Not as much to recommend as usual, as TCM starts its salute to the Oscars. There are some good things, though they are mainly Oscar nominees (for those few who may not have noticed: the Oscars seldom go to the best films).
Several John Huston films this month. As I have recently written, in my post Jan. 15 on The Man Who Would Be King, Huston's style now seems quite classic and his vision of those who fail -- not always through any fault of their own -- is uniquely personal. The Man Who Would Be King is showing on Feb. 6, The Maltese Falcon on the 19th, The Asphalt Jungle on Feb. 7, Under the Volcano and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean on the 21st, Night of the Iguana on the 25th.
On Feb. 3 is The Third Man, written by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed.
On the 4th is Sam Peckinpah's elegant but violent Western The Wild Bunch and Budd Boetticher's classic gangster film The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (which I have written about previously)
Raoul Walsh's White Heat, a corrosive film about violence and mother-love, is on Feb. 5 and his lovely and funny period film, The Strawberry Blonde, is on Feb. 29.
There are three stylish comedies directed by Lubitsch are on Feb.5: Heaven Can Wait, The Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant.
On Feb. 6 is Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, wonderful use of widescreen and color.
Feb. 10 is Jean Renoir's This Land of Mine, 1943, a film about the occupation in France, made by Renoir in Hollywood.
The 14th has Leo McCarey's Love Affair, his comedy of re-marriage The Awful Truth, and George Cukor's Adam's Rib, the best of the Tracy/Hepburn comedies.
The 15 has John Ford's Stagecoach and on the 18th is Vincente Minnelli's melancholic musical, Bandwagon.
On the 19th is Anthony Mann's T-Men, with cinematography by John Alton, a master of light and shadow.
On the 22nd is Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, with production design by William Cameron Menzies (TCM did a tribute to Menzies in January).
The 26th has Lubitsch's Ninotchka, written by Billy Wilder and containing a favorite joke of mine.
And on the 29th is Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings, 1939, the best civilian airplane film.
As always, please contact me if you want more information about any films that TCM is showing.
Friday, January 29, 2016
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Struggling With the Social Security Bureaucracy
No, this is not the name of a book, a ballet or a movie, just a reason why I have not been posting as much as I would like lately: I have been struggling with the Social Security bureaucracy in my attempts to get my children's benefits restored.
In 2013 I turned 66 and filed for social security. I was asked at the time I filed whether I had children under 18 and I said yes, I have two. They said each of them was entitled to $1000 a month until they turned 18, though originally they only received $750 a month in order to keep the total for the three of us at the maximum of $3500. I was told only that the money had to be used for the children's benefit, so we put the money in mutual funds for their eventual use in college. The children's benefits were sent with mine each month and in 2014 I filed copies of the mutual fund reports with Social Security. Then in 2015 I continued to put money in the mutual funds and when I filed my report that year I was told, by mail and phone, that the money had to be in federally insured accounts and the payments to the children were suspended. I promptly asked where that was in the Social Security laws and was cited Program Operations Manual System for SS PR 07240.035, regulations that apply to New York State and say nothing about requiring federally insured accounts (one can look them up online). Social Security kindly sent me a printed copy of "Kansas City Area Regulations" which does require a federally insured account!
At this point we decided to just move the children's money to federally insured savings accounts and we sent copies of that bank information. "return receipt requested," to Social Security offices in both Jamaica and Brooklyn, since we had heard from both offices, and included an appeal to restore the children's money. For a month we heard nothing and I could not reach anyone at Social Security who could tell us the status of our appeal. So then, in early January, it was time to contact Senator Chuck Schumer's office. In January 1996 we had taken Amtrak to Washington D.C. to see the Vermeer show at the National Gallery; we had tickets to the sold-out show. When we arrived in Washington the National Gallery was closed because of the snowstorm, which had just started when we left New York, and we pounded on doors of the Gallery, to no avail. So we turned around and went drearily back to New York, walking from Grand Army Plaza to Windsor Terrace because the F train, which goes aboveground, was no longer running. A couple of days later I called Chuck Schumer's office -- he was our Congressman at that time -- to see if there was anything he could do to get us tickets to the sold-out show. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do, though he did at least try (and eventually we saw all the Vermeers at shows here and in Holland, except for The View of Delft, which was in the US when we were in Holland and back to The Hague when we returned to America!)
I was by no means sure that Senator Schumer could help me with Social Security but his website has a form I filled out, detailing my struggles with SS. Two days later I received a call from Social Security to ask if I could fax them the information about the children's bank accounts. I said I had sent that information four times to two different addresses and her response was "well, maybe it's here somewhere but please fax it anyway to my attention," which I proceeded to do. Then I received an e-mail from Schumer's office asking if I had received that call from Social Security and I said "yes I have but I can't confirm that they have restored the money." So Schumer's office checked with their "source at SS" and wrote back to me that I should have the money restored this week; it is now in the bank! Schumer's office told me to contact them if I had any other problems with SS.
