Because Feb. is Oscar month TCM brings out many of the lumbering white elephants (to use critic Manny Farber's term) that routinely win Oscars. In some Februaries TCM has shown the more obscure (and usually better) films that were nominated but did not win; not so much this Feb. But there are some films by Lubitsch, John Ford and Hitchcock that, as always, I highly recommend.
Feb. 3 has Leo McCarey's genial Going My Way (1944) and Raoul Walsh's corrosive and perverse White Heat (1949).
Feb 10 has John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and on the 11th Ford's Grapes of Wrath.
On Feb. 15 is Douglas Sirk's eye-popping and ironic Written on the Wind (1957)
On the 23rd is John Ford's Wee Willie Winkle (1931), life in colonial India as seen by a child (Shirley Temple)
On the 24th is Max Ophuls's elegant La Ronde(1950) and Jacques Demy's marvelous musical The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
Friday, January 31, 2020
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Ruth Marcus's Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover
"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizen's doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."
--Ted Kennedy
Yet for all the wonky focus on regulatory considerations, what won the day with Trump, the ultimate decision-maker, were Gorsuch's good looks -- his strong jaw and silver hair -- and his academic pedigree, which included not just Columbia University and Harvard Law School but also a stint at Oxford on a Marshall scholarship.
--Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition (Simon and Schuster, 2019)
Whatever happened to the Burkean ideal that we elected and appointed public officials because of their integrity and ability to make decisions based on the facts and their own moral compass, not because they thought they should do it because they wanted to make their constituents happy and enhance their own position? Of course Burke's ideal was probably more honored in the breach than the observance, but it continued to be often seen as an ideal.
Ruth Marcus's book is a fascinating and detailed story about Brett Kavanaugh and politics in an increasing polarized environment. I was working at "The Nation" in 1987 and we published "Justice Watch," one of a number of publications that thoroughly investigated Bork's judicial history and philosophy; for those who don't remember or weren't around, he even thought that constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech applied only to "political" speech! It is clear from Marcus's book that there were many reasons to object to Kavanaugh based on his record and his decisions and that the emphasis on Christine Blasey Ford's testimony -- even it hadn't been bungled by Dianne Feinstein -- was a distracting issue. Unfortunately we no longer have a senator who can summarize a Supreme Court nominee's record as eloquently as Ted Kennedy and we no longer can count on nominees to be honest about their views and inclinations without first --at least in the current administration --consulting with Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society.
--Ted Kennedy
Yet for all the wonky focus on regulatory considerations, what won the day with Trump, the ultimate decision-maker, were Gorsuch's good looks -- his strong jaw and silver hair -- and his academic pedigree, which included not just Columbia University and Harvard Law School but also a stint at Oxford on a Marshall scholarship.
--Ruth Marcus, Supreme Ambition (Simon and Schuster, 2019)
Whatever happened to the Burkean ideal that we elected and appointed public officials because of their integrity and ability to make decisions based on the facts and their own moral compass, not because they thought they should do it because they wanted to make their constituents happy and enhance their own position? Of course Burke's ideal was probably more honored in the breach than the observance, but it continued to be often seen as an ideal.
Ruth Marcus's book is a fascinating and detailed story about Brett Kavanaugh and politics in an increasing polarized environment. I was working at "The Nation" in 1987 and we published "Justice Watch," one of a number of publications that thoroughly investigated Bork's judicial history and philosophy; for those who don't remember or weren't around, he even thought that constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech applied only to "political" speech! It is clear from Marcus's book that there were many reasons to object to Kavanaugh based on his record and his decisions and that the emphasis on Christine Blasey Ford's testimony -- even it hadn't been bungled by Dianne Feinstein -- was a distracting issue. Unfortunately we no longer have a senator who can summarize a Supreme Court nominee's record as eloquently as Ted Kennedy and we no longer can count on nominees to be honest about their views and inclinations without first --at least in the current administration --consulting with Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Edwin L. Marin's Raton Pass (1951)
Raton Pass is a pretty good B+ Western, with Patricia Neal as an unusual and effective villain, who marries Dennis Morgan and ends up using a shady financier to take over the ranch that belongs to Morgan and his father (Basil Ruysdael) in New Mexico in 1880. Morgan vows to take back the ranch, with the help of Louis Jean Heydt and all his men, with whom he had previously been fighting over access to water. Neal gets help from gunfighter Steve Cochran and his gang and the range war begins, with warfare taking up most of the film, to an evocative score by Max Steiner. The family conflicts and shifting alliances are Shakespearean in their intensity, as Neal is shot in the back by Cochran, who was planning to take away the ranch from Neal. Morgan's father returns after going into exile (he felt that Morgan should have shot Neal and her lover when he discovered her betrayal) and Morgan takes up with a Mexican girl who had loved him from afar when they were both much younger.
