Turner Classic Movies recently showed Lesley Selander's Fort Vengeance, from 1953, in a tribute to Rito Moreno, whose part is small indeed, with one good scene of her dancing. Selander is sometimes listed as the most prolific of Western directors, having directed 107 Westerns from 1935 to 1967, after which he shifted to TV. In 1951 Selander directed eight films, not all of them Westerns. The script for Fort Vengeance was an original screenplay by Daniel Ullman, who wrote many B films, and photographed by Harry Neumann, who photographed many B films.
The pleasures of a Western --like other genres, including horror and film noir -- include the tension between the conventions of the genre and the derivations from it. Some of the greatest directors (Anthony Mann, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Budd Boetticher, et al.) put a very personal stamp on their Westerns, often using genre conventions with particular insights and analyses of them. Sam Peckinpah said that anything could be a Western and Selander and Ullman have an interesting approach: Fort Vengeance is a Western that takes place in Canada just after the battle of The Little Bighorn, as Sitting Bull flees to Canada and tries to stir up the Blackfeet. The cavalry are pursuing Sitting Bull while two gunmen (James Craig and Keith Larsen) escape a posse by crossing the Canadian border and joining the newly-formed Northwest Mounted Police, whose files of red coats in the wilderness are a visual motif throughout the film. The Mounties, led by Reginald Denny, want to keep the peace and don't want the involvement of American troops, who offer to attack and kill the Indians. Keith Larsen steals furs that the Indians have trapped and almost provokes a war, until his brother tracks down and kills him in a shoot-out and the peace of the Queen is kept.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Monday, October 28, 2019
Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2019
A pretty good month of solid examples of the classical cinema, with lots of John Ford and Bette Davis:
On the 2nd is John Ford's The Searchers, 1956, and Alexander Mackendrick's corrosive The Sweet Smell of Success , also 1956.
On the 5th is James Whale's moving film Waterloo Bridge, 1931, its pre-Code grittiness much preferable to Mervyn LeRoy's 1940 version.
On the 6th is John Ford' The Grapes of Wrath, 1940 and F.W. Murnau's exquisite Sunrise,1927.
On the 8th is Raoul Walsh's superb Western They Died with Their Boots On, 1941.
On the 9th is Roberto Rossellini's marvelous Journey to Italy, 1954
On the 11th is King Vidor's intensive The Big Parade, 1927
On the 13th are two of Michael Powell's loveliest uses of color, Black Narcissus, 1947, and The Red Shoes, 1948
On the 16th is John Ford's colorful and moving Drums Along the Mohawk, 1939
On the 2nd is John Ford's The Searchers, 1956, and Alexander Mackendrick's corrosive The Sweet Smell of Success , also 1956.
On the 5th is James Whale's moving film Waterloo Bridge, 1931, its pre-Code grittiness much preferable to Mervyn LeRoy's 1940 version.
On the 6th is John Ford' The Grapes of Wrath, 1940 and F.W. Murnau's exquisite Sunrise,1927.
On the 8th is Raoul Walsh's superb Western They Died with Their Boots On, 1941.
On the 9th is Roberto Rossellini's marvelous Journey to Italy, 1954
On the 11th is King Vidor's intensive The Big Parade, 1927
On the 13th are two of Michael Powell's loveliest uses of color, Black Narcissus, 1947, and The Red Shoes, 1948
On the 16th is John Ford's colorful and moving Drums Along the Mohawk, 1939
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire (1942)
The film scores through the breathless rhythm of a chase that takes us from a miserable shack shrouded in fog and surrounded by the police to a sensational manhunt inside a gas plant.
-- Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941-1953, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, translated by Paul Hammond (City Lights Books, 2002, from a 1955 French original).
Reading Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris, by Ginette Vincendeau (BFI, 2006) recently I read that Le Samourai, 1967, was strongly influenced by This Gun for Hire, made from a Graham Greene novel in 1942. Although I am not a particular fan of director Tuttle (except, perhaps, for A Cry in the Night, 1956) I now realize that Tuttle was enough of a craftsman (he directed his first film in 1922) to use intelligently the resources of Paramount Studios to create one of the earliest examples of film noir in This Gun for Hire: the inspired casting of Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, the black-and-white chiaroscuro of cinematographer John Seitz (who would do Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity in 1944), the skillful writing of screenwriters Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett.
