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.

Staten Island Yankees vs. Williamsport Crosscutters, Aug. 10, 2017

It was a beautiful day for a ballgame.  We took a car service to Staten Island and saw parts of the island for the first time:  slums and mansions not too far away from each other. When we had been to the Richmond County Bank Ballpark on July 25 we had been somewhat distracted by our restless daughter (see my post of Jul 25) and this time Susan and I had an unusual opportunity to spend time together, just the two of us, with our son in Baltimore and our daughter at camp.  And it was a terrific game, with Yankee pitcher Juan De Paul pitching six no-hit innings and Andy Diaz scoring the only run of the game in the 8th inning on a wild pitch, the Yankees winning 1-0.  Diaz also had an assist, throwing from centerfield to nail a runner at home who was trying to turn a fly ball into a sacrifice fly.  I was keeping score and the game was wonderfully minimalist, producing a very neat scorecard.

We had beautiful seats in the shade  (at our request) along the first-base side.  The capacity of the stadium is 7,171 so all the seats are pretty good; there were 3,639 fans in attendance on Aug. 10, many of them well-behaved young campers for whom the 11 A.M. starting time had been designed and which allowed us plenty of time to get home and pick up our daughter from her camp in Bay Ridge.  The sun shone, the fish-and-chips were fine, the elegant geometry of the game itself was as beautiful as at any major-league stadium, with a better view and a much lower price than at any major-league stadium:  a wonderful way to spend a summer day.

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Clueness in America by Joan C. Williams

The reason I don't define class solely with reference to income is that class is not just about money.  Nor is class an abiding characteristic of individuals; it's more like a cultural tradition that people riff off as they shape their everyday behavior and make sense of their lives.
--Joan C, Williams, White Working Class (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017).

Having grown up with parents who did not go to college I see, from my perspective, the primary cultural traditions of the working class as intolerance, racism, anti-intellectualism, hypocrisy, authoritarianism toward children and misogyny, among other attributes.  Joan Williams certainly has some useful suggestions for how to cross the divides between classes but most of them, such as job training and retraining, have been tried, at least to some extent, and have failed.  Communication is part of the problem, as many people don't realize, when railing against welfare, how much they benefit from Medicare, Social Security and SS disability, mortgage interest deductions, student loans, tax exemptions for retirement and health benefits, et. al.  But some differences are hard to overcome, as when Williams suggests that pro-choice people can overcome objections to abortion by arguing that those who believe in healthy families should support the choices of those who don't want children!

There's no doubt that more working class kids should go to college and there should be more and better student advisors helping kids in high school.   In the 50's and 60's most of the working class kids I grew up with did not go to college but went to work in the many decent-paying factories in the area:  cement, pocketbooks, pipes, matches and many other items were manufactured and the factory jobs paid well. I will not get into the debate here about the purpose of college other than to say that there are many benefits to an education beyond what job one can get and how much money one can make; but college is not for everyone and there should be many more ways of learning trades, in high school and after high school in community colleges and apprentice programs.

There are a number of ways of overcoming working class resentment:
1. Bring back strong unions and support them.  It is not surprising that the current shift in equality is directly tied to the waning power of unions.

2. Medicare for everyone, i.e., a single-payer health system such as every other developed country has.  Many people worry about their health benefits if they lose their jobs (that is, if they even have health benefits) while even those with benefits have trouble meeting high deductibles and co-payments.

3. Free public university and community college education, so qualified people can go to college and contribute to society in ways other than a lucrative job that helps pay the enormous debt that often goes with a college education.

4. "Some combination of a universal basic income and a federal jobs guarantee," as Sarah Jones says in the Aug 14/21 Nation.  "Charity and worker retraining are no real substitutes for the redistribution of wealth."

Allan Dwan's Black Sheep (1935)

From the Fairbanks period in the silents, to unassuming comedies in the thirties and forties, and to Westerns in the fifties, Dwan has been as active as he has been obscure.
--Andrew Sarris

I had to come back as a writer.  If you go in with material you are always welcome.
Allan Dwan speaking about Black Sheep.

