NYC Ballet -- The Nutcracker -- Dec. 27, 2017

It's a pyramid of theatrical marvels, each one outdazzling the last.  But I think we aren't as much impressed by the dazzle as we are moved by the emotion it represents;   a kind of mounting ecstatic melancholy holds us in its grip.
---Arlene Croce on Balanchine's Nutcracker, "The New Yorker," Jan 22 1979

I don't have --at the moment -- too much to add to what I wrote about The Nutcracker two years ago on this blog. I was put off by the tendency of too many parents to take their kids to The Nutcracker and then never again to another ballet, as well as discussing this ballet with others and hearing them rave about the growing Christmas tree without any appreciation of the dancing or the choreography.  But this is certainly not the fault of Balanchine or the ballet; i.e., Balanchine did a lot of work for the theatre and movies --before he took over New York City Ballet --and understood the power of theatrical effects.  Balanchine's Nutcracker is like Chaplin's films:  it can be appreciated by everyone in different ways and at different levels, from the growing tree to the incredible intricacy of the arabesques, traveling rond de jambs and tour jetes in the Waltz of the Flowers and the beautiful music of Tschaikovsky, here conducted by Andrews Sill.

As usual the children were great, 63 children rehearsed by Dena Abergel, Children's Ballet Master.  I have often mentioned that Balanchine's choreography emphasizes the solo, the couple and the group, but he also emphasizes, in The Nutcracker and a few other ballets (A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example) the interactions of different ages.  In The Nutcracker, for instance, all the children want to be grown-ups and many of the grown-ups wish they could be children again and there is a tension, part of the melancholy that Arlene Croce mentions, among what we are, what we could be, and what we could have been.

The Nutcracker, like many of Balanchine's ballets, is somewhat dancer-proof.  In Tuesday's performance they had the second string in (no principals) and they were superb, perhaps to some extent due to the chance they were given and maybe even somewhat due to the current absence of Peter Martins.  Particularly lovely were Unity Phelan as The Sugarplum Fairy and Cameron Dieck as Her Cavalier; the magical moment when she glides across the stage on point while barely touching him captures the beauty of a relationship where each person is independent but still thrives with the support of another, a constant Balanchine theme.

Turner Classic Movie Jan. 2018

Nothing that new or unusual in Jan., but a number of good American and foreign films:

Jan. 3 has Howard Hawks's excellent science fiction/horror film The Thing From Another World (1951, technically directed by Christian Nyby), as well as La Jettee (1962), an intense short by Chris Marker (remade as the bloated Twelve Monkeys in 1995)

On the 4th is Leo McCarey's lovely Love Affair (1939).

The 7th has Nicholas Ray's film noir In a Lonely Place (1950, from a novel by Dorothy Hughes) and Antonioni's existential La Notte (1961)

The 8th has George Cukor's male/female rivalry comedy Adam's Rib (1949), Joseph Losey's M (1951, an American remake of Fritz Lang's 1931 original) and Phil Karlson's dark film about corruption The Phenix City Story (1955).

On the 11th is Howard Hawks's comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938).

On the 15th is King Vidor's early sound film Hallelujah (1929) and John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge, about an early African-American cavalry unit (1960)

On the 16th is Lubitsch's elegant Ninotchka (1939) and Orson Welles's botched The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), never properly completed.

On the 17th is Welles's intelligent and brilliant Chimes at Midnight (1965), Lubitsch's final comedy, Cluny Brown (1946) and Max Ophuls's stylish The Earrings of Madame De..(1953)

On the 20th is McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), a wonderful film about growing old, Vincente Minnelli's melancholic musical Band Wagon (1953) and Ermmano Olmi's soaring The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (1978)

On the 23rd are two beautiful films by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, Equinox Flower(1958) and Early Summer (1951).

More Lubitsch on the 24th, including The Merry Widow (1934) and the dark and wonderful To Be or Not To Be (1942).

The 25th has Budd Boetticher's beautiful and austere Western, Comanche Station (1960).

The 27 has two great films noirs:  Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949) and Rudolph Mate's D.O.A. (1950), with Edmond O'Brien walking into a police station to announce "I've been murdered."

The 28th has Chaplin's A Woman of Paris (1923)

On the 29th is Lloyd Bacon's Kill the Umpire (1950), written by Frank Tashlin and one of the best movies about baseball.

On the 30th is John Ford's war film, They Were Expendable (1945), about grace in defeat, and on the 31st is Otto Preminger's grimly beautiful film noir Angel Face (1952).

Ferdinand, directed by Carlos Saldanha

Ferdinand, the film, is based on the 1936 book The Story of Ferdinand, written by Munro Leaf and illustrated in black-and- white by Robert Lawson.  I accompanied my wife and daughter to this at our local theatre, The Alpine, in a showing sponsored by my daughter's school.  My response:  stick to the charming book or, at least, the eight-minute hand-drawn version directed for Disney by Dick Rickard in 1938, a version that even includes Ferdinand's mother, who is not in the new version; it's available on YouTube.

The 2017 version of Ferdinand is directed by Carlos Saldanha in a typically bloated version of computer animation.  The narrative comes to the same conclusion as the book --be yourself-- but includes endless examples of what one can do with computer animation these days, regardless of any narrative logic: Ferdinand includes "a bull in a china shop" scene and plenty of talking and wise-cracking animals, including some Lipizzaner horses doing some bizarre and pointless choreography.

Carlos Saldanha is Brazilian and bullfighting has never been successful in Brazil, though the Portuguese version does not include killing the bull in the ring.  Ferdinand takes place in Spain and is somewhat coy about what actually happens at a bullfight, though it does show the "chop shop" where bulls are sent if they are considered unsuitable for the ring.

Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Howling Dog (1934) and John Grisham's The Rooster Bar (2017)

A broad-shouldered, rather heavy-set man, of about thirty-two, with haunted brown eyes, walked into the office, and stared at the sober countenance of Perry Mason.
Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Howling Dog (1934)

The difference between Gardner's novel and Grisham's is one of eighty-three years and intensity of focus, i.e., Gardner's book is about one case in one place, while Grisham's is about many cases and takes place in various American cities as well as in Senegal.  Both Perry Mason and the three protagonists of Grisham's novel skirt the law, with Mason just inside of it and Mark, Todd and Zola just outside of it.  Grisham's novel uses the relatively limited vocabulary of current potboilers, while Gardner is not afraid to use words such as meretricious and use them well.   Gardner's book starts out with a simple plot that becomes progressively more complex, leading up to a sensational murder trial, while Grisham explains everything at length while indulging in somewhat one-sided social criticism:  of banks, law schools and immigration authorities.

Gardner's book is structured to some extent like an eighteenth century novel, with plot elements continually discussed by Mason and Paul Drake, his investigator, to keep us informed of various developments. In Grisham's novel three law-school students drop out of law school after one of their fellow students commits suicide and decide to practice law without a degree and without passing the bar.  Interestingly there is no discussion by the students or by Grisham about the position of Milton Friedman and some other economists that licensing lawyers is simply a way to keep the number of lawyers down and the prices up.  Also, there is no mention of the seven states that allow one to become a lawyer without going to law school; the three law school seniors have student debt of several hundred-thousand dollars each.  The three Grisham students quickly get caught (they haven't paid attention to the statutes of limitation in their three years of law school) but manage to escape to Zola's family, now deported to Senegal.  Perry Mason gets an acquittal for his client, though he (and we) are not sure whether or not she did actually commit murder.

Alexander Mackendrick's The Maggie (1954)

Alexander Mackendrick's comedies lead up to this kind of extreme, savage ending with triumph and humiliation and an uncertainty about what they "mean."
--Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (The Overlook Press, 1977)

Mackendrick was an American who directed several gentle comedies at Ealing in the 50's (The Man in the White Suit was another, in 1952) that were not so gentle, often pitting Americans against the old-fashioned customs of Scotland (as in The Maggie) or England and where nobody comes off unscathed.  In The Maggie (called High and Dry in America) an American tries to ship his furniture to his estate in Scotland and an Englishman screws up the shipping, assigning it to an old broken down Scottish "puffer, " barely able to make it on The Clyde.  The American has his way of doing things and the Scots have theirs and the Scottish skipper outwits every attempt of the American to intimidate him, with the furniture and the appliances ending up at the bottom of the river and the captain paid off and The Maggie renamed The Calvin B. Marshall in the American's honor.

Like most good comedies The Maggie is a serious film, about the clash between the old ways, represented by Captain Mactaggart (played by Alex Mackenzie) and the new ways represented by Marshall (Paul Douglas).  In the middle is a boy (played by Tommy Kearins) who tries --mostly unsuccessfully-- to understand both sides.  The film was made on Scottish locations, in beautiful black-and-white.

Mackendrick came back to America after this film and made the corrosive The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and in 1959 Ealing was dissolved, a victim of some of the same forces portrayed in The Maggie.  Although Ealing is known for its comedies (particularly those with Alec Guinness) they did make some superb dramas, especially in their early years (the studio years were 1939-59).  My own favorite is It Always Rains on Sunday, directed by Robert Hamer in 1947.  I highly recommend Charles Barr's intelligent and thorough book about Ealing, England and the British film industry.

Big Apple Circus Dec. 10, 2017

The Big Apple Circus has returned to New York's Lincoln Center; after going bankrupt last year as a nonprofit it has returned under the ownership of Big Top Works, who purchased all its assets. This year it is directed by Mark Lonergan and choreographed by Antoinette DiPiertropolo.  To some extent the original Big Apple Circus was known for its performance art (not a term one hears too much anymore) but now it is more traditional circus acts, with Ringling Brothers having gone out of business.  I think at this point a circus appeals more to children than adults and my six-year-old daughter loved it, though the performances can still be exciting and, occasionally, beautiful and the pointlessness of much of the show is part of the appeal.

I was particularly impressed with the balancing act of Dandino Luciana on the rola bola, a board on top of a rolling can that looked like something I have used in physical therapy, and I was impressed by juggler Gamel Garcia, bouncing and juggling a dozen tennis balls at a time. And I liked the acrobats, the Anastasni brothers, and the Flying Tienzianis on  the trapeze.  The Wallendas did a pyramid of seven people on the tightrope, a format that was more interesting than beautiful. The strangest act was that of contortionist Elayne Kraymer, who shot an arrow into a balloon using a bow with her feet, that were over her head.

