July is a solid month of movies at TCM but not much I haven't written about before (as usual please send me an e-mail if you have any questions about any movies on Turner).
July 2nd has two excellent Fritz Lang science fiction films from the silent era: Metropolis (1926) and Die Frau im Mond (1929).
July 4th has three beautiful and intense Westerns by John Ford: The Searchers (1956), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Fort Apache (1948)
July 5th has Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).
July 7th there's Mark Sandrich's lovely Rogers and Astaire musical The Gay Divorcee (1934).
On July 20th is Leo McCarey's strange spy story Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) and on the 26th is McCarey's lovely Love Affair (1949).
On the 28th is Jean-Pierre Melville's beautiful Le Samourai (1967).
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Harry Beaumont's When Ladies Meet (1933)
One can tell that this is a pre-Code film not only because it uses the word "virgin" but also because it has plenty of adultery and non-marital sex and discusses it in detail. The estimable Ann Harding plays Claire, married to publisher Rogers Woodruff (Frank Morgan), whose mistress Mary Howard (Myrna Loy) is one of his authors. Jimmy (Robert Montgomery) is in love with Mary and uses devious means to get Claire and Mary to meet at Bridget's (Alice Brady) summer house without either of them knowing who the other woman is. Mary and Claire discuss Mary's latest book, which has a plot about a married publisher and his mistress and they discuss how the characters behave. Rogers arrives and all is revealed. Claire relates how Mary is just another woman in Rogers's long list of them and storms out, while Mary and Jimmy have breakfast.
When Ladies Meet is beautifully acted and directed, with elegant art direction by Cedric Gibbons and cinematography by Ray June, The film has a certain level of snappy dialogue (Jimmy says of Mary "I am the dust beneath her feet, not the cream in her coffee") from the original play by Rachel Crothers,but this is clearly an attempt by all concerned to cover up their unhappiness and confusion. Even Bridget is getting older and feeling her own mortality, keeping a young man around to sleep with. And nothing gets resolved: will Claire finally leave Rogers (they have two children) and will Jimmy end up with Mary? Beaumont (who directed silent films and later B movies) effectively uses long shots and a minimum of close-ups and sets to keep the original play's complexities under control and keep the audience involved, emphasizing that there are few easy answers to life's dilemmas.
When Ladies Meet is beautifully acted and directed, with elegant art direction by Cedric Gibbons and cinematography by Ray June, The film has a certain level of snappy dialogue (Jimmy says of Mary "I am the dust beneath her feet, not the cream in her coffee") from the original play by Rachel Crothers,but this is clearly an attempt by all concerned to cover up their unhappiness and confusion. Even Bridget is getting older and feeling her own mortality, keeping a young man around to sleep with. And nothing gets resolved: will Claire finally leave Rogers (they have two children) and will Jimmy end up with Mary? Beaumont (who directed silent films and later B movies) effectively uses long shots and a minimum of close-ups and sets to keep the original play's complexities under control and keep the audience involved, emphasizing that there are few easy answers to life's dilemmas.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and Blake Edwards's "10" (1979)
As readers of this blog know I tend to be a splitter rather than a lumper but I was surprised to find many similarities between David Lean's Brief Encounter and Blake Edwards's "10" when they were recently broadcast on Turner Classic Movies: both movies are about temptation that is resisted by continuing commitment and each effectively evokes a time and a place, England in 1945 and America in 1979,
Brief Encounter is based on a Noel Coward play and concentrateds on two characters (Celia Johnson as Laura Jesson and Trevor Howard as Dr. Alec Harvey) and one major location (a train station in suburban England). Jesson and Harvey are both married with two children each, fall in love after a chance encounter, unsuccessfully try to consummate their relationship (the owner of a borrowed flat returns too early) and fail to overcome their guilt and shame; Harvey moves to Africa with his family and Jesson returns to her husband. In "10" George Webber (Dudley Moore) sees Jenny Hanley (Bo Derek) on her way to her wedding, follows her on her honeymoon to Mexico, rescues her husband from being washed out to sea, tries to make love to Jenny and fails because of impotence and returns to his lover Samantha Taylor(Julie Andrews)
Music is important in both films: Lean uses the rich romanticism of Rachmaninoff's Concerto #2 throughout Brief Encounter, George in "10" is a composer, Samantha is a singer and the score is by the more modern romantic Henry Mancini, who scored a number of films for director Blake Edwards. In Brief Encounter when Laura and Alec meet at a restaurant they are entertained by an all-female music ensemble, presumably because of the war, which is never even mentioned in Lean's film, just as the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, is never mentioned in "10." Jenny insists to George that they make love to Ravel's Bolero.
