (M, The Prowler, The Big Night), a refugee from the film industry witch hunts of the early fifties. Relocating to Britain and working at first under various pseudonyms, he continued his film directing career as an expatriate until his death in 1984.

The Criminal opens with a shot of three men sitting around a table playing poker with tense concentration. As they make their final bet of 7,000 pounds and lay down their cards, the camera draws back for a longer shot—to reveal that the men are actually sitting in a prison cell and the 7,000 pounds is really seven cigarettes. Almost immediately the credit sequence begins, a two-minute long take of numerous prisoners and guards and the roving camera performing an elaborately choreographed dance around each other while the credits roll and on the soundtrack Cleo Laine sings the mournful, bluesy theme song: "All my sadness, all my joy / Came from loving a thieving boy." It's a remarkable opening which announces unequivocally that this is going to be a film that uses image and sound in ways which will keep us constantly surprised.

In the film Stanley Baker plays a career criminal named John Bannion who is due to be released on parole the next day. During his three years inside, he has been planning a racetrack robbery in meticulous detail. Upon his release he reconnects with an old criminal crony, Mike Carter (played by the American actor Sam Wanamaker, another refugee from the Hollywood witch hunts), who helps him handpick a team to assist in the heist. The evening of his release, Carter organizes a welcome home party for Bannion, where he meets the sexy and seductive Suzanne (Margit Saad), who throws herself at him, and soon he has fallen in love with her. The robbery succeeds, and Bannion takes the stolen money to a field in the countryside, where he buries it, planning to retrieve it to be laundered after it has cooled off.

When Bannion makes the mistake of taking 500 pounds from the loot to buy an engagement ring for Suzanne, this allows the police to trace the money back to him, and he quickly finds himself back in prison. As soon as he arrives, he begins to plan an escape so that he can make his way to the loot, the escape to be covered by a riot engineered by Bannion's prison friends to divert attention away from him. The riot and escape form a stunningly conceived sequence, sensationally staged by Losey, photographed by Robert Krasker (Carol Reed's Odd Man Out and The Third Man), and scored by jazz composer John Dankworth. It's a good example of what David Thomson identifies as the defining feature of Losey's early films, the melding of the contradictory qualities of "subtlety" and "hysteria"—subtle in its precisely controlled visual choreography, hysterical in its typically flamboyant Losey touches and its hyperkinetic sense of organized chaos.

The screenplay, credited to Alun Owen (A Hard Day's Night) but according to the British Film Institute actually a rewrite of a script by veteran Hammer Films writer Jimmy Sangster, gives the film a tidy four-act structure. The first and third parts—about half the film's running time—take place in prison. In many ways these sections are an update of the traditional Warner Brothers-style prison movies of the thirties. The power structure of the inmates with Johnny as "top man," the opposing alliances of prisoners enforced by violent intimidation, the autocratic head guard, the weak prison warden—all the elements associated with this type of movie are present, only depicted here with even greater than usual emphasis on prison corruption and brutality. As bleak as this prison world is, though, it's a world that is totally ordered and self-regulated. The rules that govern it are understood, each man has a defined place in its power hierarchy, and its concepts of justice and ethics—as peculiar as they may be—are clear. At the same time it's also a world whose sense of order allows for a certain amount of individuality and fluidity within its social structure.

One of the great ironies of The Criminal is that when Bannion leaves prison, he finds in the criminal world outside its walls an even more oppressive environment, and the film takes an unexpected turn from a prison/heist movie to a movie about a loner battling the power elite (a type of narrative strategy Losey would use with even more startling results in his next film, the juvenile delinquent thriller turned sci-fi chiller These Are the Damned). At this point the film noir ethos really comes into play. Maybe Losey did in fact have a Marxist world view, because what happens to Bannion outside prison could almost be considered analogous to the plight of the individual worker in the face of a monolithic power structure, here a criminal syndicate organized on corporate principles. As Mike Carter warns Bannion at one point when he attempts to rebel against the dictates of the higher-ups in the criminal world, "Your sort doesn't fit into an organization. So we can't have you running about messing things up, now can we, Johnny?"

An even greater irony is that while Bannion might believe he's in control of his destiny, in this deterministic film noir universe the concept of choice turns out to be largely illusory. It is only toward the end of the film that he realizes he has been played and betrayed by the criminal organization the whole way to get him to lead them to the money. Every decision, every action he has taken has actually been preordained. Subtle forces have been exerted on him to move him in a certain direction, and his every reaction to these forces has been predicted and plotted in advance. Bannion thinks he has been acting on his own initiative, but the entire time since his release from prison, about twenty minutes into the movie, he has been callously manipulated like a piece in a chess game.

If like Bannion you think there is any possibility of his overcoming the odds against him, forget it. "Don't be a silly boy, John," Carter tells him smugly. "You can't win." And of course he's right.

You might also like:
• These Are the Damned (1963)
• They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)

Humoresque (1946)

2012-01-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: Jean Negulesco

Joan Crawford has never been one of my favorite actresses of the Hollywood studio era. In the movies she made at MGM in the thirties, her driving ambition to be a movie star seemed to overshadow her acting. She always gave the impression of trying too hard—over-emoting in dramatic roles and too tense to be wholly convincing in lighter ones. And she never really seemed at ease playing the kind of upper-crust sophisticates who dominated MGM movies of the time. It didn't help that she usually got parts only after they were rejected by MGM's two biggest female stars, Norma Shearer (whom Crawford had doubled for early in her career) and Greta Garbo. Nor was she helped by being so often cast opposite flaccid leading men with whom she appeared to have little chemistry, actors like Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor, Melvyn Douglas, or Franchot Tone (to whom she was married for several years). Still, there's no denying her popularity in the early thirties, when she was named one of the top ten box office stars for five years running.

Crawford's career was set back in 1938 when a group of theater owners included her on a list of stars they considered "box office poison," a list that also damaged the careers of Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Mae West, and Marlene Dietrich. She did make a comeback of sorts in The Women (1939), where under the direction of George Cukor she made a strong impression in what was really a supporting role as the gold-digging nemesis of the picture's genteel star, Crawford's long-time rival Norma Shearer. Then in 1941 she got a plum role in A Woman's Face after Garbo turned it down and, again under the direction of Cukor, gave an impressive performance—at least in the first half of the picture, where she played against the great German actor Conrad Veidt—as an embittered woman with a disfigured face.

After a few more undistinguished films at MGM, her time at that studio came to a humiliating end in 1943 when the obsessively profit-conscious Louis B. Mayer decided not to renew her contract. Quick to move forward, though, Crawford then signed a contract with Warner Bros. The reigning female star there was Bette Davis, who got first choice of the best pictures, and again Crawford found herself in the position of being offered leftovers after they were rejected by someone higher in the studio's pecking order. In fact, she got her first assignment at Warners after it was passed on not only by Davis, but also by Ann Sheridan and Rosalind Russell. The picture was Mildred Pierce, and it not only revived Crawford's career, but showed she really could act and, after twenty years in Hollywood and something like sixty movies, got her an Oscar as best actress.

She got her next two pictures at Warners after they were also turned down by Davis, Humoresque (1946) and Possessed (1947), which got her another Oscar nomination. (I wonder if her success in these films had something to do with the famous rivalry between Crawford and Davis, whose career at Warners was rapidly winding down). For my money, those three performances are the best of Crawford's career. But as much as I like her in Mildred Pierce—she really did deserve that Oscar—and as good as she is in Possessed, it was in Humoresque that Joan Crawford gave my favorite of all her performances.

In Humoresque she plays a rich socialite, Helen Wright, who fancies herself a patron of unknown artists and keeps a group of attractive, sycophantic young men hovering around her. At one of her salon evenings a gifted young violinist, Paul Boray (John Garfield), attracts her attention with his playing. After the nearsighted Helen asks one of her toy boys to fetch her eyeglasses so she can get a better look at Paul, the undisguised sexual interest on her face shows that as well as his talent, she is also fascinated by his brooding good looks and almost surly manner. At their first meeting, fireworks fly. She baits him about being conceited and he responds by insulting her musically, playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" to suggest that she is a dilettante less interested in art than in her image as a patron of the arts, and also perhaps to allude to her waspish temperament and bevy of young drones. Yet despite this rocky initial encounter, before long he has become her protégé and she is paying the bills to get him started as a professional concert musician.

Helen becomes increasingly infatuated with Paul, and he seems to return her feelings—to a point. As she grows more possessive and he finds his career taking off, cracks begin to develop in the relationship. As the power dynamic in the relationship begins to reverse, she becomes more clinging and he begins to look for ways to assert his independence. There's a wonderful scene in the film where she takes out a cigarette and waits for him to light it for her, and he pointedly turns his back on her and pours himself a drink. When she begins to see that Paul will never be as devoted to her as she is to him, that his object of devotion is his music, it's clear that this is a love affair fated to end badly.

The role of Helen Wright gives Crawford the opportunity to show everything she is capable of, and she does so using an artfully judged balance of intensity and restraint. Helen may be a socialite now, but when she tells Paul about her first two marriages, it's apparent that her current social position is the result of her third marriage to a wealthy older man whom she dominates completely. It's also apparent that she intentionally surrounds herself with men who pay court to her like an imperious queen but whom she can keep at an emotional distance. Paul's resistance to being controlled by Helen just makes him all the more attractive to her; as her husband tells her, Paul has "a touch of the savage" about him.

This is a woman accustomed to being in control, to using her allure, money, and influence as instruments of power. Suddenly she finds that these things don't work on Paul in their usual way. Worse, this cool, manipulative woman finds herself losing her own self-control as she becomes increasingly enthralled by her younger protégé. Helen may give the impression of being a self-contained, almost overly confident woman, but her inability to keep in check her sexual feelings for Paul brings to the surface her repressed vulnerability. She is in actuality a profoundly unhappy woman hiding her unhappiness behind wealth and booze, an insecure, emotionally unfulfilled woman who has built emotional barriers between herself and the rest of the world and now suddenly finds herself susceptible to the power of her own feelings. When she sees the possibility of happiness with Paul, she seizes the opportunity with such ardor that she ends up smothering it.

John Garfield, who was just entering the peak years of his career, may seem an unlikely match for Crawford, but his moody, strongly masculine presence is exactly what is needed to bring out Crawford's strengths. Crawford herself had such a forceful screen presence that she tended to overpower her male costars. That certainly isn't the case here with Garfield. Actually, the movie at first seems really more his story than hers, the first half-hour of the picture taken up with establishing his backstory before she even appears. Once she enters the scene, though, hers becomes the dominant presence. A movie whose focus at first seems Paul's conflict between his art and love quickly becomes the story of a woman who falls in love with a man who can never feel as intensely about her as she does about him.

Oscar Levant is on hand not only to play the piano, but also to serve as Paul's cynical, wisecracking friend and mentor, Sid Jeffers. The screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold is filled with articulate, well-crafted dialogue, and Levant gets the most attention-grabbing lines. Sounding as if they might have been written for Groucho Marx, his quips are at times so clever that they almost threaten to divert attention from the main plot of the film. Then there is the music. As in many films of the forties, the combination of passionate symphonic music of the Romantic era and big emotions is an unbeatable one, and Humoresque makes the most of it, using the music to underscore the emotional tone at key points. (The film also makes good use of popular standards by people like Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and the Gershwins, a particular standout being Crawford's drunken rendition of "Embraceable You.") The music almost becomes shorthand for Helen's sexual attraction to Paul.

One of the best sequences in the film happens during a big concert. As Paul plays the dramatic first movement of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, Helen sits alone in a box in the concert hall. Oblivious of the embarrassed and disapproving glances of his family sitting in the front row, she concentrates on him completely. Crawford plays her scenes in close-up without speaking a word, occasionally leaning forward or briefly closing her eyes or making the slightest movement with her lips. (At one point she seems to be muttering something, and I couldn't help wondering if it was "I love you . . . I love you.") Her performance is in the expressions on her face as she gazes at Paul as though hypnotized, with a mixture of adoration, lust, and surrender. Crawford's control of her facial expressions in these scenes is absolute and without even a suggestion of calculation, on a par with Garbo's in her greatest silent films.

Humoresque may deal with many issues—the class divide between Helen and Paul, Paul's conflict between the demands of his career and the emotional demands of Helen, the compromises necessary to establish a career in the arts. But when the focus of the film is Helen's feelings for Paul and Crawford is onscreen, it's impossible to take your eyes off her or direct your attention to anything but the emotions she projects. Hers is a presence saturated with that indefinable quality known as star power, but here grounded in real acting ability and for once transcending ambition with genuine feeling. I may have reservations about the totality of Joan Crawford's acting career, more that of a movie star than a real actress. But when a movie star is this good, it's easy to see why she was such a powerful screen presence for so long.

You might also like:
• Body and Soul: A Knockout of a Movie

This post is part of the LAMB Acting School 101 event on Joan Crawford. To learn more click here.

CMBA Comedy Classics Blogathon: The Palm Beach Story (1942)

2012-01-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

****
Country: US
Director: Preston Sturges

"Sex always has something to do with it," Geraldine Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) says in exasperation to her husband Thomas (Joel McCrea) in writer-director Preston Sturges's 1942 screwball comedy The Palm Beach Story. She is trying to explain to the suspicious Thomas why she has just been given several hundred dollars by a perfect stranger, an elderly millionaire calling himself the Wienie King of Texas, who took pity on her after learning she was about to be evicted from their Park Avenue apartment for not being able to pay the rent. Thomas is having a hard time believing there isn't more to the unlikely tale than Geraldine is telling, and she has been trying to convince him that nothing improper happened. Like The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, those other audacious Sturges sex comedies of the 1940s, The Palm Beach Story pushed the strictures of the Production Code to the limit with its sexual innuendo. But then it had to, for the entire film might have been designed to illustrate the truth of Gerry's observation that the tangled relations between men and women are always in some way governed by sex.

The film begins with a mystery. In a silent, stop-and-start slapstick sequence, we see Claudette Colbert rushing out of an apartment in a wedding dress. At the same time, she appears—through the cinematic sleight of hand of crosscutting—to be locked in a closet in the apartment, bound and gagged, while a maid has hysterics and finally faints at the sight of the wedding-gowned Colbert. The meaning of this paradoxical sequence won't be revealed until the last scene in the picture, when it becomes the device used to resolve the plot's multiple sexual entanglements. By that point, though, so much else has happened in this frantically paced movie that most viewers probably won't even remember its puzzling opening.

Flash forward five years. The former bride and groom, Tom and Gerry, are having serious problems in the two areas this movie dwells on—money and sex. Tom, an engineer-inventor, is having trouble raising the capital to finance a demonstration project of his new invention, a stressed-cable mesh airport stretched across skyscraper rooftops. (Is this idea intended to be as loony as it sounds?) Not only are the couple broke and about to become homeless, but the pizazz has gone from their marriage—at least for Gerry, who tells Tom, "We don't love each other the way we used to." When Tom seems reluctant to believe her story about the Wienie King's largesse, it's the last straw and she heads for Palm Beach to get a divorce. Tom, however, isn't ready to give up on the marriage and takes off in pursuit to change Gerry's mind.

On her journey to Palm Beach, Gerry takes the viewer along on what can only be described as a frenetic spree, with one hilarious episode after another coming at a furious pace. Gerry starts her journey with no money, no luggage, no train ticket, nothing but the clothes she is wearing, and before long she has lost even those, showing up for breakfast in the train's dining car wearing a Pullman blanket for a skirt and the top of borrowed pajamas as a blouse, with the pajama pants wrapped around her head as an impromptu turban. This gal is nothing if not inventive. She manages to inveigle her way aboard a Florida-bound train, where she is adopted as a female mascot by the wacky Ale and Quail club, hooks up with a millionaire, J. D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), acquires an expensive new designer wardrobe and a diamond and ruby bracelet, is wined and dined aboard Hackensacker's yacht for the final leg of the journey, and arrives in Palm Beach engaged to him.

Gerry being serenaded by the Ale and Quail Club

In his autobiography Sturges, who began as a playwright and later turned to writing movies, describes plays and screenplays as less literature than architecture, and the plot of The Palm Beach Story is a perfect illustration of this idea. From an initial premise, the film keeps evolving in unexpected ways, snowballing from one episode to the next, not with any conventional causality, but with its own delirious narrative momentum. If you haven't seen this picture before, trying to predict what will come next is a futile exercise that will only end up keeping you flummoxed. All you can do is surrender yourself to the frenzy of Sturges's seemingly improvised comic invention and hold on to your seat for the duration of the ride. One farcical situation seems to follow another spontaneously, in the tradition of sublime narrative anarchy found in the great silent comedies, the Marx Brothers, and the zaniest screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby. It's only in retrospect that it becomes apparent how carefully engineered the entire edifice is, held together by its own self-generated narrative logic.

In addition to its hilarious situations and frequent physical comedy ("I happen to love pratfalls," Sturges writes in his autobiography), the film is propelled by its clever dialogue and its characters. As an experienced playwright, Sturges knew the value of dialogue and loaded the picture with rapid-fire conversations generously spiked with quips, bons mots, and witticisms. And as the writer as well as the director of the picture, he made sure to get the maximum effect from his expertly crafted dialogue, using long takes and being careful to avoid distracting the viewer with gratuitous directorial flourishes. This, of course, requires the expertise of actors perfectly attuned to Sturges's approach, and in The Palm Beach Story he has assembled a cast that might contain some surprising choices but would be difficult to improve on.

Preston Sturges flanked by his stars

As well as his regular character actors like William Demarest and Franklin Pangborn in smaller roles, mostly as members of the Ale and Quail club, Sturges casts Rudy Vallee as the stodgy, sexually naive millionaire Gerry becomes engaged to. The colorless and rather enervated Vallee is an inspired choice for the boyish J. D. Hackensacker III. Standing in complete contrast is his unconventional sister, the manic, wisecracking Maude, the Princess Centimillia. Married and divorced five times and clearly possessing a powerful sex drive, Maude sets her sights on Tom, by this point masquerading as Gerry's brother, the moment she sees him. Mary Astor, cast against melodramatic type, plays the man-hungry Princess with a superb comic flair I haven't seen her display in any other picture.

As the on-again, off-again Tom and Gerry, Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert are a great team. He's single-minded, humorless, and sexually possessive, the straight man to Colbert's Gerry. It's a great role for the usually laid-back McCrea, who plays Tom with the same intensity as he played the movie director in Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, released earlier the same year. But the film really belongs to Claudette Colbert. Her Gerry is a woman with a clear and realistic view of herself and others, a woman who makes no bones about her mercenary nature, a great improviser who lives by her wits, using in a benign way what Sturges has described as "the aristocracy of beauty"—in other words, the power of her sexual attractiveness to men—to get by.

Yet there doesn't seem to be anything manipulative about her, beyond the fact that she knows what she wants and is uncommonly shrewd about how to get it. For Gerry, her sex appeal is merely a practical way to navigate her way through life. She's no guileful seductress; she doesn't go out of her way to vamp men. Nor is she a child-woman, playing dumb and pandering to helpless little-girl male fantasies, but a mature, intelligent, and unaffected woman. When men respond to her attractiveness, she simply goes along with it as a serendipitous opportunity.

This happens time and again—with the Wienie King, the cab driver who takes a shine to her and drives her to Penn Station for free, the rowdy Ale and Quail Club, J. D. Hackensacker. It is exactly this quality in Gerry's personality, her guilt-free willingness to use her natural advantages to get results, that maddens Tom and arouses his jealously. I can't think of a more appropriate choice to play such an original character as Gerry—with her combination of femininity, brains, and playfulness—than Claudette Colbert. For me it's her best role and her most delightful performance.

As a director, Sturges had a brief but illustrious run. Remarkably, he produced his two greatest films in the space of just one year: Sullivan's Travels, which makes a serious statement on the subject of humor, and The Palm Beach Story, which takes the serious subject of sex and makes it as funny as it's ever been in a movie.

This post is part of the Comedy Classics Blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. The event runs January 22-27. For a complete list of participants and to learn more, click here.

They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)

2012-01-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

***^½
Country: UK
Director: Alberto Cavalcanti

For about ten years after the end of World War II, until the mid-1950s, the influence of film noir in the American film industry was pervasive. Every year dozens of films were made in the genre, and even pictures not in the genre were influenced by the visual style and the attitude of film noir. Although many British crime films were made in this period, few that I've seen come as close to the look and spirit of postwar American film noir as Alberto Cavalcanti's They Made Me a Fugitive (released in the US in 1948 as I Became a Criminal).

In one of his earliest film roles, Trevor Howard plays Clem Morgan, a recently discharged Royal Air Force pilot having trouble adjusting to the routine of civilian life after the daily risk of being a wartime flier. So when he is recruited by a small-time London gang leader involved in the postwar black market, Clem eagerly accepts to put a bit of excitement and danger back in his life. The gang leader, Narcy, short for Narcissus (Griffith Jones), is a ruthless Cockney looking for the upper-class Clem to add a bit of cachet to the gang. Working out of an undertaker's office, the gang specializes in the usual postwar black market items like cigarettes and nylon stockings, smuggled into their headquarters in coffins.

When Clem discovers that Narcy is smuggling drugs as well and threatens to leave the gang, Narcy promises to stop this, but it's clear that he resents Clem's challenge to his power. This, combined with Narcy's interest in Clem's posh, slutty girl friend, seals Clem's fate. Framed by Narcy during a robbery in which a policeman is killed, Clem is convicted and sent to prison. But he manages to escape and make his way back to London in search of the one gang member who can prove his innocence. After a series of misadventures, he hooks up with Narcy's former girl friend, a showgirl named Sally Connor (Sally Gray) who, bitter about being dumped by Narcy, agrees to help Clem. While simultaneously avoiding both the police and the vicious Narcy, Clem and Sally gradually find themselves attracted to each other.

The reason French film critics called this type of picture film noir is the pervasive darkness of the world it depicts, a darkness that extends far beyond the predominance of nighttime scenes, the night clubs, the criminal activities, the treacherous urban settings, and the underworld milieu typical of the genre. They Made Me a Fugitive certainly has these—along with the Expressionist-inflected cinematography, courtesy of the Prague-born Otto Heller, and the striking editing of the great film noirs—and more. Like the best film noirs, it has a sense that the world is a place where corruption is endemic, a place where people are ruled by self-interest and where nobility, morality, and any kind of ethical behavior are rare commodities indeed. There are no heroes in this world, with its relentlessly bleak view of human nature. Even the people the fugitive Clem encounters on his way to London turn out to be selfish manipulators intent on using him for their own ends.

Instead we see arrogant psychopaths like Narcy, an ego-driven dandy who stops at nothing to get what he wants, whether it's money, material goods, unearned status, or the girl he fancies at the moment. Most of all, he wants power, the ability to control other people through their terror of him and use them as instruments of his will. Griffith Jones gives a chilling performance as the vain, tyrannical Narcy. Even in a film as brutal as this one, his sadism is startling. The scene where he punches and kicks Sally in her dressing room after he finds she has visited Clem in prison seems strong even by today's standards of violence. But in 1947 it must have been downright shocking, far more graphic than anything similar I've seen in an American film of the time.

Matching Jones's performance is Trevor Howard as Clem. In his long film career Howard didn't often play such an unrepentantly unsympathetic character, but when he did—in pictures like Outcast of the Islands (1951), Sons and Lovers (1960), as Capt. Bligh in the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty—he was most effective. His Clem is as cynical an antihero as you'll find in postwar British cinema. He is not motivated by any abstract sense of justice. His world is too pitiless a place and too indifferent to the suffering of any one individual to expect any such thing, and he is too aware that he is in the eyes of society himself a villain. Instead he is driven by a strictly personal sense of having been wronged. It's a stark, amoral take on the kind of film Alfred Hitchcock made time and again, the story of the wrongly accused man on the run desperately trying to prove his innocence.

The thing that most closely allies this film to postwar American film noir, though, is its unrelenting sense of fatalism. This aura of doom is the thing that for me distinguishes film noir from the gangster and crime films from which it developed—that feeling that the main character is enmeshed in circumstances beyond his control from which there is little possibility of escape. In the conventional gangster picture, the main character's fate is the result of flaws in his own nature, an ego that becomes so bloated that it spins out of control and leads to self-destruction. In film noir, the main character is a victim controlled by external forces. Like Clem, he may be responsible for putting himself in the situation that leads to his downfall, but in the end he becomes controlled by the situation. Unlike the gangster, the film noir antihero's downfall is ultimately caused not by internal, but by external forces.

One of the most intriguing things about They Made Me a Fugitive is the way it teases us at the end with the possibility that Clem might be able to avoid his fate after all. This comes about after a Hitchcock-like set piece that forms the picture's finale. With the police looking on from below, Clem chases Narcy across the roof of the undertaker's parlor which is the gang's hideout, a building with a huge sign that reads RIP on its roof. (Did I mention what a bizarre sense of humor and an almost Dickensian feel for the macabre the film has—perhaps not surprising from the director of the 1947 Nicholas Nickleby and the best episodes of Dead of Night.) Will Narcy relent and exonerate Clem in the end? Not on your life. Narcy remains true to character, continuing to insist that Clem is responsible for the policeman's death. Will Clem take comfort from Sally's vow to wait for him? "I was afraid you'd say that," he tells her coldly as he is led away.

There are no bogus happy endings in They Made Me a Fugitive, no contrived reversals intended to restore the viewer's sense of security and comfort. The movie doesn't draw back from following through on the implications of its cynical view of the world, but is faithful to its downbeat film noir sensibility to the end.

Turner Classic Movies is airing They Made Me a Fugitive on March 8. Check local listings for times. It's also available from Kino Video as part of the set Film Noir: Five Classics from the Studio Vaults.

Deadly Obsession: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

2012-01-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

****
Country: US
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

What's that old Oscar Wilde thing? "Each man kills the thing he loves . . ." That I think is a very natural phenomenon, really.

—Alfred Hitchcock, in a 1963 interview

In his fifty-five year long career in films, Alfred Hitchcock directed sixty-seven movies. At least a dozen of these are bona fide masterpieces, and about an equal number are excellent movies that fall just short of the masterpiece mark. By any measure that's an impressive record, one unequaled by any other filmmaker I can think of. Even more impressive is that Hitchcock's pictures are not rarefied works of art of interest mainly to aesthetes and film scholars, but full-blooded movies that appeal equally to ordinary filmgoers looking for accomplished entertainments and to cinephiles looking for an intellectually and artistically stimulating film-viewing experience. Of all Hitchcock's pictures, none managed to combine these two modes—entertainment and art—so skillfully, so intriguingly, and so pleasingly as his 1958 film Vertigo.

Most people are familiar with the plot of Vertigo. A retired San Francisco police detective, John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart), psychologically traumatized after a rooftop chase to apprehend a criminal ends badly, is targeted as a dupe by his old college friend Gavin Elster, who exploits Scottie's crippling fear of heights to bring off an intricate scheme to murder his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak). The film's plot is a clever one and since this is a mystery thriller with hints of the supernatural (can Madeleine really be the reincarnation of her ancestor, as she believes?), neither the audience nor Scottie realizes what is really happening until quite far into the film. This allows the viewer's understanding of the situation to be manipulated, just as Scottie's is, to create a mood of suspense and, after the truth is revealed to the viewer about three-quarters of the way through the film, for that suspense to be prolonged as the film proceeds in a completely unexpected direction right up to its shock ending.

Such a narrative strategy requires that the viewer's reactions be precisely guided at every turn, and nobody was more expert at this than Hitchcock. Well known for his need for absolute control over all aspects of his films from conception to release, Hitchcock was by temperament the epitome of the film auteur, the director who puts his stamp on every element of his work. The way he accomplished this was by meticulous attention to detail. Because each shot was storyboarded in advance, the final film essentially needed no editing and thus was immune to tampering with by producers and studio executives. Like most filmmakers who began by directing silents, Hitchcock viewed cinema storytelling as essentially a visual process, with dialogue, music, and sound used to augment the film's imagery. Because the way he chose to show the action—placement and movement of the camera, the use of visual effects that form his famous set pieces, the exact way images succeed one another to form a spatial and narrative continuum—was the product of his own imagination, his films always seem expressions of a personal and very distinctive vision. Many directors have made movies in the Hitchcock style, but I can't think of a single one of those films that on close viewing could actually be mistaken for the work of the master himself.

Because of the convoluted and deceptive nature of its plot, Vertigo is even more dependent on Hitchcock's almost obsessive attention to detail as a means of controlling audience response than any other film he made. But in Vertigo he uses his working methods as much more than merely a practical means of telling a story in his own way. He amplifies his control-freak approach to directing until it becomes an all-encompassing aesthetic used to suggest a great deal more than is apparent in what at first seems little more than a deftly contrived suspense melodrama. It is this effect of using every device in his vast repertoire of cinematic tricks to evince the complex psychological and thematic undertones of the film that makes Vertigo Hitchcock's greatest achievement. It's a haunting film that can be watched again and again and still continue to entertain and thrill and deliver new revelations.

Perhaps the most powerful and resonant thing about the film is the way Hitchcock uses repetition to emphasize the idea of doubling. Elements in the first part of the film recur later in the film, and elements in the later part of the film mirror those in the first part, giving the film a strange pattern of symmetrical associations. Scottie seeks out places where he saw Madeleine in the beginning of the film and revisits them later in the film: the missions, the florist's shop, the museum, Ernie's restaurant. He watches Judy at her hotel window the same way he watched Madeleine at her hotel window earlier. His transformation of Judy into Madeleine exactly duplicates Elster's transformation of Judy to pass her off as his wife.

Near the end of the picture Hitchcock expresses the complete fusion of Madeleine and Judy, of past and present, of Scottie's memories and his dreams, in the most striking of several memorable set pieces in the film—a long, passionate kiss between Scottie and Judy after he sees her for the first time as the fully re-created Madeleine. The camera swirls, Scottie and Judy swirl, and the room appears to revolve around them. The background fades from Judy's room to the stable where Scottie and Madeleine kissed for the last time and finally back to Judy's room again, while Bernard Herrmann's glorious music—clearly inspired by Wagner's Tristan und Isolde—surges and pulses in unison with the intense emotions of the passage. It's the most rapturously erotic scene in a Hitchcock movie since the kiss in Notorious.

Hitchcock was famous for his lack of interest in the acting of his performers, and for saying that actors should be treated like cattle, that is, prodded into doing what he needed for the shot he was working on. This was perhaps a holdover from his silent days, when facial expressions, body language, and movement were more important than character development and line delivery because the director essentially created the performance visually, through the staging and editing of the film. This is one reason experienced theater actors often found working with Hitchcock such a frustrating experience. Yet for all this, in Vertigo he gets two remarkable performances from his stars.

