The Street with No Name is a pretty good film noir, though Mark Stevens is a bland star and Keighley's direction is routine. What it does have going for it is the intense villainy and homoeroticism of gangster boss Richard Widmark, who slaps around his men even more that he slaps his wife (an effectively blonde Barbara Lawrence). It also has cinematography by the reliable Joseph MacDonald, who does a terrific job with the shadows, staircases, diners, gyms, and the general sleaziness of skid row, where most of the film takes place (except for the house of an on-the-take police detective in the suburbs). And everything takes place at night. The script is by the pro Harry Kleiner, who later reworked it for Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955).
The film is one of a number of 20th Century Fox films of the forties, including The House on 92nd St. (1945) and Call Northside 777 (1948), that uses a pseudo-documentary approach, with an omniscient narrator and shots of labs processing fingerprints and ballistics. It also is one of a number of contemporaneous films about federal agents working undercover, the best of which is Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947). One quibble I do have with The Street with No Name is that we don't know anything about FBI agent Gene Cordel (the character played by Mark Stevens) so putting him in harm's way produces little emotion or concern (not helped by Stevens's insipidness)
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Monday, June 26, 2017
Richard Nixon The Life by John A. Farrell
Nixon would have been recorded as being a very great president had it not been for that fatal character flaw: he did not believe in anything.
----James Farmer
Farrell's thoughtful book (Doubleday 2017) goes some distance in helping us to understand Nixon but we still have a long way to go. I remember the chill that went through some of us when Bob Fass announced on Radio Unnameable on WBAI, his voice full of doom, that "Richard Nixon is now President of the United States." What Nixon accomplished is mostly forgotten now, overshadowed by Watergate and the bombing of Cambodia. But Nixon helped to enact tax reform, aid for education and food stamp increases. He hiked Social Security payments, established the Occupation Safety and Health Act, doubled funding for the arts, signed Title IX banning gender discrimination in college, ended the draft, and helped lower the voting age to 18. He even proposed healthcare reform similar to what passed under Obama and supported Daniel Moynihan's Family Assistance Plan, including a guaranteed annual income and subsidized daycare. He supported affirmative action and desegregation. One might even argue that Nixon was a true populist, unlike our current president, whose "populism" is mostly a smokescreen for helping the rich get richer.
Unfortunately Nixon was insecure and paranoid. He violated the law by secretly warning South Vietnam before the 1968 election that they could get a better deal from him than they could from Johnson and continued to prolong the Vietnam war long after he and Kissinger ceased to believe that it could be won. Just before I read Farrell's book I had seen Marcel Ophuls's 1976 documentary The Memory of Justice. Ophuls's film is mostly about the Nuremburg trials but also looks into the parallels with the United States in Vietnam and France in Algeria, raising complicated legal and ethical questions. Were the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, not considered war crimes because we were the winners? Barbara Keating, whose husband was killed in Vietnam, says that if we lost the Vietnam war (we had not yet lost when she was interviewed) then Vietnam could try us for war crimes and that made no sense. Well, why not? And if Johnson, Westmoreland, Nixon, Kissinger are war criminals can anything be done about it?
----James Farmer
Farrell's thoughtful book (Doubleday 2017) goes some distance in helping us to understand Nixon but we still have a long way to go. I remember the chill that went through some of us when Bob Fass announced on Radio Unnameable on WBAI, his voice full of doom, that "Richard Nixon is now President of the United States." What Nixon accomplished is mostly forgotten now, overshadowed by Watergate and the bombing of Cambodia. But Nixon helped to enact tax reform, aid for education and food stamp increases. He hiked Social Security payments, established the Occupation Safety and Health Act, doubled funding for the arts, signed Title IX banning gender discrimination in college, ended the draft, and helped lower the voting age to 18. He even proposed healthcare reform similar to what passed under Obama and supported Daniel Moynihan's Family Assistance Plan, including a guaranteed annual income and subsidized daycare. He supported affirmative action and desegregation. One might even argue that Nixon was a true populist, unlike our current president, whose "populism" is mostly a smokescreen for helping the rich get richer.