Raton Pass was Marin's penultimate film after twenty years of (mostly B) films and fifty features. His style was classical without being particularly personal and he could make a compelling film when he had a good script and a good cinematographer, as he did in Raton Pass: Thomas Blackburn wrote the script from his own novel and Wilfred Cline did the cinematography.
Raton Pass was Marin's penultimate film after twenty years of (mostly B) films and fifty features. His style was classical without being particularly personal and he could make a compelling film when he had a good script and a good cinematographer, as he did in Raton Pass: Thomas Blackburn wrote the script from his own novel and Wilfred Cline did the cinematography.
Matt Tynauer's Where's My Roy Cohn
Matt Tynauer's documentary is a fairly thorough review of Roy Cohn's --a self-hating Jew and self-hating gay man -- strange and powerful career, from prosecuting the Rosenbergs to working for Joe McCarthy to defending John Gotti and Donald Trump (the documentary title comes from Trump's whine after Cohn's death from AIDS in 1986). Much of Trump's behavior is based on Cohn's mentoring: always deny that you are telling lies, always blame somebody else when things go wrong, never settle but if you have to then declare victory.
Tynauer's choices of interviewees is felicitous, especially journalist Ken Auletta, cohort Roger Stone,and Cohn's lover Adam Wallace, and the documentary is enlightening in a scary way for those who are unfamiliar with Cohn and his relationship with McCarthy and Trump. For those of us more familiar with Cohn it would have been nice to go deeper, especially into his many legal troubles and his eventual disbarment, as the clips of Cohn show an impressive ability to dodge questions about everything from his sexuality to his legal history. For those who would like more detail I recommend Nicholas Von Hoffman's Citizen Cohn, though it was written just after Cohn's death in 1986 and doesn't include a great deal about his relationship with Trump.
Tynauer's choices of interviewees is felicitous, especially journalist Ken Auletta, cohort Roger Stone,and Cohn's lover Adam Wallace, and the documentary is enlightening in a scary way for those who are unfamiliar with Cohn and his relationship with McCarthy and Trump. For those of us more familiar with Cohn it would have been nice to go deeper, especially into his many legal troubles and his eventual disbarment, as the clips of Cohn show an impressive ability to dodge questions about everything from his sexuality to his legal history. For those who would like more detail I recommend Nicholas Von Hoffman's Citizen Cohn, though it was written just after Cohn's death in 1986 and doesn't include a great deal about his relationship with Trump.
Frozen on Broadway
My eight-year-old daughter loved the movie of "Frozen" and wanted to see the Broadway version as soon as she heard about it. Susan and I warned her that it might be a risky venture, i.e., a Broadway show is not much like an animated movie and Broadway, with which we have limited experience, appeals to a different and less demanding audience than the New York City Ballet, which she loves. We didn't press the issue much, deciding as we often do to offer her the experience and let her decide. After hearing what my daughter called a "shrieking" version of "Let It Go," a favorite song from the movie, at the end of the first act, my daughter was ready to leave -- she had had it with the ear-piercing "music" and heavily miked dialogue, the unfunny "comedy" and the klutzy "choreography" and dancing ("where was the grace and poise we see at the ballet?" my daughter said) So we fled the theatre and the meretricious and insipid show.
Whom does one blame for this aggressive spectacle? First of all I blame the undemanding audience that doesn't want to think but just to be wowed by the loud music and the grandiose and dubious special effects, then I blame Disney Theatrical Productions for squeezing every last buck they can from kids and their parents, remaking the same properties over and over, from film to Broadway to live action and back again. Complicit is Jennifer Lee, who wrote the book after writing and co-directing the original film, Kristin Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez for the insipid songs and Michael Grandage for his direction, which treated the special effects as more important than the story of the two sisters.