It is well documented that Kim Novak was not Hitchcock's first choice to play Madeleine/Judy; Vera Miles was. But by the time he was ready to begin shooting, Miles was pregnant and so somebody else had to be cast. I have no idea how he hit on the idea of casting Kim Novak, but I did notice that just as Elster and Scottie transform Judy into the image of Madeleine, Hitchcock almost seems to transform Kim Novak into an uncanny image of Grace Kelly, right down to her hair and makeup, and her accent and diction. I can't help wondering if one of the reasons Vertigo seems to be Hitchcock's most personal film is his own understanding of the compulsion behind Scottie's Pygmalion-like behavior.

In any event, Novak, who under the right conditions could be a much better actress than she is generally given credit for, does a tremendous job as the mysterious, spaced-out Madeleine. But her more demanding incarnation as Judy is even more impressive. If Madeleine is an enigma, Judy is a fully defined character. Hitchcock and his writer, Samuel Taylor, make a daring narrative decision that happens soon after Scottie meets Judy. The conventional thing to do would have been to conceal the truth about the murder plot from the audience until the end then reveal it to the viewer and Scottie at the same time, in the kind of twist ending typical of films of this kind. Instead Hitchcock and Taylor devise a situation in which Judy writes a letter to Scottie explaining everything to him then impetuously tears it up before he sees it.

The audience is now aware of the true nature of events even if Scottie isn't, and the entire tone of the movie has changed. Now that we know the truth, the point of view shifts much more in Judy's direction. The crux of suspense is no longer what really happened, but how long will it take Scottie to figure it out and what will be his reaction when he does. What all this means for Novak's performance is that she can no longer play her character as an enigma, but must externalize the conflict Judy feels about what she has done to Scottie and the ambivalence she feels about his controlling attitude. Novak's role immediately becomes much more demanding, and she handles the requirements of those demands admirably. If only she looked less like a caricature of a rather common shopgirl!

But the real center of the movie is James Stewart's Scottie, a character who inspires Stewart to give one of the most remarkable performances of his career. We tend to think of the screen persona of James Stewart as that of an optimistic, boyish everyman. But in truth Stewart's characters often had a dark side to them, a willfulness that threatened to cause the passion of their emotions to spill over into obsession. We tend to forget this because until Vertigo, even though that dark side might threaten to take over whatever character Stewart was playing—George Bailey or even Jefferson Smith for Frank Capra or one of the revenge-driven men in the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, for instance—at the end of the film his character always managed to pull back from the brink before he went over the edge. Hitchcock himself perceived the latent darkness in Stewart's screen image and used it as a sort of dangerous recklessness in the characters Stewart played in Rope and Rear Window. But in Vertigo, for the first and only time I can think of, Stewart's character is completely overcome by the darkness in him and propels the film to a catastrophic conclusion.

During the course of the picture, Stewart must convincingly go through a series of changes that illustrate the stages of the disintegration of Scottie's personality. At the beginning of the movie, he seems like the familiar James Stewart. He has experienced a traumatizing event, his life has been drastically changed by it, and he must live with his disabling acrophobia. But his resilience and sense of proportion intact, he seems able to cope with the changes in his circumstances and determined to overcome his handicap. As he reluctantly follows Madeleine, he finds his detective's curiosity about this mysterious woman aroused. Curiosity soon turns to fascination and then to passionate love. At this point he is already beginning to lose his objectivity as he desperately tries to rationalize Madeleine's delusional behavior.

After Madeleine's death, he is a broken man, a state he conveys in his scenes in the mental hospital through his dazed expression and total lack of affect. If he seems to have regained a precarious sense of balance after several months of treatment, he begins to lose it as soon as he first spots Judy. As he grows closer to her, he progressively loses control of himself until he has become an emotional juggernaut moving inexorably toward the annihilation of both himself and the object of his love. This idea that external and internal forces could collude in such a way to transform a person's ego into an unstoppable engine of destruction is a chilling one indeed.

By the film's conclusion, Hitchcock has carefully guided us to a place where he is at last able to make the point he has been aiming for all along: the fine distinction between passion and obsession, between real life and dreams, between creation and destruction. The death of Judy at the end makes real the fake suicide that was staged for Scottie's benefit earlier. What began as make-believe has taken on a terrible life of its own and become reality, a reality born of the destructive potential when love overpowers reason.

You might also like:
• A Dedicated Man: An Appreciation of James Stewart
• The Wrong Man (1956)
• I Confess (1953)
• Young and Innocent (1937): A Neglected Early Hitchcock Masterwork

This post is part of A Month of VERTIGO at The Lady Eve's REEL LIFE. Click here to learn more about the event and read more posts on Vertigo.

Yellow Sky (1948)

2012-01-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: William Wellman

One of the great pleasures of my last few years of film viewing has been the rediscovery of the Western, a genre that once had little appeal for me apart from the classics like Stagecoach and High Noon. Reduced to their essential elements of character, uncomplicated conflict, and the starkly atmospheric landscapes of the American West, how satisfying and unpretentious the Westerns made between the end of World War II and the early 1960s seem to me now. Every once in a while I come across one of these pictures that delivers the expected delights of the genre and more. One film that fits this description is William Wellman's Yellow Sky (1948).

In this movie a group of outlaws rob a bank in a small town and then, pursued by a posse, find no means of escape except by crossing a vast dry salt lake, an undertaking that looks certain to end in death for the outlaws. Their leader is the rather coarse Stretch (Gregory Peck), and his main rival for leadership is the dandyish Dude (Richard Widmark). Predictably, under the pressure of blasting heat, no supplies, and only one canteen of water apiece, conflict within the group builds. Just when it seems as though the men aren't going to make it across the desert, they stumble upon a derelict mining town called Yellow Sky inhabited only by a grizzled old man and his tomboyish granddaughter (Anne Baxter). The power struggle between Peck and Widmark is now further intensified by rivalry for the young woman and also by the discovery that she and her grandfather are hoarding a fortune in gold.

I've always had mixed feelings about Wellman. He seemed drawn to powerful subjects, but aside from A Star Is Born (1937), his movies often strike me as rather perfunctory efforts that fall short of their potential. Even so, one thing Wellman was very good at was bringing out the best in his actors. James Cagney in Public Enemy, Loretta Young in Midnight Mary, Richard Barthelmess in Heroes for Sale, Carole Lombard in Nothing Sacred, Henry Fonda in The Ox-Bow Incident—these seem to me brilliant performances that outshine the movies they're found in. In Yellow Sky Wellman gets excellent performances not only from actors we expect to be good—people like Widmark, here playing another of the menacing characters he specialized in early in his career, and in a supporting role Henry (Harry) Morgan—but also from actors who are less consistent but given the right role and director can be quite good, in this case Peck and Baxter.

Another of Wellman's traits as a director is his ability to keep the picture moving swiftly. While this haste to get on with the action can lead to an impression of superficiality in some of his films, it is actually an advantage in a Western, where maintaining a brisk pace is especially important. Working from a story by W. R. Burnett (he wrote the novels that Little Caesar, High Sierra, and The Ashpalt Jungle are based on, so you know this film's plot is well engineered and dynamic), in Yellow Sky Wellman is well served by his talent for vigorous storytelling.

But the thing that for me really distinguishes this movie is the brilliant photography of Joe MacDonald. For years MacDonald worked for Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio that produced Yellow Sky. He was a gifted cinematographer who seemed to have the ability to provide the exact look appropriate to the project, whether it was the Technicolor CinemaScope of slick entertainment like How to Marry a Millionaire (the first picture shot in CinemaScope at Fox), the high-contrast black-and-white of noirish pictures like The Dark Corner or Pickup on South Street, with their urban setting, or the spacious landscapes of Westerns like John Ford's My Darling Clementine. MacDonald might not have had a distinctive style like that of Gregg Toland or John Alton, but surely such adaptability is a virtue that makes him worthy of greater recognition than he has received.

MacDonald's location shooting in Death Valley and on Owens Lake, a huge salt flat in the Sierra Nevada, adds tremendous atmosphere and authenticity to the bleak narrative of Yellow Sky. He really gives us a strong sense of the roughness of the characters and the harshness of their environment. He was a master of nuanced lighting, and isn't that what black-and-white cinematography is all about? That talent is on full display here, making the limpid desert light and searing heat almost palpable.

The denouement of the movie at first seemed to me just a bit pat, a little incongruously upbeat given the grim nature of much of what has come before. On reflection, however, I wonder if perhaps the name of the town is an allusion to "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"—a short story by Stephen Crane set in the Old West in which a misfit's anti-social behavior is curbed by the positive influence of a woman—and if the outcome of the movie is perhaps modeled on the similar outcome of that story. Like Crane's story, this movie has a somber tone with the mounting tension suddenly relieved at the end by an almost whimsical conclusion. The abrupt shift in tone at the end of the picture did initially startle me, but after I accepted it I found Yellow Sky an excellent film, notable especially for its strong character and pictorial values.

Yellow Sky was recently released on Blu-ray by the German company Koch Media.

Back Street (1941)

2011-12-26T00:00:00.001-08:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: Robert Stevenson

It isn't his fault. It isn't my fault.

For more than four decades, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, Fannie Hurst wrote popular novels and short stories about women and their problems, with the emphasis on their romantic lives. F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously predicted that nothing she wrote would be remembered ten years later. Not surprisingly, a number of her works were adapted for the screen during the heyday of the woman's picture in the studio years, and it is these movies that in a way have proved Fitzgerald wrong. Among the movies adapted from her work are Four Daughters (1938) and its two sequels and musical remake, Young at Heart (1954), the Joan Crawford-John Garfield picture Humoresque (1946), two versions of her novel Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959), and three versions of her novel Back Street (1932, 1941, and 1961). The 1941 and 1961 versions of Back Street have recently been released on DVD as part of the TCM Vault Collection.

The 1941 version from Universal stars Charles Boyer as Walter Saxel and Margaret Sullavan as Ray Smith, the woman who has a three decade-long affair with him. The two first meet in Cincinnati around the turn of the twentieth century. Ray is a young woman working in a dress shop with her spoiled stepsister and overbearing stepmother and Walter a businessman traveling through town when the two meet and fall in love. Their plans to get married are derailed by a melodramatic contrivance typical of this kind of picture, and each moves on. Five years later they run across each other by chance during a snowstorm in New York, where Ray is working as a fashion designer and Walter, now married and a father, is working in the investment bank of his wife's uncle. Finding that their feelings for each other have not cooled, they soon begin an affair that lasts nearly thirty years. During this time Ray voluntarily sacrifices her life, career, and chance to marry another man to be Walter's mistress, his kept "back street" woman.

The plot may be pure soap opera, but the resulting film is a splendid example of its genre, avoiding obvious sentimentality in favor of a light and subtle touch. Everything about the movie is restrained. The direction by Robert Stevenson (the very good 1943 version of Jane Eyre and a slew of Disney movies in the 1960s, including Mary Poppins) is professional and unobtrusive, the marvelous set decoration and costumes create a flavorful period atmosphere without being overdone, and the photography by the great William Daniels is first-rate. Even the music is subdued. What really makes this movie special, though, is its star, Margaret Sullavan.

I've been a fan of Margaret Sullavan since first seeing her many years ago in Ernst Lubtisch's The Shop Around the Corner (1941). Sullavan, who died in 1960, was a trained stage actress who made only seventeen movies in her brief screen career, all but one in the ten years between 1933 and 1943. I've seen about half of these, and of the ones I've seen, her performance in Back Street is among her very best, right up there with her Klara Novak in that Lubitsch masterpiece and her tragic Patricia in Frank Borzage's Three Comrades (1938), a performance that earned her the New York Film Critics Circle award and an Oscar nomination as best actress.

Sullavan had a screen presence that was unique among the actresses of her generation. With her unusual voice, both throaty and breathy, no one else sounded quite like her. Her ability to register fine emotional shifts with that voice and with her subtle facial expressions made her an ideal film actress. She was not a conventionally beautiful woman and in fact could at times look quite plain. But in Back Street she looks as lovely as I've ever seen her, helped by the high-necked gowns and pinned-up hairstyles and by cinematographer William Daniels's sympathetic lighting. (A master at making actresses look beautiful, he was Garbo's favorite cinematographer, working with her on twenty-one pictures.)

But it was above all the personal qualities Sullavan projected—an unusual and very appealing combination of strength and delicacy—that made her unlike any other screen actress of her time. I can't think of any of her contemporaries who could simultaneously express these exact qualities as consistently and with so little apparent effort as Sullavan did, with such a finely calibrated sense of balance that they seem to coexist naturally in every character I've seen her play. In Back Street she dominates the movie not only because her character is the most important in the film, but because of the way she infuses that character so completely with her unique personality. Her distinctive screen presence is the thing that holds the movie together and elevates it above standard tearjerker fare.

At the beginning of the picture, Ray is criticized by her stepmother for being so friendly with the traveling salesmen who visit their shop. There's a wonderful scene early in the film where Ray is playing cards with a group of these salesmen, the only woman at the table. It's clear that she is completely at ease with these men and that they are thrilled to be socializing with such an attractive and personable young woman. Sullavan manages to convey an easy camaraderie with the men without losing any of her femininity or seeming in any way loose or flirtatious. She's naturally intelligent and unselfconscious, and it's easy to see why Walter would be attracted to her as soon as he meets her. Ray is also an independent woman, someone who feels stifled by the limitations of her circumstances and yearns for a more meaningful life. You can sense this in the wistfulness Sullavan was so good at projecting, the same wistfulness that motivated her Klara in The Shop Around the Corner.

When Ray meets Walter again in New York, she has realized her aspirations and is living as a single career woman. When she forgoes her career and eventually sacrifices her independence to become his mistress, it's presented as a measure of the strength of her love for Walter that she is willing to give up things which plainly mean so much to her. This idea of sacrifice for love was at the heart of the woman's pictures that were so popular from the 1930s through the 1950s, sacrifice for a child or for a lover. It may seem a strange attitude to modern sensibilities, but keep in mind that the story takes place in the early 1900s and reflects the mores of its time. These are mores and a social milieu that were explored with a more probing and feminist slant by writers like Edith Wharton, and in some ways Back Street resembles a less socially aware and more melodramatic version of Wharton's novels like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. It may be difficult for modern viewers to understand Ray's decisions, but there is one constant in her situation, which is that people in love have always behaved foolishly and often in ways that are not in their own interest, and they still do.

Charles Boyer's Walter is a more difficult person to understand. He seems to expect to have both a family and a mistress as a privilege of his sex and social standing. He loves Ray but seems insensitive to the sacrifices she makes for him, a man concerned only with his own happiness and not above exploiting her feelings for him in order to keep her. The film maintains a neutral attitude to Walter, but neither does it or Boyer do anything to make him overtly sympathetic. That makes it easy for modern viewers to condemn him for his selfishness. But again, I think we need to remind ourselves of the mores of the time, when such expectations as Walter's were not uncommon and privileged men like Walter tended not to feel guilty about the emotional demands they made of women like Ray.

At the end of the film, after a quarter-century as Walter's mistress, how does Ray really feel about the personal sacrifices she has made for him? The conventions of this kind of movie idealize such sacrifices, portraying them as either noble or tragic. Back Street doesn't romanticize her situation, though, again taking a surprisingly neutral view of her actions. In the end, we don't know for sure if she was happy or unhappy about her decisions and the course of her life. We just know this was the way it happened, and that tone of emotional understatement—a rarity in films of this type—coupled with Margaret Sullavan's graceful and touching performance has made Back Street age uncommonly well.

You might also be interested in:

• Three Comrades (1938)
• Fairy Tales Can Come True: The Good Fairy (1935)
• Have Yourself a Merry Lubitsch Christmas: The Shop Around the Corner (1941)

The Tree of Life (2011)

2011-12-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

****
Country: US
Director: Terrence Malick

Our Town, Meet Me in St. Louis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Michael Powell's A Matter of Life and Death, Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror. These are a few of the movies that flashed through my mind as I watched Terrence Malick's remarkable new film The Tree of Life, now out on DVD. Like its director, this is a picture which galvanizes those who see it, a love-it-or-hate-it film, one which has divided the jury at Cannes that awarded it the Palme d'Or, critics who have reviewed it, and audiences who saw it in its general release earlier this year. Some find it pretentious and dull, others brilliant and innovative. Nobody seems to have a mild reaction to the film, and nobody seems to respond to it with indifference. My own response is that this is the most ambitious, personal, and original work yet from one of the most important American filmmakers of the last forty years.

Malick is a very private man who doesn't give interviews, doesn't promote his movies, and has little to say about the artistic intentions of his films. We can, however, infer some things about his films from his working methods. He has made only five pictures in nearly forty years, so it is clear that he spends a great deal of time thinking about and preparing each project before filming even begins. On the DVD extras of Days of Heaven, Richard Gere comments that the screenplay he read when he agreed to make the film was a straightforward one, quite different from the film he finally saw, which he called an "impressionistic" version of the shooting script. David Thomson writes that he has read a script "very different" from the completed film of The Thin Red Line. Sean Penn, discussing The Tree of Life in the French newspaper Le Figaro, calls the film's script "the most magnificent one that I've ever read" but notes how different the tone of the film is from that of the screenplay. This kind of comment makes me believe that Malick's movies most likely begin as conventional screenplays and may even be filmed that way. We do know that he can spend several years at the editing stage, transforming the footage he has shot into the final film. We also know that his films have certain things in common—the use of voice-over narration to comment on and explain the action, repeated shots of nature interwoven into the narrative (he seems especially fascinated with rivers and with shots of the sky seen looking up through treetops), multiple points of view, a fragmented narrative line—that seem more likely to emerge in the editing room than to find their origin in the screenplay.

In The Tree of Life, Malick takes all those stylistic mannerisms we have come to associate with his previous films and amplifies them. To these he adds a pair of new elements that take the film in a direction different from anything he has done before. Each of his earlier films seemed to have an even more fragmented plot than the last one, but still each told its story chronologically. In The Tree of Life, he takes this last holdover from conventional film storytelling and smashes it to bits. And he takes the mystical strain that seemed to become more pronounced with each new film and makes it the central element. His aim here is to chronicle one man's search for meaning in life as he tries to place the pattern of his own life's story in no less than the history of the universe.

The man is Jack O'Brien, who is played as an adult by Sean Penn and as a child by Hunter McCracken. The plot of the film is a straightforward one. When Jack learns that his father has died, the news triggers a swirling collage of memories of growing up in Texas in the 1950s, memories that revolve around his family and in particular the often troubled relationship between him and his father. Like the central character in all of Malick's films, Jack, even as a child, is what might be called a meta-observer, someone who seems to live inside life while simultaneously observing it from the outside. From his earliest memories, Jack has been torn between two ways of viewing the world, which he calls the way of Nature and the way of Grace. He identifies each of these with one of his parents—the way of Nature, with its need to understand and control the world, with his father, and the way of Grace, with its unquestioning acceptance of life's events, with his mother. These are dialectically opposed principles analogous to the yin and yang of Asian philosophy. Is it any surprise that Malick was a philosophy major in college and later taught philosophy briefly at MIT?

If the combination in one movie of this simple plot, complicated storytelling technique, and heady philosophical underpinning were not enough to challenge viewers, Malick bookends the main part of the movie with two sequences that will further alienate those not already responsive to his approach. At the beginning, he shows in largely abstract images nothing less than the birth of the universe in the Big Bang, the formation of the Earth, the evolution of life on Earth, and finally Jack's own conception and birth. With little to latch onto emotionally during this long section, which amounts to an overture to the main part of the film, it is perhaps understandable that some viewers will become impatient or even put off.

But if in dramatic terms this sequence is largely of intellectual rather than emotional appeal, it is conceptually necessary to establish the subject of the film. The Tree of Life is not just about the events in Jack's life. It is about his lifelong attempts to understand the forces that drive the universe and where his own life fits into the overall scheme of the cosmos. Like Job, who is referred to at several points in the film, Jack feels compelled to know why things happen, specifically why bad things happen. He is essentially looking for answers to questions that have no answers. Yet right up to the very end that does not stop him from asking and searching, so great is his need to know.

Jack's dreamlike vision at the end, a passage that serves as the film's coda, is as challenging as the opening sequence, a vision of life and death which suggests that the universe and everyone in it exists in a kind of continuum in which the individual is both the creator and a participant. I know this all sounds very paradoxical and metaphysical, and it is. But consider how difficult it must be to convey such abstractions through concrete events and images in a narrative, even one as fragmented and impressionistic as this one, and it becomes clear what a tremendously ambitious task Malick has set for himself. The amazing thing is that he manages to pull it off without becoming lost in narrative chaos, and without losing that spirit of wonder which drives the artist to seek order where none is apparent. Could that conflict between Nature and Grace be another way of stating the artist's dilemma between close but detached observation of life and the need to impose some kind of order to make sense of those observations?

All of this may seem quite conceptual and metaphysical, and if that were all there was to The Tree of Life, then it would be a cold and sterile movie indeed. But it's not. This is a deeply absorbing film on the emotional level, and the reason for that is the richness and the authenticity of both the characters and the visual details in the film.

One of the risks of Malick's approach to his subject is that the people in the movie could easily become schematic and unconvincing. But they don't. Instead they are fully realized individuals sympathetically inhabited by actors wholly attuned to Malick's view of their identities, problems, and relationships to one another. Brad Pitt, who also co-produced the film, plays Jack's father. Pitt plays this complicated man with commendable restraint—no star turn here—managing to find a balance between his likable and unlikable qualities, and between his sometimes loving, sometimes overly stern and authoritarian treatment of Jack. Jessica Chastain plays Jack's mother, a nurturing woman whose love for her children is constant and invariable, a gentle woman who accepts Jack's strengths and weaknesses without judgment or his father's constant attempts to mold his personality. She may not be as sharply delineated a character as Jack's father, but I think that is deliberate, for to Jack she is both a real person and an ideal. Chastain finds just the right note to center her character then maintains it throughout the film.

Sean Penn conveys all the shock, pain, and confusion of the adult Jack. It's an emotionally raw performance, numb on the surface but with a core of almost palpable despair, one of his most intense and focused performances since Dead Man Walking. But the real discovery here is young Hunter McCracken, who plays Jack as a boy. He manages to create an impression of solitude, bewilderment, and a driving need to understand the world that so exactly matches the personality of the adult Jack that it is easy to see how the boy became the man. If Penn gives the film its brains and Chastain its heart, young McCracken gives the film its soul. It's one of the great child characters in the movies and one of the great child performances.

Besides its fully realized characters, the other thing that keeps The Tree of Life from becoming an arid conceptual treatise is the astounding level of realistic visual detail in the film. From the cold, impersonal cityscape where Jack works and the equally bleak ultra-modern apartment where he lives, to the small Texas town and traditional neighborhood where he grew up, each setting is carefully chosen to create an emotional mood. Those childhood settings in particular had my mind reeling. Everything about Jack's childhood, right down to the dishes the family eats from and the food they eat, is absolutely authentic. If you grew up during this time and in a place similar to this, as I did, then time and again you will experience an instant shock of recognition.

This is not the academic authenticity found in well-researched period movies, or even the studied authenticity of Mad Men, where the set decorators consult mail-order catalogues and magazines of the time, but real, remembered authenticity. Such literal visual details should dispel any doubt about the autobiographical origins of this film. (A glance at a biography of Malick confirms that many of the details in the movie duplicate those of his own life.) As well as Malick's own memory of his childhood environment, credit for the extraordinary look of the film should also go to the production designer, Jack Fisk, who has worked with Malick on all of his pictures, beginning with his first, Badlands, in 1973.

Of all the scenes in The Tree of Life, the one that stays with me above all others is not one of the film's visionary, cosmic, or emotionally wrenching scenes, but one of its briefest and simplest. After the family plants a young tree in the back yard of their house, Jack's mother remarks, "You'll be grown up before this tree gets big." For me that simple statement somehow encapsulates all the mysteries of time and change, of life and death, of the vastness of the universe and the finiteness of an individual life, that the rest of the movie explores in such imaginative detail.

You might also be interested in:

• The Cinematic New World of Terrence Malick
• Brief Reviews: Days of Heaven (1978)

My Favorite Musicals

2011-11-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

The 70 Best Musicals Countdown at Wonders in the Dark is complete. (Click here to see the results.) Taken together, the seventy reviews written for the countdown by a number of contributors are a great introduction to, and overview of, the genre. I didn't vote in the countdown, but I did contribute one post (on the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Top Hat, no. 11) and I did follow the countdown. Now that it's over, I thought I would present my own list of favorite musicals.

The classic Hollywood musical is one of my very favorite genres, and I'll watch just about any of them, even the lesser ones, with enjoyment. One of the quirks of the WitD countdown was that each of those who voted determined what constituted a musical film (although, to be fair, I don't see how the countdown could have been conducted any other way). Quite a few films that received votes would not have occurred to me as falling within my own definition of a musical film. This made me realize that my definition of "musical" is a fairly narrow one. If I had voted, I would not, for example, have included any operas, even though several made the final cut of the 70 Best Musicals. I love classical music, but I must confess that in general the experience of watching an entire opera from beginning to end is one that is beyond my endurance. Still, I have seen a few outstanding movies of operas that I thought worked as films, but not nearly enough to be able to pick among all the possibilities with any confidence. Moreover, I'm not sure that, strictly speaking, opera movies really strike me as musicals in the movie sense. Nor did I include any animated films, four of which placed in the countdown. Because I'm not a big fan of animated movies, I just don't watch them in the same way I watch live-action movies and don't feel able to judge them the same way I do live-action musicals.

A Hard Day's Night came in at no. 44. This is another film it would not have occurred to me to include, because I don't find that it really fits comfortably with musical movies as I see the genre. The same goes for the other rock-music movies I especially like: the wonderful Quadrophenia based on the album by the Who, those two hugely enjoyable Irish musicals The Commitments and Once (no. 57), and of course the other Richard Lester-Beatles movie, Help! Coming in at no. 28 was Yankee Doodle Dandy, the musical biography of James M. Cohan with James Cagney so memorable in the lead role. Again, this is a movie that before seeing the results of the poll would not have occurred to me to include. The same goes for other musical biographies that I find especially good: I'll Cry Tomorrow, Love Me or Leave Me, The Buddy Holly Story, Coal Miner's Daughter. When I think of musicals, I just don't think of movies like these, even though they're movies and music is performed in them.

So what did make my list? I was able to come up with a list of thirty movies that I consider either masterpieces of the genre or, falling short of masterpiece status, still excellent films. There are many more musicals that I can watch with pleasure, but because the qualitative differences between them are so slight, I didn't see any sense in ranking them in any kind of order. It should be clear from the list that I prefer the classics. The most recent movie on the list is Cabaret, released in 1972. I also seem to prefer the musicals from MGM over those of any other studio. Ten of the thirty films on my list came from that studio, including fully half of the top ten and all of the top three. It's also clear that I have a strong preference for original movie musicals over stage-to-film adaptations. I'm not sure why this is except possibly that adaptations of stage musicals so often emphasize faithfulness to the original version over cinematic values. Movie musicals conceived as movies from the beginning seem to me generally more successful as films.

Another thing I noticed when comparing my choices to those of the voters in the countdown poll is that some of those who voted seemed to place a higher value on their response to the music in the movie than I did. South Pacific, for instance, which placed no. 35, has one of the loveliest scores of all musicals, and I'll go along with the voters' and commenters' consensus that its score is the best of all those the great Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote. But as much as I love the songs from South Pacific, I could never find a place for it on a list of the best movie musicals because the film version has so many obvious faults. The same goes for the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (no. 42). It occurs to me that some voters might also have been swayed by memories of stage productions they'd seen of some of the musicals they voted for.

Before getting to my list of favorite musicals, I'm going to repeat part of what I wrote in the review of Top Hat for the countdown, in which I explain what for me are the defining characteristics of the musical film:

The musical film is an inherently artificial genre. . . . The basic aim of the musical film is to heighten reality through contrived and often frivolous plots, simplified characterization, and the combining of speech with song and movement with dance. Artifice, stylization, and exaggeration are the engines that drive musical films.

Anyway, here is my own list of the best musicals. For those that placed in the top 70 of the countdown, I've placed their WitD position in parentheses after the title.

MY 30 FAVORITE MUSICALS

1. Singin' in the Rain (#1)
2. On the Town (#16)
3. Meet Me in St. Louis (#5)
4. Love Me Tonight (#8)
5. Top Hat (#11)
6. Gold Diggers of 1933 (#3)
7. West Side Story (#4)
8 . Cabaret (#7)
9. The Wizard of Oz (#2)
10. The Band Wagon (#10)
11. A Star Is Born (#19)
12. Gigi (#22)
13. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (#12)
14. Swing Time (#6)
15. Funny Face (#45)
16. 42nd Street (#15)
17. Easter Parade (#33)
18. An American in Paris (#13)
19. My Fair Lady (#37)
20. The Music Man #(14)
21. The Pajama Game
22. The Merry Widow (1934) (#26)
23. Oklahoma! (#27)
24. Kiss Me Kate (#48)
25. Annie Get Your Gun
26. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (#56)
27. The King and I (#23)
28. Shall We Dance (1937)
29. The Gay Divorcée (#46)
30. French Cancan

I can't claim to have seen every musical ever made, so there are bound to be omissions for that reason. For one, I've never seen The Sound of Music, although I'm familiar with its score and plot, so it was not possible for me to include it. (Someday I'll have to write a post on the most shocking gaps in my film-viewing history.) There are three highly regarded musicals I've tried to watch, some more than once, but have never been able to watch for more than about twenty minutes before giving up: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Fiddler on the Roof, and Oliver! I can't say exactly what it was about these films that rubbed me the wrong way, but I do know that I couldn't face the prospect of another two or three hours of them.

If anyone has a favorite musical you think belongs in the company of the ones I did include, please mention it in a comment.

You might also be interested in:

• Top Hat (1935)
• The Best Fred Astaire Musicals Without Ginger Rogers
• Love Me Tonight (1932)
• Brief Reviews: Gold Diggers of 1933

Top Hat (1935)

2011-10-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: US
Director: Mark Sandrich

"Every once in a while I suddenly find myself dancing," Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) says to Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) when they meet cute at a London hotel at the beginning of Top Hat. Jerry, a song-and-dance man, has just arrived in London to star in a show for his producer pal Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton) and has been explaining to Horace his casual philosophy of romance. How else would Fred Astaire express his feelings in a musical film but through song and dance? Here the song is "No Strings (I'm Fancy Free)"—"No ties to my affections / I'm fancy free and free for anything fa-a-a-ncy"—and the dance is a raucous tap routine that has disturbed the sleep of the young woman in the room below, Dale. This is why Jerry feels the need to explain to her his occasional compulsion to sing and dance. At this first meeting, Dale responds to Jerry frostily. He responds to her with a level of interest that has him rethinking his no strings attitude to romance.

