On May 3rd is Anthony Mann's unusual period noir The Black Book (1949), with superb cinematography by John Alton
On the 4th and 5th is Edmund Goulding's powerful Nightmare Alley (1947). Pierre Sauvage wrote that this film was "well-written (Jules Furthman), shot (Lee Garmes), and directed; the film presents a gruesomely sharp pageant of sleazy ambition, pathetic gullibility, and disastrous failure and degradation."
On the 5th is Lubitsch's elegant Ninotchka (1939).
The 6th has Hitchcock's near-neorealist The Wrong Man (1956).
On the 9th is Preston Sturges's moving and amusing The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944).
On the 11th is Vincente Minnelli's impressive take on gender roles Designing Women (1957) and Raoul Walsh's corrosive gangster film White Heat (1949), "top of the world, Ma!"
On the 14th is Orson Welles's marvelously Shakespearean Chimes at Midnight (1967).
On the 18th is Anthony Mann's intense Western The Man From Laramie (1955) and Nicholas Ray's contemporary rodeo story The Lusty Men (1952).
On the 19th is Leo McCarey's comedy of marriage and re-marriage The Awful Truth (1937).
On the 20th is Michael Curtiz's bizarre film about a deranged ballet teacher Mad Genius (1931)
On the 21st are a number of excellent films about man's darker side: James Whale's Wives Under Suspicion (1938), Felix Feist's The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945), Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951).
On the 24th is John Ford's beautiful and intense The Searchers (1956).
On the 27th there are several excellent war films, including Anthony Mann's Men in War (1957) and Samuel Fuller's Steel Helmet (1951).
On the 29th is John Huston's fascinating spy film The Mackintosh Man (1973).
The 30th has Howard Hawks's impressive Western Rio Bravo (1959) and Preston Sturges's delightful satire of heroism Hail the Conquering Hero (1944).
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Monday, April 29, 2019
Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball by Christopher J. Phillips
Louis Menand's review of Scouting and Scoring in the April 8, 2019 New Yorker does not reflect accurately the content of Phillips's book. Phillips does not compare stats with scouting reports, as Menand suggests, but treats scouting and scoring almost completely separately. As Menand points out "more than a thousand baseball players are drafted every year, and less than ten per cent of them ever play in the majors," and, most of those are not there for very long. What scouts try to do is come up with a measurement of "overall future potential," an awkward and redundant term based on the fact that a great high school or college player may or may not become a major leaguer, a very different situation from football or basketball. What so-called sabermetricians (another awkward term) do is something very different, i.e., they figure out obscure and arcane numerical values of players who, in most cases, have already played in the major leagues.
Menand confusingly conflates "scoring" with numbers crunching, while Phillips is mostly talking about the history of keeping score from the very beginning of professional baseball to today, including a fascinating history of how errors have been decided over the years. Menand's review is less about Phillips's book and more about Michael Lewis's Moneyball, a book about how Billy Beane of the Oakland A's used new ways of evaluating performance to find relatively inexpensive players. Of course now all teams use the statistics that Beane pioneered and scouting is no longer done by each team but is centralized in the Major League Scouting Bureau.
All of this leads to some major dilemmas for those of us who love the beauty of the game, as misused analytics have lead to extraordinary levels of home runs, strikeouts and walks and a considerably diminished number of bunts and stolen bases (considered too risky). Baseball is televised more poorly than ever and some further absurd rule changes are under consideration to speed up a game that exists in its own sacred time. Let's hope the pendulum swings the other way sooner rather than later.
Menand confusingly conflates "scoring" with numbers crunching, while Phillips is mostly talking about the history of keeping score from the very beginning of professional baseball to today, including a fascinating history of how errors have been decided over the years. Menand's review is less about Phillips's book and more about Michael Lewis's Moneyball, a book about how Billy Beane of the Oakland A's used new ways of evaluating performance to find relatively inexpensive players. Of course now all teams use the statistics that Beane pioneered and scouting is no longer done by each team but is centralized in the Major League Scouting Bureau.
