Yasujiro Ozu's Early Spring

Ozu is a Japanese director who is seldom talked about today but whose elegant films are one of the glories of movies.  When Tokyo Story (1953) opened in New York in 1972 at The New Yorker Theatre it was sold out for months, but then Ozu returned to relative obscurity.  Last week Turner Classic Movies showed Ozu's Early Spring, presumably --at least in part -- because of the title.

Early Spring (1956) is like music, with almost no camera movement and most shots framed from low angles (whether this is meant as a view from a tatami mat is disputed among Ozu scholars).  Early Spring is a domestic drama, with very little happening -- a Japanese married salaryman, Sugiyama,, has a brief affair with a co-worker and is transferred far from Tokyo, where his wife, Masako, eventually joins him.  Most scenes are composed geometrically and introduced by shots of trains and buildings, these shots themselves having a geometric beauty.  Everyone is struggling with the aftermath of WW II and those who were in the war together meet often and reminisce about it, finding it difficult to move on with their lives.  Sugiyama and Masako had a child who died in infancy and their sadness and lack of income makes them wary of having another.  Most of Sugiyama's co-workers feel they cannot afford children and few have cars or  a TV.  An older man tells Sugiyama, as they sit on a bridge watching the river flow by, that he is in "the Spring time of life," but he seems unconvinced.

Ozu made 54 films in his 36-year career and they can be watched and seen in many different ways.  Some feel that his films are "too Japanese" for Western audiences, more so than Kurosawa's perhaps, but no more than Mizoguchi's mostly-period films. Ozu often used the same actors and his movies have very similar titles (Early Summer, Late Autumn, etc.), all of which can be confusing but for me add to their beauty;  he creates his own world that is very much like ours but is both more problematic and more serene:  we are distanced from it but invited to enter it and are highly rewarded if we do. Ozu shows clearly that each phase of life, like each season, has its own problems and its own pleasures

Turner Classic Movies in April

Once again, a highly selective choice of some of my favorite movies on TCM, where movies are shown in the proper aspect ratio, uncut  and uninterrupted. 

The Party, April 4.  Blake Edwards's brilliant use of silence and the wide-screen to produce a subtle and wonderful comedy

Her Sister's Secret, April 12.  Edgar Ulmer's low-budget erotic soap opera.

Umbrellas of Cherbourg, April 12.  Jacques Demy's brightly-colored soap opera, in which every word is sung.

French CanCan and The Golden Coach, April 12.  Two magnificent films of color and beauty by Jean Renoir.

Moonfleet, April 16.  An elegant period piece by Fritz Lang.

Woman on the Beach, April 16.  A fascinatingly bizarre film by Renoir, made in America.

D.O.A. , April 19.  Rudolph Mate's corrosive film noir.

Intolerance, April 19.  Made by D.W. Griffith in 1916 and still unsurpassed.

7 Women, April 20.  John Ford's last film, a beautiful farewell.

Kiss Me Deadly, April 20.  Robert Aldrich's film noir about the deadly politics of the 50's.

Detour, April 20.  Edgar Ulmer's fatalistic film of the 40's.  "Every time you turn around fate sticks out its foot and trips you."

The Apartment, April 24.  Billy Wilder's ultimate in cynicism.

Some Came Running, April 24.  Exquisite Minnelli melodrama.

Night Moves, April 27.  Superbly obscure Arthur Penn detective drama.

Two Films by Edward L. Cahn: Two-Dollar Bettor (1951) and Afraid to Talk (1932)

One thing I learned as a graduate student in art history was that there is no artist so obscure that he won't at some point be rediscovered.  This is also true of film directors, especially in this age of the DVD.  While there are many fine films still under copyright that have not yet made it into the market there are many in the public domain that are available in the grey market. When I told someone recently that I am not about to give up cable TV only because of Turner Classic Movies they suggested that all the films shown on TCM were on DVD anyway.  Would that it were so!  I did a somewhat arbitrary count of one month of TCM and found that only about 20% were available on DVD.  Of the remaining 80% a small number are available for purchase in the grey market.

Which brings us to the case of Edward L. Cahn, who made more than 100 movies in his thirty-year career (1932-62), some of them quite inspired, most of them at least workmanlike, including Law and Order, about the Earp Brothers, made in 1932.  Also made in 1932 was Afraid to Talk, one of the most uncompromising films ever about political corruption.  When gangster Edward Arnold murders someone in a hotel room he is let off because he has compromising evidence about the corruption of everyone from the mayor on down.  Because the assistant D.A., played by the ever-sleazy Louis Calhern, has to prosecute someone he beats up a bellboy in order to get a confession from him and then tries to hang him in his cell.  The only ones who drink more than the reporters are the politicians, who plot everything at their cocktail parties.  Headlines are not shown on newspapers but rather electronic news ticker, with citizens commenting in crowded streets about their inability to find a job.

