Budd Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960)

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond is a minor classic in the perverse Scarface tradition.
--Andrew Sarris

The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hand like a placard, like a club.
--Robert Warshaw, The Gangster as Tragic Hero.

There is no doubt in my mind that the demise of the gangster film, in spite of many attempts to keep it alive, has to do with almost all films being made now in color and the shifting of locales to rural areas, e.g., Bonnie and Clyde (1967), as well as the changes in the production code that allow gangsters to sometimes escape death. Boetticher's film is one of the last classic gangster films, though it had to be a period piece, since Prohibition is so important to the gangster.  But gangsters have since shifted now to the corporate world (Samuel Fuller's Underworld U.S.A., 1961) or the Mafia family (The Godfather, 1972), leaving little power to the individual.

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond was made after Boetticher's series of austere and beautiful Westerns (which thrive on color), with Ray Danton playing Diamond the dancer who became a gang leader and was finally felled by his own narcissism and his inability to care about anybody but himself.  As is often the case with gangster films one is drawn into the clever and ruthless rise to power, until that power becomes an end in itself and leads to destruction. The black-and-white was handled by cinematographer Lucian Ballard, who previously worked on Boetticher's The Killer is Loose (1956) and later on color films for Sam Peckinpah.  Boetticher and Ballard are among those filmmakers from the classical era who knew the work of D.W. Griffith (who made the first gangster film, The Musketeers of Pig Alley,1912) and Josef Von Sternberg, who made Underworld in 1927.  They also pay tribute to the first gangster films in sound, which allowed one to hear the noises of motorcars and machine guns:  Mervyn Leroy's Little Caesar (1930), William Wellman's Public Enemy (1931) and Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932).

Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) did not revive the gangster film the way his Westerns revived the Western, at least for a time.  But Leone's film was also a period piece; whereas the Western is almost infinitely malleable in time and space the classic gangster film (as opposed to the heist film, the thriller or other variations) is extremely limited in its time period and its iconography.

Orson Welles's Last Movie, by Josh Karp

Orson Welles's Last Movie:  The Making of the Other Side of the Wind (St. Martins, 2015) is a fascinating chronicle of the attempt by Welles to make a film, working on it from 1970 to his death in 1985.  Although Karp mildly disputes those who felt Welles had "a fear of completion" he definitely had a fear of something, as well as a difficult time handling money:  he turned down several offers of completion money because he was worried about losing control and failed to accurately account for more than a million dollars he did receive.  Karp intelligently contrasts Welles with John Huston, who plays a lead role in the uncompleted film and who was willing throughout his career to make one or two commercial films in order to make films he truly cared about.  Welles made Citizen Kane without interference, but when The Magnificent Ambersons was cut without his permission he seldom again trusted a studio or producer, at least until A Touch of Evil, which was then also cut  against his wishes.

It is not clear to me how Welles was able to draw so many people into his orbit, often getting them to work without pay or sometimes even without sleep.  But, then, I never met Welles. As Karp says, "What you did receive was the opportunity to be in the presence of genius; and to work in the glow of that ;genius."  Karp quotes factotum Eric Sherman:  "The concepts Orson had for shots were utterly astounding  and his ability to conceptualize them was total." 

This books has many layers over many years.  Fascinating subtexts include a confirmation of what I have often thought about Welles sycophant Peter Bogdanovich, who made the lovely The Last Picture Show (1971) but faltered considerably after that film:  his obsession with Cybill Shepherd destroyed his marriage to designer Polly Platt, who had brought what Karp correctly calls "her impeccable visual instincts"  to his first film. 

Karp follows in detail what happened to Welles's film after his death, as too many people wanted too much money (including banks in Iran, who had loaned money when the Shah was still in power) to allow the film to be released, in any form.  Karp (who has seen much of the available footage) describes the film as "a fragment, composed of brilliance and madness; finely honed and wildly disorganized; meticulously edited but ultimately unfinished."  Making it kept Welles alive, but finishing it would mean the end of Welles as an artist. One is not convinced that The Other Side of the Wind is a masterpiece still waiting to be seen.

Turner Classic Movies, Sept. 2015

I want to first recommend two Val Lewton Movies:  I Walked with a Zombie (1943) on Sept. 5 and Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) on Sept 10, the first directed by Jacques Tourneur and the second by Robert Wise.  Val Lewton had his own B unit at RKO in the forties and produced a number of low-budget but poetic films (the best thing written about him so far is Val Lewton:  The Reality of Terror by Joel Siegel, Viking 1973).  The Tourneur is a free adaptation of Jane Eyre, the Wise based on two stories by Maupassant.

