Turner Classic Movies July 2018

By the way, if you missed the musicals shown last month many of them will be shown again in July.

  Here are the other films I like:

July 1:  Raoul Walsh's superb Western They Died With Their Boots On, 1941 and Jean-Pierre Melville's intense film noir Le Deuxieme Souffle, 1966

July 4:  Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness, directed by Clarence Brown.

July 7:  Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, 1941;  John Ford's The Searchers, 1956; Nicholas Ray's Party Girl ,1958

July 9:  Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet, 1951;Chaplin's The Great Dictator, 1940

July 10:  Phil Karlson's corrosive The Phenix City Story, 1955

July 11:  two excellent film noirs: Andre DeToth's Crime Wave, 1954, and John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, 1950

July 12:  Anthony Mann's historical film noir The Black Book, 1949, cinematography by John Alton.

July 13:  Jacques Tourneur's literary horror film I Walked With a Zombie, 1943

July 15:  Billy Wilder's cynical but romantic view of the American salaryman The Apartment, 1960.

July 25:  Chaplin's Modern Times, 1936

July 29:  D.W. Griffith's Way Down East, 1920, a film from which one can learn much.

Charles Walters's High Society (1956)

High Society is a musical remake of George Cukor's Philadelphia Story (1940) starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly in the roles originally played by Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Katherine Hepburn.  The Cole Porter songs in the film are pleasant enough, especially the ones performed by Louis Armstrong, who is nicely integrated into the film (Crosby puts his arm around him when they sing "Now You Has Jazz" together).  There are, however, two major problems in the movie: there is almost no dancing and the film is in Vistavision.  I much prefer musicals with dancing.  We know Frank Sinatra could dance (On the Town, 1949) but there is no one in High Society for him to dance with; Bing Crosby was strictly a crooner and Grace Kelly did not dance.  Director Charles Walters had little chance to show his skill with choreography, as he had in Good News (1947). Vistavision was a wonderful process for Westerns (John Ford used it beautifully in The Searchers, also in 1956) and Hitchcock's dreamlike films (Vertigo, 1958, was shot in Vistavision) but its high resolution produced little intimacy among the characters and a great deal of empty space in the sets representing the "high society" of Newport, where Walters's film took place.  I'm not sure whether "high society" was meant to have a double meaning, by the way, but the characters were sloppily drunk during a good part of the film.

Brad Bird's Incredibles 2

I would recommend Incredibles 2 only if one wants a headache and nausea.  This animated adventure of a family of superheroes has all the confusion of bad science fiction (it's unclear even what super powers the superheroes have, much less their limitations) and even the contemporary idea of a stay-at-home father is mishandled to the point of absurdity and condescension (the baby catches on fire, turns into a demon, etc.).  The film seems to be attempting to be more "realistic" looking, in which case one might ask why use animation at all.  I do not think that I am a "resolute animation hater and congenital sourpuss," as Todd McCarthy says in The Hollywood reporter, just because I think there is more humor and beauty in Chuck Jones's seven-minute hand-drawn What's Opera, Doc? than in all 126 minutes of  the computer-generated images of Incredibles 2.

One thing I would like explained is why established actors --Holly Hunter, Bob Odenkirk, et. al. --  are hired to do the voices of animated characters, causing one to "see" the actor instead of the character.  Are there those who buy tickets because they want to hear an actor's voice at the expense of the illusion?  I hope Film Forum will open again soon so I can go to a theatre to see a real movie, instead of just cartoons, live-action or animated.

Erich Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1922)

The mark of genius is an obsession with irrelevant detail.
Andrew Sarris, writing about Stroheim.

The essential contradictions in Stroheim's work:  between melodrama and naturalism; romanticism and cynicism; psychological detail and epic perspectives.
--David Thomson

Stroheim is gradually being forgotten.  Even the truncated Greed (1925) does not make the lists of greatest films as it once did, though TCM has shown a reconstructed four-hour version, using stills.  None of Stroheim's films survive as anything other than a pale shadow of their original versions, those that survive at all.  Two hours of the original six-hour Foolish Wives survive, even though Stroheim made himself the star in hopes of keeping the complete footage; Universal did not replace Stroheim, they just chopped up his film -- what remains is magnificent, with Monte Carlo built in California in exquisite detail. Stroheim plays a con man masquerading as Count Karamazin, offering European sophistication to American wives, especially the wife of the American ambassador, whom he attempts to seduce in order to con her out of money.  When he fails at this seduction he seduces the mentally-challenged daughter of his counterfeiter, who kills Karamazin and throws him into the sewer.

