Not much that Turner hasn't shown previously; the highlights of the month for me are the two Jean-Pierre Melville films and the Samuel Fuller film at the end of the month.
1st: the month starts off with Howard Hawks's impressive Only Angels Have Wings (1939), an extraordinary film about civil aviation.
5th: Ernst Lubitsch's delightful comedy Design for Living (1933), Noel Coward by way of Ben Hecht.
9th: Raoul Walsh's magnificent film about Custer: They Died with Their Boots On (1941) and Rudolph Mate's fatalistic D.O.A.
13th: The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Frank Capra before populism.
14th: Billy Wilder's corrosive Ace in the Hole (1951).
16th: John Ford's great cavalry film Fort Apache (1948).
20th: Vincente Minnelli's widescreen melodrama Some Came Running (1958)
24th: Jean-Pierre Melville's Les Enfants Terrible (1950), from a Cocteau novel, and Melville's L'Aine Des Ferchaux (1963), from a Simenon novel.
28th: Samuel Fuller's film about the early days of newspapers in New York, Park Row (1952)
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
The Academy Awards 2019
There were two significant things about the Academy Awards this year: one name that was surprisingly mentioned and one that was unsurprisingly not mentioned. Director Alfonso Cuaron said "Billy Wilder had a sign in his office that said 'How would Lubitsch do it?' and I have a sign that says 'How would Lubezki do it'" One could see the audience members looking at each other and saying "Billy Wilder, Lubitsch, who are they; who is he talking about?" This is an industry whose members sadly know little and care less about the history of film. They don't even seem to have lifetime achievement awards any more, the only way that some of the great film artists --Chaplin, Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Ennio Morricone --were ever recognized.
Meanwhile, director Bryan Singer, whose Bohemian Rhapsody won four Oscars, was mentioned by no one, presumably because of the accusations against him for sexual harassment. The Academy Awards have almost always been about uplifting and "serious" films, not about the quality of what is best, even if that could be determined. One too often hears that one should see such-and-such a film because it "won an Oscar" but few people even know what that means: the Academy membership is by invitation only and consists largely of white males over fifty, who are no longer required to see the movies on which they vote. It is about time to abolish the Oscars, which serve no useful, discernible purpose, except to bring television money to the useless and self-serving Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Meanwhile, director Bryan Singer, whose Bohemian Rhapsody won four Oscars, was mentioned by no one, presumably because of the accusations against him for sexual harassment. The Academy Awards have almost always been about uplifting and "serious" films, not about the quality of what is best, even if that could be determined. One too often hears that one should see such-and-such a film because it "won an Oscar" but few people even know what that means: the Academy membership is by invitation only and consists largely of white males over fifty, who are no longer required to see the movies on which they vote. It is about time to abolish the Oscars, which serve no useful, discernible purpose, except to bring television money to the useless and self-serving Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942)
By showing a group of artists managing to do what many then thought virtually impossible --defeating the Nazis -- Lubitsch was demonstrating the power or artistry and intelligence over brute force, of laughter over terror, of humanity over cruelty.
--Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, 2018).
An hour later, of even if you've just seen it for the sixth time, I defy you to tell me the plot of To Be or Not to Be. It's absolutely impossible
--Francois Truffaut.
Lubitsch is one of my favorite directors and the only reason I have not written more about him is that his movies are so multilayered and complex that it is extremely difficult to convey with words their effect on one. To Be or Not to Be is no exception: a spy movie, a satire of Hitler and Nazis, a romance, a love triangle, a black comedy, a film about theatre etc. At one point Jack Benny, playing Polish actor Joseph Tura in disguise as Nazi spy Professor Siletsky, asks a Nazi general ("so they call me concentration camp Erhard?") if he has ever heard of that great Polish actor Joseph Tura. Erhard thinks for a minute and then says, "I saw him once before the war: what he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland." This line is amusing, yes, but it is delivered with such gusto by actor Sig Ruman that one is more horrified than amused; this film was released only two months after Pearl Harbor.
