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. 

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?