New York City Ballet Dec. 26, 2020

There is a powerful dramatic expressiveness in the large opposition between the so-to-speak forest-thick pantomime that fills the first act and leads only to a small clearing where snowflakes dance, and the spaciousness of the second act, with its clear dances that appear and disappear as free as the shapes in the sky.
--Edwin Denby on George Balanchine's The Nutcracker, Center, March 1954

I don't have a great deal to add to my previous posts about The Nutcracker (Dec.24 2015, Dec. 27 2017, Dec.28, 2018); it is as glorious and beautiful as ever and each time I see it I discover new details in this impressively structured work. Some people call it magical but I think of "magical" as a contrived attempt the fool the audience and except for the one movement of the Sugarplum Fairy across the stage on point while remaining still as a statue (the floor moves underneath her) -- a movement that Balanchine added years after the ballet's premiere and, I think, would have eventually removed -- there's nothing faked or phony in this exquisite ballet of feeling and emotion.

Balanchine danced in the original ballet when he was a young student in St. Petersburg and the current choreography includes much of what Balanchine remembers, with considerable speed and complexity added; like many Balanchine ballets it is original but based on Balanchine's extensive knowledge of the steps and the history, giving it the classical quality of much of Balanchine's choreography.  The Sugarplum Fairy and her Cavalier were beautifully danced by soloists Emilie Gerrity and Jovani Furlan.  Conductor Clotilde brought out all the warmth and richness of Tschaikovsky's music and the gorgeous costumes were by Karinska, who played an important role in Balanchine's work,

Jan. 2020 Turner Classic Movies

I hope we will be seeing some movies this year that haven't been on Turner recently or even ever (Frank Tashlin's Marry Me Again, for instance).  I will continue mentioning films I haven't mentioned recently but feel free to e-mail me if you have a question about any film.

Jan. 1 has Budd Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) and on the 2nd is Samuel Fuller's first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949).

On the third is Anthony Mann's period film noir, The Black Book (1949), with cinematography by the great John Alton.

On the 6th is Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943), one of the best films about military flying and a plane's crew, and on the 8th is Hawks's marvelous gangster film Scarface (1932).

On the tenth is Raoul Walsh's wonderful period romance/comedy The Strawberry Blond (1941) as well as three of Douglas Sirk's ironic soap operas:  Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1957).

On the 11th is Joseph Losey's The Big Night (1951), which I wrote about on  Dec. 4,  and on the 19th is Michael Curtiz's  intense The Breaking Point (1950)

On the 25th are two corrosive and cynical views about America by the soon-to-be blacklisted Cy Enfield:  Try and Get Me and Underworld Story (both from 1950).

The Nutcracker, The Vicky Simegiatos Dance Company Dec. 22, 2019.

One of the pleasures of seeing the Vicky Simegiatos Nutcracker was the venue, The St. George Theater on Staten Island; two of my daughter's friends take class at Simegiatos's school and had small parts in the production.  The theater was built in 1928 as a movie and vaudeville theater, seats 1900 with excellent sightlines and is a masterpiece of kitsch, beautifully restored starting in 2004. 

The choreography was by Vicky Simegatos and her daughter Matina Simegiatos and was impressively danced by the amateur company.  The children were well-rehearsed and demonstrated a keen enthusiasm as mice, soldiers and angels; Madison Pender was a charming Clara and Athan Sporek an assertive Nutracker Prince. Ask la Cour and Teresa Reichlen, from NYC Ballet, were the Sugar Plum Fairy and Her Cavalier, which --for better or worse--made clear how different Balanchine's production is from the one we were seeing, if only the elegant complexity of their pas de deux.  Simegiatos, like Balanchine, uses the original libretto by Petipa and Ivanov from 1892 but very intelligently keeps the choreography much simpler for the amateur dancers, who communicated the pleasure of dancing to Tchaikovsky's necessarily taped score. 

Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser

I met Susan Sontag once, at a party.  She came up and praised something that I had written.  Thrilled, I began chattering about I don't know what.  Sontag froze.  She retreated, taking backward steps before running away.  It dawned on me that receiving her blessing was supposed to have been enough; a solemn initiation.  I had presumed on it.
--Peter Schjeldahll, "77 Sunset Me," The New Yorker (Dec. 23, 2019).