The disorienting plot follows the confusing narrative of the Greene novel fairly closely, though the Veronica Lake character changes from a chorus girl to a magician dressed as a dominatrix singing "I've Got You Hooked" by Loesser and Press and acting as a spy for a U. S. Senator who suspects that Laird Cregar and the chemical company he works for are selling poison gas to the Japanese. Lake hooks up with misanthropic hit man Alan Ladd, who was paid for a job by Cregar in marked money and is seeking vengeance while being trailed by the cops -- one of whom is Lake's lover -- who know him by the burned wrist he received from his foster mother. Ladd rescues Lake from Cregar, who tries to kill her, and Ladd eventually kills Cregar and Cregar's crooked boss and is killed himself by the cops.
In 1942 there was a great deal of anxiety about America's role in WW II,, but the American film industry quickly switched to more optimistic films than This Gun for Hire and the film noir only flourished later, in the era of postwar disillusionment.
-- Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941-1953, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, translated by Paul Hammond (City Lights Books, 2002, from a 1955 French original).
Reading Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris, by Ginette Vincendeau (BFI, 2006) recently I read that Le Samourai, 1967, was strongly influenced by This Gun for Hire, made from a Graham Greene novel in 1942. Although I am not a particular fan of director Tuttle (except, perhaps, for A Cry in the Night, 1956) I now realize that Tuttle was enough of a craftsman (he directed his first film in 1922) to use intelligently the resources of Paramount Studios to create one of the earliest examples of film noir in This Gun for Hire: the inspired casting of Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, the black-and-white chiaroscuro of cinematographer John Seitz (who would do Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity in 1944), the skillful writing of screenwriters Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett.
The disorienting plot follows the confusing narrative of the Greene novel fairly closely, though the Veronica Lake character changes from a chorus girl to a magician dressed as a dominatrix singing "I've Got You Hooked" by Loesser and Press and acting as a spy for a U. S. Senator who suspects that Laird Cregar and the chemical company he works for are selling poison gas to the Japanese. Lake hooks up with misanthropic hit man Alan Ladd, who was paid for a job by Cregar in marked money and is seeking vengeance while being trailed by the cops -- one of whom is Lake's lover -- who know him by the burned wrist he received from his foster mother. Ladd rescues Lake from Cregar, who tries to kill her, and Ladd eventually kills Cregar and Cregar's crooked boss and is killed himself by the cops.
In 1942 there was a great deal of anxiety about America's role in WW II,, but the American film industry quickly switched to more optimistic films than This Gun for Hire and the film noir only flourished later, in the era of postwar disillusionment.
Friday, October 25, 2019
John Brahm's Let Us Live (1939)
John Brahm, a German émigré, is known for his baroque Gothic dramas The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945) but he started originally in America doing programmers for Columbia, including Let Us Live, similar to two other films by émigré directors about the darkness of the American justice system -- Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1936) and Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1957) --all three films starring Henry Fonda as a good guy suffering the vicissitudes of fate.
Fonda is convicted of a murder and sentenced to the electric chair, the evidence against him somewhat weak except for witnesses' identification. His fiancée, played by Maureen O'Sullivan, searches with off-duty detective Ralph Bellamy for evidence to clear him and finally finds it, just in the nick of time. Fonda is freed but is now bitter and without hope. saying "the law can't admit it's wrong; we have no chance, us little people," the prosecutor having said it is his job to get convictions. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who later became a master of color and the widescreen working with directors Blake Edwards and Sam Peckinpah, here does a beautiful job with Brahm of showing Fonda's world changing visually and psychologically from bright and hopeful to dark, shadowy and despairing, as Bellamy and O'Sullivan trudge through the snow in the attempt to find exonerating evidence.
Fonda is convicted of a murder and sentenced to the electric chair, the evidence against him somewhat weak except for witnesses' identification. His fiancée, played by Maureen O'Sullivan, searches with off-duty detective Ralph Bellamy for evidence to clear him and finally finds it, just in the nick of time. Fonda is freed but is now bitter and without hope. saying "the law can't admit it's wrong; we have no chance, us little people," the prosecutor having said it is his job to get convictions. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who later became a master of color and the widescreen working with directors Blake Edwards and Sam Peckinpah, here does a beautiful job with Brahm of showing Fonda's world changing visually and psychologically from bright and hopeful to dark, shadowy and despairing, as Bellamy and O'Sullivan trudge through the snow in the attempt to find exonerating evidence.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
William Wellman's The Star Witness (1931)
The Star Witness is an excellent example of the swift and incisive films that William Wellman made at Warner Brothers in the early sound era. There is a shooting in the street and the perpetrators come running through the Reeds house, threatening the family and. telling them not to talk. Then the father (Grant Mitchell) gets beaten up after he talks to the gruff D.A. (Walter Huston) and their very young son (Dickie Moore) is kidnapped on his way to play baseball. So the family refuses to testify, except for Gramps (Charles Sale), veteran of the Civil War who denounces the "foreign" gangsters and says Americans need to speak up. Gramps starts walking the streets, playing tunes on his fife, and when the captive Moore hears the familiar tune he throws a baseball out the window and, just in time, he is rescued and the killer is convicted. The film ends with Gramps back at the Soldiers Home, playing his fife as he passes by a cemetery.
