Turner Classic Movies May 2016

Nothing much new, unusual or different this month, just a solid line-up of some good movies.

May 1 is Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933), Noel Coward improved by Ben Hecht. Elegant, funny, sexy.

May 2 is Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939) and Edgar Ulmer's Carnegie Hall (1947), mostly wonderful classical music performances from Rise Stevens, Arthur Rubinstein and many others, framed by a somewhat corny story.

May 4 has Fritz Lang's first American film, Fury (1936), about a lynching, and Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), production design by William Cameron Menzies.'

May 7 has Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939), about civilian flyers in South America and the 8th has Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing(1965), in beautiful wide-screen black-and white.  Also on the 8th is John Stahl's Imitation of Life, about tolerance and understanding (very different from the later Douglas Sirk version) and two complex and ambiguous films by Antonioni, L'Avventura (1960) and Blow-Up (1966).

On May 14 is Leo McCarey's moving and funny The Awful Truth (1937) and the 15th has Abel Gance's epic silent film La Roue (1922) and Max Ophuls's elegant La Ronde (1950).

May 18 has two good Westerns:  Gordon Douglas's Yellowstone Kelly (1959; I wrote about it on Nov.7, 2014) and Anthony Mann's Last Frontier (1956).  Sam Peckinpah's Vietnam-era Western The Wild Bunch (1969) is on May 20.

The 21st has one of the earliest films noir, Bill Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) and the 22nd has Jacques Demy's stylish Lola (1961).

On the 23rd is Gene Kelly's Tunnel of Love (1958), made from Peter De Vries's novel.  I prefer the novel (it's funnier) but Kelly knows how to move the cast and the camera.

The 25th has Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blonde (1941), a charming period piece and two of Frank Tashlin's best films, colorful satires of the fifties, The Girl Can't Help It (1956, with great music from the period) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957).

On the 27th is Anthony Mann's corrosive Men in War (1957) and John Ford's film of defeat and victory, They Were Expendable (1945).

The 29th and 30th have two of the best war films ever made, gritty and grim:  King Vidor's The Big Parade (1922), about WW I and Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma (1945), about WW II.

Agon by Jennifer Homans

Agon, a Ballet by Igor Stravinsky with Choreography by George Balanchine appears in the May 12, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books.  Jennifer Homans, who wrote the excellent Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet, is one of the few writers on ballet today who can bring intense insight to the art of ballet and can write about it without the subjective generalities or excessive technical terms of too many writers on the subject, especially now that Arlene Croce is not writing about ballet currently(and when is her long-delayed book on Balanchine going to appear?).

Agon had its premiere on Dec.1,1957 and looks very different now, with Balanchine no longer around.  It is no longer shocking for its music, its astounding choreography or its cast, with a white woman and a black man in the lead(originally Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell) and has now, as Homans puts it, "achieved the dubious status of a 'classic.'"  What Homans does, quite effectively, is describe not only the details of the ballet but the effect it had on the audience when it was first performed.  She is able to do this with a minimum of technical terms because it is one of the many astounding things about this ballet that it uses few standard ballet steps.  Yes, there is arabesque en point but there is also walking, bowing and running. One of the reasons it amuses me that many people find Stravinsky difficult to appreciate is that in Agon the way Balanchine uses the music enhances the complex beauty of not only the choreography but the music itself. 

Thanks to Homans I hope I can stop taking Agon somewhat for granted and start again to appreciate its pure-dance elegance.

Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid

Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) was both ahead of its time with its bawdiness and behind it with its elegant widescreen black-and-white cinematography (by Joseph LaShelle, who worked with everyone from John Ford to Gerd Oswald).  Whether one thinks the movie is funny or not is subjective but no doubt its theme of aspirations for success at the price of infidelity are as American as only the Austrian Billy Wilder can be.  I found much of its rampant bawdiness both vulgar and funny -- "she's going to take me outside and show me her parsley" -- and rather like Shakespeare in its changing of partners and constant attempts at deception.  I think that the casting is key in this film, with Kim Novak as Pollie the Pistol (she has a cold and a dubious New Jersey accent), Dean Martin playing with his rat pack image.and Ray Walston as Orville Spooner the schlub piano teacher who is trying to sell songs.  Wilder originally wanted Jack Lemmon in the Walston role and then filmed for several weeks with Peter Sellers, who fell ill.  Walston is most effective as the jealous husband in the small town of Climax, Nevada, where he suspects even the milkman.

