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).