Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner

It is with some sadness that I report my disappointment with Mike Leigh's latest film, since he is one of the few directors whose new films I look forward to.  Mr. Turner is an incoherent mess.  The "biopic" of an artist is, of course, a most difficult proposition and the only one that I think is a glorious success is Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), which is mostly wonderful performances of Bach's music in original locations, interspersed with reflections on his life.  For a composer one can perform his music but for a writer or painter it is more difficult to showcase the work, and Mr. Turner is a series of sequences of Turner painting, and feuding with his fellow artists.  In Turner's paintings there is little room for humanity, but Leigh's film is full of endless close-ups of Turner and his women, with only occasional walks in the outdoors. 

Leigh has done a wonderful job, in films such as Secrets and Lies (1996) and Vera Drake (2004), of exposing the absurdities of class distinctions in England.  But his Turner film has little of this, other than to briefly dwell on Turner and his father, a barber.  The film does not tell us the date and place of each scene, which is all to the good, but it also does little to indicate what the time and place is, even if one is thoroughly knowledgeable about Turner's career.  The series of anecdotes -- Turner with a female Scottish scientist, Turner at the Royal Academy feuding with Constable, Turner singing Purcell -- are given little context or meaning.  Turner himself is boorish and inarticulate, speaking mostly in a series of grunts.

One would not know from this film what a great artist Turner was, because paintings are not shown to great advantage on film: the texture is entirely missing.   Certainly Turner has a great ego -- something that seems necessary for an artist -- but there is little attempt here to understand or communicate what made him a great painter; Dick Pope's pretty cinematography is very much beside the point, though it glows beautifully on the big screen at the Angelika.

My Ballet Performance: January 17, 2015

I have been taking ballet classes at the 92nd St Y now for a number of years and I have participated in the Adult Student Dance Concert now a number of times since I have been with my current teacher.  Before this year, however, the last time I did it was in 2011:  in 2012 my daughter was only a few months old, in 2013 I was having cataract operations, in 2014 I was recovering from hospitalization.  In the fall of 2014 I returned to ballet class after my teacher started teaching "ballet for the older body" and I was pleased to be able to join in this year's performance, for which she choreographed a piece that included students from three different classes.

I have been studying ballet for a number of years but had never contemplated actually doing a performance until the opportunity came at the Y.  In a sense ballet class is a preparation for something that never happens --for most of us -- so it is a pleasure indeed to actually perform before an audience, especially one as supportive as the family and friends to come to see us at the Y.  Originally the performances were upstairs in one of the studios but gradually the demand for tickets increased --once we had to do three performances to accommodate the crowds! --and now we have moved to the larger ground-floor theatre.

For this performance our instructor used music by Leon Minkus, La Bayadere Waltz, and we had rehearsals for several weeks. Part of that time was to fix the choreography but most of the time was used simply to practice and get everything right, especially since the fourteen participants (twelve women and two men) had very different levels of experience.  The choreography is relatively simple, no big jumps or complex turns:  port de bras, tendues temp lié, four balancés downstage and turn, four balancés upstage and turn, four more balancés downstage, into sous-sous and pas de boureé, chasse pas de boureé to the right and left, final port de bras.  Learning the basics of this is not too difficult but getting all the movements of arms, legs, feet, hands and head properly coordinated is complex and, once again, one realizes what professional dancers go through to make everything look beautiful and relatively effortless.  There was a great deal to learn for a piece that only lasted three minutes!  My wife Susan and children Gideon and Victoria were great supporters throughout rehearsals, somewhat patiently listening to my endless comments.

I did have to get black ballet slippers for the performance, with black shirt and pants and minimal make-up.  I arrived early on Saturday for tech rehearsal, scheduled for 3 P.M., and went over our piece several times with Patti, who was also in another piece (several dancers were in more than one piece).  Tech rehearsal went quickly; though it was our only rehearsal on stage we quickly established the spacing and lighting.  Then all of us in the ballet dances had a warm-up upstairs in our regular studio and another run-through of our dance. Before I knew it it was performance time (I had, as always, brought a book with me but spent most of the time talking with my fellow performers).  They had a video feed so we could see all the dances; we were scheduled for 10th and our time came quickly, after my wife and children dropped in to say hello to everyone. Our performance went well, as I concentrated on smiling and pointing my feet.  Applause was enthusiastic and I was pleased, as were Susan, Gideon and Victoria and Susan's aunt and uncle, Phoebe and Stan, all of whom stayed for all the dances