Cahn's Two-Dollar Bettor was made in 1951 and contrasts a banker father who becomes addicted to gambling with his wholesome daughter (whose mother is dead), who plans to marry the boss's son, a recent Princeton graduate, and at first the father wins enough bets to buy things for his daughter  When the father is smitten by the bookie's messenger, femme fatale Marie Windsor, she convinces him to steal money to bet on a sure thing and she plans to leave town with the money and her boyfriend,  The father kills them both and in turn is killed himself.  It's an effectively downbeat story about greed and lust in 50's America, a common theme in Cahn's films.

Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet (Overlook Press, 2012)

I once shared Bonnet's disinclination to part with a book once I had acquired it, but that was before I had a family, which Bonnet does not mention having, and needed the space for other things, such as toys.  Although Susan and I still have thousands of books we have winnowed them out considerably as we have moved several times.  Now I only acquire a few books a year -- those that are meaningful to me -- as I use the library more and more.  We have a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library near our apartment and they have no limit on how many times one can renew a book unless it has been requested, so I can keep a book until I am ready to read it, most of the books I borrow not being particularly popular.

When people visited us they use to say things such as "how many of these books have you guys read?" (most of them) or "do you guys like to read?"(yes) but now we hear such questions less often, as fewer people seem to be reading fewer books, probably because of the lure of the internet.  Most of Bonnet's book is devoted to obscure titles in obscure languages and how he obtained them and the problems in arranging them.  Though I did pass reading exams in Latin, German, and French in order to receive my graduate degree in art history I admit to having few books in languages other than English and I admit to a certain envy of my great-grandfather, who read Latin and Greek for pleasure every night (from the ages of 11 to 13 his studies were entirely devoted to Latin).

Bonnet devotes too little time to the books he likes and the pleasures of reading, so obsessed is he with tracking down and collecting obscure volumes.  When he does take time to talk about the pleasures of reading he effectively conveys how books can evoke other times and other places:  War and Peace, The Alexandria Quartet, Moby-Dick, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Bonnet devotes most of his time to private libraries, particularly his own, but does briefly discuss public libraries and institutional libraries.  I recommend Adam Gopnik's article on the library of the Warburg Institute in London in the March 16 The New Yorker for what the future might hold for such libraries.

Richard Linklater's Boyhood

Boyhood is a gimmicky and depressing film, one of the most depressing I have ever seen.  Those of us who grew up in lower-middle-class environments and suffered what the children in this film suffer from authority figures -- parents, teachers, et al. -- find it hard to believe that even going to college will save these kids, especially since the parents insist they stay in-state in order to save on tuition! 

The gimmick is that this film was filmed for a month or so a year over twelve years.  Why this is better than using different actors to portray the kids at different ages is quite unclear, effective only as a publicity gimmick.  Certainly things could have been done to show the passage of time and its influence in other ways than playing period pop songs and changing haircuts. The family moves around Texas a fair amount, drunken husbands abuse the kids, the father shows up every other week-end, the teachers lecture kids that they need to do what the teachers tell them if the kids want to ever get jobs, the Harry Potter series and Kurt Vonnegut are the only books even briefly referred to.  The son does aspire somewhat to photography, so there may be some hope for him (if he can stay off drugs); the daughter is more or less lost in the shuffle.

The Strange Case of Henry Hathaway: Nevada Smith

The professional detractors of Ford and Hawks almost invariably attempt to palm off Hathaway as  a reasonable facsimile, but such a comparison is patently absurd.
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, The University of Chicago Press, 1968

Nevada Smith is a combination of The Searchers (John Ford,1956) and Seven Men From Now (Budd Boetticher, 1956) but it is without the beauty or passion of either.  Director Henry Hathaway is as detached as his star, Steve McQueen, who seems uncomfortable in his role as someone  hunting down the three men who murdered his parents:  he kills one in a stream, one in a swamp and one in a cattle stampede. The screenplay by John Michael Hayes (who did several screenplays for Hitchcock)  is workmanlike and the score by Alfred Newman is minimal; the real star is the cinematography of Lucien Ballard(who also did films for Peckinpah and Walsh), with its wide-screen vistas of dusty towns and elegant mountains.  Also giving one pleasure are the many older stars -- Brian Keith, Paul Fix, Ted de Corsia -- who give the film a whiff of authenticity.