Whom does one blame for this aggressive spectacle? First of all I blame the undemanding audience that doesn't want to think but just to be wowed by the loud music and the grandiose and dubious special effects, then I blame Disney Theatrical Productions for squeezing every last buck they can from kids and their parents, remaking the same properties over and over, from film to Broadway to live action and back again. Complicit is Jennifer Lee, who wrote the book after writing and co-directing the original film, Kristin Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez for the insipid songs and Michael Grandage for his direction, which treated the special effects as more important than the story of the two sisters.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Lucy Ellmann's Mimi
"Tell me, my dear, what do you have against us poor men? We really try our best, you know ---"
Without a pause Mimi replied, "War, racism, injustice, destruction, tyranny, feudalism, monarchies, mercenaries, pirates, despots, the slave trade, the Ku Klux Klan, global warming, capitalism, corrupt bankers, wife-beating, the Freemasons, monotheism, radioactive waste, ugly architecture, animal extinctions, toga parties, pubic hair removal, sniper rifles that can shoot people a mile away, and failure to do the dishes."
Lucy Ellmann, Mimi (Bloomsbury USA, 2013).
While I waited in the queue at the Brooklyn Public Library for Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport (I cannot resist the idea of one sentence that is almost 1000 pages long) I read her earlier Mimi, a novel that makes up in passion what it lacks in narrative drive, with three main characters: plastic surgeon Harrison Hanafan; his sister, artist Bridget Hanafan; and his lover and speaking coach M.Z. Fortune (Mimi). There are plenty of other characters, including Harrison's cat Bubbles, and a great deal of neuroses to go around, including Harrison's lists, my favorite being Why I Hate Bathrobes ("1. The belt never stays tied"). There are also numerous references to films, books, art,classical composers (including actual sheet music) literature and art, some of the references are even relative to the narrative, what there is of it.
In its often dark humor Mimi reminds me of Peter De Vries, whose many books in the sixties and seventies skewered that period as effectively as Ellmann does our own, though De Vries's books were somewhat more genteel and less angry than Ellmann's, for good reason in both cases; De Vries published many stories in The New Yorker before profanity was allowed.
Without a pause Mimi replied, "War, racism, injustice, destruction, tyranny, feudalism, monarchies, mercenaries, pirates, despots, the slave trade, the Ku Klux Klan, global warming, capitalism, corrupt bankers, wife-beating, the Freemasons, monotheism, radioactive waste, ugly architecture, animal extinctions, toga parties, pubic hair removal, sniper rifles that can shoot people a mile away, and failure to do the dishes."
Lucy Ellmann, Mimi (Bloomsbury USA, 2013).
While I waited in the queue at the Brooklyn Public Library for Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport (I cannot resist the idea of one sentence that is almost 1000 pages long) I read her earlier Mimi, a novel that makes up in passion what it lacks in narrative drive, with three main characters: plastic surgeon Harrison Hanafan; his sister, artist Bridget Hanafan; and his lover and speaking coach M.Z. Fortune (Mimi). There are plenty of other characters, including Harrison's cat Bubbles, and a great deal of neuroses to go around, including Harrison's lists, my favorite being Why I Hate Bathrobes ("1. The belt never stays tied"). There are also numerous references to films, books, art,classical composers (including actual sheet music) literature and art, some of the references are even relative to the narrative, what there is of it.
In its often dark humor Mimi reminds me of Peter De Vries, whose many books in the sixties and seventies skewered that period as effectively as Ellmann does our own, though De Vries's books were somewhat more genteel and less angry than Ellmann's, for good reason in both cases; De Vries published many stories in The New Yorker before profanity was allowed.
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Douglas Sirk's Weekend with Father (1951)
Whether in color or black-and-white, Sirk's forte is composition, and it can be argued that his flair for arranging actors and objects in space, balancing volumes, and distributing light and shadows comes through even more impressively without the help of color.
--Jean-Pierre Coursodon
"It has the Thoreau theme in it; it ties up with All That Heaven Allows .. I can't remember the picture too well any longer. I think I did it only for the children."
--Douglas Sirk
Weekend with Father is in exquisite black-and-white, shot by journeyman cinematographer Clifford Stine. and written by journeyman writer Joseph Hoffman, writer of many B movies. Some of the best directors of American films were immigrants, including Douglas Sirk, who had an impressive stage and film career in Germany and made some of the best films about America and all its contradictions in the forties and fifties.
