New York City Ballet Dec. 26, 2020

There is a powerful dramatic expressiveness in the large opposition between the so-to-speak forest-thick pantomime that fills the first act and leads only to a small clearing where snowflakes dance, and the spaciousness of the second act, with its clear dances that appear and disappear as free as the shapes in the sky.
--Edwin Denby on George Balanchine's The Nutcracker, Center, March 1954

I don't have a great deal to add to my previous posts about The Nutcracker (Dec.24 2015, Dec. 27 2017, Dec.28, 2018); it is as glorious and beautiful as ever and each time I see it I discover new details in this impressively structured work. Some people call it magical but I think of "magical" as a contrived attempt the fool the audience and except for the one movement of the Sugarplum Fairy across the stage on point while remaining still as a statue (the floor moves underneath her) -- a movement that Balanchine added years after the ballet's premiere and, I think, would have eventually removed -- there's nothing faked or phony in this exquisite ballet of feeling and emotion.

Balanchine danced in the original ballet when he was a young student in St. Petersburg and the current choreography includes much of what Balanchine remembers, with considerable speed and complexity added; like many Balanchine ballets it is original but based on Balanchine's extensive knowledge of the steps and the history, giving it the classical quality of much of Balanchine's choreography.  The Sugarplum Fairy and her Cavalier were beautifully danced by soloists Emilie Gerrity and Jovani Furlan.  Conductor Clotilde brought out all the warmth and richness of Tschaikovsky's music and the gorgeous costumes were by Karinska, who played an important role in Balanchine's work,

Jan. 2020 Turner Classic Movies

I hope we will be seeing some movies this year that haven't been on Turner recently or even ever (Frank Tashlin's Marry Me Again, for instance).  I will continue mentioning films I haven't mentioned recently but feel free to e-mail me if you have a question about any film.

Jan. 1 has Budd Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) and on the 2nd is Samuel Fuller's first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949).

On the third is Anthony Mann's period film noir, The Black Book (1949), with cinematography by the great John Alton.

On the 6th is Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943), one of the best films about military flying and a plane's crew, and on the 8th is Hawks's marvelous gangster film Scarface (1932).

On the tenth is Raoul Walsh's wonderful period romance/comedy The Strawberry Blond (1941) as well as three of Douglas Sirk's ironic soap operas:  Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1957).

On the 11th is Joseph Losey's The Big Night (1951), which I wrote about on  Dec. 4,  and on the 19th is Michael Curtiz's  intense The Breaking Point (1950)

On the 25th are two corrosive and cynical views about America by the soon-to-be blacklisted Cy Enfield:  Try and Get Me and Underworld Story (both from 1950).

The Nutcracker, The Vicky Simegiatos Dance Company Dec. 22, 2019.

One of the pleasures of seeing the Vicky Simegiatos Nutcracker was the venue, The St. George Theater on Staten Island; two of my daughter's friends take class at Simegiatos's school and had small parts in the production.  The theater was built in 1928 as a movie and vaudeville theater, seats 1900 with excellent sightlines and is a masterpiece of kitsch, beautifully restored starting in 2004. 

The choreography was by Vicky Simegatos and her daughter Matina Simegiatos and was impressively danced by the amateur company.  The children were well-rehearsed and demonstrated a keen enthusiasm as mice, soldiers and angels; Madison Pender was a charming Clara and Athan Sporek an assertive Nutracker Prince. Ask la Cour and Teresa Reichlen, from NYC Ballet, were the Sugar Plum Fairy and Her Cavalier, which --for better or worse--made clear how different Balanchine's production is from the one we were seeing, if only the elegant complexity of their pas de deux.  Simegiatos, like Balanchine, uses the original libretto by Petipa and Ivanov from 1892 but very intelligently keeps the choreography much simpler for the amateur dancers, who communicated the pleasure of dancing to Tchaikovsky's necessarily taped score. 

Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser

I met Susan Sontag once, at a party.  She came up and praised something that I had written.  Thrilled, I began chattering about I don't know what.  Sontag froze.  She retreated, taking backward steps before running away.  It dawned on me that receiving her blessing was supposed to have been enough; a solemn initiation.  I had presumed on it.
--Peter Schjeldahll, "77 Sunset Me," The New Yorker (Dec. 23, 2019).

The record of Sontag's kindly and generous acts is brief; that of her egotism, selfishness and cruelty, copius.
Joseph Epstein; "Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot," Commentary (December 2019)

For almost fifty years, she, more than any other prominent public figure, had set the terms of the cultural debate in a way that no intellectual had done before, or has done since.
--Benjamin Moser, Sontag (HarperCollins, 2019).

I often saw Susan Sontag (who died in 2004) at The New York City Ballet and was tempted to approach her with questions about Robert Bresson or Balanchine or something that she had written.  I am glad now I never did; based on the many incidents reported in Moser's biography I doubt that she would have given me the time of day.  Among other things she wrote that "the white race is the cancer of history" and the music of Mozart and the ballets of Balanchine do not redeem it.  In her intelligent essay about Bresson and spirituality she writes "it is almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color" and when Bresson made five films in color she did not, as far as I can find out, write anything about them. She was a supporter of North Vietnam as well as Castro's Cuba and then abruptly changed her mind, referring to communism as "fascism with a human face."  She treated her son badly and was subsidized by Roger Straus, her publisher, and Annie Leibowitz, her lover, to the tune of millions of dollars, but often treated Leibowitz cruelly, especially in public, and resisted all attempts to encourage her to come out of the closet during the AIDS crisis.

At this point what will Sontag be remembered for?  Probably not for her turgid movies or her  misguided novels -- I've seen the movies and read the books -- so that leaves her dubious essays, including "Notes on 'Camp'" in 1964, published in Partisan Review.  Sontag was attacked by some defenders of high culture as a "leveler" of culture but her references to popular music (the Supremes) and American films (Budd Boetticher) were few and far between and demonstrated little insight into popular culture.  She did bring some limited attention to foreign writers such as E.M. Cioran and others but her attention span was limited and she was always moving on to something else, even writing Illness as Metaphor without mentioning her own struggles with her health.  Perhaps she will be remembered as one of the last "public intellectuals," always ready to speak her mind to anyone who would listen.

R.G. Springsteen's Cole Younger, Gunfighter (1958)

Une tres jolie surprise que ce premier film a relativement gros budget du realisateur R.G. Springsteen.
--Erick Maurel

Cole Younger is an impressive B Western by R.G. Springsteen, who made many of them, with a complicated plot written by Daniel Mainwaring (though not quite as complicated as his script for Out of the Past, 1947), beautifully photographed by veteran Harry Neuman in color and cinemascope and starring Frank Lovejoy, James Best and Abby Dalton, all of whom mostly worked in television.  The film focuses on the rebellion of Texans in 1873 against dictatorial governor Edmund Davis, as Best hooks up with gunfighter Cole Younger to escape Davis's police, the so-called Bluebellies.  Lovejoy is in the role of the "good bad man," which goes back to the silent days of Western stars William S. Hart and Harry Carey and when Best is accused of murdering two Bluebellies Younger enters the courtroom with guns drawn and proves that Best's friend Merlin (played by Frank Wittrock) had framed Best in order to win Abby Dalton.  Best and Dalton plan to get married, Davis is voted out of office and Younger rides off alone.

As in Out of the Past alliances are constantly shifting and rearranging. Unlike TV Westerns of the time Cole Younger has mostly exterior shots and a fair amount of choreographed gunplay, as Best and Lovejoy each shoot one of a pair of twins (Myron Healey) in self-defense and spend their time punching cows while hiding out from the Bluebellies.

Hal Ashby's Being There (1979)

One of the contemporary directors I most admired, Hal Ashby, a maker of offbeat character studies with strong elements of antiestablishment social satire, was milling around afterward raving about Star Wars, and I was thinking, "Doesn't he know this film will destroy his career?" As the Reagan era approached in the late seventies. like an inexorable Death Star, an even more risk-adverse timidity took over the industry.
--Joseph McBride

Being There was one of the last interesting films of the seventies.  It stars Peter Sellers, who died the next year at age 55; was written by Jerzy Kosinski, who committed suicide twelve years later at age 59; directed by Hal Ashby, who died in 1988 at the age of 58. I don't think most of the films by the directors who flourished in the seventies --Bogdanovitch, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, Friedkin, Ashby -- are artistically successful but they were made with passion and intelligence, especially when one compares them with the meretricious quality of what one sees at the multiplex today.

Being There is basically a one-joke shaggy dog story.  Peter Sellers plays Chance, a retarded, illiterate and possibly autistic gardener who ventures out into the world when his wealthy patron dies.  Sellers' character only watches television and can't even feed himself.  He is rescued in the street by Shirley MacLaine and taken home to live with her and her wealthy and dying tycoon husband, played by veteran Melvyn Douglas.  Everyone thinks Chance is brilliant because he has nothing to say about anything except what he knows about from watching the banalities of television.  Even his attempted seduction by MacLaine is met with "I like to watch" and MacLaine obliges him. Peter Sellers' one-note minimalist performance, only surpassed by his low-key role in Blake Edwards's The Party (1968), reminds one of Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1869) and the donkey in Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, characters who appropriated the sins of those around them; the ending of Being There suggesting that Chance can literally walk on water.

Robert Florey's Smarty (1934)

Smarty was released by Warner Brothers in 1934, just before the Production Code began to be enforced, and is usually lumped in with other pre-code films for its sex and violence.  Although there is much that has been written lately about pre-Code films and what they have in common there has been little analysis of the directors who worked during this period.  Smarty was one of four films directed by Robert Florey in 1934, a native of France who came to America, after working with Melies and Feuillade, in the silent era to learn about films and then to direct them.  Although I have not seen most of Florey's films one can read my previous entries on Bedside (1934), The House on 56th Street (1933) and The Face Behind the Mask (1941) to see how Florey was interested in the quirky, strange and hidden aspects of American life.  Smarty is about consensual sadomasochism.