Interestingly, I had talked with a financial adviser and directly and indirectly with two different lawyers about my problems with Social Security and no one suggested contacting my elected representatives. I think many of us have become too cynical about Congress -- with good reason -- and the idea of "writing to your Congressman" has become rather a joke. But I strongly recommend one contact a Senator or Representative before one becomes enmeshed in the bureaucracy of a government agency.
In 2013 I turned 66 and filed for social security. I was asked at the time I filed whether I had children under 18 and I said yes, I have two. They said each of them was entitled to $1000 a month until they turned 18, though originally they only received $750 a month in order to keep the total for the three of us at the maximum of $3500. I was told only that the money had to be used for the children's benefit, so we put the money in mutual funds for their eventual use in college. The children's benefits were sent with mine each month and in 2014 I filed copies of the mutual fund reports with Social Security. Then in 2015 I continued to put money in the mutual funds and when I filed my report that year I was told, by mail and phone, that the money had to be in federally insured accounts and the payments to the children were suspended. I promptly asked where that was in the Social Security laws and was cited Program Operations Manual System for SS PR 07240.035, regulations that apply to New York State and say nothing about requiring federally insured accounts (one can look them up online). Social Security kindly sent me a printed copy of "Kansas City Area Regulations" which does require a federally insured account!
At this point we decided to just move the children's money to federally insured savings accounts and we sent copies of that bank information. "return receipt requested," to Social Security offices in both Jamaica and Brooklyn, since we had heard from both offices, and included an appeal to restore the children's money. For a month we heard nothing and I could not reach anyone at Social Security who could tell us the status of our appeal. So then, in early January, it was time to contact Senator Chuck Schumer's office. In January 1996 we had taken Amtrak to Washington D.C. to see the Vermeer show at the National Gallery; we had tickets to the sold-out show. When we arrived in Washington the National Gallery was closed because of the snowstorm, which had just started when we left New York, and we pounded on doors of the Gallery, to no avail. So we turned around and went drearily back to New York, walking from Grand Army Plaza to Windsor Terrace because the F train, which goes aboveground, was no longer running. A couple of days later I called Chuck Schumer's office -- he was our Congressman at that time -- to see if there was anything he could do to get us tickets to the sold-out show. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do, though he did at least try (and eventually we saw all the Vermeers at shows here and in Holland, except for The View of Delft, which was in the US when we were in Holland and back to The Hague when we returned to America!)
I was by no means sure that Senator Schumer could help me with Social Security but his website has a form I filled out, detailing my struggles with SS. Two days later I received a call from Social Security to ask if I could fax them the information about the children's bank accounts. I said I had sent that information four times to two different addresses and her response was "well, maybe it's here somewhere but please fax it anyway to my attention," which I proceeded to do. Then I received an e-mail from Schumer's office asking if I had received that call from Social Security and I said "yes I have but I can't confirm that they have restored the money." So Schumer's office checked with their "source at SS" and wrote back to me that I should have the money restored this week; it is now in the bank! Schumer's office told me to contact them if I had any other problems with SS.
Interestingly, I had talked with a financial adviser and directly and indirectly with two different lawyers about my problems with Social Security and no one suggested contacting my elected representatives. I think many of us have become too cynical about Congress -- with good reason -- and the idea of "writing to your Congressman" has become rather a joke. But I strongly recommend one contact a Senator or Representative before one becomes enmeshed in the bureaucracy of a government agency.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Making a Murderer, directed by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi
Making a Murderer runs for about 10 hours on Netflix and is, in many ways, a fascinating story about small-town America. I strongly recommend that if you watch it you also read Kathryn Schulz's piece in the Jan. 25 New Yorker, "Dead Certainty: How 'Making a Murderer' Goes Wrong." The two most important points that Schulz makes are that such a private investigative project answers to no one and that true-crime documentaries "turn people's private tragedies into public entertainment," hence the unwillingness of some who are involved to participate.
The main problem with a true-crime film -- even one ten hours long -- is in the selection of what you show and what you don't, what you tell the audience and what you withhold. A director can easily manipulate the sympathies of an audience by even such simple methods as showing the prosecutor quickly combing his hair before the judge starts the day. I have served on two criminal juries and I was surprised that Making a Murderer did not talk to any of the jury members after the two trials. It might have been useful for us to know what happened in the deliberations; if there was some reason they could not talk to the jury members or tell us anything about who was on the jury and how they were selected the directors did not inform us what that reason might be.
Making a Murderer takes place in Manitowoc County Wisconsin, where Steve Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey are on trial, separately, for the murder of Teresa Halbach. These trials take place only a few years after Avery has been freed from eighteen years in jail for a crime of which he is now, thanks to DNA, exonerated. Avery's lawyers try to claim that the evidence against him was planted by the sheriff's department because the sheriffs are being sued by Avery, but the defense case for a frame is as circumstantial as the prosecution's case against Avery. And sixteen-year-old Brendan Dassey is convicted almost exclusively on the basis of a confession -- one he claims was coerced when his mother and lawyer were not present. Dassey claims he made up the confession based on a book he read, possibly Kiss the Girls by James Patterson, though Dassey does not remember the author and the defense does not seem to take this any more seriously than the prosecution, perhaps because no one believes that the mentally impaired Dassey could read a book. This is one of many loose ends left dangling by the filmmakers.
