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.

American Masters: The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived

Nick Davis's film about Ted Williams is good as far as it goes; it does not have any new information or analysis, though it is nice to hear talking heads such as Wade Boggs and the ubiquitous Bob Costa tell us what a great hitter he was and to hear from his daughter (and many others) what a temper he had.  One of the talking heads is Ben Bradlee, Jr., whose 800-page biography of Williams I wrote about in my post of July 8, 2015 and about which I complained that there was little or nothing about Williams ability as an outfielder:  if any sabermetrician has done an analysis of Williams's fielding I would like to hear about it.

Williams has the highest on-base percentage of any player in baseball history, .482, partly because he walked a great deal; he was an extremely patient hitter and averaged over 100 walks a year.  He was the last player to hit over .400 (.406 in 1941) but he does not seem to be what today would be considered a "five-tool player," hitting for average and power but not having particularly good speed, arm strength and fielding.  Williams only had 24 stolen bases in his career but he played in an era when stolen bases were not held in high esteem (after all, one could get thrown out).

The footage of Williams in Davis's film is spotty but it does demonstrate how beautiful his swing was, the kind of beauty not seen often these days.  And, oh yes, Williams only struck out 709 times in his 19-year career; the most strike-outs in a year Williams ever had was 64 in his rookie year (last year Aaron Judge struck out 208 times).

Critics of the Arts

A case can be made for Groucho as Ivan, Harpo as Aloysha, and Chico as Dmitri.
--Andrew Sarris, comparing the Marx brothers to The Brothers Karamozov.

I'm hoping English Department curriculums have changed since I was in college. I couldn't make it through Spenser's The Faerie Queen or Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.
--Michiko Kakutani in "The New York Times Book Review" (July 15, 2018).

I was thinking about the current state of movie reviewing while recently watching Paul Thomas Anderson's The Phantom Thread.  Since Andrew Sarris died in 2012 I have not paid attention to most film critics, who seem to find good things in any film that has a large advertising budget.  I can only guess that Anderson's film was praised because it is a personal film (he was writer and cinematographer as well as director).  I have never cared for the aloof and condescending Daniel Day-Lewis and it was unclear what he was supposed to represent in Anderson's film.  If he was supposed to be a great artist of couture and therefore forgiven for his offensive behavior, then why were his dresses so ugly?  Or were they not meant to be ugly by 50's standards (though it was murky as to exactly when the film was taking place)? Day-Lewis's behavior was so unpleasant that his wife, who also worked for him, poisoned him.  This worked well for a time and then he started being rude and nasty again and this time he knew he was being poisoned again and felt he deserved it.  Then they forgave each other and lived unhappily ever after.  I worked at Fairchild (then home to "Women's Wear Daily") for several years and found fashion to be a dubious and useless industry; was Anderson mocking it or celebrating its "artists" who made fancy, ostentatious  dresses for the wealthy?  Do critics these days see so many terrible movies that anything that has a glimmer of intelligence is celebrated?  Incidentally, some key plot points in The Phantom Thread remind one of Truffaut's La Sirene du Mississippi (1969), from a Cornell Woolrich novel.

Book, dance, music and art critics are not much better these days.  Michiko Kakutani retired as daily book critic at The New York Times and I cannot remember a single review that interested me in the book.  She, too, probably is subject to so many bad books that a slight glimmer of intelligent writing wins her praise.  I do not believe that she was assigned Spenser and Richardson at Yale is the 70's but, if so, good for the English Department.  Clarissa is a favorite novel of mine and I highly recommend it (see my post of April 25, 2014) and I just bought a copy of The Faerie Queen, since I had never read it.  I find the National Book Awards and the Booker prizes useful guides for what books to avoid; though one can find useful reviews in both "The New York Review of Books" and the "London Review" one has to do a great deal of reading between the lines.  Where is Edmund Wilson when we really need him?

E. A. Dupont's The Steel Lady (1953)

I wrote a bit about Dupont in my post of Jan. 27, 2017 and was pleased that The Steel Lady was screened by Turner Classic Movies in their tribute to Tab Hunter this week.  This was Hunter's fourth film after being "discovered" by agent Henry Willson, who specialized in attractive young men who made the teenagers swoon but were often gay (Hunter, Rock Hudson, et al.).  Hunter's shirtless role in Dupont's film is minor and effectively low-key; he plays the radio operator on a plane for an oil company that has to make an emergency landing in the Sahara Desert.

