Turner Classic Movies, Jan. 2016

Joseph Losey's M (1951) shows up on Jan.1.  This film has long been unavailable and it will be interesting to see how it compares with Fritz Lang's original.

Jan.3  John Stahl's Imitation of Life, 1934, as true to the 1930's as Sirk's version is to the 1950's

Jan 4  Hitchcock's Stage Fright, 1950, with its unusual unreliable flashback.

January 9 Raoul Walsh's Captain Horatio Hornblower, 1951, and Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story, 1955

Jan. 10  John Cromwell's Anna and the King of Siam, 1946, and three films by Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu:  The Story of Floating Weeds,1934, Equinox Flower,1958, The End of Summer, 1961.

Jan 11 Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, 1944, funny and didactic.

Jan. 12 Howard Hawks's marvelous Only Angels Have Wings, 1939

Jan 13  Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, 1944, and Douglas Sirk's ironic soap opera There's Always Tomorrow, 1956.

Jan 15 Jean de Limur's original version of The Letter, 1929, with Jeanne Eagels, and John Ford's Stagecoach, 1939

Jan 17.  Lubitsch's pre-code Design for Living, with Noel Coward brilliantly re-written by Ben Hecht.

Jan. 18 King Vidor's innovative early sound film, Halleluah, 1929, with an all-black cast.

Jan. 20  Billy Wilder's The Apartment, 1960, funny and, of course, cynical.

Jan. 28  Lubitsch's The Love Parade, 1929, exquisite and funny.

and the month ends up with two excellent example of film noir, Anthony Mann's The Black Book,1949, on the 28th and Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady, 1944, based on a Cornell Woolrich story, on the 31st.

NYC Ballet -- The Nutcracker -- Dec. 24, 2015

The Nutcracker, both in conception and execution, seems to me as nearly flawless a work as the New York City Ballet has ever staged.

The Waltz of the Flowers is so dazzling in the sweep of its imagery and so concentrated in its means that one might analyze it for days without coming to the end of what Balanchine knows about choreography.

--Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, Jan. 21 1974

I now admit I was wrong, i.e., The Nutcracker is still a ballet for those who do not like ballet, but it is also for those who do!  Until Thursday I had not seen The Nutcracker for more than twelve years and I often made disparaging remarks about it, though mainly because too many people take their children to it and never to another ballet!  But I certainly can't blame the ballet or Balanchine for that and I retract those remarks; the ballet is magnificent not only in its choreography but in its story-telling, something I couldn't quite see when I was in thrall to Balanchine's brilliant abstract ballets. The magic -- the growing Christmas tree, the traveling bed, the battle with the mice, the nutcracker who comes alive, the flying sled -- that so entrances audiences is also in service to the dancing.  I had remembered the first act as having no dancing when, in fact, it has a great deal of dancing, mostly by the children but including the choreographed movement of the adults and the wonderful snowflakes dancing in the snow. The second act has one of the loveliest pieces of magic, when the cavalier (danced beautifully by Joseph Gordon) pulls the Sugarplum Fairy (Sara Adams) across the stage while she is still on point (he is able to do this because of a moving disk on the floor, but it all happens too quickly for one to figure out how the magic is done);  it also has delightful pure dancing, with The Waltz of the Flowers led by Tiler Peck doing lovely tour jetes.

I have written before how Balanchine's ballets capture the elegance and complexity of solos, pas de deux and large groups; in The Nutcracker Balanchine shows, through dancing, how people behave as a couple, alone, or in groups, but he also includes tributes to all ages, from grandfathers to young children, as well as different ethnic groups, occupations, and even the otherworldly in the form of angels; they exist all in a fantastic harmony.  My four-year-old daughter, my seventeen-year-old son, my wife and I, all enjoyed this incredibly beautiful combination of story-telling, dreams come to life and beautiful dancing.  I also must add the experience was helped immensely by the gorgeous Tschaikovsky music, conducted by Andrew Litton, the new music director of the New York City Ballet.

Bolshoi Babylon

The major effect that Nick Read and Mark Franchetti's documentary, Bolshoi Babylon, had on me was to make me happy that we do not have politicians running ballet and opera companies in this country.  Before I ever went to the ballet I would hear that the Russians had the best dancers and ballet companies because of the money the government was pouring into them.  Now, having seen the Bolshoi and the more artistically interesting Mariinsky it is clear that the Russian companies have never really moved out of the Stalin era, either politically or artistically, and it not surprising that some of the  best Russian dancers -- Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Marakova, et al.-- defected.  Unfortunately this documentary does not go into any detail about the ballets the Bolshoi performs or their choreographers, though we do get glimpses of Swan Lake and Giselle none of the excerpts is identified.  Read and Franchetti also make the common mistake of showing much of the dancing -- though they don't show very much -- in slow motion, which does little to capture the beauty of ballet and much to obscure it.

Read and Franchetti are mainly interested in the juicy scandal of dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko throwing acid in the face of artistic director Sergei Filin.  In this country a dancer who did not like the people in charge would simply find a job at another company, or perhaps turn to teaching, but this freedom does not exist in Russia.  Pavel was apparently miffed at the lack of roles for himself and his girlfriend.  The film moves quickly, the dancers have a great deal to complain about and the tiny subtitles cannot keep up with the rapid Russian spoken by all the participants.  The few moments of real beauty come when the filmmakers are recording Bolshoi classes, with hard-working students and intense instructors.

Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo

Those of his films that cannot be dismissed as sophisticated but uninspired hackwork are inevitably cursed with either preachy self-importance or cheery (but still preachy) patriotism.
  --Richard Corliss on Dalton Trumbo, Talking Pictures, The Overlook Press, 1974

Christopher Trumbo started this book and Ceplair took over in 2011 when Christopher died.  It is a fascinating biography of a screenwriter and a member of the Hollywood Ten who went to jail when, in 1947, he refused to answer questions asked by The House Committee on Un-American Activities (a strange name indeed for a Congressional committee).  Trumbo worked for nine years in a bakery while he worked on novels; Eclipse, his eighth novel, was published in 1935.  This led to a job as a reader at Warner Brothers and eventually a lucrative screenwriting career.  After his refusal to answer questions from HUAC in 1947 he was blacklisted, moved to Mexico for awhile and continued to write screenplays using "fronts" and pseudonyms.  When the blacklist was effectively coming to an end, with changing times, Trumbo's name went on Spartacus, thanks to Kirk Douglas, and Exodus, thanks to Otto Preminger.  Both films came out in 1960.  In 1970 Trumbo received an award from the Writers' Guild of America and gave an intelligent and compassionate speech, in which he said, "The blacklist was a time of evil; no one on either side who survived came through untouched by evil."  Trumbo rightly assigned the blame to HUAC rather than to those who, unlike himself, testified and named names.  In 1971 Trumbo directed a film version of his 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun.  I saw the film that year at MoMA and Trumbo talked about the film with intense passion and a love for movies.

Two questions remain largely unexplored by Ceplair:  how dogmatic a communist was Trumbo from 1943 to 1947 when he was a member of the party and how good of a screenwriter was he.  Corliss enthusiastically  recommends the collection of Trumbo letters, Additional Dialogue (M. Evans and Company 1970) that captures Trumbo's written wit and style.  But these letters say little about his political beliefs or actions, which seem to have mostly consisted of joining organizations and donating money.  Among the films Trumbo worked on there are two that stand out:  Gun Crazy (1950) and The Prowler (1951), the first directed by Joseph H. Lewis, the second by Joseph Losey (who eventually was threatened by the blacklist and left for England before his passport, like Trumbo's, was revoked).  These films were worked on when Trumbo was blacklisted and it is almost impossible to determine how much he actually wrote of them. Trumbo was for hire, wrote mostly for uninspired directors and didn't seem to have a vision himself, except a passion against fascism and for peace.

Film Journal: Very Semi-Serious, Shield for Muder, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Anna and the King of Siam

HBO recently showed Leah Wolchok's documentary Very Semi-Serious, about New Yorker cartoons.  The film was fairly superficial, focusing mostly on cartoon editor Bob Mankoff and what he finds funny, which is never quite clear.  But humor of course is subjective and the title of the film seems to suggest an exploration of the seriousness of the cartoons, an exploration that never happens.  Perhaps that would be too daunting a task?  We do get interviews with many of the cartoonists who, not surprisingly, are a bunch of misfits. weirdos, and neurotics:  Roz Chast, for instance, doesn't like to go outdoors because it is either too hot or too cold and "besides, there are ticks."   One of the reasons these cartoonists do what they do is because they seem to be compulsive; one cannot make a living strictly as a cartoonist because there are few places that still publish cartoons.  Mankoff is shown submitting cartoons to editor David Remnick who, based on what he publishes in The New Yorker (mostly articles about suffering), does not seem to have much of a sense of humor.  Missing from this film are two important names:  William Shawn and Peter De Vries.  Shawn was editor of The New Yorker from 1951 until 1987 and cartoons during that period reflected his gentle sense of humor, now largely absent from current cartoons.  Peter De Vries, who published twenty-three amusing and sensitive novels, worked on cartoon captions at The New Yorker from 1944 until Shawn was forced out in 1987; after all it doesn't follow that one who can draw can also write.  I sometimes wonder if the ridiculous cartoon caption competition in the current New Yorker is something of a desperate attempt to replace De Vries.

Shield for Murder, 1954, directed by Edmond O'Brien and Howard W. Koch.  This relatively late film noir covers some of the same ground as Josepy Losey's The Prowler, 1951, which I wrote about on Nov. 19th of this year, in its examination of police misuse of power.  O'Brien, a wonderful everyman of film noir, is a cop who kills a bookie and steals his money for a down payment on a house in suburbia.  He takes his girlfriend, beautifully played by Marla English, to see the house and buries some of the money in the yard.  The house represents the fulfillment of O'Brien's dream of suburbia, when his wife won't have to work as a cigarette girl.  But there was a witness to his murder of the bookie and now he has to murder the witness.  He tries to flee but his girlfriend won't go with him and he ends up shot dead on the lawn of his dream house.  Shield for Murder is directed with manic intensity, as O'Brien perspires profusely when he beats somebody up in front of a girl he just picked up in a bar.  The film is based on a book by William McGivern, who wrote a number of books that were turned into excellent movies, especially The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang in 1953.