The record of Sontag's kindly and generous acts is brief; that of her egotism, selfishness and cruelty, copius.
Joseph Epstein; "Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot," Commentary (December 2019)

For almost fifty years, she, more than any other prominent public figure, had set the terms of the cultural debate in a way that no intellectual had done before, or has done since.
--Benjamin Moser, Sontag (HarperCollins, 2019).

I often saw Susan Sontag (who died in 2004) at The New York City Ballet and was tempted to approach her with questions about Robert Bresson or Balanchine or something that she had written.  I am glad now I never did; based on the many incidents reported in Moser's biography I doubt that she would have given me the time of day.  Among other things she wrote that "the white race is the cancer of history" and the music of Mozart and the ballets of Balanchine do not redeem it.  In her intelligent essay about Bresson and spirituality she writes "it is almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color" and when Bresson made five films in color she did not, as far as I can find out, write anything about them. She was a supporter of North Vietnam as well as Castro's Cuba and then abruptly changed her mind, referring to communism as "fascism with a human face."  She treated her son badly and was subsidized by Roger Straus, her publisher, and Annie Leibowitz, her lover, to the tune of millions of dollars, but often treated Leibowitz cruelly, especially in public, and resisted all attempts to encourage her to come out of the closet during the AIDS crisis.

At this point what will Sontag be remembered for?  Probably not for her turgid movies or her  misguided novels -- I've seen the movies and read the books -- so that leaves her dubious essays, including "Notes on 'Camp'" in 1964, published in Partisan Review.  Sontag was attacked by some defenders of high culture as a "leveler" of culture but her references to popular music (the Supremes) and American films (Budd Boetticher) were few and far between and demonstrated little insight into popular culture.  She did bring some limited attention to foreign writers such as E.M. Cioran and others but her attention span was limited and she was always moving on to something else, even writing Illness as Metaphor without mentioning her own struggles with her health.  Perhaps she will be remembered as one of the last "public intellectuals," always ready to speak her mind to anyone who would listen.

R.G. Springsteen's Cole Younger, Gunfighter (1958)

Une tres jolie surprise que ce premier film a relativement gros budget du realisateur R.G. Springsteen.
--Erick Maurel

Cole Younger is an impressive B Western by R.G. Springsteen, who made many of them, with a complicated plot written by Daniel Mainwaring (though not quite as complicated as his script for Out of the Past, 1947), beautifully photographed by veteran Harry Neuman in color and cinemascope and starring Frank Lovejoy, James Best and Abby Dalton, all of whom mostly worked in television.  The film focuses on the rebellion of Texans in 1873 against dictatorial governor Edmund Davis, as Best hooks up with gunfighter Cole Younger to escape Davis's police, the so-called Bluebellies.  Lovejoy is in the role of the "good bad man," which goes back to the silent days of Western stars William S. Hart and Harry Carey and when Best is accused of murdering two Bluebellies Younger enters the courtroom with guns drawn and proves that Best's friend Merlin (played by Frank Wittrock) had framed Best in order to win Abby Dalton.  Best and Dalton plan to get married, Davis is voted out of office and Younger rides off alone.

As in Out of the Past alliances are constantly shifting and rearranging. Unlike TV Westerns of the time Cole Younger has mostly exterior shots and a fair amount of choreographed gunplay, as Best and Lovejoy each shoot one of a pair of twins (Myron Healey) in self-defense and spend their time punching cows while hiding out from the Bluebellies.

Hal Ashby's Being There (1979)

One of the contemporary directors I most admired, Hal Ashby, a maker of offbeat character studies with strong elements of antiestablishment social satire, was milling around afterward raving about Star Wars, and I was thinking, "Doesn't he know this film will destroy his career?" As the Reagan era approached in the late seventies. like an inexorable Death Star, an even more risk-adverse timidity took over the industry.
--Joseph McBride

Being There was one of the last interesting films of the seventies.  It stars Peter Sellers, who died the next year at age 55; was written by Jerzy Kosinski, who committed suicide twelve years later at age 59; directed by Hal Ashby, who died in 1988 at the age of 58. I don't think most of the films by the directors who flourished in the seventies --Bogdanovitch, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, Friedkin, Ashby -- are artistically successful but they were made with passion and intelligence, especially when one compares them with the meretricious quality of what one sees at the multiplex today.

