Turner Classic Movies April, 2018

Not that many new or rare films this month.  There are plenty of Michael Curtiz films-- probably because of Alan Rode's new biography -- and I recommend them, especially for those who still may think Casablanca is an exception to the auteur theory; a particular favorite of mine is The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932) on April 4.  There are also a fair number of B Westerns, if one's taste runs to Westerns with motorcars in them.

On April 9 is John Ford's magnificent Fort Apache (1948)

On the 13th is Budd Boetticher's elegant and austere Western The Tall T (1957)

On the 15th is Andrey Tarkovsky's beautiful and enigmatic Solaris (1972)

On the 19th is Joseph Losey's darkly romantic The Go-Between (1971),from the novel by L.P. Hartley..

The 22nd has Erich von Stroheim's silent masterpiece The Merry Widow (1925)

On the 23rd is Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), about love and growing old before Social Security

On the 27th is Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent, a powerful film about people and politics, in beautiful wide-screen black-and-white.

On the 30th is Blake Edwards's corrosive comedy S.O.B.

Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2017)

British director Ken Loach and screenwriter writer Paul Laverty have been mostly alone in carrying on the tradition of neo-realism that dates back to Rossellini and DeSica in Italy in the forties:  social consciousness and a concern for working people.  Daniel Blake is an older carpenter who has had a heart attack and spends the film futilely fighting for his "employment and support allowance" to which he is entitled by law.  Whether the government bureaucracy has gotten worse since the days of Margaret Thatcher is unclear but Blake is led around in circles while waiting to hear from the Kafkaesque "decision-maker," who may or may not actually exist.  Blake is required to learn how to use a computer ("jobs are online by default") and to produce a resume and distribute it, even though his doctor says he is not ready to return to work.

Loach has shown clearly that the worst sufferers in today's bureaucratic world are the very young (as Loach showed in his early film Kes, 1969) and the very old, as Blake uses his carpentry skills to help a woman and her two young children, who have been banished from London to Newcastle because of the problem with finding them affordable housing. The volunteers at the food pantries are quite helpful, while the welfare workers are criticized by their supervisors if they show any concern or sympathy as they make the recipients toe the line and follow the regulations.  

One thing I do wonder about is whether Drake's representative in parliament could have been of any help or if anyone even thought of this.  I only mention this because when I was having trouble receiving my children's Social Security money I contacted Senator Schumer's office and they quickly cut through the bureaucracy and solved the problem. See my post of Jan. 28, 2016 as well as my post July 16, 2017, with my comments on Loach's Jimmy's Hall.

Anthony Powell's Messenger of Day (1978)

Slight, sallow, among other accomplishments an expert skier, [Arthur] Waley always spoke in a high clipped severe tone, as if slightly offended, quiet, but essentially smacking-down.  He habitually refused to make the smallest compromise in the way of momentarily lowering intellectual standards in the interest of trivial conventional courtesies; demeanour that could produce in a room an extraordinary sense of social discomfort.
----Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day (Heineman, 1978)

This is the second volume of Powell's memoirs and describes seven years in London --1926 to 1933-- from the time he graduated from Oxford to his marriage.  During most of that time he worked at a publisher, Gerald Duckworth & Co., where his father paid half of his salary while Powell learned the business and wrote his first three novels. We learn a great deal about London at that time, from the writers and artists to the various neighborhoods, though not a great deal about what Powell was feeling and thinking.  And the annoying habit of sprinkling French throughout the book --in one paragraph alone there is faux-naif, monde, les deux sexes et autres, tete-montee -- does not convince one of sophistication.

Many of the people Powell mentions are unknown to me but their portraits are still vivid in this volume, as are those of the clubs and bars.  Those whose existence I am aware of come very much to life, personally and artistically, in Powell's book:

Ford Madox Ford's leaning toward modern forms might have been thought to militate against him with Gerald Duckworth, but Ford's own clubman pretensions, even if a trifle precarious when closely examined, were held to excuse a too insistent modernism.

Hitherto I had thought of [Wyndham] Lewis as a Vorticist painter.  Now his luminous prose 
[in Tarr], blocked in with a painter's eye, was at once immensely exciting.

[Augustus] John never took hold of himself, intellectually speaking, in a manner of which he should have been capable in the light of his own talents.  On the one hand he was a man who could meet anyone on equal terms; on the other, a kind of shyness, an almost startling personal modesty about his own attainments, undermined him, pointing the way to easy self-indulgence.