Class conflict is not mentioned by Demos and Ricciardi but it is a strong element of their film. I grew up in a small town in New York state's Columbia county, not so different from Manitowoc, where it was largely due to happenstance who became a criminal and who went into law enforcement, where the lower class looked down on the even-lower class, those like the Avery family who ran a junkyard and lived in trailers. The prosecutor in the Dassey and Avery cases was later forced to resign for repeated sexual harassment, Avery's lawyers tried unsuccessfully to claim that he was framed -- rather than emphasizing possible reasonable doubt, Dassey's lawyers were either incompetent or trying, perhaps inadvertently, to help the prosecution.
It is unclear whether the filmmakers think that there is something wrong with our criminal justice system or whether they think it is the individuals who are operating it that are the problem. It is probably both, to some extent, though it is by no means clear how things can be fixed or improved so that we can be sure justice is achieved for everyone, regardless of race, class or IQ. Even a documentary film this long leaves much out. When one watches a documentary by Frederic Wiseman, for instance, there are no lives at stake and he is free to add or subtract whatever he thinks is appropriate to enhance his point of view. Making a Murderer is a riveting documentary but generally I prefer true-crime books that examine all sides in considerable detail: Jack Olsen's Doc, Peter Meyer's The Yale Murder, Joe McGinnis's Fatal Vision.
The main problem with a true-crime film -- even one ten hours long -- is in the selection of what you show and what you don't, what you tell the audience and what you withhold. A director can easily manipulate the sympathies of an audience by even such simple methods as showing the prosecutor quickly combing his hair before the judge starts the day. I have served on two criminal juries and I was surprised that Making a Murderer did not talk to any of the jury members after the two trials. It might have been useful for us to know what happened in the deliberations; if there was some reason they could not talk to the jury members or tell us anything about who was on the jury and how they were selected the directors did not inform us what that reason might be.
Making a Murderer takes place in Manitowoc County Wisconsin, where Steve Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey are on trial, separately, for the murder of Teresa Halbach. These trials take place only a few years after Avery has been freed from eighteen years in jail for a crime of which he is now, thanks to DNA, exonerated. Avery's lawyers try to claim that the evidence against him was planted by the sheriff's department because the sheriffs are being sued by Avery, but the defense case for a frame is as circumstantial as the prosecution's case against Avery. And sixteen-year-old Brendan Dassey is convicted almost exclusively on the basis of a confession -- one he claims was coerced when his mother and lawyer were not present. Dassey claims he made up the confession based on a book he read, possibly Kiss the Girls by James Patterson, though Dassey does not remember the author and the defense does not seem to take this any more seriously than the prosecution, perhaps because no one believes that the mentally impaired Dassey could read a book. This is one of many loose ends left dangling by the filmmakers.
Class conflict is not mentioned by Demos and Ricciardi but it is a strong element of their film. I grew up in a small town in New York state's Columbia county, not so different from Manitowoc, where it was largely due to happenstance who became a criminal and who went into law enforcement, where the lower class looked down on the even-lower class, those like the Avery family who ran a junkyard and lived in trailers. The prosecutor in the Dassey and Avery cases was later forced to resign for repeated sexual harassment, Avery's lawyers tried unsuccessfully to claim that he was framed -- rather than emphasizing possible reasonable doubt, Dassey's lawyers were either incompetent or trying, perhaps inadvertently, to help the prosecution.
It is unclear whether the filmmakers think that there is something wrong with our criminal justice system or whether they think it is the individuals who are operating it that are the problem. It is probably both, to some extent, though it is by no means clear how things can be fixed or improved so that we can be sure justice is achieved for everyone, regardless of race, class or IQ. Even a documentary film this long leaves much out. When one watches a documentary by Frederic Wiseman, for instance, there are no lives at stake and he is free to add or subtract whatever he thinks is appropriate to enhance his point of view. Making a Murderer is a riveting documentary but generally I prefer true-crime books that examine all sides in considerable detail: Jack Olsen's Doc, Peter Meyer's The Yale Murder, Joe McGinnis's Fatal Vision.
Friday, January 22, 2016
Ida Lupino's Never Fear 1949
Never Fear,1949, was the first of several low-budget melodramas directed by actress Ida Lupino, after which she turned to TV directing. Female directors were almost unknown in the sound era before Lupino started directing, though there were several in the silent period, including Lois Weber and Frances Marion, and Lupino paved the way for other women directors who (slowly) followed.
Never Fear is about a dancer (played by Sally Forrest) who is struck down by polio and her struggles to walk again and reconcile with her dancing partner (played by Keefe Brasselle). She tries to struggle alone and only reluctantly accepts help; Lupino uses Forrest's voiceover to capture her despair. She finally reluctantly accepts help from another patient, played by Hugh O'Brian (a Lupino discovery) and a highlight of the film is when O'Brian and Forrest square dance together in their wheelchairs.