The rest of the movie might be described as Fred persists, Ginger resists, with complications. It's those complications that are wrung for every last drop of plot to sustain this light-as-air confection of a movie. The main complication is one of the oldest in the book—mistaken identity. Just when Dale is beginning to reconsider her opinion of Jerry, circumstances lead her to believe that Jerry is actually Horace, who happens to be the husband of her best friend Madge (Helen Broderick), and narrative coincidences conspire to perpetuate her error. Naturally, she finds her pursuer a cad and continues to reject his advances, while Jerry can't understand why she won't thaw in the face of his tenacity. Things definitely reach an impasse when Dale impulsively decides to marry a sexually ambiguous dress designer to avoid Jerry.

Besides the sublime team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Top Hat has a great deal else to recommend it. For one thing, there's the delightful score by Irving Berlin. It might not have the number of standards found in Shall We Dance or Swing Time, but its five songs are all tuneful and lyrically catchy, and one, "Cheek to Cheek," not only provides the music for the most memorable dance routine in the film but became a much-recorded standard. The song was nominated for an Oscar but came in second behind "Lullaby of Broadway," a well-crafted song which, however, doesn't strike me as having the lasting appeal of "Cheek to Cheek." But who ever credited the Academy with foresight? And its chances were probably hurt by the fact that the winner was the centerpiece of a mind-blowing 14-minute long Busby Berkeley production number in a movie directed by the master himself (Gold Diggers of 1935) and also that the only other nominee, "Lovely to Look At," was from another Astaire-Rogers movie, Roberta.

The art direction in Top Hat, which also received an Oscar nomination, is by Carroll Clark and Van Nest Polglase, who was head of the art department at RKO from 1932 to 1943. (Among the 331 films Polglase is credited with are all nine of the Astaire-Rogers musicals made at RKO in the 1930s as well as Citizen Kane, also made at RKO.) The great film director Michael Powell wrote in his autobiography that "the most genuinely creative member of a film unit, if the author of the original story and screenplay is excluded, is the art director . . . the creator of those miraculous images up there on the big screen." Top Hat is a great illustration of the truth of that statement, for the art direction of this film is largely responsible for its considerable visual appeal.

The first half of Top Hat takes place in London, mostly in a swanky hotel, and the decor here is pure Art Deco, all angles and planes and architectonic silhouettes arrayed in open, spacious settings. When the action moves to Venice in the second half of the film, the decor becomes rococo frou-frou full of sensuous curves and ornamentation, a look that might have been inspired by the decoration on a wedding cake. Throughout, the color scheme is pale—white on white on white. Dark colors are restricted largely to the costumes, which helps the actors stand out amid all that pallid visual splendor. The set decoration reaches its zenith in the elaborate sound stage representation of a fantasy Venice, a set so vast that two sound stages were required to house it.

In the Greatest Musicals Countdown there has been some discussion of the use of the sound stage in musicals and whether this is a practice antithetical to the innate realism of the film medium. But let's face it—the musical film is an inherently artificial genre. In the traditional musical like Top Hat, the fundamental mode of expression is fantasy, not realism. This is due at least in part to its antecedents in opera and in the operettas, variety shows, and musical comedies of the stage. I'm not saying that real locations don't enhance outdoor scenes and the serious subjects of the modern social realist musical like West Side Story. But the basic aim of the musical film is to heighten reality through contrived and often frivolous plots, simplified characterization, and the combining of speech with song and movement with dance. Artifice, stylization, and exaggeration are the engines that drive musical films like Top Hat.

Now on to the great cast of Top Hat. Anyone reading this is likely well-acquainted with the talent and teamwork of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. But one thing that makes their films work so well is the support they get from the character actors cast in smaller roles, and none of their pictures has a better supporting cast than this one. Erik Rhodes plays the fashion designer Ginger marries (you'll have to watch the movie to see the clever ruse used to get around this so that Fred and Ginger can get together at the end of the movie), an excitable Italian named Beddini, essentially a reprise of his excitable Italian Tonetti from The Gay Divorcée. Helen Broderick plays Madge Hardwick, making wry moues and snapping out wisecracks as though it were second nature. Best of all are fussy Edward Everett Horton, firing off exclamations like "Oh, dear dear!" and "My word!" while doing double-takes, and Eric Blore, as Horton's sassy valet Bates. Horton and Blore make a wonderful comedy team, Horton feeding Blore straight lines and Blore rolling his eyes, pulling faces, and drawling back punch lines with hilariously over-precise diction. And I mustn't forget to mention a platinum blonde Lucille Ball in a tiny role as a florist's assistant. (She must have had fond memories of this picture. Horton later appeared with her in a memorable episode of I Love Lucy, and in another episode Desi Arnaz sang "Cheek to Cheek" to a pregnant Lucy.)

Finally, there are the dance numbers, choreographed by Astaire and the great Hermes Pan, who worked on all ten of the Astaire-Rogers movies. The five musical numbers here represent just about every style of dance then current in musical movies. "No Strings" begins as an energetic tap dance and ends as a hushed soft-shoe with Fred lulling Ginger to sleep by dancing on sand. "Isn't This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?" starts off almost as a competition between the two, with Fred attempting to use his dance technique as a tactic for seduction. Ginger begins mimicking his moves to prove her dancing mettle but ends up dancing in unison with him, a choreographic strategy perhaps intended to show how close Fred came to succeeding. It's a good thing that thunderstorm passed before things went too far! "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" is done as a stage number in Jerry and Horace's musical revue, in the style of the Warners backstage musicals, Astaire performing solo with a male chorus. The legendary "Cheek to Cheek" is the ultimate romantic dance, with Fred in tails and Ginger in that famous feathered dress, together gliding, swooping, and whirling with ethereal grace, like a pair of exotic birds performing a mating ritual. The film's final number, "The Piccolino," sung by Ginger and performed on that huge Venetian set, is a lavish production number on the grand scale, almost an homage to Busby Berkeley.

Top Hat, nominated for an Oscar as best picture, was the fifth of ten musicals Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made together and one of five directed by Mark Sandrich. It is in the opinion of just about everybody one of the two best of the lot, the other being Swing Time (1936). I'd go along with that opinion, but if pressed to choose one as the absolute best, I'd go for Top Hat over Swing Time, as much as I like that George Stevens-directed delight. Top Hat is a more comfortable fit with the airiness I consider typical of Astaire-Rogers vehicles, and of all the Astaire-Rogers movies, it's the funniest and the most risqué.

This post is part of the Greatest Musicals Countdown at Wonders in the Dark, where Top Hat came in at no. 11. Click here to catch up on the countdown. You might also be interested in my post on "The Best Fred Astaire Musicals Without Ginger Rogers." Click here to read it.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 4: Song of Summer (1968)

2011-10-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

The final film in the six-film box set of Ken Russell's work at the BBC in the 1960s is on the English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934). Of all the films in the set, this is the closest in its narrative organization to a conventional feature and the most subdued in tone. It is also the only film of the six based not on an original screenplay but on an existing source, the book Delius As I Knew Him by Eric Fenby, who collaborated with Russell on the screenplay, and it is to this that Russell attributes his stylistic restraint: "Song of Summer was less fragmentary and kaleidoscopic than some of my work. But the book was a straightforward story [with] a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there didn't seem to be any point in jazzing it up." Although the least tricked up film in the set, it is ultimately the most satisfying, a moving work that offers Russell's most profound insights yet into the creative mind of the artist.

The film covers the last five years of Delius's life and his association with a young Yorkshireman, Eric Fenby, a self-taught musician and composer who became Delius's assistant during this time. Hearing a work by Delius on the radio one evening, Fenby writes to Delius's wife Jelka offering his services. By this time, Delius is paralyzed and blind and has for several years been unable to compose. Jelka invites Fenby to join them in their house outside Paris, where they have lived essentially in isolation for more than thirty years. Fenby finds the atmosphere of the household "sinister" (his room is decorated with a copy of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream) and Delius cranky, opinionated, and demanding. At first the two don't get along. Unimpressed by Fenby's limited musical education and inability to follow the composer's attempts to dictate his musical ideas for transcription, Delius bullies the diffident young man mercilessly. Fenby manages to form a close relationship with Jelka, though, and she encourages him to stand up to Delius.

Fenby does assert himself, and eventually, through trial and error, the two are able to work out a method of musical dictation that makes it possible for Delius to begin composing again. The bulk of Delius's compositions were impressionistic tone poems based on natural scenes and elements—places, seasons, the time of day, for example—and although very different in temperament, the two men have one important thing in common that allows them to forge a working relationship: their ability to hear the music in nature and to use that as the source of their inspiration. When Fenby puts a broadcast of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the radio, Delius reacts dismissively: "Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and that lot. . . . A complete waste of time. . . . Listen to the music of nature. Forget the immortals. I did long ago."

The scenes of their first successful working sessions together, about half an hour into the film, are just stunning. Film biographies have often attempted to portray the almost subliminal communication of creative minds that can occur when songwriters work together, but Russell's depiction of this process in Song of Summer is far ahead of any other attempt of this kind that I'm aware of. The film critic Richard Schickel once called Song of Summer "the best dramatic television program I've ever seen" because of its insights into the creative process and the creative personality, and I have to say that, along with Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, it's the best film of any kind on these subjects I've seen. As he slowly returns to life, Delius doesn't abandon his waspish personality altogether, but you can nevertheless sense an easing of his frustration and hostility. And you can see his attitude toward Fenby evolve into something resembling gratitude as the two collaborate to translate the melodies in Delius's mind into musical notation. For his part Fenby is very much the receptor in all this—he describes himself as Delius's "amanuensis"—but you can sense his active pleasure in enabling the great composer to regain his creative voice.

The film may concentrate on the last five years of Delius's life, but as he develops greater intimacy with Fenby, he opens up to him and begins reminiscing about the past, and this permits Russell to work in unobtrusive biographical details about Delius. Two episodes from Delius's past are particularly striking. One is of his experiences in Florida as a young man working as a factor on an orange plantation near Jacksonville. After Delius asks Jelka to play a recording of "Ol' Man River" on the gramophone, he tells his young assistant of the profound effect on him of the African American music of Florida, its spontaneous sense of harmony, rhythm, and counterpoint such a contrast to the academic music of Europe. It was in Florida, he tells Fenby, that "I first felt the urge to express myself in music."

The other experience, this time shown in flashback, is one that happened in Norway years earlier, when he could no longer walk but before he lost his sight. He wanted to go to the top of a nearby mountain to see the sunset and was taken there in a chair carried by Jelka, his friend the English composer Percy Grainger, and a Norwegian servant. This is a beautifully conceived sequence which shows the group ascending higher up the snow-covered mountain through clouds that grow ever denser. Then suddenly at the last moment they break through the clouds at the top of the mountain and see the sun setting in the distance. All this is accompanied by glorious music by Delius that exactly corresponds to the mood of the images, building in intensity until it suddenly seems to resolve itself tonally, soar free, and float away in an almost mystical sense of calm and release. Visually and dramatically, this small, technically simple sequence is the centerpiece of the film, a return to the melding of rapturous music with rapturous imagery that distinguished Russell's earlier biographical films on Edward Elgar and Claude Debussy.

In the earlier films in the set, Russell tended to use non-professional actors—often choosing them, like Fellini, for their faces—and to mold their characterizations himself through the writing, photography, and editing. But in Song of Summer, with its more conventional narrative approach, he concentrates more on getting his main actors to create sustained characterizations. And it pays off. Christopher Gable, who plays Eric Fenby, was a ballet dancer who had appeared in only one television program before this film. But he seems wholly comfortable with his character here, conveying all the boyish enthusiasm, hero worship, and insecurity of the young Fenby. Later, as he becomes a full-fledged collaborator with Delius, he makes plain Fenby's greater maturity and self-confidence. (He would go on to work with Russell five more times before his death in 1998.)

Maureen Pryor, an experienced film and television actress who plays Delius's wife Jelka, grounds her character in Jelka's selfless devotion to her husband and her motherly but companionable support of Fenby. Her finest moment comes when Delius delivers a tirade to Fenby against marriage. "It's only from your art you will find lasting happiness in your life," he tells Fenby, then advises him that if he must marry, marry a woman who is more devoted to his art than to him. The blind Delius cannot see the effect his thoughtless words have on Jelka, but we can, and the pain provoked by his insensitivity registers clearly on her face.

As good as those two actors are, though, it is really Max Adrian as Delius who carries the film. At this point in his life, Delius is paralyzed, confined to a wheel chair, and blind. His character unable to gesture or use his body, unable to see, his eyes often concealed behind dark glasses, and his facial expressions immobilized by his illness, Adrian must create a portrait of Delius largely through his voice. Despite these limitations, he gives Delius a tremendously vivid personality. Another of Russell's troubled geniuses, he has the additional burden of being an artist still in possession of his full creative ability, but physically unable to express it. His resentment of his dependence on Fenby gradually becomes tolerance then admiration as Fenby subsumes his own creativity to Delius's and becomes a channel for the great composer's inspiration. Delius may never entirely lose his irascibility and egotism, but Adrian lets us see some of the sharp edges to his personality begin to soften and suggests just a touch of increasing regard for someone other than himself.

Song of Summer is a remarkable finale to the six works in this box set. Beginning with Elgar, the closest to a traditional biographical documentary, Russell proceeds in these films through stages that become more and more idiosyncratic. "There are certain points in every film I do, where I deliberately want to shock people into awareness," he once said in an interview, and in these works you can see him honing this vision of cinema as shock treatment. Finally he arrives at Song of Summer, in which he synthesizes all he has done in the previous films and integrates it into a more subdued yet still emotionally intense experience. To follow Russell through these six films is to be taken through the successive phases of a truly original filmmaker's experimentation with how to tell the life stories of artists in innovative ways. It's a journey well worth taking.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 3: Dante's Inferno (1967)

2011-10-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

If you didn't know you were watching the beginning of Ken Russell's 1967 biography of the English Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828-1882), you might think you were watching a black-and-white Hammer horror film from the 1960s. The film opens in sensational Hammer fashion, with the nighttime exhumation of a grave. While eerie, melodramatic music on the soundtrack builds in intensity, torches wave over a coffin being raised from an open grave, the scene shot from overhead. The lid slides away from the coffin and we see an arm sweep away cobwebs from the shriveled remains of a woman in a burial shroud. The arm reaches into the coffin and lifts out a small moldy book, the camera moves in for a closer shot of the face, its skin sunken and stretched tight over the skull, and suddenly the title of the film appears: Dante's Inferno.

Immediately the scene cuts to a shot of Oliver Reed, who plays Rosetti, leaping directly at the camera over a bonfire around which a group of people are cavorting as they toss in paintings in the style of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds and chant slogans like "Away with the wishy-washies!" A narrator explains in voice-over: "Arson, rapine, riot, civil insurrection is terrifying Europe. This is 1848. . . . In England rebels conspire to overthrow the Royal Academy of Art." Thus the film begins in Ken Russell's typically flamboyant style, with the juxtaposition of horror, social rebellion, and high jinks.

For the next hour and a half Russell gives us a crash course in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with its fascination with knights and damsels and all things medieval. The cast of characters surrounding Rosetti sounds like a who's who of the movement: his sister the poet Christina Rosetti, the painters Millais, Holman Hunt, and Burne-Jones, the decorative artist and founder of the English Arts and Crafts Movement William Morris, the poet Algernon Swinburne, the critic John Ruskin. But always at the film's center are Dante Gabriel Rosetti and his lovers: his model Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Burden, another model who later married William Morris before beginning an affair with Rosetti, and Fanny Cornforth, yet another model with whom Rosetti lived off and on for several years at the end of his life. The film concentrates especially on Rosetti's relationship with Elizabeth Siddal (Judith Paris), a milliner's assistant who became his model, his muse, his mistress, and eventually his wife. Siddal posed for many of the best-known paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, including Millais's iconic Ophelia. Their relationship was a stormy one, complicated by her mysterious chronic illness, her addiction to laudanum, and her adoption as a protégée by the domineering John Ruskin.

The tone of the film—at least for the first hour—is the mixture of satire and seriousness of Russell's earlier films on Henri Rousseau and Isadora Duncan. The PRB might be preaching a revolutionary message, but unlike their champion the priggish John Ruskin (when offered snuff, he declines, saying condescendingly, "Art is my stimulant"), they aim to have a good time doing it. When early in the film Russell accompanies their prankish behavior with Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business" playing on a carnival organ on the soundtrack, we know that these are young men living their lives as theater. Later when Rosetti, Morris, Burne-Jones, and Swinburne spend the summer in Oxford painting murals of the Arthurian legends on the walls of the Oxford Union debating hall, they frolic like buffoons, becoming Russell's Pre-Raphaelite version of the Marx Brothers. Yet when they go out punting on the Isis with Jane Burden, who is posing for the murals as Guinevere, the visuals become almost idyllically beautiful.

After Siddal's death in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum, the tone of the film takes a sharp turn, becoming serious, hallucinatory, and morbid, and stays there for its last half hour. Siddal's death is portrayed in the film as suicide after she learned of Rosetti's affair with Jane Morris. (The coroner's verdict was accidental death.) It is Elizabeth Siddal's grave which is opened at the beginning of the film, and the book inside her coffin is a journal of Rosetti's containing the only copy of his early poems. Persuaded by an unscrupulous art dealer to exhume Elizabeth Siddal to retrieve those early poems so they could be published, Rosetti chose to place commerce over art, and he never really got over what he came to view as a betrayal of the idealistic principles of his youth. Already in a fragile mental state, his health ruined by alcohol and dependence on the drug chloral hydrate, Rosetti was haunted by what he had done. "He accuses and condemns himself . . . endlessly," his sister Christina says of his despair over the exhumation. Russell has said it was specifically that incident and its effect on Rosetti which inspired him to make Dante's Inferno and guided his approach to portraying Rosetti's life.

The film continues the style Russell developed in the earlier semi-documentary biographies in this box set, but with all the elements of that style more elaborate than ever. Voice-over narration, fully dramatized scenes, and a copious number of passages from Rosetti's poetry recited by Reed accompany stunningly staged, photographed, and edited images filled with detailed period decor, costumes, and Pre-Raphaelite art. Especially memorable are images of the Lake District, where Rosetti and Siddal pursue their romance, and a waterfall used as a recurring location at key points in the film. It appears to be the same waterfall where Millais posed John Ruskin for his portrait of Ruskin, an amazingly realistic, almost photographic work that illustrates the Pre-Raphaelite creed of "truth to nature." (The waterfall's exact location wasn't discovered until 2010, so the one used in the film must be a similar one, though it appears virtually identical.)

Early in the film Rosetti paints Siddal posed there. Later, after the exhumation, it appears in a hallucinatory dream/nightmare sequence while Rosetti is stoned on chloral. Still later it appears again in another hallucinatory sequence during his attempt to commit suicide with laudanum, with Siddal reaching out for Rosetti from her open coffin, which is resting on a boulder in the stream, and Rosetti plunging headlong off the boulder and into the stream at the end of the sequence. At the very end of the film, he returns to the Lake District setting of the early days of his romance with Siddal and yet again to that waterfall, which has become an image of the untamed drama of Rosetti's life.

Dante's Inferno is a wonderfully apposite follow-up to Russell's film on Isadora Duncan. Like Isadora, Dante Gabriel Rosetti was a great artist, but also a self-centered showoff who lived life on the grand emotional scale. His contradictory personality was, like Isadora's, composed of traits that were frequently at odds with one another, his serious creative urges shot through with pretension and a degree of dilettantism, his troubled personal and professional lives dominated almost as much by a showbiz mentality as by the artistic impulse. Both were youthful innovators who later ran out of new ideas, who grew stale and saw their creativity fossilize, and whose response to this and to their personal troubles was behavior that became increasingly self-destructive. Theirs was the tragedy of those artists who blaze bright in their youth and burn out in middle age.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 2: Always on Sunday (1965) and Isadora (1966)

2011-10-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

After his New Wave-influenced The Debussy Film, in which he presented the composer Claude Debussy's life as an intricate Chinese box of time, character, point of view, and narrative mode, Ken Russell next turned to the life of the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). In his film on Rousseau, Always on Sunday, Russell returns to the more conventional approach of his 1962 biography of the composer Edward Elgar. He uses a combination of impersonal voice-over narration (by Oliver Reed), first-person narration by Rousseau (the voice and accent of the actor playing Rousseau, James Lloyd, sound exactly like those of the English actor Jim Broadbent), passages from contemporary critics' reviews of Rousseau's work, music, and dramatized scenes—some factual, some imagined—to tell Rousseau's story.

Rather than covering all of Rousseau's life, Russell begins with Rousseau's retirement, at the age of fifty-one, after twenty years as a French government civil servant, to devote his life to painting. The very first scene shows Rousseau packing his civil servant's uniform and the French flag (he was a customs inspector) in a trunk and pouring mothballs over them. On the soundtrack we hear a chauvinistic passage from the valedictory letter of Rousseau's supervisor expressing the hope that in his retirement he will produce art which will raise the opinion of France in the estimation of "foreigners." If the title of the film, with its word play on the title of the movie Never on Sunday, doesn't make us suspect that something not quite straightforward is up, Russell gives us a clear indication within the first minute that this is a film whose tone—both visual and verbal—will combine seriousness with satire. That is the innovation of Always on Sunday—its combination of a conventional stylistic approach and a wildly unconventional and constantly shifting tone in which scenes of restrained visual beauty alternate with scenes of outlandish comic exaggeration.

Rousseau retired the same year the avant-garde painters of Paris founded the Salon des Indépendants. This was an annual exhibition in which painters like Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Seurat could display work that had been rejected for the annual exhibition of the conservative Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In fact, anyone could enter work in the new exhibition, and this is exactly what Rousseau did that first year and nearly every year for the rest of his life. But Rousseau, a self-taught painter and ordinary middle-class retiree, was not part of the Impressionists or any other artistic movement or group and was ignored by other artists and scorned for his primitive style even by critics and those members of the public sympathetic to the new style of painting. This gives rise to a jaw-dropping scene early in the film in which Russell gives full rein to his mordant sense of humor and his extreme sense of dramatic hyperbole.

At the first exhibition of the Salon, a group of onlookers gathers around Rousseau, who is standing beside one of his paintings, and ridicule him. At the front of the group are a rakish gentleman and a woman in tawdry dress. As she gorges on a huge box of chocolates she is holding, the two trade repartee in working-class British accents for the benefit of amused bystanders. The painting, of Rousseau's Army unit, is titled 51st Artillery: A Portrait of the Artist and His Brothers at Arms (it's pictured above), and the couple are making fun of the fact that all of the soldiers look pretty much alike. (They do.) "Which one's he then?" the man asks. "That's him," she says, pointing to one of the soldiers. "No, uh, that's him," he replies, pointing to a different soldier. The pair continue trading those two lines—"That's him!" "That's him!"—faster and more shrilly as the whole group breaks up with laughter and the abashed Rousseau looks on in humiliation. Finally the woman silences the man by shoving a chocolate in his mouth. The entire absurd routine wouldn't seem out of place in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Things get even more peculiar when Rousseau is adopted as a protégé by the proto-surrealist dramatist and poet Alfred Jarry, who promotes Rousseau's original painting style as "unconscious" genius. "Why should strangeness provoke mockery?" he asks. Their scenes together are filmed in a frenetic physical style which recalls that of silent comedy, not the balletic comedy of Chaplin or the acrobatic comedy of Keaton, but the hyperactive knockabout farce of the Keystone Kops. Rousseau and Jarry, who is played by the five-foot tall actress Annette Robertson from The Debussy Film, become a weird comedy team of physical opposites in the style of Laurel and Hardy.

If the film later settles into a comparatively more sedate style, it never loses its satirical edge. Yet even though it pokes fun at just about everything in sight, it never makes fun of Rousseau, portraying him as a naïf (he actually considered himself a "realist" painter) and as a perennial outsider, too odd to be fully accepted by the straight world, too unfashionable to be embraced by the avant-garde art movement. Russell treats the neglect of Rousseau's talent during his lifetime—he was consistently dismissed by the public, critics, and other artists—seriously as well. Despite being championed by Jarry, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and very late in his life by Pablo Picasso, who discovered Rousseau after buying one of his paintings for a few dollars in a junk shop, Rousseau was only truly recognized as an innovative genius by the Cubists and Surrealists, who claimed him as a forerunner of their styles, years after his death.

Russell takes the satirical exaggeration of Always on Sunday even further in the fourth film in the set, his biography of Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World, and this time extends it to the subject of the film herself. The film begins with a narrator reading from newspaper articles describing events in Isadora's life: being banned from Boston after a nude performance, the death of her two children when their car rolls into the Seine, the suicide of the mad Russian poet she married, Isadora's suicide attempt on the French Riviera, finally her bizarre death and her funeral. Accompanying this Citizen Kane-like opening, however, are images played strictly for farce, filmed in fast motion and edited like a manic two-reel silent comedy. The rest of Isadora continues in this vein, as lyrical passages lead to outrageously comic ones. But mostly the tone is comic, covering just about every variety of comedy—farce, satire, irony, parody, visual and verbal humor.

Aside from that opening newsreel-style sequence and a few passages where Isadora (Vivian Pickles) reads from her letters, the narration is by Sewell Stokes, a writer who was a friend of Isadora and is given credit along with Russell for the screenplay and sole credit for the dialogue. "I suppose Isadora had the most sensational life of any woman who has lived during this century," he begins, and what follows makes a strong case that he is not exaggerating. The film really has two stars. One of these is, of course, Isadora herself as portrayed by Pickles. A stage and television actress who was also a trained dancer, Pickles, with her flat-voweled, drawling imitation of an American accent, is a marvel as Isadora, whose motto was "To dance is to live."

A self-taught dancer born in California who modeled her movements on what she imagined to be those of dancers in the statues and frescoes of ancient Greece, Isadora didn't set out to shock, even if that was often her effect on others, but to express herself without the customary constraints of society and to spread her "message of beauty and freedom." She did this above all by using the fluidity of her body in motion to express through movement her inner life and blend her entire being with the moment. If Isadora as portrayed in this film is impossible to take completely seriously, Pickles makes it clear that Isadora took herself seriously. No matter how extravagant her private life or how theatrical and impetuous her behavior, Isadora was absolutely serious about her dancing, which Pickles makes seem earnest, graceful, and spontaneous.

The other star of Isadora is Ken Russell. Here Russell takes the application of the auteur principle to the film biography, begun in The Debussy Film, and goes all the way with it. One expects a film in this genre to be serious, especially when it is dealing with a life as frustrating, unorthodox, and at times tragic as Isadora Duncan's. (Think of Karel Reisz's Isadora with Vanessa Redgrave, which was made at the same time as this film.) Yet nearly everything about Russell's Isadora pulls the film in an opposite direction from its serious subject. Russell's seemingly capricious style is all over the map, veering from gorgeous high-contrast scenes that might have come from a Murnau silent, to scenes of decadence reminiscent of those in a Stroheim silent, to sequences inspired by Mack Sennett and by British New Wave films like Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and Tony Richardson's Tom Jones. The choice of music is sometimes serious, sometimes jokey—everything from Satie, Prokofiev, and Beethoven to John Philip Sousa, "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," and "Bye Bye, Blackbird." Serious subjects like death, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse sit side by side with hysterically funny passages that will have you laughing out loud.

For all the gravity of its subject and the quirkiness of Russell's treatment of it, this is one seriously entertaining movie. It's an incredibly dense movie too, covering in one hour more than most films could manage in twice that time. Yet in the end, Russell's synthesis of opposing styles is not merely self-indulgent cleverness, but rather an intentional choice used to make some very important points. Of all the films in the set I've written about so far, Isadora has the most vivid and clearly defined main character. And for all Russell's stylistic shenanigans, this is also the film that makes the strongest statement so far on the nature of art and artists. If anything lingers after watching Isadora, it's the paradox of just how close individualism is to narcissism, genius to foolishness, and a life's tragedy to farce.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 1: Elgar (1962) and The Debussy Film (1965)

2011-10-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

In 2008 BBC Video released Ken Russell at the BBC, a three-disc DVD collection of six biographical documentaries Ken Russell made for the BBC between 1962 and 1968. For the next few weeks I'll be writing about these groundbreaking films.

When John Schlesinger left the BBC arts program Monitor in 1959 to pursue a career in feature films, Ken Russell was hired to replace him on the program as a director of documentaries. According to Russell, his task there was to make films that were "inviting, accessible, and entertaining." He made short documentary profiles of people as diverse as Spike Milligan, the creator and costar (along with Peter Sellers) of the BBC Radio comedy program The Goon Show, the playwright Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey), and the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. He stayed with Monitor and its successor series Omnibus for the next ten years, until he too left to make feature films. When Russell made his first documentary on a composer for Monitor, on Sergei Prokofiev in 1961, he asked the producer if he could hire an actor to re-create some scenes from Prokofiev's life. The producer was horrified at the idea of adding anything remotely fictional to a serious, high-toned documentary film but finally relented and allowed Russell one shot of an actor impersonating the composer, but only seen in reflection in a pond filled with floating leaves.

When Russell made his next film on a composer the following year, it was immediately apparent how far his and his producer's vision of what was permissible in a BBC documentary had progressed in the interval. This time the subject was the British composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934), and the complete title of the episode is Elgar: Portrait of a Composer. If this didn't convey the message that Russell's approach to his subject was going to take the definition of such a film in new directions, then the opening minutes of the film certainly did. After a brief voice-over statement that Elgar spent much of his boyhood riding in the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire, where he was born and grew up, for the next two minutes we see nothing but a young boy riding a pony across Malvern landscapes while Elgar's rhapsodic Introduction and Allegro for Strings plays on the soundtrack, a two-minute long cinematic tone poem.

Elgar contains no spoken dialogue, only voice-over narration that summarizes the composer's life and occasionally quotes from letters, diaries, and even postcards written to his daughter. But if the narration is conventional, the imagery that accompanies it most definitely is not. Russell illustrates the straightforward biographical narration with a combination of dramatized re-creations of scenes from Elgar's life—some shot with a hand-held camera to emulate the immediacy of newsreels and home movies—landscapes, still lifes, still photographs, and genuine period newsreel footage, all set to the glorious music of the composer. Using a mélange of images, inventive camera work and editing, music, sound effects, and narration, Russell overturns the traditionally impersonal tone of an established genre and replaces it with the personal vision of an inspired filmmaker. If today this approach to the biographical documentary seems less experimental than it once did, Elgar still seems remarkably fresh, and I think that's because of Russell's thorough commitment to finding creative ways to tell the story of Elgar and his music.

