Unashamed (1932) and Emergency Call (1933)

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

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

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

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

Nov. 2016 Turner Classic Movies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buster Keaton's The Cameraman 1928

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

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

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

Surrender, New York by Caleb Carr

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

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

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

New York City Ballet, October 8 2016

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

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

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

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

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

New York Times on Baseball

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

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

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

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

Turner Classic Movies Oct. 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin

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

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

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