Turner Classic Movies Feb. 2019

Lately I have been refraining from recommending any films that I have already recommended multiple times; please feel free to email me with any questions about any films. Again, I recommend anything by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Nicholas Ray, Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli.

Feb. 1 has two marvelous silent films from the end of the silent era:  F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and Frank Borzage's Street Angel (1928)

Feb. 2:  Jacques Demy's beautiful and moving The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Feb. 8 is George Cukor's Adam's Rib (1949), a movie about modern marriage that transcends its time.

Feb. 14 is Leo McCarey's exquisite Love Affair (1939)

Feb. 20th is Fritz Lang's excoriating Fury (1936)

Feb. 25 is McCarey's wryly funny The Awful Truth (1937)

Feb. 27th  is John Huston's great gangster/caper film ("are you boning me?"), 1950's The Asphalt Jungle.

New York City Ballet 1/26/19

Balanchine has an extraordinary gift for bringing performers to life on their own personal terms, so that the unconscious grace that is in each one of them can shine out in the work they do, giving it the momentary and mortal expression of beauty.
--Edwin Denby, Modern Music, Jan.- Feb. 1943.

Denby was writing about Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, originally called Ballet Imperial, a reference to the Petipa style; Balanchine changed the title in 1973, when he felt it could stand on its own in relation to the music.  It did this beautifully on Saturday:  new costumes by Marc Happel, conducting by Andrew Litton, piano played by Susan Walters and, especially, dancing by Teresa Reichlen, Megan LeCrone and Tyler Angle and a superb corps all played their part.  I only grew to love Tschaikovsky's music when I started seeing Balanchine's beautiful choreography to his compositions, including Serenade (to Serenade for Strings), Mozartinana (Suite No. 4) and Suite No. 3.

Serenade was the first piece on Saturday and the first piece Balanchine did in America (1935).  Balanchine reversed the order of the last two movements, adding an unusual adagio ending.  Though Serenade has no literal story it is something of an analogy for Balanchine's arrival in America --it begins with the corps shifting into fifth position-- even including accidents that happened during rehearsals in the choreography.  I have seen Serenade many times and, like other Balanchine ballets, I always see something new in it while enjoying the complex details of its familiarity.

Mozartiana is about growing up and facing death.  It was choregraphed for Suzanne Farrell in 1981, one of Balanchine's last ballets (he died in 1983).  One can see in Mozartiana all the reasons why Balanchine loved Farrell, especially her ability to do multiple off-balance turns.  The ballet includes four girls from the School of the American Ballet and four corps members, representing them when they are older.  It's about time passing by and using that time well. Saturday it was danced by Sterling Hyltin and Anthony Huxley in the roles originated by Farrell and Ib Andersen.

The grand perspectives of the piano concerto are dramatized in dancing that is spacious, clear and, in human terms, temperate.  The ballet's countenance is placid.  Yet we are gripped by an underlying tension -- the tension of scale and sweep and the more intimate tension of mood.
--Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, 6/11/79

It has been about ten years since I last saw Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 and my breath was taken away Saturday by both its scale (especially when Tyler Angle had ten women boureeing on each arm) and its intimacy (Angle doing cabrioles and brisee vole as well as pas de deux with Teresa Reichlen).  The overall impression of the day was beauty and classicism.  The three ballets date from 1935, 1941 and 1981:  each ballet is of its time while simultaneously transcending it.

Michael Curtiz's Dr. X (1932)

The suspenseful tempo created by Curtiz overcame several lapses in the credibility of the script.
--- Alan K. Rode on Dr. X (Michael Curtiz, University of Kentucky Press, 2017)