John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967, was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies in their Southern Gothic series and in the original gold-tinted version, with red as the only other visible color (the cinematography was by Aldo Tonti).  Andrew Sarris has written:  "John Huston's theme has been remarkably consistent from The Maltese Falcon to Reflections in a Golden Eye:  his protagonists almost invariably fail at what they set out to do, generally through no fault or flaw of their own."  Huston's film is quite faithful to Carson McCullers' novel, with most of the perversions taking place just off-screen or in the minds of the characters.  The villain is implicitly the macho culture of the military, where interest in culture is considered "sissy" and the competition for wives and rank is intense.  Marlon Brando is particularly effective as the repressed homosexual, whose repression erupts in violence, and Elizabeth Taylor is his shrewish wife who whips him at a party.

Anna and the King of Siam, 1946, directed by John Cromwell.  About Cromwell Andrew Sarris wrote:  "Fortunately his formal deficiencies seldom obscure the beautiful drivers of his vehicles."  The beautiful driver here is Irene Dunne, playing a widow who comes to Siam in 1862 to teach the sixty-seven children of the king, played intelligently by Rex Harrison (we will leave for another time the discussion of whether this and other such roles should be played by Asians).  Cromwell is perhaps more of a craftsman than an artist and he and his cinematographer, veteran Arthur Miller, use effectively the interior sets that display both the opulence and the claustrophobia of the king's palace. The one exterior scene is when Dunne's young son goes horseback riding and dies in a fall when his horse stumbles.  As the king and the governess struggle to understand each other and the customs of their respective countries their relationship is always at a professional level and provides an important subtext about the threat of imperialism.  Throughout the film Dunne glows with intelligence and beauty.

Don Siegel's The Gun Runners 1958

The limitations placed upon Siegel by the material he is given to film are sometimes severe and he circumvents them with agility and grace.
--Judith M. Kass, Don Siegel (Tantivy Press, 1975)

The Gun Runners was the third film version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not:  the first was the Bogart/Bacall version of 1944, the second The Breaking Point with John Garfield in 1950 (which I wrote about briefly on March 3,2014).  The first version, directed by Howard Hawks, emphasized professionalism and The Breaking Point, directed by Michael Curtiz, was intensely emotional and political.  Siegel's version emphasizes action and shows a certain sympathy for the Cuban revolution.  Hemingway's story is somewhat minimal, allowing three different interpretations from three good directors.

The Gun Runners starred Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated soldiers of WW II who became an actor, mostly in B Westerns.  One of those Westerns was Don Siegel's The Duel at Silver Creek (1952) and Murphy chose Siegel for The Gun Runners.  Murphy was not much of an actor, but Siegel knew how to show him re-acting -- to Everett Sloane, Eddie Albert, Patricia Owens and Gita Hall -- with facial expressions and various nods.  The Gun Runners was a relatively low-budget film and Siegel also had the experienced cinematographer Hal Mohr, who had worked with him on two previous films and knew how to do a lot with little. Siegel had worked on montage and directing second units for years, before becoming a director, and The Gun Runners is full of kinetic energy building up to a violent end. 

Siegel, though not well remembered today, was a master craftsman of genres.  He directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), two excellent police dramas in 1968, Madigan and Coogan's Bluff (he was an important mentor to Clint Eastwood), and even John Wayne's last film, The Shootist (1976).  He also did a another remake of a Hemingway story, The Killers (1964), filmed first by Robert Siodmak in 1946.

Little Orchestra Society

I probably do not need to justify anything I put on this blog, but I do prefer to stick to the four main topics after which this blog is named.   I include The Little Orchestra Society because at the Dvorak performance we saw on Saturday they included a marvelous  pas de deux to Slavonic Dance No. 7, danced by Shoshana Rosenthal and James Shee, from the Tom Gold Dance Company.  Tom Gold was a marvelous dancer for The New York City Ballet and this dance was quite influenced by Balanchine's folk dances in a number of ballets, especially Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.  It was part of a number of Dvorak excerpts, including "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka, beautifully sung by Bryn Holdsworth.

Last year when we went to the LOS concerts with our daughter, who is now four, they had more goofiness than serious music, but this year the proportions have been reversed  They had a character portraying Dvorak and plenty of audience involvement, making the kinds of sounds that influenced the American Quartet and playing the tambourines that were distributed to all the children in the audience, but they also took the music quite seriously and though the didactic elements were played for humor, as in a video of shopping for a horn to illustrate what an English horn was, they were also quite informative. After the shopper returned with everything from a shoehorn to a bicycle horn Randall Ellis, in the orchestra, pulled out a genuine English horn and played a lovely excerpt from Dvorak's Symphony No. 9.

At this performance, as well as at the Mozart performance we saw and heard on Nov. 8, they used some very young soloists (Han Lee on the cello for a Dvorak cello concerto, Alex Manasse on clarinet and Oliver and Clara Neubauer on violin and viola for Mozart) who made quite an impression on the audience, ages 3 to 7.   I think one of the difficulties one has with concerts and concert halls is the often overweening stuffiness.  Music is to be enjoyed, as Rex Harrison said in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours, "with a sandwich in one hand and a beer in the other" and The Little Orchestra Society captures some of that sense of fun.

Two 1916 films by Allan Dwan: The Half-Breed; The Good Bad Man

Turner Classic Movies does a truly wonderful job of showing movies from all periods, uninterrupted and in the correct aspect ratio.  My only (slight) quibble is that they do not show enough films from the silent era, in some ways the artistic apex of film.  Unfortunately only about 35% of the 10,000 films made between 1912 and 1929 survive in any form at all and only about 11% in their original 35 mm. format. Among many problems in showing these films is the projection speed (in the silent era this was variable but now silent films are usually projected at a standard 16 frames per second) and the quality of the surviving prints, especially since only MoMA has a variance from the fire department to show original nitrate prints, which are gorgeous.  But at least Turner does show some silent films, including most recently films of Douglas Fairbanks.

I am not a big fan of the grinning, jumping Fairbanks of his films in the twenties, but these two Allan Dwan films, The Half-Breed and The Good Bad Man, have a much more subdued and intense Fairbanks.  These films were both made by Dwan for D.W. Griffith's company and Dwan learned a great deal from the man who, at that time, was making Intolerance:  the importance of "the wind in the trees" and the importance of low-key acting, the ability of the camera to show emotion. Dwan went on to make films until 1961 but even in these early efforts he shows an ability to use locations and to direct actors.  The Half-Breed, based on a Bret Harte story, takes place largely in a forest,, while much of The Good Bad Man (a term often applied to the persona of William S. Hart, a star of silent Westerns) takes place in the desert.  The desert and the forest are places where the Fairbanks characters feel most comfortable and they are contrasted with the evils of so-called "civilization."  Both films have Fairbanks looking for his lost father:  in The Half-Breed his white father abandoned his Indian mother (who committed suicide) and in The Good Bad Man his father was murdered before Passin' Through, the Fairbanks character, was born. Themes of nature and paternity continued to fascinate Dwan throughout his career.

For an excellent discussion and history of these two films I highly recommend Frederic Lombardi's Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios (McFarland and Company, Inc., 2013), with its impressive amount of detail about Dwan's career.

The Crossing by Michael Connelly

"I work a case for you -- not just you, any defense lawyer -- and it'll undo everything I did with the badge"
-- Harry Bosch in The Crossing (Little, Brown and Company, 2015).

Michael Connelly is a master of the roman policier.  I discovered his books at the bookstore Partners & Crime a good number of years ago and continue to read everything he publishes.  What makes his books good is character, environment, and detail.  Plot is something I care less about but it is also something Connelly does well.  The Crossing is mainly about retired detective Harry Bosch (Harry is short for Hieronymous, which only a few appreciate) and somewhat about Micky Haller, the defense attorney who is suing the police department on Harry's behalf; Micky is Bosch's half-brother.

Bosch is asked by Haller to investigate a murder of which Haller's client has been accused.  Bosch is initially reluctant to take the case but finally does, less for the money he needs to continue restoring a 1950 Harley and for paying his daughter's college tuition than for his increasing feeling that Haller's client may be innocent, in which case the real culprit needs to be caught. I wonder how true it is that every defense lawyer feels his client is being railroaded and every police detective thinks that the guy he caught did it.  Bosch's character is part of a police environment where there is much chicanery in the pursuit of so-called justice.  Bosch "knew every trick there was when it came to planting obfuscation and misdirection in a murder book" and of course this knowledge is useful when Bosch goes to work for the defense after he finds out that Haller's client's alibi was murdered. 

The Crossing is rich with appropriate detail about the houses, neighborhoods and restaurants of Los Angeles, as well of the necessity and nuisances of motorcars.  Bosch is successful in this case because of his dedication to chasing down every detail, especially those that raise questions.  In The Crossing he follows the trail of an expensive watch that the murder victim's husband had given her, paying six thousand dollars for it at an estate sale. (I assume people buy such expensive watches so that when they leave their BMW people will still know how well-off they are).  This leads to a couple of cops who are running an extortion racket and killing people who get in their way.

Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story

I sometimes, in my perverse way, would name Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu as my favorite film stars.  They both appeared as regular cast members in the films of Ozu, a great director who, once again, is little known in this country  I say "once again" because there was a brief period in the 70's when he was known to most film lovers.  In 1972 Tokyo Story was shown at The New Yorker Theatre and there were lines around the block, as well as a rapturous review of the film by Roger Greenspun in The New York Times.  In Japanese film I was originally attracted to the films of Akira Kurosawa, gradually found my way to the intensely emotional period dramas of Kenji Mizoguchi and only came later to the extraordinary films of Yasujiro Ozu. 