I've written about Dwan films on July 11 2014, June 11 2015, Dec 4 2015
Dwan was one of the first directors whose work I saw in considerable depth, when Peter Bogdanovitch introduced Dwan and his considerable body of work at MoMA in 1971, coinciding with Bogdanovitch's interview book Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (Praeger, 1971). Dwan started directing in 1911 and directed his last film in 1961.  Of the 400 or so films he directed most of the silent films are lost but most of the sound films survive, many of high quality directed under difficult circumstances.

Many of even the best directors were tossed aside when sound came in but Dwan was trained as an engineer and was adept at solving technical problems (sometimes assisting D.W. Griffith), which put him in good stead during the sound era, when he often found ways of saving money.  Black Sheep, like many of Dwan's films, does not fit neatly into any genre or category:  it's something of a comedy, with strong soap opera overtones, about a gambler (Edmund Lowe) and a girl (Claire Trevor) who fall in love while crossing the Atlantic.  The plot gets quite complicated, with Lowe and Trevor rescuing a young man from wealthy gamblers and a thrice-divorced woman who has ensnared the young man to help her smuggle stolen jewels. Dwan was always quite class-conscious and emphasizes the class structure on the ship, with each class meant to stay on its own deck, as a mobile camera opens the film with shots of the first and second classes and the barriers between the two.  There is a lot of snappy patter --"dames are like measles, annoying but curable"--that covers up the melancholy of the uncertain and drifting Lowe and Trevor.

P.S. There is an excellent book covering Dwan's career in considerable detail:  Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios by Frederic Lombardi (McFarland and Company, Inc. 2013)

Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr

People lie to me, people try to kill me, people punch me in the face, people tell me I shouldn't ask questions about things that are none of my business and me and my broken jaw just have to find a way around that in the best way I can.
  Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr's Prussian Blue (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2017)

This is Kerr's twelfth novel about Bernie Gunther, a detective of various sorts in Nazi Germany.  Last we saw Bernie he was playing bridge with Somerset Maugham in 1950's France.  Now he is told by the Stasi, the East German secret police, tha he has to kill someone in England, after which he knows his own life will not be worth much.  So he escapes and heads for Germany, the novel alternating chapters between 1956 and 1939, when he is hired by Reinhard Heydrich (portrayed as Hitler's Madman in Douglas Sirk's 1943 film of that name; I wrote about it 12/20/16) to investigate a murder at Hitler's Bercthesgaden retreat that has to be solved before Hitler shows up for his 50th birthday party, though Heydrich also wants to get dirt on Hitler's secretary Martin Bormann.

A detective story that uses real people is a tricky and uneasy business that Kerr handles adeptly. The classic detective part does not fit too well into Nazi Germany --though Heydrich, Bormann, et al. are portrayed somewhat successfully as characters -- but the 1956 chase through France and Germany is vivid, reminding one of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, 1939, made into the film Man Hunt in 1941 by German émigré Fritz Lang.

I perceived how history was nothing more than an accident, a fluke, a matter of a few centimeters here or there, a head turned, a sudden gust of wind, a dirty gun barrel, a misfired cartridge, a breath held for a second too long or too little, an order misheard or misunderstood, an itchy trigger finger, a second's delay, an instant's hesitation.
---Bernie Gunther.

A Touch of Zen, Ode to Billy Joe, The Outlaw and His Wife.