While watching this film for the first time (it was shown on Turner Classic Movies recently as part of a tribute to MoMA film preservation) I could not help but think of Tanaquil Le Clercq, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who was partially paralyzed by polio in 1956, a year before Salk's polio vaccine became available; a movie about her, Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil le Clercq, is available from Netflix.
Lupino's film captures the struggle against polio, which Lupino herself had in 1934, though she made an almost complete recovery. One can't help but think that her battle against polio helped to inoculate her in her attempts to get film directing jobs in the male-dominated film industry.
Never Fear is about a dancer (played by Sally Forrest) who is struck down by polio and her struggles to walk again and reconcile with her dancing partner (played by Keefe Brasselle). She tries to struggle alone and only reluctantly accepts help; Lupino uses Forrest's voiceover to capture her despair. She finally reluctantly accepts help from another patient, played by Hugh O'Brian (a Lupino discovery) and a highlight of the film is when O'Brian and Forrest square dance together in their wheelchairs.
While watching this film for the first time (it was shown on Turner Classic Movies recently as part of a tribute to MoMA film preservation) I could not help but think of Tanaquil Le Clercq, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who was partially paralyzed by polio in 1956, a year before Salk's polio vaccine became available; a movie about her, Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil le Clercq, is available from Netflix.
Lupino's film captures the struggle against polio, which Lupino herself had in 1934, though she made an almost complete recovery. One can't help but think that her battle against polio helped to inoculate her in her attempts to get film directing jobs in the male-dominated film industry.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Samuel Fuller's The Crimson Kimono 1959
In Crimson Kimono Fuller uses the conventional police-thriller genre as a framework for a complex study of racialism
--Lynda Myles, Edinburgh Film Festival, 1969
"Love is a battle and someone has to get a bloody nose."
--Joe Kojaku in The Crimson Kimono.
Joe Kojaku is an outsider in two senses: a policeman and a Nisei, an American born of Japanese immigrant parents, a term not heard much any more. The Crimson Kimono is a low-budget and powerful film about assimilation and integration in modern America and Joe is at the center of it. In 1959 many states still had laws prohibiting whites from marrying anyone of a different race, including Asians, and Joe is struggling with his identity as he falls in love with the white woman his partner is courting, a woman they met in their investigation of the murder of a stripper. As in many Fulller films there are explosions of violence, not only physical but emotional, as the partners -- who live together and work together -- look for the murderer of Sugar Torch, who was working on an erotic Japanese-oriented strip act.
Much of the film was shot on location in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles and includes scenes in a Buddhist temple and a war memorial to Japanese Americans (Joe and his partner were in the Korean War together) as Joe struggles with his identity, blaming his partner Charlie for his own internal confusion and violating the rules of Kendo in his exhibition match with Charlie. There are many effective cameos of those who live and work in Little Tokyo, including karate experts, a Japanese nun, and an alcoholic artist and friend to the two policeman, beautifully played by Anna Lee.
The film begins with the murder of a stripper as she runs through the streets and ends with the murderer running through the streets during the Japanese New Year's festival, chased by the two policemen. The rough and pulpy exterior of Fuller's film conveys, underneath it, a sensitivity and an understated desire for everyone to find their own identity in a chaotic and emotional world.
--Lynda Myles, Edinburgh Film Festival, 1969
"Love is a battle and someone has to get a bloody nose."
--Joe Kojaku in The Crimson Kimono.
Joe Kojaku is an outsider in two senses: a policeman and a Nisei, an American born of Japanese immigrant parents, a term not heard much any more. The Crimson Kimono is a low-budget and powerful film about assimilation and integration in modern America and Joe is at the center of it. In 1959 many states still had laws prohibiting whites from marrying anyone of a different race, including Asians, and Joe is struggling with his identity as he falls in love with the white woman his partner is courting, a woman they met in their investigation of the murder of a stripper. As in many Fulller films there are explosions of violence, not only physical but emotional, as the partners -- who live together and work together -- look for the murderer of Sugar Torch, who was working on an erotic Japanese-oriented strip act.
Much of the film was shot on location in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles and includes scenes in a Buddhist temple and a war memorial to Japanese Americans (Joe and his partner were in the Korean War together) as Joe struggles with his identity, blaming his partner Charlie for his own internal confusion and violating the rules of Kendo in his exhibition match with Charlie. There are many effective cameos of those who live and work in Little Tokyo, including karate experts, a Japanese nun, and an alcoholic artist and friend to the two policeman, beautifully played by Anna Lee.
The film begins with the murder of a stripper as she runs through the streets and ends with the murderer running through the streets during the Japanese New Year's festival, chased by the two policemen. The rough and pulpy exterior of Fuller's film conveys, underneath it, a sensitivity and an understated desire for everyone to find their own identity in a chaotic and emotional world.
Friday, January 15, 2016
John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King 1975
In October of last year I wrote about Kipling's novella, The Man Who Would Be King, made into a movie by John Huston in 1975. It is an excellent example of how short stories can often make better sources for books than novels: in a movie from a novel you have to leave things out, in one from a short story you can add things in. Huston's film closely follows Kipling-- with a few minor exceptions-- and most of the dialogue is straight from the book. Huston was sixty-eight when he made this film and was looking to the past, not only the past of the British Empire but also his own past, when he had read and loved Kipling, trying for twenty-five years to make this film before he finally succeeded.