All of this leads to some major dilemmas for those of us who love the beauty of the game, as misused analytics have lead to extraordinary levels of home runs, strikeouts and walks and a considerably diminished number of bunts and stolen bases (considered too risky). Baseball is televised more poorly than ever and some further absurd rule changes are under consideration to speed up a game that exists in its own sacred time. Let's hope the pendulum swings the other way sooner rather than later.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
Snap at The New Victory Theatre April 26, 2019
We love taking our seven-year-old to The New Victory Theatre on 42nd Street, one of New York's oldest theatres (1900) now devoted to entertainment for kids and families. The theatre is beautifully restored and is small enough that when we sit in the balcony (seats are less than $20) the view and sightlines are excellent.
"Snap" is a Korean group that "combines mime, shadow graffiti, media art, physical theatre and magic." In other words, it is performance art, including acts and characters like "the oddball," who plays with and balances boxes like the juggler in the Big Apple Circus. The music is loud and the lights are bright and the magic is blatantly fake-looking and the mime is unfunny (few who claim to be "Chaplinesque" show any understanding of Chaplin). There was a fair amount of symbolism that meant little to me but may have meant something to the Koreans in the audience. My daughter did seem to enjoy some parts of it and didn't understand other parts and was somewhat disturbed that some of the younger children present were scared and cried; the show was advertised for six-years-old and up but there was a fair number of younger children present. The theatre has a pleasant staff and a decent selection of snacks.
"Snap" is a Korean group that "combines mime, shadow graffiti, media art, physical theatre and magic." In other words, it is performance art, including acts and characters like "the oddball," who plays with and balances boxes like the juggler in the Big Apple Circus. The music is loud and the lights are bright and the magic is blatantly fake-looking and the mime is unfunny (few who claim to be "Chaplinesque" show any understanding of Chaplin). There was a fair amount of symbolism that meant little to me but may have meant something to the Koreans in the audience. My daughter did seem to enjoy some parts of it and didn't understand other parts and was somewhat disturbed that some of the younger children present were scared and cried; the show was advertised for six-years-old and up but there was a fair number of younger children present. The theatre has a pleasant staff and a decent selection of snacks.
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Blake Edwards's The Party (1968)
The Party only illustrates the undisciplined talents of Peter Sellers.
---David Thomson, The Biographical Dictionary of Film.
Shocking as it may seem, The Party may very well be one of the most radically experimental films in Hollywood history; in fact, it may be the single most radical film made in Hollywood since D.W. Griffith's style came to dominate the American cinema.
--Peter Lehman and William Luhr, Blake Edwards
The Party, like many Edwards films, has an aspect of a fairy tale, but it also serves as Edwards's reminder to himself that there are values that are too precious to be lost.
--Myron Meisel, American Directors (Volume II)
Why some people admire Blake Edwards and others hate him has always been a mystery to me, though I think it has something to with attitudes to comedy. Comedies vary between situational humor and anarchic humor and most comedies are one or the other, situational often being more verbal and anarchic being more physical, the difference between Lubitsch (whom I like) and the Marx Brothers (whom I don't like). Blake Edwards is an unusual director in the way he combines the two, with some of his comedies being more verbal and others more physical. The Party is more physical --there is very little discernible dialogue -- and visual, similar to Chaplin and Keaton and the more contemporary Jacques Tati. Edwards is a master of the widescreen and with his cinematographer Lucien Ballard (who did a number of Sam Peckinpah's movies) creates rich and complex images, with different things happening in different parts of the screen. In the center of it, and often on the sides, is Peter Sellers as the Indian Hrundi V. Bakshi, who is serene about himself but lost and confused on a film set and at a Hollywood party to which he is accidentally invited.
