Here was another trap he was falling into, that of the spouse who thinks to compensate for his unfaithfulness by performing small selfless services for the betrayed one.
Ruth Rendell, The Girl Next Door (Scribner, 2014)
"I knew a couple of jokes that made you laugh."
Barkley Cooper to his wife of 50 years in Make Way for Tomorrow (Paramount,1937)
The difference between Rendell's book and McCarey's film -- both about marriage -- is the difference between the today of common divorce and the time when divorce was rare. Make Way for Tomorrow, however, is very much relevant today, as the Coopers lose their house to the bank (Social Security had not yet been fully implemented) and are shuttled around among their five children, none of whom quite want to be bothered with them. Mr. Cooper finally leaves NY for California for health reasons, but since their daughter there does not have room for them both Mrs. Cooper ends up in a nursing home. They relive their honeymoon in NY and say good-bye -- perhaps for good -- at the train station. McCarey has demonstrated his feeling for the importance of marriage in a number of other films, particularly An Affair to Remember (where an older couple gets their last chance to marry and have children) and The Awful Truth (where a couple comes to their senses just before their divorce becomes final). McCarey has a straightforward style -- the camera hardly ever moves except to follow action - that allows behavioral nuances, both funny and moving, to come through with emotional intensity.
McCarey was only in his forties when he made Make Way for Tomorrow, though being younger in no way limited his feeling for those who were older. Ruth Rendell was 84 this year, when The Girl Next Door was published, a finely observed portrait of the different ways people can deal with growing old, some fighting in various ways, some submitting. Her Inspector Wexford has retired and is spending the time reading Gibbon (No Man's Nightingale, 2013), while the characters in her latest book were all very young children in WW II and are now wondering about two severed hands that were recently found in some tunnels they played in when the war was going on. Rendell's stories are less mysteries -- we know from the very beginning who the murderer is -- than finely tuned psychological portraits of those caught in or near violence. The man and woman to whom the hands belonged were killed by the woman's husband, at a time when divorce was unusual and expensive and "living in sin" was highly frowned on. The adults, now in their seventies, who played as children in the tunnels where the hands are found, react in a variety of ways, causing them to question many of their previously cherished beliefs.
Friday, December 19, 2014
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss; Otto Preminger's The Human Factor
The Naked Kiss may be a moral tract, but it uses the cinema for its medium; its virtues rest not on the rightness of its moral but on Fuller's transformation of ethics into aesthetics.
Phil Hardy, Samuel Fuller (Praeger 1970)
Owing to Preminger's objectivity of presentation, we cannot say at any point that he endorses this or that; we can only say that such and such is endorsed by the film.
Robin Wood, The Movie Reader (November Books Limited 1972)
These two films, The Naked Kiss(1964) and The Human Factor(1979), were recently shown on Turner Classic Movies; each film represents an end point for its director. Fuller's austere, corrosive film was his last major work and though he lived for another thirty-four years his few subsequent films (The Big Red One, White Dog, The Street of No Return) were all seriously compromised in one way or another. The Human Factor was Preminger's last film and he struggled to get it made; .he died in 1986. Each film to some extent is a summation of each director's work and each film is minimalist in style, emphasizing moral concerns.
The Naked Kiss stars the iconic Constance Towers who quits life as a prostitute and becomes a nurse in a small town. She becomes engaged to the town's millionaire until she catches him molesting a little girl and kills him. (The naked kiss is the kiss of a pedophile). Fuller's explains his philosophy in Godard's Pierrot Le Fou : "Film is a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word: emotions." The only innocents in Fuller's films are the children, because they have not yet been corrupted, though the adults are working hard to corrupt them. Towers works in the children's ward at the hospital and in one astonishing sequence the children fantasize that they are no longer ill or crippled and can play outside. But the small town where Towers works will not accept that she is reformed and she leaves, just as Fuller left America and worked for years in Europe, after continually exposing the hypocrisy of America during the Cold War (Fuller's major films were made between 1949 and 1964).
The Human Factor is from a Graham Green novel, with screenplay by Tom Stoppard, and, like many of Preminger's films, has a strong Cold War consciousness. Nicol Williamson plays a bureaucratic British spy, Maurice Castle, in the African section of the secret service M16. He is giving information to the Russians because a South African communist helped to get his wife out of Africa. When M16 suspects another agent and kills him Castle continues to give the Russians information about South Africa's plan to use nuclear weapons against its indigenous population. Castle has to flee England, leaving his wife and child behind. Preminger's final film is more subdued in style, with less camera movement and more cuts, than usual. All the characters are in one moral dilemma or another but Castle's is the most severe, with no ideology to guide him, just a concern for individuals.
Phil Hardy, Samuel Fuller (Praeger 1970)
Owing to Preminger's objectivity of presentation, we cannot say at any point that he endorses this or that; we can only say that such and such is endorsed by the film.
Robin Wood, The Movie Reader (November Books Limited 1972)
These two films, The Naked Kiss(1964) and The Human Factor(1979), were recently shown on Turner Classic Movies; each film represents an end point for its director. Fuller's austere, corrosive film was his last major work and though he lived for another thirty-four years his few subsequent films (The Big Red One, White Dog, The Street of No Return) were all seriously compromised in one way or another. The Human Factor was Preminger's last film and he struggled to get it made; .he died in 1986. Each film to some extent is a summation of each director's work and each film is minimalist in style, emphasizing moral concerns.
The Naked Kiss stars the iconic Constance Towers who quits life as a prostitute and becomes a nurse in a small town. She becomes engaged to the town's millionaire until she catches him molesting a little girl and kills him. (The naked kiss is the kiss of a pedophile). Fuller's explains his philosophy in Godard's Pierrot Le Fou : "Film is a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word: emotions." The only innocents in Fuller's films are the children, because they have not yet been corrupted, though the adults are working hard to corrupt them. Towers works in the children's ward at the hospital and in one astonishing sequence the children fantasize that they are no longer ill or crippled and can play outside. But the small town where Towers works will not accept that she is reformed and she leaves, just as Fuller left America and worked for years in Europe, after continually exposing the hypocrisy of America during the Cold War (Fuller's major films were made between 1949 and 1964).
The Human Factor is from a Graham Green novel, with screenplay by Tom Stoppard, and, like many of Preminger's films, has a strong Cold War consciousness. Nicol Williamson plays a bureaucratic British spy, Maurice Castle, in the African section of the secret service M16. He is giving information to the Russians because a South African communist helped to get his wife out of Africa. When M16 suspects another agent and kills him Castle continues to give the Russians information about South Africa's plan to use nuclear weapons against its indigenous population. Castle has to flee England, leaving his wife and child behind. Preminger's final film is more subdued in style, with less camera movement and more cuts, than usual. All the characters are in one moral dilemma or another but Castle's is the most severe, with no ideology to guide him, just a concern for individuals.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
My Upcoming Ballet Performance
I am very much looking forward to dancing to an excerpt from Minkus's La Bayadere on January 17. This will be part of the 92nd St. Y's adult dance performance, where the various classes perform: there will be ballet, jazz, tap, flamenco, modern and other styles. I have done this several times before but not since my daughter was born in 2011. The classes at the Y are quite wonderful and this semester I am taking Dance for the Older Body, a class that is slightly slower and doesn't involve a great deal of jumping. Like most dance courses at the Y, this class is both rigorously serious and a great deal of fun. I have been taking classes at the Y for about twenty years now and started taking ballet classes when I realized that I loved going to the ballet but felt that the dancers on stage were having more fun dancing than I was having watching them.
I first took ballet class at the Columbia University gym, something that took some courage on my part. My sister had taken ballet briefly but the opportunity was not offered to me when I was young. So when I first walked into class I had no idea even what to wear, much less how to stand at the barre or what it meant to flex one's feet! But my teacher was helpful and understanding and I eventually got the hang of it, slowly learning the vocabulary. I gradually realized that even the simplest ballet steps, such as the tendu, could always be better. I have seen people come and go in ballet classes and it is easy to get frustrated -- after all part of the idea of a ballet is to make it look somewhat effortless -- but no matter how much difficulty I am having with a particular step or difficult combination I always find that in each class I can do something, even a simple frappe, a little better than in the previous class. And I have found that ballet classes also involve tremendous concentration, to get the sequences of the steps as well as their execution correct. This concentration means that for an hour and a half one no longer thinks about the difficulties or problems of a particular day, but rather about being a dancer and dancing well.
The idea of performing was at first scary and somewhat intimidating, but when we started to rehearse it quickly became fun, as one begins to become part of a group and work together with other dancers. In my current class we have dancers at all different levels and the choreography for our performance is intensely complicated but without particularly advanced or difficult steps, no pirouettes or jetes. We have been in rehearsal for several weeks now, as we use the steps from our classes in complex combinations. It gives one a new appreciation of choreography and what dancers go through to learn it, and the feeling that classes can actually lead somewhere, as well as being enjoyable ends in themselves.
I first took ballet class at the Columbia University gym, something that took some courage on my part. My sister had taken ballet briefly but the opportunity was not offered to me when I was young. So when I first walked into class I had no idea even what to wear, much less how to stand at the barre or what it meant to flex one's feet! But my teacher was helpful and understanding and I eventually got the hang of it, slowly learning the vocabulary. I gradually realized that even the simplest ballet steps, such as the tendu, could always be better. I have seen people come and go in ballet classes and it is easy to get frustrated -- after all part of the idea of a ballet is to make it look somewhat effortless -- but no matter how much difficulty I am having with a particular step or difficult combination I always find that in each class I can do something, even a simple frappe, a little better than in the previous class. And I have found that ballet classes also involve tremendous concentration, to get the sequences of the steps as well as their execution correct. This concentration means that for an hour and a half one no longer thinks about the difficulties or problems of a particular day, but rather about being a dancer and dancing well.
The idea of performing was at first scary and somewhat intimidating, but when we started to rehearse it quickly became fun, as one begins to become part of a group and work together with other dancers. In my current class we have dancers at all different levels and the choreography for our performance is intensely complicated but without particularly advanced or difficult steps, no pirouettes or jetes. We have been in rehearsal for several weeks now, as we use the steps from our classes in complex combinations. It gives one a new appreciation of choreography and what dancers go through to learn it, and the feeling that classes can actually lead somewhere, as well as being enjoyable ends in themselves.
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus"
A big foaming sea came out of the mist; it made for the ship, roaring wildly, and in its rush it looked as mischievous and discomposing as a madman with an axe.
Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (William Heinemann, 1898).
This storm is the centerpiece of Conrad's novel, as the ship, on its way from India to England, puts it side in the water and the soaked crew waits. In all that crowd of cold and hungry men, waiting wearily for a violent death, not a voice was heard: they were mute, and in somber thoughtfulness listened to the horrible imprecations of the gale.
But suddenly they realize Jimmy Wait, the title character, was missing and they risk their lives to rescue him from his wrecked cabin, where he had retreated to die, being too sick (or pretending to be) to work. Then, after he was rescued and seemed well, the captain confined him to his quarters, which almost precipitated a mutiny.
To me it seems slightly foolish to defend Conrad (or Mark Twain) from racism, since Jimmy is the most fully realized character in the book, much more so than the polyglot crew with their accents and slang. Jimmy rather reminds me of the unfairly maligned Stepin Fetchit, a master of using the perceptions of others to pursue his own ends.
Life on the Narcissus is vividly portrayed and, like the best allegories, functions effectively on the most realistic level. But the ship is like the world and its societies, with the continuing struggle between the authority of the captain and the lives of the crew, as well as the relations of the various nationalities and races (there are no women in the book, though they are spoken of).
The narration of the story is somewhat confusing, with the crew sometimes being "we" and sometimes "they," and the ending is written in the first person. Overall, however, the effect is to cause one to feel one is actually on the storm-tossed ship. And there is plenty of detail about the ship, with a glossary provided in the Penguin edition I have, defining everything from 'baccy to Yellow Jack. What might also have helped would have been a drawing of the ship itself, which one finds in Patrick O'Brian's books about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.
Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (William Heinemann, 1898).
This storm is the centerpiece of Conrad's novel, as the ship, on its way from India to England, puts it side in the water and the soaked crew waits. In all that crowd of cold and hungry men, waiting wearily for a violent death, not a voice was heard: they were mute, and in somber thoughtfulness listened to the horrible imprecations of the gale.
But suddenly they realize Jimmy Wait, the title character, was missing and they risk their lives to rescue him from his wrecked cabin, where he had retreated to die, being too sick (or pretending to be) to work. Then, after he was rescued and seemed well, the captain confined him to his quarters, which almost precipitated a mutiny.
To me it seems slightly foolish to defend Conrad (or Mark Twain) from racism, since Jimmy is the most fully realized character in the book, much more so than the polyglot crew with their accents and slang. Jimmy rather reminds me of the unfairly maligned Stepin Fetchit, a master of using the perceptions of others to pursue his own ends.
Life on the Narcissus is vividly portrayed and, like the best allegories, functions effectively on the most realistic level. But the ship is like the world and its societies, with the continuing struggle between the authority of the captain and the lives of the crew, as well as the relations of the various nationalities and races (there are no women in the book, though they are spoken of).
The narration of the story is somewhat confusing, with the crew sometimes being "we" and sometimes "they," and the ending is written in the first person. Overall, however, the effect is to cause one to feel one is actually on the storm-tossed ship. And there is plenty of detail about the ship, with a glossary provided in the Penguin edition I have, defining everything from 'baccy to Yellow Jack. What might also have helped would have been a drawing of the ship itself, which one finds in Patrick O'Brian's books about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Clouzot's Le Salaire de la Peur and Friedkin's Sorcerer
Both Henri-Georges Clouzot's film (1953) and William Friedkin's 1977 re-make Sorcerer are films that are a part of their time but do not transcend it, mainly because both directors are mostly interested in manipulating the audience and have little to say, other than some reflexive nihilism and anti-Americanism.
The story in Wages of Fear and Sorcerer is the same: some desperate men are hired by American oil interests to drive trucks carrying unstable explosives (four men, two to a truck) three hundred miles on bad roads through deserts and jungles to where the explosives are needed to put out an oil fire. Wages of Fear, a French film, is more in the nature of a black-and-white existential journey -- "yesterday we were like other people" -- while Sorcerer is more of a simple story of desperate men who need money. Clouzot's film starts out in a crummy South American town, where the men who become drivers are trapped for (mostly) mysterious reasons, rather like characters in Sartre or Camus, whereas Friedkin gives more background to his characters, criminals and terrorists on the lam. Friedkin is much more explicitly violent, as he was in The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) while the fear in Clouzot's film is more psychological, as in his Quai des Orfevres (1947) and Diabolique (1955).
The differences between the two films are few but represent the times in which they were made:
In the Clouzot film one truck blows up and all we see is the explosion in the distance; it is neither shown up close nor explained. In Friedkin's film the truck that explodes has a tire blow and the truck goes off a cliff.
In Sorcerer one trucker is killed by rebels, while in the Clouzot he dies trying to help get the truck through an oil spill.
In each film one driver survives: in the Friedkin hit men arrive to kill the survivor, while in the Clouzot the survivor dies in an accident as he drives recklessly in a hurry to get home.
Both films are fatalistic and represent life as hopeless, the French film for philosophical reasons, the American one for practical reasons. Clouzot and Friedkin are both quite skilled in manipulating the viewer and some have compared both directors to Hitchcock. Hitchcock was indeed a manipulator but his films have so much more, as repeated viewings reveal, about the human condition, about love and responsibility, about guilt and the transference of it and, ultimately,about sin and redemption.
The story in Wages of Fear and Sorcerer is the same: some desperate men are hired by American oil interests to drive trucks carrying unstable explosives (four men, two to a truck) three hundred miles on bad roads through deserts and jungles to where the explosives are needed to put out an oil fire. Wages of Fear, a French film, is more in the nature of a black-and-white existential journey -- "yesterday we were like other people" -- while Sorcerer is more of a simple story of desperate men who need money. Clouzot's film starts out in a crummy South American town, where the men who become drivers are trapped for (mostly) mysterious reasons, rather like characters in Sartre or Camus, whereas Friedkin gives more background to his characters, criminals and terrorists on the lam. Friedkin is much more explicitly violent, as he was in The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) while the fear in Clouzot's film is more psychological, as in his Quai des Orfevres (1947) and Diabolique (1955).
