Turner Classic Movies June 2020

A pretty good month of solid classics.

Jun 1:  two of Otto Preminger's best films, The Man with the Golden Arm (1956) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

June 3:  films by Sam Peckinpah, my favorite still being Ride the High Country (1962)

June 4:  Howard Hawks's unique version of The Front Page, His Girl Friday (1940)

June 5:  The Marx Brothers; their best film by far is Duck Soup, their only film with a good director (Leo McCarey)

June 7:  two by the surrealist Georges Franju:  Judex (1963) and Eyes Without a Face (1959)

June 10:  two by Vincente Minnelli:  The Clock (1945) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

June 12:  John Ford's last film, Seven Women (1966)

June 13:  Terence Fisher's Horror of Dracula (1958), Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1950) and Andre de Toth's Springfield Rifle (1952)

June 14: Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940)

June 15:  Robert Wise's film noir Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

June 17: Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina (1934), one of Garbo's best films.

June 19:  four excellent examples of the film noir:  Anthony Mann's Side Street (1950),  Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952), Rudolph Mate's D.O.A. (1950), Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950).

June 20:  Samuel Fuller's Underworld USA (1961) and Charlie Chaplin's brilliant The Kid (1921).

June 22:  two by Billy Wilder, The Apartment (1960) and Double Indemnity (1944).

June 24:  Stephanie Rothman's It's a Bikini World (1967)

June 27:  Robert Mulligan's Western The Stalking Moon (1968)

June 28:  King Vidor's silent masterpiece The Crowd (1928) and Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1963)

June 30: Vincente Minnelli's melodrama Home from the Hill (1960) and Phil Karlson's corrosive film noir The Phenix City Story (1955)

NYC Ballet Digital Spring 21st Century Choreographers

NYC Ballet digital Spring ended with "21st Century Choreographers," which did make one feel particularly optimistic about the future.  The only ballet in this group that I thought showed promise was Gianna Reisen's Composer's Holiday, to the music of Lukas Foss, which at least tried a new approach to ballet. especially with its assertive female corps stepping into unusual piques in unusual formations.  Justin Peck's two "sneaker ballets --Easy, to the music of Leonard Bernstein and Times Are Racing, to a score by Dan Deacon -- showed some energy, especially the latter ballet, a pas de deux with Peck and Robert Fairchild, but were mostly derivative of Jerome Robbins.  Pam Tanowitz's Bartok Ballet, to Bartok's string quartet #5,  was strange and strained, with hands-on-shoulders port de bras and weird hopping on one leg with the other leg in attitude.  Alexei Ratmansky, who seems to produce endless pointless ballets is represented by Voices, with a score of piano mixed with, yes, voices by Peter Albinger, with dancers mostly rolling around on the floor and Kyle Abraham's The Runaway excerpt is mostly Taylor Stanley endlessly twitching. Oltemare, choregraphed by Mauro Bigonzetti to music by Bruno Moretti is the closest any of these ballets comes to a narrative and is not the better for it, with hunched shoulders and floppy bodies, possibly representing the difficulties of going "beyond the sea" to find a new home.

Fortunately all of these ballets -- with the exception of Peck's Easy -- were excerpts, none of which made one wish to see them in their entirety. None of them were beautiful -- some were quite ugly-- or engaged one's emotions.

Death From a Top Hat by Clayton Rawson

"I want food; then I'm going home where I can think.  I can't do it around you.  Too much going on.  Suspects hpoping in and out like mad, questions and answers popping six dozen to the minute, detectives swarming, Harte writing a book on the back of an envelope, photographers climbing all over me, fingerprint experts spraying powder down my neck, and every ten minutes the whole blame case does a triple somersault over six elephants and lands on it neck.  Once tonight I thought I had it all nicely figured out, and then, suddenly, my solution melted, all at once, like a Vanishing Bird Cage."
--Merlini in Death From a Top Hat by Clayton Rawson (Penzler Publishers, 1938)