As I have said many times, the best comedies are the most serious and Wilder is most interested in social roles, how people and families interact with each other.  When Mrs. Spooner (Felicia Farr) goes home to her mother and father (Dora Merande and Howard McNear) Wilder shows them together on the porch in one uncut shot, as her mother denounces her daughter for who she married when she had so many other choices.  It's funny, sad and painful, just as it is when Mrs. Spooner sleeps with Dino so he will buy some of her husband's songs. Wilder, like other great directors who worked in widescreen black-and-white (Preminger, Fuller, et al.) knows how effective it is to let the actors interact in a scene without cuts. In spite of its bawdiness (or, perhaps, because of it) Kiss Me, Stupid is as corrosive a film about success and celebrity in America as Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951) and The Apartment (1960)

Evicted by Matthew Desmond

She was beginning to wonder what was most responsible for keeping them homeless:  her drug conviction from several years back, the fact that Ned was on the run and had no proof of income, their eviction record, their poverty, or their children.
--Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, 2016).

Desmond's book is a vivid portrait of those who get evicted in Milwaukee.  Constant evictions lead to losses of jobs and income, diminished school for the children and misery of all sorts.  Eviction makes it even harder to find a new place to live and leads to dubious bargains, such as not complaining about clogged sinks and toilets in order to avoid eviction.  Even Bernie Sanders has not talked about housing as a right in this country, as it is in many others. Desmond's intelligent solution is vouchers combined with rent stabilization:  "economists have argued that the current housing voucher program could be expanded to serve all poor families in America without additional spending if we prevented overcharging and made the program more efficient."

Eviction is both a cause and result of other problems, financial, political and psychological. I would suggest that, along with vouchers, we should also take the following steps:

Provide lawyers for those who are being evicted and cannot afford a lawyer (most landlords can).  Desmond points out that when tenants have lawyers their chances of keeping their homes increases dramatically.  Currently many tenants are fatalistic and don't even show up for their eviction hearing.

Offer more jobs and less incarceration.  As the men are locked up the women lose income and end up getting locked out.  Even the women risk losing their jobs if they take a day off to fight eviction in court.

Enforcement of laws that prohibit landlords from discriminating against families with children.

Single-payer healthcare.  Some of those who are evicted have mental and physical problems as well as addictions and, not surprisingly, have no health insurance; after food and rent there is often little money left.

Eviction brings it characters vividly to life, from Shereena the landlord to Arleen the tenant to Tobin, who makes a considerable profit running a trailer park and renting dilapidated trailers. Some people are considerably better than others at "gaming" a system that needs fixing.

Sally Gross -- The Pleasure of Stillness, a film by Albert Maysles and Kristen Nutile.

The Pleasure of Stillness is the perfect title for a film about Sally Gross. It is also the title of her piece performed in 2007, the making of which is chronicled in the film.  In July of last year I wrote about Sally when she died at the age of 82 and I was pleased that Film Forum showed this film in its recent survey of the work of the Maysles Brothers.  We have very few records of how pieces are choreographed and how choreographers work and this film is a wonderful example not only of Gross's work but of her importance in the history of dance.  She grew up on the Lower East Side, the daughter  of immigrants, and learned to dance at the Henry Street Settlement House. She played an important role in the Judson Church post-modern dance scene and continued to choreograph and dance -- at least one new piece a year -- until the end of her life. As someone who currently takes a class in "dance for the older body" I am particularly impressed by how, both in her choreography and her classes, Sally showed that anyone, regardless of age or body type, could be a dancer

The film also shows what an open and understanding person Sally was; she was influenced by art, literature and music, all of which she incorporated into her dancing and choreography.  We are fortunate indeed to have this film which includes many examples of her work, both early and recent (the film was made in 2007).

Nathan Juran's A Good Day for a Hanging.