Like the best comedies The Party is effective on mulitple levels. Bakshi is an outsider at the party and is as unsuccessful at conversation with self-involved Hollywood snobs as he is at finding the bathroom which, when he does find it, overflows as he tries to stuff in it the toilet paper that seems to have a life of its own. Edwards's film is very much of its time (1968) in its attempts find common ground among cultures (Russian ballet dancers show up at the party) and shows an understanding of generation and cultural divides, as Sellers and Claudie Longet (who sings and plays the guitar) hook up to wash off an elephant that hippies have painted with slogans. But The Party also transcends its time in its examination of the difficulties of social interaction in a strange environment and Edwards's use of exquisite detail, especially in the details of the house where the party is taking place, the food served, and the overworked kitchen staff listening to Vin Scully announcing a Dodgers game on the radio.
---David Thomson, The Biographical Dictionary of Film.
Shocking as it may seem, The Party may very well be one of the most radically experimental films in Hollywood history; in fact, it may be the single most radical film made in Hollywood since D.W. Griffith's style came to dominate the American cinema.
--Peter Lehman and William Luhr, Blake Edwards
The Party, like many Edwards films, has an aspect of a fairy tale, but it also serves as Edwards's reminder to himself that there are values that are too precious to be lost.
--Myron Meisel, American Directors (Volume II)
Why some people admire Blake Edwards and others hate him has always been a mystery to me, though I think it has something to with attitudes to comedy. Comedies vary between situational humor and anarchic humor and most comedies are one or the other, situational often being more verbal and anarchic being more physical, the difference between Lubitsch (whom I like) and the Marx Brothers (whom I don't like). Blake Edwards is an unusual director in the way he combines the two, with some of his comedies being more verbal and others more physical. The Party is more physical --there is very little discernible dialogue -- and visual, similar to Chaplin and Keaton and the more contemporary Jacques Tati. Edwards is a master of the widescreen and with his cinematographer Lucien Ballard (who did a number of Sam Peckinpah's movies) creates rich and complex images, with different things happening in different parts of the screen. In the center of it, and often on the sides, is Peter Sellers as the Indian Hrundi V. Bakshi, who is serene about himself but lost and confused on a film set and at a Hollywood party to which he is accidentally invited.
Like the best comedies The Party is effective on mulitple levels. Bakshi is an outsider at the party and is as unsuccessful at conversation with self-involved Hollywood snobs as he is at finding the bathroom which, when he does find it, overflows as he tries to stuff in it the toilet paper that seems to have a life of its own. Edwards's film is very much of its time (1968) in its attempts find common ground among cultures (Russian ballet dancers show up at the party) and shows an understanding of generation and cultural divides, as Sellers and Claudie Longet (who sings and plays the guitar) hook up to wash off an elephant that hippies have painted with slogans. But The Party also transcends its time in its examination of the difficulties of social interaction in a strange environment and Edwards's use of exquisite detail, especially in the details of the house where the party is taking place, the food served, and the overworked kitchen staff listening to Vin Scully announcing a Dodgers game on the radio.
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Sam Woods's Kitty Foyle 1940
Menzies created the whole look of the film; I simply followed his orders. Sam Wood just directed the actors; he knew nothing about visuals.
--cinematographer Lee Garmes
Everything about Kitty Foyle is, in fact, a presentation of two choices: the right and wrong ways for a woman to live, think, love, marry.
--Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View (Knopf, 1993)
Unfortunately William Cameron Menzies did not work on Kitty Foyle; though Wood did a fair job of directing star Ginger Rogers in her attempt to distance herself from Fred Astaire the film has little visual distinction and a confusing flashback structure. It is a soap opera, a "woman's picture" without the irony of Douglas Sirk or the searing social analysis of John T. Stahl. There is unintentional irony in Sam Wood, who became a ferocious anti-communist, directing a film about class struggle that is written by Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten.