When her husband Warren William slaps his wife Joan Blondell during a bridge game for saying "diced carrots" Blondell files immediately for divorce.  There is a strong suggestion that William is only capable of sex when he and Blondell are role-playing and doesn't like it when she refers to his impotence in front of other people.  Blondell gets a divorce, marries her lawyer Edward Everett Horton and then provokes Horton to slap her; when he does she leaves him and returns to William, telling him once they are alone to "hit me again." The other main characters are Frank McHugh, playing a bachelor; Claire Dodd, a woman who has been divorced several times and known for her bed-hopping, and Joan Wheeler, who plays a married woman who hooks up with the divorced William and is always worried that it is her husband knocking at the door.

Everyone in Smarty is randy in one way or another; the opening shot of Smarty is similar to that of Bedside:  a lovely woman's leg in a sheer stocking.  Smarty is subversive towards traditional sexual roles and Florey was able to continue with these kinds of observations well into the enforcement of the production code by working somewhat under the radar on B pictures (Smarty has a running time of 65 minutes) with relatively low budgets.

The Big Apple Circus Dec. 7, 2019

The Big Apple Circus was a bit of a disappointment  this year, though not to my eight-year-old daughter, who loved it, though she seemed to be one of the older children there this time and it may be a different story next year.  There were no horses (though they were mentioned on the Big Apple Circus website and in the New York Times review of this year's show) or trained pigs (see my post about last year's show); instead we were treated to the Savitsky cats, one of whom climbed a pole and another one who walked on hind legs -- the rest of the time the Savitsky family was herding them.  There were several repetitive aerial acts, with twirling on ropes and riding bicycles high in the air, and Jason Dominguez on a giant spinning hamster wheel.  And there was The Explosive Duo, who hung horizontally on a pole -- I'm pretty sure I saw them a couple of months ago on the IRT.

The one performer I was impressed with was the juggler Kyle Driggs, whose imaginative act included juggling open umbrellas.  There was, of course, an unfunny clown --Amy Gordon dressed as a pigeon -- that almost made one wish for the return of Grandma (Barry Lubin), who retired after accusations of sexual harassment. This year there was no band, only recorded music.  In moving from a non-profit to a hedge-fund owner The Big Apple Circus has moved away from its origins in performance art and needs new and different kinds of performers.

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Stevenson musters all possible devices, images, intonations, word patterns, and also false scents, to build up gradually a world in which the strange transformation to be described in Jekyll's own words will have the impact of satisfactory and artistic reality upon the reader -- or rather will lead to such a state of mind in which the reader will not ask himself whether this transformation is possible or not.
--Vladimir Nabokov

As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many different women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment of fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings.  This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling.
--Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Stevenson's novella was published in 1886, after Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (1859) but before anything was published by Freud (born in 1856), whom Stevenson presages.   The novella is very different than the stage and film versions that were inspired by it, mainly because it is written as a mystery narrated by several voices, with the "solution" found in Jekyll's writing only after Jekyll is dead, poisoning himself after he can no longer keep from turning into Hyde.  The influences of Dickens and Wilkie Collins are felt in Stevenson's book, with an emphasis on the struggle between the arrogant upper classes and the impoverished lower classes, between suppressing one's instincts and giving in to them and with narrators who know Dr. Jekyll but have no idea what he is up to, with his adventures as Hyde left mostly to our imagination, except for one incident described by a narrator where Hyde tramples a young girl and pays off her parents with a check signed by Jekyll.

Joseph Losey's The Big Night (1951)

The Big Night was Losey's last American film (of five) before he left for exile in England, one step ahead of HUAC.  It's a corrosive view of one night in America where a son, John Drew Barrymore, looks for revenge on a well-known sportswriter who gave Barrymore's father a thrashing in a bar, as a dozen spectators watched.  It's a film noir of dark and lonely streets, grifters and dipsomaniacs, seedy nightclubs and bars, shot in crisp black-and-white by veteran cinematographer Hal Mohr.   Only after Barrymore shoots the sportswriter does Barrymore's father (Preson Foster) tell him that he had refused to marry the sportswriter's sister because he was still married to Barrymore's mother, who had left him and was still alive, contrary to what he had told Barrymore.

Barrymore's hunt for the sportswriter takes him to a boxing match, where he gets shaken down by a lowlife pretending to be a cop and hooks up with a dipso and his two female friends, one of whom tries unsuccessfully to hide Barrymore's gun.  Barrymore has a great deal to prove, after the local kids beat him up because he is carrying books, and he constantly seeks the approval of his father.  The America that Losey portrays is matter-of-factly anti-intellectual and racist.  At one point Barrymore hears an African-American (Mauri Leighton) sing a lovely version of "Am I Too Young?" in a nightclub and when he sees the singer on his way out he compliments her, telling her she is beautiful and she smiles until he adds, "even if you are..." and he leaves the sentence unfinished as her expression quickly turns to sadness.

Everyone in the film is lonely, for one reason or another, a regular theme of Losey's in his five American films as well as the English films, particularly those written by Harold Pinter:  The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971)

Lamont Johnson's One on One (1977)

I originally saw One on One when it came out in 1977 and was impressed by Lamont Johnson's direction, Robby Benson and Jerry Segal's (Benson's father) script and Donald Morgan's straight forward cinematography, though I did not care much for the Seals and Crofts songs.  I was nervous seeing it again but it actually holds up pretty well, especially the relationship between Benson, a scholarship basketball student at a Los Angeles college, and the estimable Annette O' Toole as his tutor and eventual lover.

All the corruption that makes college basketball (and other big time college sports) still so odious are there: the bullying coaches, the no-show jobs, the tutoring and the easy courses,  Benson is a naive guy from a small town and has trouble playing along; he is eventually asked to renounce his no-cut scholarship and refuses, even when the coach has other members of the team beat him up. Benson triumphs in the end, when the coach is left with no one else to put in the game and Benson scores the winning points.

Most of Lamont Johnson's films were made for television but he always came through when he had the chance to make a theatrical film with a good script, a good cast,  and a medium budget, including The Last American Hero (1973) and the Burt Lancaster Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981), also movies about triumph against difficult odds.

Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott

I like to think that Darwin might have recognized structural patterns in this long history of evolution and that it would have given him pleasure to see that the process of discovery did not travel in a straight line. a historical progression moving inexorably toward a final truth.  Instead, like the history of species as he understood it, the story of the discovery of natural selection is a story of meanderings and false starts, of outgrowths, adaptations, and atrophies, of movements backward as well as forward, of sudden jumps and accelerations and convergences.
--Rebecca Stott, The Secret History of Evolution (Spiegel and Grau, 2012)

We like to give credit to one person for inventions and discoveries:  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Edison invented electric light, Philo Farnsworth invented television, Darwin discovered natural selection.  In fact, all these guys had numerous predecessors and sometimes it depended on when one filed for a patent and when one published.  Darwin, for instance, rushed On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection to print in 1859 because Alfred Wallace was about to publish his book on the same subject, though Wallace's theories were developed after Darwin's

But even before Wallace and Darwin there were numerous scientists who came close to the same conclusions, often hampered and suppressed by the prejudices and power of the Catholic Church.  Rebecca Stott's book is both stylish and intelligent, as she lays out in fascinating detail all the amateurs and scientists who preceded Darwin -- to whom Darwin gave credit -- starting with Aristotle, who published The History of Animals in 344 BC, through Jahiz in 850, Leonardo in the 15th century, Plissy in the 16th century, Diderot in the 18th century and the increasing numbers in the 19th century: Lamarck, Coldstream, Grant, Chambers and Wallace.  Stott brings these seekers after knowledge vividly alive, not only for their discoveries but for their struggles against ignorance and prejudice and for their personal struggles with their health and finances.

Turner Classic Movies in December

Turner has its usual slate of Christmas movies in Dec. but it also has a number of films and their remakes, including three versions of Showboat (1929, 1936, 1951).  My favorites for Christmas are Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis, 1944 on the 24th, Going My Way, also 1944 on the 22nd and Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, 1940, on Dec. 1.

Dec. 3 has Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be,1942

On Dec. 6 is Sam Peckinpah's gritty Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia 1974

On Dec. 8 is John Ford's beautiful Three Godfathers and on Dec. 9 is Ford's Mogambo 1953

On Dec. 9 is the Preston Sturges/Mitch Leisen Remember the Night 1940.(see my post of Jan 3 of this year) and two versions of Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk's from 1959 and John Stahl's from 1934.

On Dec. 26 is Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939 and on the 27th is Sirk's All That Heaven Allows.

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about films on Turner in Dec.

John Robertson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1920

"My present condition of mind is much inferior in strength and solidity to what might have been had I not given loose reins to my lustful appetites.  I have been ruined and enervated by a life of effeminacy and slothful indulgence."
John Coldstream, marine zoologist, 1830.  Quoted in Darwin's Ghosts:  The Secret History of Evolution, Rebecca Stott (Spiegel and Grau, 2012)

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" in 1886 it was the Victorian era, when scientists were often clergymen and doctors and struggled to reconcile ideas of God and man's nature, especially after the publication of Darwin's controversial Origin of the Species in 1859.  By 1920, when John Barrymore played Jekyll and Hyde in John Robertson's film, there had been several film versions of Stevenson's story and at this point there are over one hundred film versions, the best ones being Rouben Mamoulian's pre-code version with Frederic March in 1931 and Victor Fleming's 1941 version with Spencer Tracy (both of which will be shown on Turner Classic Movies in December) ; my own favorites are Roy Ward Baker's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1963).

John Robertson's 1920 version is fairly stagy, based, as most early versions were, on the 1886 stage play by Thomas Russell Sullivan, but it does have an extraordinary performance by John Barrymore, who changes from Jekyll to Hyde at first without makeup, though in later scenes grotesque makeup is used in dissolving from Jekyll to Hyde as Hyde descends into debauchery, ignoring his sweet fiancee (played by Millicent Carewe) for temptress Gina (Nita Naldi) and hanging out with prostitutes in opium dens.  Jekyll had made the mistake of thinking he could change to Hyde "without touching his soul," eventually running out of the drug he needs to change back.

