Turner Classic Movies April 1, 2020

On April 1 are a number of Kurosawa movies; I loved them when I was an adolescent but I now prefer the more subtle films of Ozu and Mizoguchi.  It may be time to look at Kurosawa again.

On April 4 is Anthony Mann's Winchester '73, (1950) the first of a series of intense Westerns Mann made with James Stewart.
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On the 5th is Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960), funny, touching and, of course, cynical.

On the 11th is Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), impressively fatalistic and imaginative.

On the 15th is Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937), the best of the Astaire/Rogers films, with glorious dancing, Gershwin music.

On the 17th is John Ford's beautiful She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

On the 18th is Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1956), from a Nelson Algren novel, with Kim Novak and an impressive score by Elmer Bernstein and Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), one of his best British films.

On the 20th is Jacque Tourneur's Out of the Past, a terrific film noir and Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1946).

On the 24th is Douglas Sirk's melancholy and ironic soap opera, There's Always Tomorrow (1956), with Barbara Stanwyck.

On the 26 is Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955) and Buster Keaton's brilliant Sherlock, Jr.(1924).

On the 27th is Nicholas Ray's impressive Hot Blood (1956)

Jacques Tourneur's Wichita 1955

Tourneur uses historical setting and genre conventions to establish only very basic identities of characters.
--Roger McNiven, "Jacques Tourneur" in American Directors (McGraw Hill, 1983)

Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterton were regular characters in Westerns, both on TV and in movies, and here they are again.  Earp is hoping to start a small business of some sort in Wichita, where Masterson is working on the local newspaper.  Then trailhands ride in to town to "hurrah" it and a small boy is accidentally killed and Earp accepts the mayor's offer to become the new marshal and proceeds to ban handguns.  The powerful businessmen in town try to convince the mayor to rescind the offer and when he refuses they try to kill Earp.

Earp is played effectively by Joel McCrea, who at this point in his career was working exclusively in Westerns, with Vera Miles as his love interest.  McCrea arrive as a distant speck on the hills in the Cinemascope frame (cinematography by Harold Lipstein) and Tourneur keeps his role low-key, with Earp's gun drawn quickly and quietly when necessary.  As he did so beautifully in his black-and-white films --e.g., Out of the Past (1947) -- Tourneur uses only natural light sources.

Balanchine's Jewels in Munich

Bayerisches  Staatsballett in Munich streamed their performance of Balanchine's Jewels for one day on March 21 and it was one of the most successful examples of a filmed ballet I have ever seen. They used at least four cameras and tried to film it as if it were being seen by the human eye, as it switched easily and intelligently from close-up to long shot; there was no director credited in the streaming.  All Balanchine ballet productions have to be approved by The Balanchine Trust and a repetiteur is assigned to do the choreography; in Munich the repetieurs were former NYC Ballet dancers Patricia Neary and Elyse Borne.  It probably helped that the Munich company has dancers from all over the world, as Emeralds, to the music of Faure, is influenced by French ballet; Rubies, to Stravinsky, is American-influenced --NYC Ballet dancer Ashley Bouder danced the lead -- and Diamonds, to the music of Tschaikovsky, had Russians Alina Somova and Vladimir Schiyarov in the lead. And I'm sure it helped that the Bayerisches Staatsballet is run by Russian Igor Zelensky, who danced for the NYC Ballet.

This performance of Jewels worked beautifully on every level:  the magical green forest of Emeralds, the jazzy red of Rubies, the romantic and elegant sparkle of Diamonds.  Of course my hope increased that we will be able to go to the two performances in May of NYC Ballet for which we have tickets.

Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven

Jeevan kept thinking about his girlfriend, his house in Cabbagetown, wondering if he was going to see either of them again.  Cell phones had stopped working by then.  His brother had no landline.  Outside the world was ending and snow continued to fall.
--Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (Alfred A. Knopf)

On the day that the Georgian flu reached North America Arthur Leander dropped dead during a performance of King Lear.  Station Eleven flashes forward and backward to demonstrate what happened to the EMT who tried to help him, the little girl who was in the cast, as well as Arthur's friends and former wives and what their lives were like before and after the arrival of the pandemic.  This is probably not the novel to read during our current pandemic, especially if one is a pessimist. One friend of Arthur's spent the next twenty years in an airport.  Station Eleven is an imaginary world that former wife Miranda drew and survived to be handed down and passed around among the survivors of the pandemic, while Kirsten, the young girl in the cast of King Lear, became part of a traveling troupe performing concerts and Shakespeare plays with salvaged instruments and costumes.  This grim and moving novel ends with a glimmer of hope, literally, as a town in the distance seems to have been able to turn the electricity on.

Fred F. Sears's Badman's Country 1958

Hampton's script treats history in a cavalier fashion that is matched by Sears' exuberant direction.
--Phil Hardy on Badman's Country in The Western (William Morrow,1983)

Fred F. Sears was sometimes an actor but mainly a prolific director of B movies, most of them either in the horror or Western genres; he made 54 movies in his eighteen year career and Badman's Country was one of the five movies he directed that were released in 1958, a year after he died at the age of 44, and had to compete with the Westerns that were crowding the TV screen.  Badman's Country competed by doing what many of the B Westerns of that period did:  shooting on location and emphasizing action and violence.  Sears, writer Orville Hampton and producer Robert Kent came up with the effective idea that since they could not afford well-known actors they would use well known characters:  Pat Garrett (George Montgomery),Buffalo Bill Cody (Malcolm Atterbury), Wyatt Earp (Buster Crabbe), Bat Masterton (Gregory Walcott) and bad guys Butch Cassidy (Neville Brand) and the Sundance Kid (Russell Johnson) and included a significant number of impressive character actors:  Richard Devon, Morris Ankrum, et al.  The one woman in the cast was Karin Booth, who was involved in an adult subplot of supporting Pat Garrett in his last job of marshalling before they could leave for California.   Howard Hough was the second unit director responsible for the beautiful choreographed gunfights and Ben Kline --who started doing cinematography in the 20's --did the crisp black-and-white photography.  I'm sure I would have loved this movie if I had had a chance to see it when it came out; I was eleven years old at the time

Pawel Pawlikowski's Cold War 2019

Cold War is a glowingly beautiful film, its story and direction by Pawel Pawlikowsi and its luminous black-and- white and Academic aspect ratio cinematography by Lukasz Zal.  It follows the amor fou of musician Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) from Poland to France and back again, from 1949 to 1964.  They start out in Poland putting together a folk dance ensemble, beautiful and successful on its own, until they are told by a Party bureaucrat to make it more about labor and the struggle for world peace, i.e., Stalinist.  Wiktor escapes to Paris, as Zula stays in Poland, eventually marrying an Italian and meeting Wiktor in Yugoslavia.  Wiktor sticks with jazz as rock 'n roll becomes more popular, while Zula becomes more disillusioned with the increasing political folk dancing and singing.  They end up taking pills and sitting next to a single tree on a bench next to a field of wheat, reminding one of DW. Griffith and "the wind blowing through the trees."

Zula struggles for personal freedom while Wiktor seeks artistic freedom; each is unhappy with the compromises one has to make as they repeatedly attempt to reconcile.  Pawlikowski's direction is effectively low-key, inspired by the films not only of Robert Bresson but of Roman Polanski's Polish films, where the viewer meets the image halfway and is trusted to understand the often complicated artistic and political complexities of this gorgeous film.

Monte Hellman's Beast from the Haunted Cave.1959

When I wrote my post about snow in movies in 2014 I neglected to mention Monte Hellman's Beast from the Haunted Cave, probably since I had not seen it since 1972; it is now on Amazon Prime.  It's Hellman's first movie in a rather sparse career: 14 films in 60 years, some of them highly regarded (The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, both 1966, and Two-Lane Blacktop in 1971), almost all of them low-budget.  Produced by Gene Corman (brother of Roger, who was shooting Ski Troop Attack at the same time with the same actors).  Beast.. is a rather unusual combination of a horror film and a heist film, as a group steals gold from a bank and takes off on skis through the snow, followed by a blood sucking monster who fancies the female of the group, Gypsy (played by Sheila Noonan).  The group quarrels among themselves and the monster gradually does them in, until only Gypsy and their guide through the snow survive.