Kudos to Otto Penzler for his American Mystery Classics series, bringing back to print neglected American novels.  Like many boys I was fascinated by magic when I was young; it gives the power of knowledge over adults and the pleasure of not revealing how the tricks were done and Rawson's book captures the details of magicians' lives.  Death From a Top Hat is the first in magician Rawson's series about Merlini, a consultant on unexplainable mysteries, often involving locked rooms.  In this book Merlini quotes from Gideon Fell in John Dickson Carr's Three Coffins (1935) on the various kinds of locked room mysteries, divided broadly into those where no murderer was in the room and those where the murderer was in the room but ingeniously escaped.  The two locked-room murders in Death From a Top Hat are especially impressive because they were done by a magician, trained in escapes as well as misdirection.  These murders are complex, involving multiple disguises and intricate distractions.  I'm probably not the ideal reader for this particular genre of mystery, since there are too many suspects, red herrings and changing lists of alibis for me to keep track of, but Death From a Top Hat is a fascinating period piece, giving detailed information -- with a certain sense of humor -- of the world of magic in the thirties, footnotes included.

When I was reading Rawson's book I thought it might make a good movie, with all its fascinating characters, and was surprised to find the movie version, Miracles for Sale, on the internet.  It's a 71-minute B film with Robert Young as Merlini.  It was made at MGM where director Todd Browning had trouble finding work after the compassionate and intelligent Freaks (1932) was hated by the studio, even though his film Dracula (1931) was quite a success. Browning was an actor in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance in 1916 and started making films shortly thereafter, ending his silent film career with the bizarre Unknown (1927) with Lon Chaney, with whom Browning made a number of films, many of them now lost.  Miracles for Sale is an okay B film which follows the broad outlines of Rawson's book, adding Merlini's father as a comic character.  Browning was intrigued by the elements of magic in the film but didn't care much for the comedy and the romance.  It was Browning's final film, after which he lived in seclusion until his death twenty years later.

New York City Ballet Digital Spring: Donizetti Variations

New York City Ballet's digital Spring continued this week with another Balanchine masterpiece: Donizetti Variations, originally choreographed in 1960.  It is a marvelously buoyant ballet, to music from Donizetti's Don Sebastian (Balanchine was ballet master at the Metropolitan Opera before founding New York City Ballet) and was here danced by Ashley Bouder and Andrew Veyette, who were more than equal to the speed and precision that Balanchine's choreography requires.  There was a corps of three men and six women, who were divided up in every way possible, from trios to solos to pas de deux.  The uninhibited style was considerably influenced by the Danish choreographer August Bournonville, especially the use of lowered arms and assertive use of space,

What I particularly noticed in this performance was how much time was spent in the air:  when Veyette lifted Bouder she was high in the air and seemed to float across the stage and when she did grand pas de chat one saw only the passe in the air; when Veyette did tours en l'air he stayed up for multiple turns before descending to do multiple pirouettes and when he did cabrioles his feet were beautifully pointed and his legs fully turned out.  And their pas de deux expressed the joy of their relationship, dancing to please themselves, each other and, of course, the audience.

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New York City Ballet's Digital Spring: Christopher Wheeldon

This week there were two more Wheeldon ballets on the NYC Ballet website:  Liturgy and Carousel: A Dance; two more ballets, slight but likable, that I didn't have to pay for, as I try to find some more marginal benefits to sheltering in place (I was able to get back to ballet classes after a five-year absence because a teacher of mine is giving digital classes.)  Liturgy at first glance seems to be considerably influenced by Balanchine's magnificent Episodes -- particularly Webern's Five Pieces Op. 10 pas de deux, in which a woman wraps herself around a man on a darkened stage -- while Carousel: A Dance is more influenced by the theatrical dances of Jerome Robbins as well as Dances at a Gathering and other ballets Robbins did for the New York City Ballet.  The music for Liturgy by Arvo Part is non-serial, somewhat similar to the Webern music in  Episodes, and the Richard Rogers music for Carousel: A Dance is itself from the musical Carousel.  The dancing in both pieces was excellent:  Maria Kowkoski and Tyler Angle were intense and focused in Liturgy and Angle, Lauren Lovette and the corps were energetic and precise in Carousel: A Dance.

