Turner Classic Movies, Jan. 2016

Joseph Losey's M (1951) shows up on Jan.1.  This film has long been unavailable and it will be interesting to see how it compares with Fritz Lang's original.

Jan.3  John Stahl's Imitation of Life, 1934, as true to the 1930's as Sirk's version is to the 1950's

Jan 4  Hitchcock's Stage Fright, 1950, with its unusual unreliable flashback.

January 9 Raoul Walsh's Captain Horatio Hornblower, 1951, and Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story, 1955

Jan. 10  John Cromwell's Anna and the King of Siam, 1946, and three films by Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu:  The Story of Floating Weeds,1934, Equinox Flower,1958, The End of Summer, 1961.

Jan 11 Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, 1944, funny and didactic.

Jan. 12 Howard Hawks's marvelous Only Angels Have Wings, 1939

Jan 13  Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, 1944, and Douglas Sirk's ironic soap opera There's Always Tomorrow, 1956.

Jan 15 Jean de Limur's original version of The Letter, 1929, with Jeanne Eagels, and John Ford's Stagecoach, 1939

Jan 17.  Lubitsch's pre-code Design for Living, with Noel Coward brilliantly re-written by Ben Hecht.

Jan. 18 King Vidor's innovative early sound film, Halleluah, 1929, with an all-black cast.

Jan. 20  Billy Wilder's The Apartment, 1960, funny and, of course, cynical.

Jan. 28  Lubitsch's The Love Parade, 1929, exquisite and funny.

and the month ends up with two excellent example of film noir, Anthony Mann's The Black Book,1949, on the 28th and Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady, 1944, based on a Cornell Woolrich story, on the 31st.

NYC Ballet -- The Nutcracker -- Dec. 24, 2015

The Nutcracker, both in conception and execution, seems to me as nearly flawless a work as the New York City Ballet has ever staged.

The Waltz of the Flowers is so dazzling in the sweep of its imagery and so concentrated in its means that one might analyze it for days without coming to the end of what Balanchine knows about choreography.

--Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, Jan. 21 1974

I now admit I was wrong, i.e., The Nutcracker is still a ballet for those who do not like ballet, but it is also for those who do!  Until Thursday I had not seen The Nutcracker for more than twelve years and I often made disparaging remarks about it, though mainly because too many people take their children to it and never to another ballet!  But I certainly can't blame the ballet or Balanchine for that and I retract those remarks; the ballet is magnificent not only in its choreography but in its story-telling, something I couldn't quite see when I was in thrall to Balanchine's brilliant abstract ballets. The magic -- the growing Christmas tree, the traveling bed, the battle with the mice, the nutcracker who comes alive, the flying sled -- that so entrances audiences is also in service to the dancing.  I had remembered the first act as having no dancing when, in fact, it has a great deal of dancing, mostly by the children but including the choreographed movement of the adults and the wonderful snowflakes dancing in the snow. The second act has one of the loveliest pieces of magic, when the cavalier (danced beautifully by Joseph Gordon) pulls the Sugarplum Fairy (Sara Adams) across the stage while she is still on point (he is able to do this because of a moving disk on the floor, but it all happens too quickly for one to figure out how the magic is done);  it also has delightful pure dancing, with The Waltz of the Flowers led by Tiler Peck doing lovely tour jetes.

I have written before how Balanchine's ballets capture the elegance and complexity of solos, pas de deux and large groups; in The Nutcracker Balanchine shows, through dancing, how people behave as a couple, alone, or in groups, but he also includes tributes to all ages, from grandfathers to young children, as well as different ethnic groups, occupations, and even the otherworldly in the form of angels; they exist all in a fantastic harmony.  My four-year-old daughter, my seventeen-year-old son, my wife and I, all enjoyed this incredibly beautiful combination of story-telling, dreams come to life and beautiful dancing.  I also must add the experience was helped immensely by the gorgeous Tschaikovsky music, conducted by Andrew Litton, the new music director of the New York City Ballet.