Circuses have now eliminated the offensive wild animal acts and sideshows.  The Big Apple Circus did have the dog and pony shows of Jenny Vidbel, with the horses running around the ring and the dogs jumping through hoops.  The horses and dogs were loved by the kids in the audience, as were the clowns Grandma (played by Barry Lubin) and Joel Jeske; my daughter particularly liked the part of their act where they took large sips of water and spewed them on each other, reminding me of a scene in Catcher in the Rye.

The current trend in circuses is exemplified by Cirque du Soleil, which relies strictly on human performers and in some ways is like a dance performance. The Big Apple Circus has a foot in the past and a foot trying to extend into the future and one hopes it can continue.

Hong Sangsoo's Right Now, Wrong Then

Korean director Hong Sangsoo was brought to my attention by a recent article in Film Comment about him, written by Dan Sullivan.  Hong has made 21 movies and some of them are available on DVD.

Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) is a fairly successful attempt to go back to the beginning of film, to the time of D.W.Griffith and even before, to think about what a film can and should be.  The simplicity of Hong's style reminds one of Eric Rohmer's films (though without the philosophical insight) or  those of Yasujiro Ozu (without the historical reflections):  two characters talk within a single shot, with an occasional relatively unobtrusive zoom (zoom lenses go back to the twenties, though were used most extensively in the 1970's).  In Hong's film a director, Ham (played by Jung Jae-young) comes early to a film festival in Suwon and picks up a woman artist, Hea-jung (played by Kim Min-hee).  They drink, become inebriated and part ways when she finds out he is married.  Then the film starts all over again, with things going in a slightly different direction, where Ham (usually called "director Ham") takes Hea-jung home (she lives with her mother) and then says good-bye to her while she is watching his film the next day, after she literally leaves him out in the cold.

The differences in the two parts are relatively subtle, demonstrating how a slight word or two can make a significant change in a burgeoning relationship.  In the first part Ham comes across more as a womanizer, perhaps having even come early to Suwon to see if he can find a woman to impress with his status as a film director, and tells Hea-jung what he thinks she wants to hear, narrating to some extent what he is up to.  In the second part he seems to care more for Hea-jung but still acts like something of a drunken lout, especially when he goes with her to a party with her friends, after she has told him she has no friends; he heads back to Seoul as she walks home alone in the snow. The film is a good example of what Jean-Luc Godard once said about a film:  it should take half-way between the viewer and the screen.  Can we change who we are and how we behave in different times and places and with different people?  As Hea-jung walks home has her encounter with Ham changed her in any way?

James Whale's One More River (1934)

James Whale is most remembered for some of the best horror/science-fiction movies ever made -- Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Invisible Man (1933), The Old Dark House (1932) -- while his other complex and stylish films are mostly forgotten or ignored.  I first saw One More River (1934) at The New School, presented by William K. Everson in July 1972 with detailed program notes:  Grace is the keynote of this film -- from the cool beauty of Diana Wynyard on through the elegant sets and camerawork and smooth editing.  The Englishness of it all (Everson, like Whale, was English) was most apparent when C. Aubrey Smith, playing Wynyard's father, responded to her telling him that her husband (played elegantly and nastily by Colin Clive) had beaten her with a riding crop with "Bounder!  Swine!"  And when Wynyard was raped by her husband (off camera) she tried to recover with a cup of tea! 

What Whale brilliantly shows is how much is churning under the surface in England while people are trying desperately to hold on to civilized behavior, as war is drawing nearer.  Wynyard and her male friend get stuck overnight in a car and repress their emotions as they spend the night together, not knowing that her husband is having them followed.  Clive sues her for divorce, since at that time adultery was the only grounds for divorce in England, and the last third of the film is a beautifully filmed trial scene, with subtle camera movements following each witness to the dock to testify and Whale taking time to let each person testify at length and the barristers to make all their arguments. The trial helps Wynyard to recover the feeling that her husband had killed in her.

The script for One More River was from John Galsworthy's last novel and was written by playwright R.C. Sherriff. Whale, a former director of plays, brings out its subtle theatricality, with numerous scenes fading to black, followed by a low-key theatrical entrance. The print recently shown by Turner Classic Movies was sharp and beautiful and effectively captured the precise and elegant style of Whale and cinematographer John J. Mescall.

Roundup of Les Romans Policiers: Gardner, Simenon, Connelly, Child

The Knife Slipped by Erle Stanley Gardner ('writing as A.A. Fair") was recently published by Hard Case Crime.  It was written in 1939 and meant to be the second of the 40 novels Gardner wrote about private detectives Bertha Cool and Donald Lam but was considered too racy and violent at the time and Bertha Cool too hot and tough. I pulled my hat down low on my forehead and walked out of the office.  Elsie Brand didn't even look up from her typing.  Bertha Cool stood in the doorway of her private office, watching me out through the outer door. "Goodbye, lover," she said.  I slammed the door. (Titan, 2016).

The Yellow Dog is one of Georges Simenon's earlier books about Inspector Jules Maigret, who studies people rather than clues in order to discover the murderer.  In this book Simenon seems in considerable debt to Arthur Conan Doyle, as the motive for the murder goes back a fair number of years and involves a number of conspirators in a small coastal town where every one knows every one else.  Simenon wrote over 200 books, 75 of them with Maigret as the detective.  "You're lucky my friend!  Especially in this case in which my method has actually been not to have one."  (Penguin, 1931. Translated by Linda Asher).

The Midnight Line is number 20 in Lee Child's series about Jack Reacher, ex-Army MP and West Point graduate who travels randomly with just his toothbrush.  Reacher discovers a West Point class ring in a pawn shop and sets out to find its original owner, helped by his contacts in the army.  He eventually ends up in Wyoming, in the middle of an opioid ring which supplies the West Point injured soldier, Rose Sanderson, and fights (physically and mentally) his way out.  Map reading. The difference between winning and getting wiped out.  (Delacorte Press, 2017)

Two Kinds of Truth is Michael Connelly's 22nd book about Harry Bosch, now retired and working for the San Fernando police.  As usual, Connelly has loner Bosch working on two different cases simultaneously:  in one he goes undercover to solve a murder involving an opioid ring and in the other he has to defend his actions in a reopened case where he helped put someone on death row thirty years ago who is still there.  Bosch barely survives the undercover operation and is successful in defending his actions of thirty years ago, with the help of his half-brother lawyer.  Connelly continues to create vivid characters within the detailed workings of lawyers and policemen, though Bosch is fighting against his increasing cynicism.  The reality of the world was dark and horrifying.
(Little, Brown and Company, 2017)

Horror Vacuii in Coco and Our Town

Coco is the latest example of the continuing descent of the animated film into meretriciousness and irrelevant and pointless diversity.  After Moana and the islands of the South Pacific (see my post of Dec,6, 2016) we are now in Mexico and The Day of the Dead, with the usual Pixar and Disney animation that packs every frame to the point of claustrophobia.  There is a story that makes no sense on any level and with the usual vapid songs, this time with a Latin flavor.  Hundreds of people worked on this film, seventy-six minutes long, with two directors --  Lee Unkrich and Adrian Malina -- though the film seems more arbitrarily assembled than directed by anyone with any kind of vision. Endless footage is wasted showing how the skeletons in afterlife can fall apart and reassemble themselves while it is never clear what may actually be going on, as a boy seeks out his dead father.

A more successful vision of horror vacuii is Our Town (1940).  Sam Wood's direction is wooden indeed and none of the characters come to life until the last "act," when they are dead, sort of.  Thorton Wilder's play was done on stage without any elaborate sets but the production designer William Cameron Menzies packs the frames of the shots in the film with complex and elaborate fences, trees and shadows and many of the shots are through the windows of the houses of neighbors Emily and George.  The play and the film are mostly sentimental claptrap, making it ideal for high school productions, but Menzies' design makes Grover's Corners come alive in the film.  It's hard to know at this point what Wilder was actually trying to say about small towns but what comes across to this viewer, who grew up in a small town, is that everybody knows everyone else's business and conformity rules, rather like the oppressiveness of Bedford Falls in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), another critique of small town life that is often misunderstood.

Turner Classic Movies Dec 2017

The usual good and bad holiday movies, as well as some other excellent films this month.  My favorite holiday movies, for their beauty  and humor, are Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940, showing on Dec. 3) and Minnelli's delightful period musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, on Dec. 10).  And I highly recommend Remember the Night. directed by Mitch Leisen and written by Preston Sturges (1940, on Dec. 22).  Other movies this month include:

Dec. 1.  Leo McCarey's intriguing and complex Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942)

Dec. 2. James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein (1933).

Dec. 3. Richard Quine's film noir Pushover (1954) and Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954).

Dec. 4. Bresson's A Condemned Man Escapes (1956), complex in its simplicity.

Dec. 5. Fritz Lang's corrosive Clash by Night (1952).

Dec. 6. James Whale's film about theatre and theatricality in the 18th C, The Great Garrick (1937)

Dec. 8.  Deanna Durbin in the intelligent Lady on a Train (1945), directed by Charles David.

Dec. 9.  John Ford's Three Godfathers (1949), a Western version of the three wise men.

Dec. 10. Michael Curtiz's Breaking Point (1950), a superb version of a Hemingway story.

Dec. 17.  Murnau's Sunrise (1927), one of the great silent films, and Rossellini's The Flowers of St Francis (1950).

Dec. 25.  Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).

Dec. 28. Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962), the best American film about politics.

Dec. 29. Raoul Walsh's rollicking and moving Strawberry Blonde (1941).

Most Likely to Suceed by Alan Gelb: a personal response.

First of all, Gelb fudges the title of his book (Dutton, 1990) a bit.  Wyley Gates, he says, could "expect" to be salutatorian and voted "most likely to succeed" but this did not happen, since Wyley was in jail for most of his senior year at East Chatham High School, accused of killing his father, his father's live-in companion, his nineteen-year-old brother and his three-year-old orphaned nephew.  Wyley was acquitted of the murders but sentenced, along with Damian Rossney, to 8-to-25 years for conspiracy in 1987.  Wyley was released in 2003.

