Balanchine's The Nutcracker, NYC Ballet, Dec. 28, 2018

Aside from the fact that it requires a number of professionally trained children, which most ballet companies do not possess, The Nutcracker is not suitable for a company built, like the majority, around a few soloists and with a corps de ballet capable of little more than calisthenics.  George Balanchine has always set his face against such a structure.  The ideal he has worked for is a company in which every member is technically capable of dancing a solo role; in his choreography, instead of the conventional corps de ballet acting in unison, everyone has his unique part to play. Balanchine sees The Nutcracker as a festival of joy, a sort of Christmas pantomime, and only those who have lost their sense of joy and for whom, consequently ballet is a meaningless art, will find it juvenile.
---W.H, Auden, 1954 Program Note.

The Nutcracker is still the only ballet that too many parents take their kids to.  And too many people see it for its story and not for its intricate and extraordinary choreography.  But I'm becoming resigned to that.  The Nutcracker, like the best popular entertainment, can be enjoyed on multiple levels, from the spectacle of the costumes and scenery to the incredible dancing.  Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I think that New York City Ballet has improved immensely since the departure of the autocratic Peter Martins and his replacement by the "interim artistic team" of Jonathan Stafford, Justin Peck, Craig Hall and Rebecca Krohn.  On Friday all the dancers --including sixty-three children from the school, rehearsed and supervised by Dena Abergel and Arch Higgins -- were at the top of their form, especially The Sugarplum Fairy and Her Cavalier, danced by soloists Sara Adams and Sebastian Villarini-Velez, dancing passionately to the energetic conducting of the Tschaikovsky music by music director Andrew Litton.

The Nutcracker is such a holiday staple now that not everyone is aware that when Balanchine choreographed it in 1954 it was mostly a forgotten ballet, the 1892 original choreography by Petipa and Ivanov mostly lost.  Balanchine had danced in The Nutcracker as a teenager at the Maryinski in Russia and felt that there would be an audience for it in the fifties, with spectacle and costumes and a fairytale story for most people and new dances for Tschaikovsky's beautiful music.  What he didn't figure out was how to get the adults who brought their children to this ballet to bring them to his more abstract and austere ballets to the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bach, Bizet, et al.  In some ways, of course, perhaps it didn't matter:  the sold-out crowds for The Nutcracker (48 performances this year) help finance the more abstract ballets and those who are interested manage to find their way to them, at whatever age. Balanchine's Nutcracker has now found its way to other ballet companies, most of whom do not have the resources to do it at the level of New York City Ballet, but it might help keep ballet alive in the 21st century while we wait patiently for new and inspired choreography

Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents (1960)

Ray does have a theme, and a very important one; namely, that every relationship establishes its own moral code and that there is no such thing as abstract morality.
--Andrew Sarris

Nicholas Ray's beautiful The Savage Innocents is another of Ray's poetic films about outsiders to traditional Western culture and mores, including women (Johnny Guitar, 1954), gypsies (Hot Blood, 1956), rebellious youth (Rebel Without a Cause, 1952), outlaws (The True Story of Jesse James, 1957) and others.  The DVD of The Savage Innocents does not begin to compare with the exquisite Technirama 35 mm print that I saw twenty-five years ago at MoMA but it does capture some of the beauty of the Arctic environment shot by Italian cinematographer Aldo Tonti and the geographical and behavioral differences between the West and the Inuit, with Ray obviously influenced by Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922).

There is an effective documentary quality to Ray's film, with seal-hunting, igloo-building and an aging mother left on the ice to be devoured by a polar bear. The film is mostly cool blues and whites as well as earth tones, with Ray's signature garish red only showing up when Inuk (played by Anthony Quinn) makes his way to a distant trading post to trade furs and clashes with Western traders and priests  Ray does not claim that the Inuit are "noble savages" in any sense, rather that they have a unique culture that is gradually being eroded.

The Oxford Murders

In between reading Guillermo Martinez's novel The Oxford Murders (published by Penguin in 2005, translated by Sonia Soto) and watching Alex de la Iglesia's film version (2008) I read John Lancester's essay "The Case of Agatha Christie" in The London Review of Books.  I mention this because the book and the film (which follows the book fairly closely) are rather anti-Christie, i.e., they emphasize randomness rather than logic.  A graduate student narrates the book, as he tries to figure out a series of murders based on codes the murderer left in notes. He is helped by aging philosopher Arthur Seldom, who considers the universe random, suggesting that the clues in the notes do not make an orderly series, in the same way that an SAT question asking for the next in a series could have many possible answers, depending on how complicated one wants to make it.

The film subtly supports the random theory of the universe as cinematographer Kiko de la Rica follows one person and then abruptly shifts to someone else and then someone else again, none of whom seem to be relevant to the plot, the wide-screen image showing Seldom and students randomly intersecting. There is much discussion of Wittgenstein, Fermat, Godel and various other philosophers and mathematicians who have tried to make sense of a seemingly random world in which there is disagreement on whether we have somehow discovered maths (as the British call it) or invented it.  I especially liked the low-key manner in which de la Iglesia (and to a lesser extent Martinez) use Scrabble and squash in the plot, games which involve different ratios of logic and chance.

Turner Classic Movies, Jan. 2019

A pretty good line-up of classic films in January, including several by Anthony Mann (I especially like The Black Book, 1949, a film noir about the French Revolution, with exquisite cinematography by John Alton, on Jan. 8); Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point, 1950, on the 25th; John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939, on the 11th; Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, 1955, on the 20th; Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, 1950, on the 25th; and several films by the great Ernst Lubitsch on the 29th, including Ninotchka, 1939,

Other films include Leo McCarey's elegant comedy The Awful Truth,1937, on January 1 and two off-beat Westerns on Jan. 4:  Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Joseph Mankiewicz's There Was a Crooked Man, both from 1970.

If you have any questions about any other films on Turner in Jan. please feel free to contact me.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

"The most dangerous man in America:  a nigger with a library card."
  Brother Mouzone  (Michael Potts), /"The Wire" season 2, episode 10, written by Ed Burns

Susan Orlean's book (Simon and Schuster, 2018) is a meditation on libraries and the fire in the Los Angeles Public Library of 1986, when 400,000 books were destroyed.  Orlean had been fascinated by libraries since she was a child in Cleveland, when her mother regularly took her to the local library, and some of us share her fascination.  I grew up without books and without a library in Kinderhook, N.Y. and was always desperate for something to read.  Then we moved to Delmar, N.Y. and when I was in third and fourth grade there the elementary school had a pretty decent library and I read several books a day, taking the books out one day and returning them the next; I don't think I was aware at that time that there was a local public library, since neither of my parents were readers and did all they could to prevent me from reading, on the dubious grounds that it was bad for my eyes.   When I was in fourth grade we moved to Hudson, N.Y., at that time an anti-intellectual blue-collar town that regularly voted against funding a public library, with an elementary school "library" that consisted of a few non-fiction "Landmark" books (some may remember them from the 50's and 60's) and some old copies of National Geographic.

I struggled in Hudson to find reading material.  Ironically, my father had worked for a book distributor  before we moved to Hudson so he could work for an auto-parts distributor.  For my father books were just widgets to be sold and we had almost no books in the house except an encyclopedia; my parents did not believe in "reading for pleasure," since reading could give you ideas of your own and books cost money.  When a volunteer library opened in downtown Hudson I gradually read all the books that were donated until my father caught me with a copy of Catcher in the Rye when I was thirteen and made me return it.  When I asked him if he had read it he said no, but that he had formerly worked in the book business and he knew what was in it (I secretly finished reading it before I returned it),  One Christmas I asked for The Scarlet Letter but my parents "investigated" it and found it too racy and subversive!

In my later elementary school years I managed to read whatever books I could borrow from my friends; I was particularly fond of The Hardy Boys.  When I turned 12 my parents said no more allowance; I was told to get a paper route if I wanted any spending money.  In a way this was liberating, as I mostly used my several earned dollars a week buying paperbacks off the racks at the local grocery store, accidentally discovering such gems as Herndon's Life of Lincoln and George Orwell's 1984, a particular favorite. 

After graduating as my elementary school valedictorian I went as a freshman to Hudson High, where the library was rather surprisingly off-limits unless one was doing research using library materials.  In my freshman English class we were given books to read --The Microbe Hunters, Death Be Not Proud and similar middlebrow material.  Parents were outraged, how dare they make students read entire books!  My parents seemed okay with it, as long as there was no sexual or political content.  

I lasted one year at Hudson High before I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where my world totally changed.  I probably would have had a better academic record at Exeter if they didn't have such a wonderful library:  I had a lot of catching up to do, discovering everyone from Dickens to Nabokov, and spent every moment I could reading.  When I graduated from Exeter I went to Columbia in New York City, with its many bookstores and its excellent public library system.

None of this has much to do with Orlean's book, which is focused on the Los Angeles library system and the fire, which was blamed on one Harry Peak, though evidence was lacking.  In fact, as Orlean writes, "As long ago as 1977 forensic scientists warned that the principles of arson investigation were mostly myth."  I recommend reading Orlean's book and watching Frederick Wiseman's documentary Ex Libris:  The New York Public Library to see the importance and necessity of our public libraries. 

Michael Connolly's Dark Sacred Night.

She was simply staring into the pass, the never-ending movement of vehicles down on the freeway like blood through the veins of the city.
--Michael Connolly, Dark Sacred Night (Little, Brown and Company, 2018).

"Night" in Connolly's title seems to suggest two meanings, the night shift on which Rene Ballard works and the "knight" that Harry Bosch is, in his search for killers in cases that have gone cold.  Bosch even rescues a "maiden," a woman who has taken to drink and drugs after her daughter Daisy had been killed nine years ago.  To some extent policeman Bosch, now exiled to San Fernando, is passing the torch to thirty-years-younger Ballard at LAPD; each has much to learn from the other and they even rescue one another from death.  Ballard and Bosch are both dedicated to their jobs, as Bosch's daughter is in college and Ballard is devoted to her dog and the beach.