A Good Day for a Hanging, 1959 is a superior routine Western, distinguished by a low-key performance by Fred MacMurray as a reluctant sheriff and a precise and rigorous visual style by Nathan Juran, who was originally an architect and then an art director on such films as John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, 1941.  The routine and B Westerns were coming to an end around this time, gradually being replaced by TV Westerns, where Nathan Juran, screenwriter Daniel Ullman and cinematographer Henry Freulich soon found themselves.  Many people have an image of Westerns based on Bonanza and Gunsmoke, which is unfortunate, because TV Westerns represent a retreat to the sound stages after years of outstanding use of exterior locations for Westerns by Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann and, especially, John Ford, who brought the sound Western outdoors with Stagecoach in 1939.  A Good Day for a Hanging starts out with beautiful plains and mountains, as a gang gathers for a bank robbery, and then, after the robbery, moves to a powerfully choreographed chase as the robbers are pursued out of town by a posse. The rest of the movie is set in town, where a gallows is being built for one of the robbers who shot the marshal.  It is 1878 in Nebraska and a fence has to be built around the gallows because a public hanging is now considered "cruel and unusual punishment."

As in many Westerns questions of right and wrong are discussed, including whether the robber to he hanged (played as something of a juvenile delinquent by Robert Vaughn) deserves some leniency for his deprived childhood; he grew up in Springdale, where the robbery took place, and he and the sheriff's daughter still fancy each other -- she even tries to smuggle in a gun to him. The grizzled MacMurray tries to insist on hanging for Vaughn while the townspeople take up a petition for leniency to the governor, to which MacMurray responds "the whole thing's just wrong." There is some additional intensely effective choreography as MacMurray gets into a fistfight with Vaughn's defense attorney (who MacMurray thinks is being paid with the stolen bank money) and a final shootout, as Vaughn tries to escape and is shot on the gallows where he was originally to be hanged.

Vin Scully

What a pleasure it was to turn on MLB cable channel and hear Vin Scully -- now 88-years-old -- broadcasting the Dodgers/Giants game on the feed from SportsNetLA, just as I used to listen to him on my AM radio in the fifties.  He started broadcasting the Dodger games in 1950 and never stopped, though he also did the NBC Game of the Week in the 80's.  I mentioned recently that one can hear his last-inning call of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on the internet, but keep an eye on MLB and when they broadcast a Dodgers home game you will probably hear Scully, his voice instantly recognizable.

Susan asked me, "Why do you think he is such a great announcer?"  I think the two main reasons (other than his voice) are that he works alone, not feeling any need to talk all the time and letting the game speak for itself when necessary, and that he concentrates on the beauty of the game, even pointing out things -- such as the swings of the player in the on-deck circle -- that the viewer of the cramped TV image cannot see.  He doesn't bring in a lot of extraneous statistics and the like, which have nothing to do with what is going on in the game, i.e., he doesn't think, like many announcers and their producers, that the game is boring and an intrusion on discussions about the past and the future.  Andrew Sarris once said to me that he thought baseball was not a particularly good subject for movies because it is too immediate.  I think he is generally correct about that (though Lloyd Bacon and Frank Tashlin's Kill the Umpire, 1950 is an honorable exception, being mostly about umpires) and Scully does what few other announcers do:  he enhances the immediate enjoyment of a beautiful game.  In last night's game he said "the P-men --Pence, Panik, and Posey -- are on the bases" and then when the next batter singled Scully added, "they each move up ninety feet." He keeps it simple and eloquent.

New Faces of 1937

Wasn't the movie Casablanca somehow more enjoyable before it was recognized, in film courses and elsewhere, as a classic?
--Joseph Epstein, "Where Have All the Critics Gone?", Commentary, April 2016

Casablanca, the happiest of happy accidents and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory.
--Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema (The University of Chicago Press, 1968).

Joseph Epstein represents the last defenders of the idea that movies can't be art, though his use of the word "somehow" in the above quote indicates that he is either unable or unwilling to make his case. Sarris later recanted on Curtiz but did not live long enough to write a detailed retraction.  I made a few comments about Curtiz and his best film(at least of the ones I've seen), The Breaking Point, on March 2, 2014.  There is much more to be said about Curtiz and his themes of love, betrayal and reconciliation but for the moment I just want to say how much I disagree with Joseph Epstein (not to be confused with Julius and Philip Epstein, who wrote the screenplay for Casablanca) and how questionable I find his use of the word "classic," almost as though it means moldy and outdated.  If he objects to the close reading of films as somehow inhibiting one's enjoyment of them I can only say I do not find that to be true.  I agree with Alberti that no amount of analysis can spoil my enjoyment of any work of art and to dismiss even the best movies as merely "entertainment" is to encourage mindlessness and to discard all the insights of perceptive critics such as Sarris, Robin Wood, Godard, Truffaut et al.  There probably should be a moratorium on the use of the word "classic," which once exclusively referred to the ancient Romans and Greeks and is now used, more often than not, to intimidate, e.g., "instant classic."   There was certainly a "classic period" of film, running approximately from Birth of a Nation in 1915 to Psycho in 1960, but this refers primarily to the way films were made and not the quality of individual films.