September has a number of films directed by George Cukor, a stylish and intelligent director (though I am not as high on him as I once was), my favorite being It Should Happen to You, about advertising and relationships in New York (1954, showing on Sept. 2 and 11).

There are several films by John Ford, including Sergeant Rutledge from 1960, starring Woody Strode as a persecuted member of an African-American cavalry unit, showing on Sept.7.  Other good Westerns in Sept. include Delmer Daves's 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Anthony Mann's The Man from Laramie (1955) and Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959).  These three are being shown Sept. 9.

Raoul Walsh's Strawberry Blonde (1941) is being shown on Sept. 14.  It's one of three film versions of a James Hagan play and is elegantly funny and deeply moving.

On Sept. 16 there are a films by Jean-Luc Godard, including Pierrot Le Fou (1965), with its marvelous use of wide-screen and color and an impressive cameo by Samuel Fuller, whose first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949), is being shown on Sept. 20.

On Sept. 25 a films by Robert Bresson are being shown; my favorite of these austere masterpieces is Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966), influenced by Dostoevsky's The Idiot, with the title character played by a donkey.

There are a number of John Huston films being shown in Sept., my favorite being The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and there is also Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, as wonderful a use of color as the Huston is with black-and-white.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon

An article in the September issue of Commentary by Joseph Epstein, The Best of Scribblers:  Edward Gibbon and the importance of great writing to great history, has induced me to return to Gibbon's great 18th Century monumental work.  I read it once about thirty years ago, in the Modern Library three-volume version I purchased at Strand, and if one if going to read it one should avoid the various "abridged"  versions.  Yes, it is long (about 3000 pages, about as long as five or six bloated contemporary novels) but well worth it, not only for the fascinating detail but also for the elegant style.  Epstein read about 20 pages a day, taking him a total of five months, and in this time of short attention spans the effort is indeed rewarding.

If you think that corruption, fear and avarice are only contemporary problems, then this book shows you, as Epstein says, "just how wearily constant human nature has been through time."  In this day  when little history is being taught, especially below the college level, for fear of offending someone, Gibbon is not afraid to include his own opinions about the richly detailed history he recounts. He is particularly intense about the conversion of Constantine(272-337 C.E.) to Christianity, with the resultant intolerance by Christians and the hypocrisy of popes and priests.

My fondness for Gibbons is not just for his insights and his unsurpassed knowledge of history, it is also due to his elegant writing style.  Not everyone is as fond of Richardson, Smollett and Fielding as I am (though if you have not read them I would urge you to give them a try) but Gibbons is another superb 18th C. stylist.  In today's world, when too much history writing is dry and dull and fiction has a considerably diminished vocabulary, Gibbons stands out as an intense pleasure to read.

Film Journal: August 2015

Frederic Wiseman's The National Gallery.  Another in the series of Wiseman's documentaries.  As usual there is no narration and individuals are not identified, in this film about the London museum.  This is sometimes irritating and frustrating, but it emphasizes the importance of the institution itself and, at least in my case, produces more involvement in the film, as it becomes more important what is being done than who is doing it.  As often with Wiseman there is something of an emphasis on all the workers who do everything from polishing the floors to building the structures for special exhibitions.  Works are shown, artists such as Poussin and Caravaggio are discussed at great length in talks in the galleries and there is something of a wandering feel to the film, as Wiseman is interested in some artists more than others:  Turner, for instance, is shown to greater advantage than in Mike Leigh's recent film. There are fascinating views of what goes on outside the galleries, including classes for how the blind can "see" a painting, life-drawing and restoration.  Restoration continues to be a controversial endeavor and currently all restorations are done on top of a coat of varnish so all the restorations can be removed if they later turn out to be in error.

Rouben Mamoulian's Summer Holiday (1949).  This is a charming musical version of O'Neill's Ah Wilderness (a pleasant, non-musical version was made in 1935 by Clarence Brown) with the songs and dance done in context rather than on stage, though Mamoulian was mainly a stage director.  It takes place in 1906, when the automobile was just starting to disrupt life in pastoral towns.  The cast does its own singing of the Harry Warren and Ralph Blane songs; Walter Huston acquits himself remarkably well.  Mickey Rooney effectively captures the adolescent at high school graduation:  still part of the family but ready to rebel.  For an American film there are unusually intelligent discussions of Swinburne and Carlyle.  The cinematography, with its warm greens and browns, was by Charles Schoenbaum. 

Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza (1974) and Joseph Losey's The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) are two okay films from the overrated 70's, when many directors had more freedom than they knew how to handle and became more dependent on screenwriters.  The Yakuza was written by Paul and Leonard Schrader and should have been directed by Paul, who understood the tension between Japan and America better than Pollack (Schrader directed Mishima:  A Life in Four Chapters in 1985 and published a book on Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer in 1972).  Robert Mitchum wanders through the film showing little rapport with Japanese star Ken Takakura and little knowledge of Japan, though his character had spent time there after the war.  Pollack handles the action scenes effectively, though reportedly he cut much of the footage showing details of Japanese life and the rituals of the Yakuza.  The screenplay of The Romantic Englishwoman, by Tom Stoppard, is opaque without the layered complexity of the scripts Harold Pinter did for Losey.  And there is too much use of the zoom lens, overused in the 70's.  Losey went to Europe after being blacklisted in America, though before he left he made some excellent films about the corruption of America, especially The Prowler (1951).

Raoul Walsh's Desperate Journey (1942), made just after America entered the war, is similar to Walsh's Objective Burma (1945); both show a difficult slog through enemy lines.  But the 1942 film is brash and optimistic in the way that Objective Burma is not.  In Desperate Journey the Americans are caught behind German lines and have to use ingenuity to make their way through Germany to get back to England.  Errol Flynn makes one of his tight-lipped, effective performances for Walsh (compare the complex characters he plays in Walsh's films to those he plays in movies by other directors), making difficult decisions that help the war effort but leave several of his colleagues dead.  Walsh, as almost always, does a superb job with the action sequences in a film that is almost continuous movement, mostly at night and shot beautifully, in complex contrasts, by cinematographer Bert Glennon, who did a number of films for John Ford.

Richmond County Bank Ballpark, Aug. 13,2015

Both the Staten Island Yankees and the Brooklyn Cyclones have at least one "camp day" a season, both teams are in the "short-season A" Penn-NY league, the season starting in June (after draft picks have been signed or not signed) and ending in September.  These "camp day" games start at 11 AM, convenient for not only campers but those of us who have to pick up children from daycare.  We missed the Cyclones game (it was on a brutally hot day) this year but went to see the Staten Island Yankees on Aug. 13.  Getting there is a pleasurable trip:  the subway to the pleasant Staten Island Ferry ride to the short walk to the stadium.  We asked for seats in the shade and got them, with a beautiful view of the field from the third-base side, as well as the lovely view of the blue sky and the bay, with large and small ships passing by.  The game was well-played, with only two errors, though the Yankees were obviously slightly less skilled than their opponents, the league-leading Williamsport Crosscutters.  The skill level was relatively high, overall, though I am happy to say there were no homeruns hit (readers of this blog know I do not like homeruns and would rather they be considered outs, or at least the equivalent of foul balls), with the Crosscutters better at advancing runners and stealing bases, winning 7-4.

Especially because this was camp day I did not mind the entertainment between innings, sack races and so on, and the musically-challenged cheerleaders.  What I and my companions, Susan and Gideon, did not like was the constant playing of loud music, mostly hip-hop.  I like to discuss the game between innings but this becomes impossible without trying to shout over the music.  One can't even discuss the game between batters during an inning because even then music is blasting!  My own take on this is that more and more people are made uncomfortable by silence and that there are many people at ballparks who know little about the subtleties of the game.  For this I partly blame steroids and the celebration of the homerun; even now highlights of the game emphasize easily understood homeruns over sacrifice bunts, stolen bases, and hit-and-run plays (all nearly extinct at this point) and hitting for average.  I always keep score at a game, but these days I see few others who are doing so.  I am thankful that at least one does not hear the radio broadcast of games these days at stadiums, at least not since the invention of the Walkman.  I remember going to games at Dodger Stadium in the 80's when at least every other person had Vin Scully on their loud boom box (I know, at least it wasn't John Sterling!).

All in all, however, it was a gorgeous day to see a ball game, watching the white ball against the green grass and the blue sky.  Food and water were much cheaper than at major league parks and tickets were only $10 for good seats, even if one can't sit up high enough to somewhat escape the loudspeakers, as one can at Citifield.  I wonder, incidentally, how many people who see the Staten Island Yankees know why the mascot is called Scooter the Holy Cow.  Scooter was the nickname for great Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto, who played from 1941 to 1956 and was a Yankee announcer from 1957 to 1997 (he died in 2007 at the age of 89).  One of his favorite phrases when announcing games was "holy cow." 