At the end of this volume Powell is wondering if, after publishing three moderately successful novels, he has anything left to say.

Chaplin's The Pilgrim (1923)

 The Pilgrim was Chaplin's last short (a short being anything shorter than 60 minutes) before he turned exclusively to full-length films, having made The Kid in 1921.  It starts out with a lilting song about going to Texas that was written by Chaplin and sung for Chaplin's re-issue of the film (in 1959) by Matt Monroe.  It is as well Chaplin's last film starring with Edna Purviance (though she did appear in his A Woman of Paris later that year, in which Chaplin did not appear but did direct.)

The Pilgrim is a brilliant and beautiful film and I had to do a great deal of explaining along the way to my six-year-old daughter, who loves Chaplin's shorts but does not quite yet get all the social and political references in his later films.  In The Pilgrim Chaplin poses as a minister after escaping from jail and is thought by a Texan congregation to be their new pastor.  He warms to the role, e.g., doing a lovely pantomime of David and Goliath for his sermon.  Then he falls for Edna, daughter of a poor family having trouble paying the mortgage and when an old jail buddy tries to steal from her family he becomes the "good bad man" --known so well to movie-goers of the 20's from the Westerns of William S. Hart -- disguising himself as a member of a gang of robbers in order to return the money to Edna's family.

There's a lot more crammed into this complex film, including encounters with children at church and home and an impressive sequence where a hat covers up a cake and is frosted and cut before anyone realizes what has happened.  My daughter liked best of all the elegant physical comedy as Chaplin jumped on the back of the thief, closing a drawer repeatedly with his feet each time the thief opened it with his hands. This is a wonderful transitional film, as Chaplin adds political and personal elements to his marvelous choreography

Puppetworks March 18, 2018

It is nice to see that Puppetworks, a storefront in Park Slope, is still going strong.  We took our son there 15 years ago and Sunday we went with him, my wife and our six-year-old daughter.  The show is very low-tech and charming, with hand-made marionettes and impressive special effects, including water and fire made from cloth. The show this time was The Magic Flute, which followed the libretto of Mozart's opera and effectively used elements of the score, with adaptation by Nicolas Coppola and direction by Michael Leach.  The show lasted about an hour and was proceeded and followed by comments about the puppets and a demonstration of how they worked.  There was a large of cast of puppets of humans and animals, each with a distinctive voice and personality defined beautifully by how each marionette moved. My daughter was attentive, delighted by this impressive display of the age-old art of puppetry.

Jerry Lewis's The Bellboy

The Bellboy is a missed opportunity but interesting, being Lewis's first film as director and made on a low budget, as a group of ideas loosely strung together for later plucking.  This is especially true as Lewis plays the simple mute bellboy and also himself as sophisticated guest, an idea that was expanded into The Nutty Professor (1963), where Lewis portrayed himself and a version of Dean Martin, with whom he had broken up in the late fifties. Few of the unrelated gags in The Bellboy are particularly funny and most of them exhibit a mechanical property that makes little sense on any level:  Jerry filling an auditorium with chairs in a matter of minutes, Jerry somehow flying an airplane, Jerry taking the engine out of a Volkswagen thinking it is the luggage in the trunk (this one almost works).

Lewis was too much in thrall to Stan Laurel when he made this film (Lewis's character is named Stanley), with actor Bill Richmond portraying a silent Laurel in several scenes and there is an element of misanthropy and misogyny in The Bellboy similar to that in Laurel and Hardy (Big Business, 1929).  For those who think of Buster Keaton when they think of Jerry Lewis I suggest comparing Lewis's conducting a non-existent orchestra in The Bellboy with Keaton miming a baseball game in The Cameraman (1928):  Keaton brings baseball to life by miming all the positions beautifully, including the umpire, while Lewis's "conducting" is just goofy soundtrack and facial expressions.

The Case of the Careless Cupid by Erle Stanley Gardner (1968)

"This Arlington situation is getting a little complicated."
-- Perry Mason in The Case of the Careless Cupid (William Morrow, 1968)

The Case of the Careless Cupid was the penultimate Perry Mason novel, published in 1968, two years before Gardner's death and two years after the Raymond Burr TV series ended its nine-year run.  The Perry Mason of the novels is not quite the same as the TV character; in the novels he is more willing to do the slightly illegal and slightly unethical in the service of his client.  In The Case of the Careless Cupid Mason sometimes misrepresents who he is in order to keep his client out of the hands of the police.  Mason is even a bit testy and tempted to be violent.
"If I had hit him I'd probably have regretted it for a year."
"But since you didn't?" she asked.
"I'll regret it as long as I live," Mason snapped.