After thirty-five books (four of which I have mentioned previously) Connolly has the same intense feeling for 21st century Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler had for mid-20th century LA; plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.  Phillip Marlowe operated alone and so do Ballard and Bosch, albeit with some technical help from the police department, while ignoring authority and being driven by a search for truth.

Philip Moeller's Age of Innocence 1934

Edith Wharton was born in 1862 so she had some firsthand knowledge of "the gilded age" when she wrote The Age of Innocence in 1920.  The film was directed by Phillip Moeller who was mainly a stage director, except for one other movie, and used both elements of the book and of Margaret Ayer Barnes's stage adaptation; the script is by Sarah Mason and Victor Heerman.  Moeller's film is much kinder to the upper-class denizens of 1870's New York than Wharton's novel is, emphasizing how trapped they were in the mores and customs of the time (as too many of us often are).  Irene Dunne soars as the complex Ellen Oleska, who tells Newland Archer (scheduled to marry Ellen's cousin) that they can't run away together because when Europeans flee to America and Americans flee to Europe nothing changes (Ellen wants to divorce her Polish aristocratic husband but her family doesn't want the scandal).


The film of The Age of Innocence is an emotional melodrama, sometimes derisively called a "soap opera" because radio versions had soap companies as sponsors, though it is a genre which has appealed to some very talented directors, including John M. Stahl (who made Back Street with Dunne and John Boles, who played Newland Archer, in 1932), Frank Borzage, and Douglas Sirk, directors that are not afraid to appeal to the emotions within layers of irony.  Moeller heightens the emotion and the irony by framing the story as a flashback, with Newland Archer deciding not to see Ellen after twenty-six years, preferring to remember her as she was .

The Big Apple Circus Dec. 8, 2018

Victoria (age 7), Gideon (20) and I all went to the Big Apple Circus yesterday and had a great time.  There were two things that made it better than last year (see my post of Dec 10, 2017):  the absence of the unfunny clown "Grandma" (Barry Lubin was fired for sexual harassment) and the precisely timed performances.  And I do mean "performance," as the Circus is now more in tune with its origins in performance art, a term one does not hear much anymore.  I was particularly entranced by  Victor Moisev's horizontal juggling that was effectively visual (the red balls were on strings).  Jenny Vidbel was back with her domestic animals (including a potbellied pig) and The Flying Tienzianis were back with their impressive trapeze performance.  New this year was Emil Faltyny balancing on a free-standing ladder and kicking a ball into a goal while at the top of the ladder, Duo Fusion --Ihosvanys and Virginia Tuiells -- who did handstands on each other's abdomens -- and Valeriy Dynochev and Eraterina Abakarova, who did a beautiful and sexy aerial ballet.

"Grandma" was replaced by juggler Adam Kushler (who did wonderful things with piles of boxes) and Mark Goudich, who played an aspiring circus performer; they even used elements of Barry Lubin's routines, without the nastiness.  The show was written and directed by Mark Lonergan -- who never let any routine go on too long -- and choreographed by Grady MacLeod Bowman, who made much of performance seem like dance. We all loved the show, for various reasons, and Victoria loved the cotton candy and popcorn.

Lee Child's Past Tense

The bowstring thumped, the arrow hissed, and Shorty screamed and went down like he had fallen through a trap door.
--Lee Child, Past Tense (Delacorte, 2018).

Some of the strengths of Child's past Jack Reacher novels remain in Past Tense, particularly the character of Jack Reacher, always ready to help the downtrodden, and the detailed use of location as Reacher travels about the country.  In this novel Reacher is researching his childhood in New Hampshire when he stumbles across a group that kidnaps tourists and lets other men hunt them, for a price. The plot is more or less borrowed from Richard Connell's 1924 story that was made into the pretty good movie, The Most Dangerous Game, by Irving Pichel and Ernst Schoedsack, in 1932 and remade a number of times.

Kidnap victims Canadian tourists Shorty and Patty are vivid characters, as are some of the denizens of small town New Hampshire, though Child has the annoying habit of keeping information from us until late in the novel, turning suspense into predictable "surprise," something all-too-common among mystery and thriller writers.  I have the feeling that Child is spinning his wheels here, even the relationship with cop Brenda Amos doesn't suggest the possibility of it leading anywhere, as it does in other Reacher novels (see my posts of 12/5/17, 1/9/17, 11/10/15, 10/15/14).

Film Journal

While my wife Susan is recovering from a broken leg we are watching some movies I have taped from Turner Classic Movies.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  The dances are always wonderful in their films -- though there are never enough of them -- because they are choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan and the director has little to do with them.  That being said, their best "musical comedies" are directed by Mark Sandrich, who had a knack for comedy.  Top Hat (1935) was directed by Sandrich and has wonderful comedy (with the help of Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick), lovely music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and exquisite dancing, especially to "Cheek to Cheek" and "Isn't It a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?"  Before Top Hat Astaire and Rogers made Roberta (1935), the film that effectively made them a team, as they shared billing with Randolph Scott and Irene Dunne.  The film was directed by the impersonal William Dieterle and Dunne sang Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which I loved, though but Susan did not care for Dunne's warbling.  Astaire and Rogers become a couple in that film with the delightful "I Won't Dance."

Run of the Arrow (1957) was written, produced and directed by Samuel Fuller; it is a story about a Southerner (played by Rod Steiger) who is bitter at the end of the Civil War and goes to live with Native Americans in the West which is not yet officially part of the United States.  The cinematography is by Joseph Biroc (who often worked with Fuller and Robert Aldrich, among many others), who beautifully captures the isolated beauty of the West. Fuller's film works as an effective genre film --soldiers versus Indians -- but also as a parable about loyalty and country and where one belongs; at one point soldier Brian Keith tells Steiger about Phillip Nolan, the "man without a country." itself a parable by Edward Everett Hale. Fuller ends his film with a title card "the end of this film will be written by you," more true now, in our divided country, than ever. 

I admire Dean Martin, especially in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) and Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958), but he was often his own worst enemy, being remembered as the dipsomaniac host of various roasts and a member of the Rat Pack.  Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) shows Martin brilliantly making fun of his own image, being stranded in Climax, Nevada on the way from Las Vegas to Hollywood and becoming desperate because if he goes a night without sex he gets a headache.  Kiss Me, Stupid is beautifully filmed in the unusual format of widescreen black-and-white, capturing the claustrophobia of small-town America as well as its obsession with celebrities and success.  Whether one finds Wilder's film funny or not (I do) it is an intelligent observation by a foreigner (Wilder is Austrian) of America's hypocrisies and celebrity obsession and is even more relevant today than it was in 1964.

Frank Tashlin's Hollywood or Bust (1956) was the last film Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made together:  Lewis wanted to direct himself and Martin wanted more serious roles (though as the straight man he was funnier than the clown).  Unfortunately Martin and Lewis had finally found their best director, Frank Tashlin, and they had just made their best movie with him, Artists and Models (1955); Hollywood or Bust showed the strain of their increasing hostility to each other. Tashlin did use this tension somewhat effectively as Martin and Lewis traveled across country in a motorcar they had won in a raffle, Martin to a job and Lewis to meet Anita Ekberg.  There are many of Tashlin's cartoonish elements and satires of consumerism in Hollywood or Bust (at one point Lewis's dog drives the car), the title referring to the portion of the female anatomy that Tashlin saw some American men obsessed with, including Malcolm Smith, played by Lewis.  As Martin and Lewis drive across the country they see mostly young and lissome young women in scanty outfits waving at them as they go by; the one older woman they give a ride to pulls a gun on them and steals their car.  Tashlin's use of eye-popping primary colors is enhanced by VistaVision, which produces a fairly high-definition image.


King Vidor's Street Scene (1931) is an effective adaptation of Elmer Rice's play.  Vidor does not make the mistake of many film adaptations of "opening up" things and instead sticks to the one set of the exterior of a New York apartment house in a struggling neighborhood.  People come and go and stick their heads out the windows but Vidor never goes into any apartments:  when a husband comes home to shoot his wife and lover we only see the window as the lover attempts to escape.  Vidor was an innovator with early sound films -- particularly Hallelujah in 1928 (see my post of July 23, 2014) -- and worked closely with cinematographer George Barnes to move the camera and vary the shots to capture the dynamics of the streets and people moving in and out of the apartment building.

Turner Classic Movies Dec. 2018

Plenty of Christmas movies; my favorites are Vincente Minnelli's  Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), which has Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane) on Dec.1, Ernst Lubitsch's wonderful The Shop Around the Corner (1940) on Dec. 2, John Ford's The Three Godfathers (1946) on the 15th and Remember the Night (1940), written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, on Dec. 20.

Other movies in Dec. include:

Chantal Ackerman's intensely minimalist Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1977) on Dec. 2 (I commented on this film July 7, 2014)

Jacques Tourneur's great film noir Out of the Past (1947)

John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) on Dec. 11.

Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951) on Dec. 13

John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle(1950)  and Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941) on Dec. 17

Preston Sturges's Christmas in July (1940) on Dec. 20

The B Western: Stage to Chino (1940), Riding Shotgun (1954)

When I was a kid I loved Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies; now I don't care for them because they had motorcars in them and I prefer Westerns --A or B -- that take place on the 19th C. frontier.

Stage to Chino is a nice B Western starring George O'Brien who, for whatever various reasons, was a star in silent films (John Ford's The Iron Horse in 1924, Murnau's Sunrise in 1927) and mostly relegated to B Westerns in the thirties and forties, ending his career back with Ford in Fort Apache in 1948.   Stage to Chino was directed by Edward Killy, who directed mostly B films with intelligence and flair. Stage to Chino has something for everyone:  comedy (salesman Hobart Cavanaugh saying "I'm in ladies underwear"), music (by The Pals of the Golden West), action and romance.  I especially liked the key role played by Virginia Vale, as the woman who takes over her father's stagecoach line and fights for the mail business, helped by postal inspector O'Brien. The film is also something of a study of monopoly capitalism, as a rival stagecoach line resorts to robbery and murder to win the mail contract.

