Turner Classic Movies in January 2017

First of  all, a very happy new year to all my readers.  If you particularly like any movies coming up in January that I have not mentioned please feel free to bring them to my attention.

Jan. 1.  The year begins with 12 Hitchcock movies.  I particularly like the extraordinary Vertigo (1958) but these are all great films (if you like Hitchcock at all, that is; not everyone does).

Jan 2 is John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940).  It's not one of my Ford favorites but it looks better each time I see it, with its Greg Toland cinematography.

Jan. 3 is Don Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11, an intense piece of filmmaking.

On the 7th is Anthony Mann's The Far Country (1955), one of a series of great Westerns that Mann made with James Stewart.

Jan 8 has Lubitsch's dark comedy about Germany, made in 1942, To Be or Not To Be.

Jan. 9 is Ford's Stagecoach (1939), the first of his great Westerns.

Jan 10 is Raoul Walsh's corrosive White Heat (1949), with a manic performance by James Cagney.

Jan. 11 Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) with its gorgeous cinematography by Nestor Alemendros and lovely score by Ennio Morricon.

Jan 14 has King Vidor's colonial Western Northwest Passage (1940), Ford's The Searchers (1956) and Douglas Sirk's widescreen black-and-white The Tarnished Angels (from Faulkner's Pylon), 1958

On the 15th is Alexander Mackendrick's powerful The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
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On the 18th is Chaplin's incomparable City Lights (1931).

On the 21st is Anthony Mann's beautiful Bend of the River (1952) and Fritz Lang's intricate and fatalistic Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).

On the 25th is D.W. Griffith's masterful Orphans of the Storm (1921), with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and on the 26th is one of Sirk's lovely and moving soap operas:  All That Heaven Allows (1955)

Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman (1943)

I had shot the film almost like a documentary, since this seemed the style best suited to the theme, and given the very limited shooting time.

---Douglas Sirk

Hitler’s Madman was émigré Douglas Sirk’s first film in America, after a successful career in Germany.  It was shot in a week for PRC, a Poverty-Row studio, and then bought by MGM; it came out at the same time (1943) that Fritz Lang’s film Hangman Also Die was released.  Both films tell a version of the same story:  the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the German in charge of the occupation of Czechoslovakia.  It is an unusual opportunity to compare two superb directors dealing with the same story:  Sirk had only a week to make his film and shot it like a claustrophobic newsreel, isolating the town of Lidice as the Germans destroyed it.  Lang focused more on the assassin and shot his film like a film noir, emphasizing the role of fate.

One thing Sirk’s films have common with the films of other great directors is the ability to bring characters vividly to life, no matter how small the role.  In Hitler’s Madman Sirk used an extraordinary cast of supporting actors –Victor Kilian, Ralph Morgan, Edgar Kennedy, Jimmy Conlon, Patricia Morison, et al.-- to portray the villagers and their families.  He also, with his cinematographer Eugan Shuftan, created a town and the farms surrounding it with expressionistic lighting and intelligent camera angles.  Sirk’s powerful film causes one to reflect on what role we have in society, especially when things seem to be going wrong:  how does fascism succeed and how is it able to survive?  Frank Spotnitz’s intense alternate-history film on Amazon, The Man in the High Castle, raises many of the same questions; based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel, it shows the Axis winning WWII and occupying America.

And I also wanted to mention two novels that deal with possible fascism in America:  Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here(1935) and Philp Roth’s The Plot Against America(2004)

The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries

It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration:  not going to the stars but learning that one may stay where one is.

--Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (1961; Little, Brown and Company)

Among the many things that came to mind while reading this marvelous book:  it’s too bad that Peter De Vries is no longer working on the captions for New Yorker cartoons (De Vries died in 1993 and the cartoons have lacked witty captions ever since); that the funniest works of art are usually the most serious; that good books will have a different effect on one during different periods of one’s life. 

De Vries is not widely read these days (few seem to have heard of him); his twenty-five novels are now being brought back into print after many years in the wilderness.  One can almost understand this, as his novels are often considered more a part of the time in which they appeared  than transcendent of it and his struggles with religion are, like those of Graham Greene, sometimes considered irrelevant.  To those of us who lived through the fifties and sixties, however, his novels effectively capture the mordant quality of those years with rich and often withering humor.  I returned most recently to The Blood of the Lamb when I read Jill Lepore’s piece in the Nov. 21 "New Yorker," referring to it in an article about De Vries’s involvement in a project to make a film of a J.D. Salinger story

The Blood of the Lamb particularly stands out now for me in a way it didn’t before I married Susan and we had children.  Protagonist Don Wanderhope, the first-person narrator, overcomes his strict Calvinist upbringing, going to college, marrying and having a child.  He survives the early death of his brother, the madness of his father, the suicide of his wife, only to be confronted with his only child Carol becoming ill with leukemia at the age of 10.  This is one of the few books that have caused me to both laugh and cry.  Wanderhope keeps his sense of humor almost until the end.  One of Carol’s teachers later says to him “Some poems are long, some are short.  She was a short one.”

Robert Flaherty's Moana (1926) and Disney's Moana (2016)

For a quarter of a century pretty much everything coming out of our domestic film industry has aspired to the condition of the animated cartoon (as Walter Pater said the other arts did to the condition of music).
--James Bowman, "The New Criterion," Dec. 2016

Today Flaherty seems touchingly romantic in his desire to find people who have escaped the corruption of civilization.
--Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

I  don’t get out to too many movies these days (for many reasons, which I will go into at another time) but our five-year-old daughter’s school recently had a showing at our local Brooklyn theatre, the Alpine:  ten bucks for the movie, including soda and popcorn.  So Susan and I took our daughter to her first movie (our older son came also).  The theatre was comfortable, the sound and projection good; only the movie itself –Disney’s Moana—was lousy, transferring a Disney princess to the South Seas, typical bubblegum songs included.  The movie was more assembled than created -- the use of four directors indicates that – and was totally confusing:  I understood nothing about what was going on, though my daughter was occasionally scared.  I admit that I have never been a big fan of animation, though the current computer-animated cartoons are even more claustrophobic than the hand-drawn ones were.  And why do the voices get such big billing –the god Maui was voiced by Dwayne Johnson, from many action movies – when knowing the voice only interferes with appreciating, to the extent one can, the character?

Returning to Robert Flaherty’s Moana of 1926 (available from Netflix) only indicates how far we have gone with film –in the wrong direction – in 90 years.  Flaherty spent two years on Samoa filming the natives doing everything from fishing to tattooing (a rite of manhood) to climbing tall trees to obtain coconuts and making clothes out of mulberry bark.  In the 70’s Flaherty’s daughter Monica returned to Samoa and recorded some songs and sound that was added to the original silent film.  Flaherty’s films are not what could at all accurately be called “documentaries” because much of what he filmed in Moana was a re-creation of the past, as was also true of his other films, including Nanook of the North (1922).  In Moana (a male name in Flaherty's Samoa, not a female one as in the Disney film) he captures beautifully not only “the wind in the trees” (to quote D. W. Griffith), but the movement of the sea and the indigenous people and their dances.

Mark Lilla's The Shipwrecked Mind

The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

-Mark Lilla, The New York Times, Nov. 20 2016

This op-ed piece by Lilla sent me to his recent book, The Shipwrecked Mind:  On Political Reaction (New York Review Books, 2016), a study of political reaction.  The reactionaries all seem to have a time when things were great, before they went bad:  in ancient Athens or before the Reformation or before the Enlightenment.   Lilla studies three influential writer/philosophers:  Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, all of whom were on a “tragicomic quest, like Don Quixote, to revive the Golden Age,” an age that never quite existed.  “For the apocalyptic imagination the present, not the past, is a foreign country.”

Popular myths can be quite powerful, including yearning for the America of the fifties, when women and minorities knew their place and children always did as they were told.  We need to understand these myths, and not just  ignore them, in order to move ahead.  Lilla has made a good start at this, examining the thinkers who have been most influential on populist views..