Just recently Setsuko Hara died, at the age of 95.  She made six films with Ozu and basically retired after the last one, The End of Summer in 1961.  She reminded me of Deanna Durbin, who made her last film at the age of 27 and died in France in 2013 at 92 and Greta Garbo, who also was reclusive from her last film at the age of 36 until her death at 85.  Setsuko Hara never married or had children; the same was true of Ozu himself.  But in their films together they portrayed the dilemmas of post-war Japanese families, especially those of women who were combining careers with family.  In Tokyo Story parents leave their rural area to visit their children in Tokyo, children who now have their own prosperous lives and are too busy to spend much time with their parents.  The burden falls on Setsuko Hara, the widow of the son who died in the war, who always has a radiant and understanding smile.  Her father-in-law, played by Chishu Ryu, usually replies with "hmmm" to most questions and, as is typical in Ozu's films, this can be said in many different ways with many different meanings.

One of the problems I originally had with Ozu was his intensely austere style, where the camera never moves and most shots are low-angles from the position of a tatami mat. This style was not instantly appealing to one who loves the tracking shots of Ophuls. But gradually I have come to appreciate this rigorous style, with the beauty of movement within the frame and the interludes of so-called "pillow shots," -- non-narrative shots of trains, landscapes, empty rooms and, one of Ozu's favorites, clothes hanging on a clothesline --, that calm one between scenes and emphasize the environment within which the characters live. There are also many ellipses in Ozu's style, where events are discussed both before and after but never actually shown, something those who focus on narrative cause-and-effect may find disconcerting but which I find compelling and involving, in the way that Godard once said that the best movies take place halfway between the viewer and the screen.

Many Ozu films are now available on DVD and I also recommend two useful books:

Ozu's Tokyo Story, edited by David Desser (Cambridge University Press, 1997).  It even includes a fascinating essay by Arthur Nolletti, Jr  comparing Tokyo Story with Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow.
Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer  by Paul Schrader (U. of Cal. Press, 1972)

Turner Classic Movies in Dec.

Of course there are a number of movies in Dec. that are about Christmas; I'll mention the ones I have seen and liked but please feel free to indulge yourself in others if you care to do so.  I do realize that some people do not like Christmas and avoid it to the extent one can in this day and age.

Dec. 3 there is Fritz Lang's  Man Hunt (1941), beautifully adapted from Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, with a particularly moving performance by Joan Bennett.

On Dec. 5 there are two dark films about Hollywood:  Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, both from 1950 and both about the marginalization of scriptwriters.

On the 8th are Don Siegel's Gun Runners (1958) and Samuel Fuller's Crimson Kimono (1959).  The first is the third version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and best in the action scenes; the latter is indicative of Fuller's interest in Asia and best in the emotional scenes.

Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past is on Dec. 9th.  It is one of the very best of films noir.

On the 10th are several films by Claude Chabrol, a French director of bourgeois tragedy, strongly influenced by Hitchcock (about whom he and Eric Rohmer wrote a book) and Lang.  My favorite in this group is La  Ceremonie (1995), more or less from a Ruth Rendell novel.

Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1941) is showing on Dec. 11; Judy Garland sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

On Dec. 12 is Lubitsch's richly funny and poignant Heaven Can Wait and on the 13th is Charles David's Lady on the Train (1945), with a lovely performance by the largely-forgotten Deanna Durbin. On the 14th is Ingmar Bergman's intense Summer with Monika and on the 15th Chaplin's beautiful The Circus (1928).

On the 18th is Remember the Night, written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitch Leisen; it's a dark and amusing film about the holidays.

On the 19th is Lubitsch's brilliant The Shop Around the Corner, with a holiday motif, and Frank Borzage's moving and downbeat The Mortal Storm (1940), about the rise of Nazism.

On the 20th is John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) and two by Eric Rohmer:  My Night at Maud's (1969, which I stood in line for, in the rain, at the 68th St Playhouse when it came out) and La Collectionneuse (1967).

There are several Hitchcocks being shown in Dec., of which I like Under Capricorn (1949) the best, for its mobile camera and gorgeous color.  It's showing on Dec. 22.

On the 25th is John Ford's Three Godfathers, an allegory about the three wise men and an unusual Ford Western that was not filmed in Monument Valley.  Also on the 25 is Chaplin's The Kid (1921, with Jackie Coogan), his first feature.

On the 26th is Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937), my favorite of the Astaire-Rogers films. The Music is by George and Ira Gershwin and the dancing is lovely.

Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957) is on Dec. 27 and on the 30th are two of Minnelli's dream-like melodramas:  Two Weeks in Another Town(1962) and Some Came Running(1958).

What's Opera, Doc?

I must confess that I have never seen a full-length animated film that I did not find tedious and claustrophobic but I do enjoy Looney Tunes --each of which is about six minutes -- with my four-year-old daughter. One of her favorites -- and mine -- is What's Opera, Doc?, directed by Chuck Jones at Warner Brothers in 1957.  Jones collaborated on this cartoon with designer Maurice Noble and voice artist Mel Blanc.  And he used, quite intelligently, music from six different Wagner operas, even some lovely dance music to which Elmer Fudd (as Siegfried) and Bugs Bunny (as Brunhilde) do a pas de deux.  Jones is able to parody and pay tribute (the best parodies come from admiration) to opera, ballet, and Wagner quite efficiently and effectively in a mere six minutes!  The Wagnerian universe of the film is beautifully designed (including a lovely plump horse on which Brunhilde rides) and directed, with the only contemporary reference (which Jones generally avoids) being when Siegfried calls down not only earthquakes and hurricanes, but also smog.  Jones always had an operatic streak in him and this is not his first cartoon with an unhappy ending.

I did want to briefly mention Preston Sturges's brilliant dark comedy, Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which, like What's Opera, Doc?, uses the overture from Wagner's Tannhauser for emotional effect; I'll be writing about that film later. Both Sturges's film and Jones's cartoon were little appreciated or understood in their time.  What's Opera, Doc? is available on YouTube.

The Prowler. directed by Joseph Losey

The Prowler (1951), like other of Losey's American films, shows the dark side of the American dream:  the willingness to do anything to get the money, the car, the house, etc.  Van Heflin is the cop who lost his college scholarship and is bitter about life.  He kills Evelyn Keyes's husband for the money in a faked accident, letting her think it was for love, and uses the money to buy his dream business of a motel in Las Vegas, where the cars and trucks pass by on the highway just outside.  When Keyes announces she is several months pregnant Van Heflin realizes that this will reveal the affair that predates the murder and they go to a ghost town to have the baby on their own, where disaster strikes when there are problems with the pregnancy.

The Prowler was the last film photographed by Arthur Miller, a distinguished cinematographer who had worked with John Ford and Fritz Lang.  It is ironic that the screenplay was worked on by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, since after Losey made this film he left for Europe, with HUAC on his heels; it was less important that he was a communist than that he had worked with Bertold Brecht in the theatre.  Losey's theatre experience shows in his ability to create complex shots without cuts and his ability to use space --from a luxury house to a bedsitter to a shack in a ghost town -- in a film with only two main characters.  Losey's film is an unusual film noir, with its emphasis on choice rather than fate and a psychopath on the police force who appears almost normal.

You Know Who Killed Me by Loren Estleman

You sit  you watch, you smoke, you listen.  Doors open, doors close. Cars pull into the lot, cars pull out. A pigeon pecks at the ants crawling over a box from Wendy's. A hole opens in the overcast, lighter-covered clouds drifting from one side of it to the other, morphing into different shapes, a celestial Rorschach. Doors open, doors close.
--Loren D. Estleman, You Know Who Killed Me (Tom Doherty Associates, 2014).

This is the twenty-fourth in Estleman's series about Detroit private eye Amos Walker (I wrote about the previous book on July 1,2014).  Estleman is one of the last to write this kind of energetic pulp:  Ross Macdonald, John D, McDonald, Raymond Chandler, etc. are all gone.  Walker is one of the old-fashioned detectives, doing a lot of legwork and stakeouts in the search for a killer.  Walker barely knows how to use a computer but is smart enough to know those who can and he has many useful contacts from his long career.

This novel is written in the first person, so one only knows what Walker knows, learning it as he does.  He follows gangsters, and federal agents follow him as Walker, fresh from rehab, struggles with addiction to pills caused by injuries in a shootout. There is a femme fatale, of course, one of the agents who follows him, whose "legs hadn't suffered from sitting behind a desk."  As usual, Walker has no luck with women, though he was married and divorced. When he finally finds the killer, through hard work and intelligent investigation,  he goes home alone to drink coffee, which keeps him from sleeping.  I was running out of substances to abuse.

Who the Devil Made It by Peter Bogdanovitch

Some correspondents think I was too harsh on Peter Bogdanovitch's She's Funny That Way (see my post from yesterday).  To me it wasn't that the movie was not funny - that can be very subjective --but that it was not serious, i.e., the best comedies are serious, they are about something.  The deus ex machina at the end of Bogdanovitch's film demonstrated to me a complete lack of seriousness. 

So I am here to celebrate Bogdanovitch's seriousness in Who the Devil Made It (Knopf, 1997), interviews with twenty directors of the classical era, all of whom are now dead.  Bogdanovitch played an important role in bringing these directors to the public's attention and, because of him, their films were celebrated while they were still alive.  John Ford is not included because Bogdanovitch's book about him is still in print (University of California Press,1968), but there is Hitchcock and Hawks, as well as Ulmer and Joseph H. Lewis.  These interviews mostly appeared in obscure journals or books long out of print, so it is good that they are now all collected, providing a great deal of insight into the creative and financial aspects of the classical film, including lessons that Bogdanovitch ignored when he started making his own films (yes, it is different now). Even my four-year-old daughter's favorite director is included:  Chuck Jones, who directed the justly celebrated Road Runner cartoons, as well as many of the best of Bugs Bunny, et al.

Bogdanovitch may or may not make additional films (he's now 75) but he played a crucial role, along with Andrew Sarris and others, of making us aware of the many great films that have already been made and encouraging us to seek them out.

She's Funny That Way or, What Happened to Peter Bogdanovitch?

