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).
Monday, October 22, 2018
Thursday, October 18, 2018
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.
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.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
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.
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.
Monday, October 8, 2018
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.
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.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
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?
s
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?
s
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