Unfortunately Nixon was insecure and paranoid. He violated the law by secretly warning South Vietnam before the 1968 election that they could get a better deal from him than they could from Johnson and continued to prolong the Vietnam war long after he and Kissinger ceased to believe that it could be won. Just before I read Farrell's book I had seen Marcel Ophuls's 1976 documentary The Memory of Justice. Ophuls's film is mostly about the Nuremburg trials but also looks into the parallels with the United States in Vietnam and France in Algeria, raising complicated legal and ethical questions. Were the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, not considered war crimes because we were the winners? Barbara Keating, whose husband was killed in Vietnam, says that if we lost the Vietnam war (we had not yet lost when she was interviewed) then Vietnam could try us for war crimes and that made no sense. Well, why not? And if Johnson, Westmoreland, Nixon, Kissinger are war criminals can anything be done about it?
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Spotlight (2015), The Keepers (2017)
Tom McCarthy's Spotlight and Ryan White's The Keepers are movies that complement each other: the former is a drama about newspapermen and women in Boston who uncover pedophile Roman Catholic priests, while The Keepers is a documentary about the victims of pedophile priests in Baltimore and the possibility of a nun being murdered before she could report the abuse. In the Boston case the victims were mostly male, in Baltimore mostly female and in both cities the Roman Catholic hierarchy covered up the abuse, often moving the priests to other parishes, where they usually continued to be predators.
White talks with many of the Baltimore victims, who attended a girls' high school where they would be called into a priest's office and sexually molested. The statute of limitations prevented this pedophile priest from being prosecuted, though there were some unsuccessful civil suits. The victims in both cities knew little about sex and some were insecure and confused about their sexual identity. The priests knew how to take advantage of their victims' weaknesses.
The question everyone asks is: why didn't those who were abused tell anyone? Because they were ashamed and made to think they themselves were at fault. I grew up as a high church Episcopalian and was psychologically abused by our priest, especially when I was an altar boy. When we knelt at the altar we had nothing to lean on to support ourselves and since we could not eat before communion one or more of us would have to leave in the middle of the service to vomit. God was testing us, we were told. In my working-class town the clergy was beyond reproach; though my father never went to church himself he insisted that his children do so. When I asked why we had to go and he didn't he said "do as I say, not as I do," no irony intended. My father actually said he would go to church if ,in one church bulletin given our at Sunday services there was no request for money. I brought him several examples of bulletins with no requests for money but he just laughed at me.
The victims in Boston and Baltimore and the many other cities where there is abuse are usually poor or working-class, from families who believed in the moral correctness of priests, teachers and law enforcement officers, all of whom were to be obeyed and never to be questioned. In the case of priests the celibacy requirement is a factor in the abuse: in Spotlight a psychologist estimated that only 50% of priests were truly celibate and 6% of priests were pedophiles, an estimate that has turned out to be accurate in Boston and elsewhere.
Spotlight is a good example of what I call the I.F. Stone approach to journalism: thoroughly research the available records; in Boston, for instance, they tracked down information about priests not only from court records but from publications of the diocese itself, which listed transfers and medical leaves. And in The Keepers Ryan White found everyone he could who was still alive and had been involved, or possibly involved, or knew anything about the case of the priest's abuse and the nun's murder.
White talks with many of the Baltimore victims, who attended a girls' high school where they would be called into a priest's office and sexually molested. The statute of limitations prevented this pedophile priest from being prosecuted, though there were some unsuccessful civil suits. The victims in both cities knew little about sex and some were insecure and confused about their sexual identity. The priests knew how to take advantage of their victims' weaknesses.
The question everyone asks is: why didn't those who were abused tell anyone? Because they were ashamed and made to think they themselves were at fault. I grew up as a high church Episcopalian and was psychologically abused by our priest, especially when I was an altar boy. When we knelt at the altar we had nothing to lean on to support ourselves and since we could not eat before communion one or more of us would have to leave in the middle of the service to vomit. God was testing us, we were told. In my working-class town the clergy was beyond reproach; though my father never went to church himself he insisted that his children do so. When I asked why we had to go and he didn't he said "do as I say, not as I do," no irony intended. My father actually said he would go to church if ,in one church bulletin given our at Sunday services there was no request for money. I brought him several examples of bulletins with no requests for money but he just laughed at me.