 

Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin

The late Bob Hope devoted a fantastically successful and well-remembered lifetime to showing that a truly unfunny man can make it as a comic.
Christopher Hitchens

Richard Zoglin's biography of Hope (Simon and Schuster, 2014) tries hard, with little success, to show that Bob Hope was occasionally funny.  The problem is that Bob Hope had little to say --though he said it very well sometimes --and preferred making money, chasing skirts, and being famous.  Certainly he may have done some good in his many trips overseas to entertain troops, though as always he made sure not to offend anyone and always brought along starlets, encouraging the troops to ogle them.

Hope was equally at home and equally unfunny in films, radio and TV.  In his films he was always, as Zoglin says, opaque and lacking emotion, and, according to Zoglin, never worked with a major director, probably because he did not like anyone telling him what to do.  I would consider Frank Tashlin a major director and Hope would sometimes use him to add gags to his film.  But the two Hope films that Tashlin directed, Son of Paleface (1952) and The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (1968) are Hope's best films, simply because Tashlin did not let Hope dominate things with his smart--aleck persona, but rather emphasized visual gags.  Minor director Sidney Lanfield said, "Hope was the worst egomaniac I ever worked with."  

I have said before that the best comedy is the most serious and Hope was never serious, except perhaps about supporting the war in Vietnam.  One can't necessarily blame him for his political beliefs, but he never wanted to annoy a President because then maybe the guy would no longer play golf with him.  Zoglin tries to make a case for the Road movies, with Bing Crosby, but one cringes today when watching those films:  the talking camels and frequent irrelevant asides indicate a genuine insecurity with the plot, a refusal to take it seriously.

Certainly humor and what is funny can be quite subjective, though I seldom hear from anyone how much they laughed at the Bob Hope movie they watched last night.  A good comparison with Hope's radio show is that of his contemporary, Fred Allen; there are about 175 surviving episodes of each comedian's show:  they both do monologues and spoofs of current politicians and events.  But Hope's quips have no bite, while Allen's are both funny and thought-provoking.  Certainly part of the reason is that Allen wrote much of his own material, while Hope was always completely dependent on his writers, who came and went in great numbers.

John Cromwell's For The Defense

John Cromwell's For the Defense is further evidence of how innovative good directors were in the early sound era, moving the camera in spite of the difficulties of recording sound at the same time.  For the Defense starts out with the camera following a man on trial walking through jail doors and corridors until he gets to the courtroom where he is on trial, defended by William Fallon, played by William Powell.  The film ends with Powell himself convicted -- of jury bribery -- and going in the reverse direction, before arriving at Sing Sing in the rain and the doors closing on him. 

This film was something of a high point for director John Cromwell and actors Kay Francis and William Powell, though they all made quite a number of films in the sound era.  Kay Francis is best remembered for her elegant and amusing role in Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) but unfortunately usually seemed more interested in who designed her clothes than who her director was.  William Powell is most remembered for his role in The Thin Man movies, which veered far away from the Dashiell Hammett novel, where he played a smug dipsomaniac.  But before he became identified with that role he played complex and conflicted characters in For the Defense and other films, especially Von Sternberg's beautiful The Last Command (1928).  Cromwell became primarily known for his intelligent direction of females, including Barbara Stanwyck in Banjo on My Knee (1936) and Eleanor Parker in Caged (1950).

The cinematography on For the Defense is by Charles Lang, a master of light and shadow; the film is a good example of what it means when one says "black-and-white is more beautiful than color."  Lang and Cromwell use close-ups sparingly, usually giving us a wide view before moving in closely.  Cromwell is especially effective in his use of sound, often having the conversations take place off-screen while the camera is on another part of the scene.

The plot of Cromwell's film may be somewhat old-fashioned -- a lawyer bribes a juror "to save a woman's honor" -- but the style and emotion are as relevant as ever.

