Baseball Hall of Fame and the Academy Awards.

Now that Glavine, Maddux and Thomas have been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame it is time to ask the question:  what is the point of this particular institution?  It seems to me that its main value is as a modern Valhalla or Pantheon, but is it good to worship baseball players as gods and saints and go to visit their artifacts --gloves, bats, etc.-- as though they were relics of saints or pieces of the true cross?  When I was a kid baseball players were indeed gods and the baseball establishment protected them as such (remember the uproar when Jim Bouton in Ball Four --still one of the best books about baseball --described Mickey Mantle's "beaver-shooting?") but I think it's okay to find out that baseball players, with their extraordinary skills, are still human beings.  The current controversy over who should be in the Hall of Fame and who should be excluded shows the rampant hypocrisy and conflict-of-interest that goes into the whole process.  The rules say that players should be selected on the basis of their "record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which they played."  Now that we know more about drug use, etc. and are going to not elect people because of that, don't we also have to remove some people who are already in there? Also, as Robert Lipsyte as written; "Why are sportswriters giving out awards to people they cover as subjects on behalf of institutions they cover?"

Why do people take the Academy Awards seriously?  Do they have any idea who the 6000 voters are, voting for people and studios to whom they owe their jobs?  There certainly are some good films that have won Academy Awards --Casablanca, Going My Way, How Green Was My Valley--but the awards have gone more often than not to heavily-promoted, bloated epics such as Gone with The Wind.  Take 1956 as a random example:  this was a year that produced such great films as Ford's The Searchers, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, Boetticher's Seven Men From Now, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, et al. and the Oscar goes to: Around the World in 80 Days! At least the Academy has something of a veteran's committee, giving honorary Oscars to those who never won --Chaplin, Hitchcock, Ennio Morricone, etc.

Young Mr. Lincoln

With John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln scheduled for Turner Classic Movies I just wanted to recommend the 1970 Cahiers du Cinema article on the film, a collective text by the editors:
http--isites.harvard.edu-fs-docs-icb.topic235120.files-CdCLincoln.pdf and other sites. 

I suggest that if you have an aversion to the jargon of academic writing you skip part 1 and go directly to part 2, where the analysis begins.  This piece is a complete analysis of the film and its social and political context, emphasizing not only Ford's elegant direction but the role the studio, the producers and others played in the film.  But it also analyzes how we see the film as we watch it, constructing our changing views within the classical narrative. When I was an art history student I shared this article with some of my fellow students and they were amazed how the techniques of close reading could be applied to a film just as effectively as they could be applied to a painting. A great film, like any great work of art, can be enjoyed at a number of different levels.  What particularly impresses me about Young Mr. Lincoln is how effectively Ford can combine romance, comedy, melodrama, suspense and mythology, something he does in all his best films.   

Johnny Carson

I recently read Johnny Carson by his former lawyer, Henry Bushkin (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).  I usually read biographies of people I admire, in the doomed hope that I can learn how people, with all their problems and difficulties, managed to accomplish so much.  In this case I hoped to find out what made Johnny Carson so popular, something that to me was always mysterious.  Carson could not sing, dance or act, as far as one knows and, like many comedians, he was unhappy, nasty and insecure, according to Bushkin.  Apparently he did have the ability to tell a joke, though he had writers to write the jokes and most of them were not so funny.  But also he went out of his way not to offend anyone:  asked why he did not tell political jokes he responded that he did not want to alienate any portion of his audience, a condescending but probably correct perception for much of the audience. In other words, he always played it safe and took no risks and I think that is the reason why much of his audience returned to him night after night and The Tonight Show had plenty of advertisers.  Carson's predecessors, Steve Allen and Jack Paar, often took risks and enjoyed surprising the audience:  Allen was one of the first to have Elvis Presley on his show and Paar once walked out when the network censored one of his jokes. Carson's guests also tended to be bland and inoffensive and if they weren't they were not invited back.  I was in the audience for his show once in California and for the warm up Doc Severinsen came out and humped the piano while Ed McMahon flattered the audience by saying "I can tell this is a drinking crowd!" 

TCM in January

Not a lot to recommend on Turner this month, though I would like to stress that one should always investigate movies with which one is unfamiliar.  One of the reasons we know as much about movies now as we do is because Henri Langlois, when he ran the French Cinematheque. was always non-judgemental:  the scorned movies of yesterday are sometimes the masterpieces of today.

Ford. Hitchcock, Lang and Borzage are well-represented this month; I particularly recommend Borzage's wonderfully romantic History is Made at Night.  I also like Robert Aldrich's Autumn Leaves (with its lovely theme song sung by Nat KingCole) and Otto Preminger's Skidoo (promised this time in wide-screen), bizarre and quirky, with delightful credits, sung at the end by Nilsson.

Orson Welles and Josef von Sternberg

I just finished reading John Baxter's Von Sternberg (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010) and My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles (Metropolitan Books,2013), two stories about Hollywood mavericks.  Josef von Sternberg always insisted on doing things his own way and the results include many beautiful movies, from the silent The Last Command to the sound films with Marlene Dietrich.  But when von Sternberg no longer had Dietrich as a star he fell on hard times and had trouble finding financing for his films. And we all know the story of Welles, doing endless "roasts" and commercials in order to finance his films, many of which remained unfinished at his death.  Baxter's book is an intelligent survey of von Sternberg's career, while in the Jaglom book Welles comes across as a pompous blowhard, always looking for money for movies that never quite comes through.  My suggestion is just to see their movies, many of them glorious.  I am fortunate enough to have seen Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1965) and von Sternberg's Anathan (1952), movies both personal and beautiful, that the directors were able to make at the end of their careers and that sum up their personal visions.