The victims in Boston and Baltimore and the many other cities where there is abuse are usually poor or working-class, from families who believed in the moral correctness of priests, teachers and law enforcement officers, all of whom were to be obeyed and never to be questioned. In the case of priests the celibacy requirement is a factor in the abuse: in Spotlight a psychologist estimated that only 50% of priests were truly celibate and 6% of priests were pedophiles, an estimate that has turned out to be accurate in Boston and elsewhere.
Spotlight is a good example of what I call the I.F. Stone approach to journalism: thoroughly research the available records; in Boston, for instance, they tracked down information about priests not only from court records but from publications of the diocese itself, which listed transfers and medical leaves. And in The Keepers Ryan White found everyone he could who was still alive and had been involved, or possibly involved, or knew anything about the case of the priest's abuse and the nun's murder.
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Michael Curtiz's Private Detective 62
Michael Curtiz directed seven films for Warner Brothers in 1933, all of them short, snappy and of high quality. Some of the themes that we see in Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) can also be found in these films; Private Detective 62 is a meditation on ethics and money-making in the private detective racket, at a time when private dicks appeared mostly in B movies and were seen as basically sleazy, with an occasional touch of nobility. This changed when Humphrey Bogart played Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). There were actually two versions of The Maltese Falcon (in 1931 and 1936) before Huston's, with Ricardo Cortez and Warner Williams playing Spade, mostly for sleaziness and comedy. And in 1947 Robert Mitchum played a complex private eye in the excellent film noir Out of the Past, Mitchum was a reformed private eye, eschewing sleaziness for nobility after falling for the wrong girl.
William Powell is the private eye with more ethics than his partner in Private Detective 62. I have never been particularly fond of Powell -- he always seemed rather condescending and aloof, especially after he became enshrined as The Thin Man. But he was good in silent films (especially Von Sternberg's The Last Command, 1928) and in these early sound films at Warner Brothers, where he worked with gritty actors such as those in Private Detective 62: Ruth Donnelly, Arthur Hohl, James Bell, et alia. Curtiz's film is quite episodic but moves quickly and efficiently, as Powell escapes from a boat returning him to France for espionage and ingratiates himself into a detective agency after days of futilely looking for work. Being a private detective is seen as being a job of work, with much danger and little pay, with perhaps a chance of meeting a nice dame on her way to Reno. Curtiz uses rain quite effectively as a plot mechanism (common in later film noir) and only uses music from radios or night club orchestras, creatively doing without a score.
William Powell is the private eye with more ethics than his partner in Private Detective 62. I have never been particularly fond of Powell -- he always seemed rather condescending and aloof, especially after he became enshrined as The Thin Man. But he was good in silent films (especially Von Sternberg's The Last Command, 1928) and in these early sound films at Warner Brothers, where he worked with gritty actors such as those in Private Detective 62: Ruth Donnelly, Arthur Hohl, James Bell, et alia. Curtiz's film is quite episodic but moves quickly and efficiently, as Powell escapes from a boat returning him to France for espionage and ingratiates himself into a detective agency after days of futilely looking for work. Being a private detective is seen as being a job of work, with much danger and little pay, with perhaps a chance of meeting a nice dame on her way to Reno. Curtiz uses rain quite effectively as a plot mechanism (common in later film noir) and only uses music from radios or night club orchestras, creatively doing without a score.
Friday, June 16, 2017
Edgar Ulmer's The Naked Dawn (1955)
A fatalistic essay on greed and steamy atmospherics.
--Phil Hardy, The Western (Morrow, 1983)
Ulmer's film, made for peanuts (like most of his films), raises the question of what a Western actually is. Does if have to take place during the frontier (however that is defined), as some say? I was somewhat shocked to find the intrusion of a contemporary motorcar in The Naked Dawn, until I found out the film was written, under a pseudonym, by blacklisted writer Julian Zimet, who had written Westerns for Republic Studios for Roy Rogers and others, films that often involved cars. Ulmer's film emphasizes that class concerns and the power of landowners is a contemporary problem and not exclusive to the past.
Ulmer (who only made one other film in color) and cinematographer Frederick Gately (who worked mostly in television, which then was strictly black-and-white) emphasized the blues of the sky and the browns of the earth. At death "the gates of heaven open and there is land for everyone," but in life some save money to buy their own land and others steal money to enjoy the sensual pleasures of life, even if not for long. In The Naked Dawn a woman is sold along with the land and she is attracted to the bandit who comes to her husband's land, hoping he will rescue her from dreary domesticity. Everyone is confronted by choices they don't understand, ending with death for some and temporary escape for others.