Two Films by Thornton Freeman: Week-End Marriage; They Call it Sin

Thornton Freeman was a journeyman director who made four films in 1932, including Week-End Marriage and They Call It Sin, both recently shown in the Turner Classic Movies tribute to Loretta Young(she made six films in '32), who starred in both.  These films were both very much in the First National/Warner Brothers style of fast visions of modern life; each clocks in at about 65 minutes.

In They Call It Sin, Loretta Young runs away from the a stuffy small town in Kansas after traveling executive David Manners picks her up there.  When she arrives in New York she finds out that Manners is already engaged and he doesn't have the guts to give up his society dame.  So songwriter Young (Manners discovered her playing the organ in church) takes up with a show producer (played by the wonderfully sleazy Louis Calhern) who steals her songs and discards her, after which she marries George Brent, Manners's friend.

Week-End Marriage presents another point of view of the difficulty women have.  In this case Loretta Young marries Norman Foster, who resents that she makes more money than he does and drinks himself out of his job after his wife is transferred to St Louis.  He takes up with floozies and she takes up with George Brent, until Foster gets sick and she returns to him.

Both these films were made before the Production Code was enforced:  in Week-End Marriage the husband and wife even get to sleep together in a double bed and fool around in the morning!  They both also show how difficult it was for women in the Depression, with their choices even more limited than they are now.  There were points of view in both movies that women should stay home and take care of their husbands but these were more than canceled out by the glowing independence of Loretta Young, who was 19 when these films were made.

Though Freeman was a journeyman and only directed until about 1950 he shows a rare intelligence in these films.  Very much in the Warner Brothers style he gives distinctive personalities to each part, no matter how small, and he lets the audience draw its own conclusions, e.g., when Young returns to her husband and a woman is there taking care of him and the woman (beautifully played by Vivienne Osborne) smokes a cigarette and looks out the window while Young is with her husband it is quite clear the conflicting emotions she is feeling.  Freeland directs Loretta Young in an effectively minimal and restrained style, moving the camera slightly and letting the emotions show in her eyes.

Leo McCarey's Going My Way (1944)

Going My Way, a movie some think of as corny and sappy, has one of the most elegant and moving scenes I have seen in any film. Father O'Malley (played by Bing Crosby) has recently been assigned to a New York parish and passes by the Metropolitan Opera one day, where he runs into his former lover, played by Rise Stevens.  He is wearing his coat, so Stevens does not know he is a priest and she complains about how he had stopped writing to her.  He takes off his coat and she sees his clerical collar, suddenly realizing what happened.  They chat for a moment and then she goes on stage to sing, beautifully and erotically, "L'amore est un oiseau rebelle," from Carmen, while O'Malley watches from the wings and then departs.  McCarey plays this scene without much comment or reflection, allowing the audience to realize the emotions both O'Malley and Stevens are going through.

There is also a subplot of a girl O'Malley rescues from the streets who then becomes the wife of the son of the church's landlord; the landlord disapproves until he sees his son in uniform, one of the few references to the war then going on.  Crosby shows the girl how to sing and how to get across her song with emotions rather than physical gestures, just as McCarey allows the strong emotions of the film to emerge without much fuss or rhetoric. O'Malley helps the couple with a life he himself rejected, for the priesthood

I have heard stories of mothers and grandmothers sending their sons to see Going My Way, in the hope it would kindle interest in the priesthood.  Interestingly, there is almost nothing about Roman Catholic beliefs or doctrine in the film.  Father O'Malley is part of the new guard -- teaching singing and baseball to the kids, negotiating with the landlord -- against the old guard of Father Fitzgibbon, played by Barry Fitzgerald. O'Malley sings, plays baseball and golf, and makes friends with the kids and everyone else in the parish, while Fitzgibbon is more interested in whether someone goes to mass and keeping the elderly happy.

McCarey's style is a complicated mixture of the romantic and the comic, almost always viewed with compassion.  Going My Way is anecdotal, funny and moving, ending with O'Malley going on to another parish after bringing Fitzgibbon's mother over from Ireland as a Christmas surprise.

Reading Journal: The Wolf in Winter; The Secret History of Wonder Woman

When they separated again she was gone.
John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter (Atria, 2014).