The acquittal, in 1987, shocked many of the residents of Columbia County (120 miles up the Hudson River from New York City) but did not shock me, who lived there from fourth grade until I left for prep school in 1962, a beneficiary of a full scholarship.  I knew full well that it was only a matter of luck and circumstance whether a "hood" became a criminal or a policeman in his lust for power and authority in Hudson(where the trial was) and Columbia County.  My father would bring in one of his policeman friends to lecture me whenever I complained about his arbitrary authority and I would just mock the threats to send me to reform school.   The police made little or no effort to collect any physical evidence that Wyley had committed the crime and only had the dubious claim that Wyley had confessed to the man who was hired to give him a lie detector test, though Wyley's lawyer had been excluded from the testing room and, in fact, the test was never actually given.

Gelb had a summer place on the same street where Wyley lived, though his primary residence was New York City.  His description of the crime and the trial is concise and accurate but he seems to have little understanding of what life in Columbia County was like for most residents.  Wyley liked to read and use a computer, PC's just starting in the late 80's to be popular.  Wyley's father Bob, however, felt differently.  Bob had a machine and equipment repair business out of his garage and, according to Gelb, had "a concern about it being 'unatural' for the boy to stay in his room so much and would make an effort to get him outside and put him to work on gears and camshafts so that he would have some 'real' knowledge of the 'real' world."  My father, who loved antique motorcars, never got his children interested in them.  The closest I came was entering the local soap box derby:  I hated working on the actual coasters but I did like that all the entrants got to go on trips to Yankee Stadium and the movies.  And my father hated the time I spent reading, insisting it was bad for the eyes. Bob would make Wyley work in the garage in the summer, without pay and when I turned 12 my father cut off my measly allowance, since now I could get a paper route.

Hudson, which had neither a library nor a bookstore when I was growing up, was an anti-intellectual town in a blue-collar county.  I spent a year at Hudson High before leaving for prep school and during that year parents complained bitterly about their children being required to read entire books (Death Be Not Proud, The Microbe Hunters):  this was oppressive.  When the guidance counselor saw what classes I was going to take at Exeter --Latin, English, Science, History -- he couldn't understand why I wanted to go away to school, since Hudson High offered the same courses!  Wyley, of course, was accused of being a "sissy" and a "homo," just as I and anyone else who had cultural interests was.  Wyley played trumpet in the high school band but never seems to have had the chance to hear a concert at near-by Tanglewood or even New York City, only two hours away by train.

Wyley found solace in religion for a time, when he was young.  He was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and for a time was an acolyte and then, at thirteen, he totally rejected the church's teaching as "garbage."  Perhaps he was subjected to what I was as an acolyte:  since one could not have breakfast before communion and we had to kneel on unsupported pillows at least one of us would faint or throw up during the service, something our minister did not like, considering it a sign of "weakness."  Gelb claims that Wyley's father, Bob, was not upset about his rejection of the church since Bob never showed up there.  This may be true; on the other hand Bob might have been like my father, who insisted his children go to church even though he never did.  My father said, with no irony, that I should do as he says, not as he does.  He said he would go to church if there was ever an issue of the weekly church bulletin that did not ask for donations and when I would bring him examples of such bulletins he would just laugh them off.

Wyley's parents were divorced when he was young and his mother lived in California.  Wyley lived with her from the ages of eight to ten, when he moved back in with his father. Apparently his mother left him alone all day to watch television while she was out with different men.  My parents fought all the time and my father terrorized my mother as much as he did his children, usually punishing us when he came home for things we did during the day.  The absence of a nurturing mother can make a big difference.  I feel fortunate in many ways that I escaped Columbia County when I did, when the factories were closing and more people were moving in from the city.  The radical changes and gentrification were setting in when Gelb published his book in 1990 and continue apace, for better or worse, the locals and the city people having little to do with one another.

Two by Jim Jarmusch: Night on Earth (1991), Paterson (2016)

Jarmusch has a rare feeling for urban desolation, for loneliness, and the sweet, whimsical overlap of chance and companionship.
David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

From Night on Earth to Paterson Jarmusch's style had become more minimalist, i.e, saying more with less.  In the town of Paterson a man named Paterson drives a local bus, focusing on his job and seldom talking to his passengers except once, when his bus breaks down.  The film takes place during one week when Paterson drives his bus, writes poetry and walks his dog to the local tavern, where he has one beer. His wife is somewhat obsessed with things black-and-white (perhaps a comment on the ubiquity of color in movies as well as the racial composition of their New Jersey town), wearing clothes and making cupcakes in those colors.  Drama is threatened and then diffused, as a car full of African-Americans jokes about dognapping Paterson's dog Marvin (a tribute to Jarmusch's membership in "The Sons of Marvin," composed of those who have a resemblance to Lee Marvin) and Paterson wrests a gun away from a distraught man in a bar, the gun only able to shoot foam pellets. Paterson on Sunday goes for a walk in the park by himself (Marvin chewed up Paterson's notebooks and is confined to the garage) and meets a Japanese tourist and writer; they talk about Paterson native William Carlos Williams and his new friend gives him a blank notebook as a present.

Jarmusch focuses beautifully in these films on work and the quotidian.  Night on Earth has five segments with cabdrivers and passengers at 4 AM.  In Los Angeles a female cabdriver takes a fare to Beverly Hills and is offered a screen test by the fare, a casting agent.  She turns her down.  In Rome a cabby picks up a priest who dies in the cab while the driver is giving an outlandish confession.  In Paris a black cabdriver picks up a blind woman and they talk about sight and other senses.  In New York a fare teaches the new immigrant cabby how to drive and in Helsinki a driver picks up three inebriated men and they discuss how bad one of the fares has it, while the driver tops them by having it much worse. The film captures the quiet beauty of cities at 4 AM, after most businesses have closed and few have opened, and those still awake talk about their lives.

Fred Zinnemann's Kid Glove Killer (1942)

Kid Glove Killer is a crisp and efficient MGM B film about a corrupt America town, where the DA murders the mayor in order to cover up his own corruption.  The DA, played by the sleazy Lee Bowman, courts lab assistant Marsha Hunt while lab technician Van Heflin uses every technical and analytical tool of the time to track down the murderer.  The DA tries to frame a diner owner who tried to complain to the mayor about a shakedown because when he originally tried to go to the police they passed on the information to the mob and the diner owner took quite a beating. This pessimistic film is something of a precursor to the postwar film noir; it was written by John C. Higgins, who later wrote T-Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948) for Anthony Mann.

Marsha Hunt plays a low-key and intelligent lab investigator, hard-working and intelligent, the kind of woman rare in contemporary films; she later was blacklisted and worked mostly in TV.  The film was the first film directed by Fred Zinnemann, who started our making shorts, and directed another intelligent crime film (Act of Violence, 1949) before going on to direct High Noon, the Western for people who don't like Westerns, and the bloated Oscar-bait and white elephants From Here to Eternity (1953)and A Man for All Seasons.(1965).

John Huston

I never cared much for Huston's most celebrated films:  the literate Maltese Falcon (1941) and The African Queen (1951) but I think The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is one of the great caper films and Huston's final film, The Dead (1987), is intensely moving and beautiful, true in spirit to James Joyce's story.  Lately I have been watching some of Huston's films from the 70's, particularly The Mackintosh Man (1973) and Fat City (1972). (I wrote about Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, (1975), on Jan 15, 2016)

Fat City is a fatalistic film about one boxer down-and-out (Stacey Keach) and another up-and-coming (Jeff Bridges).  In typical Huston style they are both failing and flailing in their attempts to succeed and make a life and the film has some interesting analogies to Huston's own life of early success and later obscurity..  Huston never stopped making films, traveling all over the world to make them, even as he was more recognized as an actor (The Cardinal,1963; Chinatown, 1974 et al.).  And Huston always had his pick of collaborators; Richard Sylbert for the production design of Fat City and Conrad Hall for the cinematography, capturing the grittiness of the boxers and onion harvesters of Stockton, Ca.

The Mackintosh Man is a cerebral spy film in the era of James Bond; it is more like John LeCarre than Ian Fleming. It is not as merciless and ruthless as Huston's The Kremlin Letter (1970) but, once again, the infiltrator of the spy network (Paul Newman) fails in his mission(as Huston's protagonists usually do) to capture the British traitor. Newman is helped by Domique Sanda (an actress discovered by Bresson, who is always enigmatic).  Huston does some extraordinary location shooting in Ireland, capturing the wild beauty of the countryside and the isolation of the towns (the main thing I remembered from when I first saw the film in 1973) and the island of Malta.  The film, like many Huston films, builds the story slowly, leading up to an impressive prison break and confrontation with the pompous member of Parliament (James Mason) who is the leader of the spy ring.

Ruben Ostlund's Force Majeure (2014)

Though I doubt that Ostlund intended the film Force Majeure to dissuade people from skiing,it certainly had that effect on me, with its white-outs, avalanches and dangerous bus rides on mountain roads.  A bourgeois family is having lunch after skiing and an avalanche heads their way.  The husband Tomas (played by Johnanes Kuhnke) grabs his smartphone and runs, while Ebba (played by Lisa Loven Kongsli) struggles to flee with the two young children.  The avalanche is controlled and everyone returns to their lunch, but Ebba cannot easily forgive Tomas.  The "happy family" struggles to understand what happened and Tomas, who initially defended himself, breaks down in self-pity and the children think a divorce is imminent as they leave the resort.

Ostlund and his cinematographer, Fredrik Wenzel, capture the lonely beauty of skiing in the snow as well as the claustrophobia of the blonde wood of the hotel rooms, the widescreen shots emphasizing the difference between the creations of nature and of man.  At night strange machines traverse the skiing areas as they groom the slopes, looking like something on another planet.  Most shots, indoors and out, are long shots in long takes, capturing the members of the family together with their doubts and fears.  Much of the film is simply conversation, especially a scene with another couple who are trying to understand what happened with Tomas and Ebba and end up turning on each other. The film, with its conversation and moral discussions, suggests that Ostlund is an heir and successor to certain other European directors who take a similar intellectual approach:  Bergman, Rohmer, Atonioni, Dreyer, et al.