Lubitsch himself was Jewish, as was star Jack Benny, writer Edwin Justus Mayer and producer Alexander Korda. The word "Jew" was not allowed by the production code at that point but Mayer and Lubitsch made it clear what the Nazis were up to, especially when Polish troupe actor Greenberg, played by Jewish Felix Bressart, was caught by the Nazis (actually some of the other actors in the troupe playing Nazis with actors who were playing real Nazis for the film ) gives Shylock's speech from "The Merchant of Venice." Carole Lombard, who plays Maria Tura beautifully and intelligently, died in a plane crash before the movie was released; the film is very much of its time but also transcends it, telling a story relevant today, about dealing with the tyranny of those who think that the end justifies the means.
--Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, 2018).
An hour later, of even if you've just seen it for the sixth time, I defy you to tell me the plot of To Be or Not to Be. It's absolutely impossible
--Francois Truffaut.
Lubitsch is one of my favorite directors and the only reason I have not written more about him is that his movies are so multilayered and complex that it is extremely difficult to convey with words their effect on one. To Be or Not to Be is no exception: a spy movie, a satire of Hitler and Nazis, a romance, a love triangle, a black comedy, a film about theatre etc. At one point Jack Benny, playing Polish actor Joseph Tura in disguise as Nazi spy Professor Siletsky, asks a Nazi general ("so they call me concentration camp Erhard?") if he has ever heard of that great Polish actor Joseph Tura. Erhard thinks for a minute and then says, "I saw him once before the war: what he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland." This line is amusing, yes, but it is delivered with such gusto by actor Sig Ruman that one is more horrified than amused; this film was released only two months after Pearl Harbor.
Lubitsch himself was Jewish, as was star Jack Benny, writer Edwin Justus Mayer and producer Alexander Korda. The word "Jew" was not allowed by the production code at that point but Mayer and Lubitsch made it clear what the Nazis were up to, especially when Polish troupe actor Greenberg, played by Jewish Felix Bressart, was caught by the Nazis (actually some of the other actors in the troupe playing Nazis with actors who were playing real Nazis for the film ) gives Shylock's speech from "The Merchant of Venice." Carole Lombard, who plays Maria Tura beautifully and intelligently, died in a plane crash before the movie was released; the film is very much of its time but also transcends it, telling a story relevant today, about dealing with the tyranny of those who think that the end justifies the means.
Saturday, February 23, 2019
A Simple Space: Gravity and Other Myths. Feb. 22, 2019
The best thing about the performance of Gravity and Other Myths was the theatre. The New Victory Theatre on 42nd was built in 1900 and has served multiple purposes; I watched movies there in the 1970's when it was a grungy grindhouse, charging $.85 for a double-bill at 8 A.M. The theatre has been beautifully restored, keeping most of the original, as a 499-seat off-Broadway house specializing in children-related programming.
A Simple Space, with five "co-directors," was mostly people (two women and five men) standing on each other's heads and swinging each other around, i.e., circus acrobatics with minimal props (no trapeze or trampoline). There was some phony theatrical competition: holding one's breath the longest or doing a handstand the longest while the audience threw balls at the performers. I think my seven-year-old daughter liked it because it was relatively simple and uncomplicated and at the same time something of a circus act that she would never do herself. I didn't care for it much because it was superficial and lacking in resonance; there was some live drumming included that didn't add much to the experience.
I will say that the tickets were relatively inexpensive ($22 for a excellent view) for a venture into something unknown, the theatre personnel were friendly and helpful, there was an elevator to the mezzanine and the gift shop was imaginatively stocked with reasonably-priced items.
A Simple Space, with five "co-directors," was mostly people (two women and five men) standing on each other's heads and swinging each other around, i.e., circus acrobatics with minimal props (no trapeze or trampoline). There was some phony theatrical competition: holding one's breath the longest or doing a handstand the longest while the audience threw balls at the performers. I think my seven-year-old daughter liked it because it was relatively simple and uncomplicated and at the same time something of a circus act that she would never do herself. I didn't care for it much because it was superficial and lacking in resonance; there was some live drumming included that didn't add much to the experience.