Turner Classic Movies Dec. 2016

Of course there will be movies related to Christmas; my favorite of these are only partly about the holiday, which still has a significant role:  Vincente Minnelli's lovely period piece Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, showing on Dec. 11), John Ford's variation on the three wise men, as a Western, Three Godfathers (1949, also on the 11th), Lubitsch's touching and funny The Shop Around the Corner (1940, on the 15th), Leo McCarey's Going My Way (1944, on the 17th) and his Love Affair (1939, on the 20th), Preston Sturges's and Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night (1940, on the 22nd).

On Dec. 3 is Robert Siodmak's excellent film noir, Phantom Lady (1944, from a Cornell Woolrich novel), Budd Boetticher's austere Western Ride Lonesome (1959), and John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).

On Dec. 3 is German émigré Douglas Sirk's intense Hitler's Madman (1943), about the assassination of Nazi SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, and on the 4th is Billy Wilder's Lost Week-End (1945) and King Vidor's last film, Solomon and Sheba (1959).

On Dec. 6 are two of the best movies ever made about families:  Yasijuro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Leo MCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1939), about growing old in America before Social Security started.

On Dec. 7 are three movies related to Pearl Harbor:  John Ford's They Were Expendable (1943), Howard Hawks's  Air Force(1943) and Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956).

On Dec. 8 is Chaplin's exquisite Limelight (1952) and on the 11th is Kenji Mizoguchi's beautiful and moving Ugetsu (1953)

On the 13th is Delmer Daves's Western 3:10 to Yuma and Joseph Losey's caustic view of America in 1951, The Prowler.

On the 17th is Howard Hawks's comedy Monkey Business (1952) and on the 19th is Preminger's film noir Angel Face (1939).

On the 22nd is Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), from a Patricia Highsmith novel, and two elegant pre-code comedies from Lubitsch, Design for Living (1933) and The Love Parade (1929).

Raoul Walsh's Sea Devils

The heroes of Walsh are sustained by nothing more than a feeling for adventure.
--Andrew Sarris

Raoul Walsh's Sea Devils (1953) is the last film made in the 3-strip technicolor format: as more and more films were being made in color the studios did not want to spend the money for this expensive process -- it used three negatives and therefore three times as much film -- even though the result was exquisite saturated color.  Walsh and his director of photography Wilkie Cooper used this process quite effectively, with brilliant reds, yellows and purples appropriate for a costume picture and subtle day-for-night location scenes.

The films stars Yvonne DeCarlo and Rock Hudson as English spies in the Channel Islands in 1800 and is based on Victor Hugo's Les travailleurs de la mer.  Some find it hard to appreciate Rock Hudson after all we have learned about him but he did many terrific pictures for directors such as Walsh, Howard Hawks  and, especially, Douglas Sirk (my own favorite is All That Heaven Allows, 1956) who knew how to use Hudson's impressive combination of toughness and vulnerability. Some may see beefcake competing with cheesecake in the two stars of Sea Devils but I find that Walsh has effectively captured the passion of a man and a woman united in adventure and believing both in a cause and in each other.

Gordon Douglas's Bombers B-52

In recent years I have come to appreciate the craftsmanship of film director Gordon Douglas (see my posts of April 4 2016, Nov. 7 2014, Sept. 18 2014). He may not have been an artist at the level of John Ford but most of Douglas's films are beautifully crafted,  take place in the present day and detail the struggle to find one's place in society, balancing obligation and choice.  Bombers B-52 is about Air  Force mechanic Chuck Brennan (played astutely by Karl Malden) to give his wife and daughter (played by Natalie Wood) the best he can while still doing what he considers his duty.  The next generation is represented by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who is courting Wood against her father's wishes.

Brennan rejects lucrative corporate job offers and tries to make it up by going on a quiz show and answering questions about baseball.  When one of his Air Force buddies asks him how he came to know so much about baseball he said he came home one day and told his father that he had purchased a key to the pitcher's box.  His father told him that he had to learn about baseball or he would have to take ballet classes, so he quickly learned.  The irony of this was underscored later in the film when Wood and her mother are at a diner -- Brennan was outside getting the car fixed-- where there was ballet on TV and the grizzled cook was watching, intently observing that "her tour jete is not what it should be," emphasizing, in a low-key way, that ballet can be appreciated by anyone. The cook and the TV are off to the side of the widescreen frame, one of many elements in the shot.  When Brennan went on the quiz show the baseball questions were, rather strangely, all about "Casey at the Bat" and not about real baseball players. Still, Brennan won enough to buy his daughter a new convertible, though that didn't satisfy her desire for a higher status with her peers.

The beautiful widescreen cinematography was by William Clothier, who worked with Ford, Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, and Budd Boetticher, among others.  Douglas uses the wide frame intelligently, to capture the conflicts among the family as they try to find their place in the group and in society without diminishing their affection for one another.

Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon, 1956

Now that my daughter is five my wife and I decided to look at the new DVD of The Red Balloon to see if it would be appropriate for her.  The answer:  definitely not!  Seeing it again after many years (it was often shown in grade schools, usually in inferior 16 mm. prints) convinces me that it scared people away from foreign films, just as "The Nutcracker" scared people away from ballet and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss scared high school students away from literature:  they represent very limited fragments of what film, literature and dance have to offer, and not in the best way.

In The Red Balloon a young boy, probably about six, wanders around Paris with a red balloon following him.  The boy goes everywhere alone, taken care of to a limited extent by an elderly woman, no father or mother around.  Eventually other children destroy the red balloon and other balloons, of all colors, come together and lift the boy up into the sky.  The story makes no sense at any level, not even the mythopoeic, but is seen as an introduction to foreign films, for children, a sort of Antonioni film, without the intelligence, for toddlers; it's only thirty-five minutes long, with only a few words of dialogue.  That the story can be seen and interpreted in many different ways and has no meaning of its own demonstrates its condescension and artistic bankruptcy.

Most movies made for children don't work artistically for children or adults (I'm talking about you, Disney, as well as many others).  My family will continue to watch Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Chuck Jones, artists who appeal to all ages, in multiple ways at multiple levels.

Little Orchestra Society: Vivaldi

We have been taking our children to the Little Orchestra Society concerts since our daughter Victoria was three, two years ago, (see my posts of Dec. 6, 2015 and Feb. 9, 2016) and our son Gideon, now 18, and Susan and I get as much enjoyment out of them as Victoria does.  Yesterday's concert was devoted to Vivaldi and LOS did their usual excellent job of providing visual experiences for the kids without compromising the quality of the music.

The concert was conducted by Joseph Young and, as usual, the soloists were young, just out of high school or college:  Valerie Kim on violin, Martin Bernsldltein playing recorder, Elizabeth Egan on bassoon, Yifei Xu on harpsichord, Aberta Khoury and Tengyue  on guitars, and Brandon Bergeron and Atse Theodros on trumpets. The use of young soloists helps the appeal of the music to children.  There were effective fake newscasts announcing the change of seasons for "The Four Seasons" and the orchestra members donned hats and scarves to play "Winter."   Vivaldi himself was played by
David Gautschy, demonstrating that the music was actually written by a real person. And there were "circus artists" John Leo and Sarah Petersiel moving to the music, conveying another visual element.

The performance was at the Danny Kaye Theatre (few children today recognize the name Danny Kaye, for better or worse) at Hunter College, a relatively small and intimate theatre just right for this combination of music and visual support, and the concert lasted just under an hour.  I recommend LOS to all parents who want to introduce their children to the beauty of music; there are three more concerts this season, devoted to Beethoven. Mendelssohn and Bernstein.

Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent, 1962

Advise and Consent finally reveals Preminger as one of the cinema's great moralists.
--Robin Wood, Movie Magazine.

I read Allen Drury's novel when I was 13 and fascinated by politics, hoping to go into it some day.  I even tried to get a job as a Congressional page, but my Congressman was from the wrong party.  I saw Preminger's film when I was in prep school and found it fascinating, beautiful and depressing for what it "revealed" about politics.  Some movies exemplify their time, some transcend it, and some --including Advise and Consent -- do both.  The film is still considered by some homophobic for its depiction of an attempt to blackmail a Senator from Utah (presumed to be Mormon, though that it not explicitly stated) and the somewhat lurid depiction of a gay bar.  I think anyone watching the film would find it more complicated; as Robin Wood (who only later came out as gay) writes:  "Brig is hysterically rejecting an aspect of himself with which he has always refused to come to terms."  when he rejects his gay lover.