The script is by Corman regular Charles Griffith, who wrote many Corman films and could pack a great deal into a film barely over sixty minutes, and cinematographer Andrew Costikyan shot in an austere black-and-white style that never revealed much of the monster, making him mostly a psychological threat until the end.  The leader of the gang, Alexander Ward, was played with intensity by Frank Wolff, who was impressive later in his small role in Sergio Leone's C'er una volta il West (1968)

The Blood of the Lamb by Peter De Vries

I walked out past St. Catherine's to the bar and grill and back again so often through so many hospitalizations that I cannot remember which time it was that I stopped in the church on the way back to sit down and rest.  I was dead-drunk and stone-sober and bone-tired, my head split and numbed by the plague of voices in eternal disputation.  I knew why I was delaying my return to the hospital.  The report on the morning's aspiration would be phoned up to the ward from the laboratory any minute, and what I died to learn I dreaded to hear. 
-- Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (Little, Brown and Company, 1961)

I often think of De Vries when reading "The New Yorker," the cartoons lacking for many years since De Vries retired from working on their captions in 1987 after more than forty years.  I had read all of his twenty-seven novels as they came out during the same period but had not re-read any until I read in the "New York Times Book Review" several weeks ago that The Blood of the Lamb was Larry Kramer's favorite book that "no one else has heard of."  Reading it now it has a beauty and poignancy that I find quite moving, now that I have a wonderful wife and two delightful children. The best books are appreciated in different ways at different points in one's life.

De Vries never got his due because he was mistakenly identified as a "comic writer" rather than one who correctly sees life as both funny and tragic  The Blood of the Lamb is narrated by Don Wanderhope, who makes a continuous effort to shed his Calvinist upbringing and his anger at God.  He is more successful at this than, say, the characters in Graham Greene's novels, but he also struggles to understand his own suffering:  his older brother dies of pneumonia in childhood, his wife commits suicide and his twelve-year-old daughter dies from leukemia.  Wanderhope pleads futilely with God for just one more year with his daughter, so they can spend it as they have the last year "picking one snowflake and following it to the ground."  When his daughter Carol dies Wanderhope takes the birthday cake he had purchased for her and throws it a statue of Christ and watches it drip off the statue's face, in the way that Carol had appreciated the silent comedians doing when they were hit by pies.

H. Bruce Humberstone's Three Little Girls in Blue 1946

It's interesting to speculate what Three Little Girls in Blue might have been like if the film were directed by John Brahm, who originally started to direct before being replaced by the workmanlike Humberstone.  Brahm, director of Hangover Square (1945) and The Locket (1946) might have brought some artistic cynicism to this story of three farm girls who use their small inheritance to go to Atlantic City in 1902 to find wealthy husbands.  The women --June Haver, Vivian Blaine, Vera Ellen --are all rather charming, but unfortunately none of them apparently could sing, since all three were dubbed, as were the men:  George Montgomery, Frank Lattimore, Charles Smith.  Celeste Holm does come in during the final third of the film to sing "Always a Lady;" it was her first film after appearing in "Oklahoma" on Broadway.

The real star of the film is the score by Mack Gordon (who also produced the film) and Josef Myrow, including "You Make Me Feel So Young," to which Vera Ellen danced (choreography by Seymour Felix; Vera Ellen was the only dancer in the film) to a fantasy dream filled with Freudian symbolism.  The film is in beautiful technicolor with an intense palette emphasizing yellow, blue (appropriately) and red.

One of the reasons that that the Rogers/Astaire films are such successful films is not due to the directors (although Mark Sandrich directed the best ones) but because they have beautiful choreography by Astaire and Hermes Pan and scores by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, etc., with  Astaire and Rogers doing their own singing, emphasizing and illustrating their relationship.  In my ballet class dressing room one evening a fellow student and aspiring performer said that he has to be able to dance, sing and act in order to get the best parts; in too many movie musicals, even during the classical period, one or more of these skills is missing.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

The rain was stopping when Lamb pulled out of the car park.  River stared straight ahead, through the m-shape the wipers' last sweep had left, and didn't need to ask where they were headed.  They were going to Slough House.  Where else.
Mick Herron, Slow Horses (Soho Press, 2010).