Also on the NYC Ballet website was A Part of Together, in which Tiler Peck, Troy Schumacher, Lauren Lovette, Ashley Bouder, and Peter Walker danced individually on location to Bach's Brandenberg Concerto No. 6 in B-Flat Major, with Peck ending up in a swimming pool and Walker dancing up and down a flight of stairs.  The piece projected effectively the pure pleasure of dancing.

Peter Bogdanovitch's What's Up, Doc? (1972)

And while we're at it we can't scant the contributions of the editor, Verna Fields, and the production designer Polly Platt.  The design of Mr. Larabee's house -- with those Lucite pillars and all that fancy modern sculpture -- and the surreal rooms on the 17th floor of the Bristol Hotel may be the real stars of the picture.
--A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis on What's Up, Doc? (NY Times, May 22 2020)

A tremendously able craftsman, Frank Tashlin was one of the most inventive visual gag constructionists of the talkies, he brought the outrageous, impossible humor of cartoons and connected it humanly to live action.
--Peter Bogdanovitch, preface to Frank Tashlin (British Film Institute, 1994).

Although What's Up Doc? has a plot loosely based on Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1939) the actual film is based more on the Jerry Lewis films directed by Frank Tashlin -- especially The Disorderly Orderly (1964) -- and Buster Keaton, especially Seven Chances (1925); note that Bogdanovitch has recently made a documentary about Keaton (and it would be nice if he would also make one about the largely-forgotten Tashlin.)  What's Up, Doc? (Bugs Bunny's signature greeting) is often a very funny film but doesn't have the grace of Keaton, the satire of Tashlin or the tension between irresponsibility and professionalism of Hawks.  Rather, it is more like the cartoons of Chuck Jones and others, as suggested by the title, as it moves from slamming doors (as in the cartoons of Tex Avery) and broken windows in a hotel to car crashes and smashes on the hilly streets of San Francisco (I particularly liked one Keaton-like gag where a man goes to open the door on his smashed-up Volkswagon bus and the whole thing falls apart). In other words, unlike the best comedy (think of Lubitsch, McCarey, Preston Sturges), What's Up, Doc? has nothing serious to say -- as the final words of the film demonstrate -- but shows an impressive kinetic energy.  My eight-year-old daughter liked it because, for one reason, at least Ryan O'Neal's jilted fiancée Madeline Kahn ended up with another man (Austin Pendleton), unlike  Cary Grant's fiancée Virginia Walker in Bringing Up Baby.

What's Up, Doc? was the penultimate Bogdanovitch film on which Polly Platt worked, with a script by Robert Benton, David Newman, and Buck Henry.  Cinematographer Lazslo Kovacs worked with Bogdanovitch on four more films.

New York City Ballet Digital Spring: Diamonds

After the slight disappointment of Justin Peck's energetic but somewhat arbitrary Pulcinella Variations, with its unattractive costumes by Tsumori Chisato, it was a delight to see this week Balanchine's Diamonds, the third part of Jewels, from 1967 and coached by Suzanne Farrell, on whom Balanchine had choregraphed it originally.  This ballet, with music from Tschaikovsky's Symphony No. 3 in D Major (the first movement is missing, considered by Balanchine as unsuitable for dancing) is exquisite and complex, and never totally yielding up its secrets no matter how many times one sees it.