Advise and Consent is filmed in that unusual format: wide-screen black-and-white, as Preminger allows all the participants to react to each other within the frame, capturing effectively their dependence on one another.  Veteran actors Walter Pigeon, Lew Ayres, Franchot Tone and, especially, Charles Laughton (it was his last film) bring their years of experience to bear on the roles of politicians with years of experience.  Each lead role involves compromise, often against one's principles, as a means of survival, contradicting the asserted optimism of the Kennedy years.

World Series 2016

I enjoyed this World Series more than most recently because of the creativity of the managers:  Terry Francona for the Indians and Joe Maddon for the Cubs.  Neither was afraid to use relief pitchers as much as they thought they needed to, regardless of the opinions of others.  If the Cubs had lost no doubt Maddon would have been roundly criticized for bringing in Chapman when he did in the seventh game, as Chapman gave up three runs, allowing the Indians to tie the score.  Maddon even tried the squeeze, practically extinct in the major leagues.  The seven games often resembled chess matches, with moves and countermoves by both managers.  And kudos also to Theo Epstein, who staffed the Cubs with human beings and not just bundles of statistics.

The TV coverage of the Series was awful, not surprising since the producer was, once again, Pete Mecheska of Fox Sports, who is on record is saying the baseball is too boring to just show what's going on on the field so they have to show the tense fans over and over again (see my post of Oct. 30, 2013).  It seemed to me that there were more shots of the fans, especially in the later innings, than there were shots of the game!  TV announcers Joe Buck and John Smoltz added little to the game so I spent most of my time listening to the games on the radio, this year on Bloomberg radio, 1130, where Aaron Boone and Dan Shulman allowed one to "see" more than one could on TV.

Many people have forgotten, or never knew, that some consider that the 1908 Cubs did not belong in the World Series, after they won a one-game playoff with the New York Giants that became necessary because of the famous “Merkle boner.”  On Sept. 23 the Giants, playing the Cubs, had Merkle on first base and Moose McCormick on third with two out in the bottom of the ninth and the score tied 1-1.  A winning hit to the outfield by Al Bridwell scored the runner on third and fans swarmed onto the field, blocking the basepaths and sending the players to the clubhouse in center field at the Polo Grounds.  The Cubs quickly realized that Merkle had never touched second and Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers retrieved what he said was the game ball and tagged second, the run not counting because of the force-out.  It was finally ruled that if the two teams were tied at the end of the season the game would have to be replayed.  The Giants and the Cubs were tied and the Cubs won the playoff game 4-2 on Oct. 8, went to the World Series and won.

Unashamed (1932) and Emergency Call (1933)

One thing about both Unashamed (1932) and Emergency Call (1933) is that in both cases someone literally gets away with murder, something that was not allowed to happen once the Motion Picture Code began to be enforced.

I have written previously about Edward L. Cahn (in my blog post of March 26, 2015) and his prolific career. Cahn's Emergency Call is a brisk film (barely more than sixty minutes) in which William Boyd (just before he became Hopalong Cassidy) plays a doctor fighting hospital racketeering, including ambulance chasers, fake accidents and skimming by his future father-in-law, who runs the hospital.  Boyd joins across class lines with his ambulance driver, Steve, who convinces Boyd not to quit and then dies on the operating table because of the inferior ether the racketeers have supplied to the hospital.  The leader of the gangsters is shot dead by Steve’s girlfriend, who is exonerated.  Cahn’s mobile camera (the cinematographer was Roy Hunt) moves through the hospital and the surrounding streets at a fast pace, as the doctors try to save lives, including their own when they are attacked by mental patients and crooks and scammers of all kinds.

In Harry Beaumont’s Unashamed not only does Robert Young get away with murder but his sister, played by Helen Twelvetrees (who had significant roles in the early days of sound) lies about it on the witness stand and her brother gets off.  There are many references to the “unwritten law” (characterized by James Stewart as “a myth” in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, 1959).  Young shoots Helen’s lounge lizard lover as much out of suggested incestuous desire as anger that she had spent the night with her lover.  Young’s family friend and lawyer convinces Helen Twelvetrees to portray herself as a tramp on the witness stand – even though she had spent the night with her lover voluntarily in an attempt to get her father to approve their marriage. Beauont (like Cahn, a director mostly of B pictures) keeps strictly to interiors in this film, emphasizing the claustrophobic and isolated life of a wealthy family.

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for showing these two fascinating films.

Nov. 2016 Turner Classic Movies.

Nov. 3 has Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939) and the original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) as well as Arthur Penn’s very 70’s Night Moves (1975) and Preston Sturges’s cynical political film The Great McGinty (1940)

On the 5^th is Sergio Leone’s Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 1968) with its evocative Ennio Morricone score.

On the 6^th is Rudolph Mate’s fatalistic and fascinating film noir D.O.A. (1950)

The 7^th has Otto Preminger’s great film about American politics Advise and Consent (1962) and Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942).

On the 8^th is Chaplin’s late reflective and moving Limelight (1952) and Anthony Mann’s period film noir The Black Book (1949).

The 9^th has Chaplin’s first feature, the sad and funny The Kid (1921) and Leo McCarey’s lovely comedy/soap-opera Love Affair (1939)

On the 10^th is Mervyn LeRoy’s uncompromising film about a lynching They Won’t Forget (1937) and Jame Whale’s impressive The Invisible Man (1933)

The 11^th had King Vidor’s beautiful film about culture clash The Bird of Paradise (1932) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), his greatest Western.

On the 12^th is Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and the 13^th has Richard Fleischer’s taut thriller The Narrow Margin (1952).

On the 14^th is an important early documentary by Robert Flaherty Nanook of the North (1922) and on the 15^th is Howard Hawks’s intense Western Rio Bravo (1959).

On the 17^th is Raoul Walsh’s Sea Devils (1955) and on the 19^th is Blake Edwards’s tribute to slapstick The Great Race (1965).

On the 25^th are several films with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, my favorite being Shall We Dance (1937), with music by the Gershwins.

And on the 29^th are a number of films by Hitchcock.  I recommend all of Hitchcock’s films, as well as those showing in Nov. by Lubitsch, Hawks, John Ford and Preston Sturges.

Buster Keaton's The Cameraman 1928

The Cameraman shows a new maturity for Buster Keaton that should have been a beginning instead of an ending.  After he signed with MGM (which Chaplin and Lloyd had warned him against) for personal and financial reasons, he fought so hard to make the film his own way he was exhausted and never had another chance to improvise and invent his own gags.  He was also unable to convince MGM executives that just because a movie was talking that did not mean it had to be talking all the time.   Like most great comedies The Cameraman is a serious film, about a newsreel cameraman doing whatever is necessary to make the footage look good.  It is also something of a valentine to New York City, where the film was shot.  At one point Keaton goes to an empty Yankee Stadium and mimes fielding, batting, pitching and even umpiring.  There is a ride to Coney Island on a crowded double-decker bus where Keaton sits on the fender so he can talk to the girl he is courting, an amusing attempt to change clothes in a tiny dressing room with another man and a ride home in the rain in a rumble seat.

The last part of the film is poignant and beautiful, as Keaton rescues the girl he is courting from a boat accident when her boyfriend deserts her.  When Keaton rushes off to a drug store the boyfriend claims he rescued the girl and they go off together, with Keaton sinking to his knees on the sand.  Fortunately Keaton’s pet monkey, which he had rescued from an organ-grinder, had kept cranking the camera during the entire incident and the footage ends up with the newsreel company (“best camerawork I have ever seen,” says the boss) and Keaton and the girl are reunited.

As always Keaton does not smile but rather uses his eyes to express emotion, curiosity and determination and he never gives up, no matter how difficult the situation.  At one point the girl calls him on the phone and he runs, as only Keaton can run, across town to her boarding house before she realizes he is no longer on the phone.  My five-year old daughter loved this film for its humor, its beauty and its emotion, without the political content of Chaplin's full-length films (she loves his short films), though I expect she will appreciate those eventually.