John Farrow's The Unholy Wife (1957)

The Unholy Wife is a strange, sometimes ponderous sometimes beautiful, film; it's an attempted film noir in color, after the film noir had run its course with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly in 1955.  Australian-born director John Farrow had directed a number of rather impersonal films noirs (The Big Clock, 1948 and Where Danger Lives, 1950) and this is his penultimate film (he died in 1963 at the age of 58).  The Unholy Wife seems to be an attempt to move the film noir into the era of technicolor films, as Allan Dwan had started to do in 1956 with Slightly Scarlet, but things didn't quite jell:  British actress Diana Dors, method actor Rod Steiger, younger actor Tom Tryon and older actress Beulah Bondi seem to be in different worlds, with often mysterious motivations.  Add to this a priest, played by Arthus Franz, and some half-baked theology (Farrow was a Roman Catholic who had written books about popes and priests), a hard-boiled screenwriter for the film (Jonathan Latimer) and flashbacks within flashbacks and the results can be even more confusing than most films noirs.

Diana Dors, with her platinum blonde hair and her form-fitting suits in various colors (red, blue, pink) demonstrates an effective combination of sexuality and brains, ending up unrecognizable in prison with brown hair, streaked with gray, looking out a window one last time on her way to her execution for killing her mother-in-law, which she did not do (though she had killed her husband's business partner).  Dors leaves behind a young son whom Steiger (who had rescued Dors from a sordid life as a B-girl) adopts and begins to teach about grapes and the wine business that his immigrant grandfather had started.

The Unprofessionals by Julie Hecht

I had to learn that men were a kind of non-human species; they were like beings from outer space who needed a form of simple communication.
-- Julie Hecht, The Unprofessionals (Random House, 2003).

I've followed Hecht in Harper's and The New Yorker since her stories started appearing in the 1970's.  There is no question that she is a unique voice, observant and funny, sometimes cynical and misanthropic, often at odds with the modern world.  A little bit of her can go a long way, so it has taken me a while to read her novel, which turns out to be chapters that can stand on their own as short stories, tied together by the narrator's long relationship with a heroin addict.

Hecht's narrator seems to put more emphasis on what she doesn't like than what she does like, but I found in reading her novel that there is a great deal her narrator likes, even if much of it is disappearing, for reasons ranging from death to unprofessionalism, She seems to like Xanax, David Letterman (Hecht wrote a moving tribute to him when he retired from his late-night show), Elvis Presley, classical film (especially The Stranger, Shadow of a Doubt and The Red Shoes), some literature (especially Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman), Dr. Andrew Weil (the narrator is vegan), Armani jackets, buckwheat-hull pillows, et al.

The narrator's dislikes seem to be stronger than her likes, however, possibly because there is so much that is accepted uncritically in the contemporary world, including CNN, barking dogs, talc, filthy supermarkets, cable TV (the required box is ugly), the subway (for the noise alone), cordless phones, socializing (people all say the same thing), book clubs, marble rye, et al.

The Unprofessionals is sometimes quite funny but also rather tragic, as her addicted friend, who shared many of her cynical views, kills himself after numerous attempts at rehab. Only with this tragic end does the narrator realize how kind her friend had been, even if he had always remained a stranger.

Stanley Donen's Love is Better Than Ever (1951)

Stanley Donen is mostly known for his musicals, from Singing in the Rain (1952) to Damn Yankees (1958), but he also was a skilled director of low-key comedies, including Love is Better Than Ever.  The premise of the film is dated, indeed --younger woman falls in love with older man after he romances her but when he resists marriage she has to outwit him --but Donen imbues it with a certain amount of low-key humor, as Elizabeth Taylor ensnares Larry Parks.

The film is written by Ruth brooks Flippen, who mostly wrote for TV, and photographed with MGM gloss by veteran Harold Rossen.  Taylor runs a dance school in New Haven (Donen choreographs some nice routines for toddlers) and meets Parks, a theatrical agent, when she goes to New York for a convention of dance teachers.  Parks takes her to her first baseball game, the Giants at the Polo Grounds (where he explains the infield fly rule) and to nightclubs and theatres. Taylor falls in love with him but he wants "no hearts and flowers," so when she returns to New Haven rumors are started by jealous women about her and Parks and she and her mother put an announcement in the newspaper that Taylor and Parks are engaged.  Of course this brings Parks up to New Haven, where he is charmed by Taylor in her natural habitat.

Parks was 36 when Love is Better Than Ever was made and Taylor was 18 (though already married and divorced) but Parks was headed to TV after the release of Love is Better Than Ever was delayed until Parks agreed to name names for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while Taylor's career continued at MGM.  Donen moved the camera frequently and effectively in Love is Better Than Ever, from the hectic pace in N.Y. to the chaos of performances at Taylor's dancing school.

The Making of Citizen Kane by Robert L. Carringer

A cliche of film criticism since Andre Bazin is that Citizen Kane is a, if not the, supreme example of photographic realism.  It seems to me more to the point to recognize the film for the masterpiece of subtle illusionism that it is.  In a sense, it is a kind of ultimate realization of Welles's magic act.

--Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane (U. of California Press, 1985, updated 1996)

This is a fascinating and detailed book about the making of Citizen Kane, including another rebutting of Pauline Kael's dubious suggestion that the script was entirely written by Herman Mankiewicz; Carringer examines the original script and follows it through the changes that Welles made.  Carringer follows Welles from his beginning at RKO with a script for The Heart of Darkness (it was too expensive to make), through Citizen Kane, to the troubles with The Magnificent Ambersons and the axing of Welles from RKO after studio head George Schaefer was fired.

Welles said, "Collaborators make contributions, but only a director can make a film."  But Welles, who had no experience making films before Citizen Kane, chose collaborators who, as Carringer says, were "ideally suited to his temperament and working methods and capable of performing at his level of ambition."  These collaborators included composer Bernard Herrmann, cinematographer Gregg Toland, and art director Perry Ferguson, the latter something of an unsung hero for his contribution to the look of Citizen Kane, especially after its budget was reduced from $1,000,000 to $700,000.

Carringer's book is filled with drawings, photographs, schedules and budgets, providing details of the productions and changes that were made during the filming, though some are printed as too dark.  Nothing can compare, of course, to actually viewing the film in 35 mm. in a theater.  It is a stunning achievement.

Meet the Music, Nov. 10,2019

We have been seeing Bruce Adolphe's Meet the Music performances with our eight-year-old daughter since last year, our next step up from the Little Orchestra Society performances (see posts of 12/6/15, 2/9/16, 11/13/16, 3/12/17) and recommended for kids six and older.  Sunday the theme was Oceanophony, a combination of visual images, poetry and a chamber ensemble consisting of Llewellyn Sanchez Werner on piano, Alice-Ivy Pemberton on violin, Estelle Choi on cello, Xavier Foley on double bass, Sooyun Kim on flute, Romie De Guise-Langlois on clarinet, Brad Balliett on bassoon and Victor Caccese on percussion.  They played music by Bruce Adolphe composed for the 100th anniversary of the Birch Aquarium of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, introduced by whimsical poetry from Kate Light read by Adolphe and accompanied by photographs of each fish, from the Scripps Institute.

The music was somewhat evocative of a particular fish -- especially for the Octopus, with an octet performing -- and generally at the level of well structured film music, though presumably we only saw still photos of the fish --including marine snow, pufferfish, coral, stoplight parrotfish, sea horse and sarcastic fringehead fish -- because movies might have distracted one from the music. After the performance Adolphe took questions, most of which were serious questions from the kids for the performers (who all said they practiced as much as they could, up to eight hours a day). The concert was held in the Rose Theatre, a lovely venue of reasonable size usually used for jazz concerts.

Everyone listens to music differently and learning to visualize while listening to music can add to the pleasure of it; though not everyone does this it can help one to enjoy the music. For instance, when I hear music that Balanchine used for a ballet, such as Bach's concerto in D minor for two violins for Concerto Barocco, I find myself often, though not always, visualizing the ballet.  Different people respond to different music and Meet the Music does an excellent job of introducing music and the different ways it is composed and played.

Image Makers: The Adventures of America's Pioneer Cinematographers

Image Makers is directed by Daniel Raim, written by Michael Sragow and with cinematography by Asulu Austad.  It is a brisk and mostly superficial introduction to cinematographers, with a justified emphasis on the true pioneers such as Billy Bitzer, longtime cinematographer for D. W. Griffith, including information on how he lit the gigantic sets on Intolerance (1916) with hidden torches. People are beginning to realize the importance of directors and this documentary should help them become aware of those who photographed the films; included are William Daniels (MGM and Greta Garbo), Charles Rosher (Mary Pickford), Roland Totheroh (who worked exclusively for Charlie Chaplin for thirty years), Gregg Toland (John Ford and Orson Welles), James Wong Howe (freelance for Lang, Hawks, Fuller, et al.)

It would have been nice if there had been more information on how these cinematographers solved particular problems, especially as technical details became more complex.  For example, Gregg Toland did special effects on Citizen Kane (1941) right in the camera, even though by then most special effects were done by optical printing, which Toland rightly felt degraded image quality.  For instance the shot of Susan's suicide has the foreground and background in focus and Susan in the middle out of focus. This was done as an in-camera matte shot, with the foreground and background filmed separately by rewinding the negative.

It becomes clear in Image Makers that it is practically impossible to separate the contributions of the cinematographer from those of the director or even who suggested what, though the director and sometimes the producer usually have the final say.  Further detailed documentaries would be welcome, not only about cinematographers but also about writers, composers, production designers and all others who work on films.