She's Funny That Way is Peter Bogdanovitch's first film in seven years, his last one being a tedious documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.  She's Funny That Way is something of a sequel to They All Laughed (1981), which Bogdanovitch distributed himself and on which he lost millions.  The new film was co-written by Louise Stratten, the sister of Dorothy Stratten of They All Laughed, and Bogdanovitch's ex-wife.  She's Funny That Way was originally titled Squirrels to the Nuts, based on something Charles Boyer says in Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946).  It's too bad that Bogdanovitch does not have Lubitsch's skill at comic timing (an excerpt from Lubitsch's film is inserted at the end of Bogdanovitch's, though out-of-context it makes no sense).  The one scene in Bogdanovitch's new film that could have been funny, where a cabdriver gets out of his cab and hails another one himself, needed better camera placement and timing.

Some of us once hoped that Bogdanovitch's success with The Last Picture Show (1971) might have led to more intelligent American films directed by critics and former critics, as happened in France.  The problem with this was that Bogdanovitch was never actually a critic, he was a journalist.  As a journalist he accomplished a great deal, bringing much-needed attention to classical directors in the sixties and programming films at The New Yorker Theatre and MoMA.  He wrote books on Hawks, Ford, Lang, Dwan, Welles and published articles on everyone from Edgar Ulmer to Frank Tashlin.  But these were mostly interview articles and books, wisely letting these directors speak for themselves.  In 1969 I was at MoMA when Bogdanovitch introduced Alan Dwan at a retrospective of Dwan's films that considerably fueled my interest in classical cinema.  But when it came to making films Bogdanovitch turned out not to have a great deal to say.

I haven't seen The Last Picture Show  since it came out and it may hold up well.  Bogdanovitch's first four films were somewhat impressive, but what Targets (1968),The Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc (1972), Paper Moon (1973) all have in common is Polly Platt.  She was Bogdanovitch's wife at the time and production designer on all four films.  But once Bogdanovitch became obsessed with Cybill Shepherd his marriage broke up, Polly Platt was no longer his collaborator and Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975) were financial and artistic disasters.  Bogdanovitch has struggled ever since, not helping himself by trying to sleep with every actress he directs.

Lee Child's Make Me; John Connolly's A Song of Shadows

"I leave people alone if they leave me alone.  Their risk, not mine."
--Jack Reacher in Make Me (Delacorte Press, 2015)

To eradicate a little of the evil from the world, did you have to sacrifice something of your own goodness?
--A Song of Shadows (Atria, 2015)

Child and Connolly are two of my favorite genre writers these days.  "Genre" is a word I am somewhat reluctant to use, since it is considered by some to denote a lower quality of writing.  I do not lower my standards, however, and "genre" indicates to me, among other things, the use of a continuing character.  But the writing in these two novels is of a higher quality than that of most "literary" novels these days:  the use of a continuing character can be liberating.  Robert Silverberg once complained to me that just because his (great) novel Dying Inside was about someone who could read minds it was confined to the science fiction section, which to him understandably made no sense. 

The continuing character in Lee Child's novels is Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who travels the country with little more than a toothbrush and, though he deliberately does not court trouble, trouble often finds him.  He doesn't like to be pushed around and doesn't like to see others pushed around.  In Make Me he ends up in the Midwest town of Mother's Rest in the middle of nowhere and is met at the train by a private investigator, Michelle Chang, who is searching for a missing colleague.  As soon as the locals try to run Reacher out of town he becomes suspicious and teams up with Chang to find out what's going on.  Chang's search for her missing operative sends her and Reacher to Oklahoma and Chicago and eventually back to Mother's Rest, where they find a particularly horrible internet scam in which most of the small town is involved.  The detailed research Child portrays is fascinating and the insularity of small-town America is beautifully evoked.  With each Reacher novel we learn more about him and in Make Me he is beginning to show genuine feeling for others.  The only quibble I have with this novel is that we are only given pieces of what the townspeople are up to.  It's good that we don't find out the details of the scheme until Reacher and Chang do but the menace seems only partly clear because of the selectivity.  Generally with this kind of novel I find that the first-person is a more effective voice, as in Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald.

Charlie Parker is the continuing character in John Connolly's book (yes, Parker does like jazz).  Parker doesn't seek out evil but evil seeks out him and there is an element of the supernatural in Connolly's books, as the shade of his murdered daughter haunts him.  In A Song of Shadows Parker, recovering from a shooting, stumbles on a Nazi plot in Maine.  Many of the best detective novels are strongly rooted in a particular place and Connolly's uses the details of Maine geography and history to convey a palpable sense of dread; the ocean is always nearby. As descendants of Holocaust victims try to bring the last living Nazis to justice, there are still many Nazi sympathizers who are willing to protect those Nazis who still survive by killing those who hunt them.  Parker has a second wife and daughter who also live in New England but separately:  his wife has left him because of the aura of violence that surrounds him, even though she remains sympathetic to what he does. Some of Connolly's previous Parker novels alternated first-person and third-person chapters, but this one is third-person throughout, giving us some needed objectivity.

Royals Win World Series 2015

Frankly, it was a surprise that the Mets got as far as they did; few people expected them to be in the World Series this year and it's thanks to manager Terry Collins and general manager Sandy Alderson, who made some significant trades before the July deadline,  that they did.  The Royals played assertively and the Mets could not adjust, after defeating the lethargic Cubs in four straight games.  For those of us who like runs being produced by singles, doubles and aggressive base running rather than the New York style (of both the Mets and the Yankees) of waiting for homeruns,  the Royals were a beautiful team to watch, led by their stoic and heroic manager Ned Yost.

The Royals showed that the stolen base is not, as Joe Morgan and others have claimed, a lost art.  What is something of a lost art now is the complete game, which once was common for pitchers.  Now a starting pitcher is not expected to go much more than six innings and a closer only one (Goose Gossage, closer for the Yankees in the seventies and eighties, routinely went two or more innings and often came in the game with men on base), which means a team usually needs a seventh-inning guy and an eighth-inning guy and Terry Collins did not have dependable pitchers for those roles.  In addition, closer Familia had already blown two saves in the World Series, so I do not blame Collins for leaving in Matt Harvey in the ninth, even after he gave up a walk.

The Mets have good starting pitching and some hitters, especially Curtis Granderson, who can hit with power.  They need to improve their bullpen and their infield (which was not helped by the loss of  Miguel Tejada in the series with the Dodgers) and learn to put the ball in play more, sometimes even by bunting.

Turner Classic Movies in November 2015

King Vidor's moving populist drama, The Crowd (1928) is showing on Nov. 1, followed by Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) on the 2nd and Chaplin's The Circus (1928) on the 3rd.  When I first started going to the movies in the late sixties none of Chaplin's films were available except for The Gold Rush (1925), which had fallen into the public domain.  The Circus was the first of Chaplin's films to be re-released in the seventies and gradually they all returned, even A Woman of Paris (1923), which Chaplin felt would be considered too "old-fashioned."  Chaplin's Limelight (1953), a late and moving work, will be shown on Nov. 9.

John Ford is my favorite director, by far, and there is some of his best work on Turner in Nov. Mogambo (1953), an unusual Ford film that takes place in Africa, is showing on the 13th and My Darling Clementine (1946), which I wrote about on Feb.4, 2014, is showing on the 16th. Two more of Ford's films are showing in the Nov. 20 tribute to Maureen O'Hara:  The Quiet Man (1952) and Wings of Eagles (1957).

Earlier this year I earned a Certificate of Completion in the TCM and Ball State University multimedia course Into The Darkness: Investigating Film Noir; there are several excellent examples of the genre in November.  What some consider the definitive film noir, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947) is showing on Nov. 5, as is Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not (1944).  On Nov. 7th is Joseph Losey's corrosive The Prowler, followed on the 8th by Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949), more of a gangster film.

Other films on Turner this month include Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre (1958) on the 11th (I wrote about Erskine Caldwell's novel on Sept. 6 of this year), Jacques Demy's brightly-colored musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) on the 13th, Rossellini's  rigorous The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) on the 13th, Minnelli's dreamlike melodrama Some Came Running (1958) on the 23rd, Samuel Fuller's intensive geometric war film Merrill's Marauders (1962) on the 24th and the best screwball comedy, Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) on Nov 27.

The World Series 2015

First of all, kudos to The New York Times and D. Francis Barry for the deliberately anachronistic- style report Oct. 23 on the Cubs/Mets playoff:  Cubs Dreams Dashed in Loss to Metropolitans; Prayers of Wrigley Faithful Go Unanswered.  The whole piece read as though it were taking place a hundred years ago, with references to the "Sisyphean Chicago Cubs," the Mets' "Bunyanesque first-sacker." and "the larcenous Curtis Granderson."  There was even included an old-fashioned box score, listing at-bats, runs, hits, put-outs, and assists.  It was an effective visual and written reminder of the history of baseball.

 Now for the World Series between the Royals (who last won in 1985) and the Mets (1986).  I think it will come down, as it often does, to pitching and how many innings can starters Harvey, deGrom, Syndergaard, and Matz go for the Mets, and the same for Volaquez, Cureto, Ventura and Young for the Royals.  The Royals might have a slight edge in the bullpen of Wade Davis and Kelvin Herrera over Clippard and Familia but the Mets starters have been more consistent this post season and they also have Colon(and why isn't he getting a start?), Niese and Reed. 

As for hitting, one hopes Cespedes can play for the Mets -- he is something of a sparkplug -- while the Royals are slightly at a disadvantage not being able to use a DH in Citifield.  The Mets need Duda and Murphy to continue to hit, with perhaps a little more help from the rest of the starters.  Meanwhile, the Royals have speed and consistent hitting throughout their line-up that needs to be stymied by consistent Mets pitching.

My prediction:  an excellent World Series, with the Mets winning in seven games.

Two Films by Frank Tashlin: The Alphabet Murders (1965) and Rock-A-Bye Baby (1958)

Most parodies are written out of admiration rather than contempt.
--Dwight MacDonald, Parodies: An Anthology (The Modern Library,1960).

