There are several John Ford movies this month, of which my favorites are How Green Was My Valley and Three Godfathers. Joseph McBride, in his book Searching for John Ford, said that Three Godfathers was "perhaps the most ravishingly beautiful film he ever made"; it was also an unusual Western in that it was not shot in Monument Valley. And about How Green Was My Valley McBride wrote "Like Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) Ford's 1941 classic retains a deep hold on the public's emotions despite (and perhaps because of) the fact that it tells an essentially bleak story of the futility of an ordinary man's existence."
Speaking of Frank Capra, Turner is also showing one of his loveliest pre-populist/fascist films, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), described accurately by Victoria Wilson in her recent biography of Barbara Stanwyck as "dreamy, exotic, other-worldly."
No one directed comedies as funny and elegant as Ernst Lubitsch. Turner in July is showing the understated, sophisticated and beautiful Trouble in Paradise (1932) and To Be or Not To Be (1942) which, as Andrew Sarris says, was "widely critiqued as an inappropriately farcical treatment of Nazi terror, it bridges the abyss between laughter and horror."
Leo McCarey, who Jean Renoir said understood people better than any other director, directed Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), a bittersweet film about growing old.
Nicholas Ray is represented on TCM in July by The Lusty Men (1952), a film Ray biographer Patrick McGilligan referred to (correctly) as "an ambitious overlap of genres, with a dreamlike quality and a brooding fatalistic view of life."
Other films I look forward to in July include:
Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (1955), a film Truffaut called "the first modern film."
Chaplin's A King in New York (1957); America of the 50's from the point of view of an outcast.
The Big Parade (1925): King Vidor's powerful and moving WWI story, starring John Gilbert.
Capt. Horatio Hornblower (1955): Raoul Walsh's film about adventure and loss.
Out of the Past (1947): Jacques Tourneur's intense film noir.
The Mortal Storm (1940): Frank Borzage's film is one of the earliest Hollywood films about Nazis, with a doomed love affair at the center.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers and Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth
The Garvey clan was like the old Soviet Union, a once mighty power that had dissolved into a bunch of weak and cranky units.
Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers, St. Martin's Press, 2011
I admit that I read Perrotta's book because it is being used as the basis for a TV series, starting next week, put together by Damon Lindelof of Lost fame; I liked Lost, at least the first few years. The book focuses on the Garvey family in Mapleton, a family that did not lose members in the Sudden Departure, when millions of people all over the world suddenly vanished, but is nonetheless falling apart because of it. The Leftovers shows how much suburbia and the family have been falling apart, a tendency accelerated by the disappearance of so many people, people who seemed to have nothing in common; the book is sometimes funny and often sad, as family rifts come out in the open while everyone tries in their own way to understand what cannot be understood.
Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth (2012) is appealing and appalling in the same way the films of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni and Polanski were in my college days, when we would see films by these filmmakers and discuss for hours their beauty and what was "real" and what was not. In Pawlikowski's film a writer comes to Paris to see his daughter (it is never revealed why he is not allowed to by the courts), gets robbed of all his money and takes a mysterious job and a room in a seedy hotel, eventually meeting and falling in love with a woman who seems to have died in 1991. One can identify with the frustration of not seeing one's child and getting caught in a foreign country without money or the ability to speak the language well. The film captures the pain of being adrift in an off-the-beaten-track part of the beautiful city of Paris as a writer tries to write his second novel, tries unsuccessfully to see his daughter and, perhaps, descends into madness.
Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers, St. Martin's Press, 2011
I admit that I read Perrotta's book because it is being used as the basis for a TV series, starting next week, put together by Damon Lindelof of Lost fame; I liked Lost, at least the first few years. The book focuses on the Garvey family in Mapleton, a family that did not lose members in the Sudden Departure, when millions of people all over the world suddenly vanished, but is nonetheless falling apart because of it. The Leftovers shows how much suburbia and the family have been falling apart, a tendency accelerated by the disappearance of so many people, people who seemed to have nothing in common; the book is sometimes funny and often sad, as family rifts come out in the open while everyone tries in their own way to understand what cannot be understood.
Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth (2012) is appealing and appalling in the same way the films of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni and Polanski were in my college days, when we would see films by these filmmakers and discuss for hours their beauty and what was "real" and what was not. In Pawlikowski's film a writer comes to Paris to see his daughter (it is never revealed why he is not allowed to by the courts), gets robbed of all his money and takes a mysterious job and a room in a seedy hotel, eventually meeting and falling in love with a woman who seems to have died in 1991. One can identify with the frustration of not seeing one's child and getting caught in a foreign country without money or the ability to speak the language well. The film captures the pain of being adrift in an off-the-beaten-track part of the beautiful city of Paris as a writer tries to write his second novel, tries unsuccessfully to see his daughter and, perhaps, descends into madness.
Monday, June 23, 2014
Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clerq
Nancy Buirski's extraordinary film Afternoon of a Faun; Tanaquil Le Clerq showed this week-end on PBS. Le Clerq was a fabulous dancer with the New York City Ballet, married to George Balanchine and stricken with polio when she was 27, at the height of her career. There is marvelous footage of her dancing, especially with Jacques d'Amboise in Jerome Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun and Balanchine's Western Symphony; d'Amboise (who is interviewed in the film) more than keeps up with her: his elevation complements her speed. She was tall, with very long legs, and changed the ideal of a ballet dancer. After Le Clerq, Balanchine's fourth wife, Balanchine often worked with dancers with very particular looks and personalities -- Allegra Kent, Patricia McBride, Merrill Ashley, Suzanne Farrell -- whose individual strengths he would draw on for his exquisite ballets. Some of the best footage in this film is of Balanchine himself, demonstrating choreography and dancing the lead role in his own Don Quixote (which the New York City Ballet has not done in many years but which I was fortunate enough to see, staged by Suzanne Farrell, at the Kennedy Center in July 2005). Of slightly less interest is the relationship between Le Clerq and Jerome Robbins: he asked her to marry him but they stayed friends (and he returned to male lovers) after she married Balanchine. The last third of the film is both painful and moving, with Le Clerq in a wheelchair interspersed with Balanchine dancers who came after her. I appreciate that Buirski assumes at least a minimal knowledge of the New York City Ballet and is able to use so much film of Le Clerq in such Balanchine masterpieces as La Valse and Concerto Barocco.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
They Were Expendable
What could have seemed more perverse than Ford's celebration of gallant defeat in the aftermath of glorious victory?
Andrew Sarris, The John Ford Movie Mystery (Indiana University Press,1975)
They Were Expendable's verisimilitude , richness of texture and sense of spontaneity are the by-products of Ford's witnessing and recording actual warfare.
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (St. Martin's Press,2001).
John Ford's film came out in 1945 just when the war was over and was a reminder, that few wanted to hear, just what sacrifices has been made in the early part of the war, especially in the Philippines. Nobility and glory in defeat was the theme of the movie, beautifully portrayed by Ford, with the help of cinematographer Joseph August, actors Robert Montgomery, John Wayne and Donna Reed, as well as numerous members of the Ford "family" of actors. Even the Japanese were sensitively portrayed, simply by not showing them at all, the unseen enemy (Terence Malick and others, please take note!). Ford's film is often at its best when there in no dialogue, as when two young recruits come across graves in the jungle marked by crosses, Wayne sits down quietly in disgust and frustration after his PT boat is destroyed, the men quietly leave the hospital after saying farewell to a dying colleague. Ford excels at showing the individuality within the group, united for a common purpose, and how people can connect and persevere in the most difficult circumstances, as the relationship between Donna Reed and John Wayne is ended by a broken phone line and he never finds out what happened to her, unwillingly leaving the Philippines to "lay down a bunt" for the team.
Andrew Sarris, The John Ford Movie Mystery (Indiana University Press,1975)
They Were Expendable's verisimilitude , richness of texture and sense of spontaneity are the by-products of Ford's witnessing and recording actual warfare.
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (St. Martin's Press,2001).