Being There is basically a one-joke shaggy dog story.  Peter Sellers plays Chance, a retarded, illiterate and possibly autistic gardener who ventures out into the world when his wealthy patron dies.  Sellers' character only watches television and can't even feed himself.  He is rescued in the street by Shirley MacLaine and taken home to live with her and her wealthy and dying tycoon husband, played by veteran Melvyn Douglas.  Everyone thinks Chance is brilliant because he has nothing to say about anything except what he knows about from watching the banalities of television.  Even his attempted seduction by MacLaine is met with "I like to watch" and MacLaine obliges him. Peter Sellers' one-note minimalist performance, only surpassed by his low-key role in Blake Edwards's The Party (1968), reminds one of Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1869) and the donkey in Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, characters who appropriated the sins of those around them; the ending of Being There suggesting that Chance can literally walk on water.

Robert Florey's Smarty (1934)

Smarty was released by Warner Brothers in 1934, just before the Production Code began to be enforced, and is usually lumped in with other pre-code films for its sex and violence.  Although there is much that has been written lately about pre-Code films and what they have in common there has been little analysis of the directors who worked during this period.  Smarty was one of four films directed by Robert Florey in 1934, a native of France who came to America, after working with Melies and Feuillade, in the silent era to learn about films and then to direct them.  Although I have not seen most of Florey's films one can read my previous entries on Bedside (1934), The House on 56th Street (1933) and The Face Behind the Mask (1941) to see how Florey was interested in the quirky, strange and hidden aspects of American life.  Smarty is about consensual sadomasochism.

When her husband Warren William slaps his wife Joan Blondell during a bridge game for saying "diced carrots" Blondell files immediately for divorce.  There is a strong suggestion that William is only capable of sex when he and Blondell are role-playing and doesn't like it when she refers to his impotence in front of other people.  Blondell gets a divorce, marries her lawyer Edward Everett Horton and then provokes Horton to slap her; when he does she leaves him and returns to William, telling him once they are alone to "hit me again." The other main characters are Frank McHugh, playing a bachelor; Claire Dodd, a woman who has been divorced several times and known for her bed-hopping, and Joan Wheeler, who plays a married woman who hooks up with the divorced William and is always worried that it is her husband knocking at the door.

Everyone in Smarty is randy in one way or another; the opening shot of Smarty is similar to that of Bedside:  a lovely woman's leg in a sheer stocking.  Smarty is subversive towards traditional sexual roles and Florey was able to continue with these kinds of observations well into the enforcement of the production code by working somewhat under the radar on B pictures (Smarty has a running time of 65 minutes) with relatively low budgets.

The Big Apple Circus Dec. 7, 2019

The Big Apple Circus was a bit of a disappointment  this year, though not to my eight-year-old daughter, who loved it, though she seemed to be one of the older children there this time and it may be a different story next year.  There were no horses (though they were mentioned on the Big Apple Circus website and in the New York Times review of this year's show) or trained pigs (see my post about last year's show); instead we were treated to the Savitsky cats, one of whom climbed a pole and another one who walked on hind legs -- the rest of the time the Savitsky family was herding them.  There were several repetitive aerial acts, with twirling on ropes and riding bicycles high in the air, and Jason Dominguez on a giant spinning hamster wheel.  And there was The Explosive Duo, who hung horizontally on a pole -- I'm pretty sure I saw them a couple of months ago on the IRT.

The one performer I was impressed with was the juggler Kyle Driggs, whose imaginative act included juggling open umbrellas.  There was, of course, an unfunny clown --Amy Gordon dressed as a pigeon -- that almost made one wish for the return of Grandma (Barry Lubin), who retired after accusations of sexual harassment. This year there was no band, only recorded music.  In moving from a non-profit to a hedge-fund owner The Big Apple Circus has moved away from its origins in performance art and needs new and different kinds of performers.