The originality and power of Frank Tashlin resides in the fact that extremes, more diametrically opposed than ever before, touch us deeply.
--Roger Tailleur, (Frank Tashlin, Vineyard Press, 1973)

One can approve vulgarity in theory as a comment on vulgarity, but in practice all vulgarity is inseparable.
--Andrew Sarris on Frank Tashlin (The American Cinema, The University of Chicago Press, 1968)

I wrote about Frank Tashlin's The Disorderly Orderly on April 11, 2014. Most people today have never heard of Tashlin, even if they like Jerry Lewis, who credits Tashlin as an inspirational comic genius.  In the 1980's Dan Talbot would sometimes show a double bill of Tashlin films, The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter(1957) at The Metro, brilliant parodies of rock-and-roll and the advertising business, respectively; they always delighted audiences with their expressive style and inspired use of color and cinemascope. But the two films here came later and were little understood, as parodies of family life in the fifties (Rock-A-Bye Baby) and of Agatha Christie (The Alphabet Murders).

Rock-A-Bye Baby gives credit to Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), but is as different from that film as the forties were from the fifties, though Tashlin does copy one shot from the earlier film: as Jerry Lewis looks at newborn babies and asks which is his and the nurse mouths "all of them" and Lewis freaks out, just as Eddie Bracken did in Sturges's film (in which there were six babies).  Rock-A-Bye Baby substitutes a satire of fifties motherhood for Stuges's subtle Christ story; in the Tashlin story the father is known, having played mother to triplets that his sister-in-law left with him while she shot the film "White Virgin of the Nile."  Throughout the film there are parodies of movie musical production numbers, TV addicts who buy everything advertised on TV, and even Jerry Lewis as a version of Bill Haley, complete with "Comets" in plaid sportcoats   But throughout there is an affection for those who suffer from unrequited love as well as for an Italian barber who can sing opera and learns to appreciate his daughters' independent choices.  There are a number of effective songs by Harry Warren and Sammy Cahn, particularly when Lewis and his future father-in-law are singing the triplets to sleep:  "Dormi, Dormi, Dormi."  Tashlin uses color beautifully, with an emphasis on blue for peace-and-quiet and red for excitement (Lewis wears a blue bathrobe when he sings the triplets to sleep and a red tie when he performs rock-and-roll), highlighted by a red and blue mailbox in the center of a scene, a mailbox that contains an important letter.

The Alphabet Murders was shot in London in 1965 and is an affectionate parody of the Agatha Christie book, with Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot.  The film is shot in black-and-white, unusual for Tashlin at this point, and is more character-driven than most of Tashlin's film.  Tony Randall appears as himself at the beginning, on a soundstage, telling us about the character he will be playing.  I have never cared for Christie and never know who the murderer is when all the suspects are finally gathered in a room, so the confusing plot didn't bother me and I was happy to see that the murderer was somewhat obvious from the beginning . Tashlin continues in this film to parody Hitchcock (especially with the scenes on a train at the end) and the film noir, which he had previously done in It's Only Money (again with strange camera angles) as well as "swinging London" and the films of Fellini, with his use of Anita Ekberg from La Dolce Vita (1960).  Ekberg is not used in the somewhat cartoonish way (Tashlin started with cartoons and animated films) that Tashlin had used Jayne Mansfield in the fifties, as Tashlin tried to take a new approach in the sixties, reaching a dead end with Doris Day movies and dying in 1972 at the age of 59.

The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence S. Ritter

If you liked Dan Barry's article in Sunday's Times about the game between the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs in 1908, the game with Fred Merkle's famous "bonehead" play, I highly recommend Lawrence Ritter's book, subtitled The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It.  The book was published in 1966 by Collier Books and includes stories told by twenty-two players who played between 1898 and 1945.  Among the players included are two who were there for the historic game between the Cubs and the New York Giants on Sept. 23. 1908.  Both Fred Snodgrass and Al Bridwell were with the Giants that day, Snodgrass on the bench as the third-string catcher and Bridwell the batter who got the hit that set off the whole Merkle incident, when Merkle failed to touch second as the apparent winning run scored from third with two out in the bottom of the ninth.  Snodgrass explains how at the end of a game in the Polo Grounds the ushers would open the gates and the fans would run onto the field, which is why Merkle took off for the clubhouse instead of touching second base.  Johnny Evers of the Cubs gets the credit for retrieving the ball (it's still disputed whether it was the original ball) and tagging second in the middle of the chaos.  Snodgrass, Bridwell and the other Giants never blamed Merkle; they lost five games after the Merkle incident and if they had won just one of those they would not have had to play the game over.  Bridwell says he wishes he had struck out on that September day, "it would have spared Fred a lot of unfair humiliation."

The Mets are now up two games to none over the Cubs, thanks to Daniel Murphy going first to third on a walk in the final game with the Dodgers and the excellent Mets pitching. But one can't forget either 1969, when the Cubs swooned in Sept., allowing the Mets to win the pennant (could the Mets swoon this time?), or 2004, when the Yankees were up three games to none over the Red Sox and ended up losing four in a row. One of the many beautiful things about baseball is its unpredictability, with small things sometimes making a big difference.

Joseph H. Lewis's A Lawless Street, 1955

"A superior Western which Lewis directs with real flair," says Phil Hardy about A Lawless Street (The Western, William Morrow, 1983).  Lewis is best known for his crime film Gun Crazy (1950), a film that captures some of the madness of America, but also did some excellent low-budget Westerns.  A Lawless Street was produced by Harry Joe Brown, who followed it with intense and austere Randolph Scott Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher.  It has an impressive epigrammatic script ("a man's tongue is like a shovel, it can dig his grave") by Kenneth Gamet, low-key performances by Randolph Scott as the sheriff  and Angela Lansbury as the woman he loves who leaves him because of his violence, but returns to him after he cleans up the town of Medicine Bend.  The cinematography is by Ray Renahan, whose sensitive use of color goes back to John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939).

A Lawless Street begins with a solitary man riding into an empty town to shoot the sheriff, paid (as we find out later) by the business interests of Medicine Bend who are trying to make the town wide-open.  When Scott kills the hired assassin in self-defense the business interests bring in a professional gunman who demands a third of the town's profits, after the businessmen offer him too much over the going rate.  Meanwhile Angela Lansbury comes to town to perform, not knowing that Scott, who she married two years before, is there trying to clean up the town.  The gunman thinks he has killed Scott but the doctor rescues Scott and he rises, Christ-like, to chase the money interests out of town.  There are several sub-plots and Lansbury sings a saucy song about how her mother told her not to marry (before we learn that she is married to Scott).  Lewis has an impressive way of visualizing plot elements, e.g., the way he has a rancher, the rancher's wife, and the man with whom the wife was having an affair arranged in a visual triangle as the truth is revealed. 

In the end Scott convinces Lansbury that times are changing and that this is the last town, of many, that he has to clean up.  Scott and Lansbury ride off together; Scott leaves his gun behind

The Lives of Robert Ryan by J.R. Jones

The Lives of Robert Ryan (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) suggests that actor Ryan led at least two lives:  personal and professional. The dilemma of any writer of a biography (of which I read many), especially one about an artist, actor, writer, etc. is how to weigh and reconcile the various lives.  Jones does a better job than most biographers of reconciling Ryan's roles as devoted husband, father and peace activist with his film roles as, often, a snarling villain.  Ryan himself apparently viewed his usual $125,000 per picture as a way of supporting his family and helping the Oakwood School, a private progressive school that Ryan and his wife, Quaker liberal Jessica Cadawalader, started in California.

Fortunately Ryan did get to work with several good directors who were able to portray Ryan as a complex and sensitive person underneath the gruff exterior.  These included Jean Renoir (The Woman on the Beach, 1947), Andre de Toth (Day of the Outlaw, 1959), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night, 1952), Nicholas Ray (On Dangerous Ground, 1951), Samuel Fuller (House of Bamboo, 1955) and, especially, three films with Anthony Mann (The Naked Spur, 1953; Men in War, 1956; God's Little Acre, 1958).  And, near the end of his career, Ryan had a role in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch 1969, playing an older bounty hunter who wishes he had chosen another life. I only wish that Jones had gone more deeply into Ryan's performances in these films and his later ventures into theatre and how they were affected by what was going on in his life at each point.

In the sixties I would listen to Ryan's daughter, Lisa, call in to Larry Josephson's morning show on WBAI and she would emphasize Robert Ryan's commitment to SANE and other peace organizations that he supported during the Cold War.  She hoped, as I do, that Ryan would be remembered as much for his work for peace as for his film roles.

Baseball Playoffs and Baseball Announcers

The Yankees were listless and disappeared quickly, but the Mets are still solidly in it.  I prefer pitchers' duels but it was something to see the Mets explode for runs last night, especially after what happened to Tejada when Chase Utley took him out to prevent a double play on Saturday.  Ron Darling, announcing the game for TBS, was correct when he said that thirty years ago such aggressive play was common, just as the catcher blocking the plate was.

Speaking of announcers, Darling is one of the better ones in this year's playoffs, which may be because he is better educated.  Most of the former players who become announcers hardly know that nouns and verbs should agree or that there is a difference between a transitive and a non-transitive verb.  This year the announcers have mostly said that the fielders were "great athletes" and that the hitters were either "seeing the ball well" (if they were getting hits) or "not seeing the ball well" (if they were striking out).