Star Witness starts off with the written words "A neighborhood of plain people -- in an American city today" and Wellman and scenarist Lucien Hubbard pack a great deal into this 67-minute film: the heartbreak of Mrs. Reeds (Frances Starr) when her son is missing, comments about then-President Herbert Hoover, memories of the Civil War, the fear of foreign gangsters taking over American streets and towns, the passion of the D.A. to "give him the electric chair", the difficulties of finding a job and supporting a family in 1931, the popularity of baseball, the roles of faith and fate. Wellman and cinematographer James Van Trees use low-angles and traveling shots as well as narrow vertical images to give an idea of how quickly life can change and become disorienting.
Star Witness starts off with the written words "A neighborhood of plain people -- in an American city today" and Wellman and scenarist Lucien Hubbard pack a great deal into this 67-minute film: the heartbreak of Mrs. Reeds (Frances Starr) when her son is missing, comments about then-President Herbert Hoover, memories of the Civil War, the fear of foreign gangsters taking over American streets and towns, the passion of the D.A. to "give him the electric chair", the difficulties of finding a job and supporting a family in 1931, the popularity of baseball, the roles of faith and fate. Wellman and cinematographer James Van Trees use low-angles and traveling shots as well as narrow vertical images to give an idea of how quickly life can change and become disorienting.
Monday, October 21, 2019
Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood's First Writer-Director by Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges
Sturges' reputation today is strangely, and unfairly, diminished. He is known only to cineastes and film historians. He has not established himself as a household name in the same way that Billy Wilder has, for example, or John Huston or John Ford.
That he did not always conquer his demons is not, perhaps surprising -- there were many of them and they took different forms, among them drink, jealousy, and arrogance.
Preston Sturges, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges, Intellect, The University of Chicago Press (2019)
This is a sad and dispiriting book about how little Preston Sturges was able to accomplish after he left Hollywood in 1948, following the financial failures of Unfaithfully Yours (a marvelous film) and The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (somewhat less marvelous). He died in 1959, only able to make one more film, in 1955, the dreary The French They Are a Funny Race (rarely shown; I saw it at the Thalia in the 80's), spending most of that time in France, dodging creditors and away from his (fourth) wife and two young children, who he did not see at all in the last two years of his life. He was constantly writing scripts and plays and then self-destructing by not being able to get along with collaborators. On a couple of occasions he was able to get plays produced, only to have them crash and burn under withering criticism.
Sturges was his own worst enemy the last ten years of his life, which coincided with the end of the studio system and the support it gave directors like Sturges with producers, character actors and technicians. Sturges felt he was not appreciated at Paramount, where he made eight brilliant films in four years, 1940-1944 (my favorites are The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), after having written a number of excellent scripts that he felt he could have directed better than Mitch Leisen did (Easy Living,1937 and Remember the Night,1940). Sturges made the mistake of hooking up with Howard Hughes's California Pictures and then Daryll Zanuck at 20th C. Fox, neither of whom gave him the support he needed.
Aside from the demise of the studio system what happened to Sturges? Comedy filmmakers tend to burn out unless they are superb at business, as Chaplin was, and can also do other kinds of films, as Billy Wilder could. Chaplin and Wilder had a much wider knowledge of and interest in the world than Sturges did and therefore had more to say than Sturges did, who was mostly a satirist; satire, which Sturges did beautifully, has limitations which Sturges only occasionally transcended in his mostly successful comedies.
That he did not always conquer his demons is not, perhaps surprising -- there were many of them and they took different forms, among them drink, jealousy, and arrogance.