Brief Encounter is in beautiful black-and-white (cinematography by Robert Lasker) while "10" is in bright colors (cinematography by Frank Stanley) In Brief Encounter Alec and Laura are about the same age (and they both wish they had met when they were younger) while George is almost twice Jenny's age and perhaps trying to rediscover his youth, just as Alec and Laura are. Because Brief Encounter is from a Noel Coward play the secret meetings between Alec and Laura might also be a reference to the secrecy of homosexuality, against the law in England until 1967. George's songwriting partner Hugh (Robert Webber) is gay and lonely, strongly urges George to stay with Samantha. Brief Encounter is narrated by Laura, in flashbacks, while "10" is seen almost exclusively from George's point of view.
Brief Encounter is based on a Noel Coward play and concentrateds on two characters (Celia Johnson as Laura Jesson and Trevor Howard as Dr. Alec Harvey) and one major location (a train station in suburban England). Jesson and Harvey are both married with two children each, fall in love after a chance encounter, unsuccessfully try to consummate their relationship (the owner of a borrowed flat returns too early) and fail to overcome their guilt and shame; Harvey moves to Africa with his family and Jesson returns to her husband. In "10" George Webber (Dudley Moore) sees Jenny Hanley (Bo Derek) on her way to her wedding, follows her on her honeymoon to Mexico, rescues her husband from being washed out to sea, tries to make love to Jenny and fails because of impotence and returns to his lover Samantha Taylor(Julie Andrews)
Music is important in both films: Lean uses the rich romanticism of Rachmaninoff's Concerto #2 throughout Brief Encounter, George in "10" is a composer, Samantha is a singer and the score is by the more modern romantic Henry Mancini, who scored a number of films for director Blake Edwards. In Brief Encounter when Laura and Alec meet at a restaurant they are entertained by an all-female music ensemble, presumably because of the war, which is never even mentioned in Lean's film, just as the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, is never mentioned in "10." Jenny insists to George that they make love to Ravel's Bolero.
Brief Encounter is in beautiful black-and-white (cinematography by Robert Lasker) while "10" is in bright colors (cinematography by Frank Stanley) In Brief Encounter Alec and Laura are about the same age (and they both wish they had met when they were younger) while George is almost twice Jenny's age and perhaps trying to rediscover his youth, just as Alec and Laura are. Because Brief Encounter is from a Noel Coward play the secret meetings between Alec and Laura might also be a reference to the secrecy of homosexuality, against the law in England until 1967. George's songwriting partner Hugh (Robert Webber) is gay and lonely, strongly urges George to stay with Samantha. Brief Encounter is narrated by Laura, in flashbacks, while "10" is seen almost exclusively from George's point of view.
Monday, June 17, 2019
Joseph McBride's Frankly Unmasking Frank Capra
I have found as a writer of film books that it is less important how many books I sell than who reads them.
So if we ask what purpose biographies of film directors serve, that is the answer. Like any biography worth writing, they fulfill the need to know the truth for people who care deeply enough to want it.
--Joseph McBride, Frankly Unmasking Frank Capra (Hightower Press, 2019).
This book is a detailed narrative of how McBride was able to finish his biography of Frank Capra and get it published after a long struggle with publishers, agents, lawyers and archivists. I suggest that one should read Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success in order to better understand the current book. I never understood the feel-good Christmas movie that It's a Wonderful Life has become -- since I grew up in a small town I understood the dark and suicidal tendencies of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) -- but I did appreciate the skillful and intelligent direction of such earlier Capra films as American Madness (1932) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). In his biography McBride starts with Capra's arrival in the U.S. as a child and follows Capra's career from his silent films through his later informing during the Cold War years and his artistic self-destruction.
