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.
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Monday, August 29, 2016
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
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.
--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.
Saturday, August 20, 2016
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.
--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.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
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.
--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.
Monday, August 15, 2016
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.
--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.
Saturday, August 13, 2016
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.
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.
--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.
Friday, August 12, 2016
Orson Welles in Italy, by Alberto Anile
The argument over pay with Carlo Ponti and the experience of making the film with Steno put the final nail in the coffin of Welles's love affair with Italy. He had spent six years being criticized for artistic exhibitionism and excessive formalism.
---Albert Anile, Orson Welles in Italy (Indiana University Press, 2013, translated by Marcus Perryman).
Orson Welles was in Italy from 1957 to 1963. He went there to make a film, Black Magic, directed by Gregory Ratoff. He was also fleeing the political climate of the United States, as well as the IRS and Hollywood. In that time in Italy he worked constantly, when he could, on his film Othello, while taking acting jobs to raise money. Anile documents this period thoroughly, mainly through a detailed study of how critics in Italy reacted to Welles. The consensus of the Italian critics was summed up by Umberto Barbaro, writing about Welles's Shakespeare films as "poisoned baroque pies with an obtuse avant-garde style."
There were three major reasons for the Italian attitude toward Welles.
1. He was an arrogant American who did not speak Italian (though he learned while he was there)
2. The Italians were so enamored of their own neorealism they could not understand Welles's stylized films.
3. Dubbing. Films in Italy are always dubbed into Italian and by the time Citizen Kane arrived in Italy in 1948, recut and dubbed, it was barely seen or appreciated.
I must admit to a personal problem with Italian films and the fact that they do not ever use direct sound. Only directors with intelligence and style --I think particularly of Leone and Rossellini -- can overcome this major handicap. I think that the dubbing Welles became used to in Italy affected all his later films: from Othello (1951) on Welles dubbed and re-dubbed, most of the films existing now in multiple versions.
Anile covers this period in Welles's life, including Welles's romance with his future wife, Paola Mori, in more detail that any of the other Welles biographers. Anile's book makes it clear that Welles was a brilliant artist who could also be a self-destructive deadbeat.
---Albert Anile, Orson Welles in Italy (Indiana University Press, 2013, translated by Marcus Perryman).
Orson Welles was in Italy from 1957 to 1963. He went there to make a film, Black Magic, directed by Gregory Ratoff. He was also fleeing the political climate of the United States, as well as the IRS and Hollywood. In that time in Italy he worked constantly, when he could, on his film Othello, while taking acting jobs to raise money. Anile documents this period thoroughly, mainly through a detailed study of how critics in Italy reacted to Welles. The consensus of the Italian critics was summed up by Umberto Barbaro, writing about Welles's Shakespeare films as "poisoned baroque pies with an obtuse avant-garde style."
There were three major reasons for the Italian attitude toward Welles.
1. He was an arrogant American who did not speak Italian (though he learned while he was there)
2. The Italians were so enamored of their own neorealism they could not understand Welles's stylized films.
3. Dubbing. Films in Italy are always dubbed into Italian and by the time Citizen Kane arrived in Italy in 1948, recut and dubbed, it was barely seen or appreciated.
I must admit to a personal problem with Italian films and the fact that they do not ever use direct sound. Only directors with intelligence and style --I think particularly of Leone and Rossellini -- can overcome this major handicap. I think that the dubbing Welles became used to in Italy affected all his later films: from Othello (1951) on Welles dubbed and re-dubbed, most of the films existing now in multiple versions.
Anile covers this period in Welles's life, including Welles's romance with his future wife, Paola Mori, in more detail that any of the other Welles biographers. Anile's book makes it clear that Welles was a brilliant artist who could also be a self-destructive deadbeat.
Sunday, August 7, 2016
Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil
After all, we have the paintings.
--Pilar Silva Muroto, curator at the Prado, Madrid.