The others in the group are Rod Cameron, Richard Erdman, and John Dehner, all excellent character actors who made many films and radio shows (Dehner was a major radio star, in shows such as "Philip Marlowe" and "Frontier Gentleman") and were on their way to many TV shows.  The group finds an old German tank buried in the sand and get it running with parts and fuel from the plane.  Dipsomaniac Dehner finds diamonds hidden in the tank and keeps them to himself, as Bedouins attack the German tank in an attempt to get their stolen diamonds back.

The Steel Lady follows a trajectory common to other "stranded-in-the-desert" films, such as John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934), Zoltan Korda's Sahara (1943), John Brahm's Bengazi  (1955) and Robert Aldrich's Flight of the Phoenix (1965), i.e., the struggle against thirst, heat and hostile tribesmen in the attempt to get back to so-called civilization.  Dupont, writer Richard Schayer and cinematographer Floyd Crosby (who started with Robert Flaherty and F.W. Murnau) give the movie a strong air of German expressionisn and fatalism, with the four men together in a tank in the desert.

2018 Baseball All-Star Game

The All-Star game was a good example of the bad turns that baseball has taken:  all the runs but one were scored on home runs and there were twenty-five strikeouts.  Everyone seemed to treat the game like a joke, including the announcers Jack Buck and John Smolz, who said endlessly that everyone was "a five-tool player who is destined for the Hall of Fame," as Fox miked the players and even talked to them in the field while the game was going on.  For some reason all the players were allowed to take pictures of each other, also during the game.  I was not particularly in favor of the rule --abandoned last year --that the winning league was given the home field advantage in the World Series but discarding that rule made the game more anarchic and meaningless than ever.  The only difference between this game and my softball games is that there is no beer at third base to reward the players who get that far (and how did MLB miss out on that opportunity to get a beer company's money?)!  The game was little more than an extension of the odious home run derby.

Remember not long ago when pitchers in All-Star games routinely pitched three innings?  On Tuesday only Max Scherzer pitched two innings.  If the game means nothing don't let your pitchers wear themselves out, they've already had one or more Tommy John operations.  See my previous posts for my suggestions about how to improve the game, including legalizing the spitball and bringing back stolen bases and bunts.  Some baseball officials think attendance is dropping because there is so little activity on the bases; do "fans" want to see just strikeouts and home runs?

Michael Curtiz's God's Gift to Women, 1931

Those of us who have read Victoria Wilson's biography of Barbara Stanwyck (see my post of March 3, 2014) know that Frank Fay, star of God's Gift to Women, was married to Stanwyck for seven years and was a notorious dipsomaniac, spouse abuser (Stanwyck was his fourth wife), anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer.  The film title God's Gift to Women was perhaps meant ironically (the play by Jane Hinton that was the source for the film was "The Devil is Sick"), as Parisian womanizer Fay (named Toto in the film) has to fight off women until he meets the one he truly loves, played by Laura LaPlante, whose father objects to Fay.  Fay says to LaPlante's father, played by Charles Winninger, that he loves Laura more than life itself, kissing her even though his doctor says a kiss would destroy his aorta and kill him.  It turns out that the doctor was fake, hired by Winninger to see if Fay was telling the truth.  Fay's funeral, which he had arranged himself, was turned into a wedding.

I was slightly disappointed that the doctor was not named Dr. Krankheit, but perhaps that would have made the film's indebtedness to vaudeville, where Fay had been a considerable star, too obvious.  Curtiz had been a successful director of silent films and this 1931 film both looks backward to the time before sound -- Laura LaPlante and Louise Brooks, one of Toto's mistresses, had been silent film stars whose careers faltered in the sound era -- and forward, as Joan Blondell's (she played another mistress) career was just beginning and Curtiz's camera was quite mobile within the limited sets.  The film had originally been a musical but the songs (there were two) were cut out of the American version, though they stayed in other countries (Americans were tired of all the recent musicals, most of them none-too-good).  As a pre-code film, i.e., before the production code was enforced, the film is rather racy, with three women (all three also had husbands!) in bed with Fay at the same time and plenty of sexual innuendo; it is occasionally even somewhat amusing.   Fay himself comes across as rather effeminate and made only a handful of films, largely because he was annoying, arrogant, misanthropic, and, oh yes, his films did not make money.

Allan Dwan's The Inside Story (1948)

At least one can't say that Allan Dwan makes films as if D.W. Griffith never lived, since Dwan worked with Griffith on Intolerance (1916).  Dwan was one of the best at knowing where to put the camera and how to cut and edit a scene; he directed over 400 movies, starting in 1911 and directing his last in 1961.  During the sound period his movies were mostly low-budget for smaller studios such as Republic but they were always intelligent and observant, often about small town America (see my post of June 11, 2014), as is the case with The Inside Story.