Dancing: Film, TV, Magazines

Stanley Donen's movie Give a Girl a Break (1953) is a charming divertissement.  A year earlier Donen had directed the much overrated Singing in the Rain, with the overly athletic Gene Kelly, but in 1953 budgets at MGM had been cut and Give a Girl a Break does nicely with Bob Fosse and Marge and Gower Champion, with Gower Champion doing the choreography.  The serviceable songs were by Burton Lane and Ira Gershwin and Donen does an impressive job creating the competition for a leading role on Broadway with a low budget and standing sets.  Each female dancer competing for a starring role has a man who helps her and there is a fascinating subtext about the question of love or career, Donen coming down in favor of both.  Marge and Gower Champion have a wonderful rooftop reconciliation duet, "It Happens Every Time" and Fosse's choreography, which he reportedly did himself, shows his need for domination.  My quibbles are that the couples don't support and help each other enough in their dancing and that the whole enterprise is too theatrical.  Fred Astaire's films have shown that just because a musical is about the theatre it doesn't mean the dancing can't be subtle and intimate.

Astaire, of course, was one of George Balanchine's favorite dancers and the complexity, subtlety and intimacy of Balanchine's choreography was brought out nicely in Live From Lincoln Center:  Curtain Up, The School of American Ballet Workshop Performance, performed last year and recently shown on PBS.  The School of the American Ballet provides the dancers for The New York City Ballet and does a workshop performance every year at Julliard.  I confess I have never been to one of these workshops and it is obvious from this broadcast I am missing a great deal.  This performance had the complete Serenade, staged by Suki Schorer (who wrote an excellent book, Balanchine Technique, that I have consulted for help with my own dancing); an excerpt from Swan Lake, staged by Darci Kistler; the last act of Coppelia, staged by the school's staff of six; and the last act of Western Symphony, staged by Susan Pilarre (who says she learned many things from Balanchine, "no matter how small your role was he made you feel that he couldn't do the ballet without you.")  All were beautifully performed and the little girls were adorable in Coppelia, but I tend to prefer complete ballets to excerpts out of context.  Serenade was gorgeous, elegantly danced by the school's corps and by Alston Macgill and Joshua Shutkind; their youth made one realize how youthful this ballet still is, even though it was the first ballet choreographed by Balanchine in America, eighty years ago.  Kudos to the director of this broadcast, Matthew Diamond (a former dancer), whose camera angles were minimal and effective.  Most televised ballet cuts constantly between long shots and close-ups, often missing things. Diamond was able to cut down considerably on shifting camera angles because the performance was on the small stage at Julliard.

There is an impressive article in The Nation this week (Aug. 17/24) by Marina Harris about Violette Verdy, now a dance teacher at The School of the American Ballet.  Verdy, now 81, is teaching Sonatine to New York City Ballet dancers Ashley Laracey and Chase Finlay; this was the last ballet that Balanchine did on Verdy, in 1975 ( I saw her perform it that year in the Ravel festival).  Two important points that Harris makes in her piece:  first of all, "nothing can replace the guidance of a person who has danced the role many times and knows its secrets" and, secondly, Verdy's  descriptions of how Balanchine wanted her to do a role, "he had to keep me quiet and busy."  Balanchine often tailored a role to a particular dancer and when a new dancer took on the role he might change the choreography to suit that particular dancer, an option that New York City Ballet obviously no longer has (the only changes I have seen are to make the roles somewhat easier and less demanding!). 

Two by Anthony Mann: Desperate (1947) and The Tall Target (1951)

Anthony Mann is a director best known for the series of extraordinary Westerns he made with James Stewart in the fifties, but he also made some impressive films noirs before that and some other interesting films along the way. 

The Tall Target (1951) was made just after Mann had made his first Western, Winchester '73.  It takes place almost exclusively on a train from New York to Washington just after Lincoln's election and before his inauguration. One may be surprised to hear that most recent college graduates know little about Lincoln or the Civil War and its causes, knowledge taken for granted in this film, which has Southerners trying to kill Lincoln before he can get to Washington in early 1861. There is much wonderful period detail:  the firearms of the period, that horses had to pull the train through Baltimore to avoid blackening the area's laundry with soot, Ruby Dee as a slave traveling with a Southern family, etc., but the period detail is not allowed to overpower the human drama.  Dick Powell continues to leave his juvenile persona behind, playing a detective from New York trying to stop a conspiracy that nobody else believes is real.  Cinematographer Paul Vogel and Mann do a superb job of capturing the tedium and claustrophobia of train travel in 1861 and use the night and smoke to create a paranoia and expressionism that bridges the gap between Mann's urban melodramas of the forties and the evocative landscapes of his fifties' Westerns.