Kitty Foyle, played by Ginger Rogers, is a working class girl in Philadelphia who gets a job as secretary to Wyn Stafford (Dennis Morgan), a wealthy magazine editor. Kitty falls in love with Wyn and when the magazine folds (after Wyn uses up all the family money he's been given for it) Kitty and Wyn are in love and Wyn offers to keep paying Kitty's salary. Kitty is offended and moves to New York, where she meets a doctor, Mark Eisen (James Craig). Just when she starts to fall for the doctor Wyn shows up and offers to marry her. She hesitates because of their class difference but Wyn assures her they will live in N.Y. They marry but when they return to visit Wyn's snobbish family he finds out that he will not receive his trust money if he leaves and he decides they have to stay in Philadelphia after all. Kitty stalks out and returns to N.Y., gets a divorce, and finds out she is pregnant. The baby dies at birth and Kitty takes a job at a new branch of the store where she works. The new branch turns out to be in Philadelphia, where she runs into Wyn's wife and young son. Kitty goes back to New York and plans to marry the doctor and then Wyn suddenly shows up and says he wants Kitty to go with him to South America, though he says he can't get a divorce. Kitty hesitates and then leaves to marry the doctor, choosing honesty and integrity over money and social standing; we last see her in a cab headed to the church.
Both of Kitty's suitors are sleazy and manipulative, so why does Kitty have to settle on either of them? But Trumbo and Wood don't seem to see any other choice; their film seems to reflect the times without being particularly critical of them.
--cinematographer Lee Garmes
Everything about Kitty Foyle is, in fact, a presentation of two choices: the right and wrong ways for a woman to live, think, love, marry.
--Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View (Knopf, 1993)
Unfortunately William Cameron Menzies did not work on Kitty Foyle; though Wood did a fair job of directing star Ginger Rogers in her attempt to distance herself from Fred Astaire the film has little visual distinction and a confusing flashback structure. It is a soap opera, a "woman's picture" without the irony of Douglas Sirk or the searing social analysis of John T. Stahl. There is unintentional irony in Sam Wood, who became a ferocious anti-communist, directing a film about class struggle that is written by Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten.
Kitty Foyle, played by Ginger Rogers, is a working class girl in Philadelphia who gets a job as secretary to Wyn Stafford (Dennis Morgan), a wealthy magazine editor. Kitty falls in love with Wyn and when the magazine folds (after Wyn uses up all the family money he's been given for it) Kitty and Wyn are in love and Wyn offers to keep paying Kitty's salary. Kitty is offended and moves to New York, where she meets a doctor, Mark Eisen (James Craig). Just when she starts to fall for the doctor Wyn shows up and offers to marry her. She hesitates because of their class difference but Wyn assures her they will live in N.Y. They marry but when they return to visit Wyn's snobbish family he finds out that he will not receive his trust money if he leaves and he decides they have to stay in Philadelphia after all. Kitty stalks out and returns to N.Y., gets a divorce, and finds out she is pregnant. The baby dies at birth and Kitty takes a job at a new branch of the store where she works. The new branch turns out to be in Philadelphia, where she runs into Wyn's wife and young son. Kitty goes back to New York and plans to marry the doctor and then Wyn suddenly shows up and says he wants Kitty to go with him to South America, though he says he can't get a divorce. Kitty hesitates and then leaves to marry the doctor, choosing honesty and integrity over money and social standing; we last see her in a cab headed to the church.
Both of Kitty's suitors are sleazy and manipulative, so why does Kitty have to settle on either of them? But Trumbo and Wood don't seem to see any other choice; their film seems to reflect the times without being particularly critical of them.
Monday, April 15, 2019
Michael Powell's Crown v. Stevens (1936)
The thirties was a period of "quota quickies" in England; in an attempt to reduce the number of American films in English movie theatres the law said that 20% of exhibited films had to be British, though they were sometimes allowed to use American stars. Just as B films in the U. S. allowed some directors to learn their craft by keeping within budgets and allotted running times (see my previous blog entry) "quota quickies" had a similar effect, though they failed to markedly improve British films overall.