In Frankly McBride narrates the story of his original contract signing with Random House and his struggles with editor Gottlieb and archivist Jenine Basinger, who controls the Capra archive at Wesleyan and originally gave McBride access, at least until she began to suspect that McBride was not going along with her view and Capra's own view (in his fabricated book The Name Above the Title) of his life and films. The book is effectively McBride's point of view and he marshals considerable evidence, circumstantial and direct, that Gottlieb, subsequent editors (after Gottlieb left for The New Yorker) at Random House, and Basinger wanted to sanitize Capra's life, playing both chess and chicken with McBride. McBride's struggle with Random House and its lawyers -- while he struggles to make ends meet with full-time writing financed with relatively small advances and considerable borrowing -- takes on aspects of Capra's films about grappling with the powerful, aspects that come more from screenwriters Robert Riskin, Sidney Buchman and Michael Wilson than from Capra himself, as McBride demonstrates in his biography.
Be careful with your choices of lawyers and agents if you are a writer. Also, writing is a lonely business and McBride gives much credit to his companion Ruth O'Hara, who helped and advised him much of the way. I met Joseph McBride once, in Los Angeles, in 1981 when I was grandly thinking of writing a biography of Howard Hawks, who went briefly to the same prep school I attended and whose films I admired, and McBride generously spent an evening with me, giving me advice and encouragement. McBride also considerably influenced my own thinking about film, with his excellent book on John Ford he wrote with Michael Wilmington and published in 1975. McBride writes intelligently in Frankly of what the film industry has become and how research has narrowed in an era when fewer and fewer people have even heard of Frank Capra, or even John Ford and D. W. Griffith.
So if we ask what purpose biographies of film directors serve, that is the answer. Like any biography worth writing, they fulfill the need to know the truth for people who care deeply enough to want it.
--Joseph McBride, Frankly Unmasking Frank Capra (Hightower Press, 2019).
This book is a detailed narrative of how McBride was able to finish his biography of Frank Capra and get it published after a long struggle with publishers, agents, lawyers and archivists. I suggest that one should read Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success in order to better understand the current book. I never understood the feel-good Christmas movie that It's a Wonderful Life has become -- since I grew up in a small town I understood the dark and suicidal tendencies of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) -- but I did appreciate the skillful and intelligent direction of such earlier Capra films as American Madness (1932) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). In his biography McBride starts with Capra's arrival in the U.S. as a child and follows Capra's career from his silent films through his later informing during the Cold War years and his artistic self-destruction.
In Frankly McBride narrates the story of his original contract signing with Random House and his struggles with editor Gottlieb and archivist Jenine Basinger, who controls the Capra archive at Wesleyan and originally gave McBride access, at least until she began to suspect that McBride was not going along with her view and Capra's own view (in his fabricated book The Name Above the Title) of his life and films. The book is effectively McBride's point of view and he marshals considerable evidence, circumstantial and direct, that Gottlieb, subsequent editors (after Gottlieb left for The New Yorker) at Random House, and Basinger wanted to sanitize Capra's life, playing both chess and chicken with McBride. McBride's struggle with Random House and its lawyers -- while he struggles to make ends meet with full-time writing financed with relatively small advances and considerable borrowing -- takes on aspects of Capra's films about grappling with the powerful, aspects that come more from screenwriters Robert Riskin, Sidney Buchman and Michael Wilson than from Capra himself, as McBride demonstrates in his biography.
Be careful with your choices of lawyers and agents if you are a writer. Also, writing is a lonely business and McBride gives much credit to his companion Ruth O'Hara, who helped and advised him much of the way. I met Joseph McBride once, in Los Angeles, in 1981 when I was grandly thinking of writing a biography of Howard Hawks, who went briefly to the same prep school I attended and whose films I admired, and McBride generously spent an evening with me, giving me advice and encouragement. McBride also considerably influenced my own thinking about film, with his excellent book on John Ford he wrote with Michael Wilmington and published in 1975. McBride writes intelligently in Frankly of what the film industry has become and how research has narrowed in an era when fewer and fewer people have even heard of Frank Capra, or even John Ford and D. W. Griffith.
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Monrovia, Indiana and Monkey Business
A couple of days after watching Monrovia, Indiana, which ends in a graveyard, I was at a funeral in New Jersey: Susan's brother-in-law had suddenly died. Frederick Wiseman's documentary ends in a graveyard, with a truck dumping dirt into a grave, and I was already thinking about my mortality. Wiseman turned 88 in 2018, when Monrovia, Indiana was released and one wonders how many more marvelous documentaries he will make. Wiseman's style --no narration or identification of speakers -- is not to everyone's taste but is a very effective means of portraying the places and institutions his films are about, beginning with Titticut Follies in 1967 and including films about everything from ballet companies to state legislatures. In Wiseman's film about Monrovia we see high schoolers, gun shop owners, restaurant workers, lodge members, farmers, et al. going about their business of earning a living and occasionally having a cup of coffee with friends and talking about their medical problems. Wiseman captures the fleeting beauty of the landscape of everyday life, ending his film with long scenes of a funeral and a burial in a graveyard.