I highly recommend Jacob Silverman's piece in Sunday's New York Times, about Vin Scully.  Silverman correctly says that "today's broadcasters, with a few notable exceptions, are awful," never offering an insight for three whole hours or more.  Scully, who has been a Dodgers announcer since the Truman administration, not only does not utter platitudes, he also knows when not to talk, silence sometimes being more eloquent.  One can read Scully's intense and beautiful description of the last inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game; it's available on the internet. I do slightly disagree with Silverman's contention that most games are better enjoyed on mute.  The problem with this is that baseball is so poorly televised, dependent as it is on the ads projected behind the catcher, that without the announcers one would have difficulty figuring out what was going on. I remember watching one game where there was an attempt to steal home and we saw none of the drama, just the pitcher going into a jerky motion; the announcers had to tell us what was happening; long gone are the days when TV showed the whole field.   I prefer to listen to the games on radio, where one can "see" more, and we are lucky in New York to have the excellent Howie Rose and Josh Lewin announcing the Mets games (we are not so lucky with the Yankee announcers).  In the playoffs, however, not all the games are even on the radio, even though ESPN announces that they are!  If you can't afford cable TV:  good luck, since none of the games are available over the air.  I guess baseball doesn't care about radio listeners or those too poor to pay for over-priced cable; they probably couldn't afford to buy the cars advertised anyway!

Deux Jours, Une Nuit by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Two Days, One Night, written and directed by the Dardenne brothers, is the kind of film seldom made in the United States:  a film about the daily lives and difficulties of workers. Sandra is a factory worker in Belgium, just returned to work after a battle with depression, who has been voted out of her job by her fellow sixteen workers when they were offered a bonus if she were made redundant.  I have never heard of this happening in the U.S. but I would not be surprised if it has, management always looking to turn workers against each other.  The factory in which Sandra works does not seem to be unionized nor is there any reference to labor law in Belgium but even if there were a union it probably could not prevent someone from being fired, as I was for my own union activity. Sandra fights back and convinces the boss to have another vote, especially since the supervisor had talked against her to other workers.  Sandra (beautifully played by Marion Cotillard) spends the week-end visiting each of the workers, listening to the financial problems they are having and how much they need the bonus.  I know from my own union activity that there is usually less interest in any kind of solidarity than in what a union can do for the individual, and Sandra listens sympathetically.  The Dardenne brothers stay close to Sandra, making us a part of her journey, as her children and husband encourage her when she sometimes just feels like giving up.  Some of the spouses of the other workers are quite hostile to her.  In the end the vote is less important than her pride in having made the effort.

Deux Jours, Une Nuit and the other films by the Dardenne brothers have obviously been influenced, with their low-key style and emphasis on the quotidian, by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, who died this week.  I wrote about her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) on July 7, 2014 and it will be shown on Turner Classic Movies on October 27.

The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling

And that's all we know except that no one has gone there, and they fight, and in any place where they fight a man who knows how to drill men can always be a King.
 --Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King (1889)

Kipling of course is now seen rather two-dimensionally as a defender of British imperialism.  The truth is slightly more nuanced, even aside from the problem of judging the past by today's standards (Susan Sontag once attacked George Orwell, who wrote fairly and intelligently about Kipling, because, she said, if Orwell had been alive he would have supported the war in Vietnam!).  I don't even think that children these days read The Jungle Book (1894) nor is the poem If (1895) studied much now in junior high:  its reference to being "a man" probably alone disqualifies it.  But for me the novella The Man Who Would Be King shows Kipling's skills as a writer and his ability to write effectively and evocatively about a particular place and time. It starts on a train in India, from Ajmir to Mhow, when the narrator, a newspaper editor, meets Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, who plan to go to Kafiristan and make themselves kings.  They ask for help with maps. They leave, disguised as a beggar and a priest, and nothing is heard of them for two years, until Peachy returns, crippled and in rags, narrating the story of how they became kings, with fascinating detail about the landscapes and tribes they encountered.  Things go well for a time, as they convince the tribesmen that they are Gods, and then Dravot decides to take a wife, who bites him during the wedding ceremony and all is lost; he bleeds and is not a God after all. Dravot is killed and Peachy is crucified between two pine trees but is released when he doesn't die.  He takes Dravot's head with him and dies shortly after his return to the newspaper office.

The story is beautifully told, with many fascinating details about life in 19th C. India  But it also functions as an allegory about imperialism, as two Englishmen seize control in Kafiristan with their superior firepower and their ability to manipulate the trusting local population.  They, of course, come to a bad end, as would eventually happen to the English throughout their empire.

Baseball Playoffs

I have waited to comment on the playoffs until it was certain that The New York Mets and The New York Yankees are in it  Though I often say, when asked what team I root for, that I root for the elegant geometry of the game itself, I do prefer the New York teams.  When I was growing up I rooted for the Red Sox, both because my older brother was a Yankee fan and because Ted Williams was on the Red Sox (see my post about Williams July 8 of this year) but since I came to New York, exactly fifty years ago, I have rooted for the New York teams.  I prefer the Mets because I prefer the National League, where the pitcher bats and there is more strategy in trying to balance pitching, fielding and hitting.  In 1986 I was watching the final game of the Mets/Astros playoffs, along with my fellow Nation employees, when I had to leave for the opera.  I had my transistor radio with me and listened to it on the plaza at Lincoln Center, as all around me there were groups of people doing the same.  When Jesse Orosco got the final out cheers went up all over the plaza and we went into the theatre to enjoy the opera (Cendrillon, by Massenet).  So I hope the Yankees beat the Astros (now in the American League) and the Mets beat the Dodgers (as sportswriter Dick Young said, when the man who moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn died, "Walter O'Malley, I spit on your grave.").

If the Mets or the Yankees don't win I am rooting for the Royals and the Cubs.  The Cubs because they play in one of the oldest and loveliest stadiums, but also because they have not won the World Series since 1908 and last won the pennant in 1945.  As for the Royals, who came close to winning the World Series last year, I recommend Bruce Schoenfeld's article in the Oct. 4 New York Times Magazine about manager Ned Yost.  Yost is considered old-fashioned because he treats his players as individuals, not just collections of statistics, "the reach of social media and the herd mentality that pervades it may make him the most criticized manager ever."  Kansas City puts its emphasis on fielding and, especially,  middle relief, something many teams have neglected in this era of glamorous closers and starting pitchers who often can't go more that five or six innings.  Yost also allows his players to bunt and steal, both rather lost arts in today's world of power hitters and homeruns.

The Mets were something of a surprise this year.  They had good starting pitching from the beginning (Colon, deGrom, Harvey, et al.) and a successful closer in Jeurys Familia, but they only started scoring enough runs after the June acquisitions of middle reliever Tyer Clippard and hitters Yoenis Cespedes, Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe, the call-up of Michael Conforto and the return of David Wright. Of course we all know that anything can happen in one game (the Yankees vs. the Astros) or a short series (the Mets vs. the Dodgers) but I have hopes for a subway series, one that will go more than the five games of 2000.

New York City Ballet Oct. 4, 2015

We took our four-year-old daughter Victoria to the ballet for the first time and I am pleased to say that she behaved beautifully and loved watching the performances (she studies dance at her pre-school and previously had only seen a performance of mine at the 92nd St. Y;  she was slightly disappointed that I was not in this one!).  I have often mentioned how some parents take their children to The Nutcracker and to no other ballets, giving them an incomplete and distorted idea of ballet.  We do have tickets to The Nutcracker in December but decided to start off with a more complex program to give Victoria an idea of how much ballet has to offer, from Richard Tanner to Balanchine and from John Cage to Gottschalk.

The program started with Ash, choreography by Peter Martins and music by Michael Torke.  It is one of Martins's better ballets, its music intense and melodic and the choreography non-stop in a style strongly influenced by Balanchine.  There was no adagio, fortunately, since Martins has never managed to convey any emotions in his adagios. The dancing was beautifully executed -- as it was in all the dances in this performance -- and led by Ashly Isaacs and Taylor Stanley.  There was even some humor -- unusual for Martins -- as Stanley timed precisely his ducking under Isaacs' legs as she turned.

Next came Sonatas and Interludes, with Tiler Peck and Anthony Huxley, to a score by John Cage for prepared piano and choreography by Richard Tanner.  This angular pas de deux made extensive and effective use of attitude, the expressive use of a bent leg.  This was followed by Tarantella, a speedy allegro pas de deux to Gottschalk music. I have seen this Balanchine ballet performed by, among others, Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov but here it was done by soloist Erica Pereira and corps member Spartax Hoxa, who overcame their lack of technical proficiency with their enthusiastic attack.  Then we saw Justin Peck's Rode-o, to the same music as Agnes DeMille's ballet (though Peck used Copland's rearranged score for orchestra).  Peck's work, strongly influenced by Jerome Robbins, is still work-in-progress, i.e., the inventiveness of the choreography is not helped by the bursts of facetiousness, the ugly costumes, and having only one woman in the cast.  It also would have helped if Peck had more to say, since images of the DeMille ballet kept coming through unbidden.

The last piece was Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, from the 1936 production of Rogers and Hart's On Your Toes, one of Balanchine's best "show-biz" pieces (as opposed to his austere ballets and his romantic ballets), with terrific dancing by Tyler Angle and Sara Mearns.  Mearns's dancing came close to my favorite dancer in the role of the girl, Suzanne Farrell, who really "let her hair down," both literally and figuratively.  We carefully explained to our four-year-old that no one was actually hurt, that it was rather like a cartoon (she loves Chuck Jones) and she enjoyed the ballet's energy and humor, though somewhat to my surprise she found it slightly "silly" compared to the other ballets on the program.

Turner Classic Movies for October 2015

On October 3 Turner is showing the marvelous Orson Welles film Chimes at Midnight, which I wrote about in my blog June 22.  On the first of October they are showing a number of films by Alice Blache, Lois Weber and Frances Marion, in a month that emphasizes films by women.  Ida Lupino's films are being shown on Oct.6, all of them personal and intriguing.

Nicholas Ray's Wind Across the Everglades is showing October 3, a powerful film ahead of its time with its concern for ecology, and on October 4 are two excellent films noir:  Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street and Robert Siodmak's The Killers, which I wrote about on June 29.

On the 7th is Howard Hawks's Air Force, one of the best WWII aviation films and on the 9th are Buster Keaton's The General, a masterpiece of deadpan comedy, and Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, a low-key and effective horror film.

On the 10th are three excellent examples of the best directors of the classical era:  Hitchcock's atypical Under Capricorn, John Ford's My Darling Clementine (which I wrote about on Feb 4, 2014), and Lubitsch's comedy Ninotchka.

