Orson Welles was born May 6, 1915 and Turner Classic Movies is celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth with many of his films. I recommend them all, but particularly the rarely shown Chimes at Midnight (1965), the best adaptation to the screen of Shakespeare. Welles uses parts of five different plays in which Falstaff, played by Welles himself, appears. It is a sad, beautiful and funny film, made when Welles was an old man at fifty, and the last truly personal film Welles made. It is also an example of how a great film can be made on a relatively low budget, if the filmmaker passionately cares about it. Chimes at Midnight will be on at 8 PM May 15.
Other films I recommend in May:
The two best films Greta Garbo made are showing on May 2: Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939) and Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina (1933), the first a tragic comedy and the second a comic tragedy.
May 3 is Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), corrosive film about a bumbling Mike Hammer trying to solve the Cold War single-handedly and just making things worse.
May 4 is Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), a fatalistic film noir.
May 6 is Frank Borzage's romantic and tragic version of A Farewell to Arms (1932), as well as three films about crime by masters of the genre: John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Andre DeToth's Crime Wave (1954) and Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion (1957). DeToth's subversive Western, Springfield Rifle, is showing on May 7.
May 9 is Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959), one of the last great classical Westerns and a definitive statement of Hawksian themes.
May 10 has Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), an intense and ironic soap opera, as well as a pessimistic analysis of American life by a German director.
May 12 is Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), a film beautifully described and appreciated by, among many others, Karl Ove Knausgaard in My Struggle Book Two.
May 15 has Max Ophuls The Reckless Moment (1949), another complex view of America by a European director.
May 20 is Nicholas Ray's delirious Johnny Guitar (1954), a film that works on many different levels, including as an allegory of McCarthyism.
May 24, for Memorial Day, there are two of the best "anti-war" films ever made: King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) and Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937).
May 28 is Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962), a short film about time travel (that was later turned into the bloated film 12 Monkeys and the even more bloated TV series of the same name)
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
The Designated Hitter. Again
Every Spring someone wants the National League to adopt the designated hitter rule; this year William C. Rhoden of The New York Times was one of the first to voice this opinion. The reason: Cardinal pitcher Adam Wainwright injured himself batting! I've already weighed in on this subject on this blog (May 21 of last year). Rhoden and some players seem to think that fans want to see more hitting and I question that assumption: seeing the pitcher execute a sacrifice bunt is one of the beauties of the game. Wainwright himself says that the injury could have happened anyway. Are we next going to pass a rule forbidding the pitcher from covering first base on a ball hit to the first baseman (pitchers have been injured doing this, too)? Admittedly there are problems for American League pitchers running the bases and what happened to Chien-Ming Wang was indeed unfortunate, though perhaps, as I said before, that was due to inexperience; if we do away with the DH in the American League and the minor leagues that would prevent some of the the base-running problems that pitchers have, not that base-running problems and injuries are unique to pitchers.
I would also argue that there is more injury to the arms of pitchers in the American League, home of the DH, because they are never taken out for pinch-hitters, making it more likely their arms will wear out sooner. And, of course, a DH is a philosophical intrusion into one of the things that makes baseball so beautiful, the balance between hitting and fielding. Let us hope the steroid era is over and pitchers can relax somewhat -- now that not everyone is hitting home runs -- and practice their bunting and hitting occasionally.
I would also argue that there is more injury to the arms of pitchers in the American League, home of the DH, because they are never taken out for pinch-hitters, making it more likely their arms will wear out sooner. And, of course, a DH is a philosophical intrusion into one of the things that makes baseball so beautiful, the balance between hitting and fielding. Let us hope the steroid era is over and pitchers can relax somewhat -- now that not everyone is hitting home runs -- and practice their bunting and hitting occasionally.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) and Mickey Rooney
I recently watched George B. Seitz's Life Begins for Andy Hardy on Turner Classic Movies and was impressed with how much darkness Seitz was able to insert in this film released just before America's entry into WW II: a dancer friend of Andy's commits suicide when he can't find a job (though this was unconvincingly changed to a heart attack by the studio) and Andy goes hungry in N.Y., only finding a job because a femme fatale wants to make another man jealous. There have been complaints about Judy Garland's four songs being cut from this film, but Seitz intelligently realize they were not appropriate to this story of hunger, unfulfilled lust, and suicide. Of course MGM tried to make everything come out okay in the end by having Andy return home from the evil city to his family, but even then he crashes a car with his father in it (though no one is hurt and it is played for laughs). At one point in the film Judge Hardy visits Andy in New York and gives him a cryptic lecture about "fidelity to the girl who will become your wife," though of course the word "virgin" was forbidden by the production code (and not used until Otto Preminger used the word in The Moon is Blue in 1953, which he released without a code seal). Andy (and probably much of the audience) had no idea what he was talking about.