I was excited about Mick Herron after reading his first novel (see my post of Feb. 18) only to be disillusioned by this spy novel of his, with all the worst ingredients of even the best spy novelists, such as John Le Carre:  confusion, manipulation and cardboard characters.  Slough House is where MI5 spies who screwed up -- leaving documents on the tube, failing training exercises, etc.-- are exiled.  The best part of Slow Horses is how much like any office Slough House is, with the lower echelons feuding with each other while being united with a dislike for the boss.  Nobody knows why anyone has been exiled and that allows the boss to manipulate the staff as much as Herron manipulates the reader.  Some of this is rather amusing --"this thing couldn't have fallen apart faster if you'd bought it Ikea" --but much it is fairly predictable, especially if one is familiar with the good and bad of spy fiction.

Raoul Walsh's Along the Great Divide 1951

Although the script, particularly at the denouement, lacks the cutting edge of, say, Pursued (1947) the spectacular desert locations and the strong performances, from Mayo and Douglas especially, give a resonance to the mood of romantic tragedy that Walsh creates.
--Phil Hardy, The Western (William Morrow and Company, 1983)

While Walsh gives power to the psychological battles at hand -- including the complex issue of justice and living up to the law -- the battles of man against nature are the ones Walsh favors in almost every frame.
--Marilyn Ann Moss, Raoul Walsh:  The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director (University Press of Kentucky, 2011)

Kirk Douglas plays in his first Western with characteristic intensity, helped immensely by Virginia Mayo's feistiness and an impressive cast of supporting cowboys.  Douglas has to bring in Mayo's father (Walter Brennan) across the desert after rescuing him from a lynching, while being pursued by the landowner whose son was allegedly killed by Brennan.  Like most of Walsh's films the story works on multiple levels and themes, including the clash of generations, man's relationship with nature and the tension between cattle ranchers and homesteaders. It is filmed in beautiful black-and-white by cinematographer Sid Hickcox, as he and Walsh capture the textures of the rocks, the blowing and shifting of the sand and the heat of the sun in the desert in August.

Three Contemporary Films

I am occasionally asked why I don't write about more contemporary films and my simple response is twofold:  one:  contemporary films are widely reviewed already (each film I will mention here has hundreds of reviews, which one can easily find on IMDB or MRQE) and two:  most contemporary films look as though D.W. Griffith never lived; I prefer to write about movies that (mostly) I like.

Boon Jon-Hoo's Parasite, Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse and Quentin Taratino's Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are different in superficial ways but actually quite similar in construction: an original attempt to deal with class issues that, in all three cases, ends with nihilistic violence.  This a pattern from all three directors, though in the case of Eggers it is only his second film.  Boon Jon-Hoo's film takes place in the present day, the other two attempt a detailed re-creation of the past, the 1960's in Tarantino's film and the vague 19th century in Eggers case.  It's difficult to determine whether this approach is meretricious or actually a personal vision of the director, the writer and the cinematographer.  Eggers is trying to be deliberately anachronistic with his black-and-white and aspect ratio of 1.33:1, while Tarantino is obviously more interested in re-creating the looks and sounds of the late 60's than he is in anything else, his "characters" being little more than symbolically two-dimensional.

I do give credit to Eggers for influencing my returning to read more Melville --who is obviously a considerable influence on The Lighthouse -- as well as Poe, whose unfinished story was the germ of Eggers idea for the film, as Poe wrote "It never would have done to let Ormdoff accompany me.  I never should have made any way with my book as long as he was within reach of me, with his intolerable gossip -- not to mention that everlasting meerschaum."

NYC Ballet, Feb.29 2020

Haieff Divertimento is quick and sharp.  It has a hint of juvenile romance, a curiously tender very novel pas de deux, a virtuoso girl's solo that looks all simple and dewy, and a wonderful ending.
--Edwin Denby, Town and Country (April, 1947).

