Turner Classic Movies for October 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don Weis's The Affairs of Dobie Gillis

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

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

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

The Last One Left by John D. MacDonald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jody Lee Lipes's Ballet 422

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


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

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

10:04 by Ben Lerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monte Hellman's China 9, Liberty 37.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell

"I set aside an acre of my farm for God twenty-seven years ago, when I bought this place, and every year I give the church all that comes off that acre of ground."
--Ty Ty Warden in God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell (Viking,1933)

The problem is that Ty Ty's farm has not made any money in the last fifteen years, as Ty Ty and his sons Buck and Shaw have filled the farm with holes, digging for gold. Caldwell's proletarian novel was published originally in 1933 and successfully repelled attempts to prosecute or ban it, based on alleged obscenity.  There indeed is plenty of rutting going on, including by Ty Ty's unmarried daughter Darling Jill, his daughter Rosamond (married to "lint-head" Will Thompson, whose cotton mill is closed because of a lockout), Buck's wife Griselda, and Ty Ty's son Jim Leslie.  Other characters include aspiring sheriff Pluto Swint and albino Dave, kidnapped by Ty Ty and his sons to help find the elusive gold.

The book goes from crude comedy to dark tragedy, as Will Thomson is killed by strikebreakers and Buck kills Jim Leslie for lusting after Griselda and, apparently, kills himself. "Maybe God made two kinds of us, after all.  It looks like now, though I never used to think so, that God made a man to work the ground and a man to work the machinery,"  says Ty Ty.  The book takes place in Georgia and South Caroline and by using farce and sex (nothing explicit, quite tame by today's standards) Caldwell effectively captures the difficulties of whites in the South in the thirties, finding pleasure where they can and unable to make a living at either farming or manufacturing (the only two African-Americans in the book are Uncle Felix and Black Sam, who work for Ty Ty and are always hustling to find enough to eat).