Noah Hawley's Before the Fall

The universe is filled with things that don't make sense.
--Noah Hawley, Before the Fall, Hachette, 2016

I read Noah Hawley's book because I was impressed with the two seasons of Fargo he wrote, though admittedly I did not care as much for the other TV work he has done.  An important theme of the Fargo episodes he wrote is the arbitrary timing of how things happen and their consequences.  This theme is carried over in Before the Fall, about the crash of a small plane, with two survivors from the passengers and crew.  This novel was recently awarded the Edgar for best novel of the year and it makes one wonder what the competing books were like (I haven't read any of them at this point), as Before the Fall reads like a decent outline for a possibly interesting TV series:  an artist gets on the plane at the last minute, with a bunch of rich people, and survives the crash, while rescuing  a four-year-old boy.  The authorities get involved and, of course, so does the media.  Conspiracy and terrorist theories fly until it turns out that the co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane because the flight attendant rejected his advances.

Red herrings abound, as they do in too many examples of so-called "suspense" and "mystery" novels, in order to distract and manipulate the reader.  Hawley does a decent job of going back to the lives of those in the crash, though only the survivors come across as successful characters.  "Before the fall" of course refers to a prelapsarian time when things were supposedly idyllic but for most of us --and certainly for the characters in this book -- no such time actually exists.

Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2017

Nothing new particularly but lots of solid war films (Veterans' Day) and Americana.

Nov 3: John Huston's late and overlooked The Mackintosh Man (1973)

Nov.4:  Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1948), from the Raymond Chandler novel.

Nov. 7 Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma (1943), the best film about WW II in Asia; Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940); Frank Borzage's grim and beautiful The Mortal Storm (1940)

Nov. 9 King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925), about WW I; Orson Welles's great Shakespearean film, Chimes at Midnight (1965); Samuel Fuller's film about the Korean War, The Steel Helmet (1951); John Ford's exemplary film about WW II in the Pacific, They Were Expendable (1945)

Nov. 11 John Ford's Western about the African-American cavalry, Sergeant Rutledge (1960), starring Woody Strode.

Nov.13 Leo McCarey's widescreen romance, An Affair to Remember (1957) and Abraham Polonsky's film noir, Force of Evil (1948).

Nov. 14 Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932), one of the best gangster films.

Nov. 15 Masterpieces by Welles, Joseph H. Lewis, Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger:  Citizen Kane (1941), Gun Crazy (1949), Vertigo (1950) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Nov. 20 Hawks's great screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Nov 21 Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1951) a personal view of the Civil War and Native Americans.

Nov 24 Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1942), a very serious comedy.

Nov. 29 Two ferocious Westerns, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950)

Cecil B.DeMille's Madam Satan 1930

Once aboard the Zeppelin the whole pace and mood changes, and it becomes the kind of wild, vulgar, spectacular, no-holds-barred frolic that all DeMille films are supposed to be and almost never are.
--William K. Everson, Notes on Madam Satan. The New School, March 19, 1971,

In the seventies I went to Everson's film programs at The New School every Friday night; after seeing Citizen Kane at MoMA  I went everywhere to see every movie I could in order to gradually develop my own taste.  Most of what Everson showed was very much off the beaten track, obscure movies that few remember even now.  Everson collected 16 mm. prints and always stayed to talk about the films he showed for as long as anyone had questions.  Everson was always ready to help film researchers and showed me a print in his apartment of the original Lewis Milestone film of The Front Page (1931)when I was writing an article about the Billy Wilder version.  Everson also loaned me a print of John Ford's Wagon Master (1950)to show to a graduate school seminar when I was studying the visual relationships between Ford and Frederick Remington.  More on Everson another time; I am just leading up to when I first saw Madam Satan, at a showing by Everson at The New School,  It was an astonishing film to me then and still is now.

Turner Classic Movies recently showed Madam Satan as a tribute to its fine editor, Anne Bauchens. The film was written by three women -- Jeanie Macpherson, Gladys Unger, Elsie Janis --and has positive and complex views of women and marriage.  Kay Johnson is having marital troubles with her husband, played by Reginald Denny.  In the first part of the film Johnson tracks down Denny's mistress, played by Lillian Roth, whom friend Roland Young claims is his wife.  Confusion reigns, with much hiding under blankets and slamming of doors and Denny and Johnson part ways, though not before Young and Denny take a shower together (they are admittedly inebriated and fully dressed).  Some have unfavorably compared this part of the film with Lubitsch --Everson says the DeMille lacks grace --but it is intentionally more of a sexual farce than the sly humor of Lubitsch.

Denny and Young head to a costume party on a dirigible moored above Central Park that is wild indeed, art-directed to a fare-thee-well by Mitch Leisen, with crazy costumes and art deco furnishings, lots of erotic dancing (led by Lillian Roth) and hot music.  Kay Johnson comes disguised as Madam Satan, ready to take any man to hell (Roland Young says, "It's a waste to take any married man to hell") and her husband falls for her when they dance together.  She reveals herself just as the dirigible is hit by lightning and starts to break up as it drifts away.  Kay has a parachute but gives it to Lillian Roth when Roth says, "I don't want your husband, I want a parachute!" but Denny gives Kay his.  Kay lands on a couple necking in a convertible, Denny jumps into the reservoir just before the dirigible crashes, Roland Young lands in a tree in the lions' den.

The film is a mixture of genres --  romantic comedy, musical, disaster movie-- that has much to say about the roles of women in society.  DeMille unfortunately never made a movie quite like it again, sticking with Westerns and biblical dramas and eschewing the chronicles of human behavior that he had been doing since Male and Female (1919).  Also, unfortunately, as studios became more comfortable with sound they became more conservative and there were fewer and fewer female screenwriters and editors.

World Series 2017

If game 2 of this year's World Series represents the present and future of baseball please count me out.  All my comments about home runs (see my posting of Sept. 22) apply:  baseball is becoming a game where each team strikes out and hits home runs until the game is over; there were eight home runs in game 2.  Whatever happened to stolen bases, sacrifice bunts (forget bunts for hits, which one may think should be more common in this era of the shift; will there ever be another Rod Carew?), the hit-and-run play and the many other nuances of the game that once made baseball so beautiful ?  Will there ever be another Billy Martin? Other comments on the Series:

CGI commercials have so taken over that they now even cover up players making a catch!

There are more shots of the dugouts than of the field and even when there is a shift on you seldom see it and only rarely do the announcers mention it.

The announcers have no idea about basic rules of grammar:  they don't understand tenses, they can't tell adverbs from adjectives, they can't match subjects and verbs correctly, they don't know the difference between comparative and superlative, etc.  During the playoffs I tried to keep a record of all the grammatical mistakes made by the announcers but they made them faster than I could record them!  The announcers continue to celebrate home runs and never explain what, for instance, ERA and slugging percentage mean, probably because some of them don't know.  But everyone understands a home run.

There has not been a day World Series game since 1987,  Networks claim they want to have as many viewers as possible and they don't want to have to compete against football.  Both these arguments are dubious:  most football fans don't care much about baseball and night games lose the younger audience (which, of course, does not buy beer and motorcars).  See stuffnobodycaresabout.com for a detailed discussion of this question.

As statisticians continue to analyze every pitch and every swing there are still many things that can't be explained by numbers, such as why the Yankees won three playoff games in New York but could not win in Houston and what happened to the Cubs. Meanwhile, I am going off to learn about cricket.

Andre De Toth's Day of the Outlaw 1959

I have mentioned De Toth previously (posts of July 7, 2016 and May 13, 2015) as a master of relatively low-budget genre films.  Day of the Outlaw is an austere and powerful Western that was made around the time Westerns were beginning to dominate television.  De Toth's film is in black-and-white to better emphasize its simple physical beauty and the complex psychological interplay of its characters (the producer wanted color and the cinematographer is Russell Harlan, who also did De Toth's intense Ramrod, 1947).  Robert Ryan is ready to shoot it our with the husband of the woman he loves but just before the bottle rolling down the bar hits the floor to signal the shoot-out the door opens and in comes Burl Ives and his men, army deserters and thieves carrying stolen gold.

This changes the whole moral equation and the small town of about twenty people tries its best to keep the injured Ives alive; only Ives can keep his men from drinking and molesting the women.  The town of Bitters, Wyoming is snowbound but Ryan knows the troops coming after Ives and his men are not far away and offers to lead Ives's gang though a pass in the mountains to freedom, even though he and Ives know there is no such path.  Ryan is no longer concerned about how his cattle is being kept from food and water by the barbed wire of the farmers and the crisis causes him to reflect on his own bad behavior.  Ives and all his men die in a snowstorm, some shooting each other and some freezing to death.

De Toth and Harlan capture the bleak beauty of a snowbound town with only three buildings:  a store, a barber shop and a saloon.  Ryan and Ives start out as antagonists but both have good and bad in their backgrounds that are only hinted at and are used to bluff each other.  De Toth uses a grizzled collection of supporting actors --Dabbs Greer, Jack Lambert, Frank DeKova , et al. -- to effectively populate the town and the outlaws. Tina Louise is the confused woman trying to decide between Ryan and her husband (Alan Marshal).

The Police Procedural: Michael Connelly and Georges Simenon

By law they should have had a search warrant but both detectives knew they could cite exigent circumstances if a problem developed later.
--Michael Connelly, The Late Show (Little, Brown and Company 2017)

Were the goings-on in an upstairs bedroom in a private house in Rue Chaptal of any interest to the papers, the public, or even juries made up chiefly of small shopkeepers and bank clerks?
----Georges Simenon, Maigret's First Case (Penguin, 1949, translated by Ros Schwartz)

Connelly's novel takes place in the present-day while Simenon's takes place in 1913, when Jules Maigret was just starting his career as a policeman and detective.  Though Connelly's detective Renee Ballard has the use of computers, data bases and all the modern methods of crime solving that Maigret does not have, still, the two detectives both rely primarily on stake-outs and ratiocination.