This performance is danced by Russell Janzen and Sara Mearns and a corps of seventeen women and twelve men.  The first movement is allegro and a complex scene of women doing, mostly, variations on battement, pique arabesque, balance and pas de chat to the waltzlike music.  The second part is an elegant adagio pas de deux with Janzen and Mearns, as they constantly come together and pull apart, emphasizing their dependency as well as their independence.  And in the third part the corps is partnered as the music builds, slows down for mazurkas and polonaises, and builds again for fast pirouettes and grand jetes in the climax. It's a beautiful and moving ballet, emphasizing --as Balanchine often does -- everything from independence to being part of a couple and then part of a group, with individuals in harmony with one another.

Disappointments

If you admire fiction and consider it at its best richer than philosophy and novelists as the true historians of the present, but, like me, find yourself easily resisting contemporary novels, the reason, I believe, is that recent novels no longer do many of the things that once made them so glorious.
--Joseph Epstein, "What Happened to the Novel?"  (Commentary, May 2020)

I recently finished Ann Napolitano's Dear Edward (The Dial Press, 2020) and was disappointed, as I often am with contemporary novels; in spite of some graceful MFA writing the overall effect is one of blandness and a lack of passion and precision, with a considerable amount of manipulation.  Edward, twelve-years-old, is the only survivor of an airplane crash in which his parents and older brother die.  There are alternating chapters of the plane trip and after Edward's survival, as he comes to grips with what has happened to him. The novel deals with the life of an orphan who goes to live with his uncle and aunt and touches on everything after the crash, including an avalanche of letters from relatives of those who died in the crash and want, in most cases, for Edward to do something in memory of one of the 191 victims.  None of the characters, including Edward and the girl next door(literally), ever quite come to life.

The other disappointment this week was the KBO (Korea Baseball Organization) broadcasts on ESPN.  The stadiums were empty and the umpires wore masks and the level of play was not too bad, so I thought it might help me to stop missing baseball as much as I do, which is much less than I had expected to..  The camerawork was worse even then U.S. television, to the extent it was sometime hard to tell what was going on, and the announcers --the games I've watched so far had Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez -- were woefully unprepared and had little to say about Korean baseball and its history and differences and similarities with the American game.  Rather Ravech and Perez talked mostly what they thought might happen in this country, conversing with guests about American baseball while the Korean game went on, mostly uncommented on, on the side.

NYC Ballet in the plague year (continued)

I didn't care much for Alexi Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH last week-end (it looked to me like children playing on a beach, and I don't mean that as a compliment) so it was nice to see a return this week to Jerome Robbins and Balanchine, as much as I appreciate the chance to see contemporary additions to the repertory without having to pay for a ticket.

This week's repertory included two pieces by Jerome Robbins:  Spring, from Four Seasons (music by Verdi) and Afternoon of a Faun (music by Debussy), two of Robbins's more inventive ballets.  I always like to identify with the dancer (Joseph Gordon) who fantasizes about the appearance of a ballerina (Sterling Hyltin) an their dancing together in front of a mirror, represented by the fourth wall, in Afternoon of a Faun.  Spring is both playful and inventive in Robbins's theatrical style, danced exuberantly by Sara Mearns and Tyler Angle.

I'm generally not too crazy about excerpts from complete ballets, but during this time they can be engaging reminders of the complete works.  The Balanchine excerpts were the Theme and Variations from Divertimento No. 15 (music by Mozart), Phlegmatic from The Four Temperaments (music by Hindemith) and Rondo from Western Symphony (traditional music orchestrated by Hershy Kay).  These excerpts showed the range of Balanchine's genius, from pure classicism to modernism
and theatriality.  All three excerpts were beautifully danced:  Ask la Cour in Phlegmatic, Sterling Hytlin and Tiler Peck in Theme and Variations and Teresa Reichlen and Roma Mejia in Western Symphony.

John Cromwell's The Silver Chord 1933

The Silver Chord is a beautifully directed version of Sidney Howard's play, written by Jane Murfin, who started in the silent era but, like many women directors and writers, was marginalized as the studios gained power and control.  It's a pre-code film about a manipulative widowed mother, Laura Hope Crews, who thinks no women are good enough for her sons (Joel McCrea and Eric Linden) and tries to break up their relationships with McCrea's wife (Irene Dunne) and Linden's betrothed (Frances Dee).  What makes it pre-code of course is that Louis B. Mayer would never have allowed such a critical view of motherhood.