Generally I consider myself a splitter but I am also a lumper when it comes to films such as these three, all recently shown on Turner Classic Movies (perhaps the only reason one has cable TV).
All three are period films about star-crossed lovers and their relationship to nature

I missed King Hu's A Touch of Zen when it showed at the New York Film Festival in 1976, missed it again when it showed at the Bleecker Street Cinema in the 80's (it was sold out and there were lines around the block) and finally saw it at the Walter Reade in the 90's.  It is a superb example of the wuxia (martial arts heroes) genre, rather similar to the Western in this country, though somewhat more political.  King Hu's film takes place in 14th Century China and concerns a quiet artist who gets involved with a woman pursued by political assassins.  The woman, Yang Hui-zhen (played by Hsu Feng) turns out to be adept with a sword, while the artist Gu Sheng-zai (played by Shih Chun) helps her with strategy.  They have a child together, after a prolonged battle in a bamboo forest and an escape to nature, and ward off additional attempts on their lives with the help of powerful Buddhist monks.  The film is slow and subtle, combining swordplay (using hidden trampolines and fast cutting in the days before computer generated images)with philosophy and a reverence for nature.

Ode to Billy Joe (1976, directed by Max Baer, Jr.) is based on Bobbi Gentry's 1967 song, which tells us that Billy Joe threw something off Tallahatchie Bridge on the third of June, though it doesn't tell us what it was or why Billy Joe committed suicide; this question was hotly debated at the time.  In the film writer Herman Raucher and Baer explain it all, for better or worse (though it does make sense to one who grew up in the fifties). The film effectively captures life in the dusty Mississippi Delta circa 1953 when young love was discouraged and most farms did not have electricity or indoor plumbing.  Robby Benson and Glynnis O'Connor sensitively play the star-crossed lovers whose frustrations lead to disaster.

Victor Sjostrom's The Outlaw and His Wife (1918) takes place in Iceland in the 19th C. and captures the bigotry and intolerance of that particular time and place, where a parson turns down a man's plea for help and then turns him in to the authorities when one of his sheep is stolen. The film has the rigor and intelligence of a director familiar with D.W. Griffith, as the outlaw marries a wealthy farmer (they perform the marriage ceremony themselves) and are turned in by an jealous neighbor.  They flee to the mountains and have a child, flourishing during the summer but then freezing to death together in the winter after they are pursued by the authorities. Seastrom later went to Hollywood (changing his name slightly) where he made several excellent films, including The Wind (1928), again depicting man's struggle with nature.  Seastrom's Swedish films were a significant influence on Ingmar Bergman and in 1958 Seastrom had a major role in Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972)

It's been interesting and somewhat disconcerting to take the TCM/Ball State Hitchcock course and watch again many of the films.  What does Hitchcock have to say?  Is it more than that the world is full of terrors and psychopaths, spies, guilty women and falsely accused men?  Is he saying more and doing more than just "putting the audience through it?"

Hitchcock's films have always given me pleasure, as much for the way they solve technical problems as anything else, e.g., it was many years after Rope (1948) before anyone tried to make another film with just one continuous shot.  I first saw Frenzy when it was released in 1972 and thought it an interesting attempt by Hitchcock to go back to his English roots while making an R-rated film with violence and nudity.  Even so, the most powerful scene in the movie is a murder we don't see, as the camera tracks down the stairs and into the oblivious crowd while the murder is taking place.  This is after Hitchcock has portrayed the murder victim, played by Anna Massie,  as a sympathetic character and friend of the wrongly accused.  There is little humor of the sort found in Hitchcock's British film The Lady Vanishes (1938), where the humor is intrinsic to the characters.  What little attempt at humor there is in Frenzy is confined to a detective's wife trying to make gourmet meals for him when he just wants bangers and mash.

The Hitchcock course has, quite rightly, emphasized his collaborators.  Even Hitchcock has mentioned that Vertigo and Psycho depend for their effectiveness on Bernard Herrman's scores, and Hitchcock used the same editor (George Tomasini), cinematographer (Robert Burks) and production designer (Robert Boyle) many times.  Hitchcock's films without these collaborators are different, just as his films at Universal (Torn Curtain 1966, Topaz 1969) are different from his films at Paramount (Rear Window, 1954 and Vertigo, 1958).  Unfortunately not even Truffaut could get Hitchcock to discuss much beyond the technical issues in his films, though there is no doubt he coaxed many moving and beautiful performances from his actors.