Crown v. Stevens is a quota quickie directed by Michael Powell, who eventually went on to direct The Red Shoes (1948) and other brilliant and quirky films; if it had been made in America after WWII it probably would have been labeled a film noir. It is photographed by Basil Emmott (one of ten British films he photographed in 1936) and he and Powell use claustrophobic sets and shadowy black-and-white cinematography to portray a film of fatalism and class conflict. Patrick Knowles plays Chris Jensen, a low-paid clerk in a design firm, whose intended bride takes the diamond ring he has for her and absconds with it. He only had the ring on approval and when he goes to see the moneylender who sold him the ring to plead for time to pay he discovers the moneylender dead and a woman (played by Beatrix Thomson, in one of her only four film roles) hiding behind a curtain with a gun, claiming that the moneylender had attacked her. Jensen does not know what to do and while he ponders what to do next he is asked to pick something up at his boss's house and there discovers that the woman he had seen was Doris Stevens, his boss's wife, "a million people in London and it had to be you," she says. Jensen now thinks if he reports his boss's wife he will lose his job, which he desperately needs. Meanwhile Doris's friend, played by the estimable Googie Withers, inadvertently gives Doris an idea, to kill her husband and use the money from his will to buy clothes and to party, her husband being something of a skinflint. Doris poisons her husband and then leaves him in their motorcar with the engine running, but he is rescued by Jensen and his new girlfriend Molly (Glennis Lorimer).
All this and more in a brisk 66 minutes. At one point Mrs. Stevens takes the gun she had used to shoot the moneylender and drops it off a bridge, where (unfortunately for her) it lands in a boat and is delivered to the police. This seemed familiar to me and I remembered the same thing had happened to a gun that Lee. J. Cobb dropped off a bridge in Felix Feist's The Man Who Cheated Himself (blog post of 7/1/18); there undoubtedly is a moral here somewhere. Powell is particularly good at getting subtle performances from his actors, who are mostly from the stage, and at using his low budget and limited sets to show how easy it can be for one to become trapped in circumstances, including an elaborate ceiling looming ominously over Mr. Stevens.
Crown v. Stevens is a quota quickie directed by Michael Powell, who eventually went on to direct The Red Shoes (1948) and other brilliant and quirky films; if it had been made in America after WWII it probably would have been labeled a film noir. It is photographed by Basil Emmott (one of ten British films he photographed in 1936) and he and Powell use claustrophobic sets and shadowy black-and-white cinematography to portray a film of fatalism and class conflict. Patrick Knowles plays Chris Jensen, a low-paid clerk in a design firm, whose intended bride takes the diamond ring he has for her and absconds with it. He only had the ring on approval and when he goes to see the moneylender who sold him the ring to plead for time to pay he discovers the moneylender dead and a woman (played by Beatrix Thomson, in one of her only four film roles) hiding behind a curtain with a gun, claiming that the moneylender had attacked her. Jensen does not know what to do and while he ponders what to do next he is asked to pick something up at his boss's house and there discovers that the woman he had seen was Doris Stevens, his boss's wife, "a million people in London and it had to be you," she says. Jensen now thinks if he reports his boss's wife he will lose his job, which he desperately needs. Meanwhile Doris's friend, played by the estimable Googie Withers, inadvertently gives Doris an idea, to kill her husband and use the money from his will to buy clothes and to party, her husband being something of a skinflint. Doris poisons her husband and then leaves him in their motorcar with the engine running, but he is rescued by Jensen and his new girlfriend Molly (Glennis Lorimer).