Surrender, New York by Caleb Carr

I did as I was instructed; and it is no great exaggeration to say that from that moment forward, neither my own life nor the path of the investigation we had undertaken would ever be the same.
--Caleb Carr, Surrender, New York (Random House, 2016).

Surrender, New York is something of a sequel to Carr's period novel The Alienist (1996).  Dr. Trajan Jones and Michael Li have been exiled to upstate New York because they have offended the powers-that-be by insisting on the importance of the quality of any forensic evidence.  They now teach remotely at Albany State and are called for consultation by the few policemen who still trust them, on a case of the alleged murders of "throwaway children," abandoned by parents who can no longer support them in job-poor upstate New York.  They are assisted by a young blind woman, Ambyr, who may not be who she appears to be and with whom the disabled Jones (he lost a leg to cancer) has fallen in love.  Among the many themes in this detailed, rambling and intelligently didactic novel (also something of a shaggy dog story) are the treatment of animals (Jones has a cheetah he rescued from a petting zoo) and the economic devastation of upstate New York.

This 600-page novel reminds one of the picaresque novels of the 18th Century:  Smollett's Peregrine Pickle (1751, 800 pages) and Richardson's Clarissa (1747, 1534 pages).  I hope resistance to these lengthy novels has diminished since the popularity of Donna Tartt's recent The Goldfinch (2015, 771 pages).  Carr's novel even has asides to the reader and names for chapters, as was common in the 18th C. 

New York City Ballet, October 8 2016

The sisterhood of the corps in Serenade, which has expanded through the years as Balanchine has expanded the choreography, is in its anonymity one of the most moving images we have in ballet.
--Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, March 21 1977.

On Saturday Serenade was beautifully performed, as Peter Martins continues to maintain the Balanchine ballets  Particularly elegant was soloist Zachary Catazaro as he walked slowly towards Sterling Hyltin while the rest of the corps walked pass him walking in the opposite direction.  I particularly like the parts in this ballet and other Balanchine works where the male role is relatively uncomplicated and intense, perhaps because I can identify with these roles more than the more difficult and flashier ones that call for multiple pirouettes and tours en l'air.  Serenade also shows how Balanchine can turn liabilities into assets, as it was his first ballet in America, 1934, and he had to work with the students he had:  the first movement of the corps is to turn out into first position, signifying that ballet has arrived in the United States, while a late arrival and a fall are incorporated into the ballet. It also demonstrates Balanchine's mastery of music, as he changes the order of the movements of Tschaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in order to end the ballet on a melancholy note.  Serenade is beautiful, elegant and continually elusive, as one attempts to find a "story" in its structure.

Balanchine can be as flashy as anyone, but his Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux also incorporates his idea of the equality of men and women and their trust and faith in each other, as Ashly Isaacs leaps fearlessly into Gozalo's Garcia's arms and the two dancers dance solos that also emphasize their individuality:  daring leaps for the man, rapid point work for the woman.

Western Symphony is holding up well (it had its premiere on September 7, 1954) and I find that it makes one think of Sergio Leone's C'era una volta il west (Once Upon a Time in the West,1968), a film that depicts some of the myths of the America West as seen by a European.  Both Leone's film and Balanchine's ballet not only make use of myths but are themselves mythopoeic, with Leone's emphasis on families and violence and Balanchine's on love and boisterousness.  Leone's film emphasizes music (a lovely and intense score by Ennio Morricone) as much as Balanchine's ballet does (traditional tunes such as Red River Valley, orchestrated by Hershey Kay).  It seems quite natural, watching Western Symphony, that dance hall girls are on point and cowboys can leap high into the air.

The one dud on the bill was Christpher Wheeldon's American Rhapsody, done to Gershwin music.  As I said (to my wife Susan and children Gideon and Victoria, who were as always with me at the ballet), if they want to do Gershwin why not do Balanchine's Who Cares?, a gorgeous and moving ballet, rather than the drab and ugly piece by Wheeldon, whose work seems to have been coarsened by Broadway.

New York Times on Baseball

This past Sunday there were two interesting stories about baseball in The New York Times:  in the magazine was Bruce Schoenfeld's "Can the Emergence of a High-Tech Tool Bring Baseball's Statistical Revolution to Fielding" and in the sports section was Bill Pennington's "A Team's Cursed Century Warrants a Proven Savior."  The first article was about an attempt to analyze fielding, the second was about Theo Epstein's attempt to win a World Series with the Chicago Cubs.

To a certain extent these articles contradict each other.  Statcast, part of Major League Advanced Media, is attempting to analyze fielding by using a radar system combined with three high-definition cameras to record every play in baseball.  The biggest problem is that even a routine ground-ball to the shortstop produces the equivalent of 21,000 rows on a spreadsheet.  How to analyze all this data is the problem.  So far baseball statistics have focused on hitting -- which is quantifiable --and have not been particularly successful with fielding, using such dubious statistics as "range-factor."  Everyone agrees that preventing an opponent's run is as important as scoring your own but no one has figured out how to analyze individual fielding.

Meanwhile Theo Eptein, who engineered the 2004 Boston Red Sox championship, is now the general manager of the Chicago Cubs, which this year had the best record in baseball, thanks to the 22 members of the team that have gradually been acquired by Epstein.  Certainly Epstein is aware of what Billy Beane was able to do in Oakland (read Michael Lewis's Moneyball), though Oakland has not been to the World Series since 1989, but Epstein in Chicago has had the advantage of patience (the Cubs have not won the World Series since 1908) and a bigger budget.  And Epstein has learned that statistics do not tell you everything when you are dealing with human beings.  Epstein's scouts are required to ask possible prospects about three times they have faced adversity on the field and three times they have faced adversity off the field.  As one scout said, "we are scouting the person more than the player" and as Epstein has pointed out, "baseball is built on failure;" even the best players fail seven out of ten times.

As umpiring decisions are being second-guessed by machines I applaud Epstein for realizing that players are human and cannot be totally defined by their statistics, only one of the important elements in the success of an individual player and of a baseball team that plays a grueling season of 162 games.

Turner Classic Movies Oct. 2016

This month there are political and horror films, with the possibility of a political horror film to be made from this year's Presidential election.  For politics the two best films are Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent, 1962, on the 19th and John Ford's The Last Hurrah,1958, on the 26th.  Preminger's film is a masterful use of widescreen black-and-white while Ford's film is an intelligent examination of the passing of power in a big city.  Both films use older character actors and stars to summon up not only the changing elements of Washington but also of Hollywood.

For horror the best films are those of producer Val Lewton and British director Terence Fisher, the best of the Hammer Film directors.  My favorite Lewton is  The Seventh Victim, showing on the 22, directed by Mark Robson in 1943, about civilized devil-worshippers in Greenwich Village.  For an analytical and historical view of Lewton I recommend Joel Siegel's Val Lewtom:  The Reality of Terror (Viking, 1973).  My favorite Fisher this month is The Devil's Bride, 1968, showing on Halloween.  Fisher did a great deal to breathe new life, so to speak, into Dracula and Frankenstein.  David Pirie's A New Heritage of Horror:  The English Gothic Cinema (L.B. Tauris, 2008) has an excellent chapter devoted to Fisher.

Other films this month I like include:
Buster Keaton's The Cameraman (1928), beautiful and funny, on Oct 4

On the 5th are two corrosive views of America:  John Huston's Wise Blood, 1979, from the Flannery O'Connor novel, and Phil Karlson's expose/film noir The Phenix City Story,1955.

On the 6th is Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) and Alfred Hitchcock's topical Foreign Correspondent, 1940, with production design by William Cameron Menzies.

On the 8th is Tod Browning's bizarre Unknown, one of several bizarre films by this director in October.

On the 9th is George Cukor's The Marrying Kind, 1952, a film unusual in its subject of marriage in the working class.

10th:  Nicholas Ray's rich and complex Bitter Victory, 1957, followed on the 11th by Roberto Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis, 1956.