A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell (1952)

Among this residue stood an enormous sugar castor topped with a heavy silver nozzle. Barbara must have suddenly conceived the idea of sprinkling a few grains of this sugar over Widmerpool, as if in literal application of her theory that "he needed sweetening", because she picked up this receptacle and shook it over him. For some reason, perhaps because it was so full, no sugar at first sprayed out.  Barbara now tipped the castor so that it was poised vertically over Widmerpool's head, holding it there like the sword of Damocles above the tyrant.  However, unlike the merely minatory quiescence  of the normally inactive weapon, a state of dispensation was not in this case maintained, and suddenly, without the slightest warning, the massive silver apex of the castor dropped from its base, as if severed by the slash of some invisible machinery, and crashed heavily to the floor: the sugar pouring out on to Widmerpool's head in a dense and overwhelming cascade.
--Anthony Powell, A Buyer's Market (The University of Chicago Press).

A Buyer's Market, the second volume of Powell's twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, takes place in the twenties, as narrator Nicholas Jenkins finishes at university, moves to London to work for a publisher and gets caught up in various social circles, attending dances and spending week-ends at estates in the country.  He is love with Barbara Goring but their relationship goes nowhere and Jenkins sleeps with the sluttish Gypsy Jones after the death of family friend Richard Deacon, at whose antique shop he meets Jones and painter Ralph Barnby.  This sometimes funny and sometimes downbeat, but always stylish and elegant, volume ends with Jenkins having dinner with Widmerpool, Widmerpool's mother and spinster Janet Walpole-Wilson, after which Jenkins reflects on where his life is going:
For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

William Castle's Masterson of Kansas (1954)

Some of my favorite moving-going when I was quite young were William Castle's cheap horror movies and The Tingler (1959) was one of the first I saw, because I was just old enough to get a paper route and had some spare cash.  My father had forbidden me to go to the movies because, as he put it, "you know what kind of people hang out at movie theaters," though I didn't know what he actually meant;  I was not allowed to go alone or with peers, only with my parents who, of course, never wanted to go, much less to take me or my two siblings.  My father felt it was wrong to spend money on something that gave one pleasure, unless there was also some way to make money on the deal, so I had to be discreet about my movie-going.

I did not know at that time that Castle had started our making Westerns for schlockmeister Sam Katzman at Columbia, including Masterson of Kansas, which Turner Classic Movies recently showed in tribute to actress Nancy Gates, who died this year at the age of 93.  She was vulnerable and touching in the film, as she tried to prevent her father from being lynched because he sold grassland to the Indians, and dominated the film's palette of blue, brown and gray with a bright orange feather in her hat.  Bat Masterton (George Montgomery), Wyatt Earp (Bruce Cowling) and Doc Holliday (James Griffith) overcome their differences to defeat the cattlemen who are trying to take Dodge for themselves and the land away from the Indians; they stride down the main street of Dodge, shooting the bad guys, each of them firing guns with both hands.

Robert Crais's A Dangerous Man

The driver's window exploded as if they'd been broadsided by a runaway truck.  His door flew open and the driver vanished.  Something blocked the light and the man on top of her jerked away.  He convulsed and flew over the seat and out the door as if he had been sucked into space.
--Robert Crais, A Dangerous Man (Putnam, 2019).

I must say that I prefer Crais's first few novels (starting with The Monkey's Raincoat in 1987) to his more recent ones.  The earlier books focused on private eye Elvis Cole and had an element of moral ambiguity.  Since Crais added the character of Joe Pike, a mercenary and explosives expert, it's been pretty much good guys and bad guys, as Pike and Cole have teamed up to rescue damsels in distress and the novels have become something resembling medieval romances of non-stop dialogue. My wife Susan reads "cozy" mysteries and refers to them as "potato chips," something too many hard-boiled  detective novels have become, albeit spicier, for an audience seemingly bored by ratiocination.

Having said this, I do think Crais does this kind of book well and he uses the Los Angeles landscape of the 21st century almost as effectively as Raymond Chandler used it in the 20th century. Cole, Pike and damsel Isabel are well drawn and detailed, as is forensic scientist John Chen, while the thugs who are trying to recover stolen drug money are as tedious and uninteresting as such evil characters often are.

Lesley Selander's Fort Vengeance, 1953, and the Pleasures of Genre

Turner Classic Movies recently showed Lesley Selander's Fort Vengeance, from 1953, in a tribute to Rito Moreno, whose part is small indeed, with one good scene of her dancing.  Selander is sometimes listed as the most prolific of Western directors, having directed 107 Westerns from 1935 to 1967, after which he shifted to TV.  In 1951 Selander directed eight films, not all of them Westerns.  The script for Fort Vengeance was an original screenplay by Daniel Ullman, who wrote many B films, and photographed by Harry Neumann, who photographed many B films.

The pleasures of a Western --like other genres, including horror and film noir -- include the tension between the conventions of the genre and the derivations from it.  Some of the greatest directors (Anthony Mann, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Budd Boetticher, et al.) put a very personal stamp on their Westerns, often using genre conventions with particular insights and analyses of them.  Sam Peckinpah said that anything could be a Western and Selander and Ullman have an interesting approach:  Fort Vengeance is a Western that takes place in Canada just after the battle of The Little Bighorn, as Sitting Bull flees to Canada and tries to stir up the Blackfeet.  The cavalry are pursuing Sitting Bull while two gunmen (James Craig and Keith Larsen) escape a posse by crossing the Canadian border and joining the newly-formed Northwest Mounted Police, whose files of red coats in the wilderness are a visual motif throughout the film.  The Mounties, led by Reginald Denny, want to keep the peace and don't want the involvement of American troops, who offer to attack and kill the Indians.  Keith Larsen steals furs that the Indians have trapped and almost provokes a war, until his brother tracks down and kills him in a shoot-out and the peace of the Queen is kept.

Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2019

A pretty good month of solid examples of the classical cinema, with lots of John Ford and Bette Davis:

On the 2nd is John Ford's The Searchers, 1956, and Alexander Mackendrick's corrosive The Sweet Smell of Success , also 1956.

On the 5th is James Whale's moving film Waterloo Bridge, 1931, its pre-Code grittiness much preferable to Mervyn LeRoy's 1940 version.

On the 6th is John Ford' The Grapes of Wrath, 1940 and F.W. Murnau's exquisite Sunrise,1927.

On the 8th is Raoul Walsh's superb Western They Died with Their Boots On, 1941.

On the 9th is Roberto Rossellini's marvelous Journey to Italy, 1954

On the 11th is King Vidor's intensive The Big Parade, 1927

On the 13th are two of Michael Powell's loveliest uses of color, Black Narcissus, 1947, and The Red Shoes, 1948

On the 16th is John Ford's colorful and moving Drums Along the Mohawk, 1939

Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire (1942)

The film scores through the breathless rhythm of a chase that takes us from a miserable shack  shrouded in fog and surrounded by the police to a sensational manhunt inside a gas plant.
-- Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941-1953, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, translated by Paul Hammond (City Lights Books, 2002, from a 1955 French original).

Reading Jean-Pierre Melville:  An American in Paris, by Ginette Vincendeau (BFI, 2006) recently I read that Le Samourai, 1967,  was strongly influenced by This Gun for Hire, made from a Graham Greene novel in  1942.  Although I am not a particular fan of director Tuttle (except, perhaps, for A Cry in the Night, 1956) I now realize that Tuttle was enough of a craftsman (he directed his first film in 1922) to use intelligently the resources of Paramount Studios to create one of the earliest examples of film noir in This Gun for Hire:  the inspired casting of Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, the black-and-white chiaroscuro of cinematographer John Seitz (who would do Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity in 1944), the skillful writing of screenwriters Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett.

The disorienting plot follows the confusing narrative of the Greene novel fairly closely, though the Veronica Lake character changes from a chorus girl to a magician dressed as a dominatrix singing "I've  Got You Hooked" by Loesser and Press and acting as a spy for a U. S. Senator who suspects that Laird Cregar and the chemical company he works for are selling poison gas to the Japanese.  Lake hooks up with misanthropic hit man Alan Ladd, who was paid for a  job by Cregar in marked money and is seeking vengeance while being trailed by the cops -- one of whom is Lake's lover -- who know him by the burned wrist he received from his foster mother.  Ladd rescues Lake from Cregar, who tries to kill her, and Ladd eventually kills Cregar and Cregar's crooked boss and is killed himself by the cops.

In 1942 there was a great deal of anxiety about America's role in WW II,, but the American film industry quickly switched to more optimistic films than This Gun for Hire and the film noir only flourished later, in the era of postwar disillusionment.

John Brahm's Let Us Live (1939)

John Brahm, a German émigré, is known for his baroque Gothic dramas The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945) but he started originally in America doing programmers for Columbia, including Let Us Live, similar to two other films by émigré directors about the darkness of the American justice system -- Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1936) and Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1957) --all three films starring Henry Fonda as a good guy suffering the vicissitudes of fate.

Fonda is convicted of a murder and sentenced to the electric chair, the evidence against him somewhat weak except for witnesses' identification.  His fiancée, played by Maureen O'Sullivan, searches with off-duty detective Ralph Bellamy for evidence to clear him and finally finds it, just in the nick of time.  Fonda is freed but is now bitter and without hope. saying "the law can't admit it's wrong; we have no chance, us little people," the prosecutor having said it is his job to get convictions. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who later became a master of color and the widescreen working with directors Blake Edwards and Sam Peckinpah, here does a beautiful job with Brahm of showing Fonda's world changing visually and psychologically from bright and hopeful to dark, shadowy and despairing, as Bellamy and O'Sullivan trudge through the snow in the attempt to find exonerating evidence.

William Wellman's The Star Witness (1931)

The Star Witness is an excellent example of the swift and incisive films that William Wellman made at Warner Brothers in the early sound era.  There is a shooting in the street and the perpetrators come running through the Reeds house, threatening the family and. telling them not to talk.  Then the father (Grant Mitchell) gets beaten up after he talks to the gruff  D.A. (Walter Huston) and their very young son (Dickie Moore) is kidnapped on his way to play baseball.  So the family refuses to testify, except for Gramps (Charles Sale), veteran of the Civil War who denounces the "foreign" gangsters and says Americans need to speak up.  Gramps starts walking the streets, playing tunes on his fife, and when the captive Moore hears the familiar tune he throws a baseball out the window and, just in time, he is rescued and the killer is convicted.  The film ends with Gramps back at the Soldiers Home, playing his fife as he passes by a cemetery.