Bolshoi Babylon

The major effect that Nick Read and Mark Franchetti's documentary, Bolshoi Babylon, had on me was to make me happy that we do not have politicians running ballet and opera companies in this country.  Before I ever went to the ballet I would hear that the Russians had the best dancers and ballet companies because of the money the government was pouring into them.  Now, having seen the Bolshoi and the more artistically interesting Mariinsky it is clear that the Russian companies have never really moved out of the Stalin era, either politically or artistically, and it not surprising that some of the  best Russian dancers -- Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Marakova, et al.-- defected.  Unfortunately this documentary does not go into any detail about the ballets the Bolshoi performs or their choreographers, though we do get glimpses of Swan Lake and Giselle none of the excerpts is identified.  Read and Franchetti also make the common mistake of showing much of the dancing -- though they don't show very much -- in slow motion, which does little to capture the beauty of ballet and much to obscure it.

Read and Franchetti are mainly interested in the juicy scandal of dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko throwing acid in the face of artistic director Sergei Filin.  In this country a dancer who did not like the people in charge would simply find a job at another company, or perhaps turn to teaching, but this freedom does not exist in Russia.  Pavel was apparently miffed at the lack of roles for himself and his girlfriend.  The film moves quickly, the dancers have a great deal to complain about and the tiny subtitles cannot keep up with the rapid Russian spoken by all the participants.  The few moments of real beauty come when the filmmakers are recording Bolshoi classes, with hard-working students and intense instructors.

Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo

Those of his films that cannot be dismissed as sophisticated but uninspired hackwork are inevitably cursed with either preachy self-importance or cheery (but still preachy) patriotism.
  --Richard Corliss on Dalton Trumbo, Talking Pictures, The Overlook Press, 1974

Christopher Trumbo started this book and Ceplair took over in 2011 when Christopher died.  It is a fascinating biography of a screenwriter and a member of the Hollywood Ten who went to jail when, in 1947, he refused to answer questions asked by The House Committee on Un-American Activities (a strange name indeed for a Congressional committee).  Trumbo worked for nine years in a bakery while he worked on novels; Eclipse, his eighth novel, was published in 1935.  This led to a job as a reader at Warner Brothers and eventually a lucrative screenwriting career.  After his refusal to answer questions from HUAC in 1947 he was blacklisted, moved to Mexico for awhile and continued to write screenplays using "fronts" and pseudonyms.  When the blacklist was effectively coming to an end, with changing times, Trumbo's name went on Spartacus, thanks to Kirk Douglas, and Exodus, thanks to Otto Preminger.  Both films came out in 1960.  In 1970 Trumbo received an award from the Writers' Guild of America and gave an intelligent and compassionate speech, in which he said, "The blacklist was a time of evil; no one on either side who survived came through untouched by evil."  Trumbo rightly assigned the blame to HUAC rather than to those who, unlike himself, testified and named names.  In 1971 Trumbo directed a film version of his 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun.  I saw the film that year at MoMA and Trumbo talked about the film with intense passion and a love for movies.

Two questions remain largely unexplored by Ceplair:  how dogmatic a communist was Trumbo from 1943 to 1947 when he was a member of the party and how good of a screenwriter was he.  Corliss enthusiastically  recommends the collection of Trumbo letters, Additional Dialogue (M. Evans and Company 1970) that captures Trumbo's written wit and style.  But these letters say little about his political beliefs or actions, which seem to have mostly consisted of joining organizations and donating money.  Among the films Trumbo worked on there are two that stand out:  Gun Crazy (1950) and The Prowler (1951), the first directed by Joseph H. Lewis, the second by Joseph Losey (who eventually was threatened by the blacklist and left for England before his passport, like Trumbo's, was revoked).  These films were worked on when Trumbo was blacklisted and it is almost impossible to determine how much he actually wrote of them. Trumbo was for hire, wrote mostly for uninspired directors and didn't seem to have a vision himself, except a passion against fascism and for peace.