Sunday, February 17, 2019
American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer
As the prison population in America soared from 263,000 in 1976 to 1.6 million in 2009 governments tried to save money on prisons by using private corporations to run prisons (apparently the idea of putting fewer people in prison and letting more people out did not occur to anyone). Bauer worked for four months undercover as a guard at a prison in Louisiana, Winn, run by the private Corrections Corporation of America. As Bauer says, "I touch on things I saw at Winn: the violence, the understaffing, the use of force, all of which are more extreme than at publicly run prisons." The pay for guards is nine dollars an hour; there is little training.
Bauer also includes a detailed history of private prisons, especially those that were run at a profit in the South after the Civil War, essentially slavery under a different name. And now the Trump administration has reversed the Obama-era decision to stop using private prisons. Private prisons remind one of some of the other corporate scams now common in this country, especially medical insurance where, as in private prisons, the less care you provide the more money you make in a competitive environment. And society pays a price for private prisons, where there is violence and dehumanization of all concerned, prisoners and guards alike, and everyone comes out worse than when they went in.
Kudos to "Mother Jones" and Bauer for their undercover reporting, something increasingly rare after some recent court decisions, especially the decision in 1992 when ABC News was successfully sued by Food Lion for reporting on the repackaging of spoiled meat! (Food Lion asserted that the reporters were not doing their job of repackaging rotten meat!).
Bauer also includes a detailed history of private prisons, especially those that were run at a profit in the South after the Civil War, essentially slavery under a different name. And now the Trump administration has reversed the Obama-era decision to stop using private prisons. Private prisons remind one of some of the other corporate scams now common in this country, especially medical insurance where, as in private prisons, the less care you provide the more money you make in a competitive environment. And society pays a price for private prisons, where there is violence and dehumanization of all concerned, prisoners and guards alike, and everyone comes out worse than when they went in.
Kudos to "Mother Jones" and Bauer for their undercover reporting, something increasingly rare after some recent court decisions, especially the decision in 1992 when ABC News was successfully sued by Food Lion for reporting on the repackaging of spoiled meat! (Food Lion asserted that the reporters were not doing their job of repackaging rotten meat!).
Friday, February 8, 2019
Paul Schrader's First Reformed 2017
Schrader's film is grim and downbeat, taking place in upstate N.Y., a place God seems to have forgotten about (I grew up there) and where a traditional church is almost devoid of parishioners and is mostly for tourists, as it gets set to celebrate its 250th anniversary. Schrader wrote a book when he was a graduate student, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson and Dryer, and one can see the influence of these three directors in Schrader's latest film: the camera placement of Ozu, the austerity of Dreyer, the religion of Bresson, especially in Bresson's Le Journal d'un Cure de Campagne (1950), which, like Schrader's film, has a dying priest writing a diary about his struggle with faith. I recommend the films of these directors (many of them available on DVD). In Schrader's film a dying priest in a dying church in a dying town is saved --by love, more or less -- from blowing the whole place up.
Schrader has had a long career, writing (Taxidriver, 1976) as well as directing (American Gigolo 1980) and many of his films, including First Reformed, include attempts to come to terms with his own Calvinist upbringing, his films influenced not only by Bresson's Roman Catholicism but also by the Zen of Ozu and the Protestantism of Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman.
Thursday, February 7, 2019
Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948)
The important element in Rope is neither the corpse in the chest nor the commonplace cocktail party given by two young New York snobs; it is rather the simultaneous presence of these two orders of facts, the thorough amalgamation of two stylistics genres, the realistic and the thriller. Over the two previously pointed out kinds of "suspense" is superimposed a third line of current which is the very opposite of suspense: the deliberate continuity in time and space -- the famous formal postulate that slips through the back door and into the heart of the matter, in this case the film's affective and moral climate.
--Eric Rohmer & Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, translated by Stanley Hochman (Frederick Ungar, 1979, originally published in French in 1957).
Hitchcock kept a number of films to which he had the rights out of circulation in the 70's; after Hitchcock's death in 1980 they came back into circulation. Vertigo (1958) and Rear Window (1954)got the most attention, understandably, but Rope is a fascinating film not only for its unusual style but for its rich content, each reinforcing the other.
1. Rope is filmed in ten continuous takes on one set; when it is time to change reels, after ten minutes, the camera pans across something black and the illusion of continuity is maintained.