He also uses Elgar to explore themes he would delve into in greater detail in later films made for Monitor and Omnibus on composers and painters. Taken together, his ideas on these themes can be considered a working treatise of Russell's views on the nature of art and artists. Through Elgar's relationship with his wife Alice, Russell explores the intersection of artists' personal lives and relationships with their art. In emphasizing how many years it took Elgar to be accepted as a serious composer—in part at least because of his lower middle-class background and lack of formal musical training—Russell explores the ways that artists' battles with society can inhibit critical and popular recognition of their genius. Most significantly, he explores the sources of the artist's inspiration, here by focusing on the relationship between Elgar's music and the natural world. Elgar was a self-professed plein-air composer who always composed outdoors and claimed to draw his inspiration from nature, a source of inspiration hinted at from the very beginning of the film in that opening sequence of the young Elgar riding across the countryside.

Above all, Russell tells the story of Elgar's life through his music, using the music to comment on events in the composer's life. This marriage of Elgar's music with Russell's images reaches its peak in the last few minutes of the film. As a passage from the elegiac Second Symphony plays on the soundtrack, we see newsreel footage of the funeral procession of King Edward VII in 1910, which then segues into newsreel footage of World War I, while the soundtrack slowly segues into Elgar's most familiar work, the Pomp and Circumstance march. We are told how the sentimental and patriotic associations with that work were exploited to manipulate public feelings about the war and how this jingoistic appropriation of his music appalled Elgar, leading to his dismay with the modern world as a place with "no soul, no romance, and no imagination" and finally to his last great work, the hauntingly beautiful and mournful Cello Concerto, one of my own favorite pieces of classical music. (You may recall Jacqueline du Pré's exquisite version from the movie Hilary and Jackie of a few years ago.) After the sudden death of his wife Alice, Elgar gave up composing and returned to Worcestershire, and we see him making the journey across the Malvern landscapes in his automobile in a mirror image of the opening sequence, as the concluding section of Introduction and Allegro for Strings, the same piece used in that opening sequence, plays. The closing montage of the elderly Elgar confined to his bed as he drifts through his memories while the Enigma Variations plays on the soundtrack is almost unbearably sad.

If Elgar seems far removed from the standard highbrow BBC documentary of the time on a great artist, the next work in the set seems to come from another universe altogether. To call The Debussy Film innovative would be a tremendous understatement, so extreme a departure is it from anything one might have expected from the BBC circa 1965 or even from the imaginative director of Elgar. Revolutionary would be more like it, for the film constitutes an all-out assault on the traditional documentary film biography, finding startling new ways to tell the story of the life of a famous person on film and to match storytelling technique to the particulars of the subject's life.

As in Elgar, Russell announces his intentions in the opening minutes of the film. The first thing we see is a group of modern cars arriving at what appears to be a French château, where props and actors in period costume are already waiting. Then we see a film director, played by the Polish actor Vladek Sheybal, explaining to a small boy in costume that the scene about to be filmed is the funeral cortège of the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918), played in the film by Oliver Reed. (This was the first of nine times he would work with Russell, who says he cast Reed because he thought the actor looked like Debussy.) After this we watch the actual scene being shot while the director shouts directions to the actors from offscreen.

What we are watching is not a straightforward biography at all, but a film about the making of a film about Debussy. For nearly an hour and a half Russell slides between episodes from Debussy's life re-created for the film biography, dramatized scenes of that film being made, scenes of the fictional director and actors discussing the documentary both outside filming and during filming, and scenes of the performers in the documentary acting out events in their own lives that mirror the relationships of the people they are portraying in that film. At one point, right in the middle of a scene in the documentary, the director steps into the frame, yells "Cut!" and begins discussing the scene with the actors. At another point the director, now in period costume himself and playing the part of Debussy's controlling patron Pierre Louÿs ("What he really liked was to manipulate people . . . a kind of Svengali," the director has explained to Reed without a trace of irony), suddenly breaks out of character and yells "Cut!" directly at the camera. Later in the film, Russell takes the concept of the play within the play even further, as the director and cast watch other actors in period costume theatrically overacting a scene from a real play, The Naked Lady, which was based on a sex scandal from Debussy's life that they plan to cover in the documentary. To characterize The Debussy Film as multi-layered would barely begin to describe its intricacy.

In The Debussy Film Russell emphasizes his subject's personal life even more than he did in Elgar. The entire narrative of the film is organized around Debussy's love life and his succession of lovers and mistresses, especially Gaby Dupont (Annette Robertson), suggesting erotic underpinnings to Debussy's sensual music. Naturally, the actors playing these people are having a tempestuous offscreen love affair. Russell also explores how Debussy's scandalous sex life—he was part of the French avant-garde movement of the late 19th century that consciously set out to live up to its motto, épater le bourgeois (shake up the middle class)—set back his musical career.

Russell also examines the way artistic movements of the time influenced Debussy's music. It's interesting that although Debussy is usually described as an Impressionist composer, the Impressionist painters are never mentioned. Instead Russell dwells on the influence on Debussy's music of the Art Nouveau style and the English Pre-Raphaelite painters (a movement Russell and Reed would examine in detail in Dante's Inferno, their 1967 film on Dante Gabriel Rosetti). In one scene, the director explains to Reed Debussy's fascination with the Pre-Raphaelites as he guides Reed through the Pre-Raphaelite collection at the Tate Gallery. It's a good example of the imaginative ways Russell repeatedly disguises biographical and background information about Debussy as part of a narrative rather than simply having someone read the information in voice-over as was traditionally done in biographical documentaries, including Elgar.

Debussy was also inspired by the French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose poems he transposed into symphonic compositions. Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun" inspired one of Debussy's best known works, which in Russell's hands becomes one of several passages in The Debussy Film that are forerunners of the music video. As well as the music of Debussy, Russell manages to mix in, thanks to the modern, non-biographical sections, music as disparate as The Ride of the Valkyries, Rodgers and Hammerstein's "It Might As Well Be Spring," and even the Kinks' "You Really Got Me." Talk about musical diversity! But the most impressive musical passage in The Debussy Film is La Mer, and rightly so, for as Russell has his director character explain to Reed, this was the culmination of Debussy's musical innovation and the work that made his career.

The final minutes of The Debussy Film are a knockout. In a long, dreamlike passage Russell relates Debussy's obsession during the last days of his life with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." He came to identify strongly with Roderick Usher, the main character of Poe's story, and to identify his former mistress Gaby Dupont with Usher's dead sister. Visually, these are some of the simplest but most arresting parts of the entire film, the compositions reminiscent of those of Citizen Kane or Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible movies in their austere, formal beauty. And this section of the film points ahead to Russell's increasing preoccupation with bohemian eccentricities that border on, and sometimes cross over to, madness. As in Elgar, Russell brings The Debussy Film full circle at the end, by showing us straight, without any manipulation of the film's point of view, the scene of the funeral cortège that was being prepared and shot in the opening sequence. It's a marvelously unembellished, stately coda to what has been a thrilling rush of nonstop invention that transforms a staid format into something exciting, passionate, and visionary.

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)

2011-09-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

***^½
Country: US
Director: H. C. Potter

When I think of a Cary Grant movie, I tend to think of him playing someone unmarried, generally a sophisticate of some kind—a playboy, cat burglar, spy, or professional gambler. Whether he is being pursued or doing the pursuing, I think of Grant as becoming romantically involved during the movie with a beautiful woman—Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn. If he does happen to be married (or divorced), I see him in a tempestuous relationship with someone like Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, or Rosalind Russell. What I normally don't picture when I think of Cary Grant movies is Cary Grant living a settled middle-class family life with a wife, children, and unexciting job. Yet that is exactly the kind of man he plays in one of my favorite films of his, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

In this picture Grant plays a New York adman, Jim Blandings (even his name makes him sound ordinary), with a wife, Muriel (Myrna Loy), and two young daughters. Everything about the Blandings is conventional. They live in a New York City apartment, their daughters attend an expensive, progressive private school, they have a devoted longtime housekeeper and a pet canary. The only real problem they face is that they have outgrown their two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. This is conveyed in the opening minutes of the picture, as Grant gets out of bed at exactly 7:30 a.m. and begins his morning regimen. In one long take the camera follows Grant as he moves through the cramped apartment, down the narrow hallway, carefully maneuvering around furniture from one small room to the next. He finally ends up in the tiny bathroom, where, in a precisely timed physical comedy routine performed from the waist up, he attempts to shave while his wife attempts to perform her morning toilet at the same time .

Muriel's solution to the uncomfortable living conditions is to knock out a wall and redecorate. Jim has a more radical solution—buy a Colonial farmhouse in Connecticut he has seen advertised in the newspaper, join the postwar exodus from the city, and become a commuter. When Muriel agrees to the plan, the Blandings think their space problem is solved. Little do they know that their real problems are just beginning. When the house they've bought turns out to be a wreck that is beyond repair, they reluctantly follow expert advice to have it demolished and start from scratch with a new house. The new solution to their problems, however, proves to be a Pandora's Box, as one complication leads to another in a cascading series of comic mishaps. As each of these crises is dealt with, another arises and expenses mount. "Anyone who builds a house today is crazy," Jim finally complains. "You start to build a house and wind up in the poorhouse." But by now it's too late to turn back, and when the Blandings family is suddenly evicted from their apartment, they must move into the new house before it is even finished.

Jim has other problems to deal with as well. At work he has been saddled with a problem account no one else has been able to cope with, a canned pork product called Wham. As the deadline for a new advertising slogan for the product approaches, he just can't come up with anything suitable. On the personal front, he must deal with family friend Bill Cole, an attorney whose constant presence advising the Blandings on the numerous legal ramifications of the project begins to arouse Jim's jealousy. You see, Muriel dated Bill in college and was once briefly engaged to him. That Bill has never married leads everyone (including the viewer) to suspect he is still carrying a torch for Muriel.

Like the W. C. Fields movies of the 1930s, this film is a study of comic frustration, the reactions of a man to situations and people—including his own family—that test his patience at every turn. But being Cary Grant, not W. C. Fields, Jim Blandings must keep up his cool demeanor and conceal his bewilderment at all times, whether dealing with his patronizing daughters, sweetly headstrong wife, difficult construction workers, or that elusive advertising slogan. Grant plumbs these situations for their maximum comedic effect and, using his finely calibrated sense of timing whether the comedy is physical or verbal, never lets us lose sight of the exasperation simmering just beneath his controlled surface.

He always seems to find just the right balance between expressiveness and restraint, the constant struggle to tamp down explosive emotions just before they manage to burst through. From the slow burn as his young daughter lectures him at the breakfast table on the advertising industry's callous exploitation of human gullibility, to the record number of trademark Cary Grant double-takes he delivers in the scene where he comes home after spending the night in the city, only to find that his one-time rival Bill Cole has spent the night in the house alone with Muriel—above all, he uses his facial expressions to convey the struggle between his inner frustration and his need to maintain composure. Seldom has the depiction of such a struggle—played with apparent seriousness—seemed so funny.

If Grant uses all his considerable expertise to suggest without openly showing, in all fairness it must be admitted that he is given an ideal context in which to showcase this ability. The excellent screenplay is by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, a writing and later writing-directing team who were no strangers to comedy that blends subtle physical humor with witty verbal humor, working together on some thirty pictures, including several films for Bob Hope, Bing Crosby (both separately and together), and Danny Kaye. The plot, adapted from a 1946 novel, isn't exactly unfamiliar, resembling in many ways the very entertaining 1942 Jack Benny movie George Washington Slept Here, based on a play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. But if a number of the situations are similar, the characters are distinct from Hart and Kaufman's, and the addition of elements such as the Blandings children moves the plot in new directions. And Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, with their obvious onscreen chemistry, strike me as a more convincing couple than grouchy, self-centered Jack Benny and gorgeous Ann Sheridan.

Kudos must also go to Grant's costars, Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas, who lend Grant expert support. At this point Loy, who had been one of the biggest box office stars of the late 1930s when she was at MGM, was just re-establishing her acting career after taking several years off during World War II to work for the Red Cross. Like most actresses in their early forties, she didn't have an easy time finding more mature characters to play. Onscreen, she had been a mother for several years, to Nick Junior in the Thin Man movies, but by the mid-1940s that series was winding down. In The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), playing the mother of a grown daughter, she showed what a fine dramatic actress she could be. But she was really at her best in light comedies like Mr. Blandings. No screen actress of the studio era was able to combine a surface manner of deadpan comic vagueness with underlying intelligence the way Loy did, a combination of qualities that comes through beautifully in the scene where she describes to the decorators the exact shade of color she wants each room in the new house to be painted.

An equally inspired casting decision was the choice of Melvyn Douglas to play Bill Cole. Like Loy, Douglas had been involved in the war effort for several years and when he returned to pictures after the war found it impossible to get the kind of parts he was accustomed to. In the 1930s Douglas was a sort of "poor man's" Cary Grant, often being cast as the same kind of sophisticated, urbane character Grant was associated with. In fact, Douglas got the best role of his early career, playing opposite Greta Garbo as an impoverished French count in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, only because Grant, Lubitsch's first choice for the part, turned it down, probably because he sensed that Garbo's was the dominant role. So casting Douglas as the college rival of Jim Blandings for Muriel's affection made perfect movie sense. For his part, Douglas seems content to play second fiddle to Cary Grant, never trying to upstage him, but finding his own niche in the proceedings by regarding Jim Blandings's befuddlement and misguided jealousy with amused detachment as he narrates the picture in voice-over.

Despite the departure of Cary Grant from his accustomed screen persona and despite the presence of old pros Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas, not to mention a number of scene-stealing character actors like Louise Beavers, Reginald Denny, and Harry Shannon, this is first and foremost a Cary Grant picture with Grant very much at the center of the movie. Cary Grant was really a far more versatile actor than he is usually given credit for. He may have made a very successful career of impersonating his own self-created screen persona, but if you look at a list of all the movies he made, it's clear that this screen persona was actually quite an adaptable one. It also seems clear that for a few years after World War II he made a real effort to stretch the boundaries of that persona in films like Notorious, The Bishop's Wife, People Will Talk, and this one before returning in the 1950s to roles that were a more comfortable fit with his debonair image. Grant's harassed family man in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House might not be as extreme a departure as some of the parts he essayed during this period, but in hewing closer to the familiar and still being in many ways unprecedented, it is one of his most delightful performances and among my very favorites of the thirty-five year long career of the man I consider the quintessential screen actor.

This post is part of the LAMB Acting School 101 on Cary Grant. For more on this event click here.

CMBA Guilty Pleasures Movie Blogathon: Flight to Mars (1951)

2011-09-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

"Of course, academia collects masterpieces and is sometimes uneasy with silliness. . . . But real fans cherish bad movies, too, the frivolous spasms of light on the screen, the ones that led to reckless dreams."

—David Thomson

When I was six years old, I couldn't wait to get home from school each day and watch the latest installment of my favorite television show, a shoestring-budget serial called Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, shown on local after-school kids' TV. Clearly modeled on Buck Rogers, Rocky was an outer space law enforcer who cruised the galaxy in a rocket ship with his female first officer and ten-year old sidekick Bobby searching for villains and meddling in the affairs of inhabited planets. Whether battling the evil queen Cleolanta, rescuing the beautiful princess Juliandra from the machinations of her evil twin sister, or saving the heedless inhabitants of two planets on a collision course, Rocky and his crew could be relied on to triumph over villainy and save the day with their low-tech gizmos and their wits.

The program was my education in the distinction between reality and the movies. I experienced my first screen crush on the lovely Juliandra and learned that reading the credits at the end told me who she was in real life. Seeing her on another TV show playing a different character altogether and reading her name in the credits there really drove home the point that these were actors playing make-believe people, and after that I was always aware of the difference between the actor and the character. Probably the most educational result of the program, though, was when my father told me that we didn't really fly around the solar system in rocket ships, that (at this time) humans had never left Earth and the notion of space travel was wholly imaginary. I was crushed, but I did learn that just because you see it on the screen doesn't mean it really happens in life.

When I watched a DVD of the 1951 science fiction movie Flight to Mars recently, it immediately evoked the wonder felt by the six-year old armchair space traveler watching Rocky Jones. Such pleasure is almost beyond analysis and certainly beyond justification. It might be called guilty pleasure, although only an adult would think of the sensation in such a way. Briefly put, it's a movie-watching satisfaction that cannot be justified on aesthetic grounds, that in fact defies justification of any kind beyond the purely subjective. In this case—as in many similar cases, I suspect—the reaction surely is essentially one of nostalgia, a reaction in which memory completely blends with the present. For the adult it is the equivalent of revisiting that innocent, pre-rational childhood state of mind in which anything that gives mental or emotional pleasure is accepted without thought, on that level of pure sensation in which the thing itself is its own justification.

As its title indicates, Flight to Mars is about the first human expedition to Mars. One thing that makes this movie so enjoyable is that its plot is virtually a template for similar low-budget films of the 1950s about space travel to distant planets. The crew consists of four scientists—the team's leader, Dr. Jim Barker (Arthur Franz, who played the astronomer in Invaders from Mars), a professor, a medical doctor, the female member of the crew, Carol Stafford (Virginia Huston, probably best known for playing the "good girl" Robert Mitchum is engaged to in Out of the Past)—and one non-scientist, a cynical reporter along strictly as an observer, Steve Abbott (Cameron Mitchell). After surviving such perils as nearly being captured by the gravity of the Moon and dodging a sudden meteor shower, they crash land on Mars.

When the crew leaves the ship to survey the damage, they find architectural artifacts of a Martian civilization and then suddenly are greeted by Martians (led by Morris Ankrum, veteran of numerous 1950s sci-fi pictures) in colorful space suits. These Martians, who are human in every respect and even speak flawless English (they've been monitoring radio broadcasts from Earth), invite the travelers to enjoy Martian hospitality in their underground city—yet another iteration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis—while repairing the rocket ship. This is, of course, a scientifically advanced civilization whose inhabitants eat hydroponically grown and mechanically prepared food and lounge around in molded plastic chairs in starkly modernist dwellings.

Although the aliens seem civilized and friendly, we soon learn they have an agenda of their own. The element which powers their civilization, corium (could this be related to the synthetic stuff used to make kitchen countertops in the 1970s?), is running out. The Martians, needing a new home, have decided Earth fits the bill and never having developed space travel themselves, think the space ship that has landed on their planet is just the thing to take them to Earth to launch an invasion. Will the travelers learn the truth about the aliens' scheme from the brainy Martian Alita (Marguerite Chapman) who, with her slide rule and T-square, is helping Capt. Barker in his plans for the repairs while falling in love with him (don't even think about alien anatomy), and her father (veteran character actor Robert Barratt), a pacifist in favor of détente with the earthlings? If they do, will they be able to overcome fuel and weight restrictions and take Alita and her father with them as ambassadors of inter-planetary peace?

Despite its obviously minuscule resources—it was, after all, a Monogram Pictures production filmed, according to the actor Cameron Mitchell, in just five days—Flight to Mars is a striking looking movie, in many ways a triumph of imagination over budget. It was one of the first movies filmed in SuperCineColor, a three-strip color process derived from Cinecolor, a two-strip process devised in the thirties as a low-cost alternative to Technicolor and used mostly for cartoons. The garish, oddly bright colors in Flight to Mars complement the film's futuristic sets, not only adding visual appeal to the minimalist decor, but emphasizing their almost expressionist geometry and angularity and forming planes of color that lend a convincing impression of depth and space to the film's painted scenery. The curious demographics of the Martian population also give the filmmakers the opportunity to mask narrative implausibilities with eye-catching costumes. The Martian political leaders are ordinary-looking middle-aged men and their garb may be strictly functional, but all the females on the planet appear to be in their twenties—slim, leggy, gorgeous, and dressed in tight, vaguely uniform-like outfits with outlandishly architectonic shoulder pads, super short mini-skirts, and shoes that resemble a cross between high heels and calf-height boots.

The special effects of the rocket in flight are superior to those of an Ed Wood movie, but that's about the most that can be said of them. On the big screen they must have seemed especially unconvincing. The model used for the rocket ship, however, is splendid—sleek, metallic, and streamlined. It was originally designed for the 1950 film Destination Moon but wasn't used in that film. After appearing in slightly modified form in Flight to Mars, it would later be used in several other sci-fi movies of the 1950s.

Whether dealing with giant creatures, alien invasion, or space travel, science fiction movies were a major part of the American film industry of the 1950s. Mostly niche fodder for drive-ins and the lower half of double features, these films offered a more spectacular, fantastic, and often disturbing experience than the sedate television fare and the serious-minded social issues pictures of the time. Occasionally one of these films would hit artistic pay dirt. But for every Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Day the Earth Stood Still, there were dozens of lesser films. The closest the space travel sub-genre came to greatness was probably Forbidden Planet, but as enjoyable as it was, everybody knew it was really Shakespeare in outer space. It wasn't until years later that this type of film got any real respect with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet if you were to ask me which I would rather experience tonight, Kubrick's technically dazzling but cold and austere vision of the future, or the more basic—and in comparison, definitely silly and frivolous—pleasures of Flight to Mars, I would pick the latter without hesitation. And I don't believe I would feel even a trace of guilt over my choice.

This post is part of the Guilty Pleasures Movie Blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. For more on the blogathon click here. The quotation by David Thomson is from "When Is a Movie Great?" Harper's July 2011: 35-39.

Two Early Thrillers by Michael Powell, Part 2

2011-09-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Contraband (1940)
***^½

With Great Britain declaring war on Germany within weeks of its release, The Spy in Black, the first collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, was a smash hit in Britain. It was also a huge success across the Atlantic when Columbia Pictures released it in October 1939 in the US, where it was retitled U-Boat 29 after the name of the submarine Conrad Veidt commands in the film. (It didn't hurt the film's box office that less than a month before it opened in the US, the first British Navy ship to be lost in the war, the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous, had sunk with the loss of 518 lives after being torpedoed by an actual German submarine named U-29.) When Powell suggested to Pressburger that they follow up The Spy in Black with another picture starring Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson, Pressburger told him he would think about it while Powell vacationed in Scotland. A few days later Powell received a message from Pressburger saying that he had begun writing the story for the proposed film and needed Powell to return to London immediately to work with him on it.

Like The Spy in Black, the new film, titled Contraband, was an espionage thriller. Conrad Veidt plays Capt. Andersen, the captain of a Danish freighter, and Valerie Hobson plays a mysterious passenger, Mrs. Sorensen. As the ship passes through the English Channel on its way to Rotterdam, it is stopped by the British naval authorities, who are searching all merchant ships and seizing war matériel bound for Germany. Mrs. Sorensen first attracts Capt. Andersen's attention with her contrary behavior at the breakfast table, where she refuses to wear her life jacket as required. During a dressing down in the captain's quarters, she uses the opportunity to steal two shore passes the British have provided the captain and his first mate so they can make an overnight trip to London. Capt. Andersen soon sets off in pursuit of Mrs. Sorensen and her friend (Esmond Knight, who had appeared in two of Powell's earlier quota quickies and would go on to make six more films with Powell, most notably Black Narcissus).

This section of the film occupies about twenty minutes of its hour and a half running time, and even Powell admitted in his autobiography, A Life in Movies, that it is the least interesting part of the picture: "So far, it was a conventional beginning to an obvious romance between two attractive principals. Only the . . . charisma of the actor and actress, saved the scenes between them from banality." Indeed, the purpose of this section of the film was as much propagandistic—to send Hitler the message that Britain was fully prepared to control the seas and prevent war matériel from reaching Germany—as it was to set the narrative in motion.

After the action moves to London, the film picks up considerably as it becomes a tremendously thrilling race against the clock as Capt. Andersen and Mrs. Sorensen try to deliver a vital message to the War Office while tangling with a band of vicious Nazi spies and falling in love. All of this takes place in the dead of night during the London blackout. Powell called the picture "basically a chase in the blackout" and lamented that the US title, Blackout, wasn't used in Britain. He was right, for if there has ever been a movie with a more evocative sense of the wartime blackout in London, I've not seen it.

Contraband is in every respect an advance over The Spy in Black. Apart from that rather rudimentary opening passage on the freighter, the film is more inventive, more consistent in tone, progresses more smoothly from one event to the next, and is better paced, building in intensity without the occasional narrative lull of The Spy in Black. Much of this is surely down to the fact that the screenplay was completely original. Even though The Spy in Black kept little from the novel it was based on aside from the title and almost completely reorganized what did remain, Powell and Pressburger were still in some ways constrained by the basic elements of the source material. In Contraband, however, they were free to tailor the plot to their stars and to their own interests and inclinations. In this, Contraband was the forerunner of their great films of the 1940s, which by and large were based on original ideas that were then molded into a form reflecting the imaginations of the creative pair.

Unlike The Spy in Black, Contraband contains large doses of humor—not just the comic relief of Spy, but a deft blend of whimsicality and suspense that recalls the best films of Alfred Hitchcock from the the 1930s. Moreover, Powell and Pressburger emphasize the interplay and the evolving romantic relationship between Veidt and Hobson in the same way Hitchcock so memorably did with Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps and Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes. This not only makes their characters more central to the plot, but gives Veidt and Hobson a chance to shine, to show the range they were capable of, in a way the more somber tone of The Spy in Black didn't.

Additional humor is provided by the Scottish actor Hay Petrie, who specialized in eccentric characters and had a small but vivid role in The Spy in Black. He has two parts in Contraband, one as Capt. Andersen's first mate, the other as his twin brother who owns a London restaurant called The Three Vikings and who, along with his staff, becomes instrumental in helping Capt. Andersen rescue Mrs. Sorensen from the Nazi spies and foil their scheme. The Nazi gang, by the way, far from being humorous, is genuinely sinister, led by character actor Raymond Lovell, who is aided by three henchmen whom Veidt and Hobson call the Brothers Grimm, played by chubby Peter Bull, a baby-faced Leo Genn, and a hatchet-faced actor named Stuart Latham.

The plot of Contraband permits Powell—aided by the brilliant production design of Alfred Junge (they would work together on six more films, including some of Powell's most important films of the 1940s, right up to Black Narcissus), and the cinematography of the great Freddie Young (Lawrence of Arabia)—to show off his nascent flair for the kind of stylish set pieces that would become a hallmark of the later Powell-Pressburger films. The scenes in the elaborately detailed headquarters of the spies, hidden in the basement of a night club. The tour of several night clubs by Capt. Andersen and the staff of The Three Vikings to locate the spies' hideout, guided only by Andersen's memory of the music he heard from the basement before escaping. (A scene with 19-year old Deborah Kerr as a cigarette girl in one of these night clubs ended up on the cutting room floor.) No less than two vertiginous chases across rooftops that will send the pulses of acrophobes everywhere racing. A shootout between Andersen and the Nazis in the Patriotic Bust Co., filled with plaster busts of Neville Chamberlain. All these are masterfully realized set pieces that approach the best of Alfred Hitchcock's.

"It was all pure corn, but corn served up by professionals, and it worked," Powell says of Contraband. That may be an accurate description of the picture, but in saying this, I think Powell understates his achievement. The film may lack the rarefied aesthetic aspirations of Powell and Pressburger's later masterpieces, yet to call it merely "professional" downplays the level of artistry and inspiration present here. As an intelligent and imaginatively executed piece of purely escapist suspense entertainment, it "works" and then some, fulfilling genre expectations while delivering a wholly pleasurable experience of its own.

Two Early Thrillers by Michael Powell, Part 1

2011-08-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Spy in Black (1939)
***

During the 1930s Michael Powell (1905-1990) directed more than twenty movies, most of them "quota quickies." These were hastily assembled films made to fulfill the requirements of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, which stipulated that a certain number of films shown in British theaters be British-made, a law created to protect the domestic film industry in the face of competition from the US and the Continent. For Powell the Act was a boon because it meant that an inexperienced but enthusiastic director like himself could gain a great deal of practical filmmaking experience, including how to finish a film on schedule and on budget, in a short amount of time. In 1935 alone he completed seven pictures.

The noted producer and director Alexander Korda—he had produced or directed prestige films like The Private Life of Henry VIII, Rembrandt, and The Scarlet Pimpernel—so admired Powell's 1937 film The Edge of the World, a sensitive account of a community in the Shetland Islands forced to relocate to the mainland, shot mostly on location, that he put Powell under contract. Powell's first project for Korda was another picture set in Scotland, The Spy in Black, a star vehicle intended for Korda's contract players Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson that was stalled for lack of a good script. Also on the film was a screenwriter working for Korda, Emeric Pressburger (like Korda a Hungarian émigré), whom Korda had called in to rescue the film by rewriting the screenplay. So impressed were Powell and Pressburger by each other's talent and so great was the rapport between the two men that they not only went on to work together on more than twenty additional movies, but in 1943 formed their own production company, The Archers, and from 1942 on signed their films jointly: "Written, Produced, and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger."

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

The Spy in Black, their first collaboration, is an espionage thriller very much in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock's tremendously successful spy thrillers of the 1930s. The action takes place during World War One in the Orkney Islands of northern Scotland, where the British Grand Fleet, the main fleet of the British Navy, was based during the war. Conrad Veidt plays Captain Hardt, the commander of a German U-boat who is ordered to land on a remote island in the Orkneys and rendezvous with a German spy. Their mission is to find out when the fleet will be leaving the safety of the mined harbor and put out to sea. With this information German submarines can lie in wait, attack the entire fleet, and destroy the British Navy.

When Hardt arrives, riding a motorcycle to avoid suspicion, he finds that the German spy who will be helping him is a young woman (Valerie Hobson) masquerading as the island's new schoolmistress. Providing the vital information about the fleet's departure will be a disaffected, alcoholic British naval officer (Sebastian Shaw). Hardt immediately finds himself attracted to the beautiful young spy, who clearly is also attracted to him. But she insists that they keep their relationship strictly professional, going so far as to lock him in his room at the school house at night, ostensibly to keep the cleaning woman from blundering into the room in the morning. The tension between romance and duty seems to be the main focus of the film, for the plan appears to be going so well that there is little chance of anyone finding out about it.