Riding Shotgun is more of a B+  Western, directed by veteran Andre de Toth and photographed by Bert Glennon, who worked often with John Ford; it stars Randolph Scott, an icon of Westerns, and has the themes of many post-WWII Westerns and many of de Toth's film:  betrayal and revenge.  Many people die in de Toth's film, none in Killy's.  Killy's film is in black-and-white, de Toth's in gorgeous color.  De Toth emphasizes the solitariness of the Western hero (as in High Noon in 1954 and Rio Bravo in 1959), as Scott is thought mistakenly by the townspeople to be a murderer, while Killy's film has the townspeople working together.  Killy's film has important roles for women, while in de Toth's film the women are mostly on the sidelines.

Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2018

My favorite films in the first week of November are Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945).  I will get to the rest of the month presently, while continuing to recommend any films by Lubitsch, Ford, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Alfred Hitchcock, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Roberto Rossellini, Frank Borzage.

Other recommended films:

Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952) on the 16th and Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) on the 17th,

Michael Leigh' Secrets and Lies (1996) on the 20th.

Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940) on the 24th.

Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) on the 25th.

Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) on the 30th.

American Ballet Theatre Oct. 20, 2018

Most readers of this blog know my preference for NYC Ballet, but Saturday the American Ballet Theatre was performing Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante so we went:  my wife Susan, son Gideon, daughter Victoria and me.  ABT was performing their brief Fall season at The New York State Theatre --instead of the cramped City Center -- and we had nice seats in row B of the 4th ring, no longer sold by NYC Ballet for subscriptions.

Symphonie Concertante was beautifully and elegantly danced by Stella Abrera, Gillian Murphy, and Alexandre Hammoudi, the lone male in the cast.  The music was Mozart's --Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin and Viola -- and there was much lovely entwining of the three leading dancers while the corps did port de bras and tendus surrounding them. This ballet was originally done for students of the School of American Ballet in 1945 and on Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq for NYC Ballet in 1947.  My feeling is that it was dropped by Balanchine at NYC Ballet because it was too similar to Symphony in C (use of the corps) and Concerto Barocco (use of two female leads and one male), the former premiering in 1947 and the latter in 1941. Also, Balanchine did a very different sort of ballet to Mozart music in 1956:  Divertimento Number 15.  Until this week ABT had not performed Sinfornia Concertante since 2007, perhaps because they did not have enough dancers with the requisite Balanchine technique; it requires twenty-five dancers, all of whom performed Saturday with intensity and passion.

Garden Blue was performed next, choreographed by Jessica Lang, a former member of Twylas Tharp's group.  It was done to playful Dumky (using Slavic epic ballads) music, Dvorak's Piano Trio No.4 in E minor.  There was a somewhat playful aspect to Lang's choreography, very much in the Martha Graham/Paul Taylor school of dance and rather arbitrary in its relationship to the music.  The costumes and set were by Sarah Crowner, the costumes unitards of bright colors and the set including strange wing-like constructions that the dancers hid in and behind.

The final dance was Fancy Free, choreography by Jerome Robbins and music by Leonard Bernstein.  This piece has always seemed to appeal to those who like Broadway dance and vaudeville, which does not include me.  Edwin Denby wrote about it (when it premiered in 1944), "If you want to be technical you can find in the steps all sorts of references to our normal dance-hall steps, as they are done from Roseland to the Savoy: trucking, the boogie knee drop, even a round-the-back done in slow motion."  (New York Herald Tribune, April 19, 1944).  Denby even points out the parodies of Tudor and Massine in the dance, something not obvious to audiences today.  My daughter liked it "because it had a story" (which eventually became part of On the Town, on Broadway in 1944 and in a movie in 1949).

Mark Robson's Roughshod (1949)

Whenever I go with my seven-year-old daughter to some crummy new piece of animation I think of how movies once appealed across age and gender differences.  Case in point:  Roughshod.  The film has a young kid (nicely played by Claude Jarman, Jr.), a handsome older brother (played by Robert Sterling) and a sexy woman (Gloria Grahame) on a trip to California, pursued by a bad guy (John Ireland).  The film takes place mostly outdoors among rocks and forests, photographed with dappled chiaroscuro by cinematographer Joseph Biroc.  Although the film has a noir mood (it was written by Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote Out of the Past, 1947) it does have a happy ending of sorts, after all the bad guys are killed (as well as some of the good guys), and Claude Jarmen, Jr. is taught his ABC's by Gloria Grahame.

 This is a B Western, well crafted by director by Mark Robson, after his apprenticeship with Val Lewton (The Seventh Victim 1943 ) and before his bloated later films (Peyton Place 1947 et al.)

Three Private-Eye Novels

I read a fair amount of genre novels, mostly hard-boiled mystery, because, as Paul Auster says, they contain some of the best contemporary writing.  They also require a certain formulaic element that allows for artistic freedom, in the same way the Western has done for filmmakers.

At the Hands of Another was written by in 1983 by Arthur Lyons (Lyons died in 2008) and is in many ways very much in the Raymond Chandler tradition:  it is written in the first person, is  part of a series about private eye Jacob Asch, takes place in Los Angeles, is elegantly written with low-key humor and minimal violence.  It also is critical of the scamming that goes on when lawyers and doctors operate together to defraud, and includes a femme fatale who seeks Asch's help and abandons him after he helps her.

John Connolly's A Game of Ghosts (2017) is the sixteenth in his series of books about private eye Charlie Parker (yes, he likes jazz).  Connolly is Irish and his novels are rather gory and overlaid with supernatural and fantasy elements and the assumption that evil exists and that Parker and his assistants, Angel and Louis, are among those sometimes called upon to root it out.  Connolly writes, in his typically poetic way, influenced in style and subject by Milton, "it was another imperfect solution, but then it was an increasingly imperfect world."

Lyons writes in the first person, Connolly in the third, and Steve Hamilton, in Dead Man Running (2018) combines the two.  The first-person part is Alex McKnight, who is yanked from his Upper Peninsula Michigan home to Arizona  by the FBI:  a serial killer will only talk to McKnight.  Serial killers are not very interesting but McKnight's fish-out-of-water pursuit of the killer after he escapes reminds one of a Geoffrey Household novel, in McKnight's attempt to deal with a foreign landscape.  It's an impressive outing by Steve Hamilton to go beyond the Upper Peninsula and expand what McKnight --and the reader -- know.

Two Films by Seth Holt

"His virtues are things of bits and pieces," wrote Andrew Sarris of Seth Holt.  This is true of Holt's last two films, Danger Route (1967) and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971), both recently shown on Turner Classic Movies. Holt died, at the age of 47, before finishing the latter film; it was completed by Michael Carreras. Holt was championed by "Movie' magazine as a director trying to break out of the genteel tradition of British films, as was Michael Reeves, who died at 27.  Both directors were considered guilty of what critic Robin Wood called "the fallacy of bad taste" in their attempts to make personal genre films with limited budgets.

Danger Route was one of the many films of the 60's that attempted to cash in on the James Bond phenomenon.  Jonas Wilde, played by Richard Johnson (who looks a bit like Sean Connery) was something of an anti-Bond, not using any gadgets and killing people with his bare hands.  He doesn't seem to take much pleasure in sex except to the extent he can use women to accomplish his goals, as he does here with a rather frumpy-looking Diana Dors, who is the housekeeper of a mansion Wilde is trying to break into.  There is a lot about US-England rivalry and a great deal about class conflict in Danger Route, Wilde eventually being betrayed by his friends and even his shack job (Carol Lynley).  One friend, attempting to kill Wilde, says how much he resents those in the upper classes who run the intelligence operations, "unless you're in the upper classes you'll always be a sheep, never a shepherd"

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, from Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, fits in nicely with Hammer Studio's roster of horror films.  In 1959 Terence Fisher made The Mummy for Hammer and Fisher was by far Hammer's best director of horror, his films being rather cerebral period pieces about Frankenstein, Dracula, et al.  Holt was much less comfortable with this kind of material, though he gets credit for playing it straight (with the slight exception of naming a character Tod Browning, the name of the original director of Dracula), with the help of Valerie Leon, playing a modern reincarnation of an exotic Egyptian "Queen of Darkness."   Holt's film follows the basic blueprint of most Mummy films from 1932 to the present:  a Mummy comes to life in an attempt to retrieve items stolen from a tomb.  The film takes place in the present day, though it is quite stylish and if it weren't for the modern motorcars and purple shirts it could almost be Edwardian.

Andre de Toth's None Shall Escape (1944)

None Shall Escape is a harrowing film.  It is directed by Hungarian émigré Andre de Toth,  who directed several films in Hungary and filmed the Nazi invasion of Poland, before fleeing to America; None Shall Escape was de Toth's second film in the U.S., written by Lester Cole (later of the Hollywood Ten) and photographed by the estimable Lee Garmes, who had earlier worked with Josef Von Sternberg. In a manner of speaking the film is a fantasy, a prophetic film taking place after the war ends at a "United Nations" tribunal to investigate war crimes (the film was made in 1943 and released in 1944).  On trial is Wilhelm Grimm, played by Alexander Knox, and he is the subject of flashbacks from his one-time fiancée (Marsha Hunt), his brother (Erik Rolf) and his priest.(Henry Travers)  It all takes place in a small town in Poland from Grimm's return there in 1919 after WWI to the end of the WW II.  Grimm lost a leg in the first World War, wants to get even with someone and thinks he is worthy of better things than the life of a small-town schoolteacher.  Grimm feels he is being condescended to by everyone and breaks off with his fiancée when she doesn't share his dreams of greatness and glory.  He begins to feel superior and when he molests one of his students the student commits suicide.  He flees the country after he is acquitted, due to lack of evidence, and is given money by his friends (including the priest) to help him.