Desperate (1947) is Mann's first film noir and the beginning of his artistic maturity, after a number of B movies.  Steve Brodie needs to earn money for his first child, about to be born, and takes a trucking job that turns out to be a heist.  When the heist goes bad and a cop is killed he flees across the country with his wife.  The clean air of the country and the farm of the wife's uncle and aunt gives him a brief respite, but he is pursued by sinister boss Raymond Burr, who blames Brodie for the conviction and pending execution of Burr's brother; the beauty of the country is defiled by the sinister thugs from the city.  One Hitchcockian element is that the police won't believe Brodie and won't protect him, they assume his guilt and are lazy and corrupt; Brodie finally succeeds in killing Burr himself. 

Both of these films have many holes in the plot, though I will confess that that is seldom something that bothers me: one of the traits of Mann (and film noir and Westerns both) is that existence is often not logical and tidy and one often has to use violence to combat fate.

Two Films Noirs: 99 River Street and Criss-Cross

From the start it all went one way.  It was in the cards or it was fate or a jinx or whatever you want to call it.
 Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) in Criss Cross, script by Daniel Fuchs.

Criss Cross (1949) was directed by émigré Robert Siodmak and is similar in many ways to Siodmak's earlier The Killers (1946):  its star (Lancaster), its plot (a robbery gone wrong followed by betrayal), its complicated flashback structure, even its music (the marvelous Miklos Rosza).  Criss Cross uses deep focus and Los Angeles locations to give a sense of Steve being trapped by his life and his love for his former wife Anna (played by Yvonne De Carlo), with whom he plans to run off after double-crossing her present husband, Slim Dundee (played by the reliably sleazy Dan Duryea).  Everyone is trapped in their own world, from the bartender to the armored car employees, who are trying hard to make their paychecks go further, and Siodmak has sympathy for everyone's struggle.  Only the police are shown unsympathetically:  detective Pete Ramirez (played with self-conscious righteousness by Stephen McNally) causes Anna to marry Slim and then leaves Lancaster unprotected in the hospital, leading to both Steve and Anna's destruction.

The script's structure gives weight to contrasts between life and theatre, as well as beteen violence as spectacle and as private destiny
Blake Lukas on 99 River Street, script by Robert Smith (Film Noir, The Overlook Press 1979

Cinematographer Fritz Planer does as good a job with New York in Phil Karlson's 99 River Street (1953) as he did with Los Angeles in the Siodmak film.  John Payne plays Ernie Driscoll, a washed-up boxer married to a greedy former showgirl.  This film noir is late in the cycle of such films and includes a number of strange and disorienting elements, including Driscoll's last fight, before we realize Driscoll himself is watching it on TV's Great Fights of Yesterday and Linda James (played beautifully by Evelyn Keyes) claiming to Driscoll she had killed a man and when he offered to dispose of the body it turned out to be a theatre audition!  Driscoll's wife Pauline is murdered and Linda goes with him to New Jersey to track down the murderer, even as Driscoll says to her "in my book you are one more phony.  Any time you get hooked up with a dame you're bound to end up in trouble."  Because this film was made in the Eisenhower era, when the disillusionment with World War II was changing, it has an ostensibly happy ending.  But Karlson's gritty film belies the idea that Driscoll's anger and resentment can be overcome just by meeting another dame and buying a gas station. 

Theodore Dreiser's The Financier (1912)

A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler -- acting for himself or for others -- he must employ such.  A real man -- a financier -- was never a tool.  He used tools.  He created. He led.
Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912, Harper and Brothers).

Dreiser had few predecessors (only Frank Norris comes to mind) and no successors.  We could use someone like him now:  a journalist who turned to writing intelligent novels about finances and society.  The Financier is a compelling story of Frank Cowperwood's rise to wealth in Phildelphia just after the Civil War and his downfall after he was unable to meet his obligations because of the Chicago fire of 1871.  He served a year in prison for looting the city treasury, although he claimed, with some justification, that he was just doing what other financiers did and was only prosecuted because the daughter of a powerful man was his secret mistress.


The hangings, wall-paper and floor coverings were to harmonize --not match-- and the piano and music-cabinet for the parlor, as well as the etargere, cabinets and pedestals for the reception rooms, were to be or buhl or marquetry, if Frank cared to stand the expense.

Furnishings and clothes (and their social importance) are described in fascinating detail by Dreiser and the change in these when Cowperwood goes to jail are considerable.  But Cowperwood does not lose confidence and is eventually pardoned, after a year, during which his money buys considerable luxuries and visiting-time not given to other prisoners.  And he continues to conduct his business, as best he can, through an intermediary.

I find Dreiser's style quite effective in its objectivity; he describes in detail how financiers made their money.  Dreiser is careful not to draw moral or political conclusions for us, allowing one to do this for oneself. And he does not so much condemn the chicanery or moral failings of his characters as the system that makes it all too easy.