Film Journal: Very Semi-Serious, Shield for Muder, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Anna and the King of Siam

HBO recently showed Leah Wolchok's documentary Very Semi-Serious, about New Yorker cartoons.  The film was fairly superficial, focusing mostly on cartoon editor Bob Mankoff and what he finds funny, which is never quite clear.  But humor of course is subjective and the title of the film seems to suggest an exploration of the seriousness of the cartoons, an exploration that never happens.  Perhaps that would be too daunting a task?  We do get interviews with many of the cartoonists who, not surprisingly, are a bunch of misfits. weirdos, and neurotics:  Roz Chast, for instance, doesn't like to go outdoors because it is either too hot or too cold and "besides, there are ticks."   One of the reasons these cartoonists do what they do is because they seem to be compulsive; one cannot make a living strictly as a cartoonist because there are few places that still publish cartoons.  Mankoff is shown submitting cartoons to editor David Remnick who, based on what he publishes in The New Yorker (mostly articles about suffering), does not seem to have much of a sense of humor.  Missing from this film are two important names:  William Shawn and Peter De Vries.  Shawn was editor of The New Yorker from 1951 until 1987 and cartoons during that period reflected his gentle sense of humor, now largely absent from current cartoons.  Peter De Vries, who published twenty-three amusing and sensitive novels, worked on cartoon captions at The New Yorker from 1944 until Shawn was forced out in 1987; after all it doesn't follow that one who can draw can also write.  I sometimes wonder if the ridiculous cartoon caption competition in the current New Yorker is something of a desperate attempt to replace De Vries.

Shield for Murder, 1954, directed by Edmond O'Brien and Howard W. Koch.  This relatively late film noir covers some of the same ground as Josepy Losey's The Prowler, 1951, which I wrote about on Nov. 19th of this year, in its examination of police misuse of power.  O'Brien, a wonderful everyman of film noir, is a cop who kills a bookie and steals his money for a down payment on a house in suburbia.  He takes his girlfriend, beautifully played by Marla English, to see the house and buries some of the money in the yard.  The house represents the fulfillment of O'Brien's dream of suburbia, when his wife won't have to work as a cigarette girl.  But there was a witness to his murder of the bookie and now he has to murder the witness.  He tries to flee but his girlfriend won't go with him and he ends up shot dead on the lawn of his dream house.  Shield for Murder is directed with manic intensity, as O'Brien perspires profusely when he beats somebody up in front of a girl he just picked up in a bar.  The film is based on a book by William McGivern, who wrote a number of books that were turned into excellent movies, especially The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang in 1953.

John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967, was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies in their Southern Gothic series and in the original gold-tinted version, with red as the only other visible color (the cinematography was by Aldo Tonti).  Andrew Sarris has written:  "John Huston's theme has been remarkably consistent from The Maltese Falcon to Reflections in a Golden Eye:  his protagonists almost invariably fail at what they set out to do, generally through no fault or flaw of their own."  Huston's film is quite faithful to Carson McCullers' novel, with most of the perversions taking place just off-screen or in the minds of the characters.  The villain is implicitly the macho culture of the military, where interest in culture is considered "sissy" and the competition for wives and rank is intense.  Marlon Brando is particularly effective as the repressed homosexual, whose repression erupts in violence, and Elizabeth Taylor is his shrewish wife who whips him at a party.

Anna and the King of Siam, 1946, directed by John Cromwell.  About Cromwell Andrew Sarris wrote:  "Fortunately his formal deficiencies seldom obscure the beautiful drivers of his vehicles."  The beautiful driver here is Irene Dunne, playing a widow who comes to Siam in 1862 to teach the sixty-seven children of the king, played intelligently by Rex Harrison (we will leave for another time the discussion of whether this and other such roles should be played by Asians).  Cromwell is perhaps more of a craftsman than an artist and he and his cinematographer, veteran Arthur Miller, use effectively the interior sets that display both the opulence and the claustrophobia of the king's palace. The one exterior scene is when Dunne's young son goes horseback riding and dies in a fall when his horse stumbles.  As the king and the governess struggle to understand each other and the customs of their respective countries their relationship is always at a professional level and provides an important subtext about the threat of imperialism.  Throughout the film Dunne glows with intelligence and beauty.