When Germany invades Poland Grimm returns as a powerful Nazi, who takes a great deal of pleasure in mistreating everyone in the village, from burning books to using the synagogue as a stable.  When Grimm rounds up the Jews for deportation to concentration camps they are encouraged by their rabbi to fight back and they are all slaughtered.  De Toth's film was one of several by émigré directors that exposed the horrors of Nazism, once we were at war with Germany, including Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman in 1943 (see my post of 12/20/16) and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die in 1944.  De Toth not only emphasizes the horrors of Nazism, he also exposes the psychology of those who become Nazis, including the insecurity, the misogyny, the need for power.  I won't here attempt to draw analogies with our current political landscape, though I do recommend Christopher R. Browning's "The Suffocation of Democracy" in the Oct. 25 issue of The New York Review of Books.

The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank LaSalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?
Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955)

Sarah Weinman, in The Real Lolita (HarperCollins, 2018) tries to find the influence on the kidnapping Nabokov mentions in his novel on the writing of Lolita.  She makes many references to what Nabokov might have known about it while writing his novel from 1948 to 1953 and one must give her credit for much intelligent guesswork.  Her detailed narrative of Sally Horner's abduction at the age of eleven is a fascinating analysis of parenting in 1940's America, with Sally getting permission from her single mother in Camden, N.J. to go to Atlantic City with Frank La Salle, who Sally thought was an FBI agent and who she convinced her mother was a parent of one of her friends, though Mrs Horner never met La Salle.  La Salle took Sally from Atlantic City to Baltimore to Texas to California, enrolling her in Catholic schools along the way, Weinman convincingly demonstrating that Catholic schools seldom asked questions.  Twenty-one months after her abduction Sally told a friend in a California trailer park that she had been abducted.  La Salle was arrested, extradited to New Jersey, pleaded guilty and sentenced to thirty-five years.  Two years after Sally returned home she was killed in a motorcar accident.

Although there are many interesting similarities to Lolita in the Sally Horner case the similarities and how much Nabokov knew about them, are superficial.  We know that La Salle molested Sally but we know little about the details of their relationship:  neither Sally nor La Salle ever talked about it after La Salle pleaded guilty.  Nabokov's novel Lolita is all about the relationship between Dolores Haze (Lolita) and Humbert Humbert, seen from Humbert's point of view.  Weinman says that Lolita's death is a tragedy but Sally Horner's death is a greater one, because she was real.  But do the two deaths have anything to do with each other?  Does knowing about Sally Horner affect one's reading of Nabokov's novel, adding another layer of complexity to a complicated and brilliant novel, or is it a totally separate and different tragedy? Some people read mostly fiction, some mostly non-fiction; what happens when the two overlap?












































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Michael Curtiz's Mountain Justice (1937)

Mountain Justice is one of Curtiz's forgotten pictures.  Deftly photographed by Ernest Haller, it is an entertaining but flawed film.
--Alan K. Rode. Michael Curtiz:  A Life in Film (University Press of Kentucky, 2017)

Michael Curtiz was a skilled director, though more of a craftsman than an artist.  Even his best pictures --Casablanca (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Breaking Point (1950) -- are not always appreciated as his work; I have heard more than one person say how Casablanca is their favorite movie -- usually among the few they know from the classical period -- while having no idea who directed it.  For most of his professional life after he left Hungary in 1926 Curtiz was employed by Warner Brothers and mostly did as he was told by Jack Warner and Hal Wallis, though he always did it well, with the help of the WB reliable professionals. Curtiz turned out movies on time and on budget and was skilled with the camera and with actors, after years of making silent films in Hungary.

There's a growing tendency to see Casablanca as having common themes with Curtiz's other work and Mountain Justice has things in common with many of his films, including ideas of loyalty, independence, freedom and intense criticism of patriarchy. Mountain Justice is one of many gritty films from Warner Brothers in the thirties; it was one of six films that Curtiz directed in 1937 and was, as they said "torn from today's headlines," though I have never quite understood why "based on a true story" is supposed to be an effective marketing phrase.  Mountain Justice (the title being somewhat ironical) tells the story of Edith Maxwell, who was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail for killing her father in self-defense and was eventually pardoned by the governor of Virginia.  Warner Brothers had to make changes in the script in order to avoid litigation but kept most of the harrowing story, as a mountain girl, Ruth Harkins (played by Josephine Hutchinson) decides to study nursing and open a clinic, against the wishes of her church, community and father (her mother encourages her).  A lawyer, Paul Cameron (played by George Brent), comes to town from New York to prosecute Ruth's father for murder and Ruth and Paul fall in love.  Ruth's father tries to whip Ruth and she kills him in self-defense -- under a sign that says "honor thy father and mother" -- is prosecuted and receives a sentence of twenty-five years.  This sentence is deemed insufficient by the mountain people so with the help of Paul and some friends Ruth manages to escape the state with a lynch mob on her heels.  The governor of the state to which she escapes refuses to extradite her.

The film runs a brisk eighty-two minutes and tries to incorporate too many themes, leaving the Ruth/Paul relationship rather perfunctory, along with the issues of rural medical care, abusive treatment of women and mob violence.  Curtiz and cinematographer Ernest Haller do effectively capture the claustrophobia and oppressiveness of an isolated rural town.  Margaret Hamilton and Guy Kibbee play an older couple that serves both as comic relief and a serious example of peope trapped in their environment.

Turner Classic Movies Oct. 2018

October is Halloween month, of course, and I recommend any of the horror films -- if one likes cerebral horror films --of Terence Fisher (The Devil Rides Out, 1968, on Oct. 10 is one of my favorites) and Val Lewton (Cat People, 1942, on Oct.31, is a favorite of mine). e-mail me if you have questions.  Other recommendations.

Oct. 2:  Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939); a great civilian airplane film.

Oct. 3:  Raoul Walsh's Strawberry Blonde (1941), a funny and moving valentine to the era of Walsh's childhood.  And, yes, Walsh played John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.

Oct. 5:  Hitchcock's marvelous comic thriller The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Oct. 6: Leo McCarey's touching film about growing old before there was Social Security, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937); John Ford's poetic Young Mr. Lincoln (1939); Raoul Walsh's grimly beautiful war film Objective Burma (1945); Robert Wise's film noir Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), filmed partly in Hudson, N.Y.

Oct. 8:  Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940)

Oct. 13:  Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959)

Oct. 14:  Chaplin's City Lights (1931)

Oct. 18: John Ford's Stagecoach (1939)

Oct. 22: Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

Oct 27:  Anthony Mann's corrosive Western The Naked Spur (1953).

Jewels NYC Ballet Sept. 22, 2018

The track atmosphere was one of the many elements that he was integrating into Rubies; horse racing seemed to be behind all our prancing.... There were other influences... Degas, Astaire, the world of jazz and show dancing, the brashness and confidence of Broadway nightclubs.  Balanchine choreographed a tango into the pas de deux.  He even worked cakewalk movements into some of the steps.  This kind of layering is a part of every Balanchine ballet and gives them a extra dimension, a subtext that he rarely took time to point our or discuss.
--Edward Villella, Prodigal Son (Simon and Schuster, 1992).

One of the reasons one can see Balanchine ballets over and over and never exhaust their beauty and complexity is because of the extensive layering of sources, of which there were many for each ballet.  Balanchine's knowledge was extensive, not just of dance and music but of movement itself, contemporary and historic; I remember saying to Susan once when we were watching Balanchine's "Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3 "the whole world is in this ballet" and that's also true of "Jewels," three parts to three different pieces by three different composers.

"Jewels" was beautifully danced on Saturday, though one of the reasons "Rubies" was such a standout (my daughter Victoria's favorite) was because the new regime at NYC Ballet, replacing the autocratic Peter Martins, of Justin Peck, Rebecca Krohn, Jonathan Stafford, Craig Hall brought in the original dancers --Patricia McBride and Edward Villella -- to help coach the dancers.  Perhaps next they will bring back Conrad Ludlow of "Emeralds" (his partner Violette Verdy is no longer with us) and Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d'Amboise from the original "Diamonds."

"Emeralds" was elegantly danced by Tiler Peck and Taylor Stanley, Unity Phelan and Adrian Danchig-Waring. Its layers suggest myth and fairies and poets and troubadours, as well as hunters in a lovely green forest.  The ballet is slow and meditative compared to "Rubies" and "Diamonds," with music by Faure, including a suite for Pelleas et Melisande, a story of doomed love in a sylvan environment.  Ten years after "Jewels" premiered in 1967 Balanchine added the exquisite epilogue, an adagio with four women and three men; as the women slowly leave the stage the men kneel and raise their arms in epaulment, perhaps suggesting farewell to the women of their imagination.

"Rubies" is related to the several other ballets Balanchine did to Stravinsky music; in this case he uses the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra and emphasizes arabesques, flexed feet and jogging playfully around the stage.  Sterling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette were the lead dancers and they and the corps conveyed excitement and pleasure in their energetic and forceful dancing.  "Diamonds" is very much in the tradition of Balanchine's spectacular Tschaikovsky ballets, especially "Theme and Variations"(1947).  Sara Mearns did a superb job with all the off-balance turns and arabesques done originally by Suzanne Farrell and soloist Joseph Gordon provided intense support as well as spectacular tours en l'air. "Diamonds" is done to Tschaikovsky's Symphony No. 3 in D Major, though interestingly Balanchine does not use the first movement, just as he rearranged the order of movements in his first ballet in America, "Serenade," (1934) to Tschaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C.

I think too much is often made of the idea that the three ballets in "Jewels" are "abstract" just because they do not have linear plots.  Each of the ballets has different layers of stories, with an emphasis on couples, solos and groups and the beauty and necessity of human interaction.