The film also represents a battle of generations.  Dunne is a successful research scientist and Crews mocks the idea of a woman having a profession, saying that "science is not really a profession, it's more of a hobby," while insisting that McCrea stay with her rather than going to work as an architect in New York. Meanwhile Crews wants to take Linden away from Frances Dee and take him to Europe, where he could learn to be an interior designer (code term for gay, which was once thought to be an affliction caused by a domineering mother).  Dunne asserts herself magnificently, calling Crews  a "self-pitying tigress" and planning to leave by herself, if necessary, for her appointed post in New York. Meanwhile, Frances Dee can no longer take Crew's belittling and her attempts to get Linden to break up with her and runs out in the snow and jumps in the pond.

Cromwell's direction, with cinematographer Charles Rosher, is marvelously fluid, as the five protagonists roam throughout the house, arguing and reconciling all day and into the night.  Max Steiner's score is a highlight, emphasizing the rises and falls of the conflicts.

Paul Goldstone's The Sin of Nora Moran 1933

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for showing the pre-code The Sin of Nora Moran, an obscure film from a poverty row studio, Majestic Pictures, starring Zita Johann and directed by Phil Goldstone, each of whom made a handful of movies.  Johann plays Nora Moran, who is an orphan trying to make it as a dancer and when she is unable to find work she joins a circus, helping out in an animal act where the lion tamer Paulino (John Miljam) punches out the lions.  After Moran is raped by Paulino she flees and finds a job at a nightclub, where she meets and eventually shacks up with Frank Crawford (Paul Cavanagh) until she finds out that Crawford is married, just as Paulino's circus comes into town. Crawford decides to leave Moran and then changes his mind, returning to Moran just as Paulino is attacking her.  Crawford kills Paulino but Moran insists on taking the blame so as not to ruin Crawford's chances of becoming governor.  Moran is convicted of murder and when she is executed, Crawford, who is now governor and could have pardoned her, commits suicide.

This ludicrous plot is directed with considerable panache by Goldstone.  The story starts with Crawford's widow (Claire Du Brey) bringing a collection of unsigned love letters to the district attorney (John Grant) who tells the whole story before burning the letters.  There are flashbacks, flashforwards, flashbacks within flashbacks, fantasies and dream sequences, all within a 65-minute running time, which also includes considerable stock footage of nightclubs, circuses and speeding trains.  This movie, like the complex The Power and the Glory (1933, written by Preston Sturges and directed by William K. Howard), is considered by some to be an influence on the unusual structure of Citizen Kane (1941).

Digital Ballet in the Plague Year (continued)

The New York City Ballet continues its twice-weekly digital presentation with ballets filmed with one or two cameras that gives one the chance to closely study these ballets. Recently I saw Balanchine's Rubies, to Stravinsky's Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, a ballet that was beautifully danced by Gonzalo Garcia, Megan Fairchild, Mira Nadon and a sprightly and energized corps.  Of course Rubies is better seen as the middle of the full-length Jewels (see my posts of Sept. 23 2019, Sept. 24 2018,  Feb. 4 2014) but it works on its own fairly well, a jazzy and snazzy piece of classicism combined with modern techniques such as turned in legs and flexed feet.  These past couple of weeks have also included (to Stravinsky music) Balanchine's Apollo, with Taylor  Stanley, Tiler Peck, Brittany Pollack, and Indiana Woodward, a ballet that is one of Balanchine's earliest surviving ballets, made in 1928 when he was twenty-four years old.  The NYC Ballet recording included a second camera in the wings that showed a point of view not available to the audience, enhancing the artificial quality of the ballet that emphasized its brilliant classical creativity.