Howard Hawks was 56 when he made Monkey Business, a comedy about the discovery of a drug that can make one feel young again, starring Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers. Of course absent-minded professor Cary Grant does not discover the drug; it is mixed by a chimpanzee and accidentally put in the water cooler. Grant and Rogers both drink the water with the drug, though it wears off at different times, causing no end of problems with their relationship. Hawks, as usual, shoots everything at eye level and takes it very seriously, as good directors of comedy do. One may or may not find this film funny but it is also very serious in its examination of the perils and advantages of civilization; it is not coincidence that the drug is mixed by an ape and takes one back to a kind of savagery, as Grant leads a bunch of kids dressed as Indians in an attempt to "scalp" his wife's previous boyfriend, a scene weirdly predictive of John Ford's The Searchers (1956), especially since two cast members of Ford's film --Olive Carey and Harry Carey, Jr. -- have small roles in Monkey Business.
Howard Hawks was 56 when he made Monkey Business, a comedy about the discovery of a drug that can make one feel young again, starring Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers. Of course absent-minded professor Cary Grant does not discover the drug; it is mixed by a chimpanzee and accidentally put in the water cooler. Grant and Rogers both drink the water with the drug, though it wears off at different times, causing no end of problems with their relationship. Hawks, as usual, shoots everything at eye level and takes it very seriously, as good directors of comedy do. One may or may not find this film funny but it is also very serious in its examination of the perils and advantages of civilization; it is not coincidence that the drug is mixed by an ape and takes one back to a kind of savagery, as Grant leads a bunch of kids dressed as Indians in an attempt to "scalp" his wife's previous boyfriend, a scene weirdly predictive of John Ford's The Searchers (1956), especially since two cast members of Ford's film --Olive Carey and Harry Carey, Jr. -- have small roles in Monkey Business.
Monday, June 3, 2019
A Midsummer Night's Dream NYC Ballet June 1, 2019
I have few quibbles with George Balanchine's exquisite A Midsummer Night's Dream (see my posts of May 29, 2016 and May 29, 2017) except that the second act is too short, cut somewhat from the 1962 premiere, presumably, as Arlene Croce has written, "to pacify restless Nutcracker-prone audiences." Croce goes on to say "So much of the choreography [in the second act] is a condensation to begin with; in condensed and abstracted form, it continues the first act's story of love and folly." (The New Yorker, March 23 1981, reprinted in Going to the Dance.). I was not surprised that my eight-year-old daughter preferred the first act ("because of its story") though she did appreciate the complex and beautiful choreography of the second act, with the divertissement danced by Megan Fairchild and Tyler Angle.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is another one of the Balanchine ballets that seemed neglected by Peter Martins and now has refurbished costumes and scenery. The first act follows the Shakespeare play and replaces Shakespeare's poetry with expressive dancing and some mime. In the first act Joseph Gordon was Oberon and Miriam Miller was Titania, both forceful and elegant. The children from The School of American Ballet were rehearsed and supervised by Dana Abergel and Arch Higgins and were all terrific. The second act is ostensibly abstract but, as usual in Balanchine's "abstract" ballets it is about many things, including the love that exists after all the quarrels in the first act. I was also pleased with how wonderful the corps was, in both technique and attack.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is another one of the Balanchine ballets that seemed neglected by Peter Martins and now has refurbished costumes and scenery. The first act follows the Shakespeare play and replaces Shakespeare's poetry with expressive dancing and some mime. In the first act Joseph Gordon was Oberon and Miriam Miller was Titania, both forceful and elegant. The children from The School of American Ballet were rehearsed and supervised by Dana Abergel and Arch Higgins and were all terrific. The second act is ostensibly abstract but, as usual in Balanchine's "abstract" ballets it is about many things, including the love that exists after all the quarrels in the first act. I was also pleased with how wonderful the corps was, in both technique and attack.
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