The 13th has Anthony Mann's terrific film noir Raw Deal, 1948 and Citizen Kane, 1941, which never totally reveals its mysteries no matter how many times one sees it.

On the 14th is Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers,1966, both scary and funny.

On the 16th is Chaplin's The Great Dictator, 1940, moving and funny, and two interesting variations on Frankenstein by Terence Fisher:  The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957, and The Revenge of Frankenstein, 1958

On the 17th is Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings, 1939, probably the best civilian aviation film, and Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blonde, 1941, a lovely valentine about Walsh's youth.

On the 19th is Edgar Ulmer's Detour, an intensive film noir made on a shoestring and on the 21st is Georges Franju's mysterious and beautiful Eyes Without a Face, 1960.

On the 23rd are two stylish and elegant comedies:  Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve, 1941, and Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride, 1950.

The 25th has Gordon Douglas's marvelously pulpy I Was a Communist for the FBI, 1951, and on the 27th is Ernst Lubitsch's brilliant version of Noel Coward's Design for Living, 1933,as rewritten by Ben Hecht

And the 29th has Howard Hawks's clever science fiction film The Thing from Another World, 1951

American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin

Jeffrey Toobin, in American Heiress:  the wild saga of the kidnapping, crimes and trial of Patty Hearst (Doubleday, 2016), points our that there were 2,000 bombings a year in the United States in 1972,1973, 1974(the year Patty Hearst was kidnapped), with more than twenty people killed each year.  Thomas Nagel, in his review of Richard English's Does Terrorism Work? ("London Review of Books," 8 September 2016) says that all the terrorists mentioned "failed in their main aims."  In 1970 I had to go to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn for my draft physical because the Whitehall St. draft facility had been bombed. There have always been disgruntled -- for various reasons -- bombers in this country.  The particularly odd thing about the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), who kidnapped Patty Hearst, is they did not seem to have any but the vaguest goals and never consisted of more than ten people.

Toobin (whose excellent book on O.J. Simpson I wrote about on 6/25/16) follows the Patty Hearst case in fascinating detail, giving us particulars about all the participants in a period when the "counterculture" was on its way out and feminism and black power were on the way in.  Patty Hearst was in rebellion against her wealthy parents and eventually succumbed to the half-baked Marxism of her kidnappers, participating in a bank robbery for which she was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Of course it helps if one has wealthy and powerful parents and so Patty Hearst received a commutation from Jimmy Carter and a pardon from Bill Clinton and has been living happily ever after, married to her former bodyguard (who died  in 2013) and, as Toobin says, "she did not turn into a revolutionary, she turned into her mother."

New York City Ballet: Sept. 25, 2016

Yesterday the NYC Ballet performed three ballets by George Balanchine and the theatre was packed.  I think Peter Martins has finally realized that ballets by Christopher Wheeldon and Martins himself are not going to draw much attention from many of us and Martins has therefore been making more effort than usual to keep Balanchine's ballets in good shape, at least until the next choreographer of genius comes along.  Yesterday showed three of the many sides of Balanchine:  the classical, the modern/austere, the romantic.

First on the program was the classical Divertimento No. 15, to the music of Mozart.  Choreographers have tended to avoid Mozart, the music so overwhelmingly beautiful that the dance cannot live up to it.  In the case of Balanchine's piece we have an elegant tribute to Mozart and the courtliness of the 18th century. Chase Finlay and Megan Fairchild in particular stood out for their precision and speed in the "theme and variations" and the "minuet" was an impressive interpretation of the period as seen through modern eyes.  As he often does, Balanchine showed dancers alone, in pas de deux, in trios and in groups.  Arlene Croce says that this is "a chamber ballet that has the scale and sweep of five Sleeping Beautys."

Episodes was next on the program.  This was part of a joint choreographic effort by Martha Graham and Balanchine in 1959 and New York City Ballet now just performs the Balanchine part to the modern music of Anton von Webern.The first three parts are very much in a style similar to Balanchine's Stravinsky and Hindemith ballets, with much intertwining and use of flexed feet, which I have always thought was to encourage audiences to notice pointed feet.  The last part, "Ricercata in six voices from Bach's Musical Offering," was powerfully ritualistic, with Sara Mearns and Russell Janzen seeming like dancers from some lost religion.  My teenage son thought this ballet was "too minimalist," which of course was one of the things I liked about it, while my wife Susan thought it was "mechanical" in the manner of science fiction of the time (1959)

Vienna Waltzes was last on the program.  I remember what a sensation this ballet was when it premiered in 1977; demand was so great one couldn't get a ticket for love or money.  Arlene Croce wrote "Vienna Waltzes seems to come from within.  Balanchine is Viennese because he is inside the music."  My five-year-old daughter loved this piece from the very beginning, when women in pink fondant gowns danced in the woods with soldiers to the music of Johann Strauss II.  The second part was the only part done on point (which is probably part of why many who are not crazy about ballet like this one), an energetic dance, with many wonderful leaps, again to the music of Strauss.  The third part is "Explosions-Polka," again with Strauss music, slightly on the comic side, with the men sliding through the women's legs. Next came "The Gold and Silver Waltz", music by Franz Lehar, with Chase Finlay and Lauren Lovette in the roles of mystery originally danced by Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins.  The final part was music from Ricard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, with Teresa Reichlen, in the role originally danced by Suzanne Farrell, dancing alone and then with partner Jared Angle and then with many swirling couples, in a dazzlingly full ballroom, which reminded one of the ballroom in Lubitsch's film The Merry Widow (1934). My daughter particularly liked the flowing white gowns in this part and Susan made the intelligent observation that each part represented a season, not only on the calendar but in the lives of the dancers.

Frank Tashlin's The Good Humor Man, 1950, directed by Lloyd Bacon

The Good Humor Man was one of an American trilogy that Frank Tashlin  wrote and Lloyd Bacon directed in 1949 and 1950, along with Kill the Umpire and Miss Grant takes Richmond.  I have written about Tashlin previously  (March 26, 2016; April 11, 2014; Oct. 22, 2015) and it's clear that these three films were elegantly written but routinely directed by journeyman Lloyd Bacon, who had been directing since the 20's.  Tashlin, a former animator, decided he had to direct in order to see that his screenplays were properly handled, just as Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges had already done. The Good Humor Man has many Tashlin elements, including comic books, children-to-the-rescue, baseball references  and cops-and-robbers played for drama as well as humor.  Jack Carson plays a Good Humor man who stumbles into a robbery and, along with Lola Albright, whose sexual-harassing boss is the leader of the criminal gang, and a bunch of kids from the Captain Marvel club of which Carson is a member, they manage to chase the crooks into a school, which is pretty much destroyed in the fighting,  The crooks are finally subdued as the kids come to the rescue with baseballs, baseball bats and pie-throwing.  The build-up to the finale is slow and the final battle is marred somewhat by speeded up motion, obvious stunt doubles and exaggerated movement, all things that Tashlin would use to better and more subtle effect in the films he directed.

Jack Carson, who was better as a supporting player in such films as Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blond, 1941, where James Cagney played a Biff, Carson's name in The Good Humor Man, and Lola Albright, later the girlfriend of Peter Gunn in the 1958 to 1961 TV show, play an effective team, subduing the bad guys by working together, something more common in films of this period than today.  And there is considerable sexual confusion, as Carson "spends the night" with bad girl Bonnie Conroy while wearing one of her dresses (so the robbers can use his uniform and truck to sneak into a payroll office) and later interrupts a honeymoon night by posing as the husband (he's trying to find out what happened in the house where he stayed the night).  Carson is unsure whether he belongs more with Lola Albright or with the kids in the comic book club, ending up with both.