All this and more in a brisk 66 minutes. At one point Mrs. Stevens takes the gun she had used to shoot the moneylender and drops it off a bridge, where (unfortunately for her) it lands in a boat and is delivered to the police. This seemed familiar to me and I remembered the same thing had happened to a gun that Lee. J. Cobb dropped off a bridge in Felix Feist's The Man Who Cheated Himself (blog post of 7/1/18); there undoubtedly is a moral here somewhere. Powell is particularly good at getting subtle performances from his actors, who are mostly from the stage, and at using his low budget and limited sets to show how easy it can be for one to become trapped in circumstances, including an elaborate ceiling looming ominously over Mr. Stevens.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Robert Florey's The House on 56th Street
Kay Francis, largely forgotten today, was a key actress in the pre-code period, when thieves and murderers could go unpunished. Francis was never that assertive and did have a slight lisp but she could roll with the punches and finally departed from Warner Brothers when she could not get good parts and good directors, the way the feisty Bette Davis could. Kay Francis was particularly adept at low-key comedy -- masking her fragility with witty brilliance, as anyone who watches Lubitsch's elegant Trouble in Paradise (1932) can see. Unfortunately this was one of Francis's few films made with a director who understood her; she was often in weepies where she was wreathed in furs and diamonds. The House on 56th St. is one of those films, but it is intelligently and briskly directed by Robert Florey, a director who could do wonders with a relatively low budget.
"The House on 56th St". is where wealthy Monty Van Tyle (Gene Raymond) takes his bride, Peggy (Kay Francis), a chorus girl, in 1905,and when they go to Europe on their honeymoon Monty convinces Peggy to give up gambling. After they move permanently into 56th Street and have a baby Peggy goes to bid farewell to her former lover, Lyndon Fiske (John Halliday), who regrets having told Peggy that he is "not the marrying kind" and takes out a gun to kill himself. Peggy struggles to take the gun away, Fiske is shot and Peggy gets twenty years for manslaughter. Monty stands by her and while she is incarcerated a montage of newspaper headlines shows time passing during the Great War. Then Peggy receives a telegram: Monty was killed in action. After twenty years Peggy is released, to a very different New York. She is paid off by her mother-in-law to let her daughter think she is dead and takes up with crooked gambler Bill Blaine (Ricardo Cortez) to take money from suckers on ships. Eventually they get offered a job at a speakeasy, which turns out to be the old house on 56th St., long boarded up. Peggy become a successful blackjack dealer and one day her married daughter Eleanor (Margaret Lindsay) shows up to gamble Peggy doesn't reveal her identity but sees that Eleanor loses $5000, to teach her a lesson. Blaine doesn't know about Peggy and Eleanor and threatens to call Eleanor's husband. Eleanor impulsively shoots Blaine with the gun in his drawer. Peggy's boss gets rid of the body, Eleanor leaves for Europe with her husband, and Peggy remains in the house on 56th Street.
Florey tells this emotional story in 68 minutes,with passion and great deal of unobtrusive period detail. Florey was French and came to Hollywood to learn the film business, eventually working his way up to director, though most of his films were B films; this did give him considerable leeway to make them stylish as long as he kept them on schedule and on budget.
"The House on 56th St". is where wealthy Monty Van Tyle (Gene Raymond) takes his bride, Peggy (Kay Francis), a chorus girl, in 1905,and when they go to Europe on their honeymoon Monty convinces Peggy to give up gambling. After they move permanently into 56th Street and have a baby Peggy goes to bid farewell to her former lover, Lyndon Fiske (John Halliday), who regrets having told Peggy that he is "not the marrying kind" and takes out a gun to kill himself. Peggy struggles to take the gun away, Fiske is shot and Peggy gets twenty years for manslaughter. Monty stands by her and while she is incarcerated a montage of newspaper headlines shows time passing during the Great War. Then Peggy receives a telegram: Monty was killed in action. After twenty years Peggy is released, to a very different New York. She is paid off by her mother-in-law to let her daughter think she is dead and takes up with crooked gambler Bill Blaine (Ricardo Cortez) to take money from suckers on ships. Eventually they get offered a job at a speakeasy, which turns out to be the old house on 56th St., long boarded up. Peggy become a successful blackjack dealer and one day her married daughter Eleanor (Margaret Lindsay) shows up to gamble Peggy doesn't reveal her identity but sees that Eleanor loses $5000, to teach her a lesson. Blaine doesn't know about Peggy and Eleanor and threatens to call Eleanor's husband. Eleanor impulsively shoots Blaine with the gun in his drawer. Peggy's boss gets rid of the body, Eleanor leaves for Europe with her husband, and Peggy remains in the house on 56th Street.