The Late Show is Connelly's first book about Detective Renee Ballard and she faces some of the same problems of class and bureaucracy that Detective Harry Bosch has faced in the two dozen books Connelly has written with Bosch as the lead character.  Both Connelly and Simenon have a considerable grasp of the exhausting details of police work, a detective being part psychologist as well as scholar, researcher, and scientist.  Connelly and Simenon also excel in their use of specific locations and their denizens, Ballard in Los Angeles and Maigret in Paris.  Whether for private detectives or police personnel I prefer the liveliness of specific and precise locations rather than the fictional city of, for example, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series, as good as it is.

Detective Ballard has to deal with sexual harassment and condescension, while Maigret's biggest problem is one of class, i.e., his superiors are much less interested in solving a case if it involves people of wealth who may be their dining companions.  Maigret at least has an understanding wife to come home to, while Ballard is something of a loner, exiled to the night shift when her partner will not back up her complaint of harassment.  Maigret's First Case is actually the thirtieth of Simenon's extraordinary output of 75 Maigret novels (as well as many stand-alone novels).  It is not unusual, of course, for "first cases" to be published long after a detective's original appearance, e.g., Sherlock Holmes's first case, "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott," appeared several years after the first Holmes stories.

Both Maigret and Ballard are attacked and kidnapped and both manage to free themselves, though Ballard is able to retaliate against her kidnappers more effectively than Maigret, physical training for police having improved considerably in the last one hundred years, and both manage to solve their cases, even if justice is not as perfectly served as they might like.

NYC Ballet: Oct. 14, 2017

Saturday afternoon, Oct.14, The New York City Ballet performed four works by Balanchine that showed the range of his choreographic genius, a program that Susan, Gideon, Victoria and I enjoyed immensely. Of course I miss Balanchine not only because there will never be any new Balanchine ballets but also because he is not around to change the old ones, as he did many times.  A case in point is Square Dance, originally choreographed in 1957 using a caller and dancers in Western clothes, with the small orchestra on stage playing the Corelli and Vivaldi music.  Balanchine often moved to an abstract version of his choreography and in 1976 he did away with the caller, changed the clothes to practice clothes, and put the orchestra in the pit.  He also added a male solo, which on Saturday was elegantly danced by Taylor Stanley.  I did get to see a version of the original design of Square Dance by the Joffrey in 1976, with the original caller, Elisha C Keeler, calling "Gents go round, come right back.  Make your feet go wickety-wack" and other terms for steps (wickety-wack was entrechat quatre).  This was a brilliant use of the vernacular by Balanchine but did seem somewhat gimmicky.  Now the choreography has been expanded for the New York State Theatre, as Balanchine did with many of the ballets that were first performed on the smaller stage of City Center, but the square dance elements are still there if one watches carefully.  Taylor Stanley did his solo beautifully, alone on the stage as though he had briefly slipped out of the dance hall, and doing some slow-motions versions of the faster ensemble steps.  Ashley Bouder danced wonderfully, especially the tour jete that ends as an assemble that was incorporated into the choreography when Merrill Ashley danced the part (Balanchine often made changes in the choreography based on who was dancing).

Duo Concertant was danced next, to Stravinsky's music.  The musicians, violinist and pianist, were on stage and the dancers, Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild, listened to them briefly before they started to dance, emphasizing how much Balanchine's choreography is directly connected to the music.  As Charles M. Joseph says in Stravinsky and Balanchine, "In this ballet more than in any other, Balanchine affirms the music's primacy in a stunning way," as the dancers for eight bars of music do the same step. The dancers dance separately and together, the choreography being simultaneously meditative and energetic and ending on a dark stage, with spotlights on the dancer's faces.

La Valse, choreographed by Balanchine in 1951, is something of a dance noir version of Vienna Waltzes (Balanchine, 1977), a waltz of death.  Balanchine found the original score too short and added some additional Ravel waltzes.  The ballet has an unusually fatalistic quality, as death shows up at the dance.  This was a fairly common scene in the 19th C., when death came to the young more often than it does now (see Poe's The Mask of the Red Death, 1842, and Roger Corman's interesting period film version with the same title, 1964).  Sara Mearns is the woman in white (perhaps a reference to Wilkie Collins's semi-gothic novel) who is fascinated by the appearance of death at the party, which whirls around endlessly in a dance of death.  Amar Ramasar , a dancer I generally don't care for, is effectively minimal as the symbol of death (a role I saw Francisco Moncion in many times).  .

The last ballet Saturday was the energetic and gorgeous Cortege Hongrois, originally done for Melissa Hayden for her retirement in 1973.  It was one of the first Balanchine ballets I saw and is as astonishingly beautiful as ever, as Peter Martins continues to keep the Balanchine ballets in pretty good shape.  Just as Balanchine was inspired by American dancing in Square Dance he used his extraordinary knowledge of Russian folk dancing for Cortege Hongrois. The music is from Alexander Glazounov's Raymonda, a source of music for some other Balanchine ballets, and is a tribute to the Maryinsky Ballet, where Balanchine danced as a boy, and its great choreographer Marius Petipa.  Susan loved the ballet, though she did think the folk dance parts seemed like a separate ballet.  Partly the folk dances are part of the tribute to Petipa, who often included them in his choreography, but also they represent an inclusion by Balanchine.  Cortege Hongrois not only has solos and pas de quarte, it also includes everyone who likes to dance, from the aristocrats to the peasants; there are forty dancers in the ballet, all infused with terrific attack and speed, led by Teresa Reichlen and Russell Janzen, Savannah Lowery and Sean Suozzi.

William K. Howard's This Side of Heaven (1934)

This Side of Heaven is one of the best-crafted films that William K. Howard made of the sixty films he directed between 1916 and 1946,  Many of these films have not survived and even The Power and the Glory, made in 1936 with a script by Preston Sturges and considered an important influence on Citizen Kane, survives only in fragmented form.  Like many of Howard's films This Side of Heaven has a great deal of sympathy for its female characters:  a daughter going to college, another daughter who teaches school, an intelligent housekeeper and a mother who has written a novel and has just received a contract to write screenplays in Hollywood.  The men are weaker and more problematic, including the father who was tricked into embezzlement, a son who only cares about getting into a fraternity and a louse engaged to the teacher who only cares about himself.

The film was written by two women -- Zelda Sears and Eve Green -- and based on a novel by Marjorie Bartholomew Paradis.  It was filmed just before the Production Code was put into effect and includes passionate kissing, premarital sex and two attempted suicides, as it follows the Turner family (Lionel Barrymore, Fay Bainter, Mae Clark, Tom Brown, Mary Carlisle and housekeeper Una Merkel) for 24 hours as each member confronts serious problems while Mrs. Turner gets ready to leave for Hollywood.  Howard and cinematographer Hal Rosson (who worked on his first film in 1916 and his last in 1967) film in crisp black-and-white and use the uncommon swish-pan for telephone conversations and to connect scenes, emphasizing the importance of the family connections and the panic caused by difficulties getting in touch. The screenplay is rich in the slang of the time while relating problems and struggles that are as relevant as ever. The film was obviously not only a considerable influence on the Andy Hardy movies that were soon to come out of the same studio, MGM,  but also on Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), in which Lionel Barrymore was the bad guy in a similar plot.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

The Cercle Rouge script is an original in the sense it was written by me and me alone, but it won't take you long to realize it's a transposed Western, with the action taking place in Paris instead of the West, in our own time rather than after the Civil War, and with cars replacing the horse.
--Jean-Pierre Melville

Melville, who changed his name to Melville in tribute to the author of Moby Dick, was intrigued by all things American.  His favorite movie was John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), a significant influence on Le Cercle Rouge.  In Melville's film three men (Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Gian Maria Volonte) team up to rob a jeweler and it all goes bad when the fence they are using is blackmailed by both the police and the mob.  The film has very little dialogue and the only woman in the cast (a former lover of Delon) is seen briefly sleeping with a mob boss.  We know very little about the characters -- a man just out of prison, a man on his way to prison, a dipsomaniac former cop -- and the emphasis is on the planning of the robbery, the robbery itself and the disastrous aftermath.

Melville and his cinematographer, Henri Decae, use cool blues and green in an effectively desaturated color palette.  The minimalist score, by Eric Demarson, is mostly low-key percussion and works well with Melville's stylized film, with its sudden bursts of violence and its hunted men. The film, with its hats and trenchcoats, verges on the parodic but Melville overcomes that with his passion for the drama and the interplay of the thieves, the mob and the police.

William Dieterle's From Headquarters 1933

From Headquarters was directed by William Dieterle in 1933, one of five films Dieterle directed for Warner Brothers that year.  It's a fast and snappy pre-Code film with George Brent and Eugene Palette investigating a murder, without ever leaving headquarters.  The only other location in the film is the murdered man's apartment, which is shown in point-of-view shots (cinematography by William Reese)as each suspect (there are many) describes what he or she was doing there last night; since the murdered man was a drug user, an abuser of women and a blackmailer everyone had a motive. Dieterle and Reese also use some effectively extreme camera angles to capture the disorientation of suspects being questioned

The 63-minute film is also a very detailed documentary about the technical aspects of the case, with everything from fingerprinting to testing guns and hair samples shown in extensive detail and the various scientists involved depicted as both intelligent and enthusiastic.  Policeman George Brent is in love with one of the suspects, played by Margaret Lindsay and another female suspect was driven to think of suicide because of the way the murdered man had treated her.  One suspect actually murders another man in a closet in police headquarters.

If I have any quibbles about this film it is the attempts at humor that seem to be required in every B film, but here it is kept to a minimum, with Eugene Palette wanting to arrest everyone and a bail bondsman roaming the halls to drum up business. The arrest of the murderer turns out to be a very low-key parody of a murder mystery, without interfering with the seriousness of the film.

John Le Carre's A Legacy of Spies

How much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel human or free?
-- narrator Peter Guillam, A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carre (Viking 2017)

Le Carre's novels have not been as successful after the end of the Cold War as they were during it, the moral ambiguity replaced by good guys and bad guys (who are usually Americans and their aggressiveness and greed).  In his latest book Le Carre returns to the characters and operations of two of his best novels: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker,Tailor,Soldier,Spy (1974), as the children of two  people who died in Operation Windfall have brought a suit against the British government.