Pieter van Huystee's film, Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil, is obviously meant as a promotion for the Dutch exhibit this year in Bosch's hometown in the Netherlands; Bosch's best paintings remained in the Prado for its own Bosch exhibit. Films about painters generally are not effective in showing the artist's work primarily, I think, because paintings exist in space and movies exist in time (see my comments on Michael Leigh's film about Turner on Jan 20,2015). So what we get in this film is mostly art historians arguing about which paintings Bosch painted with his own hand while the curators engage in political struggles about who will lend their paintings to whom. There is little discussion about the complex and mysterious iconography in Bosch's paintings and when they do show parts of the paintings they include an overbearing score by Paul M. van Brugge. I'm not sure I expected much more but I do appreciate that I won two tickets to Film Forum for my correct response to their weekly quiz: Peter Singer's Animal Liberation was the book that influenced Unlocking the Cage, a film by Chris Hedgeders and D.A. Pennebaker. I don't get out to the movies much, with a child just about to start kindergarten, but when I do it's most often to Film Forum, with its excellent repertory and new and off-beat programming, shown at times when my wife and I can go and still get home to pick up our daughter.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in Hieronymous Bosch I recommend Ingrid Rowland's piece about the painter -- "The Mystery of Hieronymous Bosch"-- in the August 18, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books; it includes reviews of a number of books about Bosch and some interesting comments about the film.
--Pilar Silva Muroto, curator at the Prado, Madrid.
Pieter van Huystee's film, Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil, is obviously meant as a promotion for the Dutch exhibit this year in Bosch's hometown in the Netherlands; Bosch's best paintings remained in the Prado for its own Bosch exhibit. Films about painters generally are not effective in showing the artist's work primarily, I think, because paintings exist in space and movies exist in time (see my comments on Michael Leigh's film about Turner on Jan 20,2015). So what we get in this film is mostly art historians arguing about which paintings Bosch painted with his own hand while the curators engage in political struggles about who will lend their paintings to whom. There is little discussion about the complex and mysterious iconography in Bosch's paintings and when they do show parts of the paintings they include an overbearing score by Paul M. van Brugge. I'm not sure I expected much more but I do appreciate that I won two tickets to Film Forum for my correct response to their weekly quiz: Peter Singer's Animal Liberation was the book that influenced Unlocking the Cage, a film by Chris Hedgeders and D.A. Pennebaker. I don't get out to the movies much, with a child just about to start kindergarten, but when I do it's most often to Film Forum, with its excellent repertory and new and off-beat programming, shown at times when my wife and I can go and still get home to pick up our daughter.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in Hieronymous Bosch I recommend Ingrid Rowland's piece about the painter -- "The Mystery of Hieronymous Bosch"-- in the August 18, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books; it includes reviews of a number of books about Bosch and some interesting comments about the film.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
The Murder of Mary Russell by Laurie E. King
Then with an appalling, wet convulsion, the old man went limp. As Clarissa bent over her father, infant wails mingled with the keening sounds of her own abandonment.
--Laurie E. King, The Murder of Mary Russell (Bantam 2016)
I generally avoid pastiches of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (the useful website about mysteries, http://www.stopyourekillingme.com has 23 authors of Sherlock Holmes books listed) --they usually suffer from too little or too much imagination -- but a friend recommended King's books to me as being of fairly high quality. The first few, beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice in 1994, are intelligent novels about Holmes's retirement years and his eventual marriage to scholar Mary Russell. In the later books (King has written thirteen so far) Holmes is sometimes barely seen and King concentrates on the role of Mary and women in post-Victorian England. The Murder of Mary Russell was suggested by Doyle's story "The Gloria Scott" published in Strand Magazine in 1893. In that story a man survives a shipwreck and becomes a blackmailer. The blackmailer's last name is Hudson, the last name of Holmes's housekeeper, though no relationship is suggested in Doyle's story. In King's book this Hudson is Mrs. Hudson's father and the novel is mostly an extended flashback to Mrs. Hudson's childhood in Australia, her life of petty crime and her illegitimate son. Eventually Holmes finds Clarissa Hudson while hunting for her father and hires her as his housekeeper while her son stays in Australia with Clarissa's sister; there are some interesting class-conscious parallels with Samuel Richardson's 18th C, novel Clarissa.
There is an unusual amount of bloodshed in this book, mostly revealed in its aftermath. Also, like too many mystery writers, King often misleads and manipulates her readers; I presume, since it is so common, that readers like this. Generally I prefer genre writers such as John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler, who write in the first person, the reader learning about events as the narrator does. King's novel of mostly flashback is similar to Doyle's novels --especially The Valley of Fear(1914) -- and we get only a glimpse of the young Sherlock Holmes, when he rescues Clarissa from her father; he appears mostly, in King's novels, after the period that Watson writes about and the emphasis is more on his emotions than his ratiocination.