The differences between the two films are few but represent the times in which they were made:
In the Clouzot film one truck blows up and all we see is the explosion in the distance; it is neither shown up close nor explained. In Friedkin's film the truck that explodes has a tire blow and the truck goes off a cliff.
In Sorcerer one trucker is killed by rebels, while in the Clouzot he dies trying to help get the truck through an oil spill.
In each film one driver survives: in the Friedkin hit men arrive to kill the survivor, while in the Clouzot the survivor dies in an accident as he drives recklessly in a hurry to get home.
Both films are fatalistic and represent life as hopeless, the French film for philosophical reasons, the American one for practical reasons. Clouzot and Friedkin are both quite skilled in manipulating the viewer and some have compared both directors to Hitchcock. Hitchcock was indeed a manipulator but his films have so much more, as repeated viewings reveal, about the human condition, about love and responsibility, about guilt and the transference of it and, ultimately,about sin and redemption.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Michael Connelly's The Burning Room
Whether it was love or just a base human desire that he had followed, his choices had taken him into the dark waters where politics and murder swirl.
Michael Connelly, The Burning Room (Little, Brown and Company,2014).
I have been reading Connelly since I discovered him almost twenty years ago at the now-departed Foul Play on Greenwich Avenue. This is the seventeenth Bosch novel and though Bosch is usually called Harry, his actual first name is Hieronymous, after the 15th C. painter who depicted heaven, earth and hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights, now in The Prado in Madrid, where one can spend hours looking at its fascinating detail. Connelly and Bosch in a sense have done a modern version of the Bosch painting, with their depictions of the heaven, earth and hell of contemporary Los Angeles (though the Bosch novels are written in the third person, everything is seen from Bosch's point of view).
Detective Bosch has now put off his retirement and is a participant in DROP, the deferred retirement option plan, as he uses his experience to help new detectives, in this case Spanish-speaking Lucia Soto, who works with Harry in the Open-Unsolved Unit. Part of the beauty of Connolly's series is the increasing use of technology in police work as, for instance, they learn how to "ping" cell phones and follow up, while trying to mollify bosses who seem more interested in keeping to the budget than solving crimes; this level of Connelly's novels is something one can identify with: how to get the job done when the boss is a fool! Connelly's novels are elegantly plotted and written, with an emphasis on character (even the most insignificant characters have a vivid presence) and detail of personality. Bosch, for instance is a big fan of jazz and listens often to the likes of Ron Carter.
One of the most significant characters in the Bosch novels is the city of Los Angeles itself, with which Bosch has a love-hate relationship, just as Philip Marlowe did in Raymond Chandler's novels of the 40's, which paint as vivid a picture of the City of Angels then as Connelly's do now.
Incidentally, one of Amazon's TV pilots is Bosch: Titus Welliver was effectively low-key in the title role; the pilot was co-written by Connolly (based on early Bosch novels) and directed by veteran Jim McKay, who directed episodes of The Good Wife and In Treatment.
Michael Connelly, The Burning Room (Little, Brown and Company,2014).
I have been reading Connelly since I discovered him almost twenty years ago at the now-departed Foul Play on Greenwich Avenue. This is the seventeenth Bosch novel and though Bosch is usually called Harry, his actual first name is Hieronymous, after the 15th C. painter who depicted heaven, earth and hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights, now in The Prado in Madrid, where one can spend hours looking at its fascinating detail. Connelly and Bosch in a sense have done a modern version of the Bosch painting, with their depictions of the heaven, earth and hell of contemporary Los Angeles (though the Bosch novels are written in the third person, everything is seen from Bosch's point of view).
Detective Bosch has now put off his retirement and is a participant in DROP, the deferred retirement option plan, as he uses his experience to help new detectives, in this case Spanish-speaking Lucia Soto, who works with Harry in the Open-Unsolved Unit. Part of the beauty of Connolly's series is the increasing use of technology in police work as, for instance, they learn how to "ping" cell phones and follow up, while trying to mollify bosses who seem more interested in keeping to the budget than solving crimes; this level of Connelly's novels is something one can identify with: how to get the job done when the boss is a fool! Connelly's novels are elegantly plotted and written, with an emphasis on character (even the most insignificant characters have a vivid presence) and detail of personality. Bosch, for instance is a big fan of jazz and listens often to the likes of Ron Carter.
One of the most significant characters in the Bosch novels is the city of Los Angeles itself, with which Bosch has a love-hate relationship, just as Philip Marlowe did in Raymond Chandler's novels of the 40's, which paint as vivid a picture of the City of Angels then as Connelly's do now.
Incidentally, one of Amazon's TV pilots is Bosch: Titus Welliver was effectively low-key in the title role; the pilot was co-written by Connolly (based on early Bosch novels) and directed by veteran Jim McKay, who directed episodes of The Good Wife and In Treatment.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Turner Classic Movies in Dec.
For Christmas with humor and no mawkishness I recommend the following on TCM this coming month:
Remember the Night.(Dec.5) It is directed by Mitch Leisen and written by the brilliant Preston Sturges. DA Fred MacMuray takes shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck home to Indiana and then, when her mother throws her out as "no good" he takes her to his own home.
Shop Around the Corner. (Dec. 11) Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, it's a charming and moving story about shop employees at holiday time.
Meet Me in St. Louis.(Dec. 5) Vincente Minnelli's wonderful musical, highlighted by Judy Garland's rendition of the (ironic) Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
John Ford's Three Godfathers.(Dec. 25) This is the third (and best) film version of this story of three Western outlaws as the three wise men. It has typically beautiful exterior shots, not of Ford's usual Monument Valley location.
An Affair to Remember. (Dec. 8) Leo's McCarey's remake of Love Affair (on Turner Dec. 15), with an older Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant and their last chance for love.
Also in December:
McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (Dec. 8) an unusual and unflinching view of growing older together.
Three extraordinary and uncompromising films about the dark side of America: Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (Dec.2), Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place.(both Dec. 3)
Three fine, funny and poignant silent films: Chaplin's City Lights and The Kid (both Dec. 17); Buster Keaton's magnificent The Cameraman (Dec 14).
A charming chamber musical, Don Weis's I Love Melvin.(Dec.4)
Raoul Walsh's great, intensive war film Objective Burma.(Dec.9)
And several films by Otto Preminger, the favorite of mine being Advise and Consent, one of the best films about the compromises of politics, filmed in elegant long takes in widescreen black-and-white.(Dec. 5)
Remember the Night.(Dec.5) It is directed by Mitch Leisen and written by the brilliant Preston Sturges. DA Fred MacMuray takes shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck home to Indiana and then, when her mother throws her out as "no good" he takes her to his own home.
Shop Around the Corner. (Dec. 11) Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, it's a charming and moving story about shop employees at holiday time.
Meet Me in St. Louis.(Dec. 5) Vincente Minnelli's wonderful musical, highlighted by Judy Garland's rendition of the (ironic) Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
John Ford's Three Godfathers.(Dec. 25) This is the third (and best) film version of this story of three Western outlaws as the three wise men. It has typically beautiful exterior shots, not of Ford's usual Monument Valley location.
An Affair to Remember. (Dec. 8) Leo's McCarey's remake of Love Affair (on Turner Dec. 15), with an older Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant and their last chance for love.
Also in December:
McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (Dec. 8) an unusual and unflinching view of growing older together.
Three extraordinary and uncompromising films about the dark side of America: Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (Dec.2), Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place.(both Dec. 3)
Three fine, funny and poignant silent films: Chaplin's City Lights and The Kid (both Dec. 17); Buster Keaton's magnificent The Cameraman (Dec 14).
A charming chamber musical, Don Weis's I Love Melvin.(Dec.4)
Raoul Walsh's great, intensive war film Objective Burma.(Dec.9)
And several films by Otto Preminger, the favorite of mine being Advise and Consent, one of the best films about the compromises of politics, filmed in elegant long takes in widescreen black-and-white.(Dec. 5)
Friday, November 21, 2014
Alias the Doctor and Hong Kong Confidential
Michael Curtiz's Alias the Doctor (1932) and Edward L. Cahn's Hong Kong Confidential (1958) both played recently on Turner Classic Movies. Both films are just a bit longer than 60 minutes and demonstrate their experienced directors' ability to tell a story visually and compactly.
Alias the Doctor was one of five films that Curtiz directed in 1932 as he honed his craft after leaving his native Hungary to work in Austria and Germany before coming to America. Curtiz and his staff, particularly Polish-born art director Anton Grot, made Alias the Doctor a beautiful combination of emotional story-telling and expressionistic visuals. It stars Richard Barthelmess, a silent star who faltered in the sound era but remained an effectively brooding presence throughout the thirties. In the Curtiz film he plays a doctor who takes the fall for his adopted brother's medical mistakes and ends up saving his mother's life after he is caught practicing without a license. Barthelmess, who starred in films such as Way Down East(1920) for director D.W. Griffith, effectively captures the Griffith view of the beauty and simplicity of the rural life, as he eventually returns to farming and the woman he loves.
Hong Kong Confidential was one of five films that Edward L. Cahn directed in 1958. it stars Gene Barry, who was also good that year in Samuel Fuller's China Gate, and the film is as impressionistic as the Curtiz is expressionistic, i.e., Hong Kong is created with a handful of actors and a few signs. Cahn had been directing films since the thirties (his best film, of the ones that I know, is the Earp Western Law and Order, 1932) and could turn out taut melodramas quickly (he had started as an editor). Barry plays a federal agent who is a lounge singer for cover and is trying to find a kidnapped Middle Eastern prince, whom the commies are holding hostage until the prince's father signs a treaty with Russia. The bad girl is played by the exotic Allison Hayes, who at the time was starring with Barry in the TV show Bat Masterson.
Both the Curtiz film and the Cahn could be considered B films, made to play on double bills with more expensive productions with longer running times. Curtiz would later graduate to A films such as Casablanca (1942) after he had learned his craft, but Cahn always stuck with B films, working fast and efficiently, well into the 60's.
Alias the Doctor was one of five films that Curtiz directed in 1932 as he honed his craft after leaving his native Hungary to work in Austria and Germany before coming to America. Curtiz and his staff, particularly Polish-born art director Anton Grot, made Alias the Doctor a beautiful combination of emotional story-telling and expressionistic visuals. It stars Richard Barthelmess, a silent star who faltered in the sound era but remained an effectively brooding presence throughout the thirties. In the Curtiz film he plays a doctor who takes the fall for his adopted brother's medical mistakes and ends up saving his mother's life after he is caught practicing without a license. Barthelmess, who starred in films such as Way Down East(1920) for director D.W. Griffith, effectively captures the Griffith view of the beauty and simplicity of the rural life, as he eventually returns to farming and the woman he loves.
Hong Kong Confidential was one of five films that Edward L. Cahn directed in 1958. it stars Gene Barry, who was also good that year in Samuel Fuller's China Gate, and the film is as impressionistic as the Curtiz is expressionistic, i.e., Hong Kong is created with a handful of actors and a few signs. Cahn had been directing films since the thirties (his best film, of the ones that I know, is the Earp Western Law and Order, 1932) and could turn out taut melodramas quickly (he had started as an editor). Barry plays a federal agent who is a lounge singer for cover and is trying to find a kidnapped Middle Eastern prince, whom the commies are holding hostage until the prince's father signs a treaty with Russia. The bad girl is played by the exotic Allison Hayes, who at the time was starring with Barry in the TV show Bat Masterson.
Both the Curtiz film and the Cahn could be considered B films, made to play on double bills with more expensive productions with longer running times. Curtiz would later graduate to A films such as Casablanca (1942) after he had learned his craft, but Cahn always stuck with B films, working fast and efficiently, well into the 60's.
Friday, November 14, 2014
He Who Gets Slapped
He Who Gets Slapped was made in 1924, directed by Victor Seastrom and starring Lon Chaney. These names are not well-known these days but the Swedish Seastrom was one of the great directors of the silent era and Lon Chaney one of the great actors. Chaney plays a scientist, Paul Beaumont, whose discoveries and wife were stolen by his patron Baron Regnard, who slapped him in front of his laughing fellow scientists. The humiliated Beaumont became the masochistic clown known as He Who Gets Slapped, and was slapped in the circus every day for laughs for an audience (as a title says) of the "idle, ignorant and vicious." Beaumont falls in love with a bareback rider whose father tries to sell her to Regnard and Beaumont releases a lion to kill Regnard and the father, sacrificing his own life in the process.
I saw this film again recently on Turner Classic Movies, one of the few places where one can see silent films on a regular basis. I wish they could show more silent films (some think they are the artistic peak of filmmaking) but only about 20% of the films made during the silent era (before 1929) even survive, mainly because the nitrate stock on which they were printed can deteriorate rapidly and by the time people realized the value of these films and started to transfer them to safety stock many of them were already lost. Of course nitrate stock produced a beautiful image, as those of us who have seen D.W.. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) on its original nitrate stock can attest; I saw it at The Museum of Modern Art, which has a special dispensation from the fire department to show the extremely flammable nitrate.
There are many misconceptions about silent films. Some think, based on what they have seen on TV, that they are herky-jerky. Sound films are projected at a uniform speed of 24 frames per second, but silent films were often filmed with hand-cranked cameras and projected at various speeds. Generally, 16 frames per second is an acceptable speed for silent films, but MoMA does have a variable speed projector that they use when they have cue sheets from the original showings that give the various speeds (as they did for the extraordinary series of all of Griffith's films in 1976, the 100th anniversary of his birth). Also, there is sometimes not the necessary attention there should be to the music that accompanies these films. MoMA and Film Forum usually do use a live piano player, as was the case originally (though big-city showings would often use full orchestras) while Turner often commissions scores for the silent films they show, so if you don't like the score you can turn off the sound. Many of the great classical directors --Ford, Hitchcock, Lang, Vidor, Lubitsch, Renoir -- started in the silent era, learning to tell stories visually.
He Who Gets Slapped is a lovely film and, like most silent films is considerably influenced by Griffith: the clown holding a spinning globe between scenes reminds one of Lillian Gish rocking the cradle between scenes in Intolerance; Seastrom also captures "the wind in the trees" beautifully, as lovers Norma Shearer and John Gilbert escape the corrupt circus to picnic in the country. And Lon Chaney brings a subtlety to his low-key and powerful performance, this subtlety one of Griffith's major contributions to film, discarding the excesses of the theatre.
I saw this film again recently on Turner Classic Movies, one of the few places where one can see silent films on a regular basis. I wish they could show more silent films (some think they are the artistic peak of filmmaking) but only about 20% of the films made during the silent era (before 1929) even survive, mainly because the nitrate stock on which they were printed can deteriorate rapidly and by the time people realized the value of these films and started to transfer them to safety stock many of them were already lost. Of course nitrate stock produced a beautiful image, as those of us who have seen D.W.. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) on its original nitrate stock can attest; I saw it at The Museum of Modern Art, which has a special dispensation from the fire department to show the extremely flammable nitrate.
There are many misconceptions about silent films. Some think, based on what they have seen on TV, that they are herky-jerky. Sound films are projected at a uniform speed of 24 frames per second, but silent films were often filmed with hand-cranked cameras and projected at various speeds. Generally, 16 frames per second is an acceptable speed for silent films, but MoMA does have a variable speed projector that they use when they have cue sheets from the original showings that give the various speeds (as they did for the extraordinary series of all of Griffith's films in 1976, the 100th anniversary of his birth). Also, there is sometimes not the necessary attention there should be to the music that accompanies these films. MoMA and Film Forum usually do use a live piano player, as was the case originally (though big-city showings would often use full orchestras) while Turner often commissions scores for the silent films they show, so if you don't like the score you can turn off the sound. Many of the great classical directors --Ford, Hitchcock, Lang, Vidor, Lubitsch, Renoir -- started in the silent era, learning to tell stories visually.