Elmer the Great 1933

The Cubs were swept by the Yankees in the 1932 World Series, so in 1933 Ring Lardner wrote a movie (it had originally been a play,  written by Lardner and George M. Cohan) in which the Cubs win the Series over the Yankees in seven games, with the help of Elmer, played by Joe E. Brown, who is remembered today, if at all, as Osgood Fielding III, with the memorable last line of Billy Wilder's Some Like  It Hot (1959).  Brown was actually something of a star in the 30's, mostly in B pictures aimed at rural audiences. In Elmer the Great he is lured out of Indiana to play for the Cubs when the woman he loves pretends to spurn him so he will take advantage of the opportunity.  Brown plays something of a hick who ends up outsmarting the gamblers who try to trick him into throwing the World Series.  Lardner was an important Chicago baseball writer and novelist who felt betrayed by the 1919 Chicago Black Sox and this film is in some ways an attempt to get even (director John Sayles played Larder in Sayles's 1988 film Eight Men Out).

I did not find Brown particularly appealing as Elmer, and he wasn't helped by Mervyn LeRoy's somewhat slack direction (LeRoy is remembered today mostly for producing, especially The Wizard of Oz in 1939, though he did direct quite a few films).  There is not much baseball actually shown in the film but there is at least one funny bit:  it rains ands the Yankees hit a ball to Brown when the bases are loaded and he takes a long time to find it in the mud.   The film does have a number of definite pleasures, mainly the effective use of the slang of the period --"Imagine a crossroads apple-knocker high-hatting the Chicago Cubs!" -- and an impressive array of skillful character actors, including Sterling Holloway as a resident of Indiana (he played a similar role in the Mitch Leisen-Preston Sturges film Remember the Night, 1940), Frank McHugh, Russell Hopton, Berton Churchhill and others.

In Elmer the Great the Cubs win the World Series, which last actually happened in 1908, though this year they do have the best record in baseball and have already clinched their division.

11/22/63, written by Bridget Carpenter

11/22/63 was a superb and inventive book, written by Steven King, about time travel back to the 60's to save JFK from assassination.  Bridget Carpenter's eight-hour film version, originally shown on Hulu and now available on DVD, makes a few necessary changes, which I am not crazy about:  particularly eliminating the first-person narrative, which gave us considerable insight into Jake Epping's thoughts and only let us see and know what he saw and knew. This could have been done with voiceover in the film -- one of the many pleasures of films of the forties -- but in this day and age it was probably necessary to expand a minor character into a companion of Jake's and also allow us to see Lee Harvey Oswald and his preparations for the fatal day.  Also, there is less time spent on Jake's enjoyment of the three years he has before the assassination (shortened from the book), as he gets pleasure out of teaching and the music and dancing of the period (the detailed production design is by Carol Spier).  His courtship of Sadie (touchingly played by Sarah Gadon; James Franco is Jake) is intensely romantic, setting us up for the sad result.  King has added the interesting idea of when one tries to change the past "the past pushes back" and we see this happening constantly.  There is even the suggestion that Jake's intervention made things worse, similar to what happened in Jack Fiinney's Time After Time (1995) in an attempt to save the Titanic.

One of the many pleasure of this series (J.J. Adams was a producer and there were six different directors) is the use of veteran actors.  I particularly liked Annette O'Toole and, especially, Constance Towers, who plays Sadie as an old lady after Jake resets time and he and Sadie never meet in the past.  Towers was in two films by Samuel  Fuller (The Naked Kiss,1964 and Shock Corridor, 1963) as well as two by John Ford (Sergeant Rutledge, 1960 and Horse Soldiers, 1959) so there is a logic to have her, in a sense, represent the past.

This is an unusual case of a good book made into a good film, possible only because of the increased flexibility in the amount of time one can now devote to a film on various platforms such as Netflix and Hulu.

The Aspern Papers by Henry James (1888)

I don't know why it happened that on this occasion I was more than ever struck with the queer air of sociability, of courtship and family life, which makes up half the expression of Venice.  Without streets and vehicles, the uproar of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an immense collective apartment, in which Piazzo San Marco is the most ornamented corner, and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses of decoration.
---Henry James, The Aspern Papers, 1888

It seems that not many people are reading Henry James today:  is he found to be outdated, irrelevant or just too slow.  He has written some of the most intelligent works about Americans and their relationship to Europe, but perhaps many people today don't care about American and Europe in the 19th C., no matter how much one can gain an historical perspective therein.  Also, the art of reading fiction in general seems disappearing.  The Aspern Papers was originally published in serial form in The Atlantic, a publication that gave up publishing fiction in 2005. I first read Nabokov in Playboy in the sixties, though I doubt that they, or anyone other than The New Yorker, publish any serious fiction these days. I recommend The Aspern Papers, a short novel (novella?) to those who want to try Henry James's exquisite style without venturing to the longer novels.  It has a simple plot and few characters, one of the main characters, in a way, being the city of Venice, Italy.  A writer is trying, by hook or by crook, to get access to the papers of a great poet, Jeffrey Aspern, rumored to be in the possession of an elderly lover of the deceased poet and her niece.  The old woman dies and the niece says she will give the narrator the papers if he will marry her.  He hesitates and the niece burns the papers.

Not much else happens in the book, as the unnamed narrator travels in and about Venice and thinks things over and tries to come up with schemes to get access to the papers, even paying an outrageous sum to live with the old woman and her niece, who never venture out of their home.  The writing is precise and detailed, as the narrator muses on Aspern and travels about Venice.  He ends up with a small portrait of Jeffrey Aspern and says "When look at it I can scarcely bear my loss -- I mean of the precious papers."

Chaplin: A Dog's Life (1918) and Modern Times (1936)

I once thought Chaplin appealed to everyone, though perhaps in different ways and at different levels.  My five-year-old daughter loved A Dog's Life (a short film)but did not much care for Modern Times (feature length), somewhat changing my view.  Though A Dog's Life has some dubious moral elements they are not emphasized the way they are in Modern Times, when Chaplin shows a darker and more complex side.  In A Dog's Life Chaplin and Edna Purviance escape the evil city and become successful farmers by using stolen money and that is seen as okay, since they stole the money from muggers who stole it from a rich dipsomaniac, as the class element continues to emerge in Chaplin's films.  Chaplin also steals food from a pushcart vendor and inadvertently wrecks a fruit stand while saving a dog being picked on by other dogs.  The cops are seen as fair game and Chaplin escapes them regularly, by kicking them in the butt, untying their shoes and creating chaos and confusion.  My daughter thought this was "very funny and very beautiful" and she is correct:  Chaplin moves with beauty and grace as he rescues a dog and then rescues a woman who is being forced into a job as a B-girl (is that expression for a woman who works for the house and encourages men to buy drinks still used?) and even stealing food is funny, with Chaplin timing it precisely, stealing and eating while the vendor looks away for a split second.

Modern Times is a much darker film, emphasizing unemployment and political oppression.  My daughter did not like that Chaplin kept getting thrown in jail, the first time when he mistakenly picks up a red flag and is accused of leading a bolshevist mob.  He gets out because he gets accidentally high on cocaine and foils a jailbreak.  Meanwhile he hooks up with "the gamine," played by Paulette Goddard, who sees her father killed by cops trying to break up a strike.  Even the funniest scene, of a feeding machine on an assembly line (it saves time), my daughter found somewhat distressing when the machine shorts out and dumps food on Chaplin while he is confined in the machine.  Chaplin made this film while he was struggling with the advent of sound and used some sound in the film, though when he himself spoke it was to sing a nonsense song (which my daughter did not understand at all), as he lost the lyrics he had written on his cuffs. 

When Chaplin began directing full-length films he had total control, even to owning his own studio, and he began to address serious social issues in a way he could not when he was an actor for hire.  The sound films have much brilliant comedy in them, but they are serious and even sad  in a way that the short films are not. I think my daughter will eventually like and enjoy the complexity of Modern Times, City Lights, The Circus, The Gold Rush but for now I think we may stick with the earlier shorts.