I have always been one who found Le Carre's plots incomprehensible.  Perhaps there is a good reason for this, as few of the spies involved know more than a small piece of things and there is a great deal of disagreement at the Circus (as the British Secret Service is called) over who is dissembling and who is telling the truth, who is honest and loyal and who is a double agent. A Legacy of Spies is narrated by agent Peter Guillam, who tells us a great deal more than he tells the Circus members who interrogate him.  He largely fails to sort out all the ambiguities in Operation Windfall and eventually tracks down his mentor, George Smiley, who can only say, "If I had an unattainable ideal, it was leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still."

To a certain extent Le Carre is speaking here for himself.  He is revisiting the moral ambiguity of his earlier novels to emphasize reason, which he still feels is necessary for a lasting peace.

Turner Classic Movies Oct. 2017

Lots of horror and science fiction this month; I recommend everything by Terence Fisher and Val Lewton. Lewton is the producer of low-budget horror films, mostly directed by Mark Robson and Jacques Tourneur, and Fisher is the imaginative director of many films from Hammer, an English studio.

Oct 1:  The month starts off with Le Cercle Rouge, an intelligent and austere gangster/caper film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1970.
Oct. 4 has films by Buster Keaton; I particularly like The Cameraman and Steamboat Bill, Jr. for their intricate gags.
Oct. 5 has one of the best film noirs, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, 1947
Oct. 7 has Raoul Walsh's intense High Sierra (1941) and Andre DeToth's brilliant Western Day of the Outlaw (1959)
Oct. 8 is Edgar Ulmer's corrosive Detour (1945)
Oct. 10 and 11 has Val Lewton's films.
Oct. 14 is John Boorman's powerful Point Blank (1967)
Oct. 15 is Raoul Walsh's intelligently political A Lion is in the Steets (1953)
Oct. 17 is Edgar Ulmer's Carnegie Hall (1947), with some wonderful music.
Oct. 29 has Kenji Mizoguchi's mysteriously beautiful Ugetsu (1953)
Oct. 30 is Gordon Douglas's I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951); I wrote about it on Nov. 7, 2014.
Oct. 31 is an unusual vampire film that is both funny and scary:  Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1968).

Alfred Werker's The Last Posse (1953)

The Last Posse is a beautiful, elegiac film about the demise of morality and the rise of greed in the frontier West.  Director Alfred Werker directed mostly B films but could soar -- as he did with The Last Posse -- with the right collaborators.  The Last Posse is filmed in beautiful black-and-white by cinematographer Burnett Guffey and produced by Harry Joe Brown, who would later produce similarly austere Westerns with director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, often shot --as The Last Posse was -- in rugged Lone Pine, California.

The cast is headed by Broderick Crawford, playing a dipsomaniac sheriff, and Charles Bickford, as a ruthless and greedy cattle owner. Bickford is robbed by some ranchers he cheated and the posse chases them into the desert.  The film has an unusual structure, with three different narrators taking up the story at different points, as the robbers and Bickford are killed and Crawford injured, and "the good citizens" who make up the posse divide up the stolen money.  "A sheriff has no friends, just a job, " says Crawford, who survives until John Derek, who plays Bickord's adopted son, tells the whole story. The film takes place on the anniversary of Founder's Day in Roswell, New Mexico, a town carved out of the inhospitable desert and as soon as the founders, played by a marvelous collection of grizzled character actors, are outside their artificial civilization they resort to greed and power, with only the sheriff trying to extend civilization beyond the town limits.

Home Runs

An all-or-nothing game becomes a feat of strength, often at the expense of daring baserunning, acrobatic fielding and a faster pace of action.
 --Tyler Kepner, The New York Times

I confess I'm no fan of these home run effusions, whether driven by steroid or technique.  It's a dullard's game, strikeouts, power and little else.
--Michael Powell, The New York Times

This year the number of home runs is the highest ever, already having eclipsed the 2000 record of 5693.  An occasional home run can be exciting, but too many home runs and the strikeouts that go with the constant attempts are tedious.  I know my previous suggestions of making home runs outs or, at least, foul balls, is unlikely to be adopted so I make the following, only slightly more possible, suggestions.

1. Educate the fans to the nuances of the game.  The TV announcers and sportscasters could stop endlessly promoting home runs and emphasize the subtleties and beauties of the game.  The biggest problems with that, of course, is how ignorant many of the sportscasters and announcers are and the retirement of Vin Scully.

2. Help out the pitchers.  Most starters now can barely go five innings and more than 25% of major league pitchers have had Tommy John surgery, ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction. How many of the home runs are fueled by pitchers being pressured to pitch at 100 mph, now that everyone in the line-up is trying to hit a home run?
a. raise the mound to the 15 inches it was until 1969 (it is now 10 inches), after Denny McLain had thirty wins and Bob Gibson an ERA of 1.12.
b. expand the strike zone to what it was in the 60's, from the top of the shoulders to the bottom of the knees, rather than the current top of the knees to the middle of the torso.
c. legalize the spitball.  Leonard Koppett has shown that the spitball was banned in 1920 not because it was somehow "unfair," but rather for sanitary reasons, .i.e., baseballs were not replaced regularly like they are now and infielders had to handle balls loaded with various substances.

3. Do away with the designated hitter in the American League.  The dh was instituted in 1973 because Major League Baseball thought they were losing fans to football and felt they had to have higher scores. Everyone knows that having a dh undermines the balance between hitting and fielding, one of the beauties of baseball.

4. Deaden the ball, ideally going back to a rubber center instead of cork.

5. Move the outfield fences back, if possible, and make the fences higher.

Steroid testing will never be entirely successful; those who are determined will find ways to defeat it.  Other changes are necessary.

The MGM B film: Under Cover of Night; Code Two

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for showing these two movies this month. MGM, of course, was known for its glossy films with big stars, but they also made B movies, i.e., features running 60 or 70 minutes to show on a double bill.  Most B films were relatively inconsequential time-fillers but there were some good directors who rather specialized in them, particularly Edgar Ulmer and Budd Boetticher, and did not quite succumb to the formula that usually included comic relief and a happy ending.

Under Cover of Night was one of seven (!) films that George B. Seitz made for MGM in 1937.  It's a clever and unusual film about academic life, with an ambitious professor whose wife does all his research and threatens to leave him when he is unfaithful with a student.  He proceeds to throw her dog out the window, causing her to have a fatal heart attack, and then in one night kills all the people he thinks his wife may have given her notes to.  This is rather an extreme example of the cutthroat aspect of the academic life but seems not so crazy for those of us who have been in graduate school.  There is also an effective subplot of the particular difficulties of being a woman professor, condescended to and denied promotion. Seitz uses an impressive array of character actors --Edmund Lowe, Florence Rice, Henry Daniell, Sara Hade, et al.-- for the various members of the academy and uses cinematographer Charles Clarke to minimize the MGM gloss, with most of the film taking place during one long night.

The director of Code Two (1953) was Frank Wilcox, who directed only ten movies in his career, the best-known of which is The Forbidden Planet (1956), a science fiction version of The Tempest. Code Two stars Ralph Meeker, who two years later starred in the corrosive Kiss Me Deadly.  In Code Two Meeker shows the same arrogance that he showed in Robert Aldrich's film but here it is seen as positive rather than destructive.  Meeker and a couple of buddies become cops and there is documentary-like footage of their training.  After being assigned jobs of typing and counting towels they all decide to become motorcycle cops, for the excitement and extra pay, as the Harley-Davidsons become the stars of the picture, with their ability to go anywhere.  But being a motorcycle cop is dangerous and one of Meeker's buddies gets killed when he stops a truck full of stolen cows. "Everything is a Western." Sam Peckinpah once said, and Meeker goes after the cattle rustlers, on a motorcycle rather than a horse.  The truck that Meeker is looking for has tires with a distinctive pattern and at one point Meeker hides in the bushes and every time a truck goes by he splashes water on the road to check the pattern of the tires.  Meeker gets the bad guys after being shot himself and there is indeed a relatively happy ending as Meeker flirts with the nurse in the hospital in an attempt to forget the death of his friend.

Roy Del Ruth's Upperworld, 1934

Roy Del Ruth was an efficient and workmanlike director for Warner Brothers in the thirties. His films are brisk and snappy views of the working classes, at least until 1934.  In 1934 the new Production Code started to be enforced and Upperworld seems to be a film that started before code enforcement but was changed before it was released, with the title gaining a perhaps unintended irony, suggesting that if one is rich and powerful enough one can get away with murder.

Warren William plays a railroad magnate who is lonely when his wife of fourteen years, played by Mary Astor, spends all her time socializing, even sending their young son off to military school to get the "proper" education.  William (much less sleazy than in his pre-code films) falls in love with a lively dancer, played by Ginger Rogers.  Rogers' agent, played by J. Carrol Naish, tries to blackmail William and accidentally kills Rogers while shooting at William, who then kills Naish and covers up the crime, making it look like murder and suicide.  William then bribes the police commissioner who throws in jail a cop who saw William's car at the scene.  William is eventually caught by fingerprints, goes to trial, is acquitted and sails to Europe with his wife, with whom he has reconciled.

I'm giving more detail of the plot than I usually do because it illustrates how the production code, once it went into effect, elevates marriage and wealth over the struggles of the working class, which was once the bread-and-butter of Warner Brothers.  What does come through in the released version of the film is the energy and inventiveness of the working classes:  Ginger Rogers singing "Shake Your Powder Puff" in burlesque, Andy Devine as a chauffeur who hangs out at the public library to read and pick up interesting girls, Robert Greig as the unflappable butler, John Quale as a put-upon janitor, Sidney Toler as an incorruptible beat cop, etc.  Cinematographer Tony Gaudio uses a mobile camera to explore the obsequious world of a railroad magnate's office as well as the cozy world of a chorus girl's apartment.

