Turner Classic Movies in January 2017

First of  all, a very happy new year to all my readers.  If you particularly like any movies coming up in January that I have not mentioned please feel free to bring them to my attention.

Jan. 1.  The year begins with 12 Hitchcock movies.  I particularly like the extraordinary Vertigo (1958) but these are all great films (if you like Hitchcock at all, that is; not everyone does).

Jan 2 is John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940).  It's not one of my Ford favorites but it looks better each time I see it, with its Greg Toland cinematography.

Jan. 3 is Don Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11, an intense piece of filmmaking.

On the 7th is Anthony Mann's The Far Country (1955), one of a series of great Westerns that Mann made with James Stewart.

Jan 8 has Lubitsch's dark comedy about Germany, made in 1942, To Be or Not To Be.

Jan. 9 is Ford's Stagecoach (1939), the first of his great Westerns.

Jan 10 is Raoul Walsh's corrosive White Heat (1949), with a manic performance by James Cagney.

Jan. 11 Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) with its gorgeous cinematography by Nestor Alemendros and lovely score by Ennio Morricon.

Jan 14 has King Vidor's colonial Western Northwest Passage (1940), Ford's The Searchers (1956) and Douglas Sirk's widescreen black-and-white The Tarnished Angels (from Faulkner's Pylon), 1958

On the 15th is Alexander Mackendrick's powerful The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
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On the 18th is Chaplin's incomparable City Lights (1931).

On the 21st is Anthony Mann's beautiful Bend of the River (1952) and Fritz Lang's intricate and fatalistic Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).

On the 25th is D.W. Griffith's masterful Orphans of the Storm (1921), with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and on the 26th is one of Sirk's lovely and moving soap operas:  All That Heaven Allows (1955)

Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman (1943)

I had shot the film almost like a documentary, since this seemed the style best suited to the theme, and given the very limited shooting time.

---Douglas Sirk

Hitler’s Madman was émigré Douglas Sirk’s first film in America, after a successful career in Germany.  It was shot in a week for PRC, a Poverty-Row studio, and then bought by MGM; it came out at the same time (1943) that Fritz Lang’s film Hangman Also Die was released.  Both films tell a version of the same story:  the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the German in charge of the occupation of Czechoslovakia.  It is an unusual opportunity to compare two superb directors dealing with the same story:  Sirk had only a week to make his film and shot it like a claustrophobic newsreel, isolating the town of Lidice as the Germans destroyed it.  Lang focused more on the assassin and shot his film like a film noir, emphasizing the role of fate.

One thing Sirk’s films have common with the films of other great directors is the ability to bring characters vividly to life, no matter how small the role.  In Hitler’s Madman Sirk used an extraordinary cast of supporting actors –Victor Kilian, Ralph Morgan, Edgar Kennedy, Jimmy Conlon, Patricia Morison, et al.-- to portray the villagers and their families.  He also, with his cinematographer Eugan Shuftan, created a town and the farms surrounding it with expressionistic lighting and intelligent camera angles.  Sirk’s powerful film causes one to reflect on what role we have in society, especially when things seem to be going wrong:  how does fascism succeed and how is it able to survive?  Frank Spotnitz’s intense alternate-history film on Amazon, The Man in the High Castle, raises many of the same questions; based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel, it shows the Axis winning WWII and occupying America.

And I also wanted to mention two novels that deal with possible fascism in America:  Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here(1935) and Philp Roth’s The Plot Against America(2004)

The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries

It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration:  not going to the stars but learning that one may stay where one is.

--Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (1961; Little, Brown and Company)

Among the many things that came to mind while reading this marvelous book:  it’s too bad that Peter De Vries is no longer working on the captions for New Yorker cartoons (De Vries died in 1993 and the cartoons have lacked witty captions ever since); that the funniest works of art are usually the most serious; that good books will have a different effect on one during different periods of one’s life. 