We had tickets for this performance because we wanted to see Balanchine's Haieff Divertimento, which has not been in NYC Ballet's repertory for many years.  We had seen it in 2010 revived by Suzanne Farrell for her eponymous company in Washington D.C. and were delighted it had returned to New York.  The ballet sparkles as the dancers use speed and energy to convey interpretations of American dance traditions in balletic form, reminding on of Balanchine's Who Cares, to Gershwin music, and Square Dance, to the music of Vivaldi and Corelli.  It's interesting that the ballet has pas de cheval as well as beautiful off-balance turns, both of which Farrell is known for, but Farrell never danced it.  It was originally done on Maria Tallchief, whom I never saw perform but was also a favorite of Balanchine's. The short piece was elegantly danced by Unity Phelan and Harrison Ball and four couples. Haieff Divertimento was originally choregraphed in 1947 but in no way looked dated.

After the Haieff piece I suggested, somewhat jokingly, "we can go home now," which perhaps we should have done.  Robbins's Concertino to Stravinsky came next and did not fare well in comparison to Haieff Divertimento.  It may have been less misanthropic than other Robbins pieces and this pas de trois (Alec Knight, Emilie Gerrity, Peter Walker) did the best they could with excessive and ugly schlumping.

Balanchine's Episodes followed, once part of a Balanchine mixture with Martha Graham, and a demonstration of the difficulty of dancing to Webern.  Paul Taylor's original solo has been restored and was danced by Jovani Furlan; at this point it almost seems like a parody of Graham and modern dance in general.  The ballet is unusual in Balanchine's work in having no allegro at all, though the finale with Sara Mearns and Ask la Cour, to Webern's version of Bach's Musical Offering, has an intensely beautiful soaring and ritualistic quality to it.

The last piece, Justin Peck's Rodeo:  Four Dance Episodes, was tedious, with endless running and jumping in pseudo-ballet style.  Aaron Coplan's score was lovely (if you closed your eyes) and Tiler Peck did a good job in the only female role but Justin did not seem to have much to say.

My eight-year-old daughter complained, justifiably, that there was too much "jazz dance" and not enough ballet, though she loved Haieff Divertimento.  The New York State Theatre was festooned with portraits of New York City Ballet staff, including security staff, electricians, etc.  Lauren Redniss's portraits made everyone look like Nosferatu.

Turner Classic Movies March 2020

Nothing particularly new and exciting this month, though lots of solid films.  I am tending to not always list films I have listed before so I will just mention that I do recommend any movie by John Ford or Howard Hawks.

Mar. 2 has Otto Preminger's intense film noir Laura (1944) with a score by David Raskin and Joseph Mankiwicz's lovely The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1949), with haunting music by Bernard Herrmann.

Mar.5 has Vincente Minnelli's vivid and dreamlike melodrama Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

Mar. 11 has Val Lewton's scary The Seventh Victim (1943), directed by Mark Robson

Mar.. 14 has Preminger's beautiful The River of No Return (1954)

Mar,. 15 has Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954) and Douglas Sirk's ironic Christmas card (1955) All That Heaven Allows.

Mar. 18 has James Whale's The Great Garrick (1937)

Mar.. 19 has Frank Bozage's A Farewell to Arms (1932), a romantic interpretation of Hemingway's novel, and Fritz Lang's Winchester 73, the first of his intensive collaboration with James Stewart.

Mar. 20 has Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), Joseph H, Lewis's dark side of America Gun Crazy (1950), Jean-luc Godard's Breathless (1960)

Mar. 21 has Jack Arnold's poetic monster film The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Mar. 26 has Joseph H. Lewis's dark Western Terror in a Texas Town (1958), Andre de Toth's Crime Wave (1954) and John Huston's great The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Mar. 28 has John Ford's beautiful and corrosive Western The Searchers (1956)

Mar. 31 has Raoul Walsh's period romantic comedy/tragedy The Strawberry Blonde (1941)