He Who Gets Slapped is a lovely film and, like most silent films is considerably influenced by Griffith: the clown holding a spinning globe between scenes reminds one of Lillian Gish rocking the cradle between scenes in Intolerance; Seastrom also captures "the wind in the trees" beautifully, as lovers Norma Shearer and John Gilbert escape the corrupt circus to picnic in the country. And Lon Chaney brings a subtlety to his low-key and powerful performance, this subtlety one of Griffith's major contributions to film, discarding the excesses of the theatre.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Only Angels Have Wings
Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Columbia), directed by Howard Hawks, is a film I saw at the Museum of Modern Art when I first started looking at movies seriously. It is fast-moving, intelligently written by Jules Furthman (who wrote a number of Von Sternberg films, as well as other Hawks films) and beautifully directed in the dialogue as well as the action scenes. It can be seen as part of a series of civilian airplane films of the 30's (including John Ford's Air Mail, 1932) as well as a superb example of the Hawksian world, where men bond together in dangerous situations, while allowing women only if "they are good enough."
Jean Arthur plays Bonnie and bonds with the men when she arrives in the South American town of Barranca just as Joe, a flyer for Geoff's (played by Cary Grant) airline crashes and Geoff eats the steak cooked for Joe. When Bonnie complains that that was Joe's steak Geoff says, "What do you want me to do, stuff it?" Bonnie works hard to suppress her emotions so she can be one of the boys, though even Geoff cries when his best friend, the Kid, dies in a crash. Things get intense when a former lover of Geoff's (played by a young Rita Hayworth) arrives on the scene with her disgraced current husband, who had jumped out of a plane and left the mechanic to die. But her husband redeems himself as a flyer and Bonnie stays with Geoff, though the future remains uncertain.
The film was shown at the estimable Film Forum in a restored 4K print, which is the highest resolution digital format, In many ways the film looked gorgeous, with crisp blacks and whites and subtle shades of grey. I still contend, however, that even the best digital restorations do not have quite the beauty and warmth of true 35 mm. film, just as compact disks don't have the warmth of vinyl, though I think this is a price we have to pay in order for these films to survive at all. At least it's much better than the crummy 16 mm. dupes we once were regularly subjected to.
When I first saw this film forty years ago I found the Hawksian world of professionalism appealing, but now it seems, at least in some ways, a retreat from responsibility; the world of Only Angels Have Wings is an isolated one. I saw this film with my sixteen-year-old son who said, when I asked him, that he did not find some of the plot contrivances corny because they were so effectively done. He also said he much prefers to see films in theatres because the best directors, such as Hawks, created their own worlds and that when one watches their films on TV one's own world can be a distraction.
Jean Arthur plays Bonnie and bonds with the men when she arrives in the South American town of Barranca just as Joe, a flyer for Geoff's (played by Cary Grant) airline crashes and Geoff eats the steak cooked for Joe. When Bonnie complains that that was Joe's steak Geoff says, "What do you want me to do, stuff it?" Bonnie works hard to suppress her emotions so she can be one of the boys, though even Geoff cries when his best friend, the Kid, dies in a crash. Things get intense when a former lover of Geoff's (played by a young Rita Hayworth) arrives on the scene with her disgraced current husband, who had jumped out of a plane and left the mechanic to die. But her husband redeems himself as a flyer and Bonnie stays with Geoff, though the future remains uncertain.
The film was shown at the estimable Film Forum in a restored 4K print, which is the highest resolution digital format, In many ways the film looked gorgeous, with crisp blacks and whites and subtle shades of grey. I still contend, however, that even the best digital restorations do not have quite the beauty and warmth of true 35 mm. film, just as compact disks don't have the warmth of vinyl, though I think this is a price we have to pay in order for these films to survive at all. At least it's much better than the crummy 16 mm. dupes we once were regularly subjected to.
When I first saw this film forty years ago I found the Hawksian world of professionalism appealing, but now it seems, at least in some ways, a retreat from responsibility; the world of Only Angels Have Wings is an isolated one. I saw this film with my sixteen-year-old son who said, when I asked him, that he did not find some of the plot contrivances corny because they were so effectively done. He also said he much prefers to see films in theatres because the best directors, such as Hawks, created their own worlds and that when one watches their films on TV one's own world can be a distraction.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Middlemarch
Middlemarch consistently pokes through to the disorder that lies at the heart of a seemingly orderly society.
Frederick R. Karl, George Eliot: Voice of a Century (W.W. Norton and Company, 1995)
The necessary part of great intellectual powers in such a success as Middlemarch is obvious. The sub-title of the book is A Study of Provincial Life, and it is no idle pretension. The sheer informedness about society, its mechanism, the way in which people of different classes live and (if they have to) earn their livelihoods, impresses us with its range, and it is real knowledge; that is, it is knowledge alive with understanding.
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (NYU Press, 1969)
Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin, 1871).
I must admit I find it a bit hard to understand why some people find Middlemarch intimidating. Surely it can't be the length, since that has not stopped the popularity of Donna Tartt's The Gold Finch, at 775 pages (the Penguin edition of Middlemarch is 896 pages) . Is it the politics of the first reform bill in England? But that plays only a very small part, and English politics does not seem to keep readers away from Trollope. Perhaps the characters are too complex and the plotting too diffuse, especially after the scholar Casaubon dies midway through the book. I have found an effective way to read Eliot, i.e., read a minimum of a chapter a day. Most days I read more than one chapter but having a minimum kept me involved with admittedly complex characters in a complex plot. I think there is also something of a paradox at work, in that Masterpiece Theatre productions have led some people to the books being filmed but also have distanced people from them, causing them to think that these characters who drive horse-drawn carriages instead of motorcars are different from us. But many of the characters in Middlemarch are not so different from those in small towns today:
Tertius Lydgate is a doctor who wants to be a great scientist, but also wants to make money to support his status-driven wife, Rosamond. His gradual descent into bankruptcy is vividly portrayed.
Dorothea Brooke is an ambitious woman who finds that the most important thing she can do is marry the older Edward Casaubon and support his work on The Key to All Mythologies. When Casaubon dies with the marriage apparently unconsummated, she marries the young and passionate Will Ladislaw, who had mocked Casaubon's "mouldy futilities."
Dorothea's sister Celia has a traditional and happy marriage.
The feckless Fred Vincy is finally able to obtain a job he likes and wed Mary Garth.
Mr. Bulstrode is blackmailed for his youthful indiscretions by the seedy Raffles, in a subplot that reminds one of Wilkie Collins.
Mr. Featherstone dies and his will causes havoc in Middlemarch, as does Casaubon's.
Woven within the stories of these characters are parents, relatives, tradesmen, clergymen and the various busybodies of Middlemarch, as beautifully portrayed in physical and psychological detail as the more important characters,
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic -- the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.
Frederick R. Karl, George Eliot: Voice of a Century (W.W. Norton and Company, 1995)
The necessary part of great intellectual powers in such a success as Middlemarch is obvious. The sub-title of the book is A Study of Provincial Life, and it is no idle pretension. The sheer informedness about society, its mechanism, the way in which people of different classes live and (if they have to) earn their livelihoods, impresses us with its range, and it is real knowledge; that is, it is knowledge alive with understanding.
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (NYU Press, 1969)
Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin, 1871).
I must admit I find it a bit hard to understand why some people find Middlemarch intimidating. Surely it can't be the length, since that has not stopped the popularity of Donna Tartt's The Gold Finch, at 775 pages (the Penguin edition of Middlemarch is 896 pages) . Is it the politics of the first reform bill in England? But that plays only a very small part, and English politics does not seem to keep readers away from Trollope. Perhaps the characters are too complex and the plotting too diffuse, especially after the scholar Casaubon dies midway through the book. I have found an effective way to read Eliot, i.e., read a minimum of a chapter a day. Most days I read more than one chapter but having a minimum kept me involved with admittedly complex characters in a complex plot. I think there is also something of a paradox at work, in that Masterpiece Theatre productions have led some people to the books being filmed but also have distanced people from them, causing them to think that these characters who drive horse-drawn carriages instead of motorcars are different from us. But many of the characters in Middlemarch are not so different from those in small towns today:
Tertius Lydgate is a doctor who wants to be a great scientist, but also wants to make money to support his status-driven wife, Rosamond. His gradual descent into bankruptcy is vividly portrayed.
Dorothea Brooke is an ambitious woman who finds that the most important thing she can do is marry the older Edward Casaubon and support his work on The Key to All Mythologies. When Casaubon dies with the marriage apparently unconsummated, she marries the young and passionate Will Ladislaw, who had mocked Casaubon's "mouldy futilities."
Dorothea's sister Celia has a traditional and happy marriage.
The feckless Fred Vincy is finally able to obtain a job he likes and wed Mary Garth.
Mr. Bulstrode is blackmailed for his youthful indiscretions by the seedy Raffles, in a subplot that reminds one of Wilkie Collins.
Mr. Featherstone dies and his will causes havoc in Middlemarch, as does Casaubon's.
Woven within the stories of these characters are parents, relatives, tradesmen, clergymen and the various busybodies of Middlemarch, as beautifully portrayed in physical and psychological detail as the more important characters,
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic -- the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.
Friday, November 7, 2014
Three More Films by Gordon Douglas
Since I wrote about Gordon Douglas last month I have seen three more of his films on Turner Classic Movies and it has become unsurprisingly clear that this protean director was fascinated by questions of identity and one's place in society.
I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) could have been just a crime movie, as the Communist Party was portrayed basically as a group of thugs. (Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, 1953, about communist spies, was changed to a story about drug dealers when it was dubbed into French). The Party is trying to infiltrate the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Matt Cvetic joins as an undercover FBI agent. Only his priest knows the truth and the rest of his family, especially his son, treat him as just "a slimy red." Pittsburgh is beautifully portrayed as a city of fog, rain and smoke, most of the film taking place during the night. Cvetic is a first-generation American who has to pretend that he is something other than what he is and even his neighbor tells him to stop teaching kids about baseball because "baseball is an American game," though the communist rallies have pictures of Washington and Lincoln hanging next to Stalin, while they show contempt for Jews and Negroes. When Cvetic is needed to testify against party members he is finally able to resume his "real" identity as a patriotic American.
Fort Dobbs (1958) and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) are Westerns starring Clint Walker, who played Cheyenne on TV for six years (will there ever be another TV Western?) In both he is photographed from low angles, to make him appear heroic, but in both films he plays a loner who can't stand society because he has no place there. Fort Dobbs was influenced by John Ford's The Searchers (1956); even its score by Max Steiner resembles Steiner's score for the Ford film. Fort Dobbs, however, is shot in beautiful black-and-white, by cinematographer William Clothier, who did the same for Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961). In both films Walker makes something of a return to society by taking a child (Fort Dobbs) or an injured Indian woman (Yellowstone Kelly) in his arms rather in the way Ethan Edwards did at the end of The Searchers.
Both Douglas films are sympathetic to the plight of the Indians, driven from their land by white men; this is common in most A Westerns, where the cavalry does not ride to the rescue but to the destruction of the Native Americans. Both Douglas Westerns were written by Burt Kennedy and have much in common with the Westerns he was writing at around the same time for Budd Boetticher; the showdown in Fort Dobbs between Walker and Brain Keith is very similar to that between Randolph Scott and Claude Akins in the Kennedy/Boetticher Comanche Station (1960). Boetticher had the advantage of Randolph Scott for his lead, but Gordon Douglas was able to get moving performances from Clint Walker by playing him off Virginia Mayo (in Dobbs) and Ed Byrnes (in Yellowstone), who is almost as good as Ricky Nelson was in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959).
I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) could have been just a crime movie, as the Communist Party was portrayed basically as a group of thugs. (Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, 1953, about communist spies, was changed to a story about drug dealers when it was dubbed into French). The Party is trying to infiltrate the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Matt Cvetic joins as an undercover FBI agent. Only his priest knows the truth and the rest of his family, especially his son, treat him as just "a slimy red." Pittsburgh is beautifully portrayed as a city of fog, rain and smoke, most of the film taking place during the night. Cvetic is a first-generation American who has to pretend that he is something other than what he is and even his neighbor tells him to stop teaching kids about baseball because "baseball is an American game," though the communist rallies have pictures of Washington and Lincoln hanging next to Stalin, while they show contempt for Jews and Negroes. When Cvetic is needed to testify against party members he is finally able to resume his "real" identity as a patriotic American.
Fort Dobbs (1958) and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) are Westerns starring Clint Walker, who played Cheyenne on TV for six years (will there ever be another TV Western?) In both he is photographed from low angles, to make him appear heroic, but in both films he plays a loner who can't stand society because he has no place there. Fort Dobbs was influenced by John Ford's The Searchers (1956); even its score by Max Steiner resembles Steiner's score for the Ford film. Fort Dobbs, however, is shot in beautiful black-and-white, by cinematographer William Clothier, who did the same for Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961). In both films Walker makes something of a return to society by taking a child (Fort Dobbs) or an injured Indian woman (Yellowstone Kelly) in his arms rather in the way Ethan Edwards did at the end of The Searchers.
Both Douglas films are sympathetic to the plight of the Indians, driven from their land by white men; this is common in most A Westerns, where the cavalry does not ride to the rescue but to the destruction of the Native Americans. Both Douglas Westerns were written by Burt Kennedy and have much in common with the Westerns he was writing at around the same time for Budd Boetticher; the showdown in Fort Dobbs between Walker and Brain Keith is very similar to that between Randolph Scott and Claude Akins in the Kennedy/Boetticher Comanche Station (1960). Boetticher had the advantage of Randolph Scott for his lead, but Gordon Douglas was able to get moving performances from Clint Walker by playing him off Virginia Mayo (in Dobbs) and Ed Byrnes (in Yellowstone), who is almost as good as Ricky Nelson was in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959).
Thursday, November 6, 2014
The World Series 2014
The 2014 World Series is history and it wasn't a bad series -- the wonderfully named Madison Bumgarner did a great job pitching for San Francisco and the Royals did have the tying run on third in the ninth inning of game 7 -- but it was marred by the lack of radio coverage, the poor quality of the announcers and the ridiculous TV coverage.
I grew up listening to the World Series on radio, especially since most games were broadcast during the day. Not long ago the NY Times used to list not only the TV stations for sports but also the radio stations. That they no longer do this just indicates how increasingly irrelevant radio is in this country. In the case of the World Series this year the radio rights went to ESPN radio, but in New York if there was a Knicks game, a Rangers game or a Jets game those games were broadcast instead; presumably New York fans do not care about the World Series unless the Yankees are in it! Yes, one could find the game on the radio if one really tried, though the stations were not listed in the paper or even on the ESPN website, being broadcast on AM stations 570 and 1170, stations that parts of the NYC area could not even receive! If one did eventually find it on the radio and stayed up past midnight to hear it all, Dick Shulman did a decent, if uninspired, announcing job, though his sidekick Aaron Boone had nothing at all to contribute.
And who decided that former players made good announcers, or is it just that their names impress people? Harold Washington on TV was not much better and writer Tom Verducci had little to contribute; as for loudmouth Joe Buck the less said the better. On TV at least one could turn off the sound and the irrelevant announcers but then one was left with the videogame style of the broadcast itself. Producer Pete Macheska has gone on record (see my posts from last fall) as saying he thinks baseball is boring so he has to jazz it up to make it more "exciting." So he uses 38 cameras to show everything but the game itself: endless shots of the fans and the dugouts, extreme low-angle shots of the batters and close-ups of the faces, none of which has anything to do with the game. I don't like to sound like an old fart (not too much, anyway) but the beauty of baseball was captured much more effectively in the fifties, with no distorting telephoto lenses and two cameras, one elevated behind home plate and one down the left field line.
As for the off-season, I will be following the various trades and free-agency signings and catching up on my reading, including Ben Bradlee, Jr.'s biography of Ted Williams. I have tried, and failed, to like football, basketball, and hockey, but I just can't get excited about perpetual motion games or games played against the clock; I like the beauty and pace of baseball and the way it incorporates players of all sizes, especially now that the steroid period seems to be ending and one hopes to see fewer home runs and more fundamentals.