The film starts in 19th C. India, when two soldier/adventurers make their way to the remote country of Kafiristan in an attempt to seize power. They succeed, as one of them becomes king, and they loot the country of its gold. But Daniel Dravot (played by Sean Connery) decides he wants to marry and stay as king and god, son of Alexander the Great, so Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) decides to leave without him right after the wedding ceremony. But at the ceremony the bride bites Dravot and his bleeding reveals he is not a god after all, Dravot is killed and Peachy survives crucifixion, returning to Kipling to tell his tale (in the novella, but not the movie, he dies the next day).
This is another classic Huston tale of human accomplishment done in by greed and lust as well as fate, from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 through The Asphalt Jungle in 1951 to The Dead, 1987. What redeems Huston as a classic director is not just his choice of story or his direction of actors, but his quiet and unobtrusive visual style (Oswald Morris was the cinematographer on The Man Who Would Be King, as well as many other Huston films) and the knowledge of literature, art and history he brings to every movie he makes.
The film starts in 19th C. India, when two soldier/adventurers make their way to the remote country of Kafiristan in an attempt to seize power. They succeed, as one of them becomes king, and they loot the country of its gold. But Daniel Dravot (played by Sean Connery) decides he wants to marry and stay as king and god, son of Alexander the Great, so Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) decides to leave without him right after the wedding ceremony. But at the ceremony the bride bites Dravot and his bleeding reveals he is not a god after all, Dravot is killed and Peachy survives crucifixion, returning to Kipling to tell his tale (in the novella, but not the movie, he dies the next day).
This is another classic Huston tale of human accomplishment done in by greed and lust as well as fate, from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 through The Asphalt Jungle in 1951 to The Dead, 1987. What redeems Huston as a classic director is not just his choice of story or his direction of actors, but his quiet and unobtrusive visual style (Oswald Morris was the cinematographer on The Man Who Would Be King, as well as many other Huston films) and the knowledge of literature, art and history he brings to every movie he makes.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
The Way Some People Die by Ross Macdonald 1951
I re-read all of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald every few years. But I have not done so with Ross MacDonald (real name: Kenneth Millar), finding his novels a little thin when I originally read them. But I've been recently reading the letters between Ross MacDonald and Eudora Welty, rich in intelligence and observation, and decided it was time to return to Ross MacDonald's novels.
Mosquito wasted no money on front. The room stood as he had found it; bare discolored walls, broken-backed iron bed, cracked green blind over the single window, the rug on the floor marked with a threadbare path from the bed to the door of the bathroom. He could move at a minute's notice into any one of ten thousand similar rooms in the city
--Ross MacDonald, The Way Some People Die (Knopf, 1951)
The book is narrated in the first person by private detective Lew Archer, who is looking for a woman's daughter, Galatea Lawrence. The search takes him through some of the seediest parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco and he meets many shady characters: dope addicts, gangsters, grifters of all sorts. In MacDonald's novels everyone has a secret to conceal. Like the best genre writers MacDonald is expert at descriptions of everything from seedy motels to greasy spoons, where people on the fringes of society hide out. Little of Lew Archer's character is explored directly (he mentions that he was a cop and in the war) and we are given few of his thoughts; MacDonald rather gives vivid descriptions of the characters Archer meets, the places he goes, and their effect on him. When Archer first goes to meet Gatatea's mother in Santa Monica he says "the houses had too many stories, too few windows, not enough paint" and at the end, when he has to tell Galatea's mother that Galatea is guilty "The colored fanlight over the door washed her mother in sorrowful purple. She opened the door, and noon glared in on her face. The tear-tracks resembled the marks of sparse rain on a dusty road." Mrs. Lawrence is like many characters in MacDonald's world, unwilling to admit family secrets. Hammett's books exemplify the 30's, Chandler's the 40's, and Ross MacDonald's the 50's, when a placid exterior tried to conceal the deceit beneath it.
Mosquito wasted no money on front. The room stood as he had found it; bare discolored walls, broken-backed iron bed, cracked green blind over the single window, the rug on the floor marked with a threadbare path from the bed to the door of the bathroom. He could move at a minute's notice into any one of ten thousand similar rooms in the city
--Ross MacDonald, The Way Some People Die (Knopf, 1951)
The book is narrated in the first person by private detective Lew Archer, who is looking for a woman's daughter, Galatea Lawrence. The search takes him through some of the seediest parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco and he meets many shady characters: dope addicts, gangsters, grifters of all sorts. In MacDonald's novels everyone has a secret to conceal. Like the best genre writers MacDonald is expert at descriptions of everything from seedy motels to greasy spoons, where people on the fringes of society hide out. Little of Lew Archer's character is explored directly (he mentions that he was a cop and in the war) and we are given few of his thoughts; MacDonald rather gives vivid descriptions of the characters Archer meets, the places he goes, and their effect on him. When Archer first goes to meet Gatatea's mother in Santa Monica he says "the houses had too many stories, too few windows, not enough paint" and at the end, when he has to tell Galatea's mother that Galatea is guilty "The colored fanlight over the door washed her mother in sorrowful purple. She opened the door, and noon glared in on her face. The tear-tracks resembled the marks of sparse rain on a dusty road." Mrs. Lawrence is like many characters in MacDonald's world, unwilling to admit family secrets. Hammett's books exemplify the 30's, Chandler's the 40's, and Ross MacDonald's the 50's, when a placid exterior tried to conceal the deceit beneath it.
