Turner Classic Movies Dec. 2016

Of course there will be movies related to Christmas; my favorite of these are only partly about the holiday, which still has a significant role:  Vincente Minnelli's lovely period piece Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, showing on Dec. 11), John Ford's variation on the three wise men, as a Western, Three Godfathers (1949, also on the 11th), Lubitsch's touching and funny The Shop Around the Corner (1940, on the 15th), Leo McCarey's Going My Way (1944, on the 17th) and his Love Affair (1939, on the 20th), Preston Sturges's and Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night (1940, on the 22nd).

On Dec. 3 is Robert Siodmak's excellent film noir, Phantom Lady (1944, from a Cornell Woolrich novel), Budd Boetticher's austere Western Ride Lonesome (1959), and John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).

On Dec. 3 is German émigré Douglas Sirk's intense Hitler's Madman (1943), about the assassination of Nazi SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, and on the 4th is Billy Wilder's Lost Week-End (1945) and King Vidor's last film, Solomon and Sheba (1959).

On Dec. 6 are two of the best movies ever made about families:  Yasijuro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Leo MCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1939), about growing old in America before Social Security started.

On Dec. 7 are three movies related to Pearl Harbor:  John Ford's They Were Expendable (1943), Howard Hawks's  Air Force(1943) and Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956).

On Dec. 8 is Chaplin's exquisite Limelight (1952) and on the 11th is Kenji Mizoguchi's beautiful and moving Ugetsu (1953)

On the 13th is Delmer Daves's Western 3:10 to Yuma and Joseph Losey's caustic view of America in 1951, The Prowler.

On the 17th is Howard Hawks's comedy Monkey Business (1952) and on the 19th is Preminger's film noir Angel Face (1939).

On the 22nd is Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), from a Patricia Highsmith novel, and two elegant pre-code comedies from Lubitsch, Design for Living (1933) and The Love Parade (1929).

Raoul Walsh's Sea Devils

The heroes of Walsh are sustained by nothing more than a feeling for adventure.
--Andrew Sarris

Raoul Walsh's Sea Devils (1953) is the last film made in the 3-strip technicolor format: as more and more films were being made in color the studios did not want to spend the money for this expensive process -- it used three negatives and therefore three times as much film -- even though the result was exquisite saturated color.  Walsh and his director of photography Wilkie Cooper used this process quite effectively, with brilliant reds, yellows and purples appropriate for a costume picture and subtle day-for-night location scenes.

The films stars Yvonne DeCarlo and Rock Hudson as English spies in the Channel Islands in 1800 and is based on Victor Hugo's Les travailleurs de la mer.  Some find it hard to appreciate Rock Hudson after all we have learned about him but he did many terrific pictures for directors such as Walsh, Howard Hawks  and, especially, Douglas Sirk (my own favorite is All That Heaven Allows, 1956) who knew how to use Hudson's impressive combination of toughness and vulnerability. Some may see beefcake competing with cheesecake in the two stars of Sea Devils but I find that Walsh has effectively captured the passion of a man and a woman united in adventure and believing both in a cause and in each other.

Gordon Douglas's Bombers B-52

In recent years I have come to appreciate the craftsmanship of film director Gordon Douglas (see my posts of April 4 2016, Nov. 7 2014, Sept. 18 2014). He may not have been an artist at the level of John Ford but most of Douglas's films are beautifully crafted,  take place in the present day and detail the struggle to find one's place in society, balancing obligation and choice.  Bombers B-52 is about Air  Force mechanic Chuck Brennan (played astutely by Karl Malden) to give his wife and daughter (played by Natalie Wood) the best he can while still doing what he considers his duty.  The next generation is represented by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who is courting Wood against her father's wishes.

Brennan rejects lucrative corporate job offers and tries to make it up by going on a quiz show and answering questions about baseball.  When one of his Air Force buddies asks him how he came to know so much about baseball he said he came home one day and told his father that he had purchased a key to the pitcher's box.  His father told him that he had to learn about baseball or he would have to take ballet classes, so he quickly learned.  The irony of this was underscored later in the film when Wood and her mother are at a diner -- Brennan was outside getting the car fixed-- where there was ballet on TV and the grizzled cook was watching, intently observing that "her tour jete is not what it should be," emphasizing, in a low-key way, that ballet can be appreciated by anyone. The cook and the TV are off to the side of the widescreen frame, one of many elements in the shot.  When Brennan went on the quiz show the baseball questions were, rather strangely, all about "Casey at the Bat" and not about real baseball players. Still, Brennan won enough to buy his daughter a new convertible, though that didn't satisfy her desire for a higher status with her peers.

The beautiful widescreen cinematography was by William Clothier, who worked with Ford, Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, and Budd Boetticher, among others.  Douglas uses the wide frame intelligently, to capture the conflicts among the family as they try to find their place in the group and in society without diminishing their affection for one another.

Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon, 1956

Now that my daughter is five my wife and I decided to look at the new DVD of The Red Balloon to see if it would be appropriate for her.  The answer:  definitely not!  Seeing it again after many years (it was often shown in grade schools, usually in inferior 16 mm. prints) convinces me that it scared people away from foreign films, just as "The Nutcracker" scared people away from ballet and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss scared high school students away from literature:  they represent very limited fragments of what film, literature and dance have to offer, and not in the best way.