Dr. X is full of credibility lapses, as most horror films are, unfortunately (see Val Lewton's films for some of the few exceptions):  Dr. X (Lionel Atwill) putting his daughter (Fay Wray) out for bait, Lee Tracy as the comic relief making irrelevant wisecracks, etc. Dr. X was one of five films Curtiz made in 1932 and Jack Warner kept the shooting schedules short.  To the extent the film succeeds it is for two reasons:  the art direction of Anton Grot (see my post of Nov. 21, 2014) and the eerie effectiveness of the two-color technicolor (few two-color prints survive, since the films were usually shot in black-and-white at the same time). Two-color technicolor had a palette of mostly green, blue, red and orange.  Jack Lemmon once said to me that it took him a long time to appreciate films in color because they did not look real at first and later they did.  Even if this is true, why would one want color to look "real" in something as artificial as a movie; some of us want to see what a director can do with color, though mostly now (as opposed to two-color or the highly saturated three-color technicolor used from 1935 until well into the fifties) "directors put something blue next to something orange and think nothing of it," as cinematographer Philip Lathrop said to me.

Understudy for Death by Charles Willeford

For a few minutes I sat in my car, wondering what to do next.  So far my knowledge concerning Marion Huneker added up to zero, although I thought I detected a pattern of some kind. 
--Charles Willeford, Understudy for Death (originally 1961, Hard Case Crime Edition 2018)

Kudos to Hard Case Crime for reprinting many original paperbacks long out of print, including Understudy for Death.  Willeford first came to my attention when the movie Miami Blues, directed by Roger Corman protégé George Armitage, came out in 1990 (Willeford died in 1988) and I started reading Willeford's books, starting with the four, including Miami Blues, about Hoke Mosley.  Gradually Willeford's books have been coming back into print.

Understudy for Death was a paperback original that includes a fair amount of sex and violence, most of which is fairly tame by today's standards.  A married woman kills her two young children and herself and reporter Richard Hudson is assigned to investigate the story.  He gets nowhere, distracted by his wife Beryl asserting her new independence, the other women he meets and his own insecurities and failures.  This existential pulp novel reminds one of Antonioni's L'Avventura, which came out the year before Willeford's book, about a search for a missing woman who is never found.

Willeford reminds me of John D. MacDonald, who wrote many paperback originals before writing the series about Travis McGee: both authors write cynically about the development of Florida in the 60's and the complexities of passion and love.  My favorite Willeford novel is Pick-Up (1967), a moving story about people down on their luck.

Mary Poppins, Film and Book

All day long Mary Poppins had been in a hurry, and when she was in a hurry she was always cross.
--P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins (Houghton Mifflin, 1934).

Travers book is creepy, e.g, an old woman breaks off two of her fingers and gives them to the babies to suck on; neither the woman nor the babies appear in Disney's film.  Disney was something of a pioneer in animation, mainly by hiring brilliant animators like Ub Iwerks and taking credit for everything they did. Disney could make the grimmest fairy tales bland and his live-action films were mostly tedious. Mary Poppins, the film (1964) I put in the same category as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind (both from 1939):  corporate, meretricious products with some charm but little artistic quality.  The only thing I liked about Disney's movie was Julie Andrews singing songs by the Sherman Brothers, but she didn't sing nearly often enough and, as Mary Poppins, she was absent from the film for long periods, replaced by Markc Breaux's dull choreography and some unfunny routines about the English banking system. It's hard to see what, if any, role director of record Robert Stevenson (by that point a Disney house director) had in the Mary Poppins film, which I am sure was the way Disney wanted it.

All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson by Mark Griffin

"It never bothered me.  Life's too short.  Who the hell cares if he's queer?  The man plays great chess."
--John Wayne on Rock Hudson.

"Physically he [Marc Christian] fit Rock's type perfectly,"  says Hudson's friend Ken Maley.  "It was like a paper doll cut-out.  You couldn't have found a taller, blonder, sexier guy.  In every way this was Rock's dream man.  Well, at least in the beginning he was."

quotes from All That Heaven Allows, Mark Griffin (HarperCollins 2018).

Any biographer of a film actor faces the dilemma of relating the work to the person, always a tricky business.  Rock Hudson's name was changed from Roy Scherer, Jr. and he was groomed for stardom by agent Henry Willson, who also discovered and groomed Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and Rory Calhoun and had a casting couch of his own.  Hudson was something of a wooden actor but was fortunate to sign with Universal and make eight films with Douglas Sirk (including All That Heaven Allows in 1953), films rich with beauty and irony not much detected or appreciated at the time. Griffin works hard to find personal and gay themes in Hudson's movies, with middling success.  Howard Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport (1962) for instance,  is indeed about artifice and pretending to be something one is not, though missing is what Hawks called "a love affair between men," common in Hawks films such as Red River  (1948).