John Ford's film came out in 1945 just when the war was over and was a reminder, that few wanted to hear, just what sacrifices has been made in the early part of the war, especially in the Philippines. Nobility and glory in defeat was the theme of the movie, beautifully portrayed by Ford, with the help of cinematographer Joseph August, actors Robert Montgomery, John Wayne and Donna Reed, as well as numerous members of the Ford "family" of actors. Even the Japanese were sensitively portrayed, simply by not showing them at all, the unseen enemy (Terence Malick and others, please take note!). Ford's film is often at its best when there in no dialogue, as when two young recruits come across graves in the jungle marked by crosses, Wayne sits down quietly in disgust and frustration after his PT boat is destroyed, the men quietly leave the hospital after saying farewell to a dying colleague. Ford excels at showing the individuality within the group, united for a common purpose, and how people can connect and persevere in the most difficult circumstances, as the relationship between Donna Reed and John Wayne is ended by a broken phone line and he never finds out what happened to her, unwillingly leaving the Philippines to "lay down a bunt" for the team.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Scott Eyman, Mark Harris, Donna Tartt (continued), The Mets
Since the war had started he [John Ford] had watched with increasing contempt as John Wayne had made and broken one vague commitment after another to join up.
Mark Harris, Five Came Back. A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (The Penguin Press, 2014).
This is the kind of detail missing from John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman (Simon and Schuster, 2014). Eyman's book is a beautifully detailed biography of Wayne that breaks no new ground, while Harris's book is a fascinating study of five directors (Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, William Wyler) and how the war changed their lives and affected America's perceptions of WW II. Ford and Huston continued their careers with great films while Capra retreated into his muddled politics, where populism shaded into Fascism, and produced only one more interesting film (It's a Wonderful Life, which continues to be misunderstood as some kind of happy Christmas story while actually being a brilliant and bitter critique of small-town America) and William Wyler and George Stevens never truly recovered from the horrors they saw. Harris's book intelligently integrates the stories of all these men and their struggles during the war to produce vivid documentaries (with often unacknowledged re-enactments) that they could live with in spite of the racism and dubious propaganda involved.
The July issue of Vanity Fair has an interesting piece about the critical reception for Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which initially received positive reviews but was panned by The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. To me it was an enjoyable novel, with great strengths and some weaknesses, but it's just another book. Loren Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, is concerned that people who only read a couple of books a year will read this instead of something else! This is similar to some of the arguments about what high school and college students should read, with the assumption being that after they graduate they will never read another book, an assumption that has some truth to it. Ideally people should read many different books for many different purposes and make their own judgments. Even Dickens was not universally admired in his day and not all of today's critics are that crazy about him. There is no critic of books, movies or art today who is a totally reliable guide, many of them (and this is especially true of Tartt's critics) falling for the fallacy of "realism."
The dreariness of this year's New York Mets is less dreary than it might be because of their radio voices. Howie Rose and Josh Lewin continue (on WOR, 710) to be intelligent, thoughtful and perceptive. Gary Cohen is a decent TV announcer but his colleagues Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling tend to relate everything to their own careers. The radio voices of the Yankees John ("t-t-t-h-h-e-e Yankees win") Sterling and Suzyn ("that's right, John") Waldman detract from the game, and the bombastic Michael Kay makes the TV broadcasts equally hard to take.
Mark Harris, Five Came Back. A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (The Penguin Press, 2014).
This is the kind of detail missing from John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman (Simon and Schuster, 2014). Eyman's book is a beautifully detailed biography of Wayne that breaks no new ground, while Harris's book is a fascinating study of five directors (Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, William Wyler) and how the war changed their lives and affected America's perceptions of WW II. Ford and Huston continued their careers with great films while Capra retreated into his muddled politics, where populism shaded into Fascism, and produced only one more interesting film (It's a Wonderful Life, which continues to be misunderstood as some kind of happy Christmas story while actually being a brilliant and bitter critique of small-town America) and William Wyler and George Stevens never truly recovered from the horrors they saw. Harris's book intelligently integrates the stories of all these men and their struggles during the war to produce vivid documentaries (with often unacknowledged re-enactments) that they could live with in spite of the racism and dubious propaganda involved.
The July issue of Vanity Fair has an interesting piece about the critical reception for Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which initially received positive reviews but was panned by The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. To me it was an enjoyable novel, with great strengths and some weaknesses, but it's just another book. Loren Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, is concerned that people who only read a couple of books a year will read this instead of something else! This is similar to some of the arguments about what high school and college students should read, with the assumption being that after they graduate they will never read another book, an assumption that has some truth to it. Ideally people should read many different books for many different purposes and make their own judgments. Even Dickens was not universally admired in his day and not all of today's critics are that crazy about him. There is no critic of books, movies or art today who is a totally reliable guide, many of them (and this is especially true of Tartt's critics) falling for the fallacy of "realism."