In The Red Balloon a young boy, probably about six, wanders around Paris with a red balloon following him.  The boy goes everywhere alone, taken care of to a limited extent by an elderly woman, no father or mother around.  Eventually other children destroy the red balloon and other balloons, of all colors, come together and lift the boy up into the sky.  The story makes no sense at any level, not even the mythopoeic, but is seen as an introduction to foreign films, for children, a sort of Antonioni film, without the intelligence, for toddlers; it's only thirty-five minutes long, with only a few words of dialogue.  That the story can be seen and interpreted in many different ways and has no meaning of its own demonstrates its condescension and artistic bankruptcy.

Most movies made for children don't work artistically for children or adults (I'm talking about you, Disney, as well as many others).  My family will continue to watch Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Chuck Jones, artists who appeal to all ages, in multiple ways at multiple levels.

Little Orchestra Society: Vivaldi

We have been taking our children to the Little Orchestra Society concerts since our daughter Victoria was three, two years ago, (see my posts of Dec. 6, 2015 and Feb. 9, 2016) and our son Gideon, now 18, and Susan and I get as much enjoyment out of them as Victoria does.  Yesterday's concert was devoted to Vivaldi and LOS did their usual excellent job of providing visual experiences for the kids without compromising the quality of the music.

The concert was conducted by Joseph Young and, as usual, the soloists were young, just out of high school or college:  Valerie Kim on violin, Martin Bernsldltein playing recorder, Elizabeth Egan on bassoon, Yifei Xu on harpsichord, Aberta Khoury and Tengyue  on guitars, and Brandon Bergeron and Atse Theodros on trumpets. The use of young soloists helps the appeal of the music to children.  There were effective fake newscasts announcing the change of seasons for "The Four Seasons" and the orchestra members donned hats and scarves to play "Winter."   Vivaldi himself was played by
David Gautschy, demonstrating that the music was actually written by a real person. And there were "circus artists" John Leo and Sarah Petersiel moving to the music, conveying another visual element.

The performance was at the Danny Kaye Theatre (few children today recognize the name Danny Kaye, for better or worse) at Hunter College, a relatively small and intimate theatre just right for this combination of music and visual support, and the concert lasted just under an hour.  I recommend LOS to all parents who want to introduce their children to the beauty of music; there are three more concerts this season, devoted to Beethoven. Mendelssohn and Bernstein.

Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent, 1962

Advise and Consent finally reveals Preminger as one of the cinema's great moralists.
--Robin Wood, Movie Magazine.

I read Allen Drury's novel when I was 13 and fascinated by politics, hoping to go into it some day.  I even tried to get a job as a Congressional page, but my Congressman was from the wrong party.  I saw Preminger's film when I was in prep school and found it fascinating, beautiful and depressing for what it "revealed" about politics.  Some movies exemplify their time, some transcend it, and some --including Advise and Consent -- do both.  The film is still considered by some homophobic for its depiction of an attempt to blackmail a Senator from Utah (presumed to be Mormon, though that it not explicitly stated) and the somewhat lurid depiction of a gay bar.  I think anyone watching the film would find it more complicated; as Robin Wood (who only later came out as gay) writes:  "Brig is hysterically rejecting an aspect of himself with which he has always refused to come to terms."  when he rejects his gay lover.

Advise and Consent is filmed in that unusual format: wide-screen black-and-white, as Preminger allows all the participants to react to each other within the frame, capturing effectively their dependence on one another.  Veteran actors Walter Pigeon, Lew Ayres, Franchot Tone and, especially, Charles Laughton (it was his last film) bring their years of experience to bear on the roles of politicians with years of experience.  Each lead role involves compromise, often against one's principles, as a means of survival, contradicting the asserted optimism of the Kennedy years.

World Series 2016

I enjoyed this World Series more than most recently because of the creativity of the managers:  Terry Francona for the Indians and Joe Maddon for the Cubs.  Neither was afraid to use relief pitchers as much as they thought they needed to, regardless of the opinions of others.  If the Cubs had lost no doubt Maddon would have been roundly criticized for bringing in Chapman when he did in the seventh game, as Chapman gave up three runs, allowing the Indians to tie the score.  Maddon even tried the squeeze, practically extinct in the major leagues.  The seven games often resembled chess matches, with moves and countermoves by both managers.  And kudos also to Theo Epstein, who staffed the Cubs with human beings and not just bundles of statistics.

The TV coverage of the Series was awful, not surprising since the producer was, once again, Pete Mecheska of Fox Sports, who is on record is saying the baseball is too boring to just show what's going on on the field so they have to show the tense fans over and over again (see my post of Oct. 30, 2013).  It seemed to me that there were more shots of the fans, especially in the later innings, than there were shots of the game!  TV announcers Joe Buck and John Smoltz added little to the game so I spent most of my time listening to the games on the radio, this year on Bloomberg radio, 1130, where Aaron Boone and Dan Shulman allowed one to "see" more than one could on TV.

Many people have forgotten, or never knew, that some consider that the 1908 Cubs did not belong in the World Series, after they won a one-game playoff with the New York Giants that became necessary because of the famous “Merkle boner.”  On Sept. 23 the Giants, playing the Cubs, had Merkle on first base and Moose McCormick on third with two out in the bottom of the ninth and the score tied 1-1.  A winning hit to the outfield by Al Bridwell scored the runner on third and fans swarmed onto the field, blocking the basepaths and sending the players to the clubhouse in center field at the Polo Grounds.  The Cubs quickly realized that Merkle had never touched second and Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers retrieved what he said was the game ball and tagged second, the run not counting because of the force-out.  It was finally ruled that if the two teams were tied at the end of the season the game would have to be replayed.  The Giants and the Cubs were tied and the Cubs won the playoff game 4-2 on Oct. 8, went to the World Series and won.