As might be expected in a work taking its cues from Hitchcock, the plot of the picture turns out to be far more labyrinthine than it at first appears. During the last part of the film, the pace of events rapidly escalates, culminating in an exciting chase on the high seas between Hardt, trying to escape on a hijacked passenger ferry with Hobson on board, and a pursuing British destroyer, a chase complete with moral conflict (the destroyer has orders to sink the ferry with its civilian passengers and crew) and sudden ironic reversals. Taking another cue from Hitchcock, Pressburger leavens the espionage plot with comic relief in the form of several bumbling, eccentric islanders.

In his 1986 autobiography, A Life in Movies, Powell acknowledged the film's modest nature, calling it "a little film . . . an expanded quota-quickie." Powell's characteristic commitment to quality and detail, however, pushed The Spy in Black beyond the limitations of the material and the scale of production he was working with. Knowing that the picture's budget precluded a second unit crew, Powell took three colleagues who had worked with him on The Edge of the World on a surreptitious three-day trip to the Orkneys. Even though the rest of the movie was made at Korda's studio in Denham, west of London, the footage they shot in the Orkneys, skillfully interpolated into the studio footage as establishing shots and matte shots, adds a real feeling of authenticity to the finished picture. Powell also pressed the film's young cinematographer to achieve atmospheric effects with lighting, with the placement and framing of actors within the decor, and with the use of close-ups—all in emulation of the style of German Expressionism. Most important, he used the film as a showcase for Conrad Veidt, an actor he clearly was in awe of—he calls him a "great actor" and "legendary personality"—but whose talent he felt had not been properly used in the pictures Veidt had made in Britain since leaving Germany in 1933. Powell emphasizes Veidt's imposing physique and facial features to bring out what he describes as Veidt's "overpowering" screen presence, making his character and his performance the centerpiece of the film. Veidt does a remarkable job with his ambiguous character, making a person we should look upon as an enemy in many ways sympathetic—intelligent, charming, and rather dashing.

If The Spy in Black falls short of Hitchcock's best films of this type, and if it doesn't reach the exalted heights Powell and Pressburger would later achieve with their masterpieces of the 1940s, it's still a good, entertaining genre movie. Although the picture is set during World War One, audiences of the time would surely have recognized its topical relevance, for by the time of the film's release in the UK in mid-August 1939, it was clear that military conflict with Germany was unavoidable. Indeed, less than a month later Britain and Germany were at war.

Next week I'll be writing on Contraband (1940), Powell and Pressburger's follow-up to The Spy in Black.

Top 70 Musicals Countdown Begins

2011-08-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

Today the Top 70 Musicals Countdown begins at Wonders in the Dark. The countdown will continue through early November, with posts on one movie a day appearing daily except Saturday. Fifteen writers will be participating in the countdown. I'll be writing on two Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936). So head on over to Wonders in the Dark to see which musical came in at #70, and be sure to check back every day for the next movie in the countdown!

Yearning to Express Myself: The Life and Career of Tom Courtenay

2011-08-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

"As artists we would always have something to learn and our lives would always have meaning. I remember hoping against hope that I might possibly become one of these artists. It was the only thing that would give my life meaning."

—Tom Courtenay, Dear Tom: Letters from Home (2000)

In the early 1960s, the groundbreaking films of the British New Wave introduced four young actors who seemed destined for an important place in cinema history. Richard Harris (1930-2002) had been acting in films and television for several years before his breakout performance in This Sporting Life (1963) as a Yorkshire coal miner who becomes an overnight rugby superstar, a performance that earned him not only an Oscar nomination but the best actor award at Cannes. But after this auspicious role in one of the seminal films of the British New Wave, his career veered all over the place—from the lead in Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) to King Arthur in the big-budget musical flop Camelot (1967) to an unlikely leading man for Doris Day in one of her last movies, Caprice (1967), and even several pop music albums—before fizzling away to leads in mostly forgettable films and then supporting character roles in better films like Unforgiven (1992).

Alan Bates (1934-2003) had better luck with his career. After becoming familiar to American audiences playing opposite Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek (1964) and a couple of years later opposite Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl (1966), he enjoyed a strong career for more than twenty-five years, dividing his time between the stage (in 1972 he won a Tony for Butley, which he later filmed as part of the American Film Theatre series—costarring Jessica Tandy, directed by Harold Pinter and highly recommended) and American and especially British films, giving consistently fine performances for some of the best directors of the time, such as John Schlesinger, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, and Robert Altman.

After his breakout performance in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961), Albert Finney (b. 1936) became a huge star in the Oscar-winning Tom Jones (1963). Today he continues to be one of our greatest film actors, the recipient of five Oscar nominations and certainly the most successful, not to mention the most versatile, of his generation of British New Wave actors. Appearing as a romantic leading man opposite Audrey Hepburn in Two for the Road (1967), in heavy disguise playing Hercule Poirot while still in his thirties in Murder on the Orient Express (1976), in heavy disguise again as a senile elderly actor in The Dresser (1983), as a self-destructive alcoholic British expat living in Mexico in John Huston's Under the Volcano (1984), as a Prohibition-era Irish-American gangster for the Coens in Miller's Crossing (1990), as Julia Roberts's bemused boss in Erin Brockovich (2000)—nothing seems beyond his reach.

The fourth of these young men, Tom Courtenay, has had the most perplexing career of all. As gifted an actor as Bates and Finney, he saw his career soar in films of the early and mid-sixties before settling into a leisurely pattern of sporadic success largely in stage and television roles. Unlike the clearly ambitious (but also temperamental and alcoholic) Richard Harris, though, Courtenay's relatively obscure later movie career seems to have been by choice. "I never did anything about my stardom, it never meant anything to me," he said in a 1995 magazine interview. "I didn't like the parts I had and I just longed to work in the theatre, and so that's what I did."

Tom Courtenay was born in 1937 in the Yorkshire coastal town of Hull in northeast England. "Mother told me that the evening before I was born she heard 'Pennies From Heaven' on the radio. As I was expected any minute she thought of it as my signature tune [theme song]," he writes in Dear Tom: Letters from Home, his autobiographical book published in 2000. His family was working class, and he attributed the success of his early career at least in part to the fashion of the early sixties for casting young actors from working-class backgrounds in films about working-class young men: "Of course my early fame as an actor was due in some measure to my background, but I never beat my chest about being either North Country or working class. . . . I wasn't proud of it and I wasn't ashamed of it. I certainly didn't want to make a career out of it. It's just the way it was."

Tom grew up in the area of Hull called Fish Dock, where his father and most of his relatives worked in some capacity as part of the commercial fish trawling industry. His description of his boyhood makes it sound virtually impoverished, growing up in a small nineteenth-century row house without even an indoor toilet or bath, although I don't think this was that unusual in working-class houses of the time in northern England. Despite the lack of money, he describes a tight community and a close and supportive relationship between his own family and their large extended family and neighbors. Even though for years his mother complained bitterly about their terrible living conditions and dreamed of a house in the suburbs, after finally moving to a council house away from the city center when Tom was in his twenties, she felt isolated and unsettled and longed for the liveliness and sociability of Fish Dock.

Tom's academic talent took him to the local grammar school (at the time the British equivalent of a college prep high school), Kingston High, one of only two in his middle school class of fifty boys to qualify. Here he developed a lifelong passion for literature and the theater and appeared in his first plays, playing Mr. Knightley in a school production of Emma. In his senior year he was head boy and won a scholarship to University College London, the first in his family to attend university. Although he majored in English literature, a course of study he hated because of its emphasis on historical minutiae and arid literary analysis, his real love was always acting, and he soon found his life at UCL dominated by the college's drama society. In fact he chose UCL over other universities because it was just down the street from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in Bloomsbury. He held back from revealing his ambition to become a professional actor, though, because he feared his family's reaction to what he thought they would consider an impractical dream. He felt he owed it to them to complete his university education before applying to RADA. In the end he failed his final exams at UCL and didn't earn a degree but had no difficulty getting a place at RADA.

His family was actually very supportive of his pursuit of an acting career, especially his mother. Tom had a particularly close relationship to his mother. Both his parents had left school at fifteen—this was the norm in Britain before the Second World War unless you were going to university, which was really out of the question for children of the working class—but his mother Annie was clearly an intelligent and sensitive woman who loved both classical and popular music (she could play the piano by ear), poetry, and literature and encouraged her son's interest in these things. "The yearning to express myself and the instinct for doing it I got directly from my mother," he writes in Dear Tom. Much of this book consists of the weekly letters his mother wrote to him during the five years he spent in London at UCL and RADA, and the book is really as much about her as it is about himself. Her life was essentially restricted to her household and neighborhood, yet in her letters to Tom she expresses the beauty and poetry she found in everyday things. In those letters she comes across as a woman of delicate health who was frequently depressed, a sensitive and artistic woman who felt frustrated and restricted by her lack of education and was determined to see that Tom got the opportunities she never had.

Even before Tom began attending RADA he was being called "the next Albert Finney," and he soon made a name for himself there. Also in Tom's class at RADA were Sarah Miles and his lifelong friend John Thaw (television's Inspector Morse), who actually beat Tom for the Kendal Medal, the top prize of the last term at RADA. But despite the praise of others, Tom himself was unsure of his talent. He saw himself onstage as "too fidgety, too emotional, and too uncontrolled," and apparently some of his instructors agreed. "At present he is inclined to be uncontrolled and do more than is quite necessary," wrote one instructor in an end of term report. Today such a view is hard to reconcile with the gentle, introspective, and restrained image he has projected for practically his entire acting career.

Tom's big break came during his next-to-last term at RADA when he was given the lead in, of all things, a musical called Shut Up and Sing, in which he played the leader of a gang of East End teddy boys. He was a good singer—he'd been performing for his family since he was just a few years old—and fortunately wasn't required to dance. Representatives of the top London talent agencies attended to check out the promising young actor. He soon signed with one of these agencies and was on his way to a professional acting career. "I have always thought of that little musical at RADA as the greatest success I have ever had," he writes. "For the first time I felt certain that I had been right all along in wanting to become an actor. That I would become one. That my dream of being an artist was going to be fulfilled."

Even before graduating from RADA in 1960, Tom was offered the lead in the Old Vic production of Chekhov's The Seagull, costarring with Judith Anderson, and invited to become a member of the Old Vic company. He played the part for a month at the Edinburgh Festival and later at the Old Vic Theatre in London, receiving rave notices for his performance. At the same time, he was also being interviewed by Peter Hall for the Stratford Shakespeare company and by the most famous of the British New Wave film directors, Tony Richardson, who immediately promised Tom the lead in the movie version of a novel by Alan Sillitoe he was planning to film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. In 1961 Tom replaced Albert Finney in Billy Liar, his first West End theater triumph, a part he later repeated in the film version directed by John Schlesinger.

Tom's first film was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which finally started shooting in February 1962. "My first day filming The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was the longest of my life," he writes. But he soon settled into the process and actually came to enjoy it. "Tony Richardson made it as easy for me as possible," he recalls. "I scarcely remember a shot ever lasting more than one or two takes. He gave me the impression that he was letting me do whatever I wanted, even sometimes asking me to say whatever I wanted. . . . Tony made me feel very much the man of the moment. And I liked that." When it was released in the fall of 1962, the film was a smash, and Tom received the BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer.

Shortly after filming of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner began, Tom's mother was admitted to hospital, and it soon became apparent that she was suffering from a recurrence of the breast cancer for which she had been operated on several years before and that it was untreatable. She died that spring, before The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was released, and was never able to enjoy the great success that launched her son's long acting career. Tom later credited his mother with helping him form his philosophy of acting. He writes that when he and his mother discussed ideas for his grammar school essays, "we were expressing ourselves, making little stories out of our lives. That I chose to give voice to other people's words rather than my own, hardly matters. Good acting always tells a story. . . . Inner life and outer life seem to be connected. If that's not a story, what is?"

Recommended Viewing

• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). In his first major film, Courtenay is Colin Smith, a rebellious teenager sent to a borstal (reform school) for a petty crime. The school's governor discovers Colin's talent for running and enters him in a sports competition with a posh prep school. While practicing, Colin reflects in stream-of-consciousness on his past and the events that brought him to his present situation. Brilliantly directed by Tony Richardson, this is for me the best British New Wave film of them all. With Michael Redgrave as the borstal governor, James Fox as a runner from the prep school, and Courtenay's RADA classmate John Thaw as one of the other borstal inmates. (In 1998 Courtenay was a guest star in an episode of Thaw's British TV series Kavanagh QC.) Knowing that Tom's mother was dying while he was making this picture and how close he was to her makes his performance all the more poignant.

• Billy Liar (1963). Courtenay plays Billy Fisher, a North Country undertaker's clerk who dreams of being a television writer in London. At moments of stress or boredom, Billy retreats to his fantasies, where he is the king of a mythological place called Ambrosia. Billy's love life is a mess. He is engaged to two different girls and in love with a third girl, a bohemian named Liz. The highlight of the film is the fantasy sequences in Ambrosia, directed with surreal comic panache in the same style director John Schlesinger would later use in Midnight Cowboy. With Mona Washbourne as Billy's mother and a ravishing 22-year old Julie Christie as Liz. (Christie replaced another actress who dropped out when she got ill and whose footage had to be reshot.) Courtenay had replaced Albert Finney in the stage version of Billy Liar (directed by Lindsay Anderson). It's hard to imagine Finney bringing the comic wistfulness to the role that Courtenay does. Courtenay received a BAFTA nomination for best actor for his performance.

• King and Country (1964). Courtenay plays Private Arthur Hamp, a 23-year old British soldier suffering from battle fatigue who is court-martialed for desertion during World War One. The last survivor of his original unit, he simply walks away from camp one day and heads home for England. Directed with great visual flair by Joseph Losey, the film shows this war in all its folly—the filth and brutality, the class divide between officers and enlisted men, the grim resignation of men caught up in the machinery of a self-perpetuating process. Courtenay's understated performance as the young soldier too naive to grasp the gravity of his situation, an ordinary man trapped in circumstances beyond anyone's control, is remarkable. Losey is smart enough to leave just a little room for doubt as to Hamp's ultimate fate and to avoid portraying those in authority as two-dimensional martinets, making the film seem more melancholic than truculent. With Dirk Bogarde as the "soldier's friend" assigned to defend Hamp. People writing about this film at IMDb and Netflix complain of the poor quality of the available DVD, especially the sound. I was fortunate enough to see a very good print of it on TCM. This is surely a prime candidate for a quality DVD release so that it can take its place alongside those other great film indictments of World War One, All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory. Courtenay received yet another BAFTA nomination for his performance.

• The Dresser (1983). Courtenay stars as Norman, the fawning gay dresser to an aging, temperamental stage actor he calls simply Sir, supposedly based on the actor Donald Wolfit. As they tour England during World War Two, with Sir appearing as King Lear, Norman has to cajole and flatter the failing, alcoholic, and nearly senile actor every night to get him onstage. Norman idolizes Sir, and Sir is almost totally dependent on Norman to keep him going from one performance to the next. Courtenay is very touching in his devotion to his idol and almost heartbreaking in the picture's sad conclusion. Courtenay played the role on the stage and received a Tony nomination. Sir is played with a flamboyance that matches Courtenay's by his one-time rival Albert Finney, the first of two times they have appeared together, and both received BAFTA and Oscar nominations for their performances. With Eileen Atkins as the long-suffering stage manager.

• Me and the Girls (TV) (1985). Based on a story by Noel Coward, this BBC production was broadcast in the US in 1986 as part of the five-part series Star Quality: Noel Coward Stories shown on Masterpiece Theatre. Courtenay plays Georgie, the gay head of a troupe of female singer-dancers who tour England and Europe. The story is told in stream-of-consciousness style while Georgie is dying of cancer in a clinic in Switzerland. Courtenay is just marvelous—by turns funny, tragic, noble, and pathetic as he faces death with stoic courage. The British musical theater actress Nichola McAuliffe costars as Mavis, Georgie's best friend in the troupe, his singing and dancing partner and would-be lover. Their performance of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" is a highlight and, given the circumstances, very moving. Tom finally did have to learn to dance for this production and does a creditable if not exactly graceful job. His singing, though, is quite good. Me and the Girls is available as part of a seven-disc DVD box set released in 2008 by BBC, The Noel Coward Collection, which contains quite a few other choice productions as well.

• A Rather English Marriage (TV) (1998). This was the second time Courtenay costarred with Albert Finney. Roy Southgate (Courtenay) first meets Reggie Conyngham-Jervis (Finney) in the hospital as both are visiting their wives, who are dying. Later a helpful social worker suggests that Roy move into Reggie's large country home so the two widowers can keep each other company, and Reggie, effectively cut out of his rich wife's will with only a modest yearly stipend, agrees. The two are complete opposites—the working-class Roy a quiet, modest man and the upper-class Reggie a loud, assertive man who takes the privileges of his class for granted. The two soon develop a relationship not unlike Norman and Sir in The Dresser, with Roy waiting on Reggie and organizing his life for him. Finney and his boisterous Reggie dominate the first half of the film, but as Reggie becomes more dependent on Roy, Courtenay and his character gently edge their way into the foreground. Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous) costars as the gold-digging divorcée Reggie romances. Both Finney and Courtenay were nominated for the BAFTA television award as best actor, with Courtenay winning.

• Little Dorrit (TV) (2008). Courtenay plays the heroine Amy Dorrit's father in this Dickens classic. Dorrit is an inmate of debtors' prison, a spiritually broken man who clings to the prison as a refuge from the cruelties and injustices of the world. When the family's fortunes unexpectedly change and the Dorrits are not only released from debtors' prison but become rich to boot, Dorrit undergoes a complete change of personality, becoming obsessed with concealing the family's shameful past and keeping up social appearances. Courtenay is utterly convincing in his transformation from excessive shame to excessive pride, giving Dorrit a quiet intensity that lingers in the memory. Little Dorrit has everything we expect from the BBC's adaptations of Dickens: lavish production values, great period detail, an intricate plot filled with a number of interlocking subplots, a love story, a sadistic villain (played with real menace by Andy Serkis), a host of eccentric supporting characters, satirical humor, tragedy, and moments of almost surreal weirdness. In an impressive cast of British actors, Courtenay walks off with the acting honors and received an Emmy nomination for best supporting actor.

In 2000 Tom Courtenay received a knighthood. The working-class boy from Fish Dock in Hull is now Sir Thomas Daniel Courtenay. Albert Finney was knighted in 2000 and Alan Bates in 2003. Except for the one quotation from an interview published in Empire magazine in November 1995, all other quoted material comes from Dear Tom: Letters from Home (London: Doubleday, 2000). This is a wonderful book that concentrates on Courtenay's formative years and his family, especially his mother Annie. It is intelligent, candid, gently funny, and at times quite moving—rather like Tom Courtenay himself, I imagine.

Two Early Films by Ozu, Part 2

2011-08-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

There Was a Father (1942)
***^½
Country: Japan
Director: Yasujiro Ozu

After The Only Son, Ozu made one more film before being drafted into the Japanese Army. During World War Two he completed only two films, both made in the brief interval between his service in China and Singapore. The second of his wartime films, There Was a Father, is another story of a parent's sacrifices to get an education for a child and the consequences of that decision. In this film Ozu regular Chishu Ryu—this was the fourteenth of thirty-three films he made with Ozu—plays a provincial school teacher, Shuhei Horikawa. When two of his students are drowned in a boating accident during a field trip he is chaperoning, Horikawa is devastated, even though the accident happened through no fault of his own, and gives up teaching. "I don't want to be responsible for other people's children anymore," he tells a colleague. "It's too frightening." Horikawa, a widower, moves back to his provincial home in Uedo with his young son, Ryohei.

During the time they spend in Uedo, Horikawa and his son develop an especially close bond, conveyed in a series of scenes of shared moments—a visit to a nearby castle, the father helping the son with his math homework, a fly-fishing trip together. So when Horikawa sends Ryohei away to boarding school and later moves to Tokyo and gets a job in a textile factory so that he can continue to pay for his son's education, both feel the separation acutely, but especially Ryohei. The passage of the next thirteen years is succinctly limned in a series of brief scenes—Horikawa telling a colleague his son has graduated from high school, then from college, then become a teacher at a technical school. At the same time, Horikawa has progressed from a job on the factory floor to an executive post in the company's offices. About midway through, the film finally focuses on a reunion visit by the adult Ryohei to his father in Tokyo and the events surrounding this visit, which include a fly-fishing trip that mirrors the one in the early part of the picture.

During the visit Ryohei reveals that he wants to resign his teaching job and move to Tokyo to be near his father. "I can't stand living apart like this," he explains. Horikawa, though, is horrified by Ryohei's plan, telling him that the duty of every teacher is to be a good role model for students (perhaps amplifying his own reason for leaving the teaching profession, that he feels he failed to be a good role model for his students). "Our duty is to our jobs," he tells his son. "There is no room for personal relationships." This message of blind obedience to duty and paternal authority must have been a welcome one to the Japanese government and military during World War Two, when the obligation of every citizen was seen to be loyalty to the emperor's will. Ozu and leading man Chishu Ryu, however, manage to make Horikawa's actions seem less like wartime propaganda than observations about the attitudes of a certain type of character.

Ozu's postwar films—he didn't make another picture until 1947, five years after There Was a Father—tend to be remarkably consistent both in style and in subject. While neither The Only Son nor There Was a Father exactly establishes a template for Ozu's later work, elements found in both point ahead to the direction Ozu would take in his postwar films.

In their general outline, the plots of these films are quite alike: parent makes sacrifices for child's education, parent and child endure a painful separation, parent and child are reunited in the big city, parent and child come into conflict over the child's attitudes. This similarity is perhaps understandable, since the original script for There Was a Father was written only a year or so after the completion of The Only Son. Although the organization of There Was a Father in many ways parallels that of The Only Son, there are important differences between the two. The Only Son technically takes place over a period of twelve years, but the interval between these two times is covered in one cut between two scenes, and the emphasis is clearly on the later time. The first part of the film is quite brief, essentially an introductory passage used to set up the main part of the film, the visit of the mother to Tokyo, which is then presented as a simple linear narrative without subplots or narrative digressions.

In contrast, the early part of There Was a Father, when Ryohei is a boy, is developed in far greater detail than in The Only Son. This gives us a much stronger sense of the intimacy of the bond between parent and child, and of the child's feelings of loss when the two are separated. The middle part of the plot, which covers a period of thirteen years, is also given much more detail than the corresponding section of The Only Son, which is essentially an ellipsis. In There Was a Father, this bridge between the two main parts of the narrative seems particularly dense with Ozu's trademark pillow shots*, used as transitional devices between the several time periods covered. The final section of There Was a Father doesn't last as long as the equivalent section of The Only Son, which occupies nearly the entire running time of that film, yet it contains a far more intricate plot than the simple linear narrative of The Only Son.

Compared to The Only Son, There Was a Father shows a clear advance in Ozu's skill with integrating image and sound, in particular the way he uses dialogue to fashion a much more complex screenplay, succinctly using a single scene, or even a single line of dialogue, between two characters as a way for them to express their emotions to each other, or to describe important changes that occur over a number of years. But if Ozu used sound and dialogue to expand the scope of the narrative in There Was a Father, he didn't pursue this direction of narrative sprawl after the war. None of the later Ozu films I've seen covers such a long period of time as There Was a Father. Instead Ozu returned to the restricted focus on time and place of earlier films like The Only Son, using conversations between characters to fill in background events. Still, within this concentrated focus, he reproduced the surprisingly complicated narrative line of that last section of There Was a Father, with its compressed structure, frequently shifting point of view, and almost literary blend of plot and subplot.

One thing that sets both The Only Son and There Was a Father apart from Ozu's later films is the way he portrays the parent-child bond. In those two early films, he shows us stern but not unsympathetic parents and dutiful, compliant children. His postwar films present a much less idealized vision of the parent-child relationship. Just as Ozu's later films often touch on the cultural changes in postwar Japanese society, they also tend to dwell on the changing attitudes of parents and children—in particular, grown children—toward their traditional roles. Children may be too obedient and dependent for their own good and their parents troubled by their excessive devotion, as in Late Spring and its semi-remake Late Autumn. Or conversely, the children may be self-absorbed and aloof, as in Tokyo Story, or alienated and sullen like the illegitimate son in Floating Weeds. Time and again, young children are portrayed not as docile youngsters like Ryosuke in The Only Son and Ryohei in There Was a Father, but as ill-behaved brats. Parents too are often shown in an unflattering way, for example the erratic and irresponsible fathers of Floating Weeds and The End of Summer.

It is said of certain directors that their films are ones that an individual viewer will either like or dislike with great intensity. Because of the similarity of Ozu's postwar films to one another—what I called their consistency of subject and style—this seems particularly true of his pictures. Watching The Only Son and There Was a Father makes one realize that the addition of sound to his distinctively rhythmic visual style permitted Ozu to explore in ever more subtle variations his thematic preoccupation with the bond between parents and children and with the ways the changes in postwar Japanese culture affected how parents and children relate to each other. These two early sound films are essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand how Ozu arrived at the style of his great postwar films.

*Ozu created a unique visual style that he followed with little variation for his entire career. One of the defining features of his style and the visual device Ozu is best known for is his pillow shots. These are brief, lyrical montages of a few images that generally occur at transitional points. Sometimes they are used in a loosely narrative sense to indicate the passage of time or, rather like the establishing shots in Western films, a change of locale. At other times they are used in a more abstract way, to suggest a certain mood or tone that corresponds to the narrative, although not exactly in a literal sense. Certain images are often repeated from one set of pillow shots to another. These pillow shots are found in both The Only Son and There Was a Father, as they are in every Ozu movie I've seen. But There Was a Father has far more of these passages than I have seen in any other of Ozu's films, and I think the reason can be found in the intricacy of the film's plot, with its many narrative and tonal shifts. Below are two pillow shots, one from The Only Son (left) and one from There Was a Father (right).

I am a tireless proselytizer for the films of Ozu, and I think anyone with a serious interest in cinema, especially foreign cinema, should give him a try. If you've never seen a picture directed by Ozu, I suggest starting with Tokyo Story (1953), probably his most accessible film for those unacquainted with his work. You might also be interested in my post from a couple of years ago on Ozu's last three films. Click here to read it. To read Part 1 of this post, on Ozu's The Only Son (1936), click here.

Two Early Films by Ozu, Part 1

2011-08-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Only Son (1936)
***^½
Country: Japan
Director: Yasujiro Ozu

The Only Son was the thirty-sixth of fifty-four films Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) directed in his lifetime and his first sound film. Originally conceived and partially shot as a silent, it was reconceived as a sound picture and the original footage reshot with sound. "Even though I was well aware that talkies were a totally different ballgame, I couldn't help slipping back into [the] style of silents," Ozu said of his experience making this film. Compared to Ozu's later movies, The Only Son does seem to have a stripped-down, simplified narrative, and the dialogue in the film does seem almost entirely functional, as though Ozu had not yet fully assimilated how to use dialogue to convey greater complexity of plot and exposition than was practical in the silent cinema. Yet the picture fits comfortably into Ozu's later filmography, showing his amazing mastery of the visual element of filmmaking and focusing on themes that Ozu would continue to explore for the rest of his career.

The Only Son opens with a quotation from the Japanese short story writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (he wrote the story that Kurosawa's Rashomon is based on): "Life's tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child." This statement could almost sum up not only the theme of this movie, but the theme of practically every movie of Ozu's I've ever seen, for the bond between parents and children is a subject he explored in film after film. Even though in his films it rarely results in tragedy, the perilous relationship between parent and child does often lead to anxiety, sadness, and disappointment, as it does in The Only Son. The film opens in 1923 in the home of Tsune Nonomiya, a widowed mother, and her young son, Ryosuke, in the countryside. The boy, who has just left elementary school, presses his mother to let him continue to middle school, and she tells him she can't afford to. After the boy's teacher unexpectedly visits Tsune and tells her that Ryosuke has already told his classmates he will be attending middle school, she is furious. Later she relents and does send him away to continue his education as a boarder even though it means great financial hardship for her.

After this brief introductory sequence, the film moves forward twelve years. Ryosuke is now a teacher living in Tokyo with his wife and infant son, and Tsune is making her first visit to Tokyo. The rest of the picture deals with the few days she spends there with her son. Her image of her son as a successful young urban professional is soon destroyed, however, as it quickly becomes clear that Ryosuke's job is one of little prestige and that he lives in a shabby neighborhood barely scraping by on his low salary. Just to feed his mother and keep her entertained during her visit, he must beg for advances on his salary and borrow money from colleagues.

The film builds slowly to two key scenes. As mother and son are out walking one day near the garbage incinerator for Tokyo, they sit down to rest. Both are mentally exhausted from the effort of keeping up appearances and pretending nothing is wrong, and they finally reveal to each other their true feelings about the situation. He confesses his disappointment in the way his life has turned out, his belief that he will advance no further in his career, and the guilt he feels about the effect his failure will have on his mother. She responds heatedly by denouncing his defeatist attitude and saying that all her sacrifices to put him through school—she has even sold their house and land and now lives in a tenement for employees of the textile factory where she works—were not worth it.

With relations between the two at their lowest, they prepare for one last sightseeing excursion before she returns home. Their day out is interrupted, however, when a neighbor's boy is kicked by a horse and seriously injured. Ryosuke intervenes, carrying the boy to the hospital in his arms and giving the money for the excursion to the boy's impoverished mother to help pay the medical bills. In typical Ozu fashion, the film ends not in a big emotional catharsis, but quietly, in a reflective moment of insight. After witnessing her son's altruistic behavior, Tsune realizes that the honorable values and the humanity of his inner nature are more important—and more worthy of admiration—than material success, and that in itself becomes for her a source of pride. Like so many of Ozu's movies, The Only Son reaches its climax in a moment of calm resignation and the realization that even a small satisfaction in life is something to be grateful for.

Next week I'll be writing about There Was a Father (1942), one of two films Ozu made during World War Two. It and The Only Son were recently released by Criterion as a box set.

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)

2011-06-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: UK
Director: John Schlesinger

Today it's unlikely that experienced moviegoers find the notion of openly gay mainstream filmmakers like Gus Van Sant, Pedro Almodóvar, or Todd Haynes particularly novel. But this wasn't always the case. The history of cinema before about 1970 is filled with gay filmmakers who were obliged to conceal their sexuality, both in their public lives and in the films they directed, to protect their careers. The astute viewer can perhaps in hindsight detect a covert gay sensibility in the work of directors like F. W. Murnau, George Cukor, Luchino Visconti, or even Nicholas Ray. But unlike experimental filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, gay commercial filmmakers were not free to express their sexuality in their work. While young directors just beginning their careers in the seventies like Rainer Werner Fassbinder made no effort to conceal their sexual orientation, some older directors who had worked in the industry in more closeted times were just beginning to acknowledge their own sexuality and to make films that dealt candidly with gay themes. One of the first of these was the British director John Schlesinger.