Widower Van Heflin and widow Patricia Neal meet in Grand Central Station as they send their children off to camp (Heflin has two girls, Neal two boys) and then hit if off afterwards at the zoo, as wild as it gets in New York, except perhaps for Central Park, which is where Heflin earned his eagle scout badge. Heflin and Neal decide to get married and make a trip to the kids' camp for a weekend to give them the news, which causes lots of problems: Neal is pursued by rugged camp counselor Richard Denning; Heflin is followed to the camp by Virginia Field, a glamorous TV star who is unaware of Neal, and of course Heflin's girls and Neal's boys do not get along, with the girls preferring Field to Neal and the boys preferring Denning to Heflin. It all works out in the end but there are many amusing moments along the way, though of course humor is always subjective and whether one finds Weekend with Father funny is secondary to its beauty and its insight into the human emotions of love and jealousy as well as the complex relationships between parents and children, all constant themes in Sirk's work, along with the tension between nature and "civilization," as Sirk places the four adults and the four children in different groups in different shots to explore all the conflicts and possibilities.
--Jean-Pierre Coursodon
"It has the Thoreau theme in it; it ties up with All That Heaven Allows .. I can't remember the picture too well any longer. I think I did it only for the children."
--Douglas Sirk
Weekend with Father is in exquisite black-and-white, shot by journeyman cinematographer Clifford Stine. and written by journeyman writer Joseph Hoffman, writer of many B movies. Some of the best directors of American films were immigrants, including Douglas Sirk, who had an impressive stage and film career in Germany and made some of the best films about America and all its contradictions in the forties and fifties.
Widower Van Heflin and widow Patricia Neal meet in Grand Central Station as they send their children off to camp (Heflin has two girls, Neal two boys) and then hit if off afterwards at the zoo, as wild as it gets in New York, except perhaps for Central Park, which is where Heflin earned his eagle scout badge. Heflin and Neal decide to get married and make a trip to the kids' camp for a weekend to give them the news, which causes lots of problems: Neal is pursued by rugged camp counselor Richard Denning; Heflin is followed to the camp by Virginia Field, a glamorous TV star who is unaware of Neal, and of course Heflin's girls and Neal's boys do not get along, with the girls preferring Field to Neal and the boys preferring Denning to Heflin. It all works out in the end but there are many amusing moments along the way, though of course humor is always subjective and whether one finds Weekend with Father funny is secondary to its beauty and its insight into the human emotions of love and jealousy as well as the complex relationships between parents and children, all constant themes in Sirk's work, along with the tension between nature and "civilization," as Sirk places the four adults and the four children in different groups in different shots to explore all the conflicts and possibilities.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Replay by Ken Grimwood
Jeff groped without success for an explanation, something that would make even the vaguest form of sense. He'd read a fair amount of science fiction as an adolescent, but his current situation bore no resemblance to any of the time-travel scenarios he'd ever encountered.
--Ken Grimwood, Replay (Harper Collins 1986)
I'm not much of a reader of fantasy but I am interested in time travel. I recently saw Alfred Werker's film Repeat Performance (see my post of 1/3/20) and was directed, from IMDB, to a review on Noirish, John Grant's blog, where he mentioned Replay, published in 1986, as possibly influenced by Repeat Performance, just as Harold Ramis's film Groundhog Day (1993) was influenced by Grimwood's book.
In Replay Jeff Winston (possibly a reference to Winston Smith, protagonist of Orwell's 1984) "dies" in 1986 and wakes up in his dorm at Emory in 1963, with all his future memories intact. He starts betting on all the sporting events he remembers from the future and makes a fortune, then dies again. He gets to relive his life over and over, though re-starting from a later period each time. He marries in each life, has a child in one life and adopts children in another. Eventually he meets another "replayer," Pamela Phillips (she had made a movie that convinced Winston she was going through the same repeating he was) and as they look for other "replayers" they manage to change history by going public with predictions that get the attention of the government. Jeff keeps trying to make things better but either makes things worse or changes nothing; he keeps Lee Harvey Oswald from killing Kennedy but someone else does it instead.
Grimwood enhances his book with a great deal of loving detail about the news and changing fashions of each relived life, from 1963 to 1986. Eventually Jeff comes back to his original life and looks forward to new happenings rather than the same old ones. Grimwood makes little attempt to explain why Jeff and Pamela are replaying their lives and one can only wonder if we all had the opportunity to live again from our schooldays on what would we change and would those changes make any difference.
--Ken Grimwood, Replay (Harper Collins 1986)
I'm not much of a reader of fantasy but I am interested in time travel. I recently saw Alfred Werker's film Repeat Performance (see my post of 1/3/20) and was directed, from IMDB, to a review on Noirish, John Grant's blog, where he mentioned Replay, published in 1986, as possibly influenced by Repeat Performance, just as Harold Ramis's film Groundhog Day (1993) was influenced by Grimwood's book.