Preston Sturges, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges, Intellect, The University of Chicago Press (2019)
This is a sad and dispiriting book about how little Preston Sturges was able to accomplish after he left Hollywood in 1948, following the financial failures of Unfaithfully Yours (a marvelous film) and The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (somewhat less marvelous). He died in 1959, only able to make one more film, in 1955, the dreary The French They Are a Funny Race (rarely shown; I saw it at the Thalia in the 80's), spending most of that time in France, dodging creditors and away from his (fourth) wife and two young children, who he did not see at all in the last two years of his life. He was constantly writing scripts and plays and then self-destructing by not being able to get along with collaborators. On a couple of occasions he was able to get plays produced, only to have them crash and burn under withering criticism.
Sturges was his own worst enemy the last ten years of his life, which coincided with the end of the studio system and the support it gave directors like Sturges with producers, character actors and technicians. Sturges felt he was not appreciated at Paramount, where he made eight brilliant films in four years, 1940-1944 (my favorites are The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), after having written a number of excellent scripts that he felt he could have directed better than Mitch Leisen did (Easy Living,1937 and Remember the Night,1940). Sturges made the mistake of hooking up with Howard Hughes's California Pictures and then Daryll Zanuck at 20th C. Fox, neither of whom gave him the support he needed.
Aside from the demise of the studio system what happened to Sturges? Comedy filmmakers tend to burn out unless they are superb at business, as Chaplin was, and can also do other kinds of films, as Billy Wilder could. Chaplin and Wilder had a much wider knowledge of and interest in the world than Sturges did and therefore had more to say than Sturges did, who was mostly a satirist; satire, which Sturges did beautifully, has limitations which Sturges only occasionally transcended in his mostly successful comedies.
Felix Feist's The Threat (1949)
The Threat, 1949, is a terrific brisk (66 minutes) crime film from director Felix Feist. Although it has some trappings of a film noir it lacks the essential ingredients of alienation and existential obsession of the true film noir (yes, I am a splitter, not a lumper) and it has a somewhat happy/sappy ending that one associates more with its B film status than with a film noir. Charles McGraw plays an escaped convict who kidnaps the district attorney, detective and woman whom he blames for sending him to jail. He does not kill them because as a psychotic he enjoys their suffering and tortures them for information. Feist works closely with cinematographer Harry J. Wild to portray the world of the psychotic criminal and those he kidnaps by using disorienting low and tilted camera angles.
This is one of McGraw's first leading roles, after effective supporting roles in films such as The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), where he plays an amoral hitman with partner William Conrad. Feist uses the ingenious idea of a car hidden in a moving van: once the cops start after the van after McGraw shoots a cop at a gas station his gang drives the car out of the van and leaves the van behind. When McGraw, his two partners, his former lover, the district attorney and detective, and the original driver of the van get to a desert hideout to wait for a partner in crime the squabbling and betrayals start, as the heat weakens everyone.
Feist was a superb director of B genre films from 1933 to 1953 (when he turned to television), including the impressive film noir The Man Who Cheated Himself, 1950 (see my post of July 1, 2018).
This is one of McGraw's first leading roles, after effective supporting roles in films such as The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), where he plays an amoral hitman with partner William Conrad. Feist uses the ingenious idea of a car hidden in a moving van: once the cops start after the van after McGraw shoots a cop at a gas station his gang drives the car out of the van and leaves the van behind. When McGraw, his two partners, his former lover, the district attorney and detective, and the original driver of the van get to a desert hideout to wait for a partner in crime the squabbling and betrayals start, as the heat weakens everyone.
Feist was a superb director of B genre films from 1933 to 1953 (when he turned to television), including the impressive film noir The Man Who Cheated Himself, 1950 (see my post of July 1, 2018).
Friday, October 18, 2019
Heat Lightning (1934); Highway West (1941)
Heat Lightning was directed by Mervyn LeRoy and Highway West by William C. McGann; both movies were made by Warner Brothers from a play by George Abbot and Leon Abrams. The major differences between the two films were the result of the Production Code, not quite in effect in 1934, very much in effect in 1941. The plots are similar but in Heat Lightning a woman kills her lover and allows his fellow bank robber to escape and there is a great deal of sex between unmarried couples, while in Highway West there is no sex and the man is killed by a third person.