Stroheim was strongly influenced by D.W. Griffith, with whom had worked as assistant director, actor and military consultant (Stroheim had a brief career in the Austro-Hungarian army before leaving for America. fleeing creditors).  In Foolish Wives one can see the Griffith influence in the use of nature (Karamazin gets caught in a storm with the ambassador's wife) as well as the complex cross-cutting when fire engines are rushing to put out a fire.  Foolish Wives also reminds one of Chaplin, with both Chaplin and Stroheim dominating the frame, with minimal camera movement.  Unfortunately Stroheim did not have the business sense of Chaplin who, unlike Stroheim, used his own money to finance his films and thereby retained control of them.  Stroheim's last film as a director was in 1932, though most of the footage he shot was eliminated in the final film.  After that he worked fairly regularly as an actor, most notably in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1936) and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Daniel Silva's Moscow Rules

Whistling tunelessly to himself, he carried the canvas upstairs to his studio, placed it back on the original stretcher, and covered the painting with a thin coat of yellow-tinted varnish.  When the varnish had dried he summoned Sarah and John Boothy to the studio and asked them to choose which canvas was the original, and which was the forgery.  After several minutes of careful consideration and consultation, both agreed that the painting on the right was the original, and the one on the left was the forgery.
---Daniel Silva, Moscow Rules, Signet, 2009

I quite like Daniel Silva' novels for reading on a train; this is a compliment, not condescension.  Silva's novels have a strong central character -- Gabriel Allon, an art restorer and Israeli spy -- and plenty of adventure in foreign locations including, in this novel, Italy and Russia.  The plots are fairly straightforward, lacking in the confusion common in spy and mystery novels, and the prose functional and occasionally elegant.  Allon's mission in Moscow Rules is to bring down a Russian arms dealer who is selling  missiles to Al-Qaeda and he does this by forging a Mary Cassatt (the details of the forgery being, to me, one of the most interesting parts of the book) to sell to the art-loving wife of the arms dealer. Of course things go wrong and Allon loses the support of the British, American and Israeli intelligence services and ends up on his own, finally being rescued by the deus ex machina of a sympathetic Russian and returning to his new wife in Tuscany.

This novel in the eighth of Silva's seventeen excellent novels (so far) about Gabriel Allon. Technology has considerably changed since Ian Fleming's books about James Bond, though there still is the need for individual heroism in the fight against tyranny and terrorism.

The Broadway Melody (1929) Good News (1947)

Generally I give credit to the director as the main creative force in a film.  This is not always true in a musical, more of a collaboration than other genres, as been made more than clear in Mad About Musicals, the on-line course I am taking with Ball State in collaboration with Turner Classic Movies.

The Broadway Melody was one of the first sound musicals; it is pre-code (dancers in their underwear and sleeping with backers) and the kind of backstage musical that was common in the early days of sound.  There was also a silent version, a straightforward melodrama for theatres that had not yet converted to sound.  It was also the first film to use the "playback" system for musicals, live sound being expensive to fix if there were mistakes.  Dancing mistakes were usually redone, though there is a scene of dancing in The Broadway Melody where a dancer almost falls after completing a tour jete and has to put out her hand to steady herself.  Director Harry Beaumont had done many silent films and probably had little to do with the singing and dancing numbers; the songs are by Arthur Freed (lyrics) and Nacio Herb Brown (music) and the choreographer/dance director was George Cunningham.

Lyricist Freed became a producer for MGM -- starting with The Wizard of Oz in 1939 -- and most of the great MGM musicals of the 40's and 50's were produced by the so-called "Freed Unit."  One example is the energetic Good News, from 1947, directed by the reliable Charles Walters.  Good News was originally a Broadway musical, in 1927, and Freed's film takes place in that year, keeping most of the original book by Laurence Schwab and the original songs by B.G. DeSylva, Lew Brown (lyrics) and Ray Henderson (music), including "The Best Things in Life Are Free."  The choreography is intensely restrained for stars June Allyson and Peter Lawford but exuberant for the one major number by Broadway star Joan McCracken:  "Pass That Peace Pipe" (a new song written for the film by Roger Edens, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane).  Choreography is by Robert Alton, the vivid cinematography by Charles Schoenbaum and the witty screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Greene.

Mets vs. Yankees, June 8-10, 2018

One might think I'm reasonably happy about the subway series, with the Mets winning 2-0 in the last game and the Yankees winning the first two 4-1 and 4-3, and I did take some pleasure in the decent pitching and low scores.  In most ways, however, the games were tedious in the way contemporary games often are:  almost all the runs were scored on home runs and there were too many strikeouts, a total of 37 strikeouts by the Mets and 28 by the Yankees in the three games.  Also, the one run that was not scored on a home run was pitcher Masahiro Tanaka scoring on a sacrifice fly and while running from third to home he strained both hamstrings!  Shades of Yankee pitcher Chien-Mien Wang, whose promising career went downhill when he injured himself running the bases in 2008.  If there is going to be interleague play then it is time to get rid of the ridiculous designated hitter -- a violation of one of the beauties of baseball:  that one has to both hit and play the field.  Even without the dubiousness of interleague play the designated hitter is a blight on the world series, already diminished enough by the endless playoffs leading up to it.