Mark Rappaport, in his "documentary" Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1993) goes to great lengths to document what he calls "cruising scenes" in Hudson's films.  The problem is that such scenes are common in many movies with many different actors, from Cary Grant to Gary Cooper, and points out that sexuality is a rather complicated issue.  Rock Hudson was less in the closet than some other actors and was only outed when he died of AIDS.

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

Jim Jones was undeniably a man of great gifts and one who, for much of his life and ministry, achieved admirable results on behalf of the downtrodden.
--Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown (Simon & Schuster, 2017)

 One of the few worthwhile things in Terror in the Jungle, the recent "documentary" on Sundance --among the endlessly repeated genuine footage and cheesy reenactments -- was journalist Jeff Guinn's knowledgeable research on Jonestown and Jim Jones, who started out as a pastor in Indianapolis and ended up dead in Guyana with 909 members of his congregation, including many children.  In his book Guinn follows Jones from his childhood in Indiana, his singled-minded devotion to integrating much of Indianapolis,to his eventual move to establish independent churches in California.  Jones's shift from socialist to demagogue --fueled by power, drugs and sex -- seems to have been a slow process, moving from a cover as a pastor promoting socialism to one who punished his congregants physically and stored millions of dollars in secret bank accounts. Not long after Jones was given a testimonial dinner --guests included the mayor of San Francisco and Eldridge Cleaver -- an article in New West by Phil Tracy and Marshall Kilduf revealed all the abuse and skullduggery going on at Peoples Temple and Jones and his followers fled to their new outpost in the remote jungle of Guyana. When Congressman Leo Ryan went to Jonestown in Guyana to investigate complaints from relatives of those in the compound he was killed and Jones ordered mass suicide; those who resisted (how many is not known) were compelled to drink the Kool-Aid (actually a cheaper knockoff. Flavor-Aid) laced with cyanide, a poison that kills by slow suffocation.

As Guinn points out, Jones was an unusual demagogue, appealing to people with an idea of sharing equally.  He started out with ideals and lost them to power, in a haze of sex and drugs. Some were forced to drink the Kool-Aid but most apparently did it voluntarily:  they called Jim Jones Father and thought he knew best. 

Edward L. Cahn's Bad Guy (1937)

Bad Guy is a brisk (64 minutes) B-film about the working classes and technology.  "Lucky" Walden (played by a charming Bruce Cabot, with a name that is possibly a reference to Thoreau in a film about technology) is a power lineman who meets a girl when he fixes the lights at a carnival.  He takes his wrench with him to a gambling house, where he kills a card sharp who cheats him.  He is convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair, which he helps to get working properly a week before his execution, but he saves some other convicts from a live wire in the prison yard and his sentence is commuted to life.  He gets a friend to bribe a witness and he is paroled and finds another job as a lineman, during which he punches a father who lets his kid fly a kite near the power lines and his parole is revoked.  His lineman partner  Steve (Edward Norris) and girlfriend Kitty (Virginia Grey) remain loyal to him and help him use the electricity on the roof of the jail to break through the bars of his cell, though when he is escaping on the dead wires the electricity is turned back on and "Lucky" is electrocuted.

There is much irony in this complex, modest film, with electricity an agent of both life and death.  "Lucky" is a complex character, hard-working and personable but impulsive, which his friend, girlfriend and parole officer (an effective Charlie Grapewin, stepping away from his usual codger characters) are powerless (play on words intended) to stop.  Cahn's style is swift and efficient, with characters and relationships precisely defined.  See my other posts about Cahn's films on Nov 21, 2014; March 26, 2015; Oct. 31, 2016; Sept. 5, 2017.