On October 11 is the best of the Hepburn-Tracy comedies, George Cukor's Adam's Rib, followed on the 13th by Samuel Fuller's corrosive The Naked Kiss and on the 14th D.W. Griffith's masterpiece Intolerance.

On the 19th is Fritz Lang's intense Western Rancho Notorious and two of Otto Preminger's best films, the production-code-breaker (it uses the word virgin) The Moon is Blue, and the melancholic Bonjour Tristesse, with its beautiful use of wide-screen cinematography. On the 20th is another expressive use of the wide screen:  Fritz Lang's Moonfleet.

On the 21st is one of my favorite Chaplin films, City Lights, as moving as it is funny.  On the 23rd is Albert Lewin's intelligent and literate The Picture of Dorian Grey and on the 24th one of Budd Boetticher's elegant and austere Westerns, Ride Lonesome, which I just wrote about on Sept. 24. On the 26th is Chaplin's first feature The Kid and Sam Peckinpah's farewell to the classic Western Ride the High Country.

On the 27 is Chantal Ackerman's film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which I wrote about on July 7,2014.

Then at the end of the month come the horror films, for Halloween.  I recommend Terence Fisher's reflective films for Hammer, particularly Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and The Mummy and also Val Lewton's films for RKO, especially The Seventh Victim and Cat People.

Don Weis's The Affairs of Dobie Gillis

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis was one of two small-scale musicals that Don Weis made in 1953, the other being the charming I Love Melvin.  It was filmed in black-and-white, as MGM was phasing out musicals, starred Debbie Reynolds, Bobby Van, Bob Fosse and Barbara Ruick and was based on Max Shulman's novel, which was also the basis for the later TV show.  The four stars were all good (Bob Fosse) to mediocre (Barbara Ruick) dancers who danced with enthusiasm to Alex Romero's Bob Fosse-influenced choreography, especially the dance to Al Rinker and Floyd Huddleston's "You Can't Go Wrong by Doing Right," a popular song that one also hears Audrey Totter perform, in a very different interpretation, in Gerald Mayer's The Sellout (1952).

The film takes place at Grainbelt University and is in the tradition of the campus musical, which goes back to Good News in 1930, in the early days of sound.  One interesting thing about Weis's film is that some of it actually takes place in the classroom and there are no athletes to be seen.  There is even a discussion with a pompous English professor, played by Hans Conried, about whether one should take a descriptive or prescriptive approach to the English language.  The professor starts out hostile to Gillis but is eventually taken in by his plagiarized essay, the plagiarism never being caught or punished. The students work hard to meet deadlines after goofing off most of the semester.  The climax comes in a desperate attempt to raise money for a literary magazine with a fund-raiser starring Stella Kowalski's all-girl band (Stella is played by the formidable Kathleen Freeman, who appeared in many Jerry Lewis movies).  The students all struggle with finances, even at one point buying books in bulk to sell to students.  Though the film is played for comedy it is also serious in its tensions between students and their parents, their love affairs and their financial struggles.

1953, when Weis made two musicals, was also the year that Elvis Presley did his first recording at Sun records.  The traditional musical was coming to an end, replaced by Presley's insipid films, as dancers Bobby Van and Bob Fosse returned to the stage. Don Weis directed a few more graceful films (The Adventures of Hajii Baba, 1954 and The Gene Krupa Story, 1959) and then turned to television.

The Last One Left by John D. MacDonald

He stood in the night shadows watching the traffic.  He had an awareness of all the weight of the night city around him, of all the animal tensions of this single moment in time in this place, a shrewd and tawdry city, shining like toyland between the swamps and the sea.
--John D. MacDonald, The Last One Left (Random House, 1967).

Stephen King recently praised this book in The New York Times, in which he said MacDonald's Travis McGee novels were "embarrassingly dated" and his other novels were "an indigestible mixture of Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara."  I disagree with King:  I read the Travis McGee novels every few years and always find them relevant, intense and beautifully written, combining a feeling for Florida with an understanding of the people who live there.  But read them for yourself and see what you think.  As for MacDonald's other novels, there are undoubtedly influences of the writers King mentions but I feel strongly that MacDonald transcends these influences to create a distinctive style.  Judge for yourself.

King did single out for praise The Last One Left, possibly because it is more similar to King's work than most of MacDonald's other novels, with a more detailed plot and complex characters; it is also longer than most of MacDonald's other novels.  It has a somewhat unusual structure, it being well into the book before one discovers what is going on, while we get details about the lives of all the characters.  There is quite a collection of hustlers, boat people, Cuban refugees, and wheeler-dealers.  As the plot slowly evolves one learns that a high-priced hooker's sugar daddy has suddenly died and she is running out of money.  She seduces several men and enlists them in a plot to murder six people on a boat that is carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in money for bribes.  Her Cuban maid and the maid's reporter boyfriend catch wind of what's going on, as does a lawyer whose sister is one of the passengers on the doomed boat.

Like most of MacDonald's other novels The Last One Left works on multiple levels:  the details of the different lives of different classes in Florida, the working-out of the attempt to commit a perfect crime that leaves no witnesses, the complexities of the police investigation.  It is an examination of a specific crime at a specific time in a specific place, and all the people affected by it, in one way or another.

Ride Lonesome, Band of Angels, Central Park, Young Bride

Ride Lonesome (1959) is one of a series of elegant, austere Westerns that director Budd Boetticher made with actor Randolph Scott in the 50's, most of them scripted by Burt Kennedy. They usually concerned a man on a mission, either of salvation or revenge, and once he had achieved his end there was no more for him to do.  Jim Kitses, in Horizons West (Indiana University Press,1969) says "Boetticher achieves a formal rigour and philosophical nuance that recalls the most unlikely of parallels, the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu."  and Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema (The University of Chicago Press, 1968) describes these films as "constructed partly as allegorical Odysseys and partly as floating poker games where every character took turns bluffing about his hand until the final showdown."  Ride Lonesome is filmed in a widescreen format by cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr. that effectively isolates Scott in his harshly beautiful environment, until Scott burns down the tree on which a man hanged Scott's wife and kills the man.

Raoul Walsh's Band of Angels (1957) is one of the idiosyncratic films that Walsh made in the fifties after leaving Warner Brothers.  It's based on Robert Penn Warren's novel and is a complex view of a slave and her owner, played by Yvonne De Carlo and Clark Gable.  In spite of its setting and its effective Max Steiner score the film is no Gone With the Wind, but rather an intense exploration of racial issues just as the Civil Rights era was beginning.  It is also a typical Walsh story of being forced into a fate not of one's choosing, as De Carlo goes from rich girl to slave, once her true origins are revealed.  It's beautifully filmed by cinematographer Lucian Ballard, who captures the oppressiveness of New Orleans and the antebellum South.

Young Bride, directed by William Seiter, and Central Park, directed by John Adolfi were both released in 1932 and depict the struggles of ordinary people in the Depression era.  Young Bride stars Eric Linden and Helen Twelvetrees, two intelligent and sensitive actors whose careers were essentially over by 1940.  Twelvetrees is a hard-working librarian who falls for Eric Linden, a con man who mainly cons himself.  The taxi dancers, pool halls and bars entertain those who can't find jobs and Twelvetrees finds the library a refuge, though Linden can't stand even Dickens when Twelvetrees reads it to him.  Linden has dreams and schemes of making money and can't even see the happiness Twelvetrees offers him in their tiny apartment, as the camera roves restlessly with him in a futile search for a big score.  Central Park is a brisk film (only 58 minutes long) of two starving people looking for work: Joan Blondell gets caught up in a robbery at the Central Park Casino while Wallace Ford gets a job with the cops washing motorcycles.  The film has a very strong class-consciousness, as the wealthy dance at the casino while African-Americans cook for them and serve them and people are sleeping on park benches.  There is also a lion from the zoo that is released by a lunatic and a cop who is losing his eyesight and afraid of losing his pension.  It all take place in a twenty-four hour period, with Adolfi effectively combining stock footage, back projection, and studio interiors to give a feeling of the details of the park and all it contains

Jody Lee Lipes's Ballet 422

The first time I worked with Balanchine personally was when he was choreographing Square Dance. I was a complete neophyte and knew nothing about the choreographic process, but seeing the steps pour out of this man was a revelation.  He could just walk into a studio and begin choreographing the way most people begin to talk.  It seemed that easy for him.
--Edward Villella, Prodigal Son (Simon and Schuster,1992)


Ballet 422, a film directed by Jody Lee Lipes and released in 2014, is about Justin Peck and his creation of Paz de La Jolla in 2013, the 422nd ballet performed at The New York City Ballet.  Most of the first 421 were choreographed by George Balanchine, who died in 1983, and most of the ballets that came after him have not survived in the repertory.  In 1957, when Balanchine choreographed Square Dance, he also choreographed Gounod Symphony, Stars and Stripes, and Agon, each one brilliant in its own way and all still being danced regularly (with the exception of Gounod Symphony, a wonderful ballet which has not been performed since the 80's)   Did it come easy to Balanchine?  No one knows the answer to that question, because it was all going on in his head. We don't get a great deal of insight into Peck's thought process either, something Lipes wisely does not attempt.  Lipes has obviously been influenced by Frederick Wiseman, as his film (like those of Wiseman) contains no talking heads explaining things.  Wiseman has done portraits of the American Ballet Theatre (1995) and The Paris Opera Ballet (2009) but these, like most of Wiseman's films , are wide-ranging films about large institutions.  Lipes sticks to just the creation of one ballet.

I have not seen the complete Paz de La Jolla (though I intend to this season) but, based on this film, Peck is a choreographer willing and able to learn, as we watch him work closely with lighting designer Mark Stanley and costume designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung. Peck struggles a bit and records rehearsals on a computer, which he takes home to study. He is also quite comfortable with dancers Amar Ramasar, Tiler Peck and Sterling Hyltin and willing to listen to their suggestions.  An important collaborator with Peck on Paz de La Jolla and prominent in the film was former dancer Albert Evans, who died this year at the age of 47; he took notes and made suggestions to Peck throughout the choreographic process.  This is a film not just about creation but also about all the work that goes into it.  And after Peck watches the premiere of his ballet, sitting in the theatre, he goes to his dressing room and changes into dance attire to dance in the corps of the last ballet of the evening.