Star Witness starts off with the written words "A neighborhood of plain people -- in an American city today" and Wellman and scenarist Lucien Hubbard pack a great deal into this 67-minute film:  the heartbreak of Mrs. Reeds (Frances Starr) when her son is missing, comments about then-President Herbert Hoover, memories of the Civil War, the fear of foreign gangsters taking over American streets and towns, the passion of the D.A. to "give him the electric chair", the difficulties of finding a job and supporting a family in 1931, the popularity of baseball, the roles of faith and fate.  Wellman and cinematographer James Van Trees use low-angles and traveling shots as well as narrow vertical images to give an idea of how quickly life can change and become disorienting.

Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood's First Writer-Director by Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges

Sturges' reputation today is strangely, and unfairly, diminished.  He is known only to cineastes and film historians.  He has not established himself as a household name in the same way that Billy Wilder has, for example, or John Huston or John Ford.

That he did not always conquer his demons is not, perhaps surprising -- there were many of them and they took different forms, among them drink, jealousy, and arrogance.

Preston Sturges, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges, Intellect, The University of Chicago Press (2019)


This is a sad and dispiriting book about how little Preston Sturges was able to accomplish after he left Hollywood in 1948, following the financial failures of Unfaithfully Yours (a marvelous film) and The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (somewhat less marvelous).  He died in 1959, only able to make one more film, in 1955, the dreary The French They Are a Funny Race (rarely shown; I saw it at the Thalia in the 80's), spending most of that time in France, dodging creditors and away from his (fourth) wife and two young children, who he did not see at all in the last two years of his life.  He was constantly writing scripts and plays and then self-destructing by not being able to get along with collaborators.  On a couple of occasions he was able to get plays produced, only to have them crash and burn under withering criticism.

Sturges was his own worst enemy the last ten years of his life, which coincided with the end of the studio system and the support it gave directors like Sturges with producers, character actors and technicians.  Sturges felt he was not appreciated at Paramount, where he made eight brilliant films in four years, 1940-1944 (my favorites are The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), after having written a number of excellent scripts that he felt he could have directed better than Mitch Leisen did (Easy Living,1937 and Remember the Night,1940).  Sturges made the mistake of hooking up with Howard Hughes's California Pictures and then Daryll Zanuck at 20th C. Fox, neither of whom gave him the support he needed.

Aside from the demise of the studio system what happened to Sturges?  Comedy filmmakers tend to burn out unless they are superb at business, as Chaplin was, and can also do other kinds of films, as Billy Wilder could.  Chaplin and Wilder had a much wider knowledge of and interest in the world than Sturges did and therefore had more to say than Sturges did, who was mostly a satirist; satire, which Sturges did beautifully, has limitations which Sturges only occasionally transcended in his mostly successful comedies.

Felix Feist's The Threat (1949)

The Threat, 1949, is a terrific brisk (66 minutes) crime film from director Felix Feist. Although it has some trappings of a film noir it lacks the essential ingredients of alienation and existential obsession of the true film noir (yes, I am a splitter, not a lumper) and it has a somewhat happy/sappy ending that one associates more with its B film status than with a film noir.  Charles McGraw plays an escaped convict who kidnaps the district attorney, detective and woman whom he blames for sending him to jail.  He does not kill them because as a psychotic he enjoys their suffering and tortures them for information.  Feist works closely with cinematographer Harry J. Wild to portray the world of the psychotic criminal and those he kidnaps by using disorienting low and tilted camera angles.

This is one of McGraw's first leading roles, after effective supporting roles in films such as The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), where he plays an amoral hitman with partner William Conrad.  Feist uses the ingenious idea of a car hidden in a moving van:  once the cops start after the van after McGraw shoots a cop at a gas station his gang drives the car out of the van and leaves the van behind.  When McGraw, his two partners, his former lover, the district attorney and detective, and the original driver of the van get to a desert hideout to wait for a partner in crime the squabbling and betrayals start, as the heat weakens everyone.

Feist was a superb director of B genre films from 1933 to 1953 (when he turned to television), including the impressive film noir The Man Who Cheated Himself, 1950 (see my post of July 1, 2018).

Heat Lightning (1934); Highway West (1941)

Heat Lightning was directed by Mervyn LeRoy and Highway West by William C. McGann; both movies were made by Warner Brothers from a play by George Abbot and Leon Abrams.  The major differences between the two films were the result of the Production Code, not quite in effect in 1934, very much in effect in 1941.  The plots are similar but in Heat Lightning a woman kills her lover and allows his fellow bank robber to escape and there is a great deal of sex between unmarried couples, while in Highway West there is no sex and the man is killed by a third person.

The story is rather similar to Robert Sherwood's Petrified Forest, made into a film by Archie Mayo in 1937:  bank robbers hide out in a motel (called an auto camp in Heat Lightning) run by two sisters in the California desert.  One of the sisters (Aline McMahon in the first film, Brenda Marshall in the later film) has escaped  her lover and has been hiding; in the case of Brenda Marshall she was actually married and we get a bit of a backstory about how she learned her husband was a bank robber. Heat and sex are emphasized in the LeRoy film while the McGann is more of a straightforward crime story.  In Heat Lightning Aline McMahon, who usually played spinster aunts, is an expert at repairing motorcars but gives in to passion when her past lover suddenly shows up and she succumbs to him, only to shoot him when she finds out he was just using her in order to rob the place. McGann's film is more literal than LeRoy's, who emphasizes facial and body expressions rather than the overheated dialogue of McGann's film, though both directors use a mobile camera (Ted McCord is the ;cinematographer for Highway West and Sid Hickox for Heat Lightning).  Ann Dvorak plays the sister, desperate to get away and have sex,  to Aline McMahon while Olympe Bradna played Brenda Marshall's sister.

Mervyn LeRoy directed a number of gritty movies for Warner Brothers (Little Caesar and Five Star Final, both in 1932) before going on to bloated epics such as Quo Vadis (1951).  William McGann made 55 B films, mostly for Warner Brothers, between 1930 and 1944.

The Goldwyn Follies (1938)

The choreography for Vera Zorina and members of Balanchine's American Ballet Company combine pointe work with lyrical adagio movement that shows the influence of modern dance.
--Beth Genne on Balanchine's contributions to Goldwyn Follies (Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly and the American Film Musical, Oxford University Press 2018

Unless one is a fan of the Ritz Brothers or ventriloquist Edgar Bergen the only reasons to see The Goldwyn Follies are the fifteen minutes or so of choreography contributed by George Balanchine and the color cinematography of Gregg Toland in the relatively new three-strip version of Technicolor.  Otherwise the movie looks rather like a slightly demented version of The Ed Sullivan Show, full of vaudeville schtick and lacking only a juggler, with excerpts from La Traviata and bland versions of Gershwin songs sung by Howdy Doody lookalike Kenny Baker.

About thirty years ago I attended a series of lectures by Vera Zorina who showed excerpts from the film choreography that Balanchine did for her in a number of movies.  Seldom was Balanchine able to do precisely what he wanted to do; even Samuel Goldwyn did not allow his meticulously choreographed version of Gershwin's "American in Paris" because "the miners in Harrisburg would not understand it."  I wonder if they understood what remains in Goldwyn's film (nominally directed by George Marshall), the brief Romeo and Juliet as well as The Water-nymph. Both these ballets are too short but Balanchine had his own cinematic techniques of camera movement and placement, influenced by Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire, to scores by Vernon Duke.  In Romeo and Juliet (William Dollar and Vera Zorina) the Montagues are tap and jazz dancers, the Capulets are ballet dancers on pointe and Balanchine moves the camera with the music and uses effective dissolves.  In the Water-nymph Vera Zorina was the unattainable romantic heroine who emerges from the water, waltzes with revelers, tempts a man and then returns to the pool from which she came.

Balanchine was never able to do what he wanted to do on film, as Zorina said,  though The Goldwyn Follies does indicate --in what was planned as well what was actually accomplished-- some of the directions he might have gone in if he had ever had the right opportunity with the right producer.

Alfred E. Green's Union Depot 1932

Union Depot moves at a rapid pace; its 67 minutes taking place more or less in real time, or at least one night in a busy railroad station.  This pre-Code Warner Brothers film quite effectively captures the mood of the Depression, with Sol Polito's camera swooping into the train station, crammed with diverse men and women hurrying and scurrying.  The depot is stuffed not only with some respectable travelers but with con men, pickpockets, whores, grifters, unfaithful spouses and hobos.   A significant amount of time is spent in the men's room, where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. , just out of jail on a vagrancy charge, steals the suitcase of dipsomaniac Frank McHugh and dresses up. as he says, "as a gentleman for a day."  He picks up Joan Blondell, whom he mistakes for a prostitute, and takes her to a private dining room.  When he finds out she is not a tart but rather a chorus girl down on her luck who needs $64.50 to get to a job in Salt Lake City he rather shockingly slaps her in the face and then buys her dinner.

Meanwhile Fairbanks's buddy Guy Kibbee finds a claim ticket for a violin case and when he and Fairbanks retrieve it they find it is full of money.  Fairbanks uses some of the money to buy a new dress for Blondell's trip while Blondell is being lured to a train compartment by a pervert who had hired her to read dirty books to him and is now stalking her.  Fairbanks has come to the rescue as the owner of the dress shop finds out she has been paid for Blondell's dress with counterfeit money and alerts the station cops, who arrest Blondell and Fairbanks while counterfeiter Alan Hale is trying to get his violin case back. Finally everything is straightened out as Fairbanks says good-bye to Blondell and he and Kibbee go marching down the railroad tracks, presumably back to eating "vagrancy beans."