In Replay Jeff Winston (possibly a reference to Winston Smith, protagonist of Orwell's 1984) "dies" in 1986 and wakes up in his dorm at Emory in 1963, with all his future memories intact. He starts betting on all the sporting events he remembers from the future and makes a fortune, then dies again. He gets to relive his life over and over, though re-starting from a later period each time. He marries in each life, has a child in one life and adopts children in another. Eventually he meets another "replayer," Pamela Phillips (she had made a movie that convinced Winston she was going through the same repeating he was) and as they look for other "replayers" they manage to change history by going public with predictions that get the attention of the government. Jeff keeps trying to make things better but either makes things worse or changes nothing; he keeps Lee Harvey Oswald from killing Kennedy but someone else does it instead.
Grimwood enhances his book with a great deal of loving detail about the news and changing fashions of each relived life, from 1963 to 1986. Eventually Jeff comes back to his original life and looks forward to new happenings rather than the same old ones. Grimwood makes little attempt to explain why Jeff and Pamela are replaying their lives and one can only wonder if we all had the opportunity to live again from our schooldays on what would we change and would those changes make any difference.
Monday, January 13, 2020
Irving Pichel's Something in the Wind (1947), with Deanna Durbin
Why did audiences embrace Durbin? She's that American icon -- the problem solver, the little underdog winner, the individual whose determination changes things to the way she wants them to be.
--Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine (Knopf, 2007)
How and why did Deanna Durbin go from one of the most popular stars of the forties to being almost completely forgotten today? When I took a course recently on the American musical her name was not even mentioned. Tastes change and Durbin was a feisty woman with a beautiful soprano who started in movies as a teenager, made twenty-three films in twelve years, made her last movie in 1948 at the age of twenty-seven, moved to France and died in relative obscurity in 2013. She married the director, Charles David, of one of her last movies, Lady on a Train (1947), a movie, along with Christmas Holiday (Robert Siodmak, 1943) and Something in the Wind that established her as an adult, something audiences didn't seem to want, after years of mediocre films produced by Joseph Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster, where she was mostly a teenager.
Something in the Wind is a charming and somewhat goofy movie, from Donald O'Connor doing an acrobatic dance to "I Love a Mystery" (choreography by Eugene Loring, song by Johnny Green and Leo Robin) to Durbin and Metropolitan Opera star Jan Peerce singing the duet "Misere" from Verdi's Il Trovatore as Durbin tries to pick Peerce's pocket for the key that can get her out of jail. Durbin plays a young disc jockey whom John Dall (Rope, 1948) tries to buy off from revealing her affair with Dall's recently deceased grandfather (it was actually Durbin's aunt with the same name). There is much intrigue and misunderstanding, as Dall loses his interest in his fiancé Clarissa (Helena Carter) and falls for Durbin. There is a fashion show --not unusual for films in the forties -- a kidnapping and even an affectionate spoof of ballet at the end. Pichel -- a good journeyman director of Westerns and melodramas -- keeps this all under reasonable control as Durbin uses up all the space around her and sings beautifully.
I recommend Basinger's chapter on Durbin, detailing how Universal used her as a cash cow until she got fed up with the low budgets and the constant disregard of her opinions on directors, etc. She married David and retired to France.
--Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine (Knopf, 2007)
How and why did Deanna Durbin go from one of the most popular stars of the forties to being almost completely forgotten today? When I took a course recently on the American musical her name was not even mentioned. Tastes change and Durbin was a feisty woman with a beautiful soprano who started in movies as a teenager, made twenty-three films in twelve years, made her last movie in 1948 at the age of twenty-seven, moved to France and died in relative obscurity in 2013. She married the director, Charles David, of one of her last movies, Lady on a Train (1947), a movie, along with Christmas Holiday (Robert Siodmak, 1943) and Something in the Wind that established her as an adult, something audiences didn't seem to want, after years of mediocre films produced by Joseph Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster, where she was mostly a teenager.
Something in the Wind is a charming and somewhat goofy movie, from Donald O'Connor doing an acrobatic dance to "I Love a Mystery" (choreography by Eugene Loring, song by Johnny Green and Leo Robin) to Durbin and Metropolitan Opera star Jan Peerce singing the duet "Misere" from Verdi's Il Trovatore as Durbin tries to pick Peerce's pocket for the key that can get her out of jail. Durbin plays a young disc jockey whom John Dall (Rope, 1948) tries to buy off from revealing her affair with Dall's recently deceased grandfather (it was actually Durbin's aunt with the same name). There is much intrigue and misunderstanding, as Dall loses his interest in his fiancé Clarissa (Helena Carter) and falls for Durbin. There is a fashion show --not unusual for films in the forties -- a kidnapping and even an affectionate spoof of ballet at the end. Pichel -- a good journeyman director of Westerns and melodramas -- keeps this all under reasonable control as Durbin uses up all the space around her and sings beautifully.