De Vries is not widely read these days (few seem to have heard of him); his twenty-five novels are now being brought back into print after many years in the wilderness.  One can almost understand this, as his novels are often considered more a part of the time in which they appeared  than transcendent of it and his struggles with religion are, like those of Graham Greene, sometimes considered irrelevant.  To those of us who lived through the fifties and sixties, however, his novels effectively capture the mordant quality of those years with rich and often withering humor.  I returned most recently to The Blood of the Lamb when I read Jill Lepore’s piece in the Nov. 21 "New Yorker," referring to it in an article about De Vries’s involvement in a project to make a film of a J.D. Salinger story

The Blood of the Lamb particularly stands out now for me in a way it didn’t before I married Susan and we had children.  Protagonist Don Wanderhope, the first-person narrator, overcomes his strict Calvinist upbringing, going to college, marrying and having a child.  He survives the early death of his brother, the madness of his father, the suicide of his wife, only to be confronted with his only child Carol becoming ill with leukemia at the age of 10.  This is one of the few books that have caused me to both laugh and cry.  Wanderhope keeps his sense of humor almost until the end.  One of Carol’s teachers later says to him “Some poems are long, some are short.  She was a short one.”

Robert Flaherty's Moana (1926) and Disney's Moana (2016)

For a quarter of a century pretty much everything coming out of our domestic film industry has aspired to the condition of the animated cartoon (as Walter Pater said the other arts did to the condition of music).
--James Bowman, "The New Criterion," Dec. 2016

Today Flaherty seems touchingly romantic in his desire to find people who have escaped the corruption of civilization.
--Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

I  don’t get out to too many movies these days (for many reasons, which I will go into at another time) but our five-year-old daughter’s school recently had a showing at our local Brooklyn theatre, the Alpine:  ten bucks for the movie, including soda and popcorn.  So Susan and I took our daughter to her first movie (our older son came also).  The theatre was comfortable, the sound and projection good; only the movie itself –Disney’s Moana—was lousy, transferring a Disney princess to the South Seas, typical bubblegum songs included.  The movie was more assembled than created -- the use of four directors indicates that – and was totally confusing:  I understood nothing about what was going on, though my daughter was occasionally scared.  I admit that I have never been a big fan of animation, though the current computer-animated cartoons are even more claustrophobic than the hand-drawn ones were.  And why do the voices get such big billing –the god Maui was voiced by Dwayne Johnson, from many action movies – when knowing the voice only interferes with appreciating, to the extent one can, the character?

Returning to Robert Flaherty’s Moana of 1926 (available from Netflix) only indicates how far we have gone with film –in the wrong direction – in 90 years.  Flaherty spent two years on Samoa filming the natives doing everything from fishing to tattooing (a rite of manhood) to climbing tall trees to obtain coconuts and making clothes out of mulberry bark.  In the 70’s Flaherty’s daughter Monica returned to Samoa and recorded some songs and sound that was added to the original silent film.  Flaherty’s films are not what could at all accurately be called “documentaries” because much of what he filmed in Moana was a re-creation of the past, as was also true of his other films, including Nanook of the North (1922).  In Moana (a male name in Flaherty's Samoa, not a female one as in the Disney film) he captures beautifully not only “the wind in the trees” (to quote D. W. Griffith), but the movement of the sea and the indigenous people and their dances.

Mark Lilla's The Shipwrecked Mind

The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

-Mark Lilla, The New York Times, Nov. 20 2016

This op-ed piece by Lilla sent me to his recent book, The Shipwrecked Mind:  On Political Reaction (New York Review Books, 2016), a study of political reaction.  The reactionaries all seem to have a time when things were great, before they went bad:  in ancient Athens or before the Reformation or before the Enlightenment.   Lilla studies three influential writer/philosophers:  Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, all of whom were on a “tragicomic quest, like Don Quixote, to revive the Golden Age,” an age that never quite existed.  “For the apocalyptic imagination the present, not the past, is a foreign country.”

Popular myths can be quite powerful, including yearning for the America of the fifties, when women and minorities knew their place and children always did as they were told.  We need to understand these myths, and not just  ignore them, in order to move ahead.  Lilla has made a good start at this, examining the thinkers who have been most influential on populist views..