This downbeat fantasy was probably enjoyed by moviegoers who were looking to escape their own job difficulties and sympathized with an ingenious bum who knew how to appropriate and spend money.  Director Green moves this film along rapidly, with an understanding that everyone has their reasons, the African-American washroom attendants and Pullman porters doing their jobs with dignity while their customers are drinking and cheating.

Wilde Times: Patricia Wilde, George Balanchine, and the Rise of New York City Ballet by Joel Lobenthal.

"Oh, yeah, oh, yes: you go across in front of the stage," Balanchine informed Wilde.  "Nobody showed me what to do," she confessed.  He wasn't worried.  "You just do saute, step, glissade, entrechats cinq, and then you bow to Nicky and he will come on."
--Wilde Times, ForeEdge 2016

While we wait for what we hope will be a major work about Balanchine by Arlene Croce there are more and more books coming out about the "mercurial" choreographer.  Lobenthal's book is Balanchine as seen by one of his dancers, Patricia Wilde, who danced with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo when Balanchine was there, joined New York City Ballet shortly after Balanchine and Kirstein started it in 1948 and retired in 1965 (shortly before I arrived in New York for college, so I never saw her dance)

Lobenthal's book is an engrossing work of journalism, helped immensely by his knowledge of ballet steps and the choreography of Balanchine.  Lobenthal had the cooperation of Wilde while writing this book and learned a great deal about Maria Tallchief and Tranquil Le Clercq as well as Suzanne Farrell, with each of whom Balanchine was obsessed.  Lobenthal is no more successful than anyone else who has written about Balanchine in understanding his genius but there are a few hints, especially about the changes that Balanchine made in his ballets based on who was dancing them, as well as his preoccupation with not repeating himself, even (or perhaps especially) if he was using the same music with new choreography.  When one was seeing a new Balanchine ballet one never knew quite what to expect but one was almost always delighted and thrilled.

New York City Ballet Sept. 29, 2019

The program Sunday was Valse-Fantasie, Kammermusik No. 2, and Union Jack, all three choreographed by George Balanchine.  Union Jack, the last on the program, is such a stunning and overwhelming piece that one has a tendency to forget the first two.

It was windswept and buoyant, as the three women, costumed a la Russe by Barbara Karinska, shared one male partner.
--Joel Lobenthal on Valse Fantasie (Wilde Times, ForeEdge, 2016)

Valse-Fantasie is about eight minutes long and is dazzlingly beautiful as well as structurally complex.  Sunday it was danced by Erica Pereira, who did her chaine turns with speed and precision and Daniel Ulbricht, who attacked his cabrioles with elegance and beauty.

Men, perhaps are more suited that women would be to the figurative atmosphere of the piece and to its blunt, thick strokes, its metronomic austerity.
--Arlene Croce on Kammermusik No. 2 (The New Yorker, Feb. 20 1978)

Kammermusik No. 2 is one of Balanchine's "modern" ballets; like his Stravinsky ballets it has turned-in legs, flexed feet and angular port-de-bras. It has an unusual (even for Balanchine) corps of eight men.  The leads were danced by Emilie Gerrity and Unity Phelan, along with Jovani Furlan and Peter Walker, with the women dancing to Cameron Grant's piano solo rather like the two leads in Concerto Barocco. I found its jagged eccentricity quite charming.

Union Jack is looking better than ever.  It was originally done in 1976, Balanchine's somewhat ironic tribute to the bicentennial; though Balanchine was in thrall to America he did spend some time in London choreographing revues and variety shows before coming to America in 1933. The first part is Scottish and Canadian Guard Regiments moving from walking ballet-like, toe to heel, and mixing regiments, to each regiment dancing, first separately and then together. The high-point for me is the "Regimental Drum Variations," led Sunday by Sara Mearns, consisting of wild hammering leaps.  The second part is Costermonger Pas De Deux with Andrew Veyette and Megan Fairchild a tribute to the English music hall tradition from which Chaplin came; this is both poignant and funny, with a live donkey pulling two youngsters on at the end to join in the dancing.  The final section is the Royal Navy, with lots of hornpipes and Teresa Reichlen leading Wrens to The Colonel Boogie March, the ballet ending with the cannon booming, the orchestra playing "Rule Britannia" and the entire cast doing the marine semaphore code spelling out "God Save the Queen."  Much credit goes to Hershy Kay, the music arranger, who worked closely with Balanchine to produce the known and unknown Scottish military tattoos, folk-dance forms, sea songs, jigs and reels that make up the music for Union Jack, played beautifully by the New York City Ballet Orchestra, conducted on Sunday by Clotilde Otranto.

The three ballets on Sept. 29 demonstrate something of the range of Balanchine's genius: the classic, the modern and the spectacle. 

Baseball 2019

More strikeouts and more home runs this season.  For how long will this continue?  Will Major League Baseball actually do something next year to keep the ball from flying out of the ballparks so often?(see my previous posts for my suggestions).  Will the strategies that once made baseball so beautiful return:  the sacrifice bunt, the hit-and-run, et al.?  One can only hope.

Meanwhile, the Yankees are in the post-season and the Mets are not; there are many differences between the two teams and the two managers and bullpens are one of them.  Until I can study the stats in more detail I will just say that if the Mets had converted half of the saves that they blew then the Mets would have won the National League East.

A surprise pleasure came at the end of the season:  Buck Showalter teaming with Michael Kaye in the final Yankee telecasts.  Showalter was informed, intelligent and interesting; Michael Kaye was, as usual, trying hard to remember the score and the inning and getting them wrong more often than not.  My favorite story of Buck's was how when he was a minor-league third base coach in the Yankee organization he was a factor in a triple-play in which, as Showalter said, "the ball never touched leather."  As I was trying to figure out how that was possible Buck explained that there were men on first and second, nobody out and a 3-2 count on the batter.  Buck signaled to the baserunners to run on the pitch.  The batter hit a sky-high popup and the infield fly rule was called, batter out; the runner from second base had to return to second and as he was doing so the runner from first, head down, passed the runner from second on the base path so the runner from first was out and, finally, at that moment, the popup came down and clonked the runner from second on the head and he was out!

Showalter was full of insights into the game -- something relatively uncommon among baseball announcers since the death of Ralph Kiner -- including details of where to play the infield and the shift, depending on the score and the number of outs; whether to give an RBI on a double-play and where to place cameras in case of challenges.  I think Showalter would make a great announcer, though few managers make that transition (Joe Girardi, former Yankee manager, is one who did, at least for the time being), perhaps because teams might worry that a former manager might be too critical or might give away managerial secrets.

Turner Classic Movies Oct. 2019

A good month for horror films, Godzilla movies and B Westerns, if you like those kinds of things.  I do recommend the horror films of director Terence Fisher and producer Val Lewton.

On the 1st is Preson Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941), which I wrote about earlier this month.

The 2nd has Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1933), one of his best British films.

On the 5th is Joseph Losey's version of M (1951).

October 6 is Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937), my favorite Rogers and Astaire film.

October 7 is Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932)

Oct. 10 has Budd Boetticher's austerely beautiful Western Ride Lonesome(1959)

On Oct. 12 has Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride (1950) and Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952)

Oct 13 has Anonioni's L'Avenntura (1960)

On the 16th is Edgar Ulmer's corrosive Detour (1945)

On the 17th is Mitch Leisen's Easy Living (1937), script by Preston Sturges

The 23rd has Don Weis's quite funny The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953).

Edward L. Cahn's Dangerous Partners (1945)

Dangerous Partners could be the title of almost any film noir, or indeed almost any crime film.  In this one James Craig (the poor man's Clark Gable) and Signe Hasson (the poor woman's Greta Garbo) team up in a plot even more complicated than The Big Sleep, novel or film.  The film starts at the site of a plane crash where Hasson discovers an unconscious man with a briefcase chained to his wrist; she frisks him, finds the key and discovers four wills, with different testators, with one Albert Kingby as the beneficiary of all four. She writes down the information of the testators and plans with her husband (John Warburton) to track them down, joining with Craig when her husband is killed by Kingby,  One testator, Miles Kemper (Warner Anderson) has recently died after trying to change his will beneficiary from Kingby to benefit Lili Roegan, a nightclub singer played by Audrey Totter (who sings "Glad to be His" in the nightclub scene).  Hasson and Craig seek out other testators -- they have the secret passwords from the briefcase, "plum torte, roast beef, pea soup" and manage to stay one step ahead of Kingby (Edmund Gwenn), until he catches them on an island only accessible by ferry.

This swiftly-moving B film uses the MGM (where the film was made) sound stages and character actors (Mabel Paige, Felix Bressart , et al.) quite effectively and much of the film takes place in downscale greasy spoons, hot dog stands and boarding houses.  Veteran cinematographer Karl Freund, who worked with F.W. Murnau in Germany, does a superb job of capturing the atmospheric shadows and dark rooms where confrontations and torture take place; Gwenn is a Nazi supporter who has been laundering the money from the wills to use for highly-placed Nazis and he and his fellow thugs will stop at nothing to discover what Craig and Hasson know.  The script is by veteran Marion Parsonnet and director Edward Cahn does his usual workmanlike and efficient job.

Alfred E. Green's The Rich Are Always with Us 1932

Director Alfred E. Green is not a familiar name to most moviegoers, even though he directed more than 100 movies from 1917 to 1954 and is included in Jean-Pierre Melville's "pantheon of sixty-four pre-war American directors."  I haven't seen very many of Green's films but he was obviously happy  making pre-code films at Warner Brothers in the early thirties and The Rich Are Always with Us was one of five films he made in 1932, including the impressive Union Station.

The film stars Ruth Chatterton, who was forty and nearing the end of her film career, and Bette Davis, who was twenty-four and at the beginning of her film career.  In the complex relationships in the film George Brent is pursuing Ruth Chatterton while Bette Davis pursues Brent.  Chatterton and Davis are both wealthy and prefer Brent because he actually works for a living, as a writer.  The film begins with Chatterton and Brent having dinner at a restaurant where Chatterton's husband is dining with his latest floozy.  Chatterton later finds her husband kissing the floozy (played by Adrienne Dore) and leaves for a divorce in Paris, pursued by Brent who in turn is pursued by Davis.

