Turner Classic Movies April 2017

April starts with Hitchcock's intensely beautiful Vertigo (1958), with one of Bernard Herrman's loveliest scores.  April 1

April 3 has Ernst Lubitsch's mordantly funny To Be or Not to Be (1942).

April 7 has Vincente Minnelli's gorgeous color and wide-screen Some Came Running (1958), with its powerful Elmer Bernstein score.

The 8th has Andre DeToth's Springfield Rifle (1952) and Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950), two striking Westerns of betrayal and revenge.

The 9th has Yasajuro Ozu's Late Spring (1949), austerely elegant, in Ozu's deceptively simple style.

April 11th has Raoul Walsh's Western remake of his High Sierra , Colorado Territory (1949) and Preston Sturges's richly funny The Lady Eve (1941).

On April 14 is Douglas Sirk's ironic soap opera All That Heaven Allows (1955), with its exquisite color.

On the 18th is Walsh's marvelous period piece, Gentleman Jim (1942) and Samuel Fuller's biting vision of America in the early 60's, Shock Corridor (1963).

April 20th has Hitchcock's film of dangerous voyeurism, Rear Window (1954) and on the 21st is Leo McCarey's moving story of a last chance at love, An Affair to Remember (1957).

On the 23rd is Raiiner Werner Fassbinder's Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul (1974), something of a remake of the Sirk showing on April 14th.

On the 28th is Nicholas Ray's stylishly corrosive view of 50's America,  Bigger Than Life (1956).

NYC Ballet in Paris, PBS Feb. 17 and 24th, 2017

Ballet on TV is a questionable and usually dubious proposition:  if single dancers are isolated then one misses the corps, if the whole view of the stage is shown then everything is too small.  In the 70's George Balanchine did some versions of his ballets for TV; filmed in a studio they were either solos, such as the one in Tzigane, or pas de deux from more elaborate ballets.  Great Performances showed The NYC Ballet on a recent trip to Paris in two parts:  Feb. 17 had Gounod's Walpurgisnacht from Faust and Ravel's La Valse, while Feb. 24 showed Ravel's Sonatine and Bizet's Symphony in C.  All choreography was by Balanchine.  The only one of these that was at all effective on the TV screen was Sonatine, an elegant pas de deux by Megan Fairchild and a confidence-lacking Joaquin DeLuz.  Even in Sonatine director Vincent Battaillon had to choose sometimes to show only one of the dancers, when the two were very far apart.  La Valse worked when they were showing only Amar Ramasar and Sterling Hyltin in their dance of death,, Walpurgisnacht when they showed Sara Mearns, and Symphony in C when Teresa Reichlen and Tyler Angle danced the adagio.  Symphony in C has the largest cast of the four ballets --over 50 dancers -- and the last movement, with its intricate relationship between the soloists and the corps, was mostly a blur. The music was beautifully conducted by NYC conductor Daniel Capps.

I have heard it said that ballet on TV (of which there is not much)  attracts few viewers.  One can see why:  if one likes ballet it plays as badly on TV as baseball and if one is only mildly interested then one will not be convinced by TV performances.  The best we could hope for would be to re-choreograph for TV, as Balanchine did, though I rather doubt that even a "TV version" attracts enough viewers to make it financially feasible.  I would simply urge people to go to Lincoln Center to see the NYC Ballet live.  When the New York State Theatre was build Balanchine insisted on inexpensive seats with good sightlines and one can still see marvelous ballets there for around $25.  Outside New York companies such as The Los Angeles Ballet perform authorized versions of Balanchine ballets; there may not always be live music but the beauty of the choreography and the dancing is best experienced live.