Blondie on a Budget (1940)

Blondie on a Budget, written by Richard Flourney and directed by the reliable Frank R. Strayer, was the fifth Blondie movie and one of three Blondie movies released in 1940; there were 28 in all between 1938 and 1950.  Character actor Don Beddoe, who plays Dagwood's fishing buddy Marvin in the film, appeared in 29 films in 1940.  He has an important role in Blondie on a Budget, playing Dagwood's "beard", i.e., when Blondie (Penny Singleton) calls the poetically named Swan Lake Trout Club to tell Dagwood (Arthur Lake) that Baby Dumpling (Larry Sims) has a loose tooth Marvin imitates Dagwood's voice and says he will be right home, though he makes the mistake of calling Blondie "lovey," something Dagwood never does.  Meanwhile Dagwood is not fishing but in "lovers lane" with the glamorous Joan Forest (Rita Hayworth, still not a star after thirty movies) so she can reminisce about their old romance, rather than taking him to the fishing club as she had promised; she had originally shown up at his house because of a business deal with his boss, though this is one of the few Blondie movies with no Mr. Dithers.

Dagwood is innocent in all this, of course, even when Joan can't start her Packard roadster and they have to get towed.  While they wait for the car to be fixed they decide to take in a movie at a theatre complete with ticket seller, ticket taker and two ushers, one who opens the door and the other with a flashlight who signals where there are seats.  Dagwood is feeling guilty so he tries to hide in his seat and imagines everyone around him looks like Blondie, even an Asian woman and her young child.  Dagwood faints and as he is leaving the theatre he runs into Marvin, who takes him home and rehearses with him, in Blondie's voice, what he should say to Blondie.  Then Marvin gives Dagwood his own fishing rod and creel so that Blondie thinks he has been fishing.  No sooner does Dagwood get home when Blondie questions him about "lovey," finds Joan's gloves in his pocket, and opens the door to two policemen who have Dagwood's rod and creel (with his name on it) that they found in lover's lane.

That evening Dagwood gets a call from the manager of the movie theatre who tells Dagwood that he just won $200 in a drawing at the theatre.  Dagwood goes down to the theatre but doesn't have his ticket (he tore it up so that Blondie didn't see it) nor did he sign the entry form, since Joan had done that for him, so he has to call Joan (who he swore to Blondie he would never see again) to come to the theatre to verify the signature.  When the manager, with an amused smile, hands over the $200. Joan asks Dagwood what he is going to do with the money and he says he is going to buy Blondie the fur coat she wants but couldn't afford because of the budget.  When Joan asks Blondie's size Dagwood says he doesn't know so she volunteers to go with him to try on the coat, since she is just about Blondie's size.  Meanwhile, Blondie is feeling bad for suspecting Dagwood and takes the last $200 our of their bank account so he can join the trout club, stopping at the fur store to take one last look at the coat she wants.  Of course at the store she sees Joan trying on the coat for Dagwood (they don't see her) and draws what she thinks is the obvious conclusion.

Blondie takes Baby Dumpling to the bus depot to get a bus to Reno and meets a lawyer who asks her if her husband beats her, drinks, fails to support her.  Blondie realizes she may be wrong about Dagwood and heads back home.  Meanwhile Dagwood has arrived home with the fur coat and finds the house empty and a note in the stewpot, where Blondie knew he would look.  He has a bottle of champagne which he now tries to open and spills all over the floor; Daisy the dog licks it up.  When Dagwood goes to bed he puts pillows in the bed next to his and covers them up as if Blondie were still there. Blondie and Baby Dumpling return and everyone is reconciled, at least for now. 

This is one of the more stylish and poignant entries in the Blondie series, with strong elements of fantasy, subjectivity and surrealism; e.g., the usual white paperboy is replaced by African-American Willie Best, who thinks Daisy is after him when she just is making her usual run to get the paper and bring it in.

The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936), directed by William Clemens

The Case of the Velvet Claws is directed by B movie director William Clemens and runs a mere 60 minutes, effectively moving the Perry Mason franchise into B moviedom, perhaps the reason it was Warren Williams fourth and last appearance as Mason.  By this point Mason bears little resemblance to Erle Stanley Gardner's original character, even though the film is based on a Gardner story.  Gardner's strength is in his courtroom scenes but The Case of the Velvet Claws has only two scenes in a courtroom, run by Judge Mary F. O' Daugherty (Clara Blandick):  when Perry marries Della Street (Claire Dodd) in the morning and when Della wants an annulment in the evening.

It is not even clear how Mason solves the murder of the owner of a gossip rag that is trying to blackmail femme fatale Eva Belter (Wini Shaw), though Mason is not beneath doing some modest blackmailing himself.  The attempts at humor in Tom Reed's script mostly fall flat, though I did like when a magazine editor asks Mason "Are you smoking something or putting it in your arm?" After a day of sleuthing by Mason and Spudsy Drake (Eddie Acuff) in drag, as Mason himself takes it on the lam after being himself accused of the murder, Perry and Della finally leave for Pinehurst Lodge on their honeymoon.

I'm Keith Hernandez by Keith Hernandez

Domestic life just wasn't for me, especially on the heels of a batting race with Pete Rose and playing in front of 40,000 people on their feet every time I came up to the plate.
--Keith Hernandez, I'm Keith Hernandez (Little, Brown and Company 2018)

If you don't watch the Mets on SNY then you may not know what an enormous ego Keith Hernandez has; you can read this book to find out.  In 1979 he won the batting title and a Gold Glove but still resents that he had to share the MVP title with Willie Stargell of the Pirates, who Hernandez didn't think had as good a year.  For someone else this might have been an opportunity to reflect on the question of how MVP is defined, many writers and fans thinking that it goes beyond statistics, which Hernandez is quick to criticize when he is mocked for not hitting home runs.

Like many players married to baseball Hernandez's world is quite small; ever since his father (a minor leaguer turned firefighter) had him hitting a tennis ball tied to a rope Hernandez had wanted to be a baseball player and was always looking for father figures ("my father taught me …" is stated many times), finding them in managers such as Ken Boyer and thoughtful players like Pete Rose, who taught him some basic arithmetic about hitting and batting average.

Hernandez admits to smoking marijuana and cheating on his wives ("it was hard not to want something I had never had before") but fudges the question of cocaine use:  "if someone offered me coke I probably said sure."  The book ends before Hernandez is traded to the Mets, so perhaps there is another book in the works that deals with drug use and his years with the Mets, where Hernandez had a key role in the 1986 championship.

For those who listen closely to the Mets broadcasts it is clear than Hernandez's color commentary partner, Ron Darling, knows more of the vast world outside baseball than Hernandez (Darling was drafted in his junior year at Yale) but Hernandez gives as effective analyses of hitting as Darling does of pitching.  I do give Hernandez credit for mentioning in his book the key roles of Curt Flood, Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith, as well as the players union, for bringing the onerous reserve clause to an end.

Frank R. Strayer's Blondie Brings Up Baby (1939)

Blondie Brings Up Baby is the fourth in the Blondie series at Columbia; the first three I wrote about earlier this year.  This film has all the effective elements of this populist series -- written by regulars Gladys Lehman and Richard Flournoy, directed by Frank R. Strayer and cinematography by Henry Freudlich -- it has a boy and his best friend, the dog Daisy; a mailman that keeps getting run down by Dagwood on his way out the door; a paperboy on a bicycle who whistles for the dog to come to get the paper; an irascible boss (Jonathan Hale); a friendly neighbor who lends a pie tin; a wealthy neighbor who coddles his child; housewife Blondie (Penny Singleton); a scamming real estate developer who hornswoggles Dagwood; a door-to-door salesman who gives a phony test to Baby Dumpling (Larry Simms) in order to sell an encyclopedia (it cost $85 and Dagwood rips it up), dog catchers who take Daisy after she follows Baby Dumpling to school (tags weren't required in those days?); a spinsterish elementary school principal and even cops who think Dagwood kidnapped someone after a gardener hits him over the head with a shovel as he looks for Daisy and Baby Dumpling.

Is this film funny?  Perhaps to some.  It demonstrates that there is redemption for those with a good heart and punishment for the flim-flammers.  In other words, a pleasant populist fable, with the rich and poor coming together at the end.  Some of it is indeed amusing but one can decide for oneself whether to laugh, rather than being subjected to the forced laughter of the laugh tracks on the TV shows that have replaced such B movies as the Blondie series.  Blondie Brings Up Baby may be a bit corny but it has genuine compassion and beauty, rich chiaroscuro found at home, in the street and in the office with the help of director Strayer and cinematographer Freudlich.

John Ford's Judge Priest 1934

Healing America's intolerance is one of the major themes of Ford's [Will] Rogers trilogy.
---Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (St. Martin's Press, 1999)

Judge Priest today has not aged; a storyland of myth and symbol, it looks just as fresh and old-fashioned as it did fifty years ago.
---Tag Gallagher, John Ford:  The Man and His Films (U. of California Press, 1986).

I don't write enough about John Ford, a particular favorite of mine who produced an impressive body of work. Turner Classic movies recently showed Judge Priest in a series of films devoted to Anita Louise, who has a minor but significant role in the film.  Judge Priest has seldom been shown on commercial television because Stepin Fetchit has an important part, a part that was sometimes cut out when the film was shown on TV, so that the movie made no sense.  I've talked about Fetchit before, how his character outwitted white people by pretending to be ignorant and shiftless.  To quote V.S. Naipaul, who adored Fetchit when he was a child in Trinidad, "the sight of Stepin Fetchit with white people was like a dream of a happier world."  Certainly one of the loveliest images in Ford's film is Will Rogers and Stepin Fetchit walking down the road together on their way to the fishing hole.