The Inside Story flashes back to 1933, when Uncle Ed (Charles Winniger) worked at a small inn in Silver Creek, Vermont.  Everyone in the town is struggling financially and many are about to go under, since Geraldine (Florence Bates) was forced to close the mill.  Then Eustace Peabody (Roscoe Karns) shows up on the train from New York with $1000 for farmer AG Follensbee (Tom Fadden).  Uncle Ed, who can't see too well without his glasses, puts the money in an envelope which Waldo Williams (William Lundigan) had received with a letter from a New York gallery rejecting his paintings.  When inn owner Horace Taylor (Gene Lockhart) opens the safe he assumes that the money was a payment to Waldo, his son-in-law, and uses the money to pay his grocery supplier Jay Jay Johnson (Will Wright), who uses the money to pay his back rent to Geraldine, who uses the money as a retainer to lawyer Tom O'Conner(Robert Shayne), who was about to shoot himself because he couldn't support  his wife Audrey (who has to spend the week in New York to make money as a model) and to whom Tom gives the $1000, which Audrey gives to Waldo to pay for a portrait he paints of her.  Waldo returns the money to Follensbee, whose wife had just given birth to twins.

This particular version of La Ronde includes a great deal of humor and confusion, with Geraldine ("I'm not Uriah Heep") even having a chance to give a history of depressions in America, of which this is only the latest, and Eustace Peabody and Uncle Ed sharing knock-knock jokes with each other, i.e, like most comedies it is basically serious. Dwan does a superb job of creating a small town with just a few sets and the distinctive personalities of Silver Creek's denizens, played by an impressive ensemble of character actors (there are even a couple of fish-out-of-water gangsters, played by Allen Jenkins and William Haade).  Whether Uncle Ed makes the case that money should stay in circulation and not in safe deposit boxes is an intriguing question, though rather beside the point here.

Richard Fleischer's Armored Car Robbery (1950)

Richard Fleischer was a master of the low-budget, B crime film, who later went on to make rather bloated but well-crafted A films (Mandingo, 1975, was a particular favorite of critic Robin Wood for its rather lurid take on race relations). Armored Car Robbery was influenced by Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949) and in turn influenced Kubrick's The Killing (1956).  Armored Car Robbery is a lean and precise heist film that is bleak enough to be called a film noir, depending on one's definition.  Sleazy William Talman is known among criminals for his ability to plan jobs and brings in accomplices Gene Evans, Steve Brodie and Douglas Fowley to rob an armored car as it picks up receipts at L.A.'s Wrigley Field, where a farm team of the Chicago Cubs plays.  Cop Charles McGraw is near-by and answers the distress call from the stadium, where his partner is killed as McGraw wounds Fowley in the escape attempt.

Talman kills Fowley, ostensibly because of Fowley's injury but actually Talman has made plans to go to Mexico with Mrs. Fowley, a burlesque queen played by Adele Jergens as a sexy femme fatale. Gene Evans is killed by the cops and Steve Brodie escapes but is caught at the burlesque theatre as he tries to hunt down his share of the money from the robbery.  McGraw finds Fowley's body and goes to his apartment, where he finds Talman's phone number (Talman had told him not to write it down), a bit of luck that leads McGraw to the airport, where Talman is killed by a plane as he runs onto the tarmac, his money blowing in the wind.

Armored Car Robbery certainly had many elements of the film noir but is marred by some laughing at the end, as well as the lack of fatalism and disillusionment.  Cinematographer Guy Roe, who shot Railroaded for Anthony Mann in 1947, does a superb job with the Los Angeles locations, the tilted camera angles and the moody night scenes in back alleys and dark streets.  Fleischer's effectively minimalist script was written with Earl Felton, a regular collaborator.

Max Eastman A Life by Christopher Irmscher

Irmscher's biography of Max Eastman (Yale, 2017) is a fascinating story about Eastman's role in the 20th Century (he was born in 1893 and died in 1969) and how Eastman followed the arc of some other relatively public intellectuals of the time, from editing the socialist Liberator in 1918, when he was tried and acquitted under Wilson's Sedition Act, to supporting the Russian Revolution --eventually turning against Stalinism -- and ending up writing for Reader's Digest.  Along the way he had three wives and many mistresses, even sharing one in the early part of the century with Charlie Chaplin. Eastman published thirty books on many subjects, including one novel and Enjoyment of Poetry (1939) and Sense of Humor (1922).  Eastman spent several years in Russia in the twenties and translated works by Trotsky, though he was never a Trotskyite. Eastman knew and learned from everyone, from Mark Twain and John Dewey (with whom he studied at Columbia) to Ernest Hemingway, with whom he had a fight in Max Perkins's office (Hemingway thought Eastman had called him impotent).