--Phil Hardy, The Western (Morrow, 1983)
Ulmer's film, made for peanuts (like most of his films), raises the question of what a Western actually is. Does if have to take place during the frontier (however that is defined), as some say? I was somewhat shocked to find the intrusion of a contemporary motorcar in The Naked Dawn, until I found out the film was written, under a pseudonym, by blacklisted writer Julian Zimet, who had written Westerns for Republic Studios for Roy Rogers and others, films that often involved cars. Ulmer's film emphasizes that class concerns and the power of landowners is a contemporary problem and not exclusive to the past.
Ulmer (who only made one other film in color) and cinematographer Frederick Gately (who worked mostly in television, which then was strictly black-and-white) emphasized the blues of the sky and the browns of the earth. At death "the gates of heaven open and there is land for everyone," but in life some save money to buy their own land and others steal money to enjoy the sensual pleasures of life, even if not for long. In The Naked Dawn a woman is sold along with the land and she is attracted to the bandit who comes to her husband's land, hoping he will rescue her from dreary domesticity. Everyone is confronted by choices they don't understand, ending with death for some and temporary escape for others.
The City When It Rains, by Thomas H. Cook
In him, the passion of fatherhood had taken on a mystery beyond what could ever be described to someone else. It had become heroic in its refusal to accept what all fathers had heretofore accepted, that they could not rid the world of its dark snares, nor provide safe passage through them for their children.
--Thomas H. Cook, The City When It Rains (1991, The Overlook Press)
Cook writes what are sometimes called "crime novels," though often they have little or no crime in them and could be more accurately called something like meditations on the human condition, with all its negatives and positives. In The City When It Rains freelance photographer David Corman becomes obsessed with a dead woman, just as Detective Mark McPherson did in Otto Preminger's film Laura (1944), from Vera Caspary's book. Sarah Rosen jumped out of a window and Corman investigates her life, eventually finding and talking to her father and learning about Sarah's childhood and what actually happened. At the same time Corman is fighting to keep the custody of his own nine-year-old daughter.
Cook's style is both vivid and melancholic, underscoring that there may not be much we can do about fate but that nonetheless we should keep trying. Cook has an impressive feel for the streets, denizens and even the weather of New York, where the wealthiest and poorest live almost next to each other. Cook intelligently does not cut away from Corman, so that we only know what he knows, as he goes from precinct stations to morgues to the apartments of those who knew Sarah at her best and at her worst.
--Thomas H. Cook, The City When It Rains (1991, The Overlook Press)
Cook writes what are sometimes called "crime novels," though often they have little or no crime in them and could be more accurately called something like meditations on the human condition, with all its negatives and positives. In The City When It Rains freelance photographer David Corman becomes obsessed with a dead woman, just as Detective Mark McPherson did in Otto Preminger's film Laura (1944), from Vera Caspary's book. Sarah Rosen jumped out of a window and Corman investigates her life, eventually finding and talking to her father and learning about Sarah's childhood and what actually happened. At the same time Corman is fighting to keep the custody of his own nine-year-old daughter.
Cook's style is both vivid and melancholic, underscoring that there may not be much we can do about fate but that nonetheless we should keep trying. Cook has an impressive feel for the streets, denizens and even the weather of New York, where the wealthiest and poorest live almost next to each other. Cook intelligently does not cut away from Corman, so that we only know what he knows, as he goes from precinct stations to morgues to the apartments of those who knew Sarah at her best and at her worst.
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Yankees Baseball, June 6, 2017
On June 6, when manager John Farrell went out to talk to Red Sox pitcher Drew Pomeranz in the fifth inning, with the Red Sox leading and the Yankees threatening, TV announcer Michael Kay said that it looked liked Farrell wanted to keep Pomeranz in order for him to get the win but Kay did not understand why, since "wins don't matter any more as a pitching statistic." This is the kind of know-it-all pompousness that Kay spews on a regular basis. His partner that night, former pitcher David Cone, was obviously startled by this pronouncement and gently disagreed. We may never again see 30 wins in a season or 300 wins in a career (Bartolo Colon has 235 and CC Sabathia 230) but wins still matter, to the pitchers and the fans. The day might even come (though I hope not) where a starting pitcher doesn't even need to go five innings to get a win. The game is changing, eliminating platooning, for example, as teams have to use more and more pitchers; there were 11 pitchers used in the June 9th Mets game, which only went nine innings with a final score of 3-2! But baseball goes in cycles -- when I was a kid Ty Cobb's 96 stolen bases was considered a season record that would never be broken but since Ricky Henderson stole 130 in 1982 stealing bases has again gone out of fashion -- so I am hopeful that we will again see starting pitchers who can use the finesse of the curve ball and slider to get people out and can go at least eight innings.