I grew up listening to the World Series on radio, especially since most games were broadcast during the day. Not long ago the NY Times used to list not only the TV stations for sports but also the radio stations. That they no longer do this just indicates how increasingly irrelevant radio is in this country. In the case of the World Series this year the radio rights went to ESPN radio, but in New York if there was a Knicks game, a Rangers game or a Jets game those games were broadcast instead; presumably New York fans do not care about the World Series unless the Yankees are in it! Yes, one could find the game on the radio if one really tried, though the stations were not listed in the paper or even on the ESPN website, being broadcast on AM stations 570 and 1170, stations that parts of the NYC area could not even receive! If one did eventually find it on the radio and stayed up past midnight to hear it all, Dick Shulman did a decent, if uninspired, announcing job, though his sidekick Aaron Boone had nothing at all to contribute.
And who decided that former players made good announcers, or is it just that their names impress people? Harold Washington on TV was not much better and writer Tom Verducci had little to contribute; as for loudmouth Joe Buck the less said the better. On TV at least one could turn off the sound and the irrelevant announcers but then one was left with the videogame style of the broadcast itself. Producer Pete Macheska has gone on record (see my posts from last fall) as saying he thinks baseball is boring so he has to jazz it up to make it more "exciting." So he uses 38 cameras to show everything but the game itself: endless shots of the fans and the dugouts, extreme low-angle shots of the batters and close-ups of the faces, none of which has anything to do with the game. I don't like to sound like an old fart (not too much, anyway) but the beauty of baseball was captured much more effectively in the fifties, with no distorting telephoto lenses and two cameras, one elevated behind home plate and one down the left field line.
As for the off-season, I will be following the various trades and free-agency signings and catching up on my reading, including Ben Bradlee, Jr.'s biography of Ted Williams. I have tried, and failed, to like football, basketball, and hockey, but I just can't get excited about perpetual motion games or games played against the clock; I like the beauty and pace of baseball and the way it incorporates players of all sizes, especially now that the steroid period seems to be ending and one hopes to see fewer home runs and more fundamentals.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Turner Classic Movies in Nov.
There are a number of films this November by Chaplin, Keaton, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and King Vidor; I recommend everything by these directors, especially Chaplin's Limelight, Keaton's Sherlock Jr., John Ford's The Searchers, Hitchcock's Psycho and King Vidor's The Big Parade. Among other films I like:
Nov. 1. Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, an elegant dark comedy about Nazi-occupied Poland.
Nov.3. D. W. Griffith's Way Down East. I recommend this to those who wonder what I mean when I say most current movies look at though D.W. Griffith never lived.
Nov. 4. Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men, an intense melodrama about rodeo riders.
Nov. 7. Edgar Ulmer's Detour and Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy, two of the best films noir.
Nov. 9. Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance, my own favorite Rogers/Astaire film. It is quite funny and has marvelous dancing and music (by George and Ira Gershwin).
Nov. 12. Raoul Walsh's White Heat, an impressive gangster film with James Cagney at his craziest.
Nov.13. Leo McCarey's Love Affair, funny, passionate, lovely (McCarey later remade it As an Affair to Remember).
Nov. 14. Josef Von Sternberg's The Last Command, one of his most beautiful and moving movies, and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, one of the greatest silent films.
Nov. 28. Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, beautifully timed comedy and intelligent insight.
Nov. 30. Yasujiro Ozu's Ohayo (Good Morning). Ozu is still little known in this country; his films are exquisite portraits of Japanese family life. Ohayo (1959) came at the end of a career that began in 1927.
Nov. 1. Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, an elegant dark comedy about Nazi-occupied Poland.
Nov.3. D. W. Griffith's Way Down East. I recommend this to those who wonder what I mean when I say most current movies look at though D.W. Griffith never lived.
Nov. 4. Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men, an intense melodrama about rodeo riders.
Nov. 7. Edgar Ulmer's Detour and Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy, two of the best films noir.
Nov. 9. Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance, my own favorite Rogers/Astaire film. It is quite funny and has marvelous dancing and music (by George and Ira Gershwin).
Nov. 12. Raoul Walsh's White Heat, an impressive gangster film with James Cagney at his craziest.
Nov.13. Leo McCarey's Love Affair, funny, passionate, lovely (McCarey later remade it As an Affair to Remember).
Nov. 14. Josef Von Sternberg's The Last Command, one of his most beautiful and moving movies, and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, one of the greatest silent films.
Nov. 28. Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, beautifully timed comedy and intelligent insight.
Nov. 30. Yasujiro Ozu's Ohayo (Good Morning). Ozu is still little known in this country; his films are exquisite portraits of Japanese family life. Ohayo (1959) came at the end of a career that began in 1927.
Thursday, October 30, 2014
King Vidor's The Stranger Returns
...its classical plotting is a pleasurable mechanism.
Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simon, King Vidor, American (University of California Press,1988)
The Stranger Returns (1933) is one of obscure director King Vidor's more obscure films, but its populism, classical style and low-key comedy are common elements of Vidor's work. Miriam Hopkins plays an urban woman similar to those she played in Lubitsch's films (Trouble in Paradise, 1932 and Design for Living,1933) while Lionel Barrymore plays a benign and crotchety old man (compared to the evil old man he plays in Vidor's Duel in the Sun,1946) and Beulah Bondi plays a parasitic version of the generous rural woman she played in Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night, 1940. During the depression Hopkins is separated from her husband in New York and comes to her grandfather's farm to live. She is beset by "little town" gossip when she falls in love with the equally educated Franchot Tone, who has also come home to his family farm but has a wife and child. Eventually Hopkins warms to the farm -- the cooking and the occasional dance-- and realizes, as her grandfather quotes Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, that she could live there and enjoy the beauty of the country. Barrymore dies and leaves the farm to her, while Franchot Tone returns with his family to a teaching job at Cornell.
Vidor started making films in 1913, only five years after D.W. Griffith made his first films. Vidor, like many directors who started in silent films, knew how to tell a story visually, and with Griffith he shared a Jeffersonian faith in rural America, without turning a blind eye to its sometimes small-mindedness. Vidor could see the positive comforts as well as the boring conformity of rural religion (see my post on Hallelujah, July 23rd of this year); in The Stranger Returns even the dogs are put to sleep by the pompous sermons. Most importantly Vidor also understood and shared Griffith's passion for showing "the wind in the trees."
Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simon, King Vidor, American (University of California Press,1988)
The Stranger Returns (1933) is one of obscure director King Vidor's more obscure films, but its populism, classical style and low-key comedy are common elements of Vidor's work. Miriam Hopkins plays an urban woman similar to those she played in Lubitsch's films (Trouble in Paradise, 1932 and Design for Living,1933) while Lionel Barrymore plays a benign and crotchety old man (compared to the evil old man he plays in Vidor's Duel in the Sun,1946) and Beulah Bondi plays a parasitic version of the generous rural woman she played in Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night, 1940. During the depression Hopkins is separated from her husband in New York and comes to her grandfather's farm to live. She is beset by "little town" gossip when she falls in love with the equally educated Franchot Tone, who has also come home to his family farm but has a wife and child. Eventually Hopkins warms to the farm -- the cooking and the occasional dance-- and realizes, as her grandfather quotes Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, that she could live there and enjoy the beauty of the country. Barrymore dies and leaves the farm to her, while Franchot Tone returns with his family to a teaching job at Cornell.
Vidor started making films in 1913, only five years after D.W. Griffith made his first films. Vidor, like many directors who started in silent films, knew how to tell a story visually, and with Griffith he shared a Jeffersonian faith in rural America, without turning a blind eye to its sometimes small-mindedness. Vidor could see the positive comforts as well as the boring conformity of rural religion (see my post on Hallelujah, July 23rd of this year); in The Stranger Returns even the dogs are put to sleep by the pompous sermons. Most importantly Vidor also understood and shared Griffith's passion for showing "the wind in the trees."
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Edgar G. Ulmer's Her Sister's Secret
Edgar G. Ulmer's Her Sister's Secret (1946) was one of Ulmer's bigger-budgeted films for poverty row studio PRC. It is, for Ulmer, an unusual soap opera, sometimes called a "weepie," a genre in which fellow émigré Douglas Sirk excelled. Sirk's films are filled with irony and low-key satire, while Ulmer's film is passionate and moving. In the beginning there is a beautifully photographed (by Fritz Planer, who also did Max Ophuls' Letter From an Unknown Woman,1948) Mardi Gras scene when Dick (played by Phillip Reed) and Toni (played by Nancy Coleman) first meet, are immediately attracted, and go for a ride. At midnight Dick removes Toni's mask, a scene more erotic than most of today's scenes of complete nudity, and the sky goes slowly from starlight to sunlight. They plan to meet six weeks later at the same café (a plot device originally used in Leo McCarey's Love Affair,1939) and Dick never shows up, his letter used for scrap paper in the café. Toni finds out she is pregnant and gives her son to her sister, promising not to see him for three years. But she can't stay away and almost kidnaps the boy at the same time Dick returns from the war, looking for her.
Ulmer, an outsider all his life, shows great sympathy for Toni and her dilemma, a dilemma not usually shown in films of this period. There are certain similarities to Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), though even in that film the mother was not unwed, she just could not find her husband or remember his name. Her Sister's Secret (nice title, since the sisters share the secret) is full of outsiders who are friends to Toni: her widower father, whose friends are his books; the maid Mathilda, for whom Toni is her only family; Pepe, the owner of the café where Toni and Dick met, and even the foreigner feeding pigeons in the park, who complains to Toni that the birds expect him to be punctual.
There is fatalism here, as there is in all of Ulmer's films, but there is less resignation than in Ulmer's bleaker films, such as Detour (1945); the attitude is closer to a short-lived post-war optimism. As Toni's father says, "There is nothing you should regret in life, except not having lived it."
Ulmer, an outsider all his life, shows great sympathy for Toni and her dilemma, a dilemma not usually shown in films of this period. There are certain similarities to Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), though even in that film the mother was not unwed, she just could not find her husband or remember his name. Her Sister's Secret (nice title, since the sisters share the secret) is full of outsiders who are friends to Toni: her widower father, whose friends are his books; the maid Mathilda, for whom Toni is her only family; Pepe, the owner of the café where Toni and Dick met, and even the foreigner feeding pigeons in the park, who complains to Toni that the birds expect him to be punctual.
There is fatalism here, as there is in all of Ulmer's films, but there is less resignation than in Ulmer's bleaker films, such as Detour (1945); the attitude is closer to a short-lived post-war optimism. As Toni's father says, "There is nothing you should regret in life, except not having lived it."
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Edgar Ulmer's Murder is My Beat
Parallel to this narrative confusion is a chaotic visual style that repeatedly changes the characters' positions in space by viewing them first from one angle, then from another totally different one.
John Belton, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar G. Ulmer (The Tantivy Press, 1974).
I wonder what those who had never heard of Ulmer thought of his low-budget Murder is My Beat (1955), shown recently on Turner Classic Movies: something of a film noir, something of a murder mystery, something of a series of shaggy dog stories. It starts with a man driving to a motel and getting into a fistfight, only then do we realize that it is one cop looking for another. Ray was taking Eden Lane to prison when he took a bite of the apple, jumping out of the train with her when he believes her story of seeing her murder victim on a train platform. He had found her in a mountain cabin, walking many miles through the snow because he wanted to bring a murderer to justice, "I hate the wanton destruction of human life; I had seen too much of it in the Pacific." But when he is on her own with her he realizes how much he had depended on the support system of the police department. He becomes rather like Ulmer himself, who never had the support of the craftsmen of a major studio, making his films all over the world, often with miniscule budgets. Ray is running out of time when he realizes that the older neighbor lady (who introduces herself as "spinster") had seen the man who supposedly had been murdered by Eden and he brings her to town just in time to identify him.
I think of Ulmer as a very modern director; his style and his plots reflect the discontinuity and darkness of the universe, as well as a class consciousness. Ulmer plays fair with the audience in the way many directors of murder mysteries do not: we find out things only as the detectives do, their irrationality and desperation mirroring that of modern society. Like many of Ulmer's films Murder is My Beat has a narrative discontinuity common to many of his films, a discontinuity due to Ulmer's low-budget view of the universe. The "happy" ending is not to be taking literally, but rather as symbolic of waking from a bad dream.
Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man by David Lehman
David Lehman's book is an excellent companion to Evelyn Barish's biography of Paul de Man (see my post of Sept. 2). It intelligently analyzes deconstruction and the responses to the revelations of de Man's pro-Nazi journalism. Lehman's book was published in 1992 (Simon and Schuster) and his prediction has already come to pass: "It is only a matter of time before deconstruction is routinely used -- as its older cousin existentialism has steadily been used -- as the squiggle of fancy French mustard on the hot dog of a banal observation."
Lehman cuts through the jargon of deconstruction and lists ten of its propositions:
Between the signifier and the signified falls the shadow.
Writing precedes speech.
Words speak us.
All the world's a text.
The author is dead.
Presence is absence.
History is bunk.
Goodbye to aesthetics.
Language, not knowledge, is power.
What you see is never what you get.
Lehman's provides details and examples for those of us who have not read much of Derrida, de Man, et al.
In my opinion deconstruction has produced some useful analysis and criticism (see my January post about the Cahiers du Cinema article on Young Mr. Lincoln), before it became a prisoner of its own theories and jargon.
I think my own interest in de Man was piqued by his ability to re-invent himself, something many of us have tried to do, though with less success and less to atone for. Lehman writes, "In the debate precipitated by the sudden rash of disclosures about de Man's early life, one can see the truth in the old adage that the ferocity of academic politics varies inversely with the material stakes involved." (remember the journal Lingua Franca?) In this debate the deconstructionists did not distinguish themselves, Derrida and others going out of their way to exonerate de Man and ridicule his critics. Lehman fascinatingly finds three "unconscious treatments of Paul de Man's predicament in America":
1. Orson Welles's 1946 movie, The Stranger, in which Welles plays a Nazi war criminal who becomes a teacher in Connecticut.
2. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where Lehman identifies de Man with Marlow, for whom all of Europe went into his making.
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, whose eponymous character, like de Man, "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself."
Deconstruction still has holdouts in academia, but reached a dead end sooner than it may have otherwise, with the exposure of de Man's past. We have moved on to "gender" and "ethnic" studies, which analyze texts on the basis of patriarchy and power.
ci
Lehman cuts through the jargon of deconstruction and lists ten of its propositions:
Between the signifier and the signified falls the shadow.
Writing precedes speech.
Words speak us.
All the world's a text.
The author is dead.
Presence is absence.
History is bunk.
Goodbye to aesthetics.
Language, not knowledge, is power.
What you see is never what you get.
Lehman's provides details and examples for those of us who have not read much of Derrida, de Man, et al.
In my opinion deconstruction has produced some useful analysis and criticism (see my January post about the Cahiers du Cinema article on Young Mr. Lincoln), before it became a prisoner of its own theories and jargon.
I think my own interest in de Man was piqued by his ability to re-invent himself, something many of us have tried to do, though with less success and less to atone for. Lehman writes, "In the debate precipitated by the sudden rash of disclosures about de Man's early life, one can see the truth in the old adage that the ferocity of academic politics varies inversely with the material stakes involved." (remember the journal Lingua Franca?) In this debate the deconstructionists did not distinguish themselves, Derrida and others going out of their way to exonerate de Man and ridicule his critics. Lehman fascinatingly finds three "unconscious treatments of Paul de Man's predicament in America":
1. Orson Welles's 1946 movie, The Stranger, in which Welles plays a Nazi war criminal who becomes a teacher in Connecticut.
2. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where Lehman identifies de Man with Marlow, for whom all of Europe went into his making.
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, whose eponymous character, like de Man, "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself."