The story is rather similar to Robert Sherwood's Petrified Forest, made into a film by Archie Mayo in 1937: bank robbers hide out in a motel (called an auto camp in Heat Lightning) run by two sisters in the California desert. One of the sisters (Aline McMahon in the first film, Brenda Marshall in the later film) has escaped her lover and has been hiding; in the case of Brenda Marshall she was actually married and we get a bit of a backstory about how she learned her husband was a bank robber. Heat and sex are emphasized in the LeRoy film while the McGann is more of a straightforward crime story. In Heat Lightning Aline McMahon, who usually played spinster aunts, is an expert at repairing motorcars but gives in to passion when her past lover suddenly shows up and she succumbs to him, only to shoot him when she finds out he was just using her in order to rob the place. McGann's film is more literal than LeRoy's, who emphasizes facial and body expressions rather than the overheated dialogue of McGann's film, though both directors use a mobile camera (Ted McCord is the ;cinematographer for Highway West and Sid Hickox for Heat Lightning). Ann Dvorak plays the sister, desperate to get away and have sex, to Aline McMahon while Olympe Bradna played Brenda Marshall's sister.
Mervyn LeRoy directed a number of gritty movies for Warner Brothers (Little Caesar and Five Star Final, both in 1932) before going on to bloated epics such as Quo Vadis (1951). William McGann made 55 B films, mostly for Warner Brothers, between 1930 and 1944.
The story is rather similar to Robert Sherwood's Petrified Forest, made into a film by Archie Mayo in 1937: bank robbers hide out in a motel (called an auto camp in Heat Lightning) run by two sisters in the California desert. One of the sisters (Aline McMahon in the first film, Brenda Marshall in the later film) has escaped her lover and has been hiding; in the case of Brenda Marshall she was actually married and we get a bit of a backstory about how she learned her husband was a bank robber. Heat and sex are emphasized in the LeRoy film while the McGann is more of a straightforward crime story. In Heat Lightning Aline McMahon, who usually played spinster aunts, is an expert at repairing motorcars but gives in to passion when her past lover suddenly shows up and she succumbs to him, only to shoot him when she finds out he was just using her in order to rob the place. McGann's film is more literal than LeRoy's, who emphasizes facial and body expressions rather than the overheated dialogue of McGann's film, though both directors use a mobile camera (Ted McCord is the ;cinematographer for Highway West and Sid Hickox for Heat Lightning). Ann Dvorak plays the sister, desperate to get away and have sex, to Aline McMahon while Olympe Bradna played Brenda Marshall's sister.
Mervyn LeRoy directed a number of gritty movies for Warner Brothers (Little Caesar and Five Star Final, both in 1932) before going on to bloated epics such as Quo Vadis (1951). William McGann made 55 B films, mostly for Warner Brothers, between 1930 and 1944.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
The Goldwyn Follies (1938)
The choreography for Vera Zorina and members of Balanchine's American Ballet Company combine pointe work with lyrical adagio movement that shows the influence of modern dance.
--Beth Genne on Balanchine's contributions to Goldwyn Follies (Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly and the American Film Musical, Oxford University Press 2018
Unless one is a fan of the Ritz Brothers or ventriloquist Edgar Bergen the only reasons to see The Goldwyn Follies are the fifteen minutes or so of choreography contributed by George Balanchine and the color cinematography of Gregg Toland in the relatively new three-strip version of Technicolor. Otherwise the movie looks rather like a slightly demented version of The Ed Sullivan Show, full of vaudeville schtick and lacking only a juggler, with excerpts from La Traviata and bland versions of Gershwin songs sung by Howdy Doody lookalike Kenny Baker.
About thirty years ago I attended a series of lectures by Vera Zorina who showed excerpts from the film choreography that Balanchine did for her in a number of movies. Seldom was Balanchine able to do precisely what he wanted to do; even Samuel Goldwyn did not allow his meticulously choreographed version of Gershwin's "American in Paris" because "the miners in Harrisburg would not understand it." I wonder if they understood what remains in Goldwyn's film (nominally directed by George Marshall), the brief Romeo and Juliet as well as The Water-nymph. Both these ballets are too short but Balanchine had his own cinematic techniques of camera movement and placement, influenced by Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire, to scores by Vernon Duke. In Romeo and Juliet (William Dollar and Vera Zorina) the Montagues are tap and jazz dancers, the Capulets are ballet dancers on pointe and Balanchine moves the camera with the music and uses effective dissolves. In the Water-nymph Vera Zorina was the unattainable romantic heroine who emerges from the water, waltzes with revelers, tempts a man and then returns to the pool from which she came.