A Modest Proposal: Let Starters Pitch by Michael Powell

I've been asked why I didn't write anything about the 2018 World Series.  My answer is not that the Fox broadcasters and TV coverage were so lousy (they were, but that was not at all surprising; I listened to Dan Schulman on ESPN, allowing me to "see" more of the game than the TV version, which focused more on the stands and the dugouts than the field) but I've had it with players who have more strikeout than homeruns (the Dodgers had 34 hits and 56 strikeouts in five games, the Red Sox 42 and 53), pitchers who can't pitch to locations but ruin their arms trying to throw 100 mph and managers who yank pitchers and replace them with a parade of muscle-bound relievers.  As Michael Powell wrote in the January 6, 2019 NY Times:

Game 4 of the 2018 World Series presented something of a nadir when Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, a bright fellow no doubt, pulled his starting pitcher after he had yielded a single hit through six and a third innings and was ahead, 4-0.  The Dodgers ended up marching six relievers into that game , lost, 9-6, and exited the World Series the next day.

Received wisdom from the front office (who hires and fires managers) is that no pitcher should go more than 100 pitches or too many times through the batting order.  This, and other dubious analytical imperatives --no sacrifice bunts, no stealing bases, no hit-and-run plays, no hitting the ball on the ground -- have turned an exciting and beautiful game into something of a travesty. Powell talks to the great pitching coach Leo Mazzone, who believes the current pitching wisdom is absurd, "a manager covering his ass."   Powell studies the history of some great pitchers and finds that most pitchers had their worst ERA in the first inning; Tom Seaver pitched the ninth inning 17 times in 1969 and did not give up a single run!

If we don't watch out, the rule of starting pitchers having to go five innings could be changed and if some announcers (such as the annoying Michael Kay) have their way there may no longer even be a winning pitcher designated!  As I've said previously in this blog:  increase the strike zone, raise the mound, legalize the spitball, and, as Powell says, "let starting pitchers pitch."

Remember the Night (1940), directed by Mitch Leisen and written by Preston Sturges

Remember the Night is a prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) in love with a shoplifter (Barbara Stanwyck); it is close to a great film, and arguably the most human love story Preston Sturges ever wrote.
---David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf, 2014).

Remember the Night is the last film Preston Sturges wrote before he began directing his own screenplays and, though I am a great admirer of the films Sturges directed, Leisen brought a level of emotion to Sturges's screenplays (he also directed Sturges's script for Easy Living, 1938) that was sometimes lacking in Sturges's own films.  I think that Remember the Night is still not the popular Christmas movie that Frank Capra's banal populist It's a Wonderful Life (1948) is, less because of the presence of African-American actor Snowflake (as some have suggested; he is also in several of the films Sturges directed and plays a canny employee) than the subtlety of Remember the Night which, unlike Capra's film, doesn't cover up the darkness with angels and a forced happy ending.  One of the themes of Remember the Night is that one has to be accountable, not to God or authorities but to oneself.  My seven-year-old daughter Victoria watched the film with Susan, Gideon and me and seemed to enjoy it until the end, when Barbara Stanwyck accepted that she would have to go to jail and MacMurray said he would wait for her.  Victoria doesn't like it when characters she likes have to go to jail; she loves Chaplin's short films but hates when Chaplin is arrested or ends up alone, as in Modern Times(1936) or The Circus (1928) -- I am now saving City Lights (1931) for when she is older.

Although Leisen's films can be quite funny (see my post of May 19, 2016, about Suddenly It's Spring, 1947, also starring Fred MacMurray) Remember the Night is also quite serious, as the best comedies always are.  Though MacMurray's rural family is quite charming Sturges and Leisen also show the darker side of small-town Indiana:  a farmer does a citizen's arrest of MacMurray and Stanwyck when they accidentally end up in his cow pasture and use a cow's milk for breakfast; then when Stanwyck goes to see her mother for the first time since she ran away as a teenager her mother throws her out of the house as a "no-good thief."  So they spend Christmas with MacMurray's mother, maiden aunt and hired boy.  One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Aunt Emma takes out her wedding dress for Stanwyck to wear to the barn dance; Emma was briefly engaged and with the dress is a bundle of letters, which Emma holds up briefly and then quietly puts away.