Schlesinger's 1965 film Darling did have one minor character who was gay, the female main character's male "gay buddy," a character type that eventually became so familiar—and so acceptable to mainstream audiences—that a popular television sitcom was built on this premise. When Schlesinger made Midnight Cowboy in 1969, the film received an X rating on release (it was later reduced to an R rating), largely for its sexual content. But aside from one or two brief "gay for pay" encounters, the main character's escapades as a male prostitute were strictly heterosexual. As for the exact nature of the relationship between Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo, Schlesinger chose to take the Of Mice and Men route by making one character apparently heterosexual and ignoring the sexuality of the other altogether, thus creating the appearance that the relationship between the film's two main male characters was one of platonic devotion. Just two years later, however, Schlesinger was at last ready to tackle the subject of gay sexuality head-on in Sunday Bloody Sunday, which he has called "the most personal of all my films." The film's treatment of the subject may seem mild by today's standards, but I recall seeing the movie in a theater during its first run, when the sudden—and plainly erotic—kiss between Peter Finch and Murray Head a few minutes into the film had much the same galvanic effect on the audience as Sissy Spacek's hand popping out of the grave at the end of Carrie a few years later: nearly the entire audience reacted collectively with a gasp of shock and surprise.

Sunday Bloody Sunday is a film about one of the oldest subjects in movies, the love triangle. The difference here is that the love object at the apex of the triangle is a bisexual young man, Bob Elkin (Murray Head), and the two people competing for his affections are a straight woman, Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), and a gay man, Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch). The film takes place over a period of about ten days, its plot consisting of the alternating interactions of Bob with each of his lovers. Although the film follows Alex and Daniel even when Bob is not with them, it shows little of Bob's life on his own and nothing of his family or background. In contrast, we meet Alex's parents when she has Sunday dinner with them and Daniel's family when he attends his nephew's bar mitzvah, and both Alex and Bob have one brief stream-of-consciousness flash memory that economically limns a background for them.

Alex is a thirtyish divorcée who works in an employment service. Her parents are quite well off, so it is likely that from childhood she has enjoyed a privileged upper middle-class life and education. She has too resilient a disposition to be called depressed but is obviously unhappy with her life. When she tells Bob she's working on a project for her office, she is in fact drafting a letter of resignation from a stultifying job she hates. After the dinner she has with her parents, her conversation with her mother (Peggy Ashcroft) tells us that this is also the case with her marriage and that is why she walked out on it. When her mother urges her to have a more practical attitude toward marriage, Alex's response is that she is not going to settle for a passionless and sexless marriage in exchange for a comfortable life, as her mother has. She is clearly besotted with Bob, and the basis of her feelings for him is equally clearly his sexual appeal. A possessive woman, Alex plainly resents having to share him.

Daniel Hirsh is a doctor who appears to be in his forties. He may be discreet about his sexuality—when he attends that bar mitzvah, it is obvious that his family has no idea he is gay—but he is a sexually active man. The appraising glances he gives good-looking young men he happens across and a chance encounter with a former one-night-stand (Jon Finch) make this apparent. The way he relates to his patients shows us that he is a sensitive, nurturing man, a man who genuinely wants to help the people who seek his professional help, often for reasons not strictly medical. Yet he is too realistic and observant to believe that any help he offers beyond medication is likely to be acted on. His attitude toward Bob seems much the same. Even though he clearly has expectations of a certain level of commitment from Bob, he seems to sense how temperamentally incapable Bob is of meeting those expectations.

If the film sketches complete and individualized personalities for Alex and Daniel, it presents Bob as an enigma. Bob is an artist who expresses himself through his work. Yet what we see of his work is very much like Bob himself—imaginative and flashy yet at the same time glib and rather characterless. Simply put, there doesn't appear to be a great deal to him beneath the surface. As he says to Daniel at one point, "I know you're not getting enough of me. But you're getting all there is." I've read more than one review of this film that complain it is a mystery what two intelligent, sophisticated people like Alex and Daniel see in someone as shallow and opaque as Bob. But I've always thought that his blankness explains his appeal to Alex and Daniel in psychological terms which are actually quite persuasive.

For one thing, his freedom of personality makes him appear to be everything they are not but perhaps would like to be. Both Alex and Daniel have lives that are in all ways constrained—by their personal histories, their work, their education, their social position. Bob strikes me as exactly the kind of aimless, mercurial, and unconventional person who would appeal to such people. His very blankness allows—indeed encourages—them to project onto him whatever it is they would like to see in him. And his mild personality makes him quite compliant, but only up to a point. That point is when they seem to be implicitly demanding some kind of commitment from him, for such a demand is the very thing guaranteed to bring on an avoidant reaction. One begins to wonder if he is juggling two relationships precisely because this means he won't be obligated to commit fully to either of them.

Places are very important in this film. One of the first things we see in the movie is the home of each of the three main characters, and the environment each one lives in immediately tells us a great deal about them. Alex's flat, with its huge all-purpose downstairs room and upstairs sleeping loft, is the home of a rootless young professional. When she returns from a weekend spent with Bob house sitting the home of friends and looks around the flat, with dirty dishes piled in the small sink and ashtrays spilled on the carpet, you can see her dismay at the dreariness of her life. Daniel's elegant terraced house, with its orderly bookshelf-lined walls, traditional furnishings, downstairs surgery, and rear garden featuring one of Bob's installations, reflects his profession, income, and social class. Bob's small flat is largely an artist's studio, a chaotic workplace crammed with works in progress. It's hard to believe that anyone actually spends much time living there, and that seems entirely congruent with what we see of Bob, that what emotional life he has is as an extension of the emotions of Alex and Daniel.

The exemplary screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt—it deservedly received many awards including an Oscar nomination—offers Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch, both of whom were also nominated for Oscars, rich opportunities, and both turn in remarkable performances. Jackson always seemed able to project strength effortlessly, but here her natural forcefulness is tempered with uncharacteristic emotional neediness, a most compelling combination. Peter Finch, who has never been better, is a revelation in a role that would seem more naturally suited to Dirk Bogarde or Alan Bates (who was indeed Schlesinger's first choice for the part). His direct-to-camera monologue that ends the film is just stunning. Even though John Schlesinger later said he regretted casting Murray Head as Bob ("I'd have cast someone else, someone funnier who would have made them [Alex and Daniel] laugh," he said in a 1994 interview), I find Head most convincing as a beautiful cipher. A more skilled actor might have been unable to avoid suggesting some depth to the character. Numerous smaller roles are filled with a roster of wonderful actors from Peggy Ashcroft and Maurice Denham to a surprisingly young June Brown (she has been in the cast of EastEnders since 1985) as a depressed patient, and look fast for an unbilled fourteen year-old Daniel Day-Lewis as a juvenile delinquent vandalizing cars.

In its way, Sunday Bloody Sunday is as much an advance in the portrayal of gays in mainstream movies as The Boys in the Band or Brokeback Mountain. But it is a landmark film not because it deals with being gay or with the social and personal problems that entails, but precisely because it doesn't deal with any of those issues. It takes a gay character in love and treats him as though he is like any other person in the same situation. This is a movie about people, not polemics. By taking the character of Daniel Hirsh and making absolutely nothing special of his gayness, it makes him a human being first and a gay man second. It presents a gay man (and also a bisexual man) not as something Other, but as someone entirely ordinary and universally understandable. In other words, exactly like anyone else.

This post is part of the LGBTQ blogathon at Garbo Laughs. For more on the blogathon, click here.

The Red House (1947)

2011-06-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

***
Country: US
Director: Delmer Daves

A strange family living in self-imposed isolation, carefully guarded family secrets, an eerie forest rumored to be inhabited by spirits, a sinister abandoned house deep in that forest, a teenage girl with hazy memories of something terrible happening in that house—these are classic elements of Gothic melodrama found in the atmospheric 1947 thriller The Red House. The family in question are farmer Pete Morgan (Edward G. Robinson), his unmarried sister Ellen (Judith Anderson), and their adopted daughter Meg (Allene Roberts). Into their lives comes Meg's high school classmate Nath Storm (Lon McAllister), hired to help out on the Morgans' farm. His curiosity aroused by Pete's dark warnings to avoid the neighboring forest, Nath determines to get to the bottom of whatever Pete is concealing about the mysterious red house in the woods, persuading Meg to defy Pete and help him.

In The Red House Edward G. Robinson turns in another of his memorable performances of the 1940s. His Pete, a brusque man with a soft spot for his adopted daughter Meg, at first seems not too different from the loving father Robinson played a couple of years earlier in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. His desire to shield Meg from the danger he perceives in the forest seems a genuine one, the result of an overly protective attitude understandable in the parent of a young woman on the verge of adulthood. But faced with the challenge presented by Nath's presence on the farm, Pete begins to show a darker side as he grows almost neurotically possessive of Meg. As it becomes more apparent that she is experiencing an adolescent sexual awakening and transferring her feelings of daughterly love for Pete to romantic love for Nath, can Pete be viewing Nath as a rival? Several scenes—such as the one where he jealously confronts Meg in her bedroom late at night after he realizes Nath has just left by the window, threatening to kill him if he ever catches him in her room again—clearly hint at this. If he does see the young man as a rival for Meg's love, what is the true nature of his feelings for Meg?

Robinson subtly conveys Pete's conflict over his confused feelings for his adopted daughter as well as the mounting agitation Pete feels as he comes to look upon Nath as an interloper trying to steal Meg away from him. By the end of the picture, Pete has become completely unhinged by the tensions of dealing with his feelings for Meg, the consuming guilt he feels over his past misdeeds, and his desperate attempts to keep his secrets buried by placing the red house off-limits. In portraying Pete's final break with reality, Robinson avoids histrionics, and his restraint makes Pete's madness seem all the more convincing and pathetic. It's a wonderful performance that shows how skilled Robinson was at plumbing the contradictory emotions and the self-delusion of a man like Pete, almost certainly bringing greater complexity to the character than was originally intended.

The other standout performance in the film is by Allene Roberts, who was only seventeen years old when the picture was shot. Roberts is especially good at suggesting Meg's dawning awareness of sexuality. Nath has a girl friend, a sluttish classmate named Tibby, played with feral intensity by an impossibly young-looking Julie London. In one scene, Meg watches from the shore as Nath and Tibby go swimming in a nearby lake and observes with obvious fascination the sexually charged interplay between them. Like Robinson, Allene Roberts makes Meg, who might otherwise have been a superficial character, someone unexpectedly complex. In the early part of the film she seems naive and biddable, devoted to Pete. Later, as she tries to break free of Pete's domination, she begins for the first time in her life to question what she has been told about her history rather than simply accepting it. Roberts does a remarkable job of depicting this transition from girlish credulity to adult skepticism. Scene by scene, you can sense her growing more assertive and independent and less inclined to blind faith in the man she has always considered her father.

The film takes its time setting up the situation and seems a bit lethargic for the first twenty minutes or so. But as the characters' relationships begin to shift and re-form and more details are revealed about the events at the heart of the mystery, the pace picks up and the mood grows more portentous. The brisk conclusion, with its noir-influenced framing and lighting, in particular is well mounted. The location photography by Bert Glennon (The Scarlet Empress, Stagecoach) in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in northern California adds a great deal of verisimilitude to the picture. The small town where Nath's mother runs the general store, the gentle countryside of dairy farms and apple orchards, the tangled forest with its streams, lakes, and stark outcroppings of rock give an authenticity often lacking in the studio product of the time. The highly dramatic music score by Miklos Rozsa with its subtle use of theremin effectively underscores the strangeness of the plot.

The Red House is unlikely to make anyone forget Rebecca, but it's a satisfying movie that succeeds on the strength of its ominous atmosphere and a pair of quietly powerful performances. It takes the Arthur Conan Doyle device of miscreants creating the illusion of the supernatural to direct attention away from their all-too-human crimes and updates it with a large dash of Freud.

Allene Roberts discusses her brief Hollywood career in a 2009 interview at the website Films of the Golden Age. Click here to read it.

America, America (1963)

2011-06-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: US
Director: Elia Kazan

If I hadn't already known that America, America was directed by Elia Kazan, I doubt that I ever would have guessed it, so different is this picture from anything else by Kazan I've seen. Kazan used unfamiliar actors and technicians for the film—it was photographed by Haskell Wexler and edited by Dede Allen, both little known at the time but within a few years to become luminaries in their fields—and shot it almost entirely in Greece and Turkey. With its location shooting, cast of unknowns, use of the hand-held camera, and post-sync sound recording, it has a distinctly European feel, almost in the tradition of Italian neorealism. The thing which most sets it apart from the rest of Kazan's work, though, is its screenplay. Kazan is known for his masterful interpretation of screenplays written by other people—Tennessee Williams, William Inge, John Steinbeck, Budd Schulberg for example—to which according to Kazan he often made uncredited contributions, but America, America was the first picture he conceived and wrote by himself. In his 1988 autobiography, Kazan explains how, nearly twenty years into his career as a film director, he came to the decision to write his first screenplay: "In someone else's hands, it would lose its flavor. I'd grown up in that environment, remembered every sight, sound, smell, and taste. . . . I had to write that screenplay myself."

The film opens with a montage of landscapes of Anatolia in Turkey and Kazan's voice-over: "My name is Elia Kazan. I am a Greek by blood, Turk by birth, American because my uncle made a journey." It is the story, handed down orally in Kazan's family, of how his uncle, in the film called Stavros (Stathis Giallelis), became the first member of Kazan's family to emigrate to the U.S. and later arranged for his mother and his sisters and brothers along with their families to follow him one by one. (Kazan himself came when he was four years old.) It is not the story of the immigrant experience in America, but of everything that led up to that experience. It is at the same time a classic bildungsroman, or story of the coming of age and education in life of a young man, and a chronicle of overcoming huge obstacles to achieve a dream.

The film begins in 1896, when Stavros, a teenager living in what is the eastern part of modern Turkey, and his family become caught up in the struggle of the Armenian and Greek minorities against the ruling Ottoman Turks. The first part of the film establishes the state of terror the family lives in as the Ottoman government takes reprisals against the rebellious minority populations, culminating in a harrowing sequence in which Stavros's Armenian friend sacrifices himself to save Armenian villagers from being burned alive by soldiers after taking refuge in a church. Finally, in desperation his father takes all the family's material assets and dispatches Stavros to Istanbul, where he is to set himself up in business with his uncle, a prosperous rug merchant, and send for the rest of the family after he is established. But nothing goes according to his father's plans. On the way the naive Stavros is robbed, falsely accused of crimes he didn't commit, and finally forced to kill a man to save himself from death. He arrives in Istanbul relieved to have made it to his destination, but exhausted, penniless, and in rags.

Unable to fulfill his duty to his family, Stavros is sustained by one thing: his dream of emigrating to America to start over. Yet time and again circumstances contrive to block him. Far from being a successful businessman, his uncle is a financial failure who can do nothing to help him except urge him to marry the plain daughter of the rich merchant across the road. Instead Stavros works as a laborer, realizing that it will take years to save enough money for his passage. First he is robbed by a prostitute, then brutally beaten by police in a raid on a revolutionary group he has fallen in with and left for dead. After he endures one setback after another, his fixity of purpose begins to border on obsession. Inured to moral scruples, he turns ruthless and exploitative in his willingness to do anything necessary to make his dream of reaching America real.

The gradual transformation of Stavros from gentle, simple boy to hardened and mistrustful man cannot have been an easy one for Kazan to write or for the inexperienced young actor Stathis Giallelis, whom Kazan personally chose and spent more than a year grooming for the role, to play. Yet both manage to bring it off, making us understand clearly how and why Stavros becomes what he does. Stavros is both a victim and a victimizer, and Kazan and Giallelis never let us lose sight of this essential conflict of identity churning within him. Stavros is at heart a decent man, but a decent man with a dream that requires him to do things decent people don't do easily. Still, he never entirely loses his awareness of the moral compromises he must make to attain his goal, somehow managing despite all that happens to him to hold onto his inner humanity. “I’ve always kept my honor safe inside me," he says at one point.

We see flashes of his humanity from time to time when this repressed part of his nature impels him to treat those even less fortunate than himself with kindness—the sweet-tempered girl he plans to marry for her money then desert, a love-starved woman older than himself, a fatally ill young man he supports in his hopeless dream of reaching America too. Stavros's bitterness at having his aspirations repeatedly thwarted, as great as that bitterness is, never quite consumes him altogether. We are always aware that if he does achieve his dream, there is every chance that spark of humanity he has been forced to damp down will flare up again and shine bright. "In America I believe I will be washed clean," he says.

It takes roughly two-thirds of the movie—and a frustrating series of defeats and reversals and the rare stroke of fortuitous good luck—before Stavros at last manages to secure a third-class ticket and board the ship that will take him to America. But just as he arrives in New York, calamity strikes again and it seems as if circumstances are propelling him toward inevitable disappointment, that he will be rejected by the immigration authorities and sent back to Turkey. Then just as suddenly Stavros's fortunes reverse yet again, when the unexpected repayment of his kindness to one of the other emigrants on board makes it possible for his dream to come true. In the end his success at creating a new life in America is the result of both years of unwavering determination and his refusal to give up the last vestiges of his humanity.

Of the many beautifully staged and photographed scenes in the movie, my favorite occurs right before the end, directly after the ship has docked and the immigrants have disembarked. Stavros has been herded along with his fellow passengers into the huge immigration hall at Ellis Island, but because the immigration officials have left for the day, the newcomers must spend their first night in America inside the hall. When light breaks the next morning, everyone is asleep and the hall almost completely silent. As the immigration officers start to arrive, the exhausted immigrants begin to wake and stir. Within moments the packed hall goes from complete inactivity to a frenzy of movement, while the dozy silence erupts into a cacophony, and we see and hear the hopeful excitement of these people as they prepare to begin their new lives in a new land.

America, America is Kazan's most personal film not only because it deals with his own family's history, but also because it is one of his most human and least dramatically stylized films. Kazan deals with issues of tremendous importance, issues like genocide, poverty, ethnic bigotry, class prejudice, and the injustices endured by immigrants in the U.S. But he makes the artistic decision to deal with these large issues on the human scale, as part of the context of the particular story he is telling. The powerful emotional reactions the movie elicits grow organically from the characters and their experiences, and that humanizing tendency is precisely what makes this film so accessible and so moving.

America, America is a great achievement even for the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden and unlike anything else in Kazan's filmography. It's clear that for Kazan, writing and directing this picture, which he has often called his favorite, were labors of love. It is in many ways the summit of his remarkable career in film.

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 4

2011-05-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

Desk Set (1957)
***
Director: Walter Lang

In Desk Set Katharine Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, head of the reference department at a national television network, an all-female department staffed by Hepburn and her three coworkers (Dina Merrill, Sue Randall, and a delightful Joan Blondell). When their territory is invaded by an absent-minded "methods engineer," Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), who shows up unannounced one day and begins measuring the office space, Bunny assumes Sumner is some sort of efficiency expert hired to reorganize the layout of the office. But nobody knows for sure what he is up to until twenty minutes or so into the film, when he drops a bombshell. He is actually a computer engineer whose job is to install a giant computer (or "electronic brain," in the jargon of 1957) to store all the information currently held in the department's archives of print sources. Bunny, who has an absolutely retentive memory for all sorts of minutiae organized according to her own idiosyncratic method, is intellectually offended by the prospect of being replaced by a machine. "I'd match my memory any day against any machine," she boasts. The other women in the office have a more practical concern: they can't afford to lose their livelihood.

As you might expect, romantic complications soon arise. For seven years Bunny has been dating an executive at the network, Mike Cutler (Gig Young), in the expectation that a proposal of marriage is forthcoming, but to no avail. After she and Richard are caught in a rainstorm, she invites him to her apartment, where they slip into bathrobes and enjoy a comfortable dinner (fried chicken prepared by Richard) while their clothes dry. When Mike shows up unexpectedly, he jumps to the wrong conclusion and leaves in a huff. Things reach the crisis point during the drunken office Christmas party when Mike finally proposes—but on the assumption that Bunny will give up her career and life in New York and follow him to his new job in California—and the entire office learns that the new computer is to be installed the next day. The rest of the movie explains how Bunny's romantic dilemma and the department's uncertain future are ultimately resolved. (Happily, of course, for this is a comedy.)

This was the first Tracy-Hepburn movie shot in color. It was also the first not made by MGM, but instead at 20th Century-Fox, by Fox house director Walter Lang. The British film critic and historian Leslie Halliwell calls him a "director of competent but seldom outstanding entertainments," and I would say that is a fair summation of this film. When the plot begins to drag, you can sit back and admire the elaborate production design and the chic wardrobes of Hepburn and her female costars. Or you can always direct your attention to the imaginative ways Fox house cinematographer Leon Shamroy applies the CinemaScope screen ratio typical of the studio's output in the 1950s to the intimacy of a romantic comedy. Especially interesting is the way he treats the reference department as a sort of stage (the movie was, in fact, based on a play), spreading the actors and props across the screen and using dollops of color to break up the monolithic shape of the frame.

Desk Set is a bit slow to get started, the exposition of its first section more functional than engaging. The situations and characters surrounding Tracy and Hepburn have the slightness of a sitcom, although a very smoothly engineered and not unintelligent sitcom. When the focus settles on Tracy and Hepburn, however, things immediately pick up. Their interactions are quite well written, especially the scenes in which they are the only two characters present, and form the core of the film's appeal. By the time Desk Set was made, these two were so comfortable with each other onscreen that they could have taken turns reading the telephone book and made us believe it was as witty as the dialogue in a play written by Oscar Wilde. There is no doubt that their personal charisma and their star power are the things above all else that put this movie over.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
**^½
Director: Stanley Kramer

In Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn's last film together—and Tracy's last film ever—they play a married San Francisco couple, Matt and Christina Drayton. He's the editor of a newspaper and she owns an art gallery. When their 23-year old daughter Joey (played by Hepburn's niece, Katharine Houghton) returns from a vacation and announces plans to marry after a whirlwind romance with a man she has known only a few days—a widower nearly fifteen years older than herself—her mother is alarmed. She is in for an even greater shock when she meets the man and finds he is black. He is Dr. John Prentice, a medical researcher played by Sidney Poitier. As political liberals, the Draytons claim to have no objection to the marriage on racial grounds. It's the reaction of society and the problems they believe their naive daughter will encounter as part of a mixed-race marriage that trouble them. Christina quickly comes to accept the idea but realizes that the greatest obstacle to the marriage will be her husband.

Prentice further complicates matters when he proclaims to Matt that he won't marry Joey without her father's approval, and moreover that since he will be leaving for Geneva the next day, Matt has twenty-four hours to make up his mind. An additional complication ensues when Prentice's parents suddenly announce they are flying up from Los Angeles and plan to come to dinner at the Draytons' home. As the film builds to its long climactic scene, the dinner party, the women have agreed to support the marriage, but sparks are still flying between the men—Matt, Dr. Prentice, and Dr. Prentice's querulous, disapproving father—and the question of Matt's final decision in the matter is still up in the air.

Director Stanley Kramer got his start in the late 1940s as a producer of social issues movies and, after becoming a director in the mid-1950s, directed a series of issues movies of his own. But by 1967 Kramer's once-daring liberalism was beginning to look ponderous and tired. His attempt to make a serious statement about the contemporary state of race relations in the U.S. in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner seems hopelessly dated and unrealistic, and I mean dated not just in today's terms, but in the context of its own time. In the year that Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, even In the Heat of the Night were released, the sensibility of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner seems just plain out-of-step with the times. And Kramer's direction of the film, with its obviously fake backdrops of San Francisco and long didactic conversations, is as outdated as his take on its subject.

The movie has two huge flaws that make its central conflict ring false. Reviewers of the time criticized Poitier's character as being such a paragon that it made the Draytons' agonizing over the engagement seem implausible. But I find his behavior quite passive-aggressive. The "choice" he offers Matt seems more an ultimatum. He says that knowing how much Joey loves her mother and father, he couldn't bear it if a marriage without their approval caused a rift between Joey and her parents. But what does he expect to happen if he refuses to marry Joey because her parents object? Can he honestly believe such an outcome would be likely to preserve good relations between parents and daughter? Another major problem with the picture is Matt's ambivalence about the marriage. He says he only wants to protect his daughter from the unhappiness of being shunned by society. But come on. Never mind that the Draytons live in San Francisco, the most liberal city in America. Just consider that Prentice is a world-famous expert on infectious diseases and a consultant to the World Health Organization. Not only does he mix with highly educated, cosmopolitan people for whom interracial couples would hardly be unheard of, but he could choose to work and live anywhere in the world, in cities and countries where such couples were accepted even in 1967.

Then there is the strangely inconsistent tone of the film. William Rose's screenplay and Kramer's direction waver between treating the film's issues seriously and presenting them almost in sitcom trappings. Cecil Kellaway plays a friendly priest who serves as Matt's speaking conscience, urging him to greater tolerance. Kellaway starts out like a priest from a Leo McCarey picture of the 1940s, complete with Irish brogue and blarney-laden platitudes, then midway through the movie unaccountably loses both the brogue and the leprechaun personality. Isabel Sanford, as the Draytons' outspoken housekeeper haranguing Poitier for the brashness of his designs on Joey, whom she considers a surrogate daughter, comes off as a cross between Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind and Thelma Ritter. Still, she steals every scene she's in. Then there's the cringe-inducing sequence where Kramer attempts to deal with the generation gap by contriving to send Christina and Matt to Mel's drive-in, where they have an unpleasant/humorous encounter with a carhop and a pair of middle-aged-looking youths in a jalopy who seem to have strayed in from an Andy Hardy movie. And this is supposed to be San Francisco in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love!

As a finale to the Tracy-Hepburn collaboration, this film seems in every way a mistake. Tracy might have had success earlier in the decade in movies directed by Stanley Kramer, but Kramer's preoccupation with weighty political and social questions and his obvious discomfort with comedy strike me as a terrible mismatch with Tracy and Hepburn, who were at their best in pictures that concentrated on the personal relationship between their characters and leavened any serious issues underlying the plot with airy comedy. There's just no way around the fact that Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a disappointing end to one of the great acting partnerships of the movies.

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 3

2011-05-23T00:00:00.000-07:00

Adam's Rib (1949)
****
Director: George Cukor

Tracy and Hepburn reached what is for me their absolute peak in their sixth movie together, in which they play a pair of married New York City lawyers, Adam and Amanda Bonner. He works for the district attorney's office; she has a private practice. When Brooklyn housewife Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday) shoots her two-timing husband (Tom Ewell) in the apartment of his girl friend (Jean Hagen) and is charged with attempted murder, the Bonners find themselves on opposite sides of the case, he as prosecutor and she as attorney for the defense. Amanda sees the case as a question of the social double standard for men and women. She wants to make this the issue and defend her client by painting the shooting as a gender-reversal crime of passion. "Why 'not nice' if he does it," Amanda asks, "and 'something terrible' if she does it?" Adam, on the other hand, sees the case in strictly legal terms and views Amanda's attempt to put society on trial as an underhanded diversion that threatens to subvert the legal system.

The Bonners begin as friendly adversaries. But as the stubborn Amanda tries harder and harder to use the case to score points for feminism, resorting to courtroom showboating to humiliate Adam, and Adam digs in to restrict the trial to strictly legal issues, the legal dispute becomes a personal one that puts their own marriage in jeopardy. Things come to a head during the famous rubdown scene after a long day in court. Frustrated by Amanda's willingness to use any tactic to get her client acquitted, Adam slaps her behind a bit too hard during the rubdown. She retaliates with a sneaky kick to his rear end, and by the end of the evening Adam has packed his clothes and moved out. Now all is out-and-out warfare both personally and professionally. Things are further complicated when their neighbor Kip (David Wayne), an obnoxious Broadway songwriter with a crush on Amanda, takes advantage of the situation by trying to romance her. The question now is not only will Doris be convicted or acquitted, but will Adam and Amanda's marriage survive or fail.

What makes Adam's Rib such a great movie? Where to begin. There's the great screenplay by Ruth Gordon (yes, that Ruth Gordon from Rosemary's Baby and Harold and Maude) and her husband Garson Kanin, the well-known screenwriter/script doctor, playwright, and film director who specialized in romantic comedy. Adam's Rib, the second of four films they wrote for director George Cukor, may be the best "battle of the sexes" comedy ever written for the screen. The dialogue is never mechanical or perfunctory, but always tells us something about what the characters are thinking or feeling without ever seeming contrived to do so. The characters, especially Tracy and Hepburn, don't seem to be speaking lines so much as having real, although highly intelligent, conversations. And both the dialogue and the situations sparkle with wit and humor. Adam's Rib has as many belly laughs as you'll ever find in a movie, all without ever sacrificing its polished tone. This is humor entirely without vulgarity on the one hand, and artifice on the other.

The direction by George Cukor is flawless. From the opening sequence—nearly five minutes long and almost entirely without dialogue—in which Holliday ineptly stalks and finally shoots Ewell, to the mirror image sequence with Tracy, Hepburn, and Wayne at the end, Cukor's perfect coordination of tone and action never falters. His pacing of that fabulous dialogue is impeccable. The physical comedy is also brilliantly handled—always restrained, never coarse, its degree of physicality always right on the mark. The comedic high point of the film comes when Hepburn, addressing the jury in her closing speech, asks them to imagine their reactions to the crime if the gender of each of the principals were reversed. For a few seconds we see a succession of shots of Holliday, Hagen, and Ewell seated in the courtroom which dissolve briefly to shots of each of them in drag. Ewell in particular is hilarious as his female alter ego, flicking her wrist, pursing her lips, narrowing her eyes, and quickly snapping her head to one side with a defiant smirk on her face.

Above all, Adam's Rib is quite simply one of the most entertaining and realistic depictions of marriage ever to appear on the screen. Adam and Amanda Bonner are the very personification of a mid-twentieth century New York professional couple in the MGM mold—intelligent, sophisticated, rich without being ostentatious, yet all too human in their emotions. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn seem so responsive to each other's rhythms and moods that it requires no effort at all to accept them as a married couple who, despite their disagreements, have a deep psychic rapport. In this film they offer us a working definition of "screen chemistry." It is without question the pinnacle of the Tracy-Hepburn movies.