Balanchine was never able to do what he wanted to do on film, as Zorina said, though The Goldwyn Follies does indicate --in what was planned as well what was actually accomplished-- some of the directions he might have gone in if he had ever had the right opportunity with the right producer.
--Beth Genne on Balanchine's contributions to Goldwyn Follies (Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly and the American Film Musical, Oxford University Press 2018
Unless one is a fan of the Ritz Brothers or ventriloquist Edgar Bergen the only reasons to see The Goldwyn Follies are the fifteen minutes or so of choreography contributed by George Balanchine and the color cinematography of Gregg Toland in the relatively new three-strip version of Technicolor. Otherwise the movie looks rather like a slightly demented version of The Ed Sullivan Show, full of vaudeville schtick and lacking only a juggler, with excerpts from La Traviata and bland versions of Gershwin songs sung by Howdy Doody lookalike Kenny Baker.
About thirty years ago I attended a series of lectures by Vera Zorina who showed excerpts from the film choreography that Balanchine did for her in a number of movies. Seldom was Balanchine able to do precisely what he wanted to do; even Samuel Goldwyn did not allow his meticulously choreographed version of Gershwin's "American in Paris" because "the miners in Harrisburg would not understand it." I wonder if they understood what remains in Goldwyn's film (nominally directed by George Marshall), the brief Romeo and Juliet as well as The Water-nymph. Both these ballets are too short but Balanchine had his own cinematic techniques of camera movement and placement, influenced by Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire, to scores by Vernon Duke. In Romeo and Juliet (William Dollar and Vera Zorina) the Montagues are tap and jazz dancers, the Capulets are ballet dancers on pointe and Balanchine moves the camera with the music and uses effective dissolves. In the Water-nymph Vera Zorina was the unattainable romantic heroine who emerges from the water, waltzes with revelers, tempts a man and then returns to the pool from which she came.
Balanchine was never able to do what he wanted to do on film, as Zorina said, though The Goldwyn Follies does indicate --in what was planned as well what was actually accomplished-- some of the directions he might have gone in if he had ever had the right opportunity with the right producer.
Friday, October 11, 2019
Alfred E. Green's Union Depot 1932
Union Depot moves at a rapid pace; its 67 minutes taking place more or less in real time, or at least one night in a busy railroad station. This pre-Code Warner Brothers film quite effectively captures the mood of the Depression, with Sol Polito's camera swooping into the train station, crammed with diverse men and women hurrying and scurrying. The depot is stuffed not only with some respectable travelers but with con men, pickpockets, whores, grifters, unfaithful spouses and hobos. A significant amount of time is spent in the men's room, where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. , just out of jail on a vagrancy charge, steals the suitcase of dipsomaniac Frank McHugh and dresses up. as he says, "as a gentleman for a day." He picks up Joan Blondell, whom he mistakes for a prostitute, and takes her to a private dining room. When he finds out she is not a tart but rather a chorus girl down on her luck who needs $64.50 to get to a job in Salt Lake City he rather shockingly slaps her in the face and then buys her dinner.
Meanwhile Fairbanks's buddy Guy Kibbee finds a claim ticket for a violin case and when he and Fairbanks retrieve it they find it is full of money. Fairbanks uses some of the money to buy a new dress for Blondell's trip while Blondell is being lured to a train compartment by a pervert who had hired her to read dirty books to him and is now stalking her. Fairbanks has come to the rescue as the owner of the dress shop finds out she has been paid for Blondell's dress with counterfeit money and alerts the station cops, who arrest Blondell and Fairbanks while counterfeiter Alan Hale is trying to get his violin case back. Finally everything is straightened out as Fairbanks says good-bye to Blondell and he and Kibbee go marching down the railroad tracks, presumably back to eating "vagrancy beans."
This downbeat fantasy was probably enjoyed by moviegoers who were looking to escape their own job difficulties and sympathized with an ingenious bum who knew how to appropriate and spend money. Director Green moves this film along rapidly, with an understanding that everyone has their reasons, the African-American washroom attendants and Pullman porters doing their jobs with dignity while their customers are drinking and cheating.