Also this week was Balanchine's Ballo della Regina, one of Balanchine's late works (1978) that originally was a showcase for Merrill Ashley and was beautifully danced in the recent recording by Megan Fairchild and Gonzalo Garcia.  An even faster and more precise version of this ballet is available on YouTube with Merrill Ashley and Robert Weiss, on whom Balanchine did the ballet originally.

We also saw last week the Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon's After the Rain, an intensive piece with Whelan in ballet slippers instead of pointe shoes.  I do appreciate the opportunity to see the Wheeldons and the Pecks that with our limited time and budget I don't usually get to see.  Starting tonight I will have the chance to "see" Alexei Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH.

Lambert Hillyer's Once to Every Woman 1934

Once to Every Woman has about everything you'd want in a pre-code medical drama: a stalwart nurse (Fay Wray) who falls for a womanizing doctor, an older surgeon who can't adapt to modern methods (Walter Connolly), a younger doctor who takes over when the older doctor falters (Ralph Bellamy), the younger nurse (Mary Carlisle) who is only looking for a doctor to marry, a young doctor (Walter Byron; one nurse says his M. D. stands for "more dames") who canoodles with the nurses on the roof of the hospital while neglecting his patients.  The patients in the women's ward include all ages and sexual preferences, as the film begins with nurses bringing in bowls of water for the women to wash up in the morning.

Fay Wray is very much the center of this melodrama, written by Jo Swerling (who wrote Lifeboat for Hitchcock in 1944) and directed by Lambert Hillyer, who started directing in 1917, known for his silent Westerns with William S. Hart and a prolific director of B Westerns until switching to television in the fifties. The title of the film seems ambiguous to me but Wray's acting is effectively low-key and modern as a woman dedicated to her job but still looking for love. The film is all interiors except for the opening shot of an ambulance and gives the effect of a hospital as an all-encompassing environment for doctors, nurses and patients.

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

Nothing but the immediate finger of God, nothing but omnipotent power, could have done it [stopped the plague].  The contagion despised all medicine; death raged in every corner; and had it gone on as it did then, a few more weeks would have cleared the town of all, and everything that had a soul.  Men everywhere began to despair; every heart failed them for fear; people were made desperate through the anguish of their souls, and the terrors of death sat in the very faces and countenances of the people.
--Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin, first published in 1722).

Defoe was only five years old in the plague year of 1665; A Journal of the Plague Year is perhaps the first "non-fiction novel," written in the first person and based on detailed research, with caveats when Defoe is unable to exactly prove various anecdotes of deaths of particular households.  When an infected member of a household exhibits symptoms the whole house is shut up and a watcher is assigned to make sure no one escapes.  It was a less than perfect system because watchers could be bribed and people found ingenious ways to escape.  There was also the problem of those who had what Defoe calls "the distemper" but had no symptoms and were still able to spread the disease.

There are many parallels to the current pandemic, as rich people were able to flee London while the poor were crowded together and unable to leave, as many of the poor had no choice but to continue to work while worried about contacting the disease and visiting it on their families.  Approximately 100,00 people died in the plague year, about a quarter of London's population, and it was followed in 1666 by the Great Fire of London.

One may feel better or worse after reading this beautifully written novel without chapter divisions.  It can give one a useful historical perspective that one can learn from and take comfort that medicine has considerably improved in last 350 years or, one can become depressed at the similarities between London's pandemic and our current one, with all the frustrations therein.

Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow (1955)

There's Always Tomorrow is an ironic soap opera film noir, a film that is effective on many levels, as bored husband and father Fred MacMurray is surprised by a visit from an employee he has neither seen nor heard from in twenty years, played by Barbara Stanwyck..  It becomes clear that they once loved each other and MacMurray tries to rekindle the romance, to the tune of the appropriate "Blue Moon" and under the nose of his homemaker wife Joan Bennett.  There's a great deal to see and think about in this film, if one lets it take place, as Jean-Luc Godard has suggested, halfway between you and the screen.  I just wanted to mention two important incidents:
   