--Laurie E. King, The Murder of Mary Russell (Bantam 2016)
I generally avoid pastiches of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (the useful website about mysteries, http://www.stopyourekillingme.com has 23 authors of Sherlock Holmes books listed) --they usually suffer from too little or too much imagination -- but a friend recommended King's books to me as being of fairly high quality. The first few, beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice in 1994, are intelligent novels about Holmes's retirement years and his eventual marriage to scholar Mary Russell. In the later books (King has written thirteen so far) Holmes is sometimes barely seen and King concentrates on the role of Mary and women in post-Victorian England. The Murder of Mary Russell was suggested by Doyle's story "The Gloria Scott" published in Strand Magazine in 1893. In that story a man survives a shipwreck and becomes a blackmailer. The blackmailer's last name is Hudson, the last name of Holmes's housekeeper, though no relationship is suggested in Doyle's story. In King's book this Hudson is Mrs. Hudson's father and the novel is mostly an extended flashback to Mrs. Hudson's childhood in Australia, her life of petty crime and her illegitimate son. Eventually Holmes finds Clarissa Hudson while hunting for her father and hires her as his housekeeper while her son stays in Australia with Clarissa's sister; there are some interesting class-conscious parallels with Samuel Richardson's 18th C, novel Clarissa.
There is an unusual amount of bloodshed in this book, mostly revealed in its aftermath. Also, like too many mystery writers, King often misleads and manipulates her readers; I presume, since it is so common, that readers like this. Generally I prefer genre writers such as John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler, who write in the first person, the reader learning about events as the narrator does. King's novel of mostly flashback is similar to Doyle's novels --especially The Valley of Fear(1914) -- and we get only a glimpse of the young Sherlock Holmes, when he rescues Clarissa from her father; he appears mostly, in King's novels, after the period that Watson writes about and the emphasis is more on his emotions than his ratiocination.
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Don Siegel's The Line-Up (1958)
Siegel's most successful films express the doomed peculiarity of the antisocial outcast. ... the final car chase in The Line-Up and the final shoot-up in Madigan are among the most stunning displays of action montage in the history of American cinema.
--Andrew Sarris
Like many of the great directors of the classical era Don Siegel worked his way up, eventually doing montage (small editing jobs) on Warner Brothers films --including Casablanca --before he started directing. Most of his movies were low-key efforts done under the radar, often between television jobs. He got the job directing The Line-Up because he had done the pilot for the TV series, which ran on CBS from 1953 to 1960.
The Line-Up movie has an impressive script by veteran Sterling Silliphant and excellent location (San Francisco) cinematography by Hal Mohr, who worked with Sam Fuller and Fritz Lang, among many others. The film comes at the end of the film noir cycle, bringing the genre out of the physical night and darkness (the film takes place entirely in the daylight) into the psychological darkness of Dancer, played by Eli Wallach as a subtle and ingratiating psychotic. Dancer's job is to retrieve the heroin inadvertently smuggled in by unsuspecting steamship travelers from Hong Kong, who thought they had simply gotten a good deal on some Chinese art. Dancer and his partner, played by Robert Keith, have something of a homoerotic relationship, with Keith even at one point saying "women have no place in society" because they are too weak.
Siegel made one of his best films, Madigan, in 1968 before he teamed up with Clint Eastwood and eventually lost his way. American films began to require bigger budgets and bigger stars and the relatively modest virtues and craftsmanship of a film such as The Line-Up have mainly survived on TV, if they have survived at all.
--Andrew Sarris
Like many of the great directors of the classical era Don Siegel worked his way up, eventually doing montage (small editing jobs) on Warner Brothers films --including Casablanca --before he started directing. Most of his movies were low-key efforts done under the radar, often between television jobs. He got the job directing The Line-Up because he had done the pilot for the TV series, which ran on CBS from 1953 to 1960.
The Line-Up movie has an impressive script by veteran Sterling Silliphant and excellent location (San Francisco) cinematography by Hal Mohr, who worked with Sam Fuller and Fritz Lang, among many others. The film comes at the end of the film noir cycle, bringing the genre out of the physical night and darkness (the film takes place entirely in the daylight) into the psychological darkness of Dancer, played by Eli Wallach as a subtle and ingratiating psychotic. Dancer's job is to retrieve the heroin inadvertently smuggled in by unsuspecting steamship travelers from Hong Kong, who thought they had simply gotten a good deal on some Chinese art. Dancer and his partner, played by Robert Keith, have something of a homoerotic relationship, with Keith even at one point saying "women have no place in society" because they are too weak.
Siegel made one of his best films, Madigan, in 1968 before he teamed up with Clint Eastwood and eventually lost his way. American films began to require bigger budgets and bigger stars and the relatively modest virtues and craftsmanship of a film such as The Line-Up have mainly survived on TV, if they have survived at all.
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