10:04 by Ben Lerner

Normally I would not write about a book such as 10:04 (Ben Lerner, 2014, Faber and Faber), except in this case the book is such a good example of much that I think is wrong with so many novels today, seeming more like a college bull session that anything else. It is full of the fear of growing up and being responsible and takes refuge in the idea that maybe nothing is real anyway.  And it's a book about writing a book, where the author writes about himself in the third person and at various times says, in response to a question, "she's not in this story," the book consisting of stories within stories, with characters seemingly arbitrarily shifting in and out.

The fear of having children is especially strong in 10:04, with Lerner at one point donating his semen for a friend (in a scene, like much of the book, derivative of Philip Roth) and at another trying to guide a child through a museum: "I was at a total loss as to how one could both be responsible for a child at a museum and empty one's bladder."  This fear of having children is linked to a fear of the future without guidelines or guarantees and a fear of death, as the author faces the possibility of an aortic dissection and anxiety about having his wisdom teeth removed:  "nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past."

These elements of immaturity --"I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet" -- and fear of the future would be more acceptable if Lerner's writing style were not so irritating.  Much of the prose is purposely hallucinatory and there is a show-off tendency to drop somewhat irrelevant words into the middle of sentences, such as the "craquelure" of the wake of a boat underneath the "Aeolian cables" of the Brooklyn Bridge. It might be that this book was intended as a parodic catalogue of so many contemporary novels, but I somehow doubt it.

Two Films by Ingmar Bergman: Autumn Sonata (1978) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).

One can easily demonstrate that most of Bergman's films deal with themes or concerns absolutely central to human experience: themes that are either the most fundamental or the most banal, depending on the artist's response to them: transience and mortality; marriage and family; the varieties of love; the shadow of death; old age and the need for self-knowledge.
Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman (Praeger, 1969).

Before I saw Howard Hawks's El Dorado and read Andrew Sarris's book on American cinema my favorite director was Ingmar Bergman:  his movies were foreign, with subtitles; dealt with serious issues of life, death and man's relationship with God; and were often frank about sex, including even some nudity!  Bergman's films were intelligent and austere, made in black-and-white and eschewing even musical scores unless the music was actually part of a scene, e.g., coming from a radio. These days few people under 60 seem to know or care about Bergman's films while to me they seem more relevant than ever, though I would no longer say that Bergman is a greater artist than the classical American directors.

Susan Sontag once wrote:  "It is almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color" (there is truth in this; Bresson's color films I find much inferior to his black-and-white ones, for complex reasons) and the same was true for Bergman until 1969, when he made The Passion of Anna in color, presumably for commercial reasons.  With the exception of The Magic Flute  (1975) I find Bergman's color films not as interesting as the black-and-white ones.  Like Bresson, however, Bergman came to color late in life and late in his career and then tended to overdo it (compare his use of red to how Nicholas Ray uses it in Rebel Without a Cause, made in 1955, when most films still were in black-and-white).  Autumn Sonata is a relatively successful late Bergman film, its color mostly utilitarian in what is something of a chamber piece, as Charlotte (played by Ingrid Bergman in her only Ingmar Bergman film) comes to visit her daughter Eva, played by Liv Ullman, veteran of many Ingmar Bergman films.  The film includes beautifully framed flashback shots of Eva's childhood, as Eva gets more and more angry about how her mother neglected her, constantly going on concert tours and eventually leaving the family for another man.  "I had to comfort Papa," says Eva. As Eva and Charlotte talk the camera (of the reliable Sven Nykvist) frames them in one shot, with Charlotte's profile overlapping Eva's frontal face.  Many of Bergman's films have one of the four seasons in their title, though in this case I think autumn means that both Bergmans are in that period of their life (Ingrid died in 1982 at the age of 67; Ingmar lived to be 89, dying in 2007).

Smiles of a Summer Night is Bergman at the peak of his powers, making a Mozartian film that looks forward to The Magic Flute.  Smiles of a Summer Night is about finding the right lover and, since this takes place around 1900, one from the right class and of the right age:  the maid ends up with the footman, the older lawyer ends up with an old lover, an actress, while the lawyer's son ends up with his father's young wife.  The unfaithful soldier (who at one point says "my wife can be unfaithful but not my mistress" and another time says the precise opposite) and his unfaithful wife end up reconciled and swear fidelity. Most of this takes place on one summer night, as Bergman uses the short summer in Sweden as a metaphor for life.  The film ends with the soldier playing Russian roulette with the lawyer, who shoots himself with the soot that the soldier had put in the gun in place of the bullet.  "Do you think a nobleman would allow himself to be shot by a shyster?" The last image in the film is of windmills, suggesting that we are all tilting at them in our attempts to find love.  The general tone of this film is of a slightly arch comedy but I have never found Bergman to have much of a sense of humor and for me that doesn't matter, since I think the best comedies are the most serious and whether they make one laugh is not as important as, in this case, the intense analysis of human behavior.

Monte Hellman's China 9, Liberty 37.

Monte Hellman's China 9, Liberty 37 (the original Italian title was Amore, Piombo e Furore: Lead. Love and Rage) came out in 1978, at the very end of the so-called Spaghetti Westerns cycle, which reached its peak with Sergio Leone's impressive epic Once Upon a Time in the West (C'era Una Volta il West), 1969.  Although China 9, Liberty 37 was screened once in the Film Forum series of such Westerns in 2012 it is often not considered an Italian Western, because it was directed by Hellman, an American.  That series at Film Forum was clear evidence that Leone was the only Italian director to make quality Westerns; Leone's Westerns filtered American history through a European sensibility.

I first saw Hellman's film at the Thalia theatre in 1978 and not again until Turner Classic Movies showed a complete, pristine, widescreen print this week.  I originally was taken aback by the nudity and eroticism in the film (in a Western!), starring Fabio Testi, Warren Oates and Jenny Agutter.  The soundtrack is also a bit of a problem: Testi seems to have dubbed his own dialogue and can't be understood most of the time and the dialogue is sometimes drowned out by the music (though Pino Donaggio is no Ennio Morricone the music is not bad, and Ronee Blakley's rendition of the title tune, when Testi and Agutter are making love, is appropriately passionate).  Hellman has only made a few films in his career, but his austere Westerns of the 60's --The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966) -- were effective preparation for the elegant style of China 9, Liberty 37; this title is supposedly an actual road sign in Texas, though in the context of the film it suggests that China may be easier to find than freedom, as Agutter unsuccessfully tries to kill her abusive husband Oates and run off with Testi.  The cinematographer is Giuseppe Rotunno, of many Fellini films, whom Hellman uses to capture the rich browns, greens and blues of the landscape, including the deep valley in which Oates and Agutter reside, holding out against the railroad trying to get their land.  Hellman's film also has an effective cameo by director Sam Peckinpah, who plays a pulp writer ("I bring the West to the East") and whose films often included Warren Oates in the cast.

Much has been made of Fabio Testi's hat in the film, a hat similar to that of silent Western heroes such as Tom Mix and William S. Hart.  Hellman clearly wants to make us aware of the continuing vitality of the Western, going back to silent films, just as John Ford did in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962.

Two Movies About Fate and Choices: Turn Back the Clock and Holy Matrimony

Edgar Selwyn's Turn Back the Clock (1933) is an early entry in films about time travel.  Joe Gimlet (played by  an unusually vulnerable Lee Tracy) runs a tobacco store in New York and tries to convince his wife Mary (Mae Clark) to invest their savings of $4000 with an old banking friend (Otto Kruger), now married to Joe's former love Elvina (Peggy Shannon).  When Mary refuses to invest their life savings Joe stalks out and is hit by a car.  Under anesthesia he travels back in time and makes different choices: marrying Elvina,  becoming wealthy and losing all the money in the crash (he knew it was coming but Elvina  had invested the money without telling him), after which he is indicted and chased by the police.  He wakes up and realizes he had made the right choices after all, that wealth is not measured in dollars. The screenplay by Selwyn and Ben Hecht (screenwriter of many great films, including Lubitsch's Design for Living, also 1933) is not as schematic as it may sound.  With the help of MGM's cinematographer Harold Rosson, Selwyn does a wonderful job of re-creating the different time periods, not just with production design (by Stan Rogers) but with changing attitudes and mores, especially with the transition from horse-and-buggy to motorcar.   Selwyn also manages to elude the sentimentality that Capra, for instance, brought to this kind of material, eschewing sentimentality for rigorous realism, emotion and feeling.

Selwyn was originally a stage director, whose film directing began and ended with the 30's.  John M. Stahl directed films until the late forties but seems to be as forgotten as Selwyn, largely because his melodramas -- Imitation of Life (1934), Magnificent Obsession (1935) -- were eclipsed by the more ironic Douglas Sirk remakes. Andrew Sarris writes "Stahl's strong point was sincerity and a vivid visual style" and "Holy Matrimony (1943) was a success by any standards."  Holy Matrimony stars Monty Woolley and Gracie Fields (a dance-hall singer who was a charming actress), making it the kind of movie the late William K. Everson liked to show at the New School:  excellent, obscure, strongly English in tone.  Fields and Woolley are nicely restrained as two older people who end up living together because she confused him with his deceased valet, played by Eric Blore, one of many closeted homosexuals in the cast, including Woolley himself and Franklin Pangborn.  Brought together by mistake, misanthrope Woolley and Fields gradually begin to feel a mutual affection and Stahl begins to bring them together visually as they grow more protective of each other. They end up on the same isolated island where Woolley had lived with his valet. Along with Stahl credit goes to Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the screenplay, and Arnold Bennett, who wrote the original novel, Buried Alive (1910).

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for recently showing these two movies in their tributes to Mae Clark and Monty Woolley, proving once again that there is much about film and its history that has yet to be discovered and explored.