This is the 13th in a fine series by John Connolly about private detective Charlie Parker in Maine.  Parker is a driven man, ferreting evil out wherever in Maine he finds it (his wife and child were killed by a madman), even when it means chasing demons.  In The Wolf in Winter he is investigating the murder of a homeless man whose daughter has disappeared and traces the daughter to Prosperous, Maine, where the good citizens have made a pact with the devil, or something like it.  The book follows Connolly's unusual method of first-person narration by Parker alternating with third-person narration of what is going on in the town, controlled by a priest of the Family of Love.  Connolly effectively keeps the occult to a minimum while drawing vivid portraits of Parker and his suffering as well as details of the lives of the down-and-out in Maine and the desperation of small towns.

There was plenty of feminist agitation in the 1940s in the pages of Wonder Woman.
Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Knopf, 2014)

I grew up in a small town without a bookstore or library and, like many kids hungry for narrative, I read comic books.  I had no access to books (my parents said they were bad for your eyes) and little money but I could afford comic books, then priced at twelve cents, and I particularly loved Batman and Superman; at that time, in the fifties, Wonder Woman had been domesticated and had little appeal for me.  So I found Lepore's book fascinating, as it showed how William Moulton Marston invented Wonder Woman as a strong hero in 1941 and wrote her comic books until his death in 1948, after which her Amazonian qualities petered out.  Marston was a psychologist who invented the lie detector and lived with two women, both of whom bore children.  Marston hired his own artist, Harry G. Peter, though Lepore does not discuss the artistic aspects of the comic books to any significant extent; she is much more interested in its themes as they merged from the suffragette movement and the efforts of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, whose niece was a member of Marston's household.

Unfortunately Wonder Woman and other comics met a great deal of opposition from adults and were gradually relegated to obscure venues; when I was a kid you could get them on any newsstand or at any candy store.  They were an introduction to reading -- often with complex plots and intelligent themes -- that today kids seldom get, and we are the poorer for that.

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Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner

The Shop Around the Corner, which recreates Budapest in America and inhabits it with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, is a beguiling romantic comedy of pretence and cross purposes, as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball.
David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (William Morrow and Company,1976).

The estimable Film Forum showed The Shop Around the Corner (1940) this past week in a lovely, warm 35 mm. print (non-digital, in other words).  It is a moving and beautiful film;  whether it is funny or not is subjective; I have always felt that the best comedies are not necessarily funny: if Chaplin, Keaton, McCarey and Lubitsch don't make you laugh one can enjoy their films for their beauty and compassion, qualities lacking in the anarchic humor of the Marx brothers, Woody Allen, et al.

There is a dark side to The Shop Around the Corner, as Lubitsch does not venture much beyond the shop itself, full of clerks worried about their paychecks and their security and trying hard to stay in the middle class.  One of the employees is having an affair with the boss's wife and this is played more as tragedy than comedy, as the boss tries to kill himself. Unemployed Klara talks her way into a job and feuds with her boss Alfred while they have a lonely-hearts correspondence with each other anonymously, each afraid to meet and be disappointed.  Lubitsch emphasizes how our dreams don't always gibe with reality, especially when we are unwilling to "scratch the surface" of others.

William Paul, author of Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy (Columbia University Press, 1983), said he had to explain to his students why Lubitsch was funny, a futile endeavor indeed.  Lubitsch is not necessarily trying to make one laugh, he wants to observe how both mean and generous human beings can be to one another and his intelligent observations and unobtrusive camera are never condescending, as much as we may laugh at human behavior.

Turner Classic Movies in January

There are, as always, some good movies on TCM this month and, as usual, I suggest that one watch something because you know nothing about it, e.g., the featured works of low-budget director William Beaudine this month.  The movies I like and recommend include:

Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1953), a beautiful use of color and widescreen to portray what it's like to be a teenager.  Jan. 3

Robert Siodmak's Criss-Cross (1949), a cynical and corrosive film noir.  Jan. 4

Frank Borzage's History is Made at Night (1937), an intense romantic film by one of the most romantic directors. Jan.5

Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai (1948), on the 100th anniversary of Welles's birth.  Jan.14

Anthony Mann's Man of the West (1950), as mythopoeic as they come.  Jan. 15

King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), a delirious Western. Jan 18

Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), an elegant pre-code comedy.  Jan. 22

Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), a great film about families and growing older. Jan.25

Max Ophuls's The Earrings of Madame De...(1953), with tracking shots that Ophuls does better than anyone.  Jan.25