As for home runs, I have already written (posting of Sept. 22, 2018) about how to give pitchers more of an advantage: expand the strike zone, raise the mound, legalize the spitball.  If home runs are made more difficult then perhaps we can see more of what makes baseball exciting and beautiful:  the stolen base, the bunt (for a hit as well as a sacrifice), the hit-and-run play; all these elegant plays that make the game exciting and beautiful are practically extinct as everyone swings for the fences.

Frank Strayer's Blondie Takes a Vacation (1939)

The third in a lively series, Blondie Takes a Vacation is a nice piece of intelligent populism, directed by Frank Strayer with a screenplay by Richard Flourney and with cinematography by stalwart Henry Fruelich.  Of course Blondie is not taking a separate vacation, the whole family is going (I remember not too many years ago when the question --which I never understood --was often poised as to whether spouses should take separate vacations), taking a train to the Lake Hotel in the woods.  On the train they get into an altercation with a man named Morton who takes a dislike to their dog Daisy and when the Bumsteads get to the hotel he turns out to be the manager and refuses to honor their reservation.  So the Bumsteads troop around the lake until they find another hotel to stay at that turns out to be on the verge of closing because Morton has bought their lease.  Blondie and Dagwood feel sorry for the elderly owners of the Westview Inn so they pay off the debts with their last $400 and take over management of the inn.  Donald Meek plays a pyromaniac who has become friendly with Dagwood and decides to burn down the Lake Hotel but before he can do that Baby Dumpling Bumstead sneaks into the hotel's air conditioning with a skunk (which he thinks is a cat), forcing the hotel to close and driving  everyone out of the hotel and into the inn.

As usual in the Blondie series Blondie herself is the organized one while Dagwood takes care of the mechanical stuff, including setting the inn's bus on fire and having to be rescued from a runaway vacuum cleaner by Blondie pulling the plug; Baby Dumpling helps Dagwood find his pants when he accidentally locks them in a closet.  Blondie Takes a Vacation is a low-key populist fable of ordinary people taking on and overcoming moneyed interests, but it also something of a critique of patriarchy.  At the end of the film Dagwood wants to stay and manage the inn but Blondie asserts that it is time to go home and symbolizes her victory by donning a flamboyant hat, a symbolic crown, that Dagwood had mocked at the beginning of the film.






b

William Clemen's Nancy Drew Dectective (1938)

TCM recently showed the four Nancy Drew films starring Bonita Granville, starting with Nancy Drew Detective from 1938, based on The Password to Larkspur Lane, written in 1933 by Walter Karig and attributed to the non-existent Carolyn Keene.  I never read the Nancy Drew books, preferring the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, but she is an impressively intelligent, impulsive and fearless girl as portrayed by Granville, determined to find Miss Tyson, the woman who planned to donate $250,000 to Nancy's private school and then disappeared.  It's a little unclear how old Nancy is in the film, though she does drive a car and have a mainly platonic boyfriend (Ted, played by Frankie Thomas)who helps her out, even dressing in drag to sneak into the sanitarium where Miss Tyson is imprisoned and using an old x-ray machine to jam radio signals when Ted and Nancy are locked in the cellar.

How Ted uses an old x-ray machine to send out Morse code is just one of the many contrivances and coincidences of Nancy Drew Detective that makes the film such a delight, including a gang that communicates by carrier pigeon; Nancy and Ted following a carrier pigeon in a motorcar even when it's explained  that carrier pigeons travel in straight lines; the gang holding Miss Tyson prisoner in the same area where Ted's parents are vacationing; Nancy knowing that Miss Tyson is on Larkspur Lane because the password is "blue bell" and of course larkspur is the wild version of the blue bell.

In this day and age of bloated films Nancy Drew Detective, intended as a second feature, clocks in at an efficient 67 minutes.  Director William Clemens, cinematographer L. William O'Connell (who did Scarface for Howard Hawks in 1932) and writer Kenneth Gamet worked together to create an intense film of close-ups (the low-budget was certainly a factor) that is very much of its time in many ways (including the period slang, such as "23.80," the weekly paycheck of the WPA. meaning something good) but also includes a feisty and independent female lead who goes her own way while counting on help from her friends.