Don Siegel's The Gun Runners 1958

The limitations placed upon Siegel by the material he is given to film are sometimes severe and he circumvents them with agility and grace.
--Judith M. Kass, Don Siegel (Tantivy Press, 1975)

The Gun Runners was the third film version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not:  the first was the Bogart/Bacall version of 1944, the second The Breaking Point with John Garfield in 1950 (which I wrote about briefly on March 3,2014).  The first version, directed by Howard Hawks, emphasized professionalism and The Breaking Point, directed by Michael Curtiz, was intensely emotional and political.  Siegel's version emphasizes action and shows a certain sympathy for the Cuban revolution.  Hemingway's story is somewhat minimal, allowing three different interpretations from three good directors.

The Gun Runners starred Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated soldiers of WW II who became an actor, mostly in B Westerns.  One of those Westerns was Don Siegel's The Duel at Silver Creek (1952) and Murphy chose Siegel for The Gun Runners.  Murphy was not much of an actor, but Siegel knew how to show him re-acting -- to Everett Sloane, Eddie Albert, Patricia Owens and Gita Hall -- with facial expressions and various nods.  The Gun Runners was a relatively low-budget film and Siegel also had the experienced cinematographer Hal Mohr, who had worked with him on two previous films and knew how to do a lot with little. Siegel had worked on montage and directing second units for years, before becoming a director, and The Gun Runners is full of kinetic energy building up to a violent end. 

Siegel, though not well remembered today, was a master craftsman of genres.  He directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), two excellent police dramas in 1968, Madigan and Coogan's Bluff (he was an important mentor to Clint Eastwood), and even John Wayne's last film, The Shootist (1976).  He also did a another remake of a Hemingway story, The Killers (1964), filmed first by Robert Siodmak in 1946.

Little Orchestra Society

I probably do not need to justify anything I put on this blog, but I do prefer to stick to the four main topics after which this blog is named.   I include The Little Orchestra Society because at the Dvorak performance we saw on Saturday they included a marvelous  pas de deux to Slavonic Dance No. 7, danced by Shoshana Rosenthal and James Shee, from the Tom Gold Dance Company.  Tom Gold was a marvelous dancer for The New York City Ballet and this dance was quite influenced by Balanchine's folk dances in a number of ballets, especially Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.  It was part of a number of Dvorak excerpts, including "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka, beautifully sung by Bryn Holdsworth.

Last year when we went to the LOS concerts with our daughter, who is now four, they had more goofiness than serious music, but this year the proportions have been reversed  They had a character portraying Dvorak and plenty of audience involvement, making the kinds of sounds that influenced the American Quartet and playing the tambourines that were distributed to all the children in the audience, but they also took the music quite seriously and though the didactic elements were played for humor, as in a video of shopping for a horn to illustrate what an English horn was, they were also quite informative. After the shopper returned with everything from a shoehorn to a bicycle horn Randall Ellis, in the orchestra, pulled out a genuine English horn and played a lovely excerpt from Dvorak's Symphony No. 9.

At this performance, as well as at the Mozart performance we saw and heard on Nov. 8, they used some very young soloists (Han Lee on the cello for a Dvorak cello concerto, Alex Manasse on clarinet and Oliver and Clara Neubauer on violin and viola for Mozart) who made quite an impression on the audience, ages 3 to 7.   I think one of the difficulties one has with concerts and concert halls is the often overweening stuffiness.  Music is to be enjoyed, as Rex Harrison said in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours, "with a sandwich in one hand and a beer in the other" and The Little Orchestra Society captures some of that sense of fun.