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Stevenson musters all possible devices, images, intonations, word patterns, and also false scents, to build up gradually a world in which the strange transformation to be described in Jekyll's own words will have the impact of satisfactory and artistic reality upon the reader -- or rather will lead to such a state of mind in which the reader will not ask himself whether this transformation is possible or not.
--Vladimir Nabokov

As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many different women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment of fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings.  This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling.
--Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Stevenson's novella was published in 1886, after Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (1859) but before anything was published by Freud (born in 1856), whom Stevenson presages.   The novella is very different than the stage and film versions that were inspired by it, mainly because it is written as a mystery narrated by several voices, with the "solution" found in Jekyll's writing only after Jekyll is dead, poisoning himself after he can no longer keep from turning into Hyde.  The influences of Dickens and Wilkie Collins are felt in Stevenson's book, with an emphasis on the struggle between the arrogant upper classes and the impoverished lower classes, between suppressing one's instincts and giving in to them and with narrators who know Dr. Jekyll but have no idea what he is up to, with his adventures as Hyde left mostly to our imagination, except for one incident described by a narrator where Hyde tramples a young girl and pays off her parents with a check signed by Jekyll.

Joseph Losey's The Big Night (1951)

The Big Night was Losey's last American film (of five) before he left for exile in England, one step ahead of HUAC.  It's a corrosive view of one night in America where a son, John Drew Barrymore, looks for revenge on a well-known sportswriter who gave Barrymore's father a thrashing in a bar, as a dozen spectators watched.  It's a film noir of dark and lonely streets, grifters and dipsomaniacs, seedy nightclubs and bars, shot in crisp black-and-white by veteran cinematographer Hal Mohr.   Only after Barrymore shoots the sportswriter does Barrymore's father (Preson Foster) tell him that he had refused to marry the sportswriter's sister because he was still married to Barrymore's mother, who had left him and was still alive, contrary to what he had told Barrymore.

Barrymore's hunt for the sportswriter takes him to a boxing match, where he gets shaken down by a lowlife pretending to be a cop and hooks up with a dipso and his two female friends, one of whom tries unsuccessfully to hide Barrymore's gun.  Barrymore has a great deal to prove, after the local kids beat him up because he is carrying books, and he constantly seeks the approval of his father.  The America that Losey portrays is matter-of-factly anti-intellectual and racist.  At one point Barrymore hears an African-American (Mauri Leighton) sing a lovely version of "Am I Too Young?" in a nightclub and when he sees the singer on his way out he compliments her, telling her she is beautiful and she smiles until he adds, "even if you are..." and he leaves the sentence unfinished as her expression quickly turns to sadness.

Everyone in the film is lonely, for one reason or another, a regular theme of Losey's in his five American films as well as the English films, particularly those written by Harold Pinter:  The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971)

Lamont Johnson's One on One (1977)

I originally saw One on One when it came out in 1977 and was impressed by Lamont Johnson's direction, Robby Benson and Jerry Segal's (Benson's father) script and Donald Morgan's straight forward cinematography, though I did not care much for the Seals and Crofts songs.  I was nervous seeing it again but it actually holds up pretty well, especially the relationship between Benson, a scholarship basketball student at a Los Angeles college, and the estimable Annette O' Toole as his tutor and eventual lover.

All the corruption that makes college basketball (and other big time college sports) still so odious are there: the bullying coaches, the no-show jobs, the tutoring and the easy courses,  Benson is a naive guy from a small town and has trouble playing along; he is eventually asked to renounce his no-cut scholarship and refuses, even when the coach has other members of the team beat him up. Benson triumphs in the end, when the coach is left with no one else to put in the game and Benson scores the winning points.

Most of Lamont Johnson's films were made for television but he always came through when he had the chance to make a theatrical film with a good script, a good cast,  and a medium budget, including The Last American Hero (1973) and the Burt Lancaster Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981), also movies about triumph against difficult odds.