The dreariness of this year's New York Mets is less dreary than it might be because of their radio voices. Howie Rose and Josh Lewin continue (on WOR, 710) to be intelligent, thoughtful and perceptive. Gary Cohen is a decent TV announcer but his colleagues Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling tend to relate everything to their own careers. The radio voices of the Yankees John ("t-t-t-h-h-e-e Yankees win") Sterling and Suzyn ("that's right, John") Waldman detract from the game, and the bombastic Michael Kay makes the TV broadcasts equally hard to take.
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Jean-Pierre Melville and Masahiro Tanaka
What I do is false. Always.
Jean-Pierre Melville in Melville on Melville (Rui Nogueira, The Viking Press, 1971)
When I first saw Melville's Deux Hommes dan Manhattan at MoMA several years ago I found it disappointing; now that it is available on DVD I find it fascinating. It is something of a film noir as seen by a Frenchman, just as C'era Una Volta Il West is a Western seen by an Italian. It is certainly not my favorite Melville film (that would be the beautifully austere Le Samurai) but it is a complex view of New York in 1959, with exteriors filmed in a very dark New York and interiors in a French studio, as two journalists (one played by Melville himself) try to find a missing French diplomat in the seedier parts of Manhattan, going from a diner copied from Asphalt Jungle (Melville's favorite movie) to a strip club in Brooklyn and a recording studio where Glenda Leigh sings the lovely "Street in Manhattan" (written by Christian Chevalier and Jo Warfield). And the ending is obviously from another era, when the peccadillos of someone who was in the Resistance (in which Melville played a part and for which he originally took his new name, from the author of Moby Dick) would be covered up at his death.
One of the pleasures of this somewhat disappointing New York baseball season has been the pitching of Masahiro Tanaka: after last night's victory in Seattle he is now 10-2 with a 2.02 ERA and 103 strikeouts. It is beautiful to watch him work; he concentrates so effectively and pitches so quickly and intensely that the batter often doesn't even have time to step out of the batter's box and waste everyone's time adjusting his batting gloves. Last night Tanaka pitched a complete game that was over in less than three hours.
Jean-Pierre Melville in Melville on Melville (Rui Nogueira, The Viking Press, 1971)
When I first saw Melville's Deux Hommes dan Manhattan at MoMA several years ago I found it disappointing; now that it is available on DVD I find it fascinating. It is something of a film noir as seen by a Frenchman, just as C'era Una Volta Il West is a Western seen by an Italian. It is certainly not my favorite Melville film (that would be the beautifully austere Le Samurai) but it is a complex view of New York in 1959, with exteriors filmed in a very dark New York and interiors in a French studio, as two journalists (one played by Melville himself) try to find a missing French diplomat in the seedier parts of Manhattan, going from a diner copied from Asphalt Jungle (Melville's favorite movie) to a strip club in Brooklyn and a recording studio where Glenda Leigh sings the lovely "Street in Manhattan" (written by Christian Chevalier and Jo Warfield). And the ending is obviously from another era, when the peccadillos of someone who was in the Resistance (in which Melville played a part and for which he originally took his new name, from the author of Moby Dick) would be covered up at his death.
One of the pleasures of this somewhat disappointing New York baseball season has been the pitching of Masahiro Tanaka: after last night's victory in Seattle he is now 10-2 with a 2.02 ERA and 103 strikeouts. It is beautiful to watch him work; he concentrates so effectively and pitches so quickly and intensely that the batter often doesn't even have time to step out of the batter's box and waste everyone's time adjusting his batting gloves. Last night Tanaka pitched a complete game that was over in less than three hours.
Friday, June 6, 2014
The Bat
Harry was lost. In front of him were some steps, behind him was water and more steps. The level of chaos was rising, the masts in the bay were veering from one side to the other, and he had no idea how he had ended up here. He decided to climb. "Onward and upward," to quote his father.
Jo Nesbo, The Bat (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, Vintage Books, 2012).