Pat and Mike (1952)
***^½
Director: George Cukor

The follow-up to Adam's Rib was again written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by George Cukor and again deals with a battle of the sexes. Hepburn plays Pat Pemberton, a physical education instructor at a California college engaged to an administrator at the college, Collier Weld (William Ching). The very first sequence establishes the nature of their relationship. Pat is meeting Collier after class so they can drive to the golf course for a game with a potential donor and his wife. Collier complains about the slacks Pat is wearing, afraid such masculine attire will make a bad impression on his millionaire, and tells her to change into a skirt. And he reminds her that even though she is an expert golfer, she must lose the game. Collier is condescending and bossy towards Pat, but she is apparently so smitten with him (he does appear a few years younger and rather good-looking in a bland way) that she is willing to tolerate his attitude.

When she blows up after forcing herself to lose the match and impulsively quits her job at the college, she takes up the suggestion of a friendly bartender at the golf club and enters a national golf tournament. Here she meets Mike Conovan (Tracy), a professional sports promoter who, realizing how talented she is, offers to become her agent/trainer and represent her as a professional athlete. The only problem is Collier, who doesn't think it seemly for Pat to pursue a career, especially one in competitive sports, after their marriage. His disapproval becomes a jinx, for every time he shows up at a competition, Pat freezes up and fumbles. As she tells Mike, "I can't do anything well while he's watching me." Now she finds herself in the classic dilemma of romantic comedy. Will she stick with the obviously inappropriate romantic interest, or will she acknowledge the growing affection between her and Mike?

Like Adam's Rib, this film seems specifically tailored to the talents of Tracy and Hepburn, but in a completely different way. Hepburn's character is clearly based on her own natural athleticism. Hepburn was well known as a vigorous, active woman who regularly rode horses, golfed, played tennis, and swam. She reportedly swam daily until well into her eighties. It's obvious that for the most part Hepburn is really playing her own golf and tennis in Pat and Mike, with miminal use of a double. That first scene in the film where Pat's fiancé chides her for wearing slacks is surely an allusion to Hepburn's insistence on wearing slacks in the 1930s, at the time something unheard of for female stars in Hollywood. In fact, one anecdote about her recounts how RKO had her slacks removed from her dressing room to force her to wear a skirt. In protest, Hepburn strolled around the sound stage in her underwear until her slacks were returned.

Spencer Tracy was a gifted naturalistic actor whose typical approach to a role was to slip into it without much emphasis on external details. But his part in Pat and Mike, although the male lead, is essentially a character role. Under Cukor's direction, he appears quite comfortable as Mike, having fun with the mannerisms of the character and with the novelty of playing a colorful huckster conceived almost in the Damon Runyon vein. His Mike is certainly an eyeful in his gaudy faux-mobster attire—suits in loud checks, plaids, and chalk stripes worn over dark shirts and light-colored ties. Tracy manages to find the simple nobility in the character, though, despite his obvious lack of education, social polish, and fashion sense.

As much fun as this movie is—and make no mistake, it's a great deal of fun, the most sheerly enjoyable Tracy-Hepburn picture after Adam's Rib—it has a decidedly serious undertone. Even though Adam's Rib deals more openly with gender inequality as a concept, this issue is just as much at the heart of Pat and Mike. Mike's social and educational background may be a mismatch with Pat's, but unlike the patronizing Collier, a classic male chauvinist who tries to suffocate her personality, he actually respects her athletic accomplishments and treats her as an equal. Pat's association with Mike and her experience as an athlete holding her own in a male-dominated environment help her shed her submissive attitude and find her independence. The movie may wrap its feminist sensibility in a sugar coating of humor, but the message comes through nevertheless. The story of one woman's liberation, Pat and Mike is a worthy companion piece to Adam's Rib.

TO BE CONTINUED

CMBA Classic Movies of 1939 Blogathon: Stagecoach

2011-05-16T00:00:00.002-07:00

****
Country: US
Director: John Ford

"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns." This is how John Ford introduced himself at a meeting of the Directors Guild of America in 1950, as he rose to speak in defense of Guild president Joseph L. Mankiewicz for opposing a proposal to require members of the Guild to take a loyalty oath. Ford, of course, made all kinds of pictures besides Westerns during his nearly sixty years as a Hollywood director. But it is the Western with which he is most closely associated and which, according to that statement at the meeting of the DGA, he most closely identified himself. Of the many Westerns he made, several of them masterpieces of the cinema, his 1939 film Stagecoach surely is the greatest of them all. An archetype of the genre, it has just about everything one expects to find in a Western: cowboys, gunslingers, outlaws and lawmen, blood feuds, an Indian attack, a cavalry charge, a climactic gunfight, and John Wayne.

The film opens in the Arizona frontier town of Tonto with the arrival of a stagecoach to change horses and pick up passengers for its final destination of Lordsburg. When the stagecoach pulls out a short while later, besides the driver (Andy Devine) and Marshall Curley Wilcox (George Bancroft) riding shotgun, it carries five passengers, a combination of respectable citizens and not-so-respectable social misfits: the alcoholic Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell); the prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor); Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), a demure gentlewoman traveling to the next stop to meet her soldier husband; a mild-mannered liquor salesman, Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek); and a professional gambler named Hatfield (John Carradine), a genteel but somehow disreputable Southerner. At the edge of town, the coach picks up a sixth passenger, the president of the local bank, Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill).

Doc Boone and Dallas are being run out of town by the Law and Order League, a group of female social vigilantes headed by the bank president's harpy wife. As the tipsy Doc quips to Dallas, "We're the victims of a foul disease called social prejudice, my child." Some of the other passengers are concealing their own secrets and vices. The nearly frantic Mrs. Mallory clearly is driven by something more than just the desire to be reunited with her husband. The gambler Hatfield joins the others at the last minute only after developing a mysterious fascination with Mrs. Mallory at first sight. The banker is absconding with $50,000 he has embezzled. And the whole journey is wrapped in an atmosphere of imminent danger, for Geronimo has just declared war and the travelers will be accompanied on the first part of their route by a cavalry platoon to protect them from Indian attack.

Later the stagecoach encounters the final passenger for Lordsburg standing by the side of the road—the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who has just escaped from prison determined to get to Lordsburg and kill the three Plummer brothers, who are responsible for the death of his own brother. This was John Wayne's first major role in an A-movie, and our first sight of him twenty minutes into the picture—holding a rifle and a saddle, standing absolutely still against the backdrop of the desert with the buttes of Monument Valley in the distance as the camera quickly glides in for a close-up—is an auspicious one. It almost seems designed to announce the arrival of a new star.

One of the best things about Stagecoach is its perfect balance of character and action. The passengers may at first appear to be a group of near-stereotypes thrown together by circumstances, yet each is given an individual personality gradually revealed by their reactions to the dangers they must face and by the way they relate to one other. Throughout the film, their individuality continues to grow, and their personalities, far from being static, continue to evolve as they come to know one another better and their mettle is tested by the perilous situation in which they find themselves. In a way, Stagecoach is all about the way a diverse group of strangers are impelled to form an ad hoc community as a response to adversity.

One of the most fascinating episodes in the film is the interlude that occurs at their first stop. In many of John Ford's movies, meals are treated almost as a rite of fellowship, during which people reveal a great deal about themselves by the way they behave toward one another. As the stagecoach passengers prepare to dine, they divide themselves into two camps, the socially acceptable and the social outsiders. When Mrs. Mallory balks at sitting across the table from Dallas, the gambler Hatfield gallantly picks up her dish and silverware and escorts her to the far end of the table, where they are joined by most of the rest of the passengers. Only the Ringo Kid consents to remain with the humiliated and abashed Dallas and even strikes up a conversation with her. He is either too naive or too nonjudgmental or too egalitarian to treat her as a pariah, and as the movie progresses it becomes clear the two are falling in love.

Ford was well known as a lifelong Republican and political conservative. But he was the kind of libertarian conservative who places great value on individualism and has the populist's faith in the ability of ordinary people to detect corruption and power-mongering in their leaders. That his favorite presidents reportedly were Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy shows perhaps that he was more impressed with strength of character and the ability to respond forcefully to crisis than with adherence to political dogma. So it's not surprising that in Stagecoach the great humanist moviemaker who was able to find both noble and not-so-noble personal qualities in his characters reserves his most negative feelings for the banker Henry Gatewood, a thorough hypocrite willing to cheat and rob while condemning the morality of others. Unprompted, the blustering Gatewood succinctly presents his political manifesto in a hilarious monologue early in the movie: "America for Americans. The government must not interfere with business. Reduce taxes. The national debt is shocking, over a billion dollars a year. What this country needs is a businessman for President." Was this character the first Tea Party Republican?

Stagecoach is really an ensemble movie in which no cast member, some of whom worked with Ford many times, is slighted. Every single actor in the film is perfectly cast and does exemplary work. Even so, three particularly stand out. Thomas Mitchell, who appeared in no less than five of the great films of 1939, deservedly won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his performance here. Continually spouting observations on human nature like a boozy Greek chorus, his Doc Boone is a cynic whose profession and Civil War experience have taught him to be unafraid of danger. As he says at one point, "I'm not only a philosopher, sir, I'm a fatalist." Yet when unexpectedly called on to sober up and deliver a baby, he rises to the occasion, and the baby he delivers does more to smooth over tensions and unite the stagecoach passengers than anything else in the movie.

As Doc Boone's fellow social outcast, Claire Trevor makes an equally strong impression. Even her Brooklyn accent, which she takes no pains to disguise, marks her as a social alien. Trevor, who could play tough dames so convincingly—and often did—here plays a sensitive and emotionally vulnerable woman. Her Dallas is one of life's victims, a woman consumed with shame at the role her life's circumstances have forced on her and who has given up all hope of ever overcoming those circumstances. It's my own favorite of her many fine performances.

But standing apart from everyone else in the cast is the young John Wayne. A veteran of dozens of movies from 1926 on—in bit parts in A productions and later as a star of many B-movie Westerns—Wayne got his big break in Stagecoach. The movie made him a star. Producer Walter Wanger originally insisted on casting Gary Cooper as the Ringo Kid (he also wanted Marlene Dietrich to play Dallas), but the strong-willed Ford held out for John Wayne and prevailed. Ford had first met John Wayne more than ten years earlier when Wayne was a student at USC working at a summer job at the Fox studio. Over the next few years the two became good friends and Ford essentially adopted him as a protégé. He got Wayne a few bit parts at the studio then in 1928 gave him a small part in Four Sons, the first of twenty-four movies directed by Ford that Wayne appeared in over the next thirty-five years.

Thirty-one years old when Stagecoach was shot, Wayne seems ten years younger in the film. Yet Ringo's youthful appearance and demeanor belie his firmness of purpose and his idealistic sense of justice, qualities that from this film on became inseparable from the screen persona of John Wayne. Ringo's quest to avenge the death of his brother—even against overwhelming odds, for he must face a showdown with all three of the Plummer brothers—is not only personal, but also rooted in the abstract notion that justice must be done, even if it is up to a lone man to do it and even if it places him in grave danger. "There are some things a man just can't run away from," Ringo says, and that statement might have been the motto of the screen personality who became known as John Wayne.

The climactic sequence of the film is without question the attack on the stagecoach by Geronimo that occurs just before the end. By taking a circuitous route, the travelers, no longer protected by the cavalry, make it almost all the way to Lordsburg before Geronimo attacks. The Indian attack sequence, lasting nearly eight minutes and consisting of almost 100 separate shots, is a model of its kind, the sort of sequence that deserves to be watched and studied again and again. It is a thrilling and seamless combination of location and studio photography, static and traveling shots, longer shots taken from outside the stagecoach alternating with closer shots taken inside, rhythmic editing (some of the shots last more than ten seconds, others only a second or two), and astounding stunt work coordinated by the renowned stunt man Yakima Canutt.

Stagecoach may consist of those archetypal elements of the Western film I spoke of earlier, and its characters may be the familiar cross-section of humanity so often found in movies in which a group of people are placed in peril, yet it is much more than just a collection of brilliant parts. The ultimate satisfaction of this movie lies not just in its individual narrative ingredients, or even in its assortment of colorful characters, but in how organically these things seem to fit together and how masterfully director John Ford uses all the elements of his craft to form a series of images which tell the story in a way that is artful without being pretentious. This movie is living proof that entertainment and art can coexist in the same film. The screenplay, the photography and editing, the acting may all be sublime, as they are here, but it takes a master to put them all together in such a way that the whole becomes this much more than the sum of its parts. Only the greatest film directors are able to do this, and Stagecoach shows beyond doubt that Ford was a member of this select group.

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 2

2011-05-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Sea of Grass (1947)
***
Director: Elia Kazan

The fourth movie Tracy and Hepburn made together is a Western, a nineteenth-century family saga that will remind many of Giant. As the film opens, Lutie Cameron (Hepburn), a young woman from St. Louis, is engaged to Jim Brewton (Tracy), the owner of a huge cattle ranch in New Mexico. When Jim sends a message saying he can't leave the ranch to come to St. Louis for the wedding, that they will have to be married in New Mexico, it's clear where his priorities lie. Once in New Mexico and married, Lutie finds herself in an environment she has trouble adjusting to. Jim is involved in a legal dispute with homesteaders, the kind of conflict that fuels so many Westerns, and is willing to go to any lengths to prevail, even acts of brutality. When his brutality harms a farming couple with whom Lutie has become friendly, forcing them to abandon their homestead, it becomes too much for her and she leaves Jim and her young daughter and goes to Denver.

In Denver the lonely and emotionally vulnerable Lutie runs into Brice Chamberlain (Melvyn Douglas), the lawyer who represents the homesteaders in court and is Jim's bitter enemy. After a one-night stand with Brice, Lutie returns home, contrite and pregnant, and gives birth to a son, Brock. When Jim accidentally finds out the truth about Brock and Lutie refuses to support him in his illegal range war with the homesteaders, he asks her to leave. She goes back to St. Louis and except for one brief visit doesn't return to the ranch until many years later, after her children are grown. Her daughter Sarah Beth (Phyllis Thaxter) has become a sensible young woman, but Brock (Robert Walker) has grown into a surly, impulsive young man with a hot temper. Out of concern for him she finally returns, only to find that he is a fugitive wanted for murder. Brock's tragic outcome proves to be the act that finally reunites the now middle-aged couple at the end of the film.

The Sea of Grass was the second movie directed by Elia Kazan, right before his social issues pictures of the late forties and A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. As such, it doesn't bear the stylistic stamp of his later, better-known films. (Kazan was not pleased with the film. "It's the only picture I've ever made that I'm ashamed of," he writes in his 1988 autobiography.) One thing it does have in common with his later work, though, is the quality of the acting, no surprise since Kazan was a former actor and in late 1947 would become a co-founder of the Actors Studio. Attention is often focused on Robert Walker's flavorful performance as the bad boy Brock, and his acting here is certainly an eye-opener, one of his few early performances that hint at the greatness he was to achieve later in his career as the loopy Bruno in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Still, Tracy and Hepburn hold their own against his more showy role.

One hardly associates Spencer Tracy or Katharine Hepburn with the Method, yet both excel under Kazan's direction. Tracy eschews the relaxed affability he made appear so effortless, instead tapping into the hardness of earlier roles like those in Man's Castle and Fury. His Jim Brewton is a man driven by ambition to create an empire and by ruthlessness to hold on to it at any cost. He is obstinate, domineering, and unforgiving, a man who demands unquestioning loyalty from Lutie and when he doesn't get it drives her out, then redirects his love for her to overindulgent affection for his children. Jim isn't exactly an unsympathetic character, but his flaws do make him a hard one to like completely.

Like Tracy, Hepburn also avoids what comes easily to her. In her straight dramatic performances, she often seemed self-conscious and overly earnest. Her brittle acting style—especially as she aged—was better suited to comedy or to seriocomic parts where she turned her screen image to her advantage by poking fun at it. Toning down her mannerisms, she convincingly portrays Lutie, who ages some twenty years during the picture, by skillfully balancing the character's strength and vulnerability. It's one of Hepburn's unsung performances and lingers in the memory long after the film is over. The range wars plot might be familiar and the personal relationships at times close to soap opera, but the acting can't be faulted. Of the Tracy-Hepburn films, this is the dark horse, the film most likely to rise in one's estimation on repeat viewing.

State of the Union (1948)
***^½
Director: Frank Capra

Tracy and Hepburn's next movie, State of the Union, was a political comedy-drama based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by the renowned Broadway writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Tracy plays Grant Matthews, a self-made millionaire industrialist, and Hepburn his estranged wife Mary. Matthews is having an affair with Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury), a newspaper publisher with a Lady Macbeth complex who wants to use her newspaper empire to promote him to run against Harry Truman as the Republican candidate in the 1948 presidential election. (At the time Truman was considered a sure loser. This is the election remembered for the photo of the triumphant Truman holding up a newspaper with the headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.") Matthews is a political amateur running as an anti-politician with an idealistic message of togetherness and cooperation. (Sound familiar?) As Jim Conover (Adolphe Menjou), the slick political adviser Kay hires to mastermind the campaign, puts it, Matthews has the "rare combination of sincerity and drive the common herd will go for."

When his handlers insist they need his wife and children to create the right image for the campaign, Matthews is persuaded to reconcile with Mary. At first she doesn't understand that the reconciliation is a publicity gimmick. After she does, she stays on board to make sure Grant remains true to his political ideals. Matthews soon finds himself in the middle of a complex tug-of-war. He is caught between his wife and his mistress, both of whom want to be the main influence in his campaign as well as in his personal life. He's also caught between staying true to his principles, as Mary urges him to do, and the pandering to special interests that Kay and his advisers tell him is necessary to get the nomination. Things reach a crisis as Grant appears to have sold out to assure his nomination and the film moves toward its climactic sequence, a national radio-television broadcast in which Grant will lay out the policy platform Kay and company have devised for him. When Grant finally sees the toll the betrayal of his principles has taken on a dismayed Mary, what will he do, and what will be the ultimate state of their own union? Integrity or compromise? Mary or Kay?

It's easy to see what drew Capra to this project. An exploitative press, political chicanery, the corrupting influence of money and power, a main character caught in the conflict between idealism and compromise—these are things found in so many of Capra's movies. The hero, Grant Matthews, is an ordinary man enmeshed in a process he doesn't fully comprehend and can't control; the villains are the pompous, the hypocritical, the humorless, the greedy, and the power-hungry. In Capra's hands this material may become another version of his well-worn populist hokum, but it's impossible to resist. Despite all the references to politicians of the time whom few modern viewers are likely recognize, many things in the movie haven't dated at all. References to subjects like tax rates, inflation, economic depression, the dire state of housing and medical care, defense readiness, globalism, and whispering campaigns still seem surprisingly relevant. And the film's cynical view of politics is right in tune with current attitudes.

Of all the Tracy-Hepburn movies, this one seems the least tailored to their familiar screen personalities. Indeed, neither was Capra's first choice. He wanted either Clark Gable or Gary Cooper for Grant, and Claudette Colbert was actually cast as Mary before a dispute over her contract (she insisted that she not be required to work past 5 p.m.) caused Hepburn to step in just two days before filming began. Yet Tracy and Hepburn do great work for Capra. Tracy's everyman quality is well suited to the self-made man motivated more by the desire to serve than by ambition, and he strikes me as more believable presidential timber than the macho Gable or the impassive Cooper. Hepburn's role is clearly secondary to Tracy's, and she seems content to defer to him for a change. Any of a number of actresses could have handled her part capably, but one thing Hepburn puts across more convincingly than another actress might have done is the enthusiastic idealism of Mary, a quality Hepburn was particularly adept at projecting. The cast is rounded out by Lansbury (22-years old playing 40), Menjou, Van Johnson as a wise-cracking reporter commenting from the sidelines, and in smaller parts familiar faces like Raymond Walburn, Margaret Hamilton, and Charles Lane.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 1

2011-05-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

Of the many famous screen pairings of the Hollywood studio era, two stand out above all others: Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers and Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn. Astaire and Rogers made ten movies together, Tracy and Hepburn nine. All nine of the Tracy-Hepburn films have now been released by Warner Home Video in Tracy & Hepburn: The Definitive Collection. I decided to observe the release of this collection by watching the only one of their films I had never seen, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and over the next few weeks offering up my thoughts on their work together.

The thing that sets Tracy and Hepburn apart from most other famous screen teams is their well-documented offscreen romance. Other classic screen pairings were strictly professional, but when the cameras stopped rolling, Tracy and Hepburn's relationship continued in private life. This was not just a fling by two stars thrown together while making a movie, but a deep emotional relationship that lasted twenty-five years, the details of which are well known by lovers of classic cinema. The two never married because Tracy was a Roman Catholic who couldn't bring himself to divorce his wife and leave her and his handicapped son. They did often spend time together at the Malibu estate of their friend and frequent director, George Cukor, though. Tracy, who so often played easygoing, self-confident characters, was actually a profoundly tormented man, an alcoholic depressive who went on drinking binges that lasted several days and afterwards left him virtually paralyzed. The devoted Kate would play the role of his nurse during and after these binges, caring for him until he recovered.

Kate apparently developed an interest in Tracy before the two ever met based solely on her reaction to his screen personality, and when she returned to Hollywood in 1940 to film The Philadelphia Story wanted him to costar with her. (She wanted him to play Macaulay Connor, the reporter played to perfection by James Stewart. I've never quite been able to picture this myself, seeing him as better suited to the role of her manly soul-mate, C. K. Dexter Haven.) But Tracy was involved in other films (he starred in no less than four movies released in 1940), and it wasn't until Hepburn's next film, Woman of the Year, that they worked together for the first time.

Conceived by Hepburn as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy and herself, this was, like The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn's project. She commissioned the screenplay, sold it to Louis B. Mayer at MGM, and handpicked as director George Stevens, who had directed her in Alice Adams and Quality Street. Woman of the Year won an Oscar for its writers, Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr., and got Kate an Oscar nomination for best actress. (She lost to Greer Garson for Mrs. Miniver.) Its success led to a contract for Hepburn at MGM, where Tracy had been under contract since 1935, and it was for this studio that she and Tracy made their next six films.

The nine movies Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together vary in quality as well as in genre. But even the least successful of them is worth watching to see these two great actors and the way they relate to each other onscreen. I guess that's what star power and star teamwork are all about.

Woman of the Year (1942)
***^½
Director: George Stevens

The first Tracy-Hepburn film, a romantic comedy with serious undertones, is a delight, its screenplay a model of the seriocomic romantic movie. Hepburn plays Tess Harding, a political and current affairs columnist at a New York newspaper, and Tracy plays Sam Craig, the sports columnist at the same paper. A disagreement in their columns over the value of baseball leads to a first meeting in which the feuding pair are immediately attracted to each other. Before long they are in love and married. The problems begin after the marriage and revolve around the seeming impossibility of two such opposite personalities—she highly strung, he mellow—to create a life together.

The most important thing in Tess's life is her position as the country's most prominent female intellectual. Everything else, including her marriage, seems to come second. The down-to-earth Sam reacts to Tess's self-centered attitude with patience, thinking that eventually she will find room in her life for him. When Tess adopts a war orphan less out of concern for the child than as a trophy to complete her new image as working wife and mother, Sam reaches the end of his patience. Realizing that she has gone too far and is about to lose him, will Tess be able to make amends in time to save the marriage?

The characters of Sam and Tess are tailor-made for what Tracy and Hepburn did best onscreeen. As she did in Alice Adams and The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn plays an intelligent, willful woman, a perfectionist who needs to be humanized by being shown the oppressive nature of her own ego. Tracy's Sam, a tolerant and unpretentious man, is shrewd enough to realize that to attempt to do this openly would lead to automatic opposition by the headstrong Tess. True change can be accomplished only if she experiences her own epiphany by seeing what her true feelings for him are.

Some detect an anti-feminist message in this picture, but I just don't see that myself. The negative qualities in Tess's personality—her career obsession, her snobbishness, her lack of humility, her inability to empathize with other people—are undesirable ones that alienate others whether the person with those traits is a woman or a man. At the end of the movie, Sam's reaction to Tess's misguided attempt to save their marriage by becoming the perfect "little woman"—her inept efforts to cook Sam a breakfast like his mother used to make end in a series of comic mishaps—shows that this is not the kind of wife Sam wants. He's no macho man out to tame a shrew, just a man who wants an equal partner as aware, and as respectful, of his feelings as she is of her own.

Keeper of the Flame (1943)
**^½
Director: George Cukor

Tracy and Hepburn's next picture was a complete change from Woman of the Year. Shot just a few months after the U.S. entered the Second World War, Keeper of the Flame is a deadly serious political melodrama-mystery. Tracy plays Steven O'Malley, a war correspondent just back from Berlin who wants to write an inspirational biography of a famous political figure and national hero who has just died in a car crash, Robert Forrest. To do so, he needs to enlist the help of the man's widow Christine, played by Hepburn. But Christine and all of Forrest's associates are ensconced inside the fortress-like Forrest estate and aren't cooperating with the press.

When O'Malley finally gets into the estate and meets Christine, he begins to believe that she is concealing something about her late husband and determines to get to the bottom of the secrets being kept about Forrest's life and the suspicious circumstances of his death. Christine does eventually agree to help O'Malley with his book. But the more he learns about Forrest from Christine, the more apparent it becomes that the real man was far from the heroic patriot he made himself out to be in his carefully cultivated public image. Christine finally reveals the dark truth about her late husband to O'Malley in a spectacularly dramatic finale.

Keeper of the Flame, the first of three Tracy-Hepburn movies directed by Kate's friend and mentor George Cukor, is the most curious of the Tracy-Hepburn films. Hepburn gives a bizarrely ambiguous performance. Is she mad, evil, a murderess, a widow faithful to her husband's memory, part of a cover-up conspiracy, a dupe? Her first appearance, dressed in white from head to toe and bearing a bouquet of enormous white dahlias—more like a bride or vestal virgin than a grieving widow—as she glides toward an idealized portrait of her dead husband, borders on the camp. Her long final monologue, in which she reveals the truth about her dead husband to Tracy, is awkwardly declamatory and politically vague. For fans of Tracy and Hepburn, the biggest disappointment of the film is that the melodramatic plot gives the characters they play little opportunity to relate to each other on an emotional level. The movie's cautionary theme of the danger of blind hero worship takes precedence over any real relationship that might have developed between them.

Cukor and cinematographer William Daniels give the movie the full-out Gothic treatment, with obvious allusions to both Citizen Kane and Rebecca. With its high-contrast Citizen Kane-influenced lighting, its sinister atmosphere, its creepy mansion reminiscent of both Xanadu and Manderley, Forrest's mad mother in the dower house, and its hostile and secretive characters (including Richard Whorf as a worshipful male equivalent of Mrs. Danvers), the film is certainly something to behold. But as Cukor himself acknowledged, Keeper of the Flame "isn't very satisfactory as a whole." Only Tracy, who gives a consistently understated performance, and Percy Kilbride, with his incongruous comic turn as a Yankee cab driver, manage to withstand Cukor's ponderous approach. Cukor was far more successful in the two later Tracy-Hepburn films he directed with a decidedly lighter touch.

Without Love (1945)
***
Director: Harold S. Bucquet

In their third film Tracy and Hepburn returned to romantic comedy, and a welcome return it was. Released just before the end of World War II, Without Love concerns the problems of a scientist working for the government, Pat Jamieson, played by Tracy, trying to find a place to live in Washington during the wartime housing shortage. Through his friend Quentin Ladd (Keenan Wynn) he finds the perfect place, the townhouse of Quentin's unmarried cousin Jamie Rowan, played by Hepburn. After her initial coolness toward Pat, Jamie invites him to stay on as a boarder when she finds that he is a scientist like her father was. As the two become better acquainted, Jamie proposes marriage to Pat, but on a strictly platonic basis—a practical marriage "without love." She will be his research assistant while he gets a convenient place to live and work without the messy emotional entanglements of a marriage based on love. "You'd be safe forever from the other side of love," she tells him.

On their wedding night, the two retire to separate adjoining bedrooms. When Jamie prepares for bed with a dreamy expression on her face and the wistful strains of "The Boy Next Door" well up on the soundtrack, we know that for her at least something deeper than platonic feeling is emerging. Before long both Jamie and Pat begin to experience the very things she told him their arrangement would protect them from, emotions like jealousy and possessiveness, and it becomes clear that their feelings for each other have crossed over to the other side of love. When Jamie is pursued by another man, both are finally forced to admit the true nature of their feelings and act on them.

Like Hepburn's Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, Without Love is based on a play written by Philip Barry (Hepburn had appeared in the Broadway production in 1942) and polished for the screen by Donald Ogden Stewart. Like those earlier films, this is what I would call a concept romantic comedy. Although it is great fun, the movie does have its limitations. The concept that drives the action, the unlikeliness of platonic love between a man and woman, doesn't have sufficient heft to give Without Love the resonance of those earlier films. It's a perfectly serviceable device to base the action on and move it forward, but it's never more than a convenient gimmick. Hepburn's character, Jamie, is an appealing one and plainly the dominant character in the film, but Hepburn doesn't seem totally right for it. On the stage she might have been able to carry off the girlish behavior the role requires, but the closeness of the camera makes us aware that she is a bit mature for her character (she was 38-years old the year the film was released), and a bit too intelligent to portray such naiveté with complete believability.

The film is not without its rewards, though. Tracy acts in his customary relaxed style, deferring in the theatrics department to Hepburn, who shows a flair for physical comedy not seen since Bringing Up Baby. She even has a drunk scene—always a surefire audience pleaser—reminiscent of the one in The Philadelphia Story but in a more slapstick vein. Romantic comedies traditionally have a pair of second leads to provide a counterpoint to the romantic couple, and Without Love has a great pair of second leads in Keenan Wynn and Lucille Ball. Fans of Lucy will be especially interested in seeing her play Jamie's attractive, wise-cracking friend Kitty, the kind of role Eve Arden did so well, leaving the broader comedy to Kate. There is even a cute dog, Pat's cairn terrier Dizzy, the same breed as Toto in The Wizard of Oz. And look for a very young Gloria Grahame in the night club scene as a flower girl with hay fever. All in all, a very entertaining if not great movie elevated, as always, by the appeal of Tracy and Hepburn.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Greatest (Classic) Performances by an Actress

2011-04-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

This week I'm posting the follow-up to last week's list of the greatest classic performances by an actor. This week it's the turn of the great actresses. As before, I limited myself to sound films made between 1930 and 1980 because that's what I know best. I also limited myself to one performance for each actress, and again it was often difficult to choose one performance for those who might reasonably have been cited for any of a number of films, actresses like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and Liv Ullmann. On another day I might pick a different performance for some of these, but for now I'm willing to go with the ones I've chosen. The final list underscores the conclusion I drew last week about great film performances: in most cases, they're the result of the perfect conjunction of the actor, the role, and the setting.