Deconstruction still has holdouts in academia, but reached a dead end sooner than it may have otherwise, with the exposure of de Man's past. We have moved on to "gender" and "ethnic" studies, which analyze texts on the basis of patriarchy and power.
ci
The World Series
Much is being made of the decline in TV viewers for the World Series, from 34 million viewers in 1973 to 15 million in 2013. This supposedly represents a diminishing interest in baseball and that may even be true, but we can't eliminate the greed of the TV networks and the baseball owners from the equation. For one thing, games now start late and, on the East Coast at least, often don't end until after midnight. Not that long ago games were played during the day, when everyone -- young and old alike -- could watch or listen, but the last game played during the day was game six in 1987; television money demands night games and as little competition with football as possible.
The World Series has also diminished in importance with the increasing number of teams in the play-offs, from four to eight and now, ten. Baseball is a game played every day, a game of quotidian pleasures where a team used to earn its way into the World Series by playing well for more than a hundred and fifty games. The constant emphasis in our culture of having more and more "winners" has detracted considerably from the pure beauty of the game and made the World Series a much less important event.
The popularity of baseball has waxed and waned with changes in our society, especially as we have become more urban. Some consider baseball a part of our more rural past, for better or worse. There have certainly been a number of (usually) misguided attempts to make it more "relevant" to the modern viewer, including the introduction of astroturf (the purpose of which I never understood, except for saving money on groundskeeping), now mostly abandoned, and the designated hitter, a violation of the lovely balance between fielding and hitting, now unfortunately ensconced in the American League, where the pitcher is never removed for a pinch hitter. Part of the problem is certainly that the glut of steroid-fueled home runs in recent years brought in more fans than ever who knew little and cared less about the nuances of the game.
It also should be kept in mind that TV does a terrible job with baseball, the executives admitting that they find baseball boring (see my posts from October 2013) and have to try to make it interesting to the casual fan, with endless replays, close-ups of the dugouts and the fans, and interviews even while the game is going on! One can't be sure, of course, that this has a negative impact on the number of viewers who watch games, but I can't help but think that one of the reasons people say they find baseball "boring" is that TV shows it as if it were nothing but a battle between pitcher and batter, one of many important elements in a complex game. Undoubtedly many who once tuned in for the game are now turned off by the ignorant babble of the announcers and the constant close-ups of players spitting.
The World Series has also diminished in importance with the increasing number of teams in the play-offs, from four to eight and now, ten. Baseball is a game played every day, a game of quotidian pleasures where a team used to earn its way into the World Series by playing well for more than a hundred and fifty games. The constant emphasis in our culture of having more and more "winners" has detracted considerably from the pure beauty of the game and made the World Series a much less important event.
The popularity of baseball has waxed and waned with changes in our society, especially as we have become more urban. Some consider baseball a part of our more rural past, for better or worse. There have certainly been a number of (usually) misguided attempts to make it more "relevant" to the modern viewer, including the introduction of astroturf (the purpose of which I never understood, except for saving money on groundskeeping), now mostly abandoned, and the designated hitter, a violation of the lovely balance between fielding and hitting, now unfortunately ensconced in the American League, where the pitcher is never removed for a pinch hitter. Part of the problem is certainly that the glut of steroid-fueled home runs in recent years brought in more fans than ever who knew little and cared less about the nuances of the game.
It also should be kept in mind that TV does a terrible job with baseball, the executives admitting that they find baseball boring (see my posts from October 2013) and have to try to make it interesting to the casual fan, with endless replays, close-ups of the dugouts and the fans, and interviews even while the game is going on! One can't be sure, of course, that this has a negative impact on the number of viewers who watch games, but I can't help but think that one of the reasons people say they find baseball "boring" is that TV shows it as if it were nothing but a battle between pitcher and batter, one of many important elements in a complex game. Undoubtedly many who once tuned in for the game are now turned off by the ignorant babble of the announcers and the constant close-ups of players spitting.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
New York City Ballet: Oct. 18, 2014
Square Dance was originally done in 1957 and changed considerably in 1976. In the original version the musicians were on stage in shirt sleeves, playing Corelli and Vivaldi while a caller, Elisha C. Keeler, called out the steps: "Gents go out, come right back, make your feet go wickety-wack." I was fortunate enough to see this version done by the Joffrey in 1976, using the original caller. The original was quite wonderful in its way, but Balanchine always tended to pare things down to their essentials, and the current version has the orchestra in the pit and no caller. As Arlene Croce wrote in The New Yorker (Nov. 15, 1976); The ballet contains twin sets of superimpositions: traditional country dancing, American style, superimposed on classical ballet steps and set to seventeenth-century string music that, in its turn, superimposed the elegance of a courtly style on ancient folk dances. I find it one of Balanchine's most beautiful ballets, with its moods of light and dark that reflect both the seventeenth century and current America. There is delight from the moment Abi Stafford comes in, posed for a moment in B+ position (a starting position that Balanchine invented, with the foot in back pointed) to her ever-shifting steps, as a tour jete turns into an assemble. There is also a part now for the male lead dancing alone on stage, as though he wandered off from the group to think about things. This part, done to the Corelli Sarabande and danced beautifully on Saturday by Taylor Stanley, is in a somewhat different style from the exuberant other parts of the ballet, the solo dependent mostly on movements of the torso. As I have said before about Balanchine, this ballet shows how groups, couples and individuals can all flourish in their own way: there are even separate sections for just women and just the men. Square Dance has some of Balanchine's loveliest choreography for men and was one of the ballets that inspired me to start taking ballet classes.
Also on the program was Le Tombeau de Couperin, originally done for the Ravel festival in 1975, based on eighteenth-century court dances. This unusual ballet uses two sets of four couples each, no lead dancers, and has some similarities to Square Dance. But the mood of this Ravel piece is very somber, constantly going through ritual changes, and retains a very complex and courtly air. This was followed by The Steadfast Tin Soldier, a minor piece by Balanchine to Bizet music that does not follow very closely the Hans Christian Andersen story about the love between a tin soldier and a doll (in Andersen's story they are both burned up in the fireplace, in the ballet it's just the doll). The only time I've seen effective pathos and humor in this ballet was when Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride danced it in 1979.
Christopher Wheeldon's This Bitter Earth was an intense pas de deux for the retiring Wendy Whelan, who danced with Tyler Angle. Wheeldon once had promise that he has never quite lived up to and Whelan has never been a favorite of mine, though it's not her fault she joined the company after Balanchine's death, so none of his ballets could be changed to accommodate her angular qualities. I enjoyed her in the Stravinsky ballets and she was a favorite of later choreographers, whose ballets did not often live up to her talents.
The final piece on Saturday's program was The Concert, a truly nasty piece of work choreographed by Jerome Robbins in 1956. Some find this misogynistic, misanthropic ballet, choreographed to Chopin, amusing. Even if one cared for anarchic humor, which I don't, this piece about the manipulation of women and the offensiveness of men is too nasty to be funny. Fueled by Robbins's own confused sexual identity, its idea of humor is men and women getting stabbed, men being henpecked and women obsessed with their vanity. I have always preferred the beautifully structured comedies of Lubitsch to the anarchy of the Marx brothers.
One additional benefit of going to the ballet is that I find, when I go to ballet class, as I did yesterday, I have absorbed much of what I have seen: I'm more turned out, my tendus are more precise, my port de bras better placed. I can even imagine that I am part of the male corps in Square Dance.
Also on the program was Le Tombeau de Couperin, originally done for the Ravel festival in 1975, based on eighteenth-century court dances. This unusual ballet uses two sets of four couples each, no lead dancers, and has some similarities to Square Dance. But the mood of this Ravel piece is very somber, constantly going through ritual changes, and retains a very complex and courtly air. This was followed by The Steadfast Tin Soldier, a minor piece by Balanchine to Bizet music that does not follow very closely the Hans Christian Andersen story about the love between a tin soldier and a doll (in Andersen's story they are both burned up in the fireplace, in the ballet it's just the doll). The only time I've seen effective pathos and humor in this ballet was when Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride danced it in 1979.
Christopher Wheeldon's This Bitter Earth was an intense pas de deux for the retiring Wendy Whelan, who danced with Tyler Angle. Wheeldon once had promise that he has never quite lived up to and Whelan has never been a favorite of mine, though it's not her fault she joined the company after Balanchine's death, so none of his ballets could be changed to accommodate her angular qualities. I enjoyed her in the Stravinsky ballets and she was a favorite of later choreographers, whose ballets did not often live up to her talents.
The final piece on Saturday's program was The Concert, a truly nasty piece of work choreographed by Jerome Robbins in 1956. Some find this misogynistic, misanthropic ballet, choreographed to Chopin, amusing. Even if one cared for anarchic humor, which I don't, this piece about the manipulation of women and the offensiveness of men is too nasty to be funny. Fueled by Robbins's own confused sexual identity, its idea of humor is men and women getting stabbed, men being henpecked and women obsessed with their vanity. I have always preferred the beautifully structured comedies of Lubitsch to the anarchy of the Marx brothers.
One additional benefit of going to the ballet is that I find, when I go to ballet class, as I did yesterday, I have absorbed much of what I have seen: I'm more turned out, my tendus are more precise, my port de bras better placed. I can even imagine that I am part of the male corps in Square Dance.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Man Wanted and Pete Kelly's Blues
William Dieterle's Man Wanted (1932) and Jack Webb's Pete Kelly's Blues (1956), both recently screened on Turner Classic Movies, would seem to have little in common, but watching them both recently I found some similarities.
1. Andy Devine is in both films. Devine was an actor I was fond of in the 50's, when he played Jingles, Guy Madison's sidekick, in the TV show Wild Bill Hickok. He was rather rotund and often used as comic relief, but is quite effective in the Jack Webb film as a lawman, while in the Dieterle he plays a sweet roommate, with homoerotic overtones, and ends up with the girl his friend rejects. Devine was particularly good in his John Ford roles, especially Stagecoach (1939) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1965), in which he plays a sheriff who doesn't want to lock up Liberty Valance because "the lock on the jail cell is broken and, besides, I sleep there."
2. Both films have elegant cinematography: Man Wanted is photographed in beautiful black-and-white with a characteristic mobile camera by Gregg Toland, who later photographed Citizen Kane (1941), while Pete Kelly's Blues has lovely wide-screen color cinematography with a special emphasis on yellows and oranges, by Hal Rosson, who did Singing in the Rain (1952).
3. Pete Kelly's Blues stars Webb himself and Man Wanted stars Kay Francis, both stars in their time who are barely remembered today, though Webb may be, to a certain extent, for the TV show Dragnet. Webb's film employs his "staccato metaphor" style first used effectively in his radio shows Pat Novak, For Hire (1946) and Johnny Modero, Pier 23 (1947), both written by Richard Breen, who wrote Pete Kelly's Blues: "the street was as deserted as a warm bottle of beer." I always thought Webb's style more suited to radio than TV, where its effectiveness was diminished by low-budgets and minimal sets. Pete Kelly's Blues does demonstrate Webb's love of jazz and there is some terrific music, especially with Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. Kay Francis was a lisping beauty eventually done in by poor scripts and mediocre directors, though she soared in Lubitsch's stylish Trouble in Paradise (1932), where she wasn't burdened by a starring role.
1. Andy Devine is in both films. Devine was an actor I was fond of in the 50's, when he played Jingles, Guy Madison's sidekick, in the TV show Wild Bill Hickok. He was rather rotund and often used as comic relief, but is quite effective in the Jack Webb film as a lawman, while in the Dieterle he plays a sweet roommate, with homoerotic overtones, and ends up with the girl his friend rejects. Devine was particularly good in his John Ford roles, especially Stagecoach (1939) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1965), in which he plays a sheriff who doesn't want to lock up Liberty Valance because "the lock on the jail cell is broken and, besides, I sleep there."
2. Both films have elegant cinematography: Man Wanted is photographed in beautiful black-and-white with a characteristic mobile camera by Gregg Toland, who later photographed Citizen Kane (1941), while Pete Kelly's Blues has lovely wide-screen color cinematography with a special emphasis on yellows and oranges, by Hal Rosson, who did Singing in the Rain (1952).
3. Pete Kelly's Blues stars Webb himself and Man Wanted stars Kay Francis, both stars in their time who are barely remembered today, though Webb may be, to a certain extent, for the TV show Dragnet. Webb's film employs his "staccato metaphor" style first used effectively in his radio shows Pat Novak, For Hire (1946) and Johnny Modero, Pier 23 (1947), both written by Richard Breen, who wrote Pete Kelly's Blues: "the street was as deserted as a warm bottle of beer." I always thought Webb's style more suited to radio than TV, where its effectiveness was diminished by low-budgets and minimal sets. Pete Kelly's Blues does demonstrate Webb's love of jazz and there is some terrific music, especially with Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. Kay Francis was a lisping beauty eventually done in by poor scripts and mediocre directors, though she soared in Lubitsch's stylish Trouble in Paradise (1932), where she wasn't burdened by a starring role.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Val Lewton's Please Believe Me.
Lewton's fragmented mosaic story-telling is, obviously, not well suited to comedy, where pace must be built and maintained.
Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (Viking Press,1973)
One of the many pleasures of the estimable Turner Classic Movies is the rare and unusual films that show up there, including Lewton's penultimate film, Please Believe Me (1950). I don't know if there are still many people who believe, as writer Gore Vidal did, that movies are the vision of the producer rather than the director, but Please Believe Me had possibilities that were never realized, mainly because of the poor direction of Norman Taurog, a totally undistinguished director who directed nine Elvis Presley movies. For his low-budget horror films Cat People (1941), I Walked With a Zombie (1942), and The Leopard Man (1943) Lewton used director Jacques Tourneur, who shared his subtle touch with the fears just below the surface of everyday life. When RKO promoted Tourneur to A movies Lewton used first-time director Mark Robson to direct the elegant and scary The Seventh Victim (1943), maintaining strict control of the script. There are themes in Please Believe Me which obviously interested Lewton -- deception, an individual's identity, conflicts between England and America -- and I think they could have been brought out in an amusing way by the right director, with Lewton's supervision. He tailored the script for the delightful Deborah Kerr and was able to keep her as the star, but Taurog was unable to bring out her charm or adopt Lewton's vision.
Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (Viking Press,1973)
One of the many pleasures of the estimable Turner Classic Movies is the rare and unusual films that show up there, including Lewton's penultimate film, Please Believe Me (1950). I don't know if there are still many people who believe, as writer Gore Vidal did, that movies are the vision of the producer rather than the director, but Please Believe Me had possibilities that were never realized, mainly because of the poor direction of Norman Taurog, a totally undistinguished director who directed nine Elvis Presley movies. For his low-budget horror films Cat People (1941), I Walked With a Zombie (1942), and The Leopard Man (1943) Lewton used director Jacques Tourneur, who shared his subtle touch with the fears just below the surface of everyday life. When RKO promoted Tourneur to A movies Lewton used first-time director Mark Robson to direct the elegant and scary The Seventh Victim (1943), maintaining strict control of the script. There are themes in Please Believe Me which obviously interested Lewton -- deception, an individual's identity, conflicts between England and America -- and I think they could have been brought out in an amusing way by the right director, with Lewton's supervision. He tailored the script for the delightful Deborah Kerr and was able to keep her as the star, but Taurog was unable to bring out her charm or adopt Lewton's vision.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Are Baseball Games Too Long?
When people complain that baseball games are too long I am reminded of the story about the woman who was diagnosed with a fatal disease and told by her doctor that she only had a year to live.
"Is there nothing I can do?" she asked the doctor.
"Well," the doctor said, "you could marry an economist and move to Iowa."
"Would that make me live longer?"
"No," the doctor said, "but it will seem longer."
People who go to ball games in person usually do not think the game is too long; there is just too much to look at on the field, with nine players, two coaches and four umpires all moving around. And even when they are not moving there is much beauty in the quiet anticipatory moments between pitches, rather like the moment between steps in a Balanchine ballet or between notes in a Mozart concerto. But when games are shown on TV they seem much longer because there is so little to look at, basically the pitcher and the catcher and the ads behind them, shot with a distorting telephoto lens. The games also seem longer because they start late, especially in the post-season, and therefore end long after one has gone, or should have gone, to bed. In addition there are incessant ads between innings and during pitching changes, adding an hour or more to the games, and constant delays by the pitcher and the batter. Let the umpires at least enforce the rules: twelve seconds between pitches and no stepping out of the batter's box "without a good reason" (not including adjusting batting gloves!).