Harry Hole, Nesbo's dipsomaniac Norwegian cop, is inebriated again. The Bat is the first of Nesbo's Harry Hole series, though not the first translated, in which Hole goes to Australia to investigate the murder of a Norwegian there. Nesbo is one of several Scandinavian crime writers becoming popular in the U.S. Based on this book it is a little hard to see why. I do think it is a continuation of the popularity of Ingmar Bergman in this country: similarly to Bergman's films these books display a dark and bleak modern landscape where we have been abandoned by God. We know that Sweden and Norway have excellent healthcare, childcare, parental leave, unemployment compensation, etc. and I think that some Americans are Puritan enough to think that there must be a price paid for this.
Nesbo's book, which conveniently takes place completely in Australia, does not deal with Nordic life at all, except in passing. The Scandinavian crime writers are living in the shadow of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who wrote the complex series with cop Martin Beck in the 60's and 70's. These books are full of intelligent insights about Swedish society and refuse to give simple answers to important questions about crime and society. Wahloo and Sjowall were followed by the crime novels of Henning Mankell, whose Kurt Wallander character was constantly troubled in his attempts to make order out of chaos. Henning Mankell is actually married to Ingmar Bergman's daughter and has sought answers to how to deal with the problems in Swedish society, as Wallander looks not only for criminals but for the roots of crime.
Jo Nesbo, The Bat (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, Vintage Books, 2012).
Harry Hole, Nesbo's dipsomaniac Norwegian cop, is inebriated again. The Bat is the first of Nesbo's Harry Hole series, though not the first translated, in which Hole goes to Australia to investigate the murder of a Norwegian there. Nesbo is one of several Scandinavian crime writers becoming popular in the U.S. Based on this book it is a little hard to see why. I do think it is a continuation of the popularity of Ingmar Bergman in this country: similarly to Bergman's films these books display a dark and bleak modern landscape where we have been abandoned by God. We know that Sweden and Norway have excellent healthcare, childcare, parental leave, unemployment compensation, etc. and I think that some Americans are Puritan enough to think that there must be a price paid for this.
Nesbo's book, which conveniently takes place completely in Australia, does not deal with Nordic life at all, except in passing. The Scandinavian crime writers are living in the shadow of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who wrote the complex series with cop Martin Beck in the 60's and 70's. These books are full of intelligent insights about Swedish society and refuse to give simple answers to important questions about crime and society. Wahloo and Sjowall were followed by the crime novels of Henning Mankell, whose Kurt Wallander character was constantly troubled in his attempts to make order out of chaos. Henning Mankell is actually married to Ingmar Bergman's daughter and has sought answers to how to deal with the problems in Swedish society, as Wallander looks not only for criminals but for the roots of crime.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
We Live Again and The Invisible Woman
Rouben Mamoulian's We Live Again (1934), which I watched on TCM, and Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman (2013) have much in common, though the Mamoulian is beautifully photographed in black-and-white by Gregg Toland (who did Citizen Kane and The Grapes of Wrath) and the Fiennes is in wide-screen and color: they both demonstrate a complex understanding of class and gender in their respective societies, Czarist Russia and Victorian England. In these male-dominated societies relationships across class lines have to be concealed. In both films the women have illegitimate babies who die at birth and have to be buried secretly and the scenes are heart-breaking, though at least Charles Dickens, in the Fiennes film, is there to share the grief while the Czarist officer in the Mamoulian is not even aware of the birth.
Mamoulian had a long career but today is largely a forgotten director, though his Queen Christina has one of Garbo's best roles, while Fiennes has only directed two films thus far. What they each show is a respect for the intelligence of the viewer. Fiennes, for instance, makes no attempt to explain who Dickens's play collaborator Wilkie Collins is, expecting the viewer to know, while Mamoulian (of Armenian descent, born in Russia) effectively captures the mood of Tolstoy's Resurrection, the source for We Live Again.
Mamoulian had a long career but today is largely a forgotten director, though his Queen Christina has one of Garbo's best roles, while Fiennes has only directed two films thus far. What they each show is a respect for the intelligence of the viewer. Fiennes, for instance, makes no attempt to explain who Dickens's play collaborator Wilkie Collins is, expecting the viewer to know, while Mamoulian (of Armenian descent, born in Russia) effectively captures the mood of Tolstoy's Resurrection, the source for We Live Again.
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