THE LIST

Bette Davis, All About Eve
Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story
Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel
Greta Garbo, Camille
Irene Dunne, The Awful Truth
Carole Lombard, Nothing Sacred
Vivien Leigh, Gone With the Wind
Joan Fontaine, Rebecca
Margaret Sullavan, The Shop Around the Corner
Mary Astor, The Maltese Falcon
Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday
Claudette Colbert, The Palm Beach Story
Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity
Joan Bennett, Scarlet Street
Ingrid Bergman, Notorious
Olivia de Havilland, The Heiress
Gloria Swanson, Sunset Boulevard
Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday
Judy Garland, A Star Is Born
Joanne Woodward, The Three Faces of Eve
Susan Hayward, I Want to Live!
Julie Harris, The Haunting
Elizabeth Taylor, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Anne Bancroft, The Miracle Worker
Jane Fonda, Klute
Liza Minnelli, Cabaret
Faye Dunaway, Chinatown
Sissy Spacek, Carrie
Diane Keaton, Annie Hall
Celia Johnson, Brief Encounter
Wendy Hiller, I Know Where I'm Going
Deborah Kerr, The Innocents
Rita Tushingham, A Taste of Honey
Catherine Deneuve, Repulsion
Julie Christie, Darling
Vanessa Redgrave, Isadora
Glenda Jackson, Women in Love
Josette Day, La Belle et la Bête
Simone Signoret, Les Diaboliques
Maria Schell, Gervaise
Anouk Aimée, Lola
Jeanne Moreau, Jules and Jim
Sylvie, The Shameless Old Lady
Isabelle Adjani, The Story of Adèle H.
Setsuko Hara, Late Spring
Hideko Takamine, Twenty-Four Eyes
Anna Magnani, Open City
Giulietta Masina, The Nights of Cabiria
Sophia Loren, Two Women
Monica Vitti, L'Eclisse
Hanna Schygulla, The Marriage of Maria Braun
Harriet Andersson, Cries and Whispers
Bibi Andersson, Persona
Liv Ullmann, Persona
Madhabi Mukherjee, Charulata
Margarita Terekhova, The Mirror

If anyone would like to suggest any additions or alternative performances or even submit your own list of the great performances, please leave a comment.

The Greatest (Classic) Performances by an Actor

2011-04-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

Last week Sam Juliano at Wonders in the Dark came out with a surprise post, "The 43 Greatest performances of all-time by an actor in a leading role" (click here to read the post), and invited his readers to submit their own lists. Like a large number of WitD's regular readers, I couldn't resist taking Sam up on his invitation and sent him my own list of the 50+ greatest performances. Because I consider sound films of 1930-1980 my area of knowledge, I stopped at 1980 and for silent performances included only the three great American silent comics. I also limited myself to one performance for each actor, and it was often hard to choose which one. How do you pick just one performance by Keaton, Bogart, Nicholson, or Gabin?

Interestingly, the same names appeared on list after list, if not always for the same performance, a good indication that there is a certain amount of agreement as to what constitutes good acting and who the best are. There was, however, some disagreement as to the distinction between creating a character and projecting a persona. Sam's colleague at WitD, the very knowledgeable Allan Fish, objected to a couple of Sam's choices by saying that "one may as well include W. C. Fields or Groucho Marx for one of their comedies. They’re great, but it isn’t acting." I had already started my own list by the time Allan's comment was posted, and the first two names on it were Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields! Clearly there was some disagreement among those who responded at least on the definition of acting.

My own view is that many great actors are neglected because they seem to maintain pretty much the same persona from role to role, so it doesn't always seem as though they're acting so much as applying their own personality to a new set of circumstances. We think of Groucho Marx, for instance, as Groucho. But take a look at a rerun of his fifties quiz show You Bet Your Life or his interview with Dick Cavett, and it is clear that the "Groucho" of the Marx Brothers movies was an invented character sustained from one film to the next. The same is true to some extent of other actor-personalities. Consider Chaplin and his Little Tramp or my two favorite screen actors, Cary Grant and James Stewart. In the cases where an actor was associated with a certain type of character or with a persona carried over from film to film, I chose the performance which most stood out for me.

Mick La Salle, the movie critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, has made the distinction between what he calls "essence" performances and "chameleon" performances. In the former type of performance, actors express the essence of their personality through a character; in the latter, actors transform into someone totally different from themselves or from their usual screen image. It's usually this latter type of performance that gets the attention and the awards. As Elia Kazan observed, "It's the role that gets the Oscar, not the actor." Beautiful actresses like Grace Kelly transform themselves into frumps and win Oscars; great comic actors like Jack Lemmon take on a heavy dramatic role and get praised for their dramatic skills (and win Oscars too). The Myrna Loys don't get Oscar nominations, and the Cary Grants get them only for the infrequent role that calls for heavy emoting. It was hard to construct a list of great performances without slighting the "essence" and comic actors, even though I tried not to. And because I limited myself to one performance per actor, it was difficult not to gravitate toward the chameleonic and the more serious performances in an actor's body of work.

What I tried to concentrate on while compiling my list was not so much technical skill as the ability to create a character that makes a lasting impression, an identifiable personality with facial expressions, a way of speaking, behavioral traits and mannerisms so clearly defined that the memory of that character is indelible. This is the kind of performance so vivid that simply to hear the name of the character conjures up an image—a look, a gesture, a vocal inflection, an unforgettable line of dialogue. I think about the name Cody Jarrett, Margo Channing, Annie Hall, or Travis Bickle, and I instantly see and hear them: Top o' the world! Fasten your seat belts. La-di-da. You talkin' to ME? These people tend to be larger-than-life, extra colorful without unintentionally going over the top.

That there are not only so many great performances but also so many great movies on my list underscores the symbiosis between good acting and good movies. Occasionally a great performance is better than the movie it's found in and makes the movie more worth watching, but in general masterful acting is found in outstanding pictures. Maybe this goes to show the extent to which good screenwriting and good direction contribute to or at least support good acting, how a great performance is really a convergence of the actor, the role, and the setting. We people who write about film like to talk about auteurs and stars and the ability of skillful editing to shape our responses to what we see on the screen, but in truth filmmaking is a process whose collaborative nature we often oversimplify to make it easier to write about movies.

Finally, if my list of the great performances seems heavy on those by Americans, it's not because I think Americans are better actors, but because I've seen so many more American movies, and also because the studio pictures that figure so prominently in this list emphasized star power to a far greater degree than foreign or more modern films.

Sam encouraged his readers to submit their own lists of the greatest performances by an actor, and I'd like to do the same. If anyone wants to compile such a list, please leave it in a comment. Take your time. I'll be checking in during this week to see if anyone accepts the challenge. Or alternatively, you might want to post it at your own site. This week Sam is posting his choices for the greatest performances of all time by actresses. (Click here to read Sam's post.) I'm already working on my own list to have ready in time to post here next week.

THE LIST

Groucho Marx, Duck Soup
W. C. Fields, It's a Gift
James Cagney, White Heat
Edward G. Robinson, Little Caesar
William Powell, The Thin Man
Fredric March, A Star Is Born
Cary Grant, North by Northwest
Henry Fonda, The Grapes of Wrath
Humphrey Bogart, The Maltese Falcon
Walter Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Robert Mitchum, Night of the Hunter
James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause
Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire
John Wayne, The Searchers
Anthony Perkins, Psycho
Paul Newman, The Hustler
Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady
Peter O'Toole, Lawrence of Arabia
James Stewart, It's a Wonderful Life
Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Dustin Hoffman, The Graduate
Kirk Douglas, Lust for Life
Albert Finney, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Tom Courtenay, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Robert de Niro, Taxi Driver
Joel McCrea, Sullivan's Travels
Gene Hackman, The Conversation
Jean Gabin, Le Jour se Lève
Jean-Louis Barrault, Les Enfants du Paradis
Anton Walbrook, The Red Shoes
Jacques Tati, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
Maurice Ronet, The Fire Within
Takashi Shimura, Ikiru
Toshiro Mifune, Yojimbo
Carlo Battisti, Umberto D.
Marcello Mastroianni, La Dolce Vita
Victor Sjöström, Wild Strawberries
Per Oscarsson, Hunger
Max von Sydow, Shame
Peter Lorre, M
Anatoli Solonitsyn, Andrei Rublev
Nikolai Cherkasov, Ivan the Terrible
Soumitra Chatterjee, The World of Apu
Chhabi Biswas, The Music Room
Charles Laughton, The Private Life of Henry VIII
Anthony Quinn, Zorba the Greek
Alistair Sim, Scrooge
Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol
Laurence Olivier, Hamlet
Alec Guinness, Oliver Twist
Buster Keaton, Sherlock, Jr.
Harold Lloyd, The Freshman
Charles Chaplin, City Lights
Peter Sellers, Being There
Chishu Ryu, An Autumn Afternoon
Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

2011-04-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

***
Country: US
Director: Bob Rafelson

In the fun house how do you know who's really crazy?

Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens is the last of seven films produced between 1968 and 1972 by BBS Films, the production company co-founded by Rafelson. These films include oddities like Rafelson's Monkees movie Head, works of historical importance like Easy Rider, and two bona fide masterpieces, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. All seven BBS productions have now been released by Criterion in the collection America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. (Not included in the collection is an eighth BBS production, Hearts and Minds, the Oscar-winning 1974 documentary about the Vietnam War.) The King of Marvin Gardens was Rafelson's follow-up to Five Easy Pieces and, perhaps because that generously praised movie raised expectations so high, got a tepid critical reception when it was released. The film has its admirers, though. David Thomson, for example, calls it "Rafelson's most intriguing picture." Leonard Maltin calls it a "genuinely haunting, original drama." After seeing it recently for the first time, my own reaction is that those descriptions aren't inaccurate but that the film isn't wholly successful either and is something of a letdown in comparison to Five Easy Pieces.

The King of Marvin Gardens stars Jack Nicholson as David Staebler, a Philadelphia late-night radio broadcaster whose show includes long narrative monologues. The movie opens with one of those monologues, although it isn't clear at first that David is in fact doing a radio show. All we see for the first five minutes of the movie is Nicholson's face in tight close-up as he speaks in a darkened room, sometimes looking at the camera, sometimes looking away from it. For all we know, he might be speaking directly to the viewer or even to a therapist. The story he tells is about himself and his older brother and how they silently conspired to let their grandfather choke to death on a fish bone rather than help him. As David tells his tale, it seems shockingly authentic.

As he concludes with the statement "At that moment my brother and I became accomplices forever," the spell is broken by David's sound engineer abruptly cutting him off with the message that he has an urgent telephone call . . . from his brother Jason, summoning him to Atlantic City. When David goes home to pack, we see that he actually lives with his grandfather and that what seemed to be an on-air confession was completely fictional. The only true thing in the tale was the psychological truth of that statement about the two brothers being accomplices forever. It is precisely the conspiratorial, mutually dependent relationship between David and Jason that drives the movie and sustains it through its frequent narrative doldrums.

When David arrives in Atlantic City, we meet the other main characters in the film, Jason (Bruce Dern), his girl friend Sally (Ellen Burstyn), and Sally's teenage stepdaughter Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson). Jason has sent for David because he wants to include him in what is potentially a hugely profitable real estate deal he is trying to close. He claims to be negotiating to buy a small island in Hawaii and develop it into a gambling resort with financing from Japanese investors and the Atlantic City hoodlums he has been working for. It soon becomes evident, however, that the real estate deal, in fact Jason's entire account of his life in Atlantic City, is no more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy. The rest of the movie deals with how David copes with his dawning realization that the real estate deal is a pipe dream and that his brother, incapable of acknowledging the truth about the situation, expects David to support him in his extravagant fancies.

What makes The King of Marvin Gardens worth watching is not its meandering narrative or its stylish but often gratuitous set pieces or even the film's impressive visuals, with their magnificent sense of composition, use of color, and eye for the faded luster of the pre-gambling Atlantic City in winter. The real attraction here is the satisfaction of seeing great actors inhabit interesting and thoughtfully conceived characters. Nicholson gives one of his most subtle, low-key, and introspective performances. There is none of the smart-alecky nihilism or leering histrionics we often associate with him in evidence here. His David Staebler is a rather passive man, a man who seems weighed down by the complexities of life and has withdrawn to the safety of a static existence that keeps the outside world at a distance. That he earns his living by sitting alone in a darkened radio studio playing music and telling fictional stories about himself to strangers with whom he has no direct contact tells us a lot about the insularity of his life. It is hardly surprising when we learn he has been hospitalized more than once for depression.

Jason Staebler, two years older than David, is in most ways the complete opposite of his brother. David lives in his mind, Jason in his body and emotions. David is a reserved person, Jason an expressive one. If David is almost too much in touch with reality to be totally comfortable with it, Jason projects his wishes and fantasies onto the world to such a degree that he borders on being delusional. If David shrinks into himself for self-protection, Jason expands to fill his world as though he believes he can shape reality simply by occupying it fully. David is dwarfed not only by Jason's burly physique but also by his grandiose personality—his ego, self-confidence, and ambition. With his wild hair, manic eyes, and impulsive movements, Dern makes a most convincing megalomaniac. He and Nicholson play off each other with expert precision, showing how these two characters feed off each other in their grown-up version of a childhood big brother-little brother symbiosis, with Jason the leader and David the follower. When Dern and Nicholson are onscreen together, they make it absolutely believable that these two characters would instinctively fall into a fraternal folie à deux in which each enables the other to escape the unpleasant realities and burdensome responsibilities of adulthood.

Yet as good as Nicholson and Dern are, for me it is Ellen Burstyn who gives the most compelling performance in the picture. Her Sally, described at one point as "a middle-aged kewpie doll," is a former beauty queen clinging to Jason's fantasies as a palliative against the mental terror that a woman defined by her youth and looks experiences as she approaches middle age. As she grooms her stepdaughter Jessica for competition on the beauty-queen circuit—their dream is that Jessica will one day return to Atlantic City and be crowned Miss America—she watches the teenager openly flirting with Jason, and Jason responding with obvious sexual interest. (Jessica also comes on to the self-contained David, who doesn't respond.) Burstyn has some of the best scenes in the movie, and she plumbs them for maximum effect. At one point she catalogues with bitter humor and resignation the subtle signs of the inevitable physical decline in a woman of her age. Another especially telling scene is one in which she impetuously chops off her hair in an act of symbolic self-mutilation, a rejection of her role in life as little more than a decorative physical presence.

When Jason builds a bonfire on the beach and Sally, with her Joan of Arc martyr's haircut, joins him to throw in all of her possessions in anticipation of their departure for Hawaii, we realize she is jettisoning all hope for her present life and desperately putting her hopes for the future in Jason's hare-brained scheme, a last-ditch attempt to create a new identity for herself based on something more than her looks. Throughout the movie Burstyn skillfully limns each successive stage in Sally's slow downward emotional spiral, which ends in an explosive meltdown that propels her over the edge and into the role of agent of destruction. Burstyn is so good in those final scenes that she rises above the contrivance of the movie's rather arbitrary tragic ending. It's a mesmerizing performance which shows that Burstyn was one of the finest American screen actresses of the seventies.

The King of Marvin Gardens is a flawed movie, but one with enough strong points to make it worthwhile. If for no other reason, watch this film for its splendid visual sense and for the thrill of seeing these three actors at their peak, giving fascinating interpretations of lost souls living on the fringes of 1970s America, their lives unraveling before our eyes.

A Taste of Honey (1961)

2011-03-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: UK
Director: Tony Richardson

From time to time national cinemas seem to experience bursts of creativity that result in concentrated periods of inspired output. To my mind the British film industry had two such "golden ages." One was the 1940s, when directors like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Michael Powell turned out one masterpiece after another. The other was the 1960s, when the young directors of the British New Wave like Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz (all of whom turned to directing after stints as critics at Sight and Sound), Bryan Forbes, and John Schlesinger made their greatest films. These young filmmakers were inspired both by the freedom of style of their French New Wave counterparts and by the politicized class-consciousness of the "Angry Young Man" writers like John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, and Harold Pinter.

The most productive of these filmmakers during this time was Tony Richardson. Although like the rest of his contemporaries he eventually moved on to more mainstream projects, he directed no less than five notable British New Wave films between 1959 and 1963, when he won an Oscar for directing Tom Jones. The classic films of the British New Wave focus on alienated young men played by the likes of Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Tom Courtenay. Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) is one of the few films to come out of the movement whose main character is a young woman.

Jo (Rita Tushingham) is a dreamy, introverted teenager in her last year at school who lives with her mother in a dreary flat in the industrial north of England. Her mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), is an irresponsible, unemployed, depressed woman nearing the wrong side of forty and just beginning a relationship with a somewhat younger man, Peter (Robert Stephens). Jo and her mother have a curious relationship based on a kind of role reversal in which Jo tries to moderate her mother's excesses (cigarettes, booze, too many late nights down the pub, and a string of unsatisfactory short-term relationships) while clinging to her for emotional support. The first half of the movie concentrates on their sometimes pathetic, sometimes quite funny relationship. When Peter asks Helen to marry him and makes it clear that he has no intention of accepting Jo along with her, Helen chooses to marry Peter and leave Jo behind. As her mother prepares for a new life, Jo, rightly feeling emotionally abandoned, begins a romance of her own—her first—with a gentle, likable black cook on a ship temporarily in port.

The second half of the movie finds Helen married and Jo living on her own. Having left school and set up house in a flat in the upstairs of a large warehouse, Jo works as a sales clerk in a shoe store, where she meets a young gay man, Geoff (Murray Melvin), with whom she later strikes up a friendship. Geoff, who has been evicted by his landlady after she surprised him in bed with another man, eventually moves in with Jo, and after Jo realizes she is pregnant by her sailor, the two develop a platonic relationship based on their own kind of role reversal. The good-natured Geoff fusses around the flat decorating, housekeeping, and cosseting Jo during her pregnancy and making plans to care for the baby after it is born while Jo sinks into lethargy and sullenness. Just as they seem to be working through their problems toward some kind of stable, family-like living arrangement, Helen turns up, asserting her maternal rights and threatening to break up her daughter's newly forged alternative family.

Like Richardson's first two films, Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer (both written by John Osborne), A Taste of Honey is based on a play, written by Lancashire-born Shelagh Delaney when she was just eighteen years old. But if you weren't aware in advance that the source of the film is a stage play, you probably wouldn't know it from watching the movie. Richardson and Delaney worked together to adapt the play for the screen, and they clearly did a great deal more than the conventional "opening up" of a stage work by moving a few scenes outdoors. The play takes place mostly in the one small flat seen at the beginning of the film, and one thing Richardson and Delaney did was move the second half of the film to a new flat Jo rents after Helen leaves. This light-filled place, with its open spaces and wall of windows, makes quite a contrast with the dark, shabby flat of the beginning, so cramped that Jo and Helen must share a bed. The converted factory loft suggests a new, freer, almost bohemian life for Jo, who like Geoff is a talented artist.

Richardson and Delaney also added completely new scenes set outside—a winter day out in Blackpool, a holiday parade in Manchester where Jo meets up with Geoff again followed by an evening at a fun fair, a picnic and visit to nearby caves by Jo and Geoff, the Guy Fawkes Day bonfire at the end of the film in the courtyard of the warehouse where Jo lives. But they do more than just set and film scenes outdoors. Wonderfully assisted by the subtle b&w cinematography of Walter Lassally (he later won an Oscar for Zorba the Greek), they make the drab workaday streets, factories, docks, and river in and around Manchester, where the movie was shot, an integral part of the film in a way no stage play can. The result is to plunge the viewer into the midst of Jo's soul-destroying working-class world, a grim place that pollutes and corrodes the lives and dreams of the young and the not-so-young alike.

As Jo, eighteen-year old Rita Tushingham is just sensational—intelligent, observant, and mindful of the needs of others, a mature soul in a young and inexperienced body. She comes across as emotionally starved without being needy, aware of her own aspirations without being grasping or selfish, sensitive without being weak. She deservedly won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her work here. This was Tushingham's first film role (according to IMDb, she was chosen from among 2,000 actresses who wanted the part), and she went on to become one of the most visible young British actresses of the sixties, along with Julie Christie and Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave, who also first came to prominence in films of the British New Wave.

Helping define the character of Jo are the two people she has close relationships with, her mother in the first half of the film and her roommate Geoff in the second half. Jo's gregarious mother Helen is played by the veteran comic stage and television actress Dora Bryan, who tears into her colorful role with a degree of gusto that contrasts sharply with the underplayed style of Tushingham yet doesn't seem inappropriate for the character. Helen—shallow, mercurial, self-centered—is very much the opposite of her daughter. She lacks the independence and inner maturity of Jo, yet precisely because of her essential weakness she comes across mostly sympathetically, not the caricatured harridan she might easily have been. She seems genuinely to care for Jo but to lack the selflessness and consistency of character that would allow her to relate to Jo in a truly maternal way. Even though her part is really more a supporting one than a lead, Bryan received the BAFTA award as best actress.

Murray Melvin, the only cast member to have appeared in the original London stage production, makes an equally able foil for Jo in the second half of the film. Delaney has said that one of the things that motivated her to write A Taste of Honey was the dishonesty of the portrayal of gay characters in theater and literature. In Geoff she certainly created a character conceived with great respect and sympathy. It's true that Jo's sailor boyfriend is also depicted quite sympathetically, but the way he cares for Jo is more casual than the way Geoff does. Geoff cares for Jo not only because it is in his nature but because he feels a deep personal connection to her as another outsider coping with being a social misfit. Melvin, who like Tushingham received a best acting award at Cannes, makes Geoff a very poignant character indeed. At the end of the film, after he has been pushed out of Jo's life by Helen and seen his dreams of finding a place of permanent security vanish, he stands in the shadows of the courtyard, forlornly watching Jo by the light of the bonfire. It's a sobering and heartbreaking moment that makes us realize that while Jo at least has an imperfect future ahead of her, Geoff's future seems wholly devoid of hope.

A Taste of Honey is a first-rate film in all respects and a very intelligent one to boot. It's difficult to believe that a movie with such insight into its characters' emotions and moods, and so aware of the power their environment has over them, is the product of the imagination of an eighteen-year old writer. It's a melancholic film that treats its melancholy in neither an overly intellectual nor an overly sentimental way and is all the more moving for its temperate view of the essential sadness of life.

Tony Richardson's other British New Wave films are well worth checking out: Look Back in Anger (1959) with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom; The Entertainer (1960) with Laurence Olivier and a slew of up-and-coming young British actors, including Olivier's future wife, Joan Plowright (she played Jo in the Broadway production of A Taste of Honey and Angela Lansbury played Helen); The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) with Tom Courtenay and Michael Redgrave, maybe the best of Richardson's British New Wave films; and Tom Jones (1963) with Albert Finney, the movie that signaled Richardson's transition to mainstream filmmaking but still shows British New Wave influence in its exuberant style and screenplay by John Osborne. Other key performances by Rita Tushingham are in The Girl with Green Eyes (1964) with Peter Finch and Lynn Redgrave and directed by A Taste of Honey's camera operator Desmond Davis, very good in an atypically shrewish role in The Leather Boys (1964), and in Richard Lester's The Knack (1965) with Michael Crawford. Trivia note: the assistant director of A Taste of Honey was Peter Yates, who later became a noted director in his own right (Bullitt, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Breaking Away, The Dresser).

Hunger (1966)

2011-03-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

****
Country: Denmark-Norway-Sweden
Director: Henning Carlsen

One doesn't have to be mad just because one is sensitive. There are people who live on trifles and die because of a harsh word.

The main character and narrator of the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel Hunger is one of the great outsider figures of literature, ranking in importance right alongside Dostoevsky's Underground Man, Kafka's Gregor Samsa, and Camus's Meursault. In the 1966 film version of the novel, this character, who is unnamed in the novel, is called Pontus and is played by the Swedish actor Per Oscarsson. In adapting Hamsun's book for film, Henning Carlsen, who directed the movie, and his cowriter, the Danish novelist and playwright Peter Seeberg, faced a number of daunting challenges. Yet in the end they succeeded in the nearly impossible task of creating a film that preserves the themes and atmosphere of the book and is at the same time fully cinematic.

One of the biggest challenges they faced was that the novel has no conventional narrative arc of rising and falling action. Its story is less a plot than an accumulation of incidents that impart a mood, a state of mind, an idiosyncratic sense of reality. The film follows a few days in the life of Pontus in Christiania, modern-day Oslo. Pontus is an aspiring writer so poor that he cannot pay his rent, can barely afford paper and a pencil to write with, and hasn't eaten for at least several days. His hunger has begun to affect his ability to write and to make rational decisions. As he becomes more desperate, his behavior becomes more erratic. As his behavior grows more bizarre, he is ridiculed, taken advantage of, and pushed more and more to the fringes of society.

The film is framed as a series of incidents that give us a picture of the the world Pontus lives in, the inner workings of his mind, and the way his personality responds to the environment around him. For several days Pontus wanders around the city attempting to organize his life but never seeming to make any progress. Like a person caught in a whirlpool, he goes around and around, returning time and again to the same point. He tries to raise money by looking for work, always unsuccessfully, by repeatedly trying to pawn his few remaining possessions—even his eyeglasses and the clothing he is wearing—to a pawnbroker who tells him he is not interested, and by repeated visits to a newspaper to sell an article he has written. Evicted from his room for not paying the rent, he spends a night on a park bench, rents another room with the promise to pay for it the next day, then after he can't pay the rent spends a hellish night in his landlady's apartment silently observing her family mistreat and psychologically torment one another. He tries to find food but cannot bring himself to eat at a beggars' kitchen and is finally reduced to getting a soup bone at an abattoir, saying it is for his dog, then gnaws ravenously at the raw bone before vomiting. From time to time, he returns to the same bridge, where he leans over the rail staring silently at the water below. It's a recurrent image that strikingly illustrates the futility and repetition of his life.

As he wanders about, Pontus accosts strangers, haranguing a policeman then meekly skulking off before he can be arrested as a drunkard or madman. He befriends a man sitting on a park bench before changing tack without warning and hostilely berating him. He stalks a pair of young women strolling in the park, cavorting around them and verbally teasing them, then following them to a restaurant. He becomes fixated on one of these women, whom he calls Ylajali (Gunnel Lindblom, who appeared in several of Ingmar Bergman's films), as a sort of fantasy projection of an idealized love object. When he later meets her in the street and she invites him to her house, he has a romantic encounter that appears to be leading to sex but ends abruptly when she gets cold feet. This encounter seems to epitomize everything that happens to him: Any opportunity that appears to be leading somewhere becomes a dead end. Any attempt to connect with the world around him leads to rejection.

Director Carlsen and cinematographer Henning Kristiansen (he also photographed Babette's Feast) worked hard to get the right look for the film. In interviews, Carlsen has said he wanted to avoid the glamor of period pictures, one reason he chose to film in b&w rather than color. In one scene Pontus is filmed walking down a street, and the scene has the typical look of one photographed with a telephoto lens. Carlsen says he tried this because he wanted to convey the idea of Pontus moving but not really getting anywhere. After seeing the test shots for this scene, he and the cinematographer realized that the telephoto lens gave the city the look they were after and decided to shoot the entire movie with extra-long lenses. This gives the film a harsh, dense look that emphasizes the glassy opacity of the water, the oppressive grayness of the sky, and especially the hardness of the cobbled streets, iron railings, and brickwork and woodwork of the buildings. The effect is to make the world around Pontus look cold and inhospitable, a grim, hopeless place that seems determined to isolate him and slowly wear him down.

But the one thing above all else that holds Hunger together is the remarkable lead performance by Per Oscarsson, who won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival and from the National Society of Film Critics. The novel the film is based on is a first-person narrative less concerned with external events than with the personality of the narrator. This almost wholly internalized style of writing is surely the most difficult to adapt for the screen. Because movies must show everything from the outside, there are only a limited number of ways the writer and director can suggest that the world around a character is being shown from a subjective point of view. Two of the most common ways of dealing with this limitation are to show the character's delusions as hallucinations and to use voice-over narration. In Hunger Carlsen does neither. Aside from the selection of incidents in the screenplay, he is pretty much dependent on Oscarsson to convey the abnormal personality of Pontus, and Oscarsson delivers the goods in one of the great screen performances.

For one thing, he looks exactly right for the part. His gaunt frame and baggy clothing, the haunted look in his eyes, his alternately baffled and slightly maniacal facial expressions—everything about him expresses the inner intensity of Pontus and his mental dissociation from reality. He always appears edgy, disoriented, and preoccupied, and just a bit dazed from trying to make sense of what he is experiencing. Oscarsson's body language is also exactly right. He looks both rigid and slightly weak from hunger, as though he is exerting immense physical control just to keep going. Aside from those contemplative interludes on the bridge, he is nearly always on the move, and his jerky movements can be startlingly unpredictable. He often sets off in one direction then suddenly stops, turns, and impulsively veers off in another direction. As well as Pontus's steady but unfocused determination, Oscarsson also expertly conveys his perverse sense of humor. I sometimes found myself almost unwillingly laughing out loud at his outrageous verbal tirades.

Pontus is a victim of life defiantly trying to maintain his dignity in a cold and confusing world. Conspicuously lacking in social skills, he seems unable to gauge the feelings of others accurately or to respond to them appropriately. His mood can change from aggressive to obsequious in an instant. As hard as he tries to be accepted and appreciated, he does self-defeating things that quickly snowball into situations which actually prevent this. When his article is accepted by the editor of the newspaper with the proviso that he revise it within twenty-four hours, he is too proud to accept the sympathetic editor's offer of an advance on his payment. Because of this, he can't pay the rent he has promised the landlady of his new lodgings and again finds himself evicted. So he tries to revise his article on the street, using a streetlamp for light. Then along comes Ylajali and, distracted by her, he is unable to finish his article, the one thing that has kept him going for the entire film. In the end, he simply abandons his life in Christiania and signs on as a crewman on a ship leaving for a Baltic port.

Pontus's hunger can be viewed in a number of ways. His physical hunger befuddles his judgment and is at least in part responsible for his peculiar behavior and impetuous decisions. His hunger for love drives his obsession with the girl he calls Ylajali. His hunger for his art motivates him to sacrifice everything else, even food and shelter, to keep writing and to get his work into print. On the most fundamental level, though—and I think this is what gives both the novel and the movie their profound resonance—is Pontus's spiritual hunger to find meaning in life and his dread that no matter how hard he looks, there is no sustenance to be found, only the perpetual motion of an endless, fruitless search.