This is all leading up to my recommendation that Joseph Epstein watch more of Turner Classic Movies, where many of the films are more like time capsules than "classics."  It was as an example of its time that I recently enjoyed New Faces of 1937 on Turner.  Its director, Leigh Jason, made no attempt to express any personal vision but simply let old vaudeville performers and some genuine new faces do their shtick.  Typical of the humor was Joe Penner introducing himself as Seymour Seymour to a producer's secretary.  The secretary responded with "from Walla Walla, I suppose" and he countered with "no, Cin-cin- natti."  The plot, what there is of it, is the same as Mel Brooks used in The Producers (1967), i.e., many backers for a show designed to flop, so that producer Jerome Cowan can keep the money.  Milton Berle does his old stockbroker routine and Harriet Hilliard (who sang Irving Berlin beautifully in Follow the Fleet,1936) sings serviceable songs, with tenor William Brady, by Sammy Fain and Lew Brown, climaxing with "Peckin," in which the Three Chocolateers and other African-Americans, as well as the chorus girls, imitate chickens.  Ann Miller, then 14, contributes an over-energetic dance.

A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre

Kim Philby was recently in the news after the BBC discovered a tape of his speech to the East German Stasi in 1981 in which he said he was able to get away with spying because he was "born into the British governing class."  Philby was one of the Cambridge spies for the Soviet Union for many years, finally being detected in 1963 and fleeing to Russia.  His statement is no surprise to anyone who has followed the case, as Ben Macintyre writes about the repeated investigations of Philby in A Spy Among Friends (Crown, 2015), "Philby had not run away, he was happy to help and he was, importantly, a gentleman, a clubman and a highflier, which meant he must be innocent."  In addition, if he were guilty it meant that all of MI6 (British intelligence), of which he was a chief officer, had been fooled and the intelligence services looked like idiots.

The British also overreacted to the McCarthyism in America, thinking that there couldn't be any spies in their ranks, and refusing even to look very closely.  I can even understand this to a certain extent.  I was in graduate school in art history in the seventies when it was finally revealed that Sir Anthony Blunt had been the fourth Cambridge spy (along with Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess).  We were all shocked that the leading authority on Poussin had been a spy, how could this be?  Of course one of the reasons Blunt and Philby could get away with it for so long was that they deliberately built up impeccable relationships with other members of the establishment and never revealed their true political sympathies. In America Alger Hiss was successful for so many years for similar reasons:  how could such a successful and classy diplomat be a spy, accused as he was by the scruffy Whittaker Chambers?

The price that England paid for allowing Philby and the other agents to go undetected for so long was considerable, as the spies revealed all the English agents and told Russia about every operation against them.  As Macintyre writes, "The fox was not merely guarding the henhouse but building it, running it, assessing its strengths and frailties, and planning its future construction."  Macintyre's gracefully written book is a fascinating manual of how a spy can get away with it for a long time by manipulating friends and co-workers. 

Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady (1944)

Siodmak brilliantly interweaves expressionistic décor with American idiom.
--Blake Lucas, Film Noir, Overlook Press (1979)

Phantom Lady, a powerful adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich novel, lacks several key elements of a true film noir, especially the fatalism and the bleak ending, elements found in later Siodmak films such as The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949) -- I wrote about The Killers on June 29, 2015 and Criss Cross on Aug. 4, 2015. The film noir was in many ways a reflection of the disillusionment of the post WWII period, when returning veterans found that things had not changed much, except perhaps for the worse.  Phantom Lady, made during the war, is a pretty good B movie with some strong elements of later films noir --  the expressionistic photography (in this case by Woody Bredell, who also photographed Siodmak's later films), the loneliness and danger of nighttime city streets slick with rain, a Germanic sensibility (Siodmak was born in America but grew up in Germany, leaving when Hitler took over, and was considerably influenced by German silent films) -- but functions more as a wartime film that ends up reassuring the audience that a plucky woman can save a man from the electric chair, that only a madman would kill and that justice, with the help of the police (!) will prevail.  Elisha Cook, Jr. has an intensely dark role as a drummer who reaches orgasmic heights with his drum solo while courting Ella Raines, an executive masquerading as a floozy in her search for the killer.