I realized when Mickey Rooney died last year that he actually had had quite a career. Much fun has been made of his roles at MGM, especially Andy Hardy, but they were often complex characterizations of someone wanting to be a boy and also wanting to grow up. Even when Rooney was discarded by MGM (from 1934-1944 he made more than five movies a year there) he always looked for good roles and sometimes even found them, my own favorites being Richard Quine's Drive a Crooked Road (1954), Don Siegel's Baby Face Nelson (1957), Carl Reiner's The Comic (1969) (he plays an older cross-eyed comedian who points to his eyes and says "when they stopped laughing at these they started killing each other"), the amusing, if maligned, role in Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and, my own favorite, the gangster in Preminger's Skiddo (1968). In many of these and other roles one can feel the intense conflict between ego and id often apparent in the Andy Hardy films.
I realized when Mickey Rooney died last year that he actually had had quite a career. Much fun has been made of his roles at MGM, especially Andy Hardy, but they were often complex characterizations of someone wanting to be a boy and also wanting to grow up. Even when Rooney was discarded by MGM (from 1934-1944 he made more than five movies a year there) he always looked for good roles and sometimes even found them, my own favorites being Richard Quine's Drive a Crooked Road (1954), Don Siegel's Baby Face Nelson (1957), Carl Reiner's The Comic (1969) (he plays an older cross-eyed comedian who points to his eyes and says "when they stopped laughing at these they started killing each other"), the amusing, if maligned, role in Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and, my own favorite, the gangster in Preminger's Skiddo (1968). In many of these and other roles one can feel the intense conflict between ego and id often apparent in the Andy Hardy films.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men
If the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to.
Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard (translated by Tom Milne, The Viking Press, 1972)
The Lusty Men (1952) is another of Ray's portraits of a loner and an outsider (others include Rebel Without a Cause, 1955 and Johnny Guitar, 1954), beautifully filmed by cinematographer Lee Garmes (who did several Von Sternberg films) and written by Horace McCoy (most remembered for his novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? ). Ray was one of the great film poets of the fifties, capturing much of the frustration of those who were outside the American Dream of success but could be content with what they could get. For women success could mean something as simple as the man who could take them away from the tamale joint, as Arthur Kennedy takes Susan Hayward in the Lusty Men, while for a man it could mean making money in the rodeo -- as it did for Robert Mitchum -- even if the money slips through his hands.
Being a cowboy did not pay well in the fifties, but being in the rodeo did for a few, even if it meant risking injury and even death. After Mitchum is injured he walks across an empty rodeo lot carrying his saddle, on his way home. When he takes a job as a cowhand his friend Arthur Kenney is seduced by the quick money of the rodeo and hires Mitchum to teach him the basics, over Hayward's objections. Michum falls in love with Hayward and goes back to the rodeo to show her what he can do. He dies in a fall and Kennedy and Hayward quit the rodeo and go back to their modest home.
The Lusty Men is rich in dialogue, about drinking and responsibility and trust. Mitchum realizes he wants to settle down but for him it is too late, while Kennedy and Hayward are willing to settle down to an unexciting -- but safe -- life.
Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard (translated by Tom Milne, The Viking Press, 1972)
The Lusty Men (1952) is another of Ray's portraits of a loner and an outsider (others include Rebel Without a Cause, 1955 and Johnny Guitar, 1954), beautifully filmed by cinematographer Lee Garmes (who did several Von Sternberg films) and written by Horace McCoy (most remembered for his novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? ). Ray was one of the great film poets of the fifties, capturing much of the frustration of those who were outside the American Dream of success but could be content with what they could get. For women success could mean something as simple as the man who could take them away from the tamale joint, as Arthur Kennedy takes Susan Hayward in the Lusty Men, while for a man it could mean making money in the rodeo -- as it did for Robert Mitchum -- even if the money slips through his hands.
Being a cowboy did not pay well in the fifties, but being in the rodeo did for a few, even if it meant risking injury and even death. After Mitchum is injured he walks across an empty rodeo lot carrying his saddle, on his way home. When he takes a job as a cowhand his friend Arthur Kenney is seduced by the quick money of the rodeo and hires Mitchum to teach him the basics, over Hayward's objections. Michum falls in love with Hayward and goes back to the rodeo to show her what he can do. He dies in a fall and Kennedy and Hayward quit the rodeo and go back to their modest home.
The Lusty Men is rich in dialogue, about drinking and responsibility and trust. Mitchum realizes he wants to settle down but for him it is too late, while Kennedy and Hayward are willing to settle down to an unexciting -- but safe -- life.
Monday, April 13, 2015
John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Ford virtually abstracts the physical backdrop of Liberty Valance to heighten the importance of dialogue, the emotional language of faces and bodies, and the symbolic use of gestures and objects.
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (St. Martin's Press, 2001).
Filmed in black-and-white on mostly studio sets The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a return to Ford's silent Westerns, a retreat from the modern world of exteriors and color. Even many who love Ford are perplexed by this Western, made by the man who brought the Western outdoors, with Stagecoach, in 1939. It is a summary of an old man's pessimistic feeling about America, summing up many of his themes. The villain wears a black hat and doesn't even have the minimal feeling for his family of other Ford villains, such as Scar (The Searchers, 1956) and Ike Clanton (My Darling Clementine, 1946); he is simply the hired gun of the big cattle ranchers, fighting the sod-busters and statehood. The days of rugged individualism are ending and laws and lawyers are taking over. The desert has turned into a garden but we have paid quite a price for this and anarchy, represented by Liberty Valance, can only be defeated by violence. The railroads have brought not only progress but also pollution and The Iron Horse is no longer seen as just positive progress, as it was in Ford's 1924 film about the transcontinental railroad.
Ford's film not only looks back to his earliest films, it looks forward to the violence and pessimism of future Westerns (a genre some think has come to a dead-end), with its presence of Strother Martin (from future Peckipah films) and Lee Van Cleef (from future Sergio Leone films) as henchmen of Liberty Valance. The legend has become that a lawyer (played by James Stewart) has shot Liberty Valance, but actually it was Tom Doniphon (played by John Wayne) who shot him from the darkness across the street and gave up his girl in the process. The film starts with Stewart arriving for Wayne's funeral and then telling the whole story to the local newspaper, the editor refusing to print it. "This is the West. When the legend become the truth, print the legend." Ford created many of the legends, but always knew the truth.
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (St. Martin's Press, 2001).
Filmed in black-and-white on mostly studio sets The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a return to Ford's silent Westerns, a retreat from the modern world of exteriors and color. Even many who love Ford are perplexed by this Western, made by the man who brought the Western outdoors, with Stagecoach, in 1939. It is a summary of an old man's pessimistic feeling about America, summing up many of his themes. The villain wears a black hat and doesn't even have the minimal feeling for his family of other Ford villains, such as Scar (The Searchers, 1956) and Ike Clanton (My Darling Clementine, 1946); he is simply the hired gun of the big cattle ranchers, fighting the sod-busters and statehood. The days of rugged individualism are ending and laws and lawyers are taking over. The desert has turned into a garden but we have paid quite a price for this and anarchy, represented by Liberty Valance, can only be defeated by violence. The railroads have brought not only progress but also pollution and The Iron Horse is no longer seen as just positive progress, as it was in Ford's 1924 film about the transcontinental railroad.