Friday, January 8, 2016
Larry Cohen's God Told Me To (1976)
I had barely finished writing about William Sloane's genre-expanding Rim of the Morning (posted Jan. 5) when Turner Classic Movies showed Larry Cohen's God Told Me To. Cohen has made horror movies, science fiction, and police procedurals (usually in the Blaxploitation style) but this film contains elements of them all. Tony Lo Bianco is the police detective who investigates a mass killing, the killer saying just before his suicide that he did it because "God told me to." Cohen is something of a guerilla filmmaker and his film captures all the beauty, seediness and entropy of 70's New York: bright colors and lots of litter. Cohen is a master of low-budget filmmaking, using newcomers and low-priced veterans for his cast; God Told Me To is probably the only film to use both Andy Kaufman (who plays a cop who starts shooting people at the St. Patrick's Day parade) and veteran Sylvia Sydney (who plays a woman who was mysteriously impregnated by an alien in 1951)
On a strictly narrative basis this films makes little sense, though I think that reflects one of its major points, i.e., that religion does not make any sense. Lo Bianco lives with his girlfriend because his Roman Catholic wife won't give him a divorce, though he still goes to mass almost every day. His search for the "god" that is telling everyone what to do brings him back to himself, his own mother and the nuns who put him up for adoption. In some ways the mass killings in this film reflect the time of uneasiness when the film was made but they also eerily anticipate the recent madness of killings for religious reasons.
One of Cohen's best films, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, was made right after God Told Me To and is as effective an expose of law enforcement as God Told Me To is of religion. The fact that both films are considered "schlocky" is as much a matter of an accurate portrayal of their subjects as it is of Cohen's style. Few things are as schlocky as the religious paintings and statues in Sandy Dennis's Long Island house in God Told Me To.
.
On a strictly narrative basis this films makes little sense, though I think that reflects one of its major points, i.e., that religion does not make any sense. Lo Bianco lives with his girlfriend because his Roman Catholic wife won't give him a divorce, though he still goes to mass almost every day. His search for the "god" that is telling everyone what to do brings him back to himself, his own mother and the nuns who put him up for adoption. In some ways the mass killings in this film reflect the time of uneasiness when the film was made but they also eerily anticipate the recent madness of killings for religious reasons.
One of Cohen's best films, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, was made right after God Told Me To and is as effective an expose of law enforcement as God Told Me To is of religion. The fact that both films are considered "schlocky" is as much a matter of an accurate portrayal of their subjects as it is of Cohen's style. Few things are as schlocky as the religious paintings and statues in Sandy Dennis's Long Island house in God Told Me To.
.
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Leo MCarey's An Affair to Remember; Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows.
Sirk's taste is exquisite and, hence, inimitable. One big objection to his oeuvre is an inbred prejudice to what Raymond Durgnat has called the genre of the female weepies as opposed to the male weepies, particularly the kind from Italy that are hailed as "humanist."
--Andrew Sarris
I was wondering as I watched Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1956) and McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957) last week, whether it is still considered "unmanly" to have feelings and show emotion. I think it still is, though perhaps less so now, and these films are still considered "soap operas;" though that term may mean different things to different people it is still usually meant as a putdown. I do think that some people laugh at these films because the feelings they evoke make some viewers uncomfortable; many cannot distinguish genuine sentiment from meretricious sentimentality. Nor can everyone distinguish between the emotional plots and the extremely beautiful use of color in these films, although as in many great films the two enhance each other. And the role that Christmas plays in both movies adds to the discomfort.
An Affair to Remember is McCarey's remake of Love Affair, a film he made in 1939 with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. What makes the later film particularly poignant is that the love affair is between Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, who are older and for whom this may be that last chance to marry and have children. As in the earlier film they plan to jettison their current partners, pursue financial independence and, if all goes well, meet at the top of the Empire State Building ("the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York," says Kerr) in six months. McCarey uses the widescreen format brilliantly as in two exquisite scenes a door opens to show an important reflection, once to Kerr and once to Grant, causing him to realize that Kerr never showed up because she was hit by a car when she was "looking up."
All That Heaven Allows stars Jane Wyman as a widow and Rock Hudson as her younger lover. These are not stars who resonate now in a positive way, unfortunately (especially Hudson) but Sirk directs them beautifully, contrasting Wyman's small town and socially constrained widow with Hudson's love of the outdoors. Sirk also has a feeling for the seasons, the physical beauty of the fall foliage and the winter snow, as well as a feeling for how two people so different in social standing and age can find common ground in a love of beauty. There is one particularly sad shot when Wyman's children get her a television and she looks at it, the television reflecting her unhappiness at how little her children understand what matters to her.