Tom Perrotta's Mrs. Fletcher

That didn't sound bad to Amanda.  "I like Victorian novels. At least I used to.  I haven't read one since college."
"They can be kind of daunting," said Eve. "I've been meaning to start Middlemarch for the past year or so. Everybody always says how great it is.  But it never seems like the right time to crack it open."
Amanda looked wistful.  "There's so much to read but all I do iis watch Netflix and play Candy Crush.  I feel like I'm wasting my life."
--Tom Perrotta, Mrs. Fletcher, Scribner, 2017

I did like Perrotta's previous book, The Leftovers (2011) --see my blog entry of June 25, 2014 -- but did not care for Mrs. Fletcher, a book that effectively makes fun of everybody in the suburbs:  the old, the young, the LGBT community, college students, blue-collar workers, the married, the divorced, the autistic, etc.  What happened between The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher was Perrotta's stint with Damon Lindelof (of "Lost" notoriety) on the HBO version of The Leftovers, which had an arbitrary structure --let's make it up as we go along--that made no sense and was only redeemed by the presence of the luminous Carrie Coon, also this year in "Fargo."

The attempts at humor in Mrs. Fletcher are unfunny and misanthropic.  When it come to the end, with the divorced Eve marrying a plumber and her college dropout son going to work as the plumber's assistant, it comes across as a parody (and neither plumber is named Lee).  Whether it is parody, a self parody (conscious or unconscious) or something else I will leave to Dwight Macdonald's successors (see his book Parodies, The Modern Library, 1960).  Perhaps it is just too typical of many contemporary novels, with its impoverished vocabulary, gratuitous sex and arbitrary plotting, as though Jane Austen had never lived. 

Val Lewton's Youth Runs Wild (1944)

You are seeing pretty nearly the only writing and acting and directing and photography in Hollywood which is at all concerned with what happens inside real and particular people among real and particular objects.
-- James Agee on Youth Runs Wild

Agee was writing when the film came out, during WWII,  Most movies at that time stressed the heroics of the soldiers and the important sacrifices made by the workers at home.  What Lewton stressed was the impact on the children whose parents were either away or at home fighting the war.  It is an intense psychological portrait of children on their own, trying to find excitement in a time of food and gasoline rationing.  Teenage boys steal tires to make enough money to buy their girlfriends presents while the girls take dubious jobs to buy clothes; there are no scenes in school, which is largely ignored.

Lewton was a master of the subtle horror film (I Walked With a Zombie, 1943, and The Cat People, 1942) and was usually allowed to do what he wanted, as long as the budgets were low and the grosses acceptable.  RKO was concerned, however, about Lewton applying his dark and baroque sensibility to a contemporary story and they not only re-cut the film, taking out the part where a boy kills his sadistic father, but added a fatuous ending where kids become well-behaved by using youth centers (too late for the three boys in the film who were sentenced to "forestry camp").  RKO refused to honor Lewton's request to have his name removed from the film.

Still, what remains are all the contradictions of small-town-life during the war, filmed in a neo-realist style (cinematography by John J. Mescall) with only a few shabby sets and Lewton's stock company of actors, including Jean Brooks and Kent Smith.  Generally I find the director the most important part of the creative team on a movie but Lewton was a producer who worked closely with his writers and directors to produce a vision of his own.  His best films had the best directors, particularly Jacques Tourneur, but Mark Robson, who directed Youth Runs Wild, did a creditable job with it and with Lewton's marvelously eerie The Seventh Victim (1943).

Lois Weber's Where Are My Children?, 1916

Lois Weber was one of the best-known directors of the first decade of the 20th Century, but her didactic, class-conscious and social-issue oriented films fell quickly out of fashion in the jazz age and few of her several hundred films have even survived.  One that was reconstructed and preserved by The Library of Congress, Where Are My Children?, 1916, was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies.

In Where Are My Children? a district attorney is prosecuting a doctor for distributing pamphlets about birth control to the poor, after the doctor has seen starvation and abuse in the slums.  Meanwhile the DA's wife has had two abortions with a Dr. Malfit, feeling that the children her husband wants would only interfere with her life as a "social butterfly."  She regularly refers her society friends to Dr. Malfit and even refers her n'er-do-well brother to Malfit when her brother becomes involved with a maid who becomes pregnant.  Dr. Malfit bungles the maid's abortion and the maid dies, though not before telling her mother about the brother and Dr. Malfit.  The DA does not know about his wife's involvement and prosecutes Malfit for murder, finding out about his wife and her friends from Malfit's subpoenaed records.  The DA's wife cannot now have children and so the couple spends their last years together, sad and lonely, visited by their children that were never born (Weber was fond of double exposures).

Yes, the film seems dated and even a little creepy but is full of passion and vivid portrayals (Tyrone Power Sr. and Helen Rieume play the DA and his wife).  Weber is very careful about the issue of abortion:  the film is not necessarily for it or against it but rather sees it a privilege of the wealthy and the upper classes who deny even rudimentary birth control to the poor. Weber shows the outdoors and "the wind in the trees," with nature compared to the artificial lives of the upper classes.

Norman Taurog's The Stooge (1951)

The Stooge stars Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and was released in 1953, though made in 1951; producer Hal Wallis thought it was too serious a film.  The film has a title at the beginning that places it in 1930 but there is little effort to made it a serious period piece.  Rather, it gives a version of how Lewis and Martin came together and how they each felt about the team that may be too close to the truth.  Martin and Lewis made 17 movies in 8 years --1948  to 1956 -- and producer Wallis used undistinguished directors who would not monkey with the winning formula of smooth-singing Martin and goofy Lewis, often with a homoerotic undertone:  when Lewis and Martin first travel together in The Stooge Lewis climbs right in bed with Martin in their sleeping compartment on the train. Martin and Lewis both have wives in the film but obviously care more for each other, though each thinks they are the most important member of the team.  Taurog's direction is routine, consisting of mostly bland medium shots, but it does seem to give some idea of what Lewis and Martin did in their act, even if, in this case, it is taking place in a studio version of vaudeville.

Lewis was determined to improve the quality of directors, perhaps being aware that the Marx Brothers made only one consistently good movie, Duck Soup in 1933, because it was their only film directed by a skilled director of comedy, Leo McCarey.  The last two films of Martin and Lewis -- Artists and Models in 1955 and Hollywood or Bust in 1956 -- were directed by Frank Tashlin and are brilliant in their comic style and visual elegance. But by this time Martin wanted off the comedy roller coaster to do some serious acting, as he did most successfully in Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958).  Lewis continued to make effective films with Tashlin before turning to directing, starting with the low-budget The Bellboy in 1960.

The Private Eye Novel: Ross Macdonald and Loren D. Estleman

You are a very pertinacious young man and you are making a nuisance of yourself.
--spoken to Lew Archer in Ross Macdonald's The Barbarous Coast, 1956 (Library of America).

I hadn't worked in a month.  The Internet had swooped in and snatched up all the jobs I used to do, free of charge.  You could track down an old high school sweetheart, a deadbeat dad, your great-great-great-grandfather's crib in the Old Country, complete with a virtual walking tour of his thatched hut.  No phone time, no embarrassing conversation with a stranger, and best of all no bill.
---  Amos Walker in Loren D. Estleman's The Lioness is the Hunter (Tom Doherty Associates, 2017).

Things have changed since the fifties, but  Estleman's Amos Walker and Macdonald's Lew Archer both do most of their work on the phone and in person, putting themselves in dangerous situations.  I prefer detective novels written in the first person (so that we are not aware of anything the narrator is unaware of) and that use very specific locales: Archer working in a burgeoning Los Angeles in the fifties and Walker in the decrepit Detroit of today.  Both detectives are cynical former cops, always hoping to get the best from people and usually getting the worst; both are long-divorced loners who try to cover up their insecurity with snappy banter.

We know more about Walker as a person than we do Archer; Macdonald is more interested how and why people commit crimes and Estleman cares more about survival in a hostile environment; in these two books they are working at the top of their form.  Macdonald is directly descended from Hammett and Chandler, i.e., his plots are often confusing and difficult to follow, though it usually comes around full circle to the place and people with whom he started, while Walker usually follows a fairly direct path from his dusty office to a violent confrontation.  Archer's cases often originate deep in past behavior while Walker's are more immediately dangerous. Walker and Archer are both are on the side of the exploited as they search for the exploiters and bring them to justice, of one kind or another.

Douglas Sirk's All I Desire 1953

A woman comes back with all her dreams, with her love -- and she finds nothing but this rotten, decrepit middle-class American family.
--Douglas Sirk, on All I Desire

Even the title is ironic, no one in the film finds what they desire, even the long-in-the-tooth family cook cannot marry the man she loves, yet.  Naomi Murdoch (played beautifully by Barbara Stanwyck)left her home for the stage in 1900 because, among other reasons, she was condescended to because of her lower-class background . She comes back after ten years to see her daughter in a high-school play.  Her stuffed-shirt husband still resents her, her young son barely knows who she is, and her other daughter wants nothing to do with her.  Sirk and his cinematographer Carl Guthrie capture, in beautiful black-and-white, the changing family dynamics in complex shots, often showing what different family members are doing, unaware of each other, in the same shot.  The film takes place about 1910, before WWI, and was released the first year of Eisenhower's presidency.  Both periods are seen by some as peaceful and even idyllic, but those of us who grew up in the fifties in small towns experienced the narrow-mindedness and anti-intellectualism so apparent not far beneath the surface of this and other Sirk films.

Producer Ross Hunter insisted on the "happy" ending, very different than the ending of the original novel, Stopover, by Carol Brink.  But it is clear things may not be happy for long, even though Naomi has (accidentally) shot her former lover, who the whole town seems to have known about.  It's hard to believe that things will be much better for her this time around, as little has changed. Sirk deals with some of the same questions in There's Always Tomorrow (1956), also starring Barbara Stanwyck.

Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2017

Sept. is a pretty good month for Turner Classic Moves; a few suggestions:

Sept. 1 is Gordon Douglas's Up Periscope (1959), which I wrote about on Sept. 18, 2014.
Sept. 2, Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious, 1952
Sept. 3 Hitchcock's Rope, 1948
Sept. 4 tribute to Jerry Lewis, the best of which is The Nutty Professor, 1963
Sept. 5 Lubitsch's Cluny Brown, 1946, and King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, 1947
Sept. 8 tribute to women directors, including Lois Weber and Ida Lupino
Sept. 7 Werner Herzog, including Aguirre, Wrath of God, 1972
Sept. 9 John Ford's Three Godfathers, 1949, and Hitchcock's Rear Window, 1954
Sept. 10 Howard Hawks's widescreen Land of the Pharaohs, 1955
Sept. 12 Frank Borzage's Man's Castle, 1933 and Mark Robson's Youth Runs Wild, 1944
Sept. 13 Josef Von Sternberg's post-Dietrich Sergeant Madden, 1939
Sept. 16 Minnelli's melancholy Bandwagon, 1953
Sept. 17 Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, 1950, and Rossellini's didactic Socrates,1971
Sept. 18 Lubitsch's Ninotchka, 1939, and Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, 1942
Sept. 21 Jean Renoir's The River, 1951
Sept. 22 Chaplin's Modern Times, 1936, and Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, 1942
Sept. 24 Kenji Mizoguchi's Life of Oharu, 1952
Sept. 25 Buster Keaton's The General, 1927 and Jean Renoir's La Bete Humaine, 1938

Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent and Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge

Some readers of this blog have noticed that I do not usually write about contemporary movies because, as I have said, most of them look as though D.W. Griffith had never lived.  Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent and Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge are, unfortunately, no exceptions.

Embrace of the Serpent has some beautiful black-and-white cinematography of the endless water and jungle of the Amazon.  Two different scientists of the earlier and later 20th C. are using a shaman to find Yakruna, a sacred psychedelic plant.  Along the way they run into the missionaries and rubber barons who are destroying the indigenous people and their beliefs.  In the end they find the plant and the later scientist ingests it and the movie ends with 2001-like dream images, in color. Ciro Guerra flirts with the idea of the noble savage, but never seems to quite want to embrace it, at times supporting the acquisition of knowledge by the natives. The film reminds me of the books --now somewhat discredited-- that Carlos Castaneda wrote in the 60's and 70's about the Mexican shaman don Juan, encouraging us not to get too hung up on Western rationalism and allow ourselves to enter the spirit world through mushrooms.  Werner Herzog has been mining this kind of material since Fata Morgana in 1971 and I recommend the several movies of his that will be shown on Turner Classic Movies in September.  The "noble savage" myth was well handled by D.W. Griffith in 1909 with The Red Man's View.

Mel Gibson has shown some interest in the idea of the noble savage, particularly in Apocalypco (2006).  What he most seems interested in, however, is pain and suffering as a way to spiritual redemption.  Hacksaw Ridge is something of a remake of Howard Hawks's Sergeant York (1941), both movies about soldiers who, for religious reasons, don't believe in killing.  In Gibson's case it is not clear why Desmond Doss is not immediately granted his wish to be a medic and has to be rescued by his father's WWI general from a court martial.  In any case, he becomes a medic and rescues 75 injured soldiers from the Japanese hordes, winning the medal of honor.  One has not seen such slow-motion violence since the days of Sam Peckinpah and Gibson, like Peckinpah, captures the balletic beauty of violence at Okinawa after a long and tedious depiction of Doss's childhood and courtship of his wife. If one wants to see a depiction of the complexities and contradictions of war I recommend D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,1915 (the Civil War), King Vidor's The Big Parade,1925 (WWI), Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma and John Ford's They Were Expendable, both 1945 (WWII) and Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet, 1951 (Korean War).  Fuller, who fought in WWII,  wrote:  For those lucky enough to survive it, war turned your deepest convictions upside down and inside out.

Georges Franju's Judex, 1963

Judex renders credible, and it simultaneously denies, a world in the negative subjunctive, a world which seems tenderly aware of its own unreality.
----Raymond Durgnat, Franju (University of California Press, 1968)

If Georges Franju (1912-1987) is remembered at all today it is for that favorite documentary of vegetarians, Le Sang des Betes (1949), portraying what exactly happens at a slaughterhouse. But he did make a handful of elegant and stylish fictional films, including Les Yeux sans Visage ("Eyes Without a Face'" 1959) and Judex.  Judex is something of a remake of a remarkable serial by Louis Feuillade, made in 1917, about a caped crusader for justice.  Franju's remake takes place in 1914 and has a dreamlike quality that makes it seem all the more real, with its incredible visual flourishes (in vivid black-and-white, of course) in near-silence:  a villainess disguised as a Daughter of Charity nun (complete with cornette headgear), a female circus perfomer in white climbing the side of a building, followed by men in black doing the same, in the quest to rescued Judex, a conjuror at a costume party making a dead bird come alive, Judex watching a kidnapped businessman with a  primitive television system, Judex at night with his hounds, seeking justice.

Franju's Judex and Feuillade's original portray a quieter time, before The Great War changed everything and it became harder to tell the difference between good and evil. Feuillade had some hope for the future while Franju found hope in the past, in the realism of Feuillade.

Top of the Heap by A.A. Fair

His voice was like cold linoleum on bare feet.
--Top of the Heap (1952)

A.A. Fair was one of Erle Stanley Gardner's pseudonyms, publishers thinking that authors should not be too prolific.  Many readers felt otherwise and eventually these novels were sold as "Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair," especially after the success of the Perry Mason TV series 1957-1966 (Gardner wrote many Perry Mason novels and worked on the movies of the thirties, a radio version, and the TV series).   Gardner is one of the best selling novelists of all time but gradually most of his books went out of print.  Now the excellent publisher Hard Case Crime is bringing back the A.A. Fair novels and Ankerwycke is doing the same for the Perry Mason novels.

The A.A. Fair novels are about the Cool and Lam detective agency and are narrated by Donald Lam.  Pulp novels often followed a relatively rigid formula which gave some skilled writers a freedom of adventure and creativity (John D. MacDonald is a prime example; I wrote about him on Dec. 23 2013, July 28 2014, Sept. 27 2015).  In the case of Top of the Heap we see Donald Lam expand an investigation against the wishes of his boss, Bertha Cool, much given to colorful slang ("well, fry me for an oyster") and more interested in making a buck than solving a case.  Lam proceeds, against Cool's wishes, and shows considerable skill at getting people to talk to him, especially women.  Top of the Heap travels through the seedier parts of 1950's San Francisco, where the rich are good at covering up their crimes, and eventually Lam uncovers all the dirty details and keeps his job with Cool and Lam.

I slept until noon Sunday in my south-of-Market dump.  Breakfast at a nearby restaurant consisted of stale eggs fried in near-rancid grease, muddy coffee, and cold, soggy toast.
--Top of the Heap

Jerry Lewis, RIP

The Nutty Professor shows the troubled, naïve vein of seriousness on which Lewis's comedy is based.
--David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

I have written about Lewis mostly in his relationship with Frank Tashlin (April 11, 2014; Oct. 22, 2015; March 25, 2016) but he did direct six significant and innovative films, The Bellboy in 1960 and The Nutty Professor in 1963 being my favorites. After 1970 he was burned out, as often happened quickly with comedy directors, and his serious 1974 film, The Day the Clown Cried, was never released, for unknown reasons. He did do some serious work after that, particularly with Martin Scorsese in The King of Comedy in 1983 and in the TV show "Wiseguy" (1988-89) but probably is known mostly now for his yearly telethon for muscular dystrophy, though even that stopped several years ago, after that slobbering spectacle of sentimentality raised over two billion dollars.

Not that long ago it was difficult to defend John Wayne because of his right-wing politics.  Now that his political views are being forgotten his roles for Howard Hawks and John Ford are being appreciated for their power and beauty.  I think eventually Jerry Lewis's public persona will fade and his movies will be appreciated for their exceptional visual humor, something some French critics have long understood and appreciated.  Lewis -- like Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Buster Keaton -- played a little man beset by an incomprehensible world and in his case found his own exaggerated and goofy response to modern life. I, for one, am sorry that J.D. Salinger would not sell him the rights to make a film of Catcher in the Rye.

Peter Tewksbury's Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding 1967

Still, Tewksbury has persevered with his pleasantness, and such perseverance should be both recorded and rewarded.
--Andrew Sarris

I hadn't thought about Tewksbury in some time (he died in 2003) and then came Jill Lepore's article in The New Yorker (Nov. 21, 2016) about Tewksbury's attempt to make a film from J.D. Salinger's story "For Esme With Love and Squalor", and a showing last week of Tewksbury's Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding on Turner Classic Movies.  I also watched the first of the 134 episodes that Tewksbury directed of Father Knows Best (which ran from 1954 to 1960, from when I was seven to thirteen):  Lesson in Citizenhip.

Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding is a good example of the confusion of the mid-sixties, though it in no way transcends the period.  Tewksbury is trying to help Dee escape from her Tammy and Gidget roles, about which she was always ambivalent.  At one point Dee's boss, played by George Hamilton, tells her she is too "wholesome" and she responds with "what a rotten thing to say."  Dee tries to be sexy and pursue a singing career, with the help of her mother, and takes up serious drinking (something Dee herself had trouble with all her life) but then becomes pregnant, the fireworks going off when she kisses Hamilton.  Dee has three suitors (played by Bill Bixby, Dwayne Hickman and Bill Kalmen) who all want to marry her but her mother (played by Celeste Holm who, along with Allen Jenkins as an agent, represents a link to classic Hollywood) beats them off with a toilet plunger.  The film is best described as "sixties garish," though this seems to be a deliberate choice by Tewksbury and cinematographer Fred Konecamp (who also did Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, 1970), with bright orange being the main and most intense color in the crowded widescreen image.

Sandra Dee started beautifully in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) but seldom worked with directors of that quality afterwards.  Tewksbury got nowhere with his movie of a Salinger story.  Salinger's stories did not easily transfer to film and he was bitter about Mark Robson's The Foolish Heart (1949), actually a pretty okay Mark Robson film, though it did not follow Salinger's "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" particularly closely.  Tewksbury remained comfortable in television, as Lesson in Citizenship shows a skillful ability to portray a complicated plot with subtle and delicate touches, in 22 minutes.