Judge Priest was one of three films Rogers made with John Ford; Dr. Bull (1933) and Steamboat Round the Bend  (1935) were the other two.  The film, based on stories by Irvin S. Cobb, takes place in Kentucky in 1890, where the Civil War is still fresh in many minds.  The folksy Rogers plays a judge who helps to acquit a man accused of assault by evoking his bravery in The War Between the States, even having Stepin Fetchit play Dixie on the harmonica outside the courtroom window during some important testimony. The African-Americans in the film -- including Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel -- are treated with dignity; they may technically servants but they are very much in charge.  John Ford's indebtedness to D.W. Griffith in Judge Priest is clear in many ways; not only was Ford one of the klansmen in Griffith's Birth of the Nation but the major witness at the trial in Judge Priest, Rev. Ashby Brand, is played by Henry B. Walthall, one of the stars of Griffith's 1916 film.  And Ford's re-creation of a Civil War battle during Brand's testimony is a clear tribute to Griffith.

Charles Bennett's No Escape (1953)

Although No Escape is of higher quality that most of [Sonny] Tufts's fare, he turns in his usual bad performance, and the rest of the cast, though competent, cannot rescue a movie that is slow paced and wordy.
--Arthur Lyons, Death on the Cheap:  The Lost B Movies of Film Noir (Da Capo, 2000)

I don't care much one way or the other about Sonny Tufts but I like Lew Ayres, who took a big risk with his career by registering as a conscientious objector in WWII and served as a medic in the Pacific.  He did make a few movies after the war; I particularly admire his effectively low-key role as the Vice-President in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962).  Ayres has the lead role in No Escape as a washed-up dipsomaniac songwriter on the lam from a murder charge with co-star Marjorie Steele, in the last of her four movie roles.

I recommend this film for those who, like the late Gore Vidal, think the writer of the script is the true "author" of a film.  No Escape is one of the two films that Bennett directed (Madness of the Heart, 1949, was the other) after writing a number of excellent films, including Hitchcock's 39 Steps (1935) and Sabotage (1936).  Bennett's script for No Escape could have made an excellent film, with the theme of the innocent man on the run so common in Hitchcock, if it had been better and more intelligently directed, the film alternating between claustrophobic sets and shots of San Francisco obviously shot by a second unit.

Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2018

Nothing particularly new or exciting this month, just a good collection of solid classics, most of which we have seem.

Sept. 2 has Howard Hawks's delightful  Monkey Business (1952) and Chris Marker's short La Jeetee (1962), a beautiful and precise film that was the basis for the bloated Twelve Monkeys.

Sept. 4 has John M. Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934), later remade by Douglas Sirk.

Sept. 5 has Dean Martin (and Jerry Lewis) in Frank Tashlin's Hollywood or Bust (1956) and Martin with Judy Holiday in Vincente Minnelli's lovely musical Bells are Ringing (1960).

Sept. 7 has two excellent films noirs:  Fritz Lang's corrosive The Big Heat (1953) and Byron Haskin's Too Late for Tears (1949)

Sept. 8 has a John Huston late masterpiece The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

Sept. 9 has Josef von Sternberg's elegant The Devil is a Woman (1935) and Anthony Mann's film noir Desperate (1947)

Sept. 10 has Rudolph Mate's fatalistic D.O.A. (1950) and Nicholas Ray's first film They Live By Night (1949)

Sept. 11 has Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and Sept. 12 has Howard Hawks's great Western Rio Bravo (1959), two terrific films that signal the end of the classical era.

Sept. 15 has Otto Preminger's intense Angel Face (1953).

Sept. 16 has two Jean Renoir masterpieces, Rules of the Game (1939) and The Golden Coach (1953)

Sept. 18 has Jacque Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), Preminger's wonderful Carmen Jones (1954), King Vidor's early talkie musical Hallelujah (1929) and Vidor's film of Elmer Rice's Street Scene (1931).

Sept. 19 has one of my favorite Billy Wilder films Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), only superficially vulgar.

Sept. 24 has Joseph H. Lewis's intensely beautiful Gun Crazy (1950).

Sept. 28 has Edgar Ulmer's lovely noir Western The Naked Dawn (1955)

Film Gris, Brainstorm (1965) and Without Honor (1949)

I tend to limit my definition of film noir to the postwar period of chaos and uncertainty and up to the 50's of McCarthyism and the Cold War.  Things that are noirish but don't quite fit into the definition, such as William Conrad's Brainstorm and Irving Pichel's Without Honor, I prefer to call film gris.

I very much admire William Conrad as an actor, both as Marshall Matt Dillon on radio's Gunsmoke and in films such as Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946).  He was always bitter that he did not get the part of Matt Dillon on the TV version of Gunsmoke (he was considered too corpulent), though he did star in two other TV shows and directed many episodes of other series.  Brainstorm was one of the few feature films he directed. Brainstorm resembles Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) in some significant ways (I don't know if Conrad ever saw the Fuller film):  a man (Jeffrey Hunter) pretending to be insane kills the husband (Dana Andrews) of the woman he loves (Arlene Francis) and does actually go insane when the woman he loves doesn't want to wait for him to get out.  Conrad effectively shoots in widescreen black-and-white, with Sam Leavitt as cinematographer (he shot films for Fuller and Otto Preminger), with an intensive opening scene that has Hunter rescuing an inebriated Francis from her car deliberately stalled on the train tracks with a train boring down, though much of the mise en scene reminds one of television.  There are some significant noir signifiers in this film -- a femme fatale, a brooding sense of fatalism -- but the chaotic world is created by the participants, who are barely aware of their roles.

Irving Pichel's Without Honor sits somewhat off to the side during the period of the most successful film noirs; there is no mention of WWII but everyone is struggling to find their way in the post-war world of 1949.  Pichel was primarily a director of B films and he uses his one set (a suburban house) and five actors (Laraine Day, Dane Clark, Bruce Bennett, Agnes Moorhead and Franchot Tone) effectively.  Laraine Day is determined to marry Franchot Tone --both of them have spouses and Tone and his wife Moorhead have two daughters -- and when he says he can't leave his wife Day stabs him and hides him in a closet.  Then brother-in-law Dane Clark comes over, followed by Moorhead and Day's husband, Bruce Bennett, who brings with him a new TV, a common gift to make the wife happy which usually doesn't (see Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, 1956).  Recriminations on all sides ensue, with even the orange grove eventually covered in blood.

Frank Borzage's Green Light (1937)

Frank Borzage was that rarity of rarities, an uncompromising romanticist.
--Andrew Sarris

Frank Borzage's Green Light stars Errol Flynn and is from a novel by Lloyd Douglas -- and I doubt that many people these days remember any of those three names.  Borzage had a long career -- he made his first movie in 1919 and his last in 1959 -- Errol Flynn is known for his swashbucklers and Westerns and Lloyd Douglas for his religious novels made into movies, especially the two versions of Magnificent Obsession (John Stahl in 1935 and Douglas Sirk in 1954).

Errol Flynn was just starting out at Warner Brothers and was given an unusual role, the kind usually given to Paul Muni, of a doctor experimenting on himself to find a vaccine for spotted fever, and he's quite effective in his role (for the record, I much prefer the elegant restraint Flynn showed in the films he made with Raoul Walsh to the hijinks and grinning roles with Michael Curtiz).  Flynn ends up in Montana experimenting on himself because he has taken the blame for the botched surgery by another doctor that led to a patient's death. This film was shown on TCM as part of a tribute to Anita Louse, who plays the daughter of the dead patient and who eventually falls in love with Flynn.

The biggest problem with the film is the mushy religiosity espoused by Lloyd Douglas in the person of a minister who tells Flynn that he will need to get a "green light" of some sort and he will know what to do.  The fine cast includes Warner Brothers regulars Cedric Hardwicke, Margaret Lindsay and Walter Abel, the score is by the reliable Max Steiner and the cinematography is by Byron Haskin, who was soon to become a director.  Borzage made a much better film that same year, History is Made at Night, but must have felt some sympathy for Lloyd Douglas because Borzage's last film, The Big Fisherman (1959) was also from a novel by Douglas.

Sean Doolittle's Lake Country

Before Mike could turn, something hard and heavy slammed into his head.  He was a three-million-candlepower spotlight flaring white, then fading to dark.  He was an empty gun floating to the bottom of a cold black lake.  Then he was nothing at all.
---Sean Doolittle, Lake Country (Bantam Books, 2012)

Doolittle is one of the best current crime writers:  his books are elegantly plotted and crisply written.  Even if Doolittle's books were not original paperbacks I would still see him as the heir to John D. MacDonald and other crime writers who pioneered the paperback (John D. MacDonald published twenty-one Travis McGee novels -- which I reread every few years -- but also more than thirty other crime novels).

Doolittle's books are set in very specific locales with very specific denizens.  In Lake Country it's Hennepin County Minnesota and a news reporter, a bartender, a kidnapped college student, two army buddies suffering PTSD and two collectors for bookies. Doolittle shows a certain amount of compassion for every character he portrays, most of them caught in webs of their own making and everyone trying to escape.  Doolittle is quite good, as MacDonald was, on the details, from what people's homes are like to what they prefer to drink.  Everyone is driven by their background and by fate, some escaping it while others yield to it.

As Hitters Pile Up K's Fans Catch Up on Z's by Tyler Kepner

This is the first baseball season in which there may be more strikeouts than hits.  And it turns out that maybe the fans aren't as enamored of home runs as some people thought, especially when the alternative is strikeouts.  Attendance is getting lower and, as Yogi Berra said, "if people don't want to come to the ballpark you can't stop them."  The players say that they are just giving the front office what they want:  power pitching and power hitting.  As Kepner says in yesterday's New York Times, "With that formula, at times, comes a lack of nuance from a game that should have so much to offer -- daring base runners, far-ranging fielders, pitchers finding ways to last deep into game."