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Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester-by-the-Sea

Making a child die in a picture is a rather ticklish matter; it comes close to an abuse of cinematic power.
--Francoise Truffaut talking to Hitchcock about Sabotage (1936)

Mostly I write about the classical cinema, because when I see a contemporary film it often looks as though D.W. Griffith had never lived.  The Villeneuve and Lonergan films are good examples, drab films about drab people and both depicting deaths of children.  At least I think a child dies in Arrival but the timeline is so screwed up it is rather unclear.  There are two basic kinds of science fiction films:  the violent aliens, e.g., Howard Hawks's The Thing From Another World (1956) and the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-mystical, e.g., Stanley Kubrick's 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968).  Arrival is very much in the second category, with the alien spaceships looking like the structure at the beginning of the  Kubrick film and the attempt to change our perception of time is portrayed quite murkily in both movies.

Lonergan kills three children in a fire inn Manchester-by-the Sea in a meretricious attempt to explain why blue-collar Lee Chandler (well-played by Casey Affleck) is the mess he is.  Lonergan's condescending film about the working classes and grief in a small town reminds one of Elia Kazan, also a person of the theatre who was good at directing actors (On the Waterfront, 1956) but had little visual style.  Lonergan does use abrupt flashbacks in the middle of scenes, which takes some getting used to but is at least an unusual attempt to relate thoughts of the past to the present. This is only Lonergan's third film, after You Can Count on Me in 2000 and Margaret in 2005, so one hopes he is still learning.  It was interesting to me that Manchester-by-the-Sea is so similar in so many ways to the small town I grew up in the 50's.  Small towns have apparently not changed much.

Blake Edwards's The Great Race (1965)

Unlike films like 10 and Skin Deep, pictures with a splurch structure firmly rooted in ideological, emotional and dramatic logic, the gag mechanism of The Great Race appears to activate indiscriminately.

Sam Wasson, A Splurch in the Kisser:  The Movies of Blake Edwards (Wesleyan University Press, 2009).

“Some people don’t like anarchic films” Jim Hoberman once said to me.  I’m one of them.  The Great Race may be a tribute to Laurel and Hardy (the film is dedicated to them) and Mack Sennett but Laurel, Hardy, and Sennett are more tedious than funny and so is The Great Race, with its gratuitous pie-throwing and literally black-clothed and white-clothed bad guy and good guy (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis); I barely smiled at this random collection of unfunny pratfalls. 

I have a “certificate of completion” for Painfully Funny: Exploring Slapstick in the Movies from Ball State University, which perhaps qualifies me to say that slapstick without context does not work for me, i.e., I will take Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch over the Marx Brothers any day.  One theory about Blake Edwards is that he alternated meretricious movies – including seven Pink Panther movies – with the personal films he wanted to make that he knew would not be as financially successful.  One of the best of these is The Party (1968), something of a tribute to Chaplin and Keaton, with an effectively low-key Peter Sellers (who actually did not appear much in the Pink Panther movies, usually being replaced by stunt doubles).  The Party is beautifully structured and character-driven in a way The Great Race is not, though Edwards does use the wide-screen image effectively in both films.  (There was a riot by the audience at the Museum of Modern Art in NY when they showed a pan-and-scanned print of The Party at a supposed tribute to Edwards!).  In a certain sense Edwards brings film full circle, from it earliest days to the end of its classical era and beyond.

Little Orchestra Society March 4, 2017: Bernstein

We saw all four concerts of the LOS this season:  Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Bernstein.  The Little Orchestra Society does a terrific job of introducing kids to the pleasures of live music, with excerpts, videos, and some general tomfoolery and audience participation that does not detract from the beauty of the music. The Bernstein show was somewhat less successful than the other programs this season, since so much of Bernstein's music needs the context of the stage musicals and operas for which it was created.  There was not much dancing at this performance and only a little bit of singing, though Kara Guy and Kelsey Lauritano did beautifully with "Ohio" from Wonderful Town.  What was definitely missing were excerpts from the film versions of West Side Story and other musicals, presumably because the rights were too expensive, or perhaps it would have taken away from the emphasis on Bernstein's music.

As usual, the LOS used young soloists -- Alec Manasse on clarinet and Lucas Stratmann on violin -- who played beautifully and, one hopes, perhaps inspired the young listeners to study music. These concerts are excellent introductions to classical music for the intended audience of ages three to ten.  At this point our five-year-old daughter, after a couple of years going to the ballet and LOS with us (where she is an attentive watcher and listener), is ready to move on to more complete works in the concert hall.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle v.5

A rush of happiness surged through me.  It was the rain, it was the lights, it was the city.  It was me.  I was going to be a writer, a star, a beacon for others.

--Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book Five, Archipelago Books 2016 (translated by Don Bartlett).

I have written about the first four volumes in Knausgaard’s novel (I almost wrote “epic novel” but My Struggle is only epic in its attention to detail).  The first volume, dealing with his teenage years, I wrote about on April 6, 2015; the second volume, about his second marriage and later life, I wrote about on May 7 ,2015; the third volume covers ages 6-12 and I wrote about it on June 7, 2015 and the fourth volume, about ages 16-19, I wrote about on July 18, 2015.

Volume five covers Knausgaard’s life from the age of twenty to thirty-five, during which Karl Ove goes to writing school, works at psychiatric facilities when he runs out of money, gets drunk regularly, has several different lovers, marries, publishes his first book and leaves his wife.  The moments of happiness are few and at one point Knausgaard says “I had never imagined that happiness could hurt so much.”  One might ask how much of the detailed narrative is “true” and I would say that it has emotional truth, if not literal, i.e., he captures details and feelings beautifully.  He reminds one of Jean Shepherd’s monologues, in the 60’s and 70’s, about Shepherd’s boyhood in Indiana and his time in the army, which were true in a similar way.  And Knausgaard’s ability to portray the quotidian details of existence is comparable to two of my favorite authors:  Nabokov and John D. MacDonald.

Getting drunk in the middle of the day was a good feeling, there was a lot of freedom in it, suddenly the day opened and offered quite different opportunities now that I didn’t care about anything.

The way Knausgaard spends his times sounds in many ways typical of a man in his twenties, whether in Norway or elsewhere:  listening to music, chasing girls (and looking at paintings by Rubens, Delacroix and Ingres for stimulation), reading literature and poetry, going out drinking alone or with friends. He’s not even happy after his first novel is published, because he can’t get anywhere on the next book.  He goes on a book tour and says:  What was the point of all this?  Flying all over Norway to read for ten minutes to four people?  Talking smugly about literature to twelve people? Saying stupid things in the newspapers and burning with shame the day after?  Had I been able to write then this might not have mattered.

Meanwhile the light is beautiful:  The dense cloud cover over the town was grayish white, and the light in the streets around us was gentle, though not so much that it veiled or enhanced, it was more that it allowed whatever there was to appear in its own right.

Paul Wendkos's Angel Baby (1961)

Paul Wendkos’s best films –The Burglar (1957), Face of a Fugitive (1959), Gidget (1960) – are all about outsiders on the fringes of society: criminals, surfers, the poor.  Angel Baby (1961) is a gritty film about tent-show preachers and their audience.  It was filmed in the South and includes many sharecroppers and farmers similar to those in James Agee and Walker Evans’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).  George Hamilton is appropriately intense as the preacher, picked out of the choir by Mercedes McCambridge, in love with one of those he cured by faith healing and turned into a preacher, played by Salome Jens.

The movie is filmed in beautiful black-and-white by Haskell Wexler, who supposedly used roller skates to produce the tracking shots of revival meetings, parking lots and swamps in Georgia and Florida.  The traveling preachers hold out what hope there is for those without money or indoor plumbing and the revival meetings have strong emotional moments of fervor that sometimes lead to lust and fakery, as well as greed that leads to violence.  The end of the movie does suggest the slight possibility of redemption and God’s compassion.

A kind word for George Hamilton, whose film Your Cheatin’ Heart(1964), directed by Gene Nelson, was a more interesting version of Hank Williams’s life than the recent  I Saw the Light, with Tom Hiddleston directed by Mark Abraham.  Nelson at least delved into the influences on Williams – including African-American blues – and his creative song writing – especially of the lovely I Can’t Help It If I Am Still in Love with You – while with Abraham it was mostly about Hank’s drinking and infidelity.