Mason's relationship with secretary Della Street was as close as he came to intimacy and there was always a sexual tension in the novels that was never resolved.  The six movies Warner Brothers made in the thirties were somewhat different --though they followed the novels closely in plot -- with Mason and Street getting married in The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936, directed by William Clemens).  Warren William was the star of four of the films and he was more human and more complex than either the Mason of the novels or Raymond Burr of the TV series.

The Case of the Careless Cupid and all the other Perry Mason novels have a plot as rigid in its own way as Japanese Noh drama, with Perry's client being tried for murder and Perry, with the help of Della Street and investigator Paul Drake, finding the true killer.  What makes the novels enjoyable is the complexity of each case, the characters involved and Mason's legal maneuvering.  In The Case of the Careless Cupid it is all about the struggle of a family over an inheritance and the murder of a man by poisoning the crab salad with Featherfirm, usually used to secure feathers on stuffed and mounted birds.

Meet the Music March 11, 2017

My daughter is now 6 1/2 and ready to move on from the excellent programs that Little Orchestra Society offers for kids (see my posts of March 12, 2017 and Nov.13, 2016).  It's now time for Meet the Music, presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and my daughter loved yesterday's "Four Harmonious Friends for Narrator and Ensemble," written by Bruce Adolphe and performed by him on piano, Kaoru Wantanabe on flute, Mike Block on cello, Steve Wilson on bass trombone and Shane Shanahan on percussion.

This mixture of instruments from various cultures represented different animals and their adventures together around a tree, which each of them claimed as their own.  The concert part itself was proceeded by a brief but useful talk and demonstration from each performer about the history of their instruments and followed by questions from the audience.

I didn't think the music of the concert part was that beautiful but my daughter loved it.  It was a step up from charming goofiness of LOS kids and was advertised as for children six and older, as opposed to the 3-10 of LOS.  My daughter appreciated the combination of the serious and humorous and the introduction to various instruments from around the world.  The whole performance lasted about an hour in comfortable Alice Tully Hall and the prices were reasonable ($10-$30).

Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea 2011

Davies is an utterly personal lyric filmmaker who moves as swiftly as music from the lacerating to the ecstatic.
--David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

The Deep Blue Sea, from a 1952 Terence Rattigan play, takes place in London "around 1950" and rather bridges the gap between Brief Encounter  (1945) and Look Back in Anger (1959).  Davies's
earliest films were in black-and-white, which means he knows how to use color as in element in recreating a period when some were still focused on the war and others were looking ahead, and class barriers were starting to loosen slightly.  Davies's film does what few films do as successfully:  creating a particular period while depicting emotions that can apply to us all.  What is love?:  is it sexual passion, the sharing of interests or ultimately, as the landlady says, "wiping your husband's arse while maintaining the dignity of you both."

At first the flashbacks are confusing, fuzzy images of a past difficult to recall, as a pattern gradually emerges of a couple ill-suited for each other, struggling in a bed-sitting room in a bombed--out neighborhood.  The camaraderie of group singing in underground station bomb shelters has been replaced by singing in the local pub. Both Freddie (Tom Hillerston) and Hester (Rachel Weisz) have been scarred by the war in ways they are barely aware of, until they move in together after she leaves her wealthy husband who had money but no passion, for Freddie, who has passion but no money.  When Freddie forgets her birthday Hester tries to kill herself, angering Freddie, who just wants to play golf.  In the end Freddie and Hester go their separate ways, perhaps having learned something about themselves and perhaps not.

Chaplin's One A.M. (1916)

Most people seem to have only a vague idea of who Charlie Chaplin was these days, having perhaps seen him long ago in films with sound effects and wrong-speed projection. All his feature films are now available in pristine DVD's and I recommend them for their beauty, humor and emotional content.  Meanwhile his short films are available mostly in poor quality public domain versions.  I recently watched Chaplin's One A.M. in a decent (but far from perfect) quality DVD.from Echo Bridge.