--Andrew Sarris
I was wondering as I watched Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1956) and McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957) last week, whether it is still considered "unmanly" to have feelings and show emotion. I think it still is, though perhaps less so now, and these films are still considered "soap operas;" though that term may mean different things to different people it is still usually meant as a putdown. I do think that some people laugh at these films because the feelings they evoke make some viewers uncomfortable; many cannot distinguish genuine sentiment from meretricious sentimentality. Nor can everyone distinguish between the emotional plots and the extremely beautiful use of color in these films, although as in many great films the two enhance each other. And the role that Christmas plays in both movies adds to the discomfort.
An Affair to Remember is McCarey's remake of Love Affair, a film he made in 1939 with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. What makes the later film particularly poignant is that the love affair is between Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, who are older and for whom this may be that last chance to marry and have children. As in the earlier film they plan to jettison their current partners, pursue financial independence and, if all goes well, meet at the top of the Empire State Building ("the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York," says Kerr) in six months. McCarey uses the widescreen format brilliantly as in two exquisite scenes a door opens to show an important reflection, once to Kerr and once to Grant, causing him to realize that Kerr never showed up because she was hit by a car when she was "looking up."
All That Heaven Allows stars Jane Wyman as a widow and Rock Hudson as her younger lover. These are not stars who resonate now in a positive way, unfortunately (especially Hudson) but Sirk directs them beautifully, contrasting Wyman's small town and socially constrained widow with Hudson's love of the outdoors. Sirk also has a feeling for the seasons, the physical beauty of the fall foliage and the winter snow, as well as a feeling for how two people so different in social standing and age can find common ground in a love of beauty. There is one particularly sad shot when Wyman's children get her a television and she looks at it, the television reflecting her unhappiness at how little her children understand what matters to her.
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Rim of the Morning by William Sloane
Nothing in life, I think, ordinarily happens in great, thunderous episodes of obvious and dramatic force.
--William Sloane, To Walk Back the Night
"Dick, this is too absurd. We're plotting together like a couple of characters in a B picture. It's all ridiculous somehow."
--William Sloane, The Edge of Running Water.
The estimable Edwin Frank of New York Review Books has brought out William Sloane's two books from the 30's in one volume, The Rim of Morning, as they were reissued in the 60's. These books are an unusual blend of science fiction, horror, and mystery and each is narrated in the first person by an outsider who is drawn into the eerie plots by a friend. In To Walk Back the Night two recent college graduates go to visit an old professor and watch in horror as he is consumed by a mysterious fire. One of the pair ends up marrying the dead professor's wife, who is extremely beautiful and extremely strange, and it all ends in suicide and violence in the desert. In The Edge of Running Water the narrator is a friend of a professor who is using mysterious means to contact his dead wife in an isolated house in Maine; the friend was also in love with the professor's wife and, while trying vainly to help his colleague, falls for the dead wife's sister.
As bizarre as these plots are, the books are narrated in a matter-of-fact way that makes them all the scarier. It takes quite some time for Berkely Jones in To Walk Back the Night to discover how strange his friend Jerry's new wife is, as he looks into her background and finds she has none at all. In The Edge of Running Water it takes some time for Richard Sykes to find out what his friend Julian Blair is up to, as the mysterious Mrs Walters runs interference and tries to keep Blair's work secret, work that gradually leads to violence and death. To Walk Back the Night captures the uneasiness one can feel about a friend's marriage and the difficulty of knowing the true history and personality of anyone. The Edge of Running Water is about how one deals with death and grief and about the impossibility of keeping anything secret in a small town. These books are rather frightening because they suggest that the distance between the routine and the horrible can be small indeed.
I think that both these books would make excellent films if they were in the hands of a great director, such as Alfred Hitchcock, who understood horror can exist at any time, or anywhere. Then I discovered Edward Dmytryk's film version of The Edge of Running Water, made under the title of The Devil Commands in 1940, which compresses all the detailed plot elements into a fairly typical "mad doctor" story. A better film version perhaps could have been made by Michael Curtiz, who in 1936 made The Walking Dead, a rather poignant story about a musician who was electrocuted for a murder he did not commit and was brought back to life by medical science. I think that today's audiences are perhaps too impatient to get to the sensationalism and don't care enough about the complexities and psychology of human behavior.
--William Sloane, To Walk Back the Night
"Dick, this is too absurd. We're plotting together like a couple of characters in a B picture. It's all ridiculous somehow."
--William Sloane, The Edge of Running Water.
The estimable Edwin Frank of New York Review Books has brought out William Sloane's two books from the 30's in one volume, The Rim of Morning, as they were reissued in the 60's. These books are an unusual blend of science fiction, horror, and mystery and each is narrated in the first person by an outsider who is drawn into the eerie plots by a friend. In To Walk Back the Night two recent college graduates go to visit an old professor and watch in horror as he is consumed by a mysterious fire. One of the pair ends up marrying the dead professor's wife, who is extremely beautiful and extremely strange, and it all ends in suicide and violence in the desert. In The Edge of Running Water the narrator is a friend of a professor who is using mysterious means to contact his dead wife in an isolated house in Maine; the friend was also in love with the professor's wife and, while trying vainly to help his colleague, falls for the dead wife's sister.