Meanwhile, over in the radio booth, announcer John Sterling was so busy doing cartwheels over Scooter Gennett's four home runs for Cincinnati that he forgot what was happening in the Yankee game he was supposed to be announcing! The steroid era is (supposedly) over so let's stop glorifying the home run and get back to announcing the ball game. One could, I suppose, watch the game on TV and turn the sound off, though at any given point we can only see a sliver of the field and have to depend on the announcers and replays to see what's going on (and most of the time the Yankee announcers, who have a view of the whole field, don't give us any details, such as when a shift is on). The Mets announcers are a little better, especially Gary Cohen on TV (who is burdened by Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling talking endlessly about their own careers) and the poetic Josh Lewin and matter-of-fact Howie Rose on radio.
Meanwhile, over in the radio booth, announcer John Sterling was so busy doing cartwheels over Scooter Gennett's four home runs for Cincinnati that he forgot what was happening in the Yankee game he was supposed to be announcing! The steroid era is (supposedly) over so let's stop glorifying the home run and get back to announcing the ball game. One could, I suppose, watch the game on TV and turn the sound off, though at any given point we can only see a sliver of the field and have to depend on the announcers and replays to see what's going on (and most of the time the Yankee announcers, who have a view of the whole field, don't give us any details, such as when a shift is on). The Mets announcers are a little better, especially Gary Cohen on TV (who is burdened by Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling talking endlessly about their own careers) and the poetic Josh Lewin and matter-of-fact Howie Rose on radio.
Friday, June 9, 2017
Edith Wharton's The Glimpses of the Moon (1922)
Even in the light of her far-seeing cleverness, and of his own present bliss, he knew the future would not bear the examination of sober thought.
--Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon
One of the pleasures of the periodicals I read --from "The New York Times" to "The New Criterion" -- is the books they introduce me to or remind me of. A case in point is Michael Gorra's recent essay about Edith Wharton in "The New York Review of Books," which reminded me that there is still some Edith Wharton I have not read. So I picked up The Glimpses of the Moon, a strange and funny novel about Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, who have little money themselves but many wealthy friends and who decide to get married and live off the presents and hospitality given to honeymooners. In some ways it is a more positive and comic version of the superior The House of Mirth, though still with an underlying cynicism about marriage and wealth.
I do admit that I find the idea of getting married with the idea that if it doesn't work out you can always get divorced rather strange and off-putting, just as Maria Tallchief did when George Balanchine proposed to her on those terms (the marriage lasted six years). And for a long time divorce was mainly available to the wealthy and could be a stigma for some. My father, for instance, did not want my mother to associate with "divorcees" and when my cousin became the first Soule to get divorced it caused great consternation in the family. In New York State the only grounds for divorce, until 1966, was adultery and New York was the last state to allow no-fault divorce, in 2010.
The difficulty about trenchant decisions was that the next morning they generally left one facing a void.
--The Glimpses of the Moon
After Susy and Nick split, over an ethical dilemma, she gets a job taking care of children and he goes back to his writing; they find their jobs immensely more satisfying than hanging out with the well-off on yachts and in clothing stores and restaurants. The Glimpses of the Moon is beautifully and elegantly written as well as being an effectively deadpan satire.
The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again let them go.
Incidentally, the film version of The Glimpses of the Moon, directed by Allan Dwan in 1923, is part of the 70% of American silent films that are now considered lost. I recommend, instead, Ernst Lubitsch's film Trouble in Paradise (1932), a similarly brilliant satire.
--Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon
One of the pleasures of the periodicals I read --from "The New York Times" to "The New Criterion" -- is the books they introduce me to or remind me of. A case in point is Michael Gorra's recent essay about Edith Wharton in "The New York Review of Books," which reminded me that there is still some Edith Wharton I have not read. So I picked up The Glimpses of the Moon, a strange and funny novel about Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, who have little money themselves but many wealthy friends and who decide to get married and live off the presents and hospitality given to honeymooners. In some ways it is a more positive and comic version of the superior The House of Mirth, though still with an underlying cynicism about marriage and wealth.
I do admit that I find the idea of getting married with the idea that if it doesn't work out you can always get divorced rather strange and off-putting, just as Maria Tallchief did when George Balanchine proposed to her on those terms (the marriage lasted six years). And for a long time divorce was mainly available to the wealthy and could be a stigma for some. My father, for instance, did not want my mother to associate with "divorcees" and when my cousin became the first Soule to get divorced it caused great consternation in the family. In New York State the only grounds for divorce, until 1966, was adultery and New York was the last state to allow no-fault divorce, in 2010.
The difficulty about trenchant decisions was that the next morning they generally left one facing a void.
--The Glimpses of the Moon
After Susy and Nick split, over an ethical dilemma, she gets a job taking care of children and he goes back to his writing; they find their jobs immensely more satisfying than hanging out with the well-off on yachts and in clothing stores and restaurants. The Glimpses of the Moon is beautifully and elegantly written as well as being an effectively deadpan satire.
The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again let them go.
Incidentally, the film version of The Glimpses of the Moon, directed by Allan Dwan in 1923, is part of the 70% of American silent films that are now considered lost. I recommend, instead, Ernst Lubitsch's film Trouble in Paradise (1932), a similarly brilliant satire.
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948)
These are people who have more life in them than any human being ever had. But you can't simply dress up and be them, you have to make a world for them.
---Orson Welles on Shakespeare's characters.
For all the problems of Welles's Shakespeare films one thing he gets right are the worlds he creates for Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1966). These films suffer from low budgets and, surprisingly, often have compromised soundtracks. In the case of Macbeth Welles recorded the sound in advance to save money, using hit-or-miss Scottish accents. The film was financed by Republic Pictures --best known for B Westerns --in order to enhance their prestige. But after its initial release it was cut by twenty minutes and a new soundtrack was recorded, jettisoning the accents. Now Olive Pictures has restored the cuts and the original sound recording and we can enjoy Welles's film in all its passionate beauty.
Welles's Macbeth looks very much like a horror film in the manner of Val Lewton, a low-budget producer in the forties who produced films of fatalism and psychological fear, such as the beautiful I Walked With a Zombie (1944), at RKO, where Citizen Kane and King Kong were both made. Welles uses John Russell as his cinematographer and the stabbing of Banquo in Macbeth is similar to the stabbing of Detective Arbogast in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), where Russell was also director of photography. Russell and Welles do an impressive job of turning sets for Westerns into Macbeth's dark and violent world of the 11th century.
Welles did a all-black version of Macbeth in the theatre in 1936 and one can certainly see a relationship between Macbeth and Charles Foster Kane, both of whom seek power at the cost of everything and everybody else in their lives. Both men look in a broken mirror that shows how distorted things have become with their lives and loves. I have seen few films or theatrical performances of Shakespeare that bring his characters and their environment as alive as Welles does in Macbeth.
---Orson Welles on Shakespeare's characters.
For all the problems of Welles's Shakespeare films one thing he gets right are the worlds he creates for Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1966). These films suffer from low budgets and, surprisingly, often have compromised soundtracks. In the case of Macbeth Welles recorded the sound in advance to save money, using hit-or-miss Scottish accents. The film was financed by Republic Pictures --best known for B Westerns --in order to enhance their prestige. But after its initial release it was cut by twenty minutes and a new soundtrack was recorded, jettisoning the accents. Now Olive Pictures has restored the cuts and the original sound recording and we can enjoy Welles's film in all its passionate beauty.
Welles's Macbeth looks very much like a horror film in the manner of Val Lewton, a low-budget producer in the forties who produced films of fatalism and psychological fear, such as the beautiful I Walked With a Zombie (1944), at RKO, where Citizen Kane and King Kong were both made. Welles uses John Russell as his cinematographer and the stabbing of Banquo in Macbeth is similar to the stabbing of Detective Arbogast in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), where Russell was also director of photography. Russell and Welles do an impressive job of turning sets for Westerns into Macbeth's dark and violent world of the 11th century.