I recommend Basinger's chapter on Durbin, detailing how Universal used her as a cash cow until she got fed up with the low budgets and the constant disregard of her opinions on directors, etc. She married David and retired to France.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
David Lean's The Passionate Friends (1949)
The Passionate Friends is the film most deserving recovery -- an intricate triangle story.
--David Thomson
David Lean was once appreciated for his early well-crafted and personal British films, now mostly forgotten after his bloated and impersonal epics: Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965). The Passionate Friends is a very personal film from H.G. Wells's 1913 novel, a more intricate and complex version of the superb Brief Encounter (1946), starring Trevor Howard, Claude Rains and Ann Todd, containing flashbacks within flashbacks. Todd is in love with struggling student Howard but leaves him in a burst of independence --"I don't want to belong to anyone" -- for the wealthy and older Claude Rains. But she keeps running into Howard everywhere and is discovered with him in Switzerland, where they accidentally meet, when Rains arrives earlier than expected. Howard is happily married to someone else but Todd has fantasies of them being together, as she vacillates between intimacy and independence.
The theme of infidelity was an important one to Lean, who was rather a womanizer and was married six times, including a marriage to Ann Todd after their affair during the making of the The Passionate Friends (he was married to Kay Walsh at the time). Lean started as an editor on silent films and worked his way up to director, with the help and encouragement of Noel Coward. He was particularly skilled at working with screenwriters and cinematographers to get the results he wanted, working with Eric Ambler as writer and Guy Green as cinematographer on The Passionate Friends, which has, yes, passion and emotion often missing from his later films.
--David Thomson
David Lean was once appreciated for his early well-crafted and personal British films, now mostly forgotten after his bloated and impersonal epics: Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965). The Passionate Friends is a very personal film from H.G. Wells's 1913 novel, a more intricate and complex version of the superb Brief Encounter (1946), starring Trevor Howard, Claude Rains and Ann Todd, containing flashbacks within flashbacks. Todd is in love with struggling student Howard but leaves him in a burst of independence --"I don't want to belong to anyone" -- for the wealthy and older Claude Rains. But she keeps running into Howard everywhere and is discovered with him in Switzerland, where they accidentally meet, when Rains arrives earlier than expected. Howard is happily married to someone else but Todd has fantasies of them being together, as she vacillates between intimacy and independence.
The theme of infidelity was an important one to Lean, who was rather a womanizer and was married six times, including a marriage to Ann Todd after their affair during the making of the The Passionate Friends (he was married to Kay Walsh at the time). Lean started as an editor on silent films and worked his way up to director, with the help and encouragement of Noel Coward. He was particularly skilled at working with screenwriters and cinematographers to get the results he wanted, working with Eric Ambler as writer and Guy Green as cinematographer on The Passionate Friends, which has, yes, passion and emotion often missing from his later films.
Monday, January 6, 2020
Crime Novels: Sherlock Holmes, Jack Reacher, Amos Walker, Hieronymus Bosch
I sensed, rather than saw, Holmes cast a glance in my direction. With precise movements, betraying, I suspected, a certain relish for the task, Mycroft relocked the dispatch box, snapping its clasp with finality, and set it aside, retaining hold of the envelope.
--Nicholas Meyer, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols (Minotaur Books, 2019)
Reacher slammed into him with a twist and a dip of the shoulder and the guy flailed through the air like a crash test dummy and landed in a long sliding tangle of limbs, half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter. He came to rest and lay still.
--Lee Child, Blue Moon (Delacorte Press 2019)
Ballard saw it before she felt it. In the woman's hand was an open folding knife with a blade curved like a horn. All matte black except for the edge of a blade that had been sharpened to a shine. The woman brought it up and into Ballard's left armpit and then put her other arm around her neck in a V hold. She was now behind Ballard and using her as a shield. Ballard saw Bosch holding his weapon, looking for a clean shot that wasn't there.
--Michael Connolly, The Night Fire (Little, Brown and Company, 2019)
The slushy mess had settled into sullen rain. My head was a balloon. Scotch comes by sea; the cradling influence gentles it down. On the other hand, I wasn't aging as well as the bottled in bond. I guided the Cutlass into a lot next to a chain steakhouse, where I sponged up the poisons with a medium-rare-sirloin, baked potato, and a demijohn of caffeine.