As bizarre as these plots are, the books are narrated in a matter-of-fact way that makes them all the scarier. It takes quite some time for Berkely Jones in To Walk Back the Night to discover how strange his friend Jerry's new wife is, as he looks into her background and finds she has none at all. In The Edge of Running Water it takes some time for Richard Sykes to find out what his friend Julian Blair is up to, as the mysterious Mrs Walters runs interference and tries to keep Blair's work secret, work that gradually leads to violence and death. To Walk Back the Night captures the uneasiness one can feel about a friend's marriage and the difficulty of knowing the true history and personality of anyone. The Edge of Running Water is about how one deals with death and grief and about the impossibility of keeping anything secret in a small town. These books are rather frightening because they suggest that the distance between the routine and the horrible can be small indeed.
I think that both these books would make excellent films if they were in the hands of a great director, such as Alfred Hitchcock, who understood horror can exist at any time, or anywhere. Then I discovered Edward Dmytryk's film version of The Edge of Running Water, made under the title of The Devil Commands in 1940, which compresses all the detailed plot elements into a fairly typical "mad doctor" story. A better film version perhaps could have been made by Michael Curtiz, who in 1936 made The Walking Dead, a rather poignant story about a musician who was electrocuted for a murder he did not commit and was brought back to life by medical science. I think that today's audiences are perhaps too impatient to get to the sensationalism and don't care enough about the complexities and psychology of human behavior.
Monday, January 4, 2016
Joseph Losey's M, 1951
Losey spent most of his career on commissioned projects that mixed melodrama with social significance.
-- Andrew Sarris
M was the last movie that Losey made in America; he was a victim of the House Committee on Un-American activities not because he was blacklisted or jailed but because America lost an effective observer and critic when Losey fled to Europe. M, a remake of Fritz Lang's art house favorite of the same name, from 1931, feels like Losey was just beginning to accomplish something.
M has a very modern feel, as parents are afraid for their children, with a child-murderer loose in Los Angeles whom the cops can't find, concerned as they are with using rubber hoses on suspects. Many citizens are acting as vigilantes, beating up any adult they see with a kid, the adult usually turning out to be a parent. In a nice piece of irony the child-murderer is caught by a syndicate of criminals, their gambling and vice rings being hampered by police harassment. The murderer is finally identified by a blind man, who sells a balloon to the same man playing a penny whistle who had bought a balloon for a girl who was murdered. The murderer is chased into the Bradbury Building (used effectively in a number of other films of the period, including D.O.A.in 1950) and put on "trial" by the criminals and relatives of the victims. The murderer begs to be punished for what he could not help doing but is left lying on the floor for the cops to pick up, receiving more sympathy from the criminals than from law enforcement that doesn't care about his illness.
Losey uses the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles for locations, a neighborhood of both families and loners, who live in old and decaying Victorian homes (director Robert Aldrich was an assistant on Losey's film and used the same location effectively in Kiss Me Deadly, 1955). The kids and minorities don't have a lot to do but jump to follow and help identify the murderer. It is as true now as it was then that the mentally disturbed do not get the help they need and this lack of help leads to tragedies, as Losey shows a table set for dinner while a mother searches the neighborhood for her missing child.
-- Andrew Sarris
M was the last movie that Losey made in America; he was a victim of the House Committee on Un-American activities not because he was blacklisted or jailed but because America lost an effective observer and critic when Losey fled to Europe. M, a remake of Fritz Lang's art house favorite of the same name, from 1931, feels like Losey was just beginning to accomplish something.
M has a very modern feel, as parents are afraid for their children, with a child-murderer loose in Los Angeles whom the cops can't find, concerned as they are with using rubber hoses on suspects. Many citizens are acting as vigilantes, beating up any adult they see with a kid, the adult usually turning out to be a parent. In a nice piece of irony the child-murderer is caught by a syndicate of criminals, their gambling and vice rings being hampered by police harassment. The murderer is finally identified by a blind man, who sells a balloon to the same man playing a penny whistle who had bought a balloon for a girl who was murdered. The murderer is chased into the Bradbury Building (used effectively in a number of other films of the period, including D.O.A.in 1950) and put on "trial" by the criminals and relatives of the victims. The murderer begs to be punished for what he could not help doing but is left lying on the floor for the cops to pick up, receiving more sympathy from the criminals than from law enforcement that doesn't care about his illness.
Losey uses the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles for locations, a neighborhood of both families and loners, who live in old and decaying Victorian homes (director Robert Aldrich was an assistant on Losey's film and used the same location effectively in Kiss Me Deadly, 1955). The kids and minorities don't have a lot to do but jump to follow and help identify the murderer. It is as true now as it was then that the mentally disturbed do not get the help they need and this lack of help leads to tragedies, as Losey shows a table set for dinner while a mother searches the neighborhood for her missing child.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)