Meanwhile Fairbanks's buddy Guy Kibbee finds a claim ticket for a violin case and when he and Fairbanks retrieve it they find it is full of money. Fairbanks uses some of the money to buy a new dress for Blondell's trip while Blondell is being lured to a train compartment by a pervert who had hired her to read dirty books to him and is now stalking her. Fairbanks has come to the rescue as the owner of the dress shop finds out she has been paid for Blondell's dress with counterfeit money and alerts the station cops, who arrest Blondell and Fairbanks while counterfeiter Alan Hale is trying to get his violin case back. Finally everything is straightened out as Fairbanks says good-bye to Blondell and he and Kibbee go marching down the railroad tracks, presumably back to eating "vagrancy beans."
This downbeat fantasy was probably enjoyed by moviegoers who were looking to escape their own job difficulties and sympathized with an ingenious bum who knew how to appropriate and spend money. Director Green moves this film along rapidly, with an understanding that everyone has their reasons, the African-American washroom attendants and Pullman porters doing their jobs with dignity while their customers are drinking and cheating.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Wilde Times: Patricia Wilde, George Balanchine, and the Rise of New York City Ballet by Joel Lobenthal.
"Oh, yeah, oh, yes: you go across in front of the stage," Balanchine informed Wilde. "Nobody showed me what to do," she confessed. He wasn't worried. "You just do saute, step, glissade, entrechats cinq, and then you bow to Nicky and he will come on."
--Wilde Times, ForeEdge 2016
While we wait for what we hope will be a major work about Balanchine by Arlene Croce there are more and more books coming out about the "mercurial" choreographer. Lobenthal's book is Balanchine as seen by one of his dancers, Patricia Wilde, who danced with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo when Balanchine was there, joined New York City Ballet shortly after Balanchine and Kirstein started it in 1948 and retired in 1965 (shortly before I arrived in New York for college, so I never saw her dance)
Lobenthal's book is an engrossing work of journalism, helped immensely by his knowledge of ballet steps and the choreography of Balanchine. Lobenthal had the cooperation of Wilde while writing this book and learned a great deal about Maria Tallchief and Tranquil Le Clercq as well as Suzanne Farrell, with each of whom Balanchine was obsessed. Lobenthal is no more successful than anyone else who has written about Balanchine in understanding his genius but there are a few hints, especially about the changes that Balanchine made in his ballets based on who was dancing them, as well as his preoccupation with not repeating himself, even (or perhaps especially) if he was using the same music with new choreography. When one was seeing a new Balanchine ballet one never knew quite what to expect but one was almost always delighted and thrilled.
--Wilde Times, ForeEdge 2016
While we wait for what we hope will be a major work about Balanchine by Arlene Croce there are more and more books coming out about the "mercurial" choreographer. Lobenthal's book is Balanchine as seen by one of his dancers, Patricia Wilde, who danced with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo when Balanchine was there, joined New York City Ballet shortly after Balanchine and Kirstein started it in 1948 and retired in 1965 (shortly before I arrived in New York for college, so I never saw her dance)
Lobenthal's book is an engrossing work of journalism, helped immensely by his knowledge of ballet steps and the choreography of Balanchine. Lobenthal had the cooperation of Wilde while writing this book and learned a great deal about Maria Tallchief and Tranquil Le Clercq as well as Suzanne Farrell, with each of whom Balanchine was obsessed. Lobenthal is no more successful than anyone else who has written about Balanchine in understanding his genius but there are a few hints, especially about the changes that Balanchine made in his ballets based on who was dancing them, as well as his preoccupation with not repeating himself, even (or perhaps especially) if he was using the same music with new choreography. When one was seeing a new Balanchine ballet one never knew quite what to expect but one was almost always delighted and thrilled.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
New York City Ballet Sept. 29, 2019
The program Sunday was Valse-Fantasie, Kammermusik No. 2, and Union Jack, all three choreographed by George Balanchine. Union Jack, the last on the program, is such a stunning and overwhelming piece that one has a tendency to forget the first two.
It was windswept and buoyant, as the three women, costumed a la Russe by Barbara Karinska, shared one male partner.
--Joel Lobenthal on Valse Fantasie (Wilde Times, ForeEdge, 2016)
Valse-Fantasie is about eight minutes long and is dazzlingly beautiful as well as structurally complex. Sunday it was danced by Erica Pereira, who did her chaine turns with speed and precision and Daniel Ulbricht, who attacked his cabrioles with elegance and beauty.
Men, perhaps are more suited that women would be to the figurative atmosphere of the piece and to its blunt, thick strokes, its metronomic austerity.