One A.M. is a wonderful example of how much one can do with one actor and three sets -- if one is Chaplin of course.  Everything is in long shot, except for a couple of intrusive close-ups, which I suspect were imposed by the studio, Mutual.  Chaplin is inebriated when he arrives home and can't find his key.  So he climbs through a window, accidentally stepping in a goldfish bowl.  The he finds his key and climbs back out the window, unlocks the door and goes in (various versions of this gag later ended up in Looney Tunes).  Once inside Chaplin is confronted by a cozy domestic scene that engages him in a continuing battle:  he slips on the rugs, is "attacked" by dead animals, and can't get to a drink because his coat gets stuck on a turning table that he can't catch up with.  He climbs up the stairs and trips down backward (beautifully choreographed), gets back up the stairs and grabs the stair rug as he falls, ending up wrapped in it.  He finally climbs a teetering coat rack to get to the top of the stairs, only to be knocked down by a clock pendulum, which he eventually crawls under.  He gets into his bedroom (the second set) and can't find the bed, even looking under the rug.  He finally sees the button for the Murphy bed and immediately gets caught in the bed until he can get it down, a bed leg impales his hat and when he gets his hat out the bed flips over and he ends up underneath it,  Then the bed turns over and he tries to sleep on the underside of it as the mattress goes back and only the frame remains, which Chaplin trips over on his way to the bathroom (third and final set).  Chaplin then gets soaked when he gets trapped in the shower and settles down to sleep in the bathtub.

In some ways this film reminds one of Buster Keaton and some of his battles with machinery.  But Keaton usually triumphs while Chaplin makes accommodations.  Of course my description can't begin to convey the beauty and hilarity of Chaplin in this role.  My six-year-old daughter watched it with me and laughed so hard she missed some of the relatively fast-moving activity.  So of course we watched it again.  I tend not to find the actions of a dipsomaniac particularly amusing but One A.M. did not make much of the inebriation, rather it emphasized the routine difficulties of any domestic situation, from misplacing your keys to going to bed.  And I realized once again the influence Chaplin's film had on Chuck Jones, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges et al.

Ross Macdonald's The Doomsters

On a deeper level than I'd been willing to recognize till now, I experienced fear.  Fear of the treacherous darkness around us and inside of us, fear of the blind destruction that had wiped out most of a family and threatened the rest.
--Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters (Knopf, 1958)

Private detective Lew Archer exemplifies the neuroses of the 1950's, when families are breaking apart in suburbia under the pressures of greed, alcohol and drugs, all of which are in great supply in The Doomsters.  In this novel we learn a little bit about Archer's past -- his youth, his job as a cop, his marriage to Sue  that ended in divorce..  A friend from the past escapes from a mental institution and Archer tries to take him back.  The friend, Carl  Hallman, steals Archer's car and escapes. This plunges Archer into the multiple family troubles of the Hallman family and their sinister doctor, in a corrupt suburban county where the Hallman family confiscated land from a Japanese family who had been place in a camp during the war.

Archer is beaten several times and is attracted to several women along the way, all of whom already have other attachments.  Carl's brother is killed and the hunt is on for Carl,  Meanwhile other bodies are appearing as it becomes increasingly clear that Carl's parents did not die from suicide (his mother) and a heart attack (his father) and Archer tries to figure things out.

The Doomsters has a less confusing plot than some others of  Macdonald's Lew Archer novels, perhaps because there's more of Archer's philosophical musings on the human condition and the good and bad in all of us.  The novel is written effectively in the first person, so we only experience what Archer sees and hears.

Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins

The recent film version of Wonder Woman seems like a lost opportunity to change the somewhat rigid character of superhero movies, especially with a woman director.  The initial scenes on the Amazon-populated island of Theyscira show some promise but once Diana leaves the island to fight the Germans in WWI the film goes downhill, becoming a typical comic-book film, with plenty of confusing CGI and unexplained super-powers, all in a time before women were allowed to vote.

I wrote on Jan.4, 2015 about Jill Lepore's book about William Moulton Marston, the writer of the Wonder Woman comics from 1941-1948,  His complex view of Diana during WWII was a mixture of fear and admiration, with subtle suggestions of the appeal of domination that she represented during the period of Rosie the Riveter.  When the war ended some of the men who returned resented the image of strong women (see the film noirs of the post-war period)and Wonder Woman became more tamed and submissive.  Perhaps Jenkins's film will restore the female superhero, though I would prefer her to be more human.