MacMurray comes home from work on his wife's birthday with two tickets to a musical.  But Joan Bennett can't go with him because their daughter is having a ballet recital.  Apparently MacMurray didn't even know about this and doesn't care about his daughter's recital, all he wants is someone to go to the theatre with him.  His two other children can't go either and as they leave for their own dates they hit up MacMurray for money.  As MacMurray puts on an apron to get his own dinner, a scene some have seen as emasculating (incorrectly in my view), Stanwyck arrives out of the blue and agrees to go to the theatre with him, though they leave at intermission when Stanwyck says she has already seen the show in New York.  Certainly MacMurray's children are brats, as we gradually see in detail, but it is also true that he shows little interest in their lives, presumably because he thinks this is his wife's job.

Stanwyck is a successful designer and has set up a branch of her business in California.  After she comes to dinner with MacMurray's family (which turns out to be a disaster, because the two older kids think there is an affair going on between their father and Stanwyck) she invites Bennett to her shop and recommends a dress to her to try on; it looks lovely on her but she rejects it, saying it is too "young" for her.  Stanwyck suggests she take the dress home because her husband will rave about it.  Bennett shakes her head and says, "After twenty years of marriage a husband never raves about anything his wife wears."

This is a film about fatalism, choices and whether it is possible to change things if one, as MacMurray says "is in a rut."  It was written by Bernard Schoenfeld, who wrote a number of film noirs (including Phantom Lady in 1944), and photographed in black-and-white by Russell Metty, who helped Sirk make a suburban home look like a prison of bars and shadows.

Nicholas Ray's Hot Blood 1956

Nicholas Ray always wanted to make musicals and Hot Blood is as close as he ever came, in this wide-screen and colorful (cinematography by Ray June) movie, though stars Jane Russell and Cornel Wilde don't sing or dance much, mostly replaced by stand-ins except for the sado-masochistic "whip dance" after the wedding.  There are also homosexual undertones, with the men in charge of the gypsy subculture depicted here by ethnographer Ray, the depiction of outsiders and their customs a constant feature of Ray's films:   the teenagers in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the Intuit in The Savage Innocents (1960), the rodeo riders in The Lusty Men (1952).  Even the filming of Hot Blood on soundstages representing an unnamed city attests to the outsider nature of the Romani, just as the insistent use of pink, orange and red emphasizes the passions of Russell and Wilde and the blood they use to bind their marriage.

May 2020 Turner Classic Movies

The new films this month are three pre-code films:  John Cromwell's Silver Cord (1933), Phil Goldstone's Son of Nora Moreau (1933) and Lambert Hillyer's Once to Every Woman (1934) on May 3.  I have not seen these films but pre-code films are always interesting, for what they get away with if for no other reason.  Other quality films include the following:

May 2:  John Ford's beautiful Western My Darling Clementine (1946) and Otto Preminger's intense film noir Fallen Angel (1945).

May 5:  John Ford's masterful The Searchers (1956) and Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress, with Marlene Dietrich (1934).

May 8:  Raoul Walsh's The Man I Love (1947).

May 9:  Billy Wilder's cynical and corrosive Ace in the Hole (1951)

May 10: King Vidor's Stella Dallas, a class-conscious soap opera (1937) and Buster Keaton's funny and inventive Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

May 13:  three violent and socially-conscious films by Samuel Fuller:  Crimson Kimono (1959), House of Bamboo (1955), The Steel Helmet (1951)

May 15:  Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).

May 16: Jacques Tourneur's great film noir Out of the Past (1947),and Buster Keaton's impressive The General (1924).

May 17:  Mark Sandrich's exquisite Shall We Dance, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, music by George Gershwin (1937).

May 19:  Michael Powell's marvelous The Red Shoes (1948)

May 23:  John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)

May 26:  Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Michael Powell's moving I Know Where I'm Going (1945)

May 27: John Ford's The Horse Soldiers (1959)

May 28:  two by Fritz Lang, Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945).

May 29: Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953)