Ford's film not only looks back to his earliest films, it looks forward to the violence and pessimism of future Westerns (a genre some think has come to a dead-end), with its presence of Strother Martin (from future Peckipah films) and Lee Van Cleef (from future Sergio Leone films) as henchmen of Liberty Valance. The legend has become that a lawyer (played by James Stewart) has shot Liberty Valance, but actually it was Tom Doniphon (played by John Wayne) who shot him from the darkness across the street and gave up his girl in the process. The film starts with Stewart arriving for Wayne's funeral and then telling the whole story to the local newspaper, the editor refusing to print it. "This is the West. When the legend become the truth, print the legend." Ford created many of the legends, but always knew the truth.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Opening Day, April 6 2015, Mets and Yankees
They are trying to shorten games this year by not letting batters step out of the batter's box so often and by shortening the time between half-innings to two and a half minutes, from three minutes or more. The result of this, at least with the Yankees so far, is that we simply get more virtual ads behind the catcher and few views of the field; it becomes a non-stop flattened view of the pitcher and the batter. Not only don't we get to see the shifts that are more commonly being deployed, but the bombastic Michael Kay usually doesn't even tell us when they are in effect!. Announcers David Cone and Ken Singleton get an intelligent word in occasionally and there were new shots down the foul lines, though only used twice in the entire Yankees/Blue Jays game. Did anyone stop to think that perhaps one of the reasons for the decline in TV viewing of baseball is because they show you so little of the game? As I have advocated previously, we should go back to the style of the fifties, when two cameras were used and one could see the entire game on the entire field!
Things were a little better with the Mets broadcast, though possibly because the Nationals could not sell as many virtual ads; we will see what happens when the Mets return to New York. Announcer Gary Cohen is effectively low-key and not afflicted with the ugly toupees of his colleagues Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, who do a good job with the details (though Hernandez has a tendency to talk about his own career too much). Of course the Mets announcers, like most baseball announcers, do not understand exactly what an unearned run is (it requires one to reconstruct the inning) but whether or not the Mets runs were earned against starter Max Scherzer they won 3-1 behind elderly starter Bartolo Colon, who "looks like a sack of potatoes out there" (as someone once said of David Wells).
The Yankees used starter Masahiro Tanaka, who they are hoping will be their ace; he gave up five runs in the third inning and only lasted four, contributing to a crucial Chase Headley error. New shortstop Didi Gregorious was thrown out trying to steal third with two out, though I give him credit for trying to stir things up in a rather sluggish line-up. The best news for both the Mets and the Yankees was the effectiveness of their bullpens: Martin, Shreve, Carpenter, Wilson, Rogers for the Yankees and Torres, Familia, Blevins and Carlyle for the Mets; only Shreve gave up a run. In spite of all the pitchers used both the Mets game and the Yankees game ended in under three hours!
Note: I recommend Ben McGrath's Dream Teams article in the April 13th New Yorker for an intelligent analysis of how the numbers in baseball are overwhelming the beauty of the game itself. When Daniel Okrent is asked how he feels about having invented fantasy baseball he says. "I feel the same way J. Robert Oppenheimer felt about having invented the atomic bomb. I really do. I mean, pretty terrible."
Things were a little better with the Mets broadcast, though possibly because the Nationals could not sell as many virtual ads; we will see what happens when the Mets return to New York. Announcer Gary Cohen is effectively low-key and not afflicted with the ugly toupees of his colleagues Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, who do a good job with the details (though Hernandez has a tendency to talk about his own career too much). Of course the Mets announcers, like most baseball announcers, do not understand exactly what an unearned run is (it requires one to reconstruct the inning) but whether or not the Mets runs were earned against starter Max Scherzer they won 3-1 behind elderly starter Bartolo Colon, who "looks like a sack of potatoes out there" (as someone once said of David Wells).
The Yankees used starter Masahiro Tanaka, who they are hoping will be their ace; he gave up five runs in the third inning and only lasted four, contributing to a crucial Chase Headley error. New shortstop Didi Gregorious was thrown out trying to steal third with two out, though I give him credit for trying to stir things up in a rather sluggish line-up. The best news for both the Mets and the Yankees was the effectiveness of their bullpens: Martin, Shreve, Carpenter, Wilson, Rogers for the Yankees and Torres, Familia, Blevins and Carlyle for the Mets; only Shreve gave up a run. In spite of all the pitchers used both the Mets game and the Yankees game ended in under three hours!