Green and cinematographer Ernest Haller focus mostly on Davis and Chatterton, beautifully backlit, and on their clothes, furnishings, and motorcars; Brent, whose appeal is mysterious to a modern viewer, is mostly seen struggling with his typewriter.  In the double standard common at the time Brent is not seen as a gold-digger after the wealthy Chatterton in the way Dore is in her pursuit of Chatterton's husband (played by John Milan, who appeared in eleven movies in 1932).  A great deal happens in this seventy-four minute film:  laughter and tears, triumph and tragedy, beauty and ugliness.  The witty script is by Austin Parker, from E Pettit's novel, and includes plenty of references to sex and infidelity as well as alcohol and opium.

Irving Pichel's Quicksand (1950)

Quicksand is a low-budget film noir that was a transitional role for Mickey Rooney four years after his last Andy Hardy picture.  It was written by Robert Smith (who later wrote Phil Karlson's superb 99 River Street in 1953) photographed by veteran cinematographer Lionel Linden (who did The Blue Dahlia in 1946) and directed by Irving Pichel; the cynicism of Quicksand was undoubtedly fueled by Pichel's name coming up in the investigation of Hollywood by the House Committee on Un-American activities.

Rooney plays Dan Grady, an auto mechanic in California who falls for blonde Vera Novack, played by Jeanne Cagney (sister of James), a cashier in a greasy spoon.  When Dan realizes he doesn't have enough dough to take Vera out he quietly takes $20 from the garage cash register, planning to repay it when his friend Buzz gives him what he is owed.  But then the accountant shows up early and Dan has to get the money back in the till so he buys a watch for $100 on the installment plan and hocks it for $30.  Then an "investigator" (with the A.C. Doyle name of Moriarity) shows Dan the contract he signed and says he now owes the whole one hundred by the next day.  When Dan goes to drink away his cares he sees the drunken owner of a bingo game flashing his wad so he follows him and mugs him for the cash.  The crooked proprietor of Joyland, the local arcade, Nick (played by a very oily Peter Lorre, who shorts sailors a nickel when they ask for change) finds out about the crime, he says Dan has to steal a car for him or he will call the cops.  Dan steals the car from the garage where he works and then his boss Mackey (Art Smith) bluffs him into admitting it and tells him to come up with $3000 to pay for it.  E-Z Money won't give him the cash and Jack for Your Old Hack won't give him enough for his jalopy (which looks like something Andy Hardy would drive).  Vera says she knows where Nick keeps his money so Dan breaks in and steals Nick's stash, leaving the $3000 with Vera overnight.  When he goes back to Vera the next day she has already spent $1200 on a mink coat and when Dan asks her "what kind of a dame are you?" she replies "the kind that watches out for herself."  Dan then tries to get Mackey to accept $1800 and when he says yes and still calls the police Dan strangles him.  Dan leaves and meets his old girlfriend Helen and she, still madly in love with him, agrees to go to Mexico with him.  They stop a car and pull a gun on the driver and tell him to take them to Mexico. He turns out to be a lawyer and convinces them to turn around.  Dan is shot when he tries to board his friend Buzz's boat; he survives and the lawyer says he will defend him.

Generally I do not care for a happy ending in a film noir, but as the genre progressed into the fifties redemption became more possible as personal tragedy clashed with fate.  Dan and Vera had come to California to pursue the "American Dream" but had found only the squalor of boarding houses, garages and greasy spoons, where everyone seemed to be scamming in order not to be scammed themselves.  They were stuck at the end of the continent and had to start again at the beginning. Whether Dan can overcome his own weaknesses with the help of Helen is the question at the end of Quicksand.  What a tangled web we can weave.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

Like the turning lid that finds its thread, a multitude of disconnected facts revolved in Strike's mind and slid suddenly into place, incontrovertibly correct, unassailably right.  He turned his theory around and around: it was perfect, snug and solid.
---Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm (Mulholland Books, 2014)

The Silkworm is the second of Galbraith's books about private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott.  There is much I like about this book, especially its detail about London: everything about food, the tube, the weather, the publishing industry that is at the center of the murder mystery, as well as the complex histories, personalities and relationship of Cormoran and Robin.  Galbraith (a nom de plume for J.K, Rowling) writes well and has a good ear for London conversation, including slang and accents, that take up a good part of the novel.  The Silkworm is well plotted as Robin and Cormoran go about their low-budget investigation but Galbraith has Strike figure out who the murderer is long before we are told his thought process and the result.  This kind of phony suspense I find unfair to the reader, though it is unfortunately too common in genre fiction and undercuts the effective portrayal of characters and their milieu.

Jewels: New York City Ballet, Sept. 21, 2019

I don't have a great deal to add about the splendid choreography of Jewels to what I posted on Feb. 3, 2014 and Sept 24, 2018 but I do think Saturday's performance was absolutely thrilling; New York City Ballet has continued to be more and more exciting since the autocratic Peter Martins was replaced by Jonathan Stafford, Wendy Whelan, Justin Peck and Rebecca Krohn, who have consulted some of the original dancers in Balanchine's Jewels to re-invigorate the mythopoeic and pastoral Emeralds, the jazzy and sparkling Rubies, the elegant  and exquisite Diamonds. 

I also find that the more Susan and I go with our children the more we all see what Edward Villella calls the "multilayered" quality of Balanchine's ballets, layers of complexity that reveal more and more as one sees the ballets multiple times.  Saturday Victoria, who takes ballet classes herself, mentioned that when the dancers jump one never is aware of them starting the jump or landing, but rather just floating in the air.  And our son Gideon pointed out the beautiful structure of Jewels, with Diamonds (34 dancers) adding to its structure elements of Emeralds (17 dancers) and Rubies (34 dancers).

I was also impressed by how some of the leading dancers in Jewels have matured, particularly Amar Ramasar in Emeralds and Maria Kowroski in Diamonds, Ramasar having survived a scandal --with the help of his union -- and Kowrowski at the peak of her powers at the age of forty-three, three years after returning from maternity leave.  Each dancer was able to simply walk on stage opposite their partner like giant cats walking with energy ready to emerge, Ramasar with Abi Stafford and Kowroski with Tyler Angle.

Kudos to conductor Andrew Litton, who achieved a full rich sound with three very different kinds of music.  Especially beautiful and moving was the adagio ending of Emeralds, the overall playfulness of the Stravinsky's Rubies, the elegant and intense allegro ending of Tschaikovsky's  Diamonds.

Curtis Bernhardt's The High Wall, 1947

The High Wall is a reflection --another one -- of the disillusionment of war veterans and their concern that their wives were cheating on them while they were away.  In film noir we can never really get away from the heavy subject matter.  It's all here: suicide, murder, lust, adultery.  A cornucopia of sins.
--Wampa 12, The Film Noir Bible, 2003

In the forties and fifties romantic lead Robert Taylor effectively branched out into film noir, gangster films and war films, using all the resources of MGM, generally not known for genre films.  The High Wall was directed by German émigré Curtis Bernhardt with a fatalism rather like that of Fritz Lang , written by newspaperman Sidney Boehm (who scripted Lang's corrosive The Big Heat in 1953) and Hollywood Ten member Lester Cole, photographed mostly in inky darkness by Paul Vogel, and starring Robert Taylor, Audrey Totter as the femme fatale and Herbert Marshall, a skillful and austere actor who could do comedy (Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, 1932) as well as melodrama.

The High Wall (the title perhaps refers not only to the mental hospital where much of the film takes place but also the wall between people and the wall between the truth and lies) starts with Herbert Marshall drinking by himself in a bar, switches to Taylor and his dead wife speeding in a motorcar at night in the rain and ends on another rainy and dark night as Taylor and Totter seek the true killer of Taylor's wife while Taylor is getting ready for trial.  In between are moving scenes with the inmates of the asylum (2500 inmates and only 12 doctors) as well as the attendants, who spend their time sleeping and smoking; shyster lawyers;, a blackmailing apartment superintendent;, distraught mothers and children. The ending is only superficially happy, with Totter and Taylor kissing in the hope that love will save the day.

Some Musings About Buster Keaton and Preston Sturges

I haven't written much about Buster Keaton and Preston Sturges -- two of my favorite directors -- perhaps because comedy is difficult to write about and humor is subjective; nobody likes to be told something is funny if they think otherwise.  Keaton and Sturges each made a dozen masterpieces in a decade --Keaton in the twenties, Sturges in the forties -- and each then more or less self-destructed.  Chaplin continued on because of his astute business sense -- he financed all his films himself and took as long as he felt he needed to make them -- while Keaton gave up his independence when sound came in and Sturges got caught up in Howard Hughes's orbit and then was cast aside as the studio system was ending.

Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. is a beautiful and elegant surrealistic film, as Keaton dreams he is in a film and that film becomes the film we are watching.  Keaton comments eloquently on editing, as he enters a film and is edited into scenes of traffic, jungles and mountains; later on he does a brilliant scene where he walks on top of a moving train, is washed off the train by a water-feed which then pours down on some workers driving a handcart on the tracks, all done in a single shot.  One gasps sometimes as much as laughs when Keaton rides on the front of a motorcycle without knowing the driver has fallen off, even crossing over a big hole in a bridge as two trucks pass under the hole in different directions to accidentally support the cycle.

Preston Sturges started as a writer of plays, then turned to writing scripts and started directing when he felt he could do a better job directing then the directors of his scripts, though both Mitch Leisen (Easy Living, 1937; Remember the Night, 1940) and William Wyler (The Good Fairy, 1935) did creditable jobs with his scripts.  Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941) was the third film that Sturges directed and one of the few films made by anyone that used the combined comedic talents of Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck.  When my wife, son, daughter and I watched the film recently (age rage eight to seventy-two) we all enjoyed it in different ways and at different levels, from the beautifully executed physical comedy (a major influence on Blake Edwards and others) to the witty dialogue ("let us be crooked but never common") to the satire of the rich and the sadness and pain of rejected lovers.