2. Rope was Hitchcock's first film in color and has an impressive palette, the colors change as the sky darkens outside (there is an enormous window showing New York City).
3. Based on the Leopold and Loeb case there is a murder in Rope by two male students, of someone they consider "inferior." The body is put in a chest on which food and drinks are served. The two murderers have been influenced by their professor's lectures on Nietzsche and the professor is invited to the party. The two students are obviously lovers,something Hitchcock's handles with considerable delicacy, especially considering the censorship of the time.
4. In the original play by Patrick Hamilton it was not known until the end that there was a body in the chest; Hitchcock shows the murder at the start of the film, once again demonstrating the use of suspense rather than surprise.
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Michael Curtiz by Alan K. Rode
"I think he had a formula and he knew that it worked."
--Ann Blyth on Michael Curtiz, quoted in Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film by Alan Rode (University Press of Kentucky, 2017).
I was hoping that this biography would lead to resolving the question of whether Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) was an exception to the auteur theory (as Andrew Sarris originally said) or confirmation of it (as Sarris later said). Rode gives considerable detail of Curtiz's career, from his early days at Warner Brothers through his less successful days as an independent in the waning days of the studio system. Curtiz directed 178 films, in his native Hungary from 1912 to 1924 and then in America until 1961. His best films were for Warner Brothers, including Casablanca, Mildred Pierce (1945) and
The Breaking Point (1950) but I would have to say that, based on Rode's book, Curtiz was more of craftsman than an artist: his films were generally as good as his collaborators and cast. Unfortunately Rode is more focused on the making of the films and how they did at the box office than the artistic and personal quality of the work, though he does divide the films into the good, the bad and the ugly and does making something of a case for some of the lesser-known films, including The Unsuspected (1947) and The Scarlet Hour (1956), though it is not clear whether Rode saw every available Curtiz film.
Curtiz comes across as something of a bully on the set, particularly with members of the crew, perhaps a sign of insecurity and difficulty with the English language, though a number of actors found him quite pleasant. Curtiz's wife, Bess Meredyth, helped him with scripts but he was often unfaithful to her and fathered a number of children with various mistresses. Mr. and Mrs. Curtiz led a rather lavish life and there was never enough money, a factor in Curtiz's apparent willingness to direct whatever script he was handed, though he always tried to make improvements and fought often over budgets. For me the value of Rode's book is as a starting point for a more rigorous analysis of Curtiz's films.
--Ann Blyth on Michael Curtiz, quoted in Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film by Alan Rode (University Press of Kentucky, 2017).
I was hoping that this biography would lead to resolving the question of whether Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) was an exception to the auteur theory (as Andrew Sarris originally said) or confirmation of it (as Sarris later said). Rode gives considerable detail of Curtiz's career, from his early days at Warner Brothers through his less successful days as an independent in the waning days of the studio system. Curtiz directed 178 films, in his native Hungary from 1912 to 1924 and then in America until 1961. His best films were for Warner Brothers, including Casablanca, Mildred Pierce (1945) and
The Breaking Point (1950) but I would have to say that, based on Rode's book, Curtiz was more of craftsman than an artist: his films were generally as good as his collaborators and cast. Unfortunately Rode is more focused on the making of the films and how they did at the box office than the artistic and personal quality of the work, though he does divide the films into the good, the bad and the ugly and does making something of a case for some of the lesser-known films, including The Unsuspected (1947) and The Scarlet Hour (1956), though it is not clear whether Rode saw every available Curtiz film.
Curtiz comes across as something of a bully on the set, particularly with members of the crew, perhaps a sign of insecurity and difficulty with the English language, though a number of actors found him quite pleasant. Curtiz's wife, Bess Meredyth, helped him with scripts but he was often unfaithful to her and fathered a number of children with various mistresses. Mr. and Mrs. Curtiz led a rather lavish life and there was never enough money, a factor in Curtiz's apparent willingness to direct whatever script he was handed, though he always tried to make improvements and fought often over budgets. For me the value of Rode's book is as a starting point for a more rigorous analysis of Curtiz's films.
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