Note: I recommend Ben McGrath's Dream Teams article in the April 13th New Yorker for an intelligent analysis of how the numbers in baseball are overwhelming the beauty of the game itself. When Daniel Okrent is asked how he feels about having invented fantasy baseball he says. "I feel the same way J. Robert Oppenheimer felt about having invented the atomic bomb. I really do. I mean, pretty terrible."
Monday, April 6, 2015
My Struggle, Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard
I was unable to dissemble, unable to play a role, and the scholarly earnestness I brought into the house was impossible to keep at arm's length in the long run, sooner or later they would have to engage with it, and the disequilibrium it led to, as their banter never demanded anything at all of me, that was what must have made them call my mother in the end.
Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012
It was Knausgaard's articles recently in The New York Times Magazine about America --funny and perceptive -- that led me to My Struggle Book 1, a fascinating book divided into two distinct parts, one about his teenage years and one about the death of his alcoholic father. His teenage years are devoted, to a considerable extent, to obtaining alcohol for parties, while his father's death from alcohol causes him to abstain, not always successfully. Throughout he observes the quotidian details of life, finding them both beautiful and burdensome. In his teenage years he chases girls, drinks, reads, and plays in a band: We were utterly hopeless, completely out of our depth, there was not a snowball's chance in hell of anything coming of this, we wouldn't even be good enough to perform at a school party, but although this was the reality we never experienced it as such. What follows is a funny, and sad, episode where they are hired to perform at a shopping center and then thrown out after five minutes because "you don't even sing!"
When his father dies at his Grandmother's house Karl Ove and his brother go there to clean up the place, a Herculean job: The blue wall-to-wall carpet was covered with dark stains. The open built-in wardrobe was full of loose bottles and bags of them. More bottles, clothes hangers, shoes, unopened letters, advertising brochures, and plastic bags were strewn across the floor. As Karl Ove cleans he weeps and flashes back to better days with his father and his grandparents. When he goes outside he is reminded of images from Ruisdael and Giotto; this and music and memories help him get through the ordeal.
One of the many fascinating things about Book 1 is the combination of the general and the specific: the details are Norwegian in many ways (including discussion of the grandparents' relationship with the Nazis, food, education, et al.) but also the general details of being a teenager and dealing with death are, in many ways, the same everywhere. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.
Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012
It was Knausgaard's articles recently in The New York Times Magazine about America --funny and perceptive -- that led me to My Struggle Book 1, a fascinating book divided into two distinct parts, one about his teenage years and one about the death of his alcoholic father. His teenage years are devoted, to a considerable extent, to obtaining alcohol for parties, while his father's death from alcohol causes him to abstain, not always successfully. Throughout he observes the quotidian details of life, finding them both beautiful and burdensome. In his teenage years he chases girls, drinks, reads, and plays in a band: We were utterly hopeless, completely out of our depth, there was not a snowball's chance in hell of anything coming of this, we wouldn't even be good enough to perform at a school party, but although this was the reality we never experienced it as such. What follows is a funny, and sad, episode where they are hired to perform at a shopping center and then thrown out after five minutes because "you don't even sing!"
When his father dies at his Grandmother's house Karl Ove and his brother go there to clean up the place, a Herculean job: The blue wall-to-wall carpet was covered with dark stains. The open built-in wardrobe was full of loose bottles and bags of them. More bottles, clothes hangers, shoes, unopened letters, advertising brochures, and plastic bags were strewn across the floor. As Karl Ove cleans he weeps and flashes back to better days with his father and his grandparents. When he goes outside he is reminded of images from Ruisdael and Giotto; this and music and memories help him get through the ordeal.
One of the many fascinating things about Book 1 is the combination of the general and the specific: the details are Norwegian in many ways (including discussion of the grandparents' relationship with the Nazis, food, education, et al.) but also the general details of being a teenager and dealing with death are, in many ways, the same everywhere. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.
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