Mark Robson's My Foolish Heart 1949

Eloise shook Mary Jane's arm.  "I was a nice girl," she pleaded, "wasn't I?"
---J.D. Salinger

My Foolish Heart is based on J.D. Salinger's short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut", published in The New Yorker in 1948.  Salinger supposedly hated the movie so much that he never allowed anything else to be sold for that purpose (Jerry Lewis tried for years to buy the rights to Catcher in the Rye and I think he would have done a great job as director and star).  Unless Salinger had never seen a movie (which is possible) it's hard to see what exactly his objections were.  The story is just a conversation between Eloise and Mary Jane and though I think it would make an interesting sixty-minute film or stage piece, one can't blame the filmmakers for expanding on the conversation and filling in the details, which I think was handled quite effectively.

The film was written by Julius and Phillip Epstein (who wrote Casablanca, 1942, among other films), photographed by the estimable Lee Garmes (a master of light and shadow, who did John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright in 1953), scored by Victor Young (Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow in 1953) and starred Susan Hayward and Dana Andrews.  Readers of this blog know I prefer directors who varnish their films with their own personal style, but there are also directors such as Mark Robson and Michael Curtiz who can produce resonant work if they have a good script, skillful actors, and a strong producer.  My Foolish Heart was produced by Samuel Goldwyn who responded to someone's suggestion that William Wyler "made" Wuthering Heights (1939) by saying "I made Wuthering Heights, Wyler only directed it."  Robson's films considerably vary in quality; the best of his other films that I have seen is the eerie The Seventh Victim, 1943, produced by Val Lewton.

My Foolish Heart is a weepie melodrama very much of its time, without the humor of Leo McCarey. the romanticism of Frank Borzage, the irony of Douglas Sirk or the dreamlike mise-en-scene of Vincente Minnelli; it just has genuine tear-jerking, i.e., sentiment without sentimentality.   Susan Hayward falls in love with soldier Dana Andrews and becomes pregnant just before Andrews is killed in a training accident after Pearl Harbor, the accident only shown in the startled face of another soldier to whom Andrews gave an unfinished letter for Hayward,  Hayward marries Kent Smith on the rebound and passes off her child as Smith's while descending into alcoholism in Connecticut. ,Hayward's marriage ends and she stays with her young daughter in the final scene, gazing on her daughter as she did on Andrews when she first met him.  Most of the film takes place at night or in the rain, suggesting the sorrow and sadness caused by war, its victims and its aftermath. 

John M. Stahl's When Tomorrow Comes

Stahl was the Douglas Sirk of the 30's, though his irony was much further beneath the surface than Sirk's, whose remakes of Stahl's films --including Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession --reflect the more repressive 50's.   Stahl had the good fortune to have the luminous Irene Dunne in several of his films, including Back Street (1932) and Magnificent Obsession (1935) as well as When Tomorrow Comes (1939).

"Soap opera" and "melodrama" are words often used to dismiss films, though not by me, for me the only question is whether it is genuine sentiment or meretricious sentimentality; to dismiss melodrama and soap opera is to dismiss most great directors, from D. W. Griffith to Kenji Mizoguchi  In When Tomorrow Comes Stahl goes out of his way to establish Dunne as a passionately independent woman, before she meets and falls in love with Charles Boyer.  She is working as a waitress in a restaurant and takes a lead in organizing a union, for her independence and that of her co-workers, so they don't have to accept that "the customer is always right, no matter how fresh he's been with you."  She meets Boyer, they hit it off and go out together.  The only problem is that Boyer has a sickly wife,  for whom he feels responsible.  Dunne discovers this when she visits Boyer's opulent county house and also discovers he is a famous pianist. She insists on going back to New York that night because she has to picket the restaurant in the morning.  Dunne and Boyer get caught in a flash flood and spend the night together in a church, sleeping propped up against each other.  She gets back to New York in a car with Boyer's wife and his wife's mother.  Dunne is uncomfortable and even more so later in the day when Boyer's wife visits her and tells her "there are plenty of men for you" and Dunne agrees to leave Boyer alone, telling his wife "you win because you're helpless."  Boyer sees Dunne one last time and urges her to come to Paris with him.  She declines and Boyer leaves, with the last shot of Dunne showing conflicting emotions with minimalist expression.

Dwight Taylor wrote the film (he did brilliant scripts for several Astaire/Rogers films) and John J. Mescall did the straightforward cinematography (he also did Stahl's Magnificent Obsession).  Stahl effectively conveys the uncertainty and vulnerability both Dunne and Boyer feel about their relationship, leaving it open for one to wonder if they will ever get back together again.

John M. Stahl's Strictly Dishonorable

John M. Stahl is mostly known today (to the extent he is known at all) for his melodramas -- Imitation of Life in 1934, Leave Her to Heaven in 1945, et al. -- but he was also quite skilled with comedy, as in Strictly Dishonorable in 1931, from a Preston Sturges play.  The film stars Paul Lucas as a womanizing opera singer and Sidney Fox as the sweet girl who is the target of his lust (need I mention that this is a pre-Code film, with all of Sturges's sexual innuendo intact?).  Fox and the annoying George Meeker are planning to marry and live with his mother in West Orange, N.J. but they stop at a speakeasy and everything changes.  Lewis Stone, later Andy Hardy's father, is an inebriated judge who lives upstairs, just as the opera singer Paul Lukas does.  Lukas tries to seduce Fox but ends up smitten by her sweetness, while Stone gets Meeker out of the way by telling Irish cop Mulligan (Sidney Toler) that Meeker is an Orangeman and convinces Mulligan to put him in jail for the night.

Perhaps if Hollywood had not instituted the Code Sturges might not have felt the need to direct his own films, not only for control but to circumvent the Code, as he did so brilliantly in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944).  In Strictly Dishonorable Lukas uses those exact words to describe for Fox his intentions, though Stahl leaves it ambiguous as to whether Fox understands what that means and whether it appeals to her, as she is too busy looking at the cigarette butts in Lukas's ashtrays and  noticing the lipstick.  Bringing the opera singer and the naïve girl from the South together was possibly Sturges's tribute to the influences of his father's practicality and his mother's interest in culture.  Stahl and cinematographer Karl Freund (who had worked with Murnau) keep the plot, the dialogue and the camera moving through the two basic sets, as the night gradually turns to morning.

Gregory La Cava's Smart Woman 1931

Rich and poor, masters and servants, socialites and Socialists are observed side by side in La Cava's films with what appears to be a cultivated impartiality.
--Roger McNiven, American Directors Volume I, McGraw Hill 1983

Gregory La Cava is not a name remembered by many filmgoers today, though W. C. Fields (are people aware of him?) thought he had the best instincts for comedy (other than that of Fields himself).  Few of La Cava's dozen or so silent films are ever shown and he is best remembered for the so-called screwball comedy My Man Godfrey (1936), while most of his films are awaiting rediscovery.

In the pre-code days and early sound days (1929-1933) studios tended to play it safe by adopting  plays and shooting them on limited sets.  Smart Woman, from a play by Myron Fagan and an adaptation by playwright Salisbury Field, has a brief scene on a boat and the rest of it takes place in and around a large country house, owned by Mr. and Mrs Gibson (Robert Ames and Mary Astor).  Nancy Gibson comes home from France after visiting her mother there and finds her sister-in-law (Ruth Weston) and her husband's business partner (Edward Everett Horton) at home after her husband had failed to meet her at the dock.  She soon discovers that her husband has taken up with a young gold-digger (Noel Francis) and wants a divorce.  Nancy quickly recovers from the bad news and suggests inviting the gold-digger and her mother (who is always with her) for the week-end and, scheming to get her husband back, invites the wealthy Sir Guy (John Halliday)-- whom she met on the boat -- to pretend to be her lover while at the same time he is seducing Peggy, the gold-digger.  Lots of intrigue and permutations follow, worthy of P.G. Wodehouse and played with low-key and deadpan humor. The film ends with the Gibsons back together, Peggy and her mother gone, and Sir Guy melancholic after falling in love with Nancy and leaving alone.

During the thirties the male stars did not shine as much as the female ones.  Robert Ames (who died of drugs and alcohol shortly after Smart Woman was released) is, to one's modern eyes, a somewhat more ineffectual George Brent and one thinks that the luminously backlit Mary Astor (Nicholas Muscura, who photographed Out of the Past,1947, and a number of other films noirs, was the cinematographer) deserved better.

Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2019

Solid month of classic films, including the return of Noir Alley, after a one month hiatus.

Sept. 1 starts the month out well:  Lubitsch's The Merry Widow (1934), Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), Mark Sandrich directing Rogers and Astaire in Top Hat (1935), Fritz Lang's intense and fatalistic Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956).

Sept. 4 has King Vidor's Street Scene (1931; see my post of Dec. 1, 2018),Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932), D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossons (1919), Buster Keaton's The General (1927),

Sept. 5 Phil Karlson's corrosive The Phenix City Story (1955), Otto Preminger's widescreen black-and-white Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), Chaplin's The Circus (1928).
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Sept. 9 Charles Walters's charming musical Good News (1947, see my post of Jun. 17, 2018)

Sept. 11 Deborah Kerr in Michael Powell's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), and Alexander MacKendrick's dark The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

Sept. 14 Budd Boetticher's austere Western Ride Lonesome (1957)

Sept. 17 Otto Preminger's film noir Angel Face (1953)

Sept. 19  Kay Francis in Robert Florey's The House on 56th St.(1933, see my post of 4/1/19), John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).

Sept. 21 three bleak masterpieces:  Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), Otto Preminger's The Man with The Golden Arm (1956, from the Nelson Algren novel), Jean Renoir's Woman on the Beach (1947).

Sept. 24 Phil Karlson's downbeat caper film 5 Against the House (1955)

Sept. 30 Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy (1956), from the play by Robert Anderson, who went to the same prep school I did, where the play and movie take place.