Two 1916 films by Allan Dwan: The Half-Breed; The Good Bad Man

Turner Classic Movies does a truly wonderful job of showing movies from all periods, uninterrupted and in the correct aspect ratio.  My only (slight) quibble is that they do not show enough films from the silent era, in some ways the artistic apex of film.  Unfortunately only about 35% of the 10,000 films made between 1912 and 1929 survive in any form at all and only about 11% in their original 35 mm. format. Among many problems in showing these films is the projection speed (in the silent era this was variable but now silent films are usually projected at a standard 16 frames per second) and the quality of the surviving prints, especially since only MoMA has a variance from the fire department to show original nitrate prints, which are gorgeous.  But at least Turner does show some silent films, including most recently films of Douglas Fairbanks.

I am not a big fan of the grinning, jumping Fairbanks of his films in the twenties, but these two Allan Dwan films, The Half-Breed and The Good Bad Man, have a much more subdued and intense Fairbanks.  These films were both made by Dwan for D.W. Griffith's company and Dwan learned a great deal from the man who, at that time, was making Intolerance:  the importance of "the wind in the trees" and the importance of low-key acting, the ability of the camera to show emotion. Dwan went on to make films until 1961 but even in these early efforts he shows an ability to use locations and to direct actors.  The Half-Breed, based on a Bret Harte story, takes place largely in a forest,, while much of The Good Bad Man (a term often applied to the persona of William S. Hart, a star of silent Westerns) takes place in the desert.  The desert and the forest are places where the Fairbanks characters feel most comfortable and they are contrasted with the evils of so-called "civilization."  Both films have Fairbanks looking for his lost father:  in The Half-Breed his white father abandoned his Indian mother (who committed suicide) and in The Good Bad Man his father was murdered before Passin' Through, the Fairbanks character, was born. Themes of nature and paternity continued to fascinate Dwan throughout his career.

For an excellent discussion and history of these two films I highly recommend Frederic Lombardi's Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios (McFarland and Company, Inc., 2013), with its impressive amount of detail about Dwan's career.

The Crossing by Michael Connelly

"I work a case for you -- not just you, any defense lawyer -- and it'll undo everything I did with the badge"
-- Harry Bosch in The Crossing (Little, Brown and Company, 2015).

Michael Connelly is a master of the roman policier.  I discovered his books at the bookstore Partners & Crime a good number of years ago and continue to read everything he publishes.  What makes his books good is character, environment, and detail.  Plot is something I care less about but it is also something Connelly does well.  The Crossing is mainly about retired detective Harry Bosch (Harry is short for Hieronymous, which only a few appreciate) and somewhat about Micky Haller, the defense attorney who is suing the police department on Harry's behalf; Micky is Bosch's half-brother.

Bosch is asked by Haller to investigate a murder of which Haller's client has been accused.  Bosch is initially reluctant to take the case but finally does, less for the money he needs to continue restoring a 1950 Harley and for paying his daughter's college tuition than for his increasing feeling that Haller's client may be innocent, in which case the real culprit needs to be caught. I wonder how true it is that every defense lawyer feels his client is being railroaded and every police detective thinks that the guy he caught did it.  Bosch's character is part of a police environment where there is much chicanery in the pursuit of so-called justice.  Bosch "knew every trick there was when it came to planting obfuscation and misdirection in a murder book" and of course this knowledge is useful when Bosch goes to work for the defense after he finds out that Haller's client's alibi was murdered. 

The Crossing is rich with appropriate detail about the houses, neighborhoods and restaurants of Los Angeles, as well of the necessity and nuisances of motorcars.  Bosch is successful in this case because of his dedication to chasing down every detail, especially those that raise questions.  In The Crossing he follows the trail of an expensive watch that the murder victim's husband had given her, paying six thousand dollars for it at an estate sale. (I assume people buy such expensive watches so that when they leave their BMW people will still know how well-off they are).  This leads to a couple of cops who are running an extortion racket and killing people who get in their way.