--Loren D. Estleman, When Old Midnight Comes Along (Tom Doherty Associates, 2019)
These four books represent genre writers at the peak of their careers. This is Nicholas Meyer's fourth book about Sherlock Holmes (he has also directed a number of films --including the excellent Time After Time in 1979-- and written others). Blue Moon is the twenty-fourth book in Lee Child's series about drifter and vigilante Jack Reacher; The Night Fire is Michael Connolly's twenty-second book about Harry Bosch and his official and unofficial partners in the L.A. police department, and When Old Midnight Comes is Estleman's twenty-eighth novel about private eye Amos Walker.
Although none of these writers are at the level of John D. MacDonald, Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler, they come fairly close. I like the Estleman and the Meyer because they are written in the first person, allowing us only to see what private detective Amos Walker and Dr.Watson see, and I like that the Estleman is very detailed about his novel's specific location, Detroit, as is Connelly's use of Los Angeles and its police department. In Meyer's book Holmes and Watson travel to Russia at the behest of Holmes's government-employee brother, Mycroft, and Holmes even has a mild flirtation (and perhaps more, out of sight of Watson) with their translator Anna Walling, as they successfully prove that 'The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' is a forgery, though they fail at keeping it from being disseminated, as it still is in anti-Semitic circles today.
Lee Child's Blue Moon is the only of the four books to not specify its location (it is a city controlled by gangs, one Albanian and one Ukrainian) and is not written in the first person. It is considerably influenced by Dashiell Hammet's Red Harvest (1929), as well as the movies Yojimbo (directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1951) and A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), as drifter Jack Reacher helps someone who is about to be robbed on a bus, rescues him from loan sharks, and then manipulates the two gangs in town into destroying each other. Reacher even comes close to falling in love, before he decides against "the long, slow fizzle" and decides to move on.
--Nicholas Meyer, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols (Minotaur Books, 2019)
Reacher slammed into him with a twist and a dip of the shoulder and the guy flailed through the air like a crash test dummy and landed in a long sliding tangle of limbs, half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter. He came to rest and lay still.
--Lee Child, Blue Moon (Delacorte Press 2019)
Ballard saw it before she felt it. In the woman's hand was an open folding knife with a blade curved like a horn. All matte black except for the edge of a blade that had been sharpened to a shine. The woman brought it up and into Ballard's left armpit and then put her other arm around her neck in a V hold. She was now behind Ballard and using her as a shield. Ballard saw Bosch holding his weapon, looking for a clean shot that wasn't there.
--Michael Connolly, The Night Fire (Little, Brown and Company, 2019)
The slushy mess had settled into sullen rain. My head was a balloon. Scotch comes by sea; the cradling influence gentles it down. On the other hand, I wasn't aging as well as the bottled in bond. I guided the Cutlass into a lot next to a chain steakhouse, where I sponged up the poisons with a medium-rare-sirloin, baked potato, and a demijohn of caffeine.
--Loren D. Estleman, When Old Midnight Comes Along (Tom Doherty Associates, 2019)
These four books represent genre writers at the peak of their careers. This is Nicholas Meyer's fourth book about Sherlock Holmes (he has also directed a number of films --including the excellent Time After Time in 1979-- and written others). Blue Moon is the twenty-fourth book in Lee Child's series about drifter and vigilante Jack Reacher; The Night Fire is Michael Connolly's twenty-second book about Harry Bosch and his official and unofficial partners in the L.A. police department, and When Old Midnight Comes is Estleman's twenty-eighth novel about private eye Amos Walker.
Although none of these writers are at the level of John D. MacDonald, Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler, they come fairly close. I like the Estleman and the Meyer because they are written in the first person, allowing us only to see what private detective Amos Walker and Dr.Watson see, and I like that the Estleman is very detailed about his novel's specific location, Detroit, as is Connelly's use of Los Angeles and its police department. In Meyer's book Holmes and Watson travel to Russia at the behest of Holmes's government-employee brother, Mycroft, and Holmes even has a mild flirtation (and perhaps more, out of sight of Watson) with their translator Anna Walling, as they successfully prove that 'The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' is a forgery, though they fail at keeping it from being disseminated, as it still is in anti-Semitic circles today.