Welles did a all-black version of Macbeth in the theatre in 1936 and one can certainly see a relationship between Macbeth and Charles Foster Kane, both of whom seek power at the cost of everything and everybody else in their lives. Both men look in a broken mirror that shows how distorted things have become with their lives and loves. I have seen few films or theatrical performances of Shakespeare that bring his characters and their environment as alive as Welles does in Macbeth.
Monday, June 5, 2017
David Soren's Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
I wish I could find something good to say about Captain Underpants but I can't: it's the first movie I have seen in a theatre recently and it is so meretricious that it insults even the intelligence of eight-year-olds, for whom it seems to be intended (we went with our five-year-old daughter to a school-sponsored screening at our local theatre, The Alpine).
Animation is at a new low these days, taking its audience so much for granted that animated movies make less sense than ever. George and Harold, fourth-graders, hypnotize their school principal into thinking he is a superhero and with him they battle their nemesis Professor Poopypants. There are a lot of attempts at toilet humor and some attempted jokes about breaking wind but they fall flat from poor and arbitrary timing, as well as meaninglessness. I have often said that the best humor is the most serious and Soren's film goes out of its way to avoid the seriousness about school and authority figures that could have made this an interesting and funny movie. One of many examples: whenever the principal roams the halls one kid hides in a locker; this could have been funny and even moving if we knew anything about this kid, but we don't. It's another case of so many movies these days that try to be funny but don't know how to structure and time a joke, even if audiences today could appreciate the artistry of a Chaplin or a Lubitsch.
Maybe it is too easy to blame computer use for the dispiriting state of animation today when perhaps it is the fault of the animators, whom one would think would not have to jettison subtlety and the complex palettes of hand-drawn animation and replace them with ugly and claustrophobic nonsensical worlds. Is this what the audience for these films actually wants?
Animation is at a new low these days, taking its audience so much for granted that animated movies make less sense than ever. George and Harold, fourth-graders, hypnotize their school principal into thinking he is a superhero and with him they battle their nemesis Professor Poopypants. There are a lot of attempts at toilet humor and some attempted jokes about breaking wind but they fall flat from poor and arbitrary timing, as well as meaninglessness. I have often said that the best humor is the most serious and Soren's film goes out of its way to avoid the seriousness about school and authority figures that could have made this an interesting and funny movie. One of many examples: whenever the principal roams the halls one kid hides in a locker; this could have been funny and even moving if we knew anything about this kid, but we don't. It's another case of so many movies these days that try to be funny but don't know how to structure and time a joke, even if audiences today could appreciate the artistry of a Chaplin or a Lubitsch.
Maybe it is too easy to blame computer use for the dispiriting state of animation today when perhaps it is the fault of the animators, whom one would think would not have to jettison subtlety and the complex palettes of hand-drawn animation and replace them with ugly and claustrophobic nonsensical worlds. Is this what the audience for these films actually wants?
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Many Place, Many Faces
In this depressing time of making America great again (as it was before all those horrible immigrants started coming in) and America first (and the hell with everybody else) it was a pleasure to see Heartshare's After-School Program at PS 102 present its tribute to the world in all its beautiful diversity, "Many Faces, Many Places." Each class (two each in grades K-4 and one for grade 5) presented a dance from a different country and a different part of the world: the U.S. was included and so was Asia, Africa and South America at PS 102 Thursday night in Bay Ridge.
The choreography was simple enough for the kids to know it well but exuberant and intense enough for the participants to enjoy it. One of the highlights was the kindergarten tribute to Africa in "Waka Waka," where the varying repetitiveness of the music was effectively used in the choreography, especially the port de bras, and Victoria Soule was a standout performer, her smile expressing her enjoyment of her dancing.
The performers and the music represented the diversity of Bay Ridge itself, where we have lived in peace for the last 17 years.
The choreography was simple enough for the kids to know it well but exuberant and intense enough for the participants to enjoy it. One of the highlights was the kindergarten tribute to Africa in "Waka Waka," where the varying repetitiveness of the music was effectively used in the choreography, especially the port de bras, and Victoria Soule was a standout performer, her smile expressing her enjoyment of her dancing.
The performers and the music represented the diversity of Bay Ridge itself, where we have lived in peace for the last 17 years.
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