Announcers are also a problem. Instead of telling you what you are already looking at -- what's going on between the pitcher and the batter -- they could tell you what is going on that you can't see, with the base runners, the umpires and the fielders. Howie Rose and Josh Lewin, the radio announcers for the Mets, do an excellent job of describing what is going on, and one can "see" more of a Mets game on the radio than on TV.
"Is there nothing I can do?" she asked the doctor.
"Well," the doctor said, "you could marry an economist and move to Iowa."
"Would that make me live longer?"
"No," the doctor said, "but it will seem longer."
People who go to ball games in person usually do not think the game is too long; there is just too much to look at on the field, with nine players, two coaches and four umpires all moving around. And even when they are not moving there is much beauty in the quiet anticipatory moments between pitches, rather like the moment between steps in a Balanchine ballet or between notes in a Mozart concerto. But when games are shown on TV they seem much longer because there is so little to look at, basically the pitcher and the catcher and the ads behind them, shot with a distorting telephoto lens. The games also seem longer because they start late, especially in the post-season, and therefore end long after one has gone, or should have gone, to bed. In addition there are incessant ads between innings and during pitching changes, adding an hour or more to the games, and constant delays by the pitcher and the batter. Let the umpires at least enforce the rules: twelve seconds between pitches and no stepping out of the batter's box "without a good reason" (not including adjusting batting gloves!).
Announcers are also a problem. Instead of telling you what you are already looking at -- what's going on between the pitcher and the batter -- they could tell you what is going on that you can't see, with the base runners, the umpires and the fielders. Howie Rose and Josh Lewin, the radio announcers for the Mets, do an excellent job of describing what is going on, and one can "see" more of a Mets game on the radio than on TV.
Lee Child's Personal
The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere.
William James, The Moral Equivalent of War, 1910
I don't forgive and I don't forget.
Jack Reacher, Personal (Lee Child, Delacorte, 2014)
It was one of my father's regrets, that neither of his sons served in the armed forces, the army during WWII having been the highlight of his own life. Occasionally I could see the appeal --when I watched Sgt. Bilko or listened to Jean Shepherd's wonderful army stories -- but I was lucky enough to get number 350 in the Shirley-Jackson-lottery of people's lives during the Vietnam war. No doubt we are better off without the George-Orwell-like "selective service" but the all-volunteer army has been at quite a price for those without other choices in their lives. In rejecting the involuntary servitude of the draft, however, are we neglecting certain positive attitudes? Lee Child thinks so, and his character Jack Reacher, formerly an MP, has been shown (in nineteen books) to have many positive attributes, particularly morality and austerity. Reacher travels somewhat randomly around the country, carrying little more than a toothbrush but always ready to lend a helping, and often violent, hand. In Personal he is in Paris and London in an attempt to thwart an assassination by a violent sniper who is out of prison, having been put there by Reacher 15 years before. The plot is complicated but Reacher uses his usual combination of physical and mental strength to solve the problem and the Army general behind it. He doesn't sleep with his female assistant and leaves quietly on the next bus, rather like a Western hero, always aware, as he says, "You can leave the army but the army doesn't leave you. Not always. Not completely."
William James, The Moral Equivalent of War, 1910
I don't forgive and I don't forget.
Jack Reacher, Personal (Lee Child, Delacorte, 2014)
It was one of my father's regrets, that neither of his sons served in the armed forces, the army during WWII having been the highlight of his own life. Occasionally I could see the appeal --when I watched Sgt. Bilko or listened to Jean Shepherd's wonderful army stories -- but I was lucky enough to get number 350 in the Shirley-Jackson-lottery of people's lives during the Vietnam war. No doubt we are better off without the George-Orwell-like "selective service" but the all-volunteer army has been at quite a price for those without other choices in their lives. In rejecting the involuntary servitude of the draft, however, are we neglecting certain positive attitudes? Lee Child thinks so, and his character Jack Reacher, formerly an MP, has been shown (in nineteen books) to have many positive attributes, particularly morality and austerity. Reacher travels somewhat randomly around the country, carrying little more than a toothbrush but always ready to lend a helping, and often violent, hand. In Personal he is in Paris and London in an attempt to thwart an assassination by a violent sniper who is out of prison, having been put there by Reacher 15 years before. The plot is complicated but Reacher uses his usual combination of physical and mental strength to solve the problem and the Army general behind it. He doesn't sleep with his female assistant and leaves quietly on the next bus, rather like a Western hero, always aware, as he says, "You can leave the army but the army doesn't leave you. Not always. Not completely."
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Baseball Playoffs 2014
The first round of the playoffs is over; the next round, for the league pennants, starts tomorrow, with the Orioles vs. the Royals and the Cardinals vs. the Giants. I do think having 10 teams in the playoffs dilutes the daily pleasures of the season and ends up making the World Series often rather anti-climatic and tedious; the beauty of the game is getting lost in the shuffle of who wins and who loses.
About the playoffs:
1. The games start and finish too late and go on too long, most of the games ending at one or two in the morning. The various networks are simply too busy avoiding conflicts with football to give baseball the care and attention it deserves. At least, one would think, week-end games could be played during the day and commercials and promos could be limited, though of course that would mean limiting revenue. My radical suggestion is to start football, hockey and basketball only after the baseball season is completed.
2. The networks have stated repeatedly that showing too much of the game on the field is boring. So we see endless shots of the crowds, the executives, the dugouts, as well as conversations with the players and the managers while the game is going on! They at least could show the whole field occasionally, though showing just the distorted images of the pitcher and the batter through telephoto lenses maximizes revenue, with advertising images shown behind them.
3. What is the function of the mushmouths and illiterates hired for both TV and radio? When they are not mangling the English language and being as comatose as Cal Ripken (who was repeatedly asked about his career by Ron Darling and usually replied "I don't remember.") they have little to add. Their inability to give the score or the count or tell us who is on base has necessitated little boxes on the screen, so they are free to do what? Tell us statistics even they don't understand and can't usually explain? The radio announcers could do the kind of job Vin Scully but few others do: paint a picture and evoke a feeling. But the radio announcers don't even do the minimum -- such as tell us whether a player is batting right-handed or left-handed -- to allow us to visualize what is happening
About the playoffs:
1. The games start and finish too late and go on too long, most of the games ending at one or two in the morning. The various networks are simply too busy avoiding conflicts with football to give baseball the care and attention it deserves. At least, one would think, week-end games could be played during the day and commercials and promos could be limited, though of course that would mean limiting revenue. My radical suggestion is to start football, hockey and basketball only after the baseball season is completed.
2. The networks have stated repeatedly that showing too much of the game on the field is boring. So we see endless shots of the crowds, the executives, the dugouts, as well as conversations with the players and the managers while the game is going on! They at least could show the whole field occasionally, though showing just the distorted images of the pitcher and the batter through telephoto lenses maximizes revenue, with advertising images shown behind them.
3. What is the function of the mushmouths and illiterates hired for both TV and radio? When they are not mangling the English language and being as comatose as Cal Ripken (who was repeatedly asked about his career by Ron Darling and usually replied "I don't remember.") they have little to add. Their inability to give the score or the count or tell us who is on base has necessitated little boxes on the screen, so they are free to do what? Tell us statistics even they don't understand and can't usually explain? The radio announcers could do the kind of job Vin Scully but few others do: paint a picture and evoke a feeling. But the radio announcers don't even do the minimum -- such as tell us whether a player is batting right-handed or left-handed -- to allow us to visualize what is happening
John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps
"It was one of those days," a friend said, "when the only thing to do is read John Buchan."
John Keegan, introduction to The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (Penguin, 1915).
Does anyone read John Buchan today? He was once well-regarded (Raymond Chandler was an admirer) but I think he does not date well. The Thirty-Nine Steps is certainly paranoid enough for our time, with conspirators everywhere on the eve of WWI, but the book is mostly about Richard Hannay hiding in Scotland and being helped by all its eccentric inhabitants (chapters include "The Adventure of the Radical Candidate," "The Dry-Fly Fisherman," etc.). The book is full of delightful descriptions of the landscape (Buchan was Scottish) -- I first saw the pale blue sky through a net of heather, than a big shoulder of hill, and then my own boots place neatly in a blaeberry [blueberry] bush-- but otherwise too contrived even for the "thriller" genre.
The Buchan book is very much in the shadow of Hitchcock's film version, made in 1935. As Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer say in their excellent book on Hitchcock(Hitchcock: the First Forty-Four Films, translated by Stanley Hochman, Frederick Ungar, 1979): "Numerous changes were made and they were all good ones," including a female character to whom Hannay is handcuffed while trying to avoid the police and the conspirators. Fritz Lang's Man Hunt (1941) is closer to Buchan's book than Hitchcock's film is, though it is based on Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.
John Keegan, introduction to The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (Penguin, 1915).
Does anyone read John Buchan today? He was once well-regarded (Raymond Chandler was an admirer) but I think he does not date well. The Thirty-Nine Steps is certainly paranoid enough for our time, with conspirators everywhere on the eve of WWI, but the book is mostly about Richard Hannay hiding in Scotland and being helped by all its eccentric inhabitants (chapters include "The Adventure of the Radical Candidate," "The Dry-Fly Fisherman," etc.). The book is full of delightful descriptions of the landscape (Buchan was Scottish) -- I first saw the pale blue sky through a net of heather, than a big shoulder of hill, and then my own boots place neatly in a blaeberry [blueberry] bush-- but otherwise too contrived even for the "thriller" genre.
The Buchan book is very much in the shadow of Hitchcock's film version, made in 1935. As Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer say in their excellent book on Hitchcock(Hitchcock: the First Forty-Four Films, translated by Stanley Hochman, Frederick Ungar, 1979): "Numerous changes were made and they were all good ones," including a female character to whom Hannay is handcuffed while trying to avoid the police and the conspirators. Fritz Lang's Man Hunt (1941) is closer to Buchan's book than Hitchcock's film is, though it is based on Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Turner Classic Movies in October
I wrote yesterday about Edgar Ulmer and his theme of the outsider this month on TCM. There are a number of other excellent movies this month about outsiders, those who struggle to fit in, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing.
George B. Seitz's The Vanishing American (1925) is about the dilemma of the Native American, whether to fight to keep his heritage or become a part of the society that has, in some ways, rejected him.
John Ford's The Searchers (1956). John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, who struggles to find a place in a society that has changed immensely while he was off fighting in the Civil War.
Fritz Lang's Moonfleet (1955). An orphan tries to find a place in 18th C, society.
Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950). About the self-destructiveness of a screenwriter who can't sell a screenplay.
Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). A moving and beautiful film about what to do with one's parents when they get old.
Gordon Douglas's I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951). Loyalty to one's country or to one's comrades; each choice has a price.
Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942). A bleakly funny comedy about a Polish theatre troupe fighting back against the Nazis.
George B. Seitz's The Vanishing American (1925) is about the dilemma of the Native American, whether to fight to keep his heritage or become a part of the society that has, in some ways, rejected him.
John Ford's The Searchers (1956). John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, who struggles to find a place in a society that has changed immensely while he was off fighting in the Civil War.
Fritz Lang's Moonfleet (1955). An orphan tries to find a place in 18th C, society.
Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950). About the self-destructiveness of a screenwriter who can't sell a screenplay.
Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). A moving and beautiful film about what to do with one's parents when they get old.
Gordon Douglas's I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951). Loyalty to one's country or to one's comrades; each choice has a price.
Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942). A bleakly funny comedy about a Polish theatre troupe fighting back against the Nazis.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
New York City Ballet, Sept. 28, 2014
I am happy to report that Peter Martins is currently keeping the Balanchine repertory in pretty good shape, which has not always been the case. Perhaps Martins has come to realize that the artistic failure of most post-Balanchine works has made it necessary to keep the Balanchine ballets at a high artistic level, if only to keep an audience while we wait for the next great choreographer, who is not likely to be Martins or Wheeldon or Ratmansky. Sunday's performance of four Balanchine works was a delight, even if I have a slight quibble with an all-Tchaikovsky program, with too many predictable tours jetes and chaine turns.
The sisterhood of the corps in Serenade, which has expanded through the years as Balanchine expanded the choreography, is in its anonymity one of the most moving images we have in all ballet.
Arlene Croce
Serenade, originally done in 1935, looks as fresh and modern as ever. Balanchine reversed the order of the last two movements, making an emotionally complex work, the narrative of which lies elusively just beyond reach (true of many Balanchine ballets). The roles for men are relatively simple, but elegant, and one can identify with their emotional intensity.
Mozartiana is a world in a bubble....But it will always be Suzanne Farrell's ballet.
Arlene Croce.
Maria Kowroski was wonderful in Mozartiana and it certainly not her fault that she is not Suzanne Farrell. Those of us who were fortunate enough to see Farrell in this last major work that Balanchine did for her will never forget it, especially the audacious off-balance turns that were a Farrell specialty. As I have mentioned before, no doubt Balanchine would have adapted the choreography for different dancers, as he often did.
Tchaikovsky's melancholy is always accounted for, not only as the pervasive mood of his Andantes and Elegies but as a persistent aura edging even his brightest moments.
Arlene Croce.
This is an appropriate insight into Tchaikovsky Suite # 3, where life (both Tchaikovsky's and Balanchine's) are transferred into art. The melancholy of the first three movements may be about the women in Tchaikovsky's life -- his mother, who died when he was young; his sister and her two children, his disastrous marriage to Antonia Milyukova -- but also about the four women Balanchine married and the one, Suzanne Farrell, who he did not wed. But as the scrim is removed from the stage and Theme and Variations starts it is clear we are out of the realm of fantasy and ghosts and into a thrilling ballroom of love and partners that can, at least temporarily, overcome melancholy. When Joaquin De Luz does his tours en l'air, followed by multiple pirouettes, happiness reigns.
.
Sunday's performance also included Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, a short piece to an original part of the Swan Lake score, which demonstrates how Balanchine saw men and women: as equal partners who can thrive together and individually. The entire day's performance was conducted by Clotilde Otranto, who had the orchestra sounding quite lovely.
The sisterhood of the corps in Serenade, which has expanded through the years as Balanchine expanded the choreography, is in its anonymity one of the most moving images we have in all ballet.
Arlene Croce
Serenade, originally done in 1935, looks as fresh and modern as ever. Balanchine reversed the order of the last two movements, making an emotionally complex work, the narrative of which lies elusively just beyond reach (true of many Balanchine ballets). The roles for men are relatively simple, but elegant, and one can identify with their emotional intensity.
Mozartiana is a world in a bubble....But it will always be Suzanne Farrell's ballet.
Arlene Croce.
Maria Kowroski was wonderful in Mozartiana and it certainly not her fault that she is not Suzanne Farrell. Those of us who were fortunate enough to see Farrell in this last major work that Balanchine did for her will never forget it, especially the audacious off-balance turns that were a Farrell specialty. As I have mentioned before, no doubt Balanchine would have adapted the choreography for different dancers, as he often did.
Tchaikovsky's melancholy is always accounted for, not only as the pervasive mood of his Andantes and Elegies but as a persistent aura edging even his brightest moments.
Arlene Croce.
This is an appropriate insight into Tchaikovsky Suite # 3, where life (both Tchaikovsky's and Balanchine's) are transferred into art. The melancholy of the first three movements may be about the women in Tchaikovsky's life -- his mother, who died when he was young; his sister and her two children, his disastrous marriage to Antonia Milyukova -- but also about the four women Balanchine married and the one, Suzanne Farrell, who he did not wed. But as the scrim is removed from the stage and Theme and Variations starts it is clear we are out of the realm of fantasy and ghosts and into a thrilling ballroom of love and partners that can, at least temporarily, overcome melancholy. When Joaquin De Luz does his tours en l'air, followed by multiple pirouettes, happiness reigns.
.
Sunday's performance also included Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, a short piece to an original part of the Swan Lake score, which demonstrates how Balanchine saw men and women: as equal partners who can thrive together and individually. The entire day's performance was conducted by Clotilde Otranto, who had the orchestra sounding quite lovely.
Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins by Noah Isenberg
This month Turner Classic Movies is showing five films by Edgar Ulmer and Noah Isenberg's book (University of California Press, 2014) is a useful companion. Ulmer was born in Vienna in 1904 and was always an outsider, making Yiddish and African-American films and spending most his career at Poverty-Row studio PRC (Producers Releasing Company), followed (after the demise of the B-picture) by years of wandering and exile. For those of us who care relatively little about production values and so-called "star" actors Ulmer is an impressive and passionate director who made bleak films under difficult circumstances and produced an impressive body of personal work, often about those on the margins of society. The films on Turner are:
Her Sister's Secret (1946). Isenberg quotes Jan-Christopher Horak, in a survey of German exile cinema: For a B-picture the film demonstrated an unusual sensitivity for the complexity of human emotions, for the giddiness of great love affairs, for the difficulty of motherhood and for the barely repressed jealousy of siblings. The film is beautiful and moving.
Carnegie Hall (1947). Isenberg writes: Ulmer captured not merely the spirit of the hall and its evocative grandeur but the international spirit of American musical culture of the late 19th and early 20th century. There are 18 performers in the film, of which only two were born in the U.S., and there are wonderful performances by Rise Stevens and Jascha Heifetz, among many others. One might consider the framing story corny (it is, somewhat) but the music is glorious.
Murder is My Beat (1955). Isenberg says, about this film (and it could also be said about a number of other Ulmer films): The film exudes an air of rawness, its players and settings notably gruff and downtrodden, a relatively accurate reflection of the bargain-basement production.
Detour (1945). This is simply one of the great films noir. It was made for PRC with basically two actors and some back projection and captures the mood of America when the war ends, as well as Ulmer's fatalistic views. As Isenberg says: Indeed, the tawdry confined nature of the film is reflected in the characterization of its protagonists.
The Amazing Transparent Man (1960). Isenberg writes: Underpinning the larger drama that ensues in the act of becoming invisible -- and the break-in at a local power plant made possible only because of the invisibility -- is the gathering threat of nuclear disaster.
My other favorite Ulmer films, which I hope TCM will show soon, include Ruthless (1948) a low-budget answer to Citizen Kane, and Naked Dawn (1955), a bizarre and beautiful Western. One can read more about Ulmer in John Belton's Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar Ulmer (The Tantivy Press, 1974), and Peter Bogdanovitch's Who the Devil Made It (Knopf,1997) includes a long and fascinating interview with Ulmer.
Her Sister's Secret (1946). Isenberg quotes Jan-Christopher Horak, in a survey of German exile cinema: For a B-picture the film demonstrated an unusual sensitivity for the complexity of human emotions, for the giddiness of great love affairs, for the difficulty of motherhood and for the barely repressed jealousy of siblings. The film is beautiful and moving.
Carnegie Hall (1947). Isenberg writes: Ulmer captured not merely the spirit of the hall and its evocative grandeur but the international spirit of American musical culture of the late 19th and early 20th century. There are 18 performers in the film, of which only two were born in the U.S., and there are wonderful performances by Rise Stevens and Jascha Heifetz, among many others. One might consider the framing story corny (it is, somewhat) but the music is glorious.
Murder is My Beat (1955). Isenberg says, about this film (and it could also be said about a number of other Ulmer films): The film exudes an air of rawness, its players and settings notably gruff and downtrodden, a relatively accurate reflection of the bargain-basement production.
Detour (1945). This is simply one of the great films noir. It was made for PRC with basically two actors and some back projection and captures the mood of America when the war ends, as well as Ulmer's fatalistic views. As Isenberg says: Indeed, the tawdry confined nature of the film is reflected in the characterization of its protagonists.
The Amazing Transparent Man (1960). Isenberg writes: Underpinning the larger drama that ensues in the act of becoming invisible -- and the break-in at a local power plant made possible only because of the invisibility -- is the gathering threat of nuclear disaster.
My other favorite Ulmer films, which I hope TCM will show soon, include Ruthless (1948) a low-budget answer to Citizen Kane, and Naked Dawn (1955), a bizarre and beautiful Western. One can read more about Ulmer in John Belton's Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar Ulmer (The Tantivy Press, 1974), and Peter Bogdanovitch's Who the Devil Made It (Knopf,1997) includes a long and fascinating interview with Ulmer.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Exit Smiling and Two Seconds
Exit Smiling (1926) is one of five movies that Bea Lillie made (she much preferred to hear the responses of live audiences); in it she shows quite a talent not only for graceful physical comedy but also for poignancy. In the funniest scene she practically destroys a room trying to buy time for her unjustly accused lover, only to have him reject her for his hometown sweetheart. The last shot of the film shows her expressing her loss with a close-up worthy of Chaplin. Under the direction of Sam Taylor, who worked regularly with Harold Lloyd, Lillie does a delightful job of portraying life in a small traveling theatrical troupe, with all its poverty and petty rivalries. I did see Lillie in person once, not in one of her many highly-praised theatrical performances (I'm too young for that) but at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, when scholar Miles Kreuger did a series of early musicals and included Are You There? (1930) in which Lillie has a charming role as a telephone operator. Lillie made an appearance, lamented that she was too late to take her clothes off in movies, and attempted to disrobe, before Kreuger hustled her off!
Mervyn Leroy's Two Seconds is one of six intense movies he made in 1932, all with a social consciousness common at First National (later Warner Brothers) at the time. It tells the story of a working class stiff, played by Edward G. Robinson, who is betrayed by a woman and kills her. The "two seconds" refers to the time it takes to execute him in the electric chair and it is during those two seconds that the film flashes back to the events leading up to his execution, as he falls in love with a dame at a dime-a-dance joint who gets him drunk and convinces him to marry her, mainly because she can "get away with more as a Mrs. than as a Miss." The movie has been compared to Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890) but Leroy does not try to convince one that the flashbacks are taking place in the mind of the man being executed, so the effect is very different.
Mervyn Leroy's Two Seconds is one of six intense movies he made in 1932, all with a social consciousness common at First National (later Warner Brothers) at the time. It tells the story of a working class stiff, played by Edward G. Robinson, who is betrayed by a woman and kills her. The "two seconds" refers to the time it takes to execute him in the electric chair and it is during those two seconds that the film flashes back to the events leading up to his execution, as he falls in love with a dame at a dime-a-dance joint who gets him drunk and convinces him to marry her, mainly because she can "get away with more as a Mrs. than as a Miss." The movie has been compared to Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890) but Leroy does not try to convince one that the flashbacks are taking place in the mind of the man being executed, so the effect is very different.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Baseball 2014
"It's been a blah baseball year almost everywhere," says Roger Angell in the Sept. 8 The New Yorker, in a lovely tribute to Derek Jeter. Certainly one of the reasons for that is the absence of Angell's regular essays on baseball, essays that started appearing in The New Yorker in 1962 under editor William Shawn. Fortunately most of those essays have been collected in books; now that Angell is 94 there probably won't be too many more.
One of the reasons for the blah baseball year is what Angell calls "that tacky tacked-on new second wild-card spot in the post-season." This additional play-off spot is another attack on the quotidian pleasures of the beauty of baseball, a game played every day, each game unique, but each game mattering less now in the haste to win a play-off spot. The addition this year of appealing umpire calls and subjecting them to second-guessing via replays is not only an interference with the umpires' authority and a slowing down of the game, it is also just another example of the dominance of television, which is so busy showing ads, replays and shots of the dugouts and the fans that the game and its strategies are neglected.
Fortunately there is still some good baseball writing going on. This is particularly true at The New York Times, where there are more long and thoughtful pieces appearing these days when the scores are available from many sources. Two days ago Tyler Kepner wrote an intelligent piece about pitching coach Dave Wallace and this past Sunday there was a delightful and insightful piece by Barry Bearak about the Ricketts family, the new owners of the Chicago Cubs, and their business and existential troubles:
As Tom Ricketts roams the grandstands, he is often approached by someone elderly who asks a question with genuine urgency: Will the Cubs win the World Series before I die?
He is so accustomed to this query he responds with a comic's sense of timing: "Are you taking good care of yourself? Do you eat right? Are you getting your exercise?"
One of the reasons for the blah baseball year is what Angell calls "that tacky tacked-on new second wild-card spot in the post-season." This additional play-off spot is another attack on the quotidian pleasures of the beauty of baseball, a game played every day, each game unique, but each game mattering less now in the haste to win a play-off spot. The addition this year of appealing umpire calls and subjecting them to second-guessing via replays is not only an interference with the umpires' authority and a slowing down of the game, it is also just another example of the dominance of television, which is so busy showing ads, replays and shots of the dugouts and the fans that the game and its strategies are neglected.
Fortunately there is still some good baseball writing going on. This is particularly true at The New York Times, where there are more long and thoughtful pieces appearing these days when the scores are available from many sources. Two days ago Tyler Kepner wrote an intelligent piece about pitching coach Dave Wallace and this past Sunday there was a delightful and insightful piece by Barry Bearak about the Ricketts family, the new owners of the Chicago Cubs, and their business and existential troubles:
As Tom Ricketts roams the grandstands, he is often approached by someone elderly who asks a question with genuine urgency: Will the Cubs win the World Series before I die?
He is so accustomed to this query he responds with a comic's sense of timing: "Are you taking good care of yourself? Do you eat right? Are you getting your exercise?"
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Gordon Douglas: Up Periscope, Santiago
I once started to write an article about director Gordon Douglas for a film magazine but was unable to get a handle on this protean director, equally adept at musicals (Young at Heart, 1954), science fiction (Them, 1954), Westerns (The Doolins of Oklahoma, 1949) and film noir (his two best films are I Was a Communist for the FBI, 1951, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, 1950). Douglas was not an innovator and his personal style is elusive, but he was a solid professional who knew how to direct actors, where to place the camera, and how to effectively pace a story. These virtues are all quite apparent in Up Periscope (1959) and Santiago (1956), both recently shown on Turner Classic Movies.
Santiago is an unusually anti-colonial film, with gun-runners Alan Ladd and Lloyd Nolan supplying weapons to the Cuban rebels, before the involvement of the United States in the rebellion. Both are disgraced veterans of the Civil War, but Ladd is eventually converted to the cause by Rossana Podesta. The use of color by veteran cinematographer John Seitz is superb, as it often was in classical films before color became the norm. Up Periscope is a WW II submarine film very much influenced by Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water, 1954, a film that proved that the new widescreen process could be effective in the claustrophobic confines of a submarine. The cinematographer, Carl Guthrie, and Douglas use low-angle shots to effectively convey how physically stifling a submarine can be, especially as it waits on the bottom, its air running out.
Both of these films use a variety of character actors interacting in a group setting; as these films were made close to the end of the classical era many of these actors soon drifted into television. Santiago includes Royal Dano, Chill Wills and L.Q. Jones. Up Periscope stars reliable veteran Edmond O'Brien and includes James Garner, Alan Hale, Jr., Edd Byrnes and Warren Oates.
Santiago is an unusually anti-colonial film, with gun-runners Alan Ladd and Lloyd Nolan supplying weapons to the Cuban rebels, before the involvement of the United States in the rebellion. Both are disgraced veterans of the Civil War, but Ladd is eventually converted to the cause by Rossana Podesta. The use of color by veteran cinematographer John Seitz is superb, as it often was in classical films before color became the norm. Up Periscope is a WW II submarine film very much influenced by Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water, 1954, a film that proved that the new widescreen process could be effective in the claustrophobic confines of a submarine. The cinematographer, Carl Guthrie, and Douglas use low-angle shots to effectively convey how physically stifling a submarine can be, especially as it waits on the bottom, its air running out.
Both of these films use a variety of character actors interacting in a group setting; as these films were made close to the end of the classical era many of these actors soon drifted into television. Santiago includes Royal Dano, Chill Wills and L.Q. Jones. Up Periscope stars reliable veteran Edmond O'Brien and includes James Garner, Alan Hale, Jr., Edd Byrnes and Warren Oates.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Curious George
There are seven books about Curious George, written and illustrated by Margret and H.A. Rey between 1941 and 1966. Curious George is a young monkey who is too curious for his own good and my three-year-old daughter loves the books, for the following reasons (I think).
1. A beautiful balance between illustrations and story, with each reinforcing the other while having its own independent elements: each illustration has elements not explicitly in the written story, allowing a child to use her own curiosity about the details.
2. The discursive nature of the narrative, moving from one activity to the next. In Curious George Flies a Kite (1958), for instance, George plays with a ball, goes outside when he is curious about a house next door, discovers the house is full of bunnies and takes one out only to have it run away, ties a string to the mother bunny so he can find the baby, rescues the bunny and then climbs a wall where he sees a man with a fishing pole and follows him to watch him fish, goes home and makes his own fishing pole from a mop and a hook on the wall, returns to the lake to fish, falls in the water trying to catch a fish when they don't respond to cake as bait, gets rescued by Bill who has a kite, flies the kite with Bill and then helps to get the kite out of a tree, flies the kite on his own while Bill returns for his bike, gets blown into the sky when the kite takes off with him still holding on, gets rescued by the man with the yellow hat in a helicopter, and gets a baby bunny from Bill to take home. I think this sort of narrative appeals to a young child, who is always experimenting with new things and having new adventures.
3. Identification. The man in the yellow hat rescues George from the jungle. There is no reference to George's original parents so the man in the yellow hat becomes something of a parent figure, with the ambivalent role some would like in a parent, i.e., he leaves one alone to be curious until the curiosity causes problems and then the man in the yellow hat comes to the rescue: in a helicopter when a kite takes George up into the air, taking George to the doctor when he swallows a piece of a puzzle, picking George up when he destroys an exhibit at a museum, finding George after he joins a circus, rescuing George after he breaks a leg.
Basically I think children should be encouraged to be curious but should also always be safe, just as George was in these effectively low-key books.
1. A beautiful balance between illustrations and story, with each reinforcing the other while having its own independent elements: each illustration has elements not explicitly in the written story, allowing a child to use her own curiosity about the details.
2. The discursive nature of the narrative, moving from one activity to the next. In Curious George Flies a Kite (1958), for instance, George plays with a ball, goes outside when he is curious about a house next door, discovers the house is full of bunnies and takes one out only to have it run away, ties a string to the mother bunny so he can find the baby, rescues the bunny and then climbs a wall where he sees a man with a fishing pole and follows him to watch him fish, goes home and makes his own fishing pole from a mop and a hook on the wall, returns to the lake to fish, falls in the water trying to catch a fish when they don't respond to cake as bait, gets rescued by Bill who has a kite, flies the kite with Bill and then helps to get the kite out of a tree, flies the kite on his own while Bill returns for his bike, gets blown into the sky when the kite takes off with him still holding on, gets rescued by the man with the yellow hat in a helicopter, and gets a baby bunny from Bill to take home. I think this sort of narrative appeals to a young child, who is always experimenting with new things and having new adventures.
3. Identification. The man in the yellow hat rescues George from the jungle. There is no reference to George's original parents so the man in the yellow hat becomes something of a parent figure, with the ambivalent role some would like in a parent, i.e., he leaves one alone to be curious until the curiosity causes problems and then the man in the yellow hat comes to the rescue: in a helicopter when a kite takes George up into the air, taking George to the doctor when he swallows a piece of a puzzle, picking George up when he destroys an exhibit at a museum, finding George after he joins a circus, rescuing George after he breaks a leg.
Basically I think children should be encouraged to be curious but should also always be safe, just as George was in these effectively low-key books.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Illicit and How to Murder Your Wife
He had done nothing exceptional in marrying -- nothing but what society sanctions, and considers an occasion for wreaths and bouquets.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.