Lee Child's Blue Moon is the only of the four books to not specify its location (it is a city controlled by gangs, one Albanian and one Ukrainian) and is not written in the first person. It is considerably influenced by Dashiell Hammet's Red Harvest (1929), as well as the movies Yojimbo (directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1951) and A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), as drifter Jack Reacher helps someone who is about to be robbed on a bus, rescues him from loan sharks, and then manipulates the two gangs in town into destroying each other. Reacher even comes close to falling in love, before he decides against "the long, slow fizzle" and decides to move on.
Friday, January 3, 2020
Gordon Hessler's The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (1965) and Alfred Werker's Repeat Performance (1947)
Gordon Hessler's The Woman Who Wouldn't Die reminds one of Alfred Hitchcock's television series, so one is not surprised that Hessler was a producer on that show. I was a kid when I watched Hitchcock's show but even then I knew how subversive it was, with criminals getting away with their crimes and Hitch coming on at the end to satisfy the censors with the ironic tale of how they were eventually caught. Hessler does a good job of directing the low-budget The Woman Who Wouldn't Die, with the help of an excellent script by Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), and rich black-and-white cinematography by Arthur Lavis, who photographed Terence Fisher's The Earth Dies Screaming in 1964, Sinister Gary Merrill kills his wife because he is in love with a younger woman (Jane Merrow), then kills another woman in a burning car crash to cover it up, with the help of disgruntled Neil McCallum, who worked for Merrill's wife. Any regular viewer of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" knows what's really happening when Merrill's wife (Georgia Cookson) seems to come back from the dead to haunt him, thought Hessler draws it out effectively and elegantly.
While The Woman Who Wouldn't Die looks back to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Repeat Performance, 1947, looks forward to Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," which started in 1959. Alfred Wexler's film starts out on New Year's Day 1947 when Joan Leslie shoots her alcoholic and abusive husband and as she flees their apartment she finds herself on New Year's Day 1946 and realizes she has the whole year to do everything over. She tries to change everything, especially to get her alcoholic play-writing husband to stop drinking, stop philandering and finish his play. She has limited success. The screenplay, by Walter Bullock from a novel by William O'Farrell, has one of the most detailed and scary portraits of an alcoholic that I have ever seen, in an industry where drinking is too often portrayed as humorous, and Louis Hayward, as Leslie's husband, plays the role to the hilt. Leslie's friend William Williams, played by Richard Basehart, escapes from a mental hospital (Leslie tries to prevent him from ending up there in her re-lived year) and shoots Hayward when he tries to attack Leslie. As Basehart says at the end, "Destiny's a stubborn old girl. She doesn't like people interfering with her plans. But we tricked her, didn't we? Anyway, I don't think she cares about the pattern so long as the result is the same." Repeat Performance is one of a number of good films that uses New Year's eve and day for important dramatic purposes, including Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957), Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1966), and John Stahl's Only Yesterday (1933). As for Alfred Werker, director of Repeat Performance, he was a workmanlike director who is remembered, unfortunately, for replacing Eric Von Stroheim on Hello Sister (1933) and being replaced by Anthony Mann on He Walked by Night (1948).
While The Woman Who Wouldn't Die looks back to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Repeat Performance, 1947, looks forward to Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," which started in 1959. Alfred Wexler's film starts out on New Year's Day 1947 when Joan Leslie shoots her alcoholic and abusive husband and as she flees their apartment she finds herself on New Year's Day 1946 and realizes she has the whole year to do everything over. She tries to change everything, especially to get her alcoholic play-writing husband to stop drinking, stop philandering and finish his play. She has limited success. The screenplay, by Walter Bullock from a novel by William O'Farrell, has one of the most detailed and scary portraits of an alcoholic that I have ever seen, in an industry where drinking is too often portrayed as humorous, and Louis Hayward, as Leslie's husband, plays the role to the hilt. Leslie's friend William Williams, played by Richard Basehart, escapes from a mental hospital (Leslie tries to prevent him from ending up there in her re-lived year) and shoots Hayward when he tries to attack Leslie. As Basehart says at the end, "Destiny's a stubborn old girl. She doesn't like people interfering with her plans. But we tricked her, didn't we? Anyway, I don't think she cares about the pattern so long as the result is the same." Repeat Performance is one of a number of good films that uses New Year's eve and day for important dramatic purposes, including Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957), Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1966), and John Stahl's Only Yesterday (1933). As for Alfred Werker, director of Repeat Performance, he was a workmanlike director who is remembered, unfortunately, for replacing Eric Von Stroheim on Hello Sister (1933) and being replaced by Anthony Mann on He Walked by Night (1948).
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