The question becomes, of course, what can be done about this.  I think banning the shift would be a mistake; rather, hitters should learn how to beat it by hitting to the opposite field and bunting.  These days there is almost no bunting for hits or even very many sacrifice bunts.  I would also suggest deadening the ball, with home runs even being hit these days on check swings; make the home run a dramatic exception instead of the routine way of scoring runs.  This would also enable pitchers to go deeper into the game --as not everyone has to be overpowered -- and perhaps even cut down on the now-routine Tommy John surgery.  Further thoughts and suggestion to come.

Ernst Lubitsch's Love Parade (1929)

Also tossed into the mix was Ernst's fondness for Viennese and Hungarian musicals from the Strauss-Kalman-Huszka cycle of composers.
--Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch Laughter in Paradise (Simon & Schuster, 1993)

In the recent course I took, Mad About Musicals, there was little discussion about Lubitsch's four musicals, all made from 1929-1934.  The course was a relatively short one and it was hard to shoehorn in Lubitsch's films, all made before the Production Code had taken full effect; the titles of such songs in The Love Parade as "Nobody's Using It Now" and "Anything to Please the Queen" give one a pretty good idea of the racy content and the complex relationship of the queen (Jeanette MacDonald) and the slightly unwilling consort (Maurice Chevalier).  There is little dancing in the movie, the dancing being done by vaudevillians Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth who, when Lane starts to tell her the one about the farmer's daughter, says "I am the farmer's daughter." Lubitsch looks backward to vaudeville and operettas (represented especially by soprano MacDonald) and forward to the more conservative musicals of Rogers and Astaire and Vincente Minnelli, which  also integrated singing and dancing into their plots (Minnelli later switched to the creative freedom of more liberal melodrama.)

Leonard Bernstein An American Musician by Allen Shawn

We could use a Leonard Bernstein today, if only to do Young People's Concerts, of which Bernstein did fifty-three from 1958 to 1972, all of which were televised.  Several of these concerts were shown on Turner Classic Movies recently, as well as several Omnibus shows on which he appeared, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth.  These shows were not condescending but reveled in the complexities and beauties of music, from jazz to Broadway to classical.  We have taken our children to LOS (Little Orchestra Society) Kids and to Bruce Adolphe's Meet the Music concerts and we have enjoyed them, but they seem to shy away from the intricacies of the history of melody and counterpoint, the kind of thing that Bernstein could explain so well.  As Shawn says:  "to talk about music rivetingly to those who have no training in it, while also teaching and inspiring those with more knowledge, and all the while not falsifying the music itself, was a great accomplishment." (Yale University Press, 2014).

When I go to a classical concert or an opera these days I see a sea of grey heads.  Music should be a requirement of all schooling, as it was for me at Columbia and my son at Stuyvesant, very much exceptions these days when everyone is too busy taking reading and math tests.  Of course one cannot make money by learning about music but it can certainly enhance one's enjoyment of life.  Music was Bernstein's life and though, as Shawn suggests, he might have spread himself too thin by composing and conducting, by working for films (he did the music for Elia Kazan's On the  Waterfront, 1954) and doing ballets (Fancy Free, choreographed in 1944 by Jerome Robbins) and theatre (West Side Story, 1957) as well as concert works and masses, his work was never meretricious and Bernstein never neglected his rigorous approach to conducting.

Archie Mayo's The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935),

The Case of the Lucky Legs is the third Perry Mason film from Warner Brothers, starring Warren William.  Mason does not even appear in court in this film, but rather acts as a detective to solve a murder for which his client was arrested.  The murdered man was running a sleazy contest for the nicest legs in towns and then absconding with the sponsors' money without paying the winners the promised $1000.  The film is interesting for, among other things, exploiting women and then empowering them.  The "lucky legs" contestants are shown only from the thighs down and the prize money is to be awarded the next day; two winning contestants from different small towns track down the scam artist to the big city and one of them is arrested for killing him.

Mason first appears with a serious hangover, lying under his desk in the morning.  The film unfortunately plays Mason's  dipsomania for laughs, even having the doctor who examines him named Dr. Croaker (perhaps they thought not enough of the audience was knowledgeable about vaudeville to understand "Dr. Krankheit".).  It is a common failing of B movies, especially series, to eventually descend to facetiousness, especially any Warner Brothers movie in which dopey Allen Jenkins appears. Journeyman director Mayo moves the 77-minute movie briskly along and veteran cinematographer Tony Gaudio keeps the images sharp and crisp.  The men in the film are all compromised in one way or another but the film is redeemed by the contest winners -- Peggy Shannon and Patricia Ellis -- determined to get their money, as well as the deadpan wisecracks of Della Street, played in this film by Genevieve Tobin.

Two by Max Ophuls: Lola Montes (1955) and Madame de....(1953)

Max Ophuls is frivolous only if it is frivolous to be obsessed by the gap between the ideal and the reality of love.
--David Thomson

A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor dear Max
Who, separated from his dolly
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy
--James Mason

Love, the memory of love, the mortality of love comprise the Ophulsian heritage.
--Andrew Sarris

For those of us for whom time is fleeting and never stops Max Ophuls is a marvelous director, with his constantly moving camera observing the inevitable movement of time that one cannot halt.  Both Lola Montes and Madame de....take place in the nineteenth century, both recent and far away.  In Madame de.... a pair of earrings never stops moving:  from General Andre de... (Charles Boyer) to his wife Comtesse Louise de....(Danielle Darrieux) who sells them to a jeweler who sells them secretly back to the general who gives them to his mistress who sells them in Constantinople where they are bought by Baron Fabrizio Donati (Vittorio DeSica) who gives them to Louise again, without knowing their original source; when General Andre sees their reappearance he knows Louise and the Baron are lovers so he takes the earrings from  Louise and gives them to his niece whose husband goes bankrupt so the niece sells them to the jeweler that Louise had sold them to and then Louise sells all her other jewels and buys the earrings back, just before dying of a heart attack when Andre kills the Baron in a duel, with Louise willing the diamond earrings to the church.

The themes of love and circularity continue in the gorgeous Lola Montes, Ophuls' last film and his only one in color.  Only in recent years has the complete film become available, after years of shorter versions in various languages after the producer went bankrupt.  Lola's life is shown in flashbacks as she becomes a circus exhibit, with her on a turntable going one way as the camera goes the opposite way around her.  As Ophuls details Lola's life, adventures and liaisons -- from Franz Liszt to King Ludwig of Bavaria -- the camera swoops from low to high and back to low with the ups and downs of Lola's life as Lola strives to be independent, even having a carriage of her own following her with Liszt so she can escape when she needs to.  The film is widescreen, as Ophuls uses various decorations and masks for more intimate scenes.

Both these films are sympathetic to the struggles of finding love while asserting one's independence in society, struggles particularly for women, though Ophuls never degrades men.  The films are full of beauty and music, fleeting though their pleasures may be.

How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride

Lubitsch was the last of the genuine continentals let loose on the American continent, and we shall never see his like again because the world he had celebrated died -- even before he did -- everywhere except in his own memory.
--Andrew Sarris

Lubitsch became Hollywood's most acute commentator on sexual mores, countering American puritanical hypocrisy with European sophistication and making his adopting countrymen enjoy it.  
--Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, 2018).

McBride has seen every Lubitsch movie that still exists (some of the silent films are gone) and read everything on the man in every language.  Yet he still can't answer his own question, even if it were completely clear what the antecedent of "it" is.  McBride is constantly using imprecise adjectives such as ineffable, elliptical, subtle and oblique to describe Lubitsch and his films,  words that are even more subjective than "funny."  As is sometimes the case with books about film, especially comedies, reading about Lubitsch's films if one hasn't seen them is dubious in multiple ways:  if one has seen them and liked them the book has little value and if one has seen them and not liked them McBride's book has little point.

Lubitsch's style and humor are indeed too subtle for most modern viewers. When I first started going to movies I was very much under the spell of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and even walked out on Lubitsch's brilliant Design for Living (1933), which like all dazzling comedies requires the viewer to meet it halfway.  For those of us who already are in thrall to Lubitsch, McBride has some useful and interesting analyses about Lubitsch's filmmaking, including his fights with the censors and the reasons he gave up making musicals after the production code went into effect: no more joking about adultery!  For me watching Lubitsch's films is rather akin to reading Trollope, Dickens and George Eliot:  the immersion into another time and another world that is more relevant then ever. Several of Lubitsch's best films are shown on Turner Classic Movies:  Design for Living, Ninotchka (1939), Trouble in Paradise (1933), The Shop Around the Corner (1940).  If you like their brilliant and subtle direction I recommend Sarris's essay on Lubitsch in The American Cinema:  Directors and Directions 1929-1968 before reading McBride's book.

Hong Sansoo's On the Beach at Night Alone

Hong Sansoo's On the Beach at Night Alone (2017, the title from a Walt Whitman poem) continues his series of minimalist talkfests, shot mostly in single takes with occasional zooms.  Min-hee Kim plays Young-hee, who has fled from Korea to Hamburg, Germany to escape her married lover.  She thinks her lover will follow her but he doesn't.  She spends her time in Germany with a Korean female friend and they talk about love and desire, which her slightly older friend has given up on. Eventually Young-hee returns to Korea and the beach town of Gangneung, where she runs into her lover, a film director, and his crew.  As they all get together and drink lots of soju recriminations and accusations fly and Young-hee wonders if she is perhaps better off alone. A fascinating minimalist film.

Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958)

Nicholas Ray's Party Girl is a combination musical, film noir and gangster film and Nicholas Ray's last film in the United States.  It was also the last MGM film for contract players Cyd Charisse and Robert Taylor, who play lovers who discover each other in their overlapping worlds of meretriciousness, Charisse as a "party girl" and Taylor as a lawyer for the mob.  In some ways it is a paean to the gangster films of the thirties but like many period films it is more about the time in which it was made -- Ray was not allowed to use music from the period and one can even see cars from the fifties in some scenes with back projection.  Charisse's dance numbers were staged by MGM's choreographer Robert Sidney but with their eroticism, camera movement and use of primary colors look unlike anything else Sidney has done and suggest Ray's close involvement.