Turner Classic Movies showed two movies about marriage recently: Archie Mayo's Illicit from 1931 and Richard Quine's How to Murder Your Wife from 1965. In the Quine it is the man who doesn't want to get married and give up his Playboy lifestyle, while in Mayo's film Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman who doesn't want to get married because it would lead to a life of ceremony and tedium. In How to Murder Your Wife Jack Lemmon gets drunk and marries the sexy Virna Lisi, who pops out of a cake at a bachelor party where the bachelor doesn't get married (Lemmon had slept with his girlfriend the night before!). Lisi, of course, does not even speak enough English to understand that Lemmon wants a divorce and does his bachelor pad over with chintz and takes over the bathroom to wash her stockings. In Illicit Stanwyck marries because of social pressures and lives to regret it, her husband having an affair with her best friend.
The Quine film (written by George Axelrod, who wrote The Seven-Year Itch) is a mostly unfunny and rather sour comedy -- Quine's best film having been Pushover (1954), a film noir -- and it is hard to tell if How to Murder Your Wife is endorsing or satirizing Playboy, with Lemmon's closest friend being his butler, played by Terry-Thomas, with homoerotic qualities. Illicit transcends its time more effectively(at least in part, of course, because it is a pre-code film), with Barbara Stanwyck preferring just to live together, asserting her independence when all her concerns about marriage turn out to be justified. In Quine's film the marriage is considerably less equal, with Lemmon finally yielding to Lisi because, after all, she is so sexy.
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
The Pleasures of Ballet Class
I returned yesterday to ballet class, where I had been absent for a year while recovering my health. When I began going to the ballet I quickly realized that the dancers on stage were having more fun than the members of the audience. But I thought it was too late in life for me to become a ballet dancer, since training begins at a very young age. My sister had taken ballet classes but no one had offered them to me , nor would I have been likely to take them if they had. And ballet and dance was not a part of my excellent education at Exeter and Columbia (though one hopes that will change, now that Jennifer Homans, who wrote the wonderful history of ballet Apollo's Angels, has started a new academic center for ballet at NYU) so it was only word-of-mouth that got me to go to the NYC Ballet, where I had the exquisite experience of seeing George Balanchine at his most brilliantly creative. It then occurred to me that I would enjoy ballet more if I took class and knew more about the steps and terminology. At that point I was in graduate school at Columbia and saw that they offered ballet classes at the gym. That seemed like a safe bet so I finally worked up the courage to take a class. Of course I knew nothing about ballet class, not even what to wear, but the instructor was most understanding and helped me to understand what "flexing the feet" meant, as well as how one started the barre with the left hand on the barre, what "the inside leg" meant, and the basic terminology, from tendu to plié. I ended up not only learning a great deal about ballet, I also grew to love the class for its intense detail in controlling one's body. After the class ended I asked her about other classes and she told me the most important information about ballet class in New York: if you are just starting out do not take a "beginner" class in New York because beginner classes can be quite advanced! Instead, take a "basic" class, which moves much more slowly, and she suggested one at Peridance, downtown
At Peridance the teacher was from South Africa and a member of the old school, where ballet class was one of the last places where the teacher had absolute authority. Not everyone responded to this positively but I thrived under her, learning enough to go from the basic to the beginning class after a few years. In the beginning class we did jetes, pas de chats, sissone and other traveling steps where one could feel one was flying through space or suspended in the air. Now when I attended the ballet I was much more aware of the different steps and how they were put together and I was even able to absorb some of the techniques used by the dancers and put them into effect in my own dancing.
Peridance closed and I started looking for another class and a friend told me about the 92nd St. Y, where one could try a class before signing up, and I have taken classes there now for more than twenty years. The Y has wonderful teachers who are supportive of novice dancers while still offering rigorous classes. The classes also include live piano accompaniment, which gives the teachers considerable flexibility. They also have student performances once a year and I have participated in them several times, as you can see your classes actually leading to performances and you can learn something about how a ballet is actually created.
The benefits and pleasures of ballet class are many. I have found that when one is annoyed or upset about work a ballet class can be a wonderful distraction: the mental and physical concentration take one away from petty problems into pleasures of the mind and the body. The way ballet classes are structured --barre, floor work, adagio, allegro -- builds up strength, agility, flexibility. And, of course, classes enhance one's enjoyment of ballet performances.
At Peridance the teacher was from South Africa and a member of the old school, where ballet class was one of the last places where the teacher had absolute authority. Not everyone responded to this positively but I thrived under her, learning enough to go from the basic to the beginning class after a few years. In the beginning class we did jetes, pas de chats, sissone and other traveling steps where one could feel one was flying through space or suspended in the air. Now when I attended the ballet I was much more aware of the different steps and how they were put together and I was even able to absorb some of the techniques used by the dancers and put them into effect in my own dancing.
Peridance closed and I started looking for another class and a friend told me about the 92nd St. Y, where one could try a class before signing up, and I have taken classes there now for more than twenty years. The Y has wonderful teachers who are supportive of novice dancers while still offering rigorous classes. The classes also include live piano accompaniment, which gives the teachers considerable flexibility. They also have student performances once a year and I have participated in them several times, as you can see your classes actually leading to performances and you can learn something about how a ballet is actually created.
The benefits and pleasures of ballet class are many. I have found that when one is annoyed or upset about work a ballet class can be a wonderful distraction: the mental and physical concentration take one away from petty problems into pleasures of the mind and the body. The way ballet classes are structured --barre, floor work, adagio, allegro -- builds up strength, agility, flexibility. And, of course, classes enhance one's enjoyment of ballet performances.
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Turner Classic Movies in September
The highlights of this month are the 67 pre-code films that TCM will be showing on Friday nights, pre-code referring to the period before the Production Code was enforced: crimes went unpunished, unmarried couples had sex, and married couples could sleep in the same bed (I admit I have never quite understood why the Code did not allow this). My favorites in this group include the sexy and elegant comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, Trouble in Paradise(1932) and Design for Living(1933), and the gritty and class-conscious melodramas of William Wellman: Wild Boys of the Road(1933), Safe in Hell(1931), Frisco Jenny(1933), Heroes for Sale(1933) and Night Nurse(1931). The last of these stars Barbara Stanwyck, who is in a number of these films as a woman who is not afraid of any man. One sees in these films a rather different world than one sees in American films after 1933.
Other favorites of mine this month include Billy Wilder's The Apartment(1960), a funny and moving bridge between his earlier cynical films and his later, more mellow films; Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor(1963), one of his more successful films, where he recreates Dean Martin; Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth(1937), with its vivid depiction of a couple who only truly appreciate each other after they split up; Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story(1955), with its unblinking view of urban corruption; Anthony Mann's Raw Deal(1948) and T-Men(1947), films noir beautifully photographed in black-and-white by master-of-light-and-shadow John Alton.
Other favorites of mine this month include Billy Wilder's The Apartment(1960), a funny and moving bridge between his earlier cynical films and his later, more mellow films; Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor(1963), one of his more successful films, where he recreates Dean Martin; Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth(1937), with its vivid depiction of a couple who only truly appreciate each other after they split up; Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story(1955), with its unblinking view of urban corruption; Anthony Mann's Raw Deal(1948) and T-Men(1947), films noir beautifully photographed in black-and-white by master-of-light-and-shadow John Alton.
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Scene of the Crime, No Questions Asked, and the Film Noir
Roy Rowland's Scene of the Crime (1949) and Harold Kress's No Questions Asked(1951) are unusual for films noir in that they came out of MGM, not known for its grittiness. I think it helped that both films were directed by B-level directors and were probably used for MGM double bills; the great directors of this kind of film -- Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Jacques Tourneur -- did not often work at MGM. Of the two films I prefer the Kress, if only because it sees things from the point of view of the crook rather than, in the case of the Rowland, from the policeman's point of view. Arlene Dahl is in both films (they were part of a series of her films on Turner Classic Movies) and is a more interesting character in the Kress film. In the Rowland film Dahl is effective as the long-suffering wife of a cop, while in No Questions Asked she plays a more complex character, leaving her lawyer boyfriend at the altar while she runs off with another man, then returns and betrays him again.
To me one of the interesting things about films noir (and this is true of other genres also, such as Westerns) is how the often simple conventions can be used in different and often inspired ways, even by second-level directors. In both the Kress and the Rowland there is a good girl and a bad girl, the bad girl manipulating the "hero" while the good girl stands by him, the hero being tempted by sex and money and succumbing, often (though not in these two films) ending up dead. Meanwhile, the visual elements of lonely and dark streets convey a profound post-war alienation.
To me one of the interesting things about films noir (and this is true of other genres also, such as Westerns) is how the often simple conventions can be used in different and often inspired ways, even by second-level directors. In both the Kress and the Rowland there is a good girl and a bad girl, the bad girl manipulating the "hero" while the good girl stands by him, the hero being tempted by sex and money and succumbing, often (though not in these two films) ending up dead. Meanwhile, the visual elements of lonely and dark streets convey a profound post-war alienation.
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
In most contests between a biographer and his subject -- and contests they often come to seem -- it is difficult to not find yourself rooting for the subject.
Joseph Epstein, "Joe DiMaggio", in Essays in Biography (Axion Press,2012).
Evelyn Barish, in The Double Life of Paul de Man (W.W. Norton, 2014), takes such a prosecutorial approach to her subject that one starts to have sympathy for him. de Man is not talked much about today and since it has been some time since I was in graduate school I can't be sure, but I think the theory of deconstruction, the approach of de Man and Jacques Derrida, may have run its course. Barish, however, ends her biography in 1960 (de Man's influence came later, and he died in 1983), unwilling to deal with a theoretical approach that she admits she does not understand. What she does seem to be attempting is to relate de Man's idea of the close reading of the text to his own constant re-invention and the cover-up of his past.
After de Man's death it was discovered that he had been a journalistic collaborator in Belgium during the Nazi occupation, with one particularly anti-Semitic piece. Later he mismanaged a publishing company and fled to the U.S. just ahead of the law; in the U.S. he worked as a stockboy, became friends with Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy, taught at Bard, became a graduate student at Harvard. He was helped considerably by his charm and his European accent and married a Bard student, even though de Man already had a family that he had sent to South America. Perhaps understandably, Barish always puts the most negative interpretation on everything. No one ever thought de Man a Nazi sympathizer, though undoubtedly he was quite an opportunist. Barish even attacks de Man for working at Berlitz and General Electric while still a graduate student, though many of us who have been graduate students know how difficult it is to survive on a small stipend, even if one does not have, as de Man did, a wife and children. And de Man's slowness in finishing his dissertation is not all that unusual.
Do de Man's collaboration, financial misdeeds and other bad behavior invalidate his theories? Does Heidegger's relationship to the Nazis invalidate his? What about the influence of Heidegger on de Man? These are not easy questions to answer. Many of de Man's students attest to his abilities as a teacher, though Barish thinks they were often conned by de Man's impenetrability. Barish has produced a great deal of useful research about de Man's life and about writers and academics in the fifties, but what elements of de Man's theories, if any, will last?
Joseph Epstein, "Joe DiMaggio", in Essays in Biography (Axion Press,2012).
Evelyn Barish, in The Double Life of Paul de Man (W.W. Norton, 2014), takes such a prosecutorial approach to her subject that one starts to have sympathy for him. de Man is not talked much about today and since it has been some time since I was in graduate school I can't be sure, but I think the theory of deconstruction, the approach of de Man and Jacques Derrida, may have run its course. Barish, however, ends her biography in 1960 (de Man's influence came later, and he died in 1983), unwilling to deal with a theoretical approach that she admits she does not understand. What she does seem to be attempting is to relate de Man's idea of the close reading of the text to his own constant re-invention and the cover-up of his past.
After de Man's death it was discovered that he had been a journalistic collaborator in Belgium during the Nazi occupation, with one particularly anti-Semitic piece. Later he mismanaged a publishing company and fled to the U.S. just ahead of the law; in the U.S. he worked as a stockboy, became friends with Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy, taught at Bard, became a graduate student at Harvard. He was helped considerably by his charm and his European accent and married a Bard student, even though de Man already had a family that he had sent to South America. Perhaps understandably, Barish always puts the most negative interpretation on everything. No one ever thought de Man a Nazi sympathizer, though undoubtedly he was quite an opportunist. Barish even attacks de Man for working at Berlitz and General Electric while still a graduate student, though many of us who have been graduate students know how difficult it is to survive on a small stipend, even if one does not have, as de Man did, a wife and children. And de Man's slowness in finishing his dissertation is not all that unusual.
Do de Man's collaboration, financial misdeeds and other bad behavior invalidate his theories? Does Heidegger's relationship to the Nazis invalidate his? What about the influence of Heidegger on de Man? These are not easy questions to answer. Many of de Man's students attest to his abilities as a teacher, though Barish thinks they were often conned by de Man's impenetrability. Barish has produced a great deal of useful research about de Man's life and about writers and academics in the fifties, but what elements of de Man's theories, if any, will last?
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Michael Curtiz's The Strange Love of Molly Louvain and Billy Wilder's Avanti
One would normally not think of Billy Wilder and Michael Curtiz together, but both were from Austria-Hungary and had significant directing careers in the U.S. Wilder is well-known for such caustic films as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Apartment (1960)and while one often hears of Casablanca (1942) as a favorite film not many people can tell you it was directed by Michael Curtiz, who had a long career in Hollywood. I recently watched The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (one of four films Curtiz directed in 1932) and Avanti (1972) and, though I am generally a "splitter" and not a "lumper" I did find interesting similarities in these films, made 40 years apart. Both films deal with class and betrayal, common themes for both these directors. In the Curtiz film a shopgirl plans to marry a wealthy man, is abandoned by him and has his child out of wedlock, takes up with a gangster and ends up with a reporter, who had betrayed her by broadcasting a false report that her child was ill. In Avanti a wealthy businessman comes to Ischia to recover his father's body and ends up having an affair with the shopgirl who came to recover her mother's body: her mother and his father had been meeting for a month once a year for ten years and by the end of the film it looks as if the daughter and the son will be doing the same. Both films are shot mainly in interiors and emphasize the growing relationship of the lovers.
The Curtiz film is considered pre-Code, before the restrictions of the Production Code were enforced, with Ann Dvorak shown several times in her underwear. Avanti is post-Code, with the nudity allowed after the Code was no longer enforced. Curtiz's film stars the intense and effective Dvorak, who seldom received the roles she deserved (I first discovered her in the later Albert Lewin film, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, 1947 , where she was intelligent and assertive) while the Wilder film stars Juliet Mills, who had a very limited film career. Strange Love ... is breezy and fast (72 minutes), in the pre-Code Warner Brothers style, while Avanti runs 2 hours and 24 minutes, both films taking the amount of time they need to tell their stories. Avanti is an amusing comedy with melodramatic elements,a relatively mellow film very much in the tradition of Lubitsch, a continuation of Love in the Afternoon (1957); The Strange Love of Molly Louvain is a melodrama with comedic elements, especially in the reporter-The Front Page sections (one of Wilder's last films was The Front Page,1974)
One additional point about Avanti: I watched it with my wife Susan and 16-year-old son Gideon and we all found things in it --sometimes the same things, sometimes different things -- to enjoy, even if in different ways. This significant appeal of the classical cinema is practically extinct.
The Curtiz film is considered pre-Code, before the restrictions of the Production Code were enforced, with Ann Dvorak shown several times in her underwear. Avanti is post-Code, with the nudity allowed after the Code was no longer enforced. Curtiz's film stars the intense and effective Dvorak, who seldom received the roles she deserved (I first discovered her in the later Albert Lewin film, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, 1947 , where she was intelligent and assertive) while the Wilder film stars Juliet Mills, who had a very limited film career. Strange Love ... is breezy and fast (72 minutes), in the pre-Code Warner Brothers style, while Avanti runs 2 hours and 24 minutes, both films taking the amount of time they need to tell their stories. Avanti is an amusing comedy with melodramatic elements,a relatively mellow film very much in the tradition of Lubitsch, a continuation of Love in the Afternoon (1957); The Strange Love of Molly Louvain is a melodrama with comedic elements, especially in the reporter-The Front Page sections (one of Wilder's last films was The Front Page,1974)
One additional point about Avanti: I watched it with my wife Susan and 16-year-old son Gideon and we all found things in it --sometimes the same things, sometimes different things -- to enjoy, even if in different ways. This significant appeal of the classical cinema is practically extinct.
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