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)
Sunday, November 30, 2014
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.
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