Florey tells this emotional story in 68 minutes,with passion and great deal of unobtrusive period detail. Florey was French and came to Hollywood to learn the film business, eventually working his way up to director, though most of his films were B films; this did give him considerable leeway to make them stylish as long as he kept them on schedule and on budget.
Monday, April 8, 2019
Jean-Pierre Melville's Les Enfants Terribles (1950)
Les Enfants Terribles may be a great film because of Cocteau's novel, but it is that, especially in spite of, and beyond, the novel.
---Noel Burch
Other devices -- such as the unusual camera angles, rhythmic editing and expressionist lighting -- elevate Melville's dual strategy (with the help of Decae), to transform a theatrical space into a cinematic one, while maintaining the "theatricality" of Cocteau's universe.
--Ginette Vincendeau
I would have liked a more fragile. more tender actor in the role of Paul, more ambiguous even. Edouard Dhermitte, with his great strength, left no room for ambiguity.
--Jean-Pierre Melville.
Les Enfants Terribles is an impressively low-key film about youth, incest and gender fluidity. Melville, who was chosen by Cocteau to direct the film after Cocteau had seen Melville's first film Le Silence de la Mer (1947), brought his intelligent style to following the novel relatively closely, with the help of cinematographer Henri Decae, the music of Vivaldi and Bach and an elliptical narration by Cocteau himself.
A brother and sister, Elisabeth and Paul (Edward Dhermitte and Nicole Stephane) live together in a cramped apartment and see little of the outside world, except for Dargelos and Agathe (both played by Renee Cosima), as their relationship gradually become more physically incestuous. Eventually Paul and Agathe confess separately their love for each other to Elisabeth, who keeps it to herself and convinces Agathe to marry their friend Gerard instead. This leads to Paul killing himself with poison and Elisabeth then killing herself with a pistol.
This was only Melville's second film and, understandably influenced by Cocteau, it contains a bit too much surrealism --dream sequences, a statue with a drawn-on mustache, Cocteau's rather obscure narration, etc. --for my taste but shows an impressive imagination on the part of Melville (very much influenced by Orson Welles at this point) and some complicated special effects, doing a great deal with an extremely limited budget.
---Noel Burch
Other devices -- such as the unusual camera angles, rhythmic editing and expressionist lighting -- elevate Melville's dual strategy (with the help of Decae), to transform a theatrical space into a cinematic one, while maintaining the "theatricality" of Cocteau's universe.
--Ginette Vincendeau
I would have liked a more fragile. more tender actor in the role of Paul, more ambiguous even. Edouard Dhermitte, with his great strength, left no room for ambiguity.
--Jean-Pierre Melville.
Les Enfants Terribles is an impressively low-key film about youth, incest and gender fluidity. Melville, who was chosen by Cocteau to direct the film after Cocteau had seen Melville's first film Le Silence de la Mer (1947), brought his intelligent style to following the novel relatively closely, with the help of cinematographer Henri Decae, the music of Vivaldi and Bach and an elliptical narration by Cocteau himself.
A brother and sister, Elisabeth and Paul (Edward Dhermitte and Nicole Stephane) live together in a cramped apartment and see little of the outside world, except for Dargelos and Agathe (both played by Renee Cosima), as their relationship gradually become more physically incestuous. Eventually Paul and Agathe confess separately their love for each other to Elisabeth, who keeps it to herself and convinces Agathe to marry their friend Gerard instead. This leads to Paul killing himself with poison and Elisabeth then killing herself with a pistol.