Like many intellectuals Eastman was often short of cash, so in 1941 he signed up with DeWitt Wallace and Reader's Digest; they paid for him to travel the world and write articles about the places he visited.  Irmscher does not speculate whether or not this made Eastman more conservative but Eastman did soon sign up with William F  Buckley's National Review when it began in 1955.  Eastman finally resigned from National Review in 1964, Eastman's atheism clashing with Buckley's religious posturing (Eastman's parents had both been ministers).  In the early sixties I was a teenager in a house without books so I read mostly magazines that I bought with my paper-route money and found Eastman's writing stylish and thoughtful, following no party line.

Irmscher's biography rather trails off in the fifties and sixties, mentioning Eastman's many love affairs but making little attempt to understand Eastman's constantly evolving political and literary interests; Irmscher, for example, never mentions Eastman's opposition to the Vietnam War, indicating that Eastman never stopped thinking for himself and never fitted into any precise ideology.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966)

    Melville (yes, he took that name because of his admiration for the American writer) is sometimes a difficult director to like, because he appropriates so much from American films.  But he does add an impressive layer of existentialism on the surface -- usually buried deeply in American films -- that makes them uniquely French.  Le Deuxieme Souffle (Second Breath) is a heist film and a gangster film (Melville called it a film noir) that portrays the similarities between the gangsters and the police who pursue them.  The heist itself (of a truck loaded with platinum) is beautifully and elegantly done but only takes up about twenty minutes of a two-and-a-half-hour film, most of the film being devoted to the lives and planning of both the police and the gangsters and their manipulations.

  The lead role of the gangster Gu is played by Lino Ventura, who escapes from prison at the beginning of the film and joins in the heist because he needs money to leave the country. Melville directs his actors in an effectively minimalist way, with little actual dialogue, and organizes the competing factions of both the gangsters and the police in a visual scheme of crossing lines that captures the double-crossings of the characters, each of whom has something to prove.  In my most recent post, about The Man Who Cheated Himself, I mentioned that when one throws a murder weapon off a bridge one should make sure there is no boat passing underneath.  In the Melville film one learns that one should not use the same gun twice and, also, if one has escaped from prison one should stay out of sight:  the reason Gu was caught was because he ambled out to see a petanque game and was seen by a prison guard who happened to be in Paris on vacation,  a scene probably inspired by the capture of Sam Jaffe in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), one of Melville's favorite films.

Felix E. Feist's The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950)

The film noir was mostly a post-WWII phenomenon, echoing the disillusionment of veterans as they returned home.  This was combined with the many German emigres bringing greater expressionism to film and the advancing technology in film that made filming cheaper on location.  Eddie Mueller, of the Film Noir Foundation, is unearthing and restoring many films of this genre and making them available in theatres and on Turner Classic Movies, which recently showed The Man Who Cheated Himself.

Two elements of the film noir are effectively used in Felix Feist's film:  the cop who investigates a crime in which he was personally involved and the double-crossing wife whom the cop fancies and by whom he is manipulated.  The cop in this film is played by Lee J. Cobb and the wife by Jane Wyatt, later the mother in the TV series "Father Knows Best" (her role is rather small but she plays it with impressive sleaziness).  Cobb's brother and partner is played by John Dall, who did not have much of a career but was excellent in Gun Crazy (also 1950) and Hitchcock's Rope (1948), in which he played seemingly nice guys seething with passion.  In the Feist film Dall is the good-cop brother who brings down Lee J. Cobb, Dall playing  a relatively "normal" guy who tames his passion by getting married and settling down.

One lesson to be drawn from this film is that if one throws a gun used in a murder off a bridge, as Cobb does, one should make sure there is not a boat passing underneath, as happens in the film.  We only learn this later when the gun is used in another crime.  As Cobb pretends to solve the murder of Wyatt's husband Dall undercuts his efforts with his own intellectual analyses of the evidence, suggesting a new role for ratiocination in modern crime-solving.  I particularly like that in this black-and-white film a key point of evidence is the color of a car, as Dall figures out that Cobb's blue car that was used to dump the body of Wyatt's husband was misidentified as green because the witness turned out to be colorblind. The cinematographer was Russell Harlan, who also did Gun Crazy the same year (one of six films he did in 1950); he and Feist made impressive use of San Francisco locations.