Irving Reis's The Falcon Takes Over

The Falcon Takes Over (RKO, 1942) is an okay B detective story, based on Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely (1940), before Chandler became well known.  It has crisp photography by George Robinson, who did many B movies, and an impressive cast of character actors, my favorite being Ann Revere, later a victim of the blacklist, as an inebriated housewife trying to keep a secret.  The direction by Irving Reis is relatively impersonal but the biggest problem with the film is that, like many B pictures, it tries to appeal to every part of the audience:  beautiful women for the men, suave George Sanders for the women, somewhat goofy cops and sidekicks for the children.  The film runs a brisk 65 minutes and can accommodate only a small part of Chandler's original story and the tone is too light for his dark vision.  Two years later Edward Dmytryk used the same story for Murder My Sweet, with Dick Powell, and Dick Richards made it again in 1975 with Robert Mitchum; both of these were closer to the original story but suffered from relatively uninspired direction.  There are, of course, other films of Chandler's novels  but none effectively capture his bleak and fatalistic view of Los Angeles.

Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

Emma complained that he cared more for the women he imagined than for any real woman.
-- Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (The Penguin Press, 2007)

Emma was Thomas Hardy's first wife, from whom he was psychologically estranged most of her life. When she died Hardy remarried, at the age of 74, and spent time writing poetry about Emma and how sorry he was that their love did not last.  Hardy became quite wealthy from writing novels but turned to poetry when Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) were attacked as vulgar and pessimistic.  I have come to reading Hardy late in life, perhaps, to his credit, because his novels don't fit into any neat category:  too Victorian and Edwardian for many readers, too modern for others, though some of his novels continue to be made into movies.

One won't learn from Tomalin's book how to appreciate Hardy's rich and complex novels.  She does have intelligent interpretations of the books and the poetry but ultimately her book is a biography and not a work of literary criticism.  Hardy did not attend university and started out as an architecture clerk; suddenly he decided to write and worked hard at it, even though he had to pay to have his first two novels --Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) -- published.  They sold well enough so that he became a full-time writer, publishing a new novel every year or two for the next twenty-six years.  I've often said that I read biographies to see if there are any secrets to artistic and personal success and it often comes down to the same things that helped make Hardy successful:  perseverance and hard work.

If you are not familiar with Hardy's novels I suggest you read them before you read Tomalin's book, intelligent and witty as it is.  Tomalin will tell you a great deal about life in London and Dorset during Hardy's lifetime but one can only learn about Hardy and his thoughts --fatalistic, class conscious, interested in the bright and dark sides of nature -- in his beautifully written novels and poetry.

Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2016

Last year I took the course on film noir, through TCM.  This year they are offering a course in "slapstick;" see their website if you are interested.  I tend not to use the term "slapstick" because it causes too many people to think of the most primitive comedy, from Mack Sennett to The Three Stooges.  If one simply means physical comedy I have no problem with that, since I like the physical comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, Preston Sturges and Blake Edwards, all of whom use physical comedy as choreography, for its beauty. Tuesday and Wednesdays are "slapstick" days at TCM this month:  proceed at your own risk.

On Sept.1 there are six Preston Sturges comedies, my own favorite is the elegant and witty The Lady Eve (1941), with Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck.

On September 2 is Robert Rossen's intense Lilith (1964), in which residents of an insane asylum debate Dostoevsky, and John Ford's Stagecoach,an important Western.

On the 4th is Jacques Tourneur's darkly beautiful film noir Out of the Past (1947)

On the 5th are three great films that were meant to be seen in theatres and lose something on the small screen: D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956).

On the 6th are the early comedies of Mack Sennett, Max Linder and Fatty Arbuckle, all worth a look.
Also included are three marvelous comedies from 1928, the end of the silent era:  Chaplin's The Circus, Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Lloyd's Speedy.

On the 10th is Raoul Walsh's Colorado Territory (1949), his remake of High Sierra (1941) as a Western.

On the 16th is Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not (1944), from the Hemingway story and Arthur Penn's mysterious Night Moves (1975)

Two heirs of the silent comedians on the 20th and 21st --Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle (1958) and Blake Edwards's The Party (1968)

I've generally skipped over the movies that I have recommended in other posts, so please e-mail me if you have any questions about any of the films on Turner in Sept.

Alfred E. Green's Housewife (1934)

"There's no such a thing as friendship between a married man and a woman like Pat."
--Ann Dvorak in Housewife.
,
Housewife is a well-crafted and brisk entertainment (69 minutes) in the early Warner Brothers style.  Ann Dvorak plays George Brent's wife who pushes him to start his own advertising agency and, after he does, he takes up with copywriter Bette Davis (still a blonde, as she was in her earlier movies).  Brent tries to leave Dvorak but their young child is injured and the parents reconcile in divorce court.  The film makes good use of the regular Warner Brothers character actors -- Ruth Donnelly, John Halliday, Hobart Cavanaugh, et al. -- and is shot mostly in effective medium shots by cinematographer William Rees.  The scene that best combines satire with realism is a radio show that is totally inappropriate for one of Brent's clients; he was too busy with Bette Davis to oversee the show.

Ann Dvorak was a low-key actress and after her excellent start in Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) she fought --usually unsuccessfully -- for good parts, one of the few later ones being in Albert Lewin's The Private Affairs of Bel Ami  (1947).  Director Alfred Greene churned out routinely good films for WB in the thirties (my favorite of which is the complex and rich Union Depot,1932) and later turned to television. I have never understood the appeal, if any, of George Brent, but he did have a long career and was considered Bette Davis's favorite co-star, perhaps because his insipidness made her flamboyance stand out even more.

Housewife is not without irony. Ann Dvorak says to outsiders, at the beginning and the end of the film, that she is "just a housewife," though she has proven she is so much more, as she has made the necessary suggestions to fix a sponsor's radio show.

Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (1941)

In Renoir's films man's natural surroundings are almost always prominently featured, and it is this emphasis on man in his environment photographed by an unblinking camera that is the true precursor of neorealism.
--Andrew Sarris

When Renoir fled Paris after the Nazis marched in he was welcomed in Hollywood, where La Grande Illusion (1937) was known and admired.  It was thought that Renoir would do something "French" but instead he chose a script by Dudley Nichols, who had written films for John Ford, then in the Navy.  Swamp Water has many Fordian elements, including the actors Russell Simpson, John Carradine and Ward Bond (who plays a similar role -- a man who killed and blamed it on someone else --to his role in Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln,  1939) as well as a barn dance and the use of "Red River Valley" on the soundtrack.  But where Ford always emphasized the positive aspects of community and tradition Renoir emphasizes the individual and his and her struggles.  Keefer (Walter Brennan) was convicted of murder and fled to the swamps, where he hooks up with Ben (Dana Andrews) to trap together.  Keefer has acclimated himself to the swamp so that even when bitten by a cottonmouth he is able to will himself to be well, though Ben has already dug a grave for him.

Meanwhile the community on the edge of the swamp is full of hostilities and infidelities and tries to kill Ben when he brings Keefer's outcast daughter (Anne Baxter) to the barn dance. Ben finally convinces a witness to the murder, Jesse (played by Carradine) to confess, or else he will tell his father, Thursday (played by Walter Huston), that Jesse has been sneaking over to court Ben's stepmother.  Typically Renoir does not gives us any information about the murder itself, he is more interested in the people involved and their complex motives.  The swamp has been used often to represent hostile nature (King Vidor's Hallelujah, 1929, is one of my favorite examples) and in Renoir's film nobody can survive in it indefinitely; Keefer is freed from the swamp while the real killers are exiled there, one of them dying in quicksand.  It remains a question whether the community to which Keefer returns can be healed or whether the symbol of a skull on a cross with which the film opened will prevail.

Choo Choo Coleman RIP

Yesterday's Times had a pretty good obituary by Bruce Weber of Choo Choo Coleman, a catcher with "the original and woeful Mets."  Included are succinct quotes from Roger Angell --"he handles outside curve balls like a man fighting bees" and the story Ralph Kiner (one of the original Mets announcers) often told about the time he was interviewing Coleman and asked him, "What's your wife's name and what's she like?" and Coleman replied, "Her name is Mrs. Coleman -- and she likes me, Bub." 