This was only Melville's second film and, understandably influenced by Cocteau, it contains a bit too much surrealism --dream sequences, a statue with a drawn-on mustache, Cocteau's rather obscure narration, etc. --for my taste but shows an impressive imagination on the part of Melville (very much influenced by Orson Welles at this point) and some complicated special effects, doing a great deal with an extremely limited budget.
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Samuel Fuller's Park Row (1952).
Just as violence is at the core of Fuller's world, so his style centers on the violent working-together of disparate elements, the long take with the moving camera. The essence of Fuller's style lies in creating dramatic confrontations by disrupting the spatial unity of a scene; the sacrifice of external naturalism to internal significance.
--Phil Hardy, Samuel Fuller (Praeger, 1970).
At the beginning of Park Row there is a list of the 1772 daily newspapers in the United States. "one of these newspapers is yours." Many of these newspapers no longer exist, others are now owned by faceless corporations; the world of journalism has changed. Fuller's film reminds one of what journalism was like when it had barely begun. Park Row takes place in the 1880s: Mergenthaler's invention of a line-typesetting machine, the first newsstands, wholesale distribution, circulation wars, multiple editions a day. This is all shown against the backdrop of Joseph Pulitzer's subscription drive to pay for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty and Steve Brodie's leap from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Samuel Fuller started in journalism as a copyboy at 14. When I was that age I was reading several New York newspapers a day, a way to learn about the world in my small upstate town with no bookstores or library and no books in the home. I read the Daily News, Mirror, Herald-Tribune and Times in the morning and Post and Journal-American in the afternoon. I had a paper route delivering the Hudson Register-Star and, later, the Albany Times-Union. Fuller became a crime reporter, wrote pulp novels in the thirties, served in WWII and made his first film in 1949.
Park Row is a highly personal film made on a shoestring, recreating a world now even further in the past but one from which we can still learn about the importance of freedom of the press. The names of Zenger, Pulitzer and Horace Greeley are often mentioned and editor and publisher Phineas Mitchell (played by Gene Evans) keeps their pictures in the composing room; there is a statue of Benjamin Franklin on Park Row. Mitchell's big rival is Charity Hackett (played by Mary Welch, in her only film role), who is treated as an important newspaper publisher with little reference to her sex, whose newspaper eventually merges with Mitchell's. Park Row, like other Fuller films, is made with a passion for the importance of history.
--Phil Hardy, Samuel Fuller (Praeger, 1970).
At the beginning of Park Row there is a list of the 1772 daily newspapers in the United States. "one of these newspapers is yours." Many of these newspapers no longer exist, others are now owned by faceless corporations; the world of journalism has changed. Fuller's film reminds one of what journalism was like when it had barely begun. Park Row takes place in the 1880s: Mergenthaler's invention of a line-typesetting machine, the first newsstands, wholesale distribution, circulation wars, multiple editions a day. This is all shown against the backdrop of Joseph Pulitzer's subscription drive to pay for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty and Steve Brodie's leap from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Samuel Fuller started in journalism as a copyboy at 14. When I was that age I was reading several New York newspapers a day, a way to learn about the world in my small upstate town with no bookstores or library and no books in the home. I read the Daily News, Mirror, Herald-Tribune and Times in the morning and Post and Journal-American in the afternoon. I had a paper route delivering the Hudson Register-Star and, later, the Albany Times-Union. Fuller became a crime reporter, wrote pulp novels in the thirties, served in WWII and made his first film in 1949.
Park Row is a highly personal film made on a shoestring, recreating a world now even further in the past but one from which we can still learn about the importance of freedom of the press. The names of Zenger, Pulitzer and Horace Greeley are often mentioned and editor and publisher Phineas Mitchell (played by Gene Evans) keeps their pictures in the composing room; there is a statue of Benjamin Franklin on Park Row. Mitchell's big rival is Charity Hackett (played by Mary Welch, in her only film role), who is treated as an important newspaper publisher with little reference to her sex, whose newspaper eventually merges with Mitchell's. Park Row, like other Fuller films, is made with a passion for the importance of history.
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