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.