--Arlene Croce on Kammermusik No. 2 (The New Yorker, Feb. 20 1978)
Kammermusik No. 2 is one of Balanchine's "modern" ballets; like his Stravinsky ballets it has turned-in legs, flexed feet and angular port-de-bras. It has an unusual (even for Balanchine) corps of eight men. The leads were danced by Emilie Gerrity and Unity Phelan, along with Jovani Furlan and Peter Walker, with the women dancing to Cameron Grant's piano solo rather like the two leads in Concerto Barocco. I found its jagged eccentricity quite charming.
Union Jack is looking better than ever. It was originally done in 1976, Balanchine's somewhat ironic tribute to the bicentennial; though Balanchine was in thrall to America he did spend some time in London choreographing revues and variety shows before coming to America in 1933. The first part is Scottish and Canadian Guard Regiments moving from walking ballet-like, toe to heel, and mixing regiments, to each regiment dancing, first separately and then together. The high-point for me is the "Regimental Drum Variations," led Sunday by Sara Mearns, consisting of wild hammering leaps. The second part is Costermonger Pas De Deux with Andrew Veyette and Megan Fairchild a tribute to the English music hall tradition from which Chaplin came; this is both poignant and funny, with a live donkey pulling two youngsters on at the end to join in the dancing. The final section is the Royal Navy, with lots of hornpipes and Teresa Reichlen leading Wrens to The Colonel Boogie March, the ballet ending with the cannon booming, the orchestra playing "Rule Britannia" and the entire cast doing the marine semaphore code spelling out "God Save the Queen." Much credit goes to Hershy Kay, the music arranger, who worked closely with Balanchine to produce the known and unknown Scottish military tattoos, folk-dance forms, sea songs, jigs and reels that make up the music for Union Jack, played beautifully by the New York City Ballet Orchestra, conducted on Sunday by Clotilde Otranto.
The three ballets on Sept. 29 demonstrate something of the range of Balanchine's genius: the classic, the modern and the spectacle.
It was windswept and buoyant, as the three women, costumed a la Russe by Barbara Karinska, shared one male partner.
--Joel Lobenthal on Valse Fantasie (Wilde Times, ForeEdge, 2016)
Valse-Fantasie is about eight minutes long and is dazzlingly beautiful as well as structurally complex. Sunday it was danced by Erica Pereira, who did her chaine turns with speed and precision and Daniel Ulbricht, who attacked his cabrioles with elegance and beauty.
Men, perhaps are more suited that women would be to the figurative atmosphere of the piece and to its blunt, thick strokes, its metronomic austerity.
--Arlene Croce on Kammermusik No. 2 (The New Yorker, Feb. 20 1978)
Kammermusik No. 2 is one of Balanchine's "modern" ballets; like his Stravinsky ballets it has turned-in legs, flexed feet and angular port-de-bras. It has an unusual (even for Balanchine) corps of eight men. The leads were danced by Emilie Gerrity and Unity Phelan, along with Jovani Furlan and Peter Walker, with the women dancing to Cameron Grant's piano solo rather like the two leads in Concerto Barocco. I found its jagged eccentricity quite charming.
Union Jack is looking better than ever. It was originally done in 1976, Balanchine's somewhat ironic tribute to the bicentennial; though Balanchine was in thrall to America he did spend some time in London choreographing revues and variety shows before coming to America in 1933. The first part is Scottish and Canadian Guard Regiments moving from walking ballet-like, toe to heel, and mixing regiments, to each regiment dancing, first separately and then together. The high-point for me is the "Regimental Drum Variations," led Sunday by Sara Mearns, consisting of wild hammering leaps. The second part is Costermonger Pas De Deux with Andrew Veyette and Megan Fairchild a tribute to the English music hall tradition from which Chaplin came; this is both poignant and funny, with a live donkey pulling two youngsters on at the end to join in the dancing. The final section is the Royal Navy, with lots of hornpipes and Teresa Reichlen leading Wrens to The Colonel Boogie March, the ballet ending with the cannon booming, the orchestra playing "Rule Britannia" and the entire cast doing the marine semaphore code spelling out "God Save the Queen." Much credit goes to Hershy Kay, the music arranger, who worked closely with Balanchine to produce the known and unknown Scottish military tattoos, folk-dance forms, sea songs, jigs and reels that make up the music for Union Jack, played beautifully by the New York City Ballet Orchestra, conducted on Sunday by Clotilde Otranto.
The three ballets on Sept. 29 demonstrate something of the range of Balanchine's genius: the classic, the modern and the spectacle.
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