There is one story about Coleman I particularly like, and that's how Mets manager Casey Stengel once said Coleman was the fastest catcher he ever saw going after passed balls.  For a while I used this quote as an example of how quickly people can fix their mistakes, but currently I don't use it because most people don't know what a passed ball is (it's when it's the catcher's fault that a pitch gets away from him and a runner advances; when it's the pitcher's fault it's considered a wild pitch.  They are not considered "errors" because of the frequency with which the pitcher and catcher handle the baseball).  Perhaps Weber thought this story was somewhat condescending --de mortuis nil nisi bonum -- but I think it more likely he thought the story would lose something if he had to explain what it meant.  One of the worst lingering effects of the steroid era is the emphasis on home runs and the lack of understanding about other more strategic ways to score runs.  I don't even tell the story anymore about Yogi Berra not running on a hit-and-run play ("I forgot") because so few people know what a hit-and-run play is: few players can execute it and therefore few managers use it.

We now seem divided between fanatic statisticians who use dubious stats (such as "wins above replacement") and the greater number of "fans" who not only cannot figure out batting average or earned run average but barely know they exist (needless to say, the three announcers in the television booth never explain these things, often because they don't know themselves and they're too busy talking about their own careers and where to go for dinner).  Baseball is like so many beautiful things in this world --I often compare it to ballet -- the more you know the more enjoyment you can get out of it.  If you want to be better acquainted with the basics I recommend Leonard Koppett's The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball.

Buster Keaton's Go West

Go West is one of Keaton's most endearing films.  It is unique as the only picture in which the comedian deliberately aimed at pathos; and though it is totally unexpected in him and he never tried it again to the same degree, he brings it off without the least embarrassment or mawkishness.
--David Robinson,,Buster Keaton (Indiana University Press, 1969)

Go West was the first Buster Keaton film I ever saw, when it was presented in 1970 by Henri Langlois at the Metropolitan Museum in a tribute to the French Cinematheque, as something of a preview to an outpost of the Cinematheque Francais scheduled to be built in New York which, alas, never happened.   It is a lovely film and something of a parody of Chaplin, as Keaton falls for the charm of a cow and rescues it from slaughter.  When Keaton saves a train of cows from bandits the boss offers him whatever he wants.  He says "I want her," meaning not the boss's daughter but the cow, Brown Eyes, and they ride off in a motorcar together.

There are many wonderful gags in the film, including a battle with barrels on the train west; trains play an important part in a number of Keaton films and he usually battles machines to victory.  There are also scenes where Keaton is repeatedly late to the ranch's dinner, arriving just as the food is gone and the hands are leaving, until finally he arrives immediately at the dinner bell, eats rapidly and heartily and then leaves when everyone else arrives. As the cows stampede through Los Angeles, scaring people out of stores and barber shops and led by Keaton wearing a red devil suit, it becomes clear that most people do not want to know where their steak comes from.

I find Keaton a marvelous minimalist performer, expressing much more by not smiling than many do by facial contortions (in The General, 1926, Keaton expresses worry and concern with just an eye that shows through a hole in a tablecloth).   In Go West a cowboy says "smile when you say that" and the best Keaton can do is move his lips with his hands, just as Lilian Gish did in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms in 1919.  Whether one finds Keaton funny or not is subjective, but he is beautiful to watch for what he does with his face and his body, sometimes an acrobat, sometimes a dancer.

It is interesting to speculate what Keaton might have done in the sound era, if he had not done himself in with his personal problems and his contract with M-G-M; Chaplin and Harold Lloyd warned him against giving up his independence.  I am not one of those who thinks Chaplin's sound films are inferior to his silent films and I think Limelight (1952) is one of Chaplin's greatest achievements; Buster Keaton's appearance in that film suggests the unfulfilled possibilities that sound might have offered him.  Daniel Moews says in his book Keaton (University of California Press, 1977) that in Keaton's films "perfection was instantly achieved and firmly held, but it was a static perfection.  It led nowhere."  Perhaps this is true, but we still have Keaton's wonderful work, which I saw in total at the Elgin Theatre in New York in the 70's, lovingly restored with the help of Raymond Rohauer.

Max Allan Collins's Better Dead.

How could the CIA be in bed with the mob?  What lunacy is this?
--Max Allan Collins, Better Dead (Tom Doherty Associates, 2016).

This is the eighteenth in Collins's series about private detective Nate Heller.  These books vary somewhat in quality but, in general, they are impressive historical re-creations.  Heller gets involved with every thing from the Lindbergh kidnapping (Stolen Away, 1992) to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. (Flying Blind,1999).  In Better Dead Heller is something of a double agent, working for Joseph McCarthy while reporting to Dashiell Hammett and investigating the death of scientist Frank Olson while trying to recover the CIA file on Joe McCarthy.

At various points I have studied the cases and their times that Heller investigates and Collins seamlessly integrates Heller with real people and places.  He perhaps is too influenced by Mickey Spillane -- every woman who meets Heller wants to sleep with him, including the "notorious" Bettie Page, and the violence is laid on rather thickly, though I enjoyed Heller punching out the slimy Roy Cohn in the men's room of The Stork Club for getting Frank Costello to sic his goons on Heller.  Heller brings the people and places of the 50's alive -- including Robert Kennedy, who worked for McCarthy's Senate committee --without significantly deviating from the facts.  Heller even has jailhouse interviews with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who may have actually passed secrets to the Soviets but whose roles were exaggerated by prosecutor Roy Cohn, using faked evidence.

Collins includes a nicely detailed bibliography at the end for those interested.

Kent Jones's film Hitchcock/Trufaut (2015)

If the film Hitchcock/Truffaut does nothing other than alert people to the book of the same name (Simon and Schuster, 1967) it will have proven useful.  The book came out at a time when Americans had begun to appreciate the artistry of Hitchcock's films as well as their entertainment value, though some of us have always found movies, books et al. not to be entertaining if they are meretricious, i.e., entertainment does not exist without artistry.. In any case, the full-length book came out at a propitious time, the same time (late 60's) as Robin Wood's important Hitchcock's Films (A.S. Barnes and Company, 1965) and Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema (The University of Chicago Press, 1968) appeared with detailed appreciations of Hitchcock's films.  The French were somewhat ahead of us, but Chabrol and Rohmer's book about Hitchcock, though published in 1957, was not translated until 1992.

Kent Jones's film, like Truffaut's book, concentrates mostly on the technical aspects of Hitchcock's work and the all-male commentators (Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich et al.) do not address the misogyny of Hitchcock's films, which I have always found to appeal more to men than women, or the complex issues surrounding the manipulation of his audience.  It's interesting looking at the excerpts in Jones's film and see how Hitchcock changed the roles of women from his British films, such as The Lady Vanishes (1938), to American films such as Vertigo (1958).

One can get a much deeper and better understanding and appreciation of Hitchcock simply by watching his films (which reveal more each time one sees them) and reading Truffaut's and Wood's books.

Josef von Sternberg's Thunderbolt (1929)

I made my first sound film, Thunderbolt, in 1929.  It was treated with respect at the box office, but, with one exception, not a single soul noticed my attempt to put sound into its popular relation with the image.
--Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (Martin Secker and Warburg Limited, 1967).

Thunderbolt, like von Sternberg's earlier Underworld (1927) became something of a template for the many gangster movies that followed it.  George Bancroft plays a ruthless gangster whose heart is won by Fay Wray and a stray dog.  On his way to the electric chair Bancroft discovers that Wray's lover Richard Arlen, framed by Bancroft for murder, was Arlen's lover  before Bancroft arrived on the scene, and Bancroft walks calmly to his death.

Not only is Thunderbolt, like all von Sternberg films, a masterpiece of light and shadow, it is also innovative in its use of sound, adding sound outside the frame as a door opens or as a man walks to his death in the electric chair.  von Sternberg continued this use of sound in his later talkies, though only in his penultimate film, Anatahan (1954), did it reach the complexity of Thunderbolt.

von Sternberg is best-known for his films with Marlene Dietrich, starting with The Blue Angel in 1930, but in his earlier films (see my post about The Docks of New York, July 9 of this year) he portrays women in similar complicated and mysterious ways, as he does with Fay Wray in Thunderbolt, interrogated by the police as she sits above them, swathed in furs.  Thunderbolt also has an unusually sympathetic view of African-Americans, as musicians and patrons of a nightclub as well as convicts in prison.