Gordon Douglas's Claudelle Inglish (1961)

I think that Gordon Douglas's Claudelle Inglish is a better adaptation of Erskine Caldwell than John Ford's Tobacco Road (1941) or Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre (1958) simply because Douglas is more of a craftsman, Mann and Ford are artists. Mann and Ford, both of whom made many wonderful movies, were not entirely comfortable with the modern world and tended to retreat to the past, which they could shape to their own visions.  Douglas was more of a protean figure, adaptable to many different points of view, including those of Caldwell and Leonard Freeman, the writer and producer of Claudelle Inglish.  I wrote previously about the relatively unknown Douglas on Nov. 7, 2014 and Sept.18, 2014.  And I wrote about Caldwell on Sept. 6, 2015.

If Douglas has a theme at all to his work it is about finding one's individual identity and one's place in society.  These two things often come into conflict in Douglas's work and sometimes, as in Claudelle Inglish, these conflicts cannot be resolved and end in death and destruction.  Douglas's film perhaps does not transcend the time in which it was made but has much to say about that time.  Claudell is trapped with her parents -- her father is a tenant farmer (the isolation of the farm is emphasized by being shot on a sound stage) -- in a small rural town and marriage is the only escape.. Her boyfriend promises to marry her when he gets out of the army but instead, once out in the wide world, he finds and marries someone else.  Claudelle is devastated and essentially becomes a slut, sleeping with anyone who will give her presents.  This film deals with many themes that I experienced growing up in a small town when the movie was being made.  We may forget, those of us who knew, that opportunities were limited in 1961, especially for women.  But in small towns and rural areas many men did not go to college either, often being drafted into the service right out of high school and returning to work in local factories or on farms, where work, then, was always available. Many women married right out of high school and eventually became miserable, as Claudell's mother did, when the promises of wealth led nowhere.

Claudelle Inglish is shot in crisp black-and-white and Douglas and cinematographer Ralph Woolsey often capture conflict by putting three or more struggling people in a shot.  Diane McBain plays Claudelle, Constance Ford is her mother who tries to get her to marry someone rich, and Arthur Kennedy is her father, who pays for his integrity and pride by ending up alone.  There is a richly ironic musical score by Howard Jackson

Baseball is Back!

The Mets lost to the Royals last night in a game that was eerily reminiscent of the World Series or, as Yogi would say, it was like deja vu all over again.  It's nice that the Mets have such great starting pitching but everything else is a question mark at this point (even if the starting pitching holds up):  fielding (little range and a routine fly ball dropped by Cespedes), hitting (clutch and otherwise; David Wright and Cespedes both struck out in the ninth with the tying run on third), the bullpen (the starters will, of course, not go nine innings and Bastardo and Blevins are question marks) and speed (there was some taking of an extra base in the game; will that continue and is anyone a threat to steal?). 

As I've said before, I don't root for a particular team, I root for the elegant geometry of the game itself.  Unfortunately that elegance is mostly absent from the TV coverage -- which misses most of what's going on by focusing almost exclusively on the pitcher and the batter --and the announcers.  The announcers for the ESPN Mets game -- Boone, Medoza, Schulman -- stated mostly the obvious and redundant, seemed oblivious to the difference between the meanings of "less" and "fewer" and did not seem to understand that subject and verb should agree.  Vin Scully is finally retiring this year and one can hear him calling the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on YouTube if one wants to hear an excellent announcer.  For now I will listen mostly to Mets games on the radio with announcers Josh Lewin and Howie Rose, perceptive professionals.  The less said about the hapless Yankee radio announcers -- inarticulate Yankee rooters -- the better.

Spring is here and baseball -- a beautiful game played every day and never against the clock -- is back.