Hathaway has directed some enjoyable films, but he always seems to be at a distance from them, whether it's an Oscar vehicle for John Wayne (True Grit, 1969) or the comic strip Prince Valiant (1954).  Nevada Smith was made as a "prequel" to the very successful The Carpetbaggers (directed by Edward Dmytryk in 1964 from the Harold Robbins novel).

The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White

Ethel Lina White's novel (Simon and Schuster,1936) is a mediocre mystery novel that would likely be forgotten today if it had not been made into the movie The Lady Vanishes (1938), directed by Alfred Hitchcock with a screenplay by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat.  Hitchcock's film is not only suspenseful and intriguing, it is also quite funny and subtly political, with Englishmen concerned only about cricket scores when Europe is on the brink of war.  White's plot and characters are flimsy even by British mystery standards, while Hitchcock's characters are fleshed out in considerable detail, each one with a plausible reason why they can't reveal that they had seen Miss Froy, the lady who vanished.

I will give White credit for intelligence in her writing, even if it is devoid of humor and character.  At one point the following conversation is overheard:
"For instance, how would you describe that dark woman with the artificial lashes?"

"Attractive."

"Hum. I should call her meretricious and so would any average man of the world."

These days what man, average or not, would use the word meretricious?  It is a useful word that I use (some might say overuse, though I would respond that that is because of the nature of today's world) but, believe it or not, I have yet to encounter anyone who knows and appreciates its meaning.  It comes from a Latin word and I think that the limited vocabulary of today's speech and books comes from a lack of knowledge of Latin and Greek (among other causes, of course), knowledge once assumed to be a part of an education.  I am not a big admirer of Ethel Lina White or Dorothy Sayers (who wrote around the same time) but I am of P.G. Wodehouse:  they all chose the right word and trusted that their readers would understand it.

The Hot Stove League

People have been asking me why I haven't written more about the baseball off-season.  I think perhaps the major reason is that it's mostly about which of the handful of very wealthy teams can afford the top free agents, a question that doesn't interest me very much.  When Enos "Country" Slaughter (player from 1938-1958) was asked if it bothered him that players get paid so much more now than he got paid he simply said, "Well. in my day the owners got all the money" and when asked how he felt about Reggie Jackson owning a number of Rolls Royces he simply said "I can go anywhere in my pick-up truck he can go in a Rolls Royce."  As recently as 1979 Mets third-baseman Richie Hebner had a job during the off-season digging graves.  But this all changed when Marvin Miller became head of the player's union and negotiated arbitration and free agency.  Instead of insisting that all players could immediately become free agents, as he could have, he agreed to six years of experience.  The owners thought they had a victory until it quickly became clear that limiting the number of free agents drove up the price considerably, which then could be used as arguments for arbitration for non-free-agents!

Both the Mets and the Yankees have teams which could produce a subway series, but only if everything goes right.  Which is highly unlikely.  Some of the young pitching on the Mets could fall apart and some of the older players on the Yankees could fall apart (literally!).  My guess is that some things will go well with both teams and some things won't and there is not enough margin for error in either team to keep them from ending up somewhere in the middle of their divisions.  And I certainly agree with Juliet Macur in The New York Times that the Yankees should release Alex Rodriquez as soon as possible:  whatever minimum contribution he may make is certainly not worth the distraction!

The Academy Awards: Ugh!

Many lowlights this year, as usual, and only two highlights:  the best foreign picture to Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida (can one imagine an Oscar to Bresson?) and an honorary trophy to French screenwriter Jean-Paul Carriere (he's 83; perhaps there were no deserving Americans close enough to death)  Otherwise, it was the usual unfunny jokes, hideous songs, and cloying self-congratulation.  The "tribute" to those who died in 2014 was faster than ever, without even any actual clips, and only Julie Andrews and Shirley Maclaine represented anything of the history of Hollywood, briefly, and Ben Affleck did quote Frank Capra; otherwise there was no mention of any of the great filmmakers.

As far as I'm concerned every Oscar show should include some kind of tribute to D.W. Griffith and others who pioneered the art of film.  Aside from the fact that probably few members of this year's audience had ever heard of Griffith it is also likely that the Academy and its mostly anonymous members do not want to call attention to the fact that most movies made today look as though D.W, Griffith never lived (see the Griffith films coming to Film Forum presently).

One of the more obnoxious elements in this year's show was the self-congratulation about the attitude toward race, this from an industry which for many years relegated African-Americans to maids, porters, and servants!  There was no mention this year of Hattie McDaniels,  Louise Beavers, Stepin Fetchit, or any of the African-Americans who contributed significantly to the industry.

Would it be too much to ask for future Oscar shows to have less emphasis on couture and more on the history of film?  Probably.