Party Girl is in cinemascope and color and in 1958 most films were still in black-and-white, so Ray (and other directors of the period, particularly Douglas Sirk) were constantly inventive and analytical about their use of color and the widescreen. Ray was particularly precise in his use of primary colors and since he was not allowed to shoot on location in Chicago (where he grew up) he created an isolated milieu in which every character was trapped by their surroundings, though Taylor and Charisse were able to escape -- at least temporarily -- as mob boss Lee J. Cobb destroyed himself before he could destroy them.

Simon Callow's Being Wagner

Working on Parsifal, both Levi [conductor] and Rubenstein [rehearsal pianist] preferred, they said, to look for the man in his work, rather than the work in the man.
--Simon Callow, Being Wagner (Vintage, 2017),

Wagner's operas, especially Parsifal and the Ring cycle, have given me more pleasure than any other composer's; they are gesmantkunstwerke like no other operas. It is clear what drove Wagner's success: determination and luck.  Wagner worked long and hard on his operas (for which he wrote the libretti as well as the music) and at one point he had five operas fully written but never performed and no money in the bank.  At which point King Ludwig of Bavaria died and immediately King Ludwig II became Wagner's patron, allowing him to start performing his operas and providing money for building a new theatre at Bayreuth in Bavaria. Callow captures Wagner's tempestuous life in 19th century Europe, a time of upheaval in music as well as politics (at one point Wagner was considered a revolutionary and  banned from Germany for eleven years.)

Wagner reminds me of some other artists, particularly Orson Welles in film and Balanchine in ballet.  Callow has written an excellent three-volume biography of Welles, who was as determined as Wagner, who changed the art of film but whose patron at RKO, George Schaefer, was fired in 1942 -- after Citizen Kane was released and The Magnificent Ambersons botched -- and Welles never again found a reliable patron. Balanchine was brought to America and supported for many years by Lincoln Kirstein, a dedicated fundraiser for what eventually became the New York City Ballet.  Balanchine established a school (The School of the American Ballet) and trained his dancers -- just as Wagner had trained a new generation of singers to perform his difficult and complex work -- and Balanchine was able to supervise the building of his own theatre at Lincoln Center, The New York State Theatre, to make his revolutionary ballets affordable and accessible.

Callow's biography of Wagner intelligently makes little attempt to convey the experience of the operas themselves, which can be heard on recordings but which are best experienced live.  In the Spring of next year the Metropolitan Opera is doing three complete cycles of the Ring; one can experience all four operas for $300.

D.W.Griffith's Way Down East

It is about time that D.W. Griffith was rescued from the false pedestal of an outmoded pioneer.  The cinema of Griffith is no more outmoded, after all, that the drama of Aeschylus.
--Andrew Sarris

One of the most exciting and beautiful film experiences I have had was seeing all of Griffith's work at MoMA in 1975, celebrating Griffith's 100th birthday.  It included his epics as well as his intimate films, many of them --such as Way Down East --starring Lillian Gish. Gish is often alone in close-up in Way Down East, beautifully lit and framed, as her husband turns out to be a phony who quickly discards her when she become pregnant and her mother and baby die.  It is a melodrama, indeed, based on a Victorian-era play, and not without some unsuccessful bumpkin humor.  Gish is seduced in the city and faces wrath in the country when it is discovered that she had a baby without a husband.  When Gish is turned out of a farmhouse she points out that the man who seduced her is sitting as an honored guest at the table and why isn't something done about him!

Gish is turned out into a snowstorm and followed by Richard Bathelmess, the son of the farmer. who chases after her onto ice that is breaking up and flowing to a waterfall.  Gish is rescued just in the nick of time in a beautifully crafted and edited scene of ice floes on the river. Nature is important in Griffith's films and the beauty of "the wind in the trees" --a crucial part of Griffith's mise-en-scene -- is contrasted with the ability of nature to suddenly turn on you.

Films Noirs and Musicals

Why is Scene of the Crime (1949) a "police procedural with a nourish tinge," as noir czar Eddie Muller called it, and not a true film noir, at least for the splitters among us:
1.It has a relatively happy ending, with detective Van Johnson and wife Arlene Dahl reconciling.
2. Van Johnson's character is not compromised or neurotic.
3. It is too much about cops and gangsters and not enough about individuals, making it more of the gangster genre than anything else.
4. There is little ambiguity; the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad.
5. The direction, by journeyman Roy Rowland, is weak and unfocused, lacking in fatalism.

For those lumpers who see Scene of the Crime as a film noir I will say that the script, by Charles Schnee (who wrote Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night, 1948) has unrealized possibilities, that there is a bad girl (Gloria DeHaven), a stripper with whom Van Johnson flirts, and there are a number of effectively seedy characters, particularly Norman Lloyd as Sleeper (because he always looks as if he is asleep)

Rouben Mamoulian's musical Silk Stockings,1957, has some wonderful dancing by Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse (choreography by Hermes Pan and Eugene Loring) but is in many ways a weak remake of Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939).  Lubitsch made some wonderful musicals in the early days of sound but stopped making them when the production code started being enforced, mainly because of the limitations of moral ambiguity placed on the form by both the code and the audience (Joseph McBride's recent book about Lubitsch discusses this issue in some detail).  My quibbles with Mamoulian's film includes:
1. The widescreen format makes intimacy difficult; there is a strange song included making fun of the format, a format that Mamoulian didn't like and didn't do much to overcome.
2. I found the Cole Porter score weak; he puts too much emphasis on his clever rhymes and not enough on emotions.
3. Cyd Charisse danced beautifully but her singing was dubbed (by Carol Richards)
4. This so-called musical comedy had little comedy, most of which was relegated to the supporting cast and consisted of jokes about Russia and communism.  Of course Mamoulian was never known for his sense of humor

I made similar comments about Charles Walters's High Society (1956,also with a Cole Porter score) on June 28, but at least Silk Stockings has some lovely dancing.

Turner Classic Movies Aug. 2018

August is not a bad month at TCM --a number of good melodramas-- but not much new or unusual.

Aug. 1 has two terrific melodramas with Frank Sinatra: Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1956), from a novel by James Jones, and Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm, from a novel by Nelson Algren. Both films have great scores by Elmer Bernstein.

Aug. 4th has Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) and Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff  (1968).

Aug. 8 has Lubitsch' s The Merry Widow (1934).

Aug. 10 has two melodramas by Douglas Sirk:  Tarnished Angels (1958, from a Faulkner novel) and Written on the Wind (1957).

Aug. 16 has Lubitsch's elegant and funny Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Aug. 18 has John Ford's Mogambo (1953).

Aug. 20th has Fritz Lang's mythopoeic Moonfleet (1955).

Aug. 21 has John Ford's wonderful film with Will Rogers, Judge Priest (1934).

Aug. 22 has two superb films noir by Otto Preminger, Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) and Fallen Angel (1945).

Richard Flesicher's Mandingo (1975)

Is Mandingo a sleazy, lurid melodrama; a camp fest; a "blaxploitation" movie or, as critic Robin Wood wrote, "the greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood?" It is all of these simultaneously I would say.

Mandingo takes place on a run-down Louisiana plantation in 1840, run by Warren Maxwell (James Mason) and his son Hammond, played by Perry King, who marries his cousin Blanche (Susan George) in order to produce an heir.  But Hammond prefers his black "wenches" and Blanche prefers the slave Mede (Ken Norton).  When Blanche gives birth the child "ain't white" and the baby, Blanche and Mede are killed and Warren is killed by another slave. Mandingo deals with patriarchy, sex, race and their many implications the way no other American film has (few indeed have tried).  Slaves are sexually exploited by their owners and families are routinely broken up and sold separately.  Mede, the Mandingo, is used to fight other slaves to the death and the white men watching them remind one of the crowds today watching boxing.  Norton was a professional boxer who fought Ali three times, winning once, and director Fleischer and writer Norman Wexler keep his dialogue to a minimum, using his physical presence effectively.

Seeing Mandingo today reminds one that, though some things have changed, we still have a long way to go when it comes to race in this country and need to be constantly vigilant about not moving in the wrong direction.

Safer by Sean Doolittle

I opened the box labeled Callaway and followed my own rabbit down into its hole.
-- Sean Doolittle, Safer (Delacorte, 2009).

Safer captures all the horrors of a small town, like the one in which I grew up:  forced conformity, excessive deference to authority, intrusive nosiness, rampant anti-intellectualism.  I finally made my escape from a town in which my parents called the police whenever I questioned their authority, where there was no library because the taxpayers voted against funding one, where parents of high school students rebelled when their children were assigned complete books in English class and where authority was powerful at home and in school and child abuse was common.  In Doolittle's book Paul and Sara Callaway move from Boston to Clark Falls for new jobs and suffer all the horrors of a small town where everyone is (too) friendly.

The errors Paul and Sara make are mostly about keeping too much to themselves and the responses from their neighbors are extreme but only different in degree from what happens in most small towns.  When the Callaways are encouraged to move out they refuse and Paul is framed for the sexual abuse of a thirteen-year-old neighbor to whom he made the mistake of loaning books.  Doolittle flashes forward and backward in time from Paul's arrest, artfully framing the history of the block on which the Callaways live, where one neighbor has been videotaping all the homes on the block. The one flaw I found in Doolittle's narrative is that Paul is eventually exonerated because of the lack of tattoos in the pictures Paul is accused of taking, which meant that the pictures were taken before the Callaways moved to Clark Falls; this has all the conviction of a deus ex machina.

Sometimes I am asked how I decide what books to read and the answer is that there are many sources; it is occasionally random and often due to reviews and articles in the periodicals I read, including "The New York Review of Books," "The London Review of Books," "The New York Times," "The New Criterion," et al.  I read Doolittle's book because I read an intelligent interview with him in Eddie Muller's excellent online "Noir City," which also has incisive film and book reviews.