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.
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