New York City Ballet: Sept. 25, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elmer the Great 1933

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

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

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

11/22/63, written by Bridget Carpenter

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

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

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

The Aspern Papers by Henry James (1888)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irving Reis's The Falcon Takes Over

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