Cornell Woolrich's Waltz into Darkness 1947

 There wasn't a glint of pity in the stars over him as he came out into the open night and his face dimmed to its secretive shade.  There wasn't a breath of tenderness in the human salt breeze that came in from the Gulf.  He'd have her alone , and no one should save her.  He'd have her death and nothing else would do.

--Cornell Woolrich, Waltz into Darkness (Penzler, 2020; originally published by Lippincott,1947)

Francis M. Nevins, Jr., Woolrich's biographer, refers to the "lunatic excess" of Waltz into Darkness, and also says, " As Woolrich couldn't shake free from his mother's grip, neither can Durand from the grip of la femme fatale."  The novel takes place in Louisiana, and other Southern states, in 1880, as coffee tycoon Louis Durand marries a mail order bride.  The bride, Julia, turns out to be someone other than who she claims to be,  something Durand finds out when she takes all his money and disappears.  He tracks her down but when he finds her he falls for her story and falls for her again. Durand kills the private detective who he had hired to find his bride and Durand and Julia go on the run.  When Durand runs out of money his wife tries to kill him with rat poison, changing her mind a moment too late.

This rather implausible and full-of-coincidences tale reminds one of Wilkie Collins and of other 19th century writers, including Dickens. Woolrich adds misogyny and misanthropy to the mix and fills out the novel (his longest) with details and descriptions of the weather, the houses and the clothes everyone wears, adding verisimilitude to the nightmarish and passionate plot.  Many of Woolrich's stories and novels were made into film noir movies, though Waltz into Darkness was not made into a film until 1969, Mississippi Mermaid, directed by Francois Truffaut, which did not have Woolrich's intense prose to shield it from absurdity.

Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2020

 Sept. 1 has several Hitchcocks to start off the month; my favorite of the group is The Lady Vanishes (1938), with its impressive combination of suspense and humor.

Sept. 1 also has Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle, 1995, the first of many films this month directed by women.

Sept. 4 has Billy Wilder's The Apartment, 1960, with its dark comedy.

Sept. 5 has John Ford's Stagecoach, 1939, his first sound Western.

Sept. 6 has Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not, 1944, the first of the three versions of Hemingway's story.

Sept. 8 has John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, 1950, a terrific film noir, and Barbara Loden's Wanda, 1970.

Sept. 9 has Frank Strayer's Blondie Goes to College, 1942, part of an excellent B series.

Sept. 10 has three of Val Lewton's films, including Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher, 1945

Sept. 14 has Alfred E. Green's pre-code Union Station, 1932

Sept. 16 is Edgar Selwyn's fantasy Turn Back the Clock, 1933

Sept. 17 has a number of Otto Preminger's films, my favorite being Bunny Lake is Missing, 1965, in beautiful widescreen black-and-white.

Sept. 19 is Delmer Daves's exemplary Western 3:10 to Yuma, 1957

Sept. 20 is Leo McCarey's Going My Way, 1944

Sept. 21 is Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli, 1950.

Sept. 24 has two of Douglas Sirk's best films: All That Heaven Allows, 1955, and Written on the Wind, 1957.

Sept. 28 has a number of King Vidor films, my favorite is Street Scene, 1931, a pre-code film with Syliva Sidney.

Ted Tetzlaff's A Dangerous Profession

A Dangerous Profession (bail bondsman) has many of the important elements of film noir without being totally successful as one.  The plot is convoluted enough, the visuals are impressively dark and seedy, but there is not enough of the moody fatalism that makes an outstanding film noir.  George Raft is minimally acceptable; though he doesn't project much emotion he shows it, to a certain extent, with his eyes.  Raft is a partner with Pat O'Brien in a bail bond business and is hired to bail out the husband (Bill Williams) of his former lover, the estimable femme fatale Ella Raines; when they first go looking for Williams there is the smell of Raines's perfume that Raft instantly recognizes. Williams ends up dead when he is bailed out and Raines and Raft end up together in a rather sappy ending. Director Tetzlaff (who started out as a cinematographer) and director of photography Robert de Grasse (who shot Hitchcock's Notorious in 1946) effectively capture the dour atmosphere of jails and bail bond offices and use location shots on the streets of Los Angeles effectively; the script, by Martin Rackin and Warren Duff, is direct ("lay off that sentiment stuff.") 

The Vanished by Lotte and Soren Hammer

 For the rest of the week Simonsen's investigation made little headway.  The autumn again turned damp and dismal as police officers methodically sifted through the area surrounding Norballe Vandrehjem, comparing summer houses with images photocopied from Kramer Nielsen's photographs.  It was a slow and meticulous business, and one that produced nothing in the way of results.  Klavs Arnold insisted on a second pass, and then another.

--Lotte and Soren Hammer, The Vanished (Bloomsbury, 2011, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken)

In the July 26 New York Times Book Review there was a survey of "Nordic Noir," downbeat detective stories from Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Norway.  I've read many of these authors and the standouts are still Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who wrote the ten Martin Beck novels that ended in 1975, when Wahloo died, and Henning Mankell, who died in 2015 after publishing eleven Kurt Wallander novels.  These Swedish novelists wrote detective novels that were as much about the political and cultural promises and problems of Sweden as about solving crimes. My most recent reading of this genre is The Vanished, from Denmark.

The hero (or, perhaps, anti-hero) of the Hammers' books is detective Konrad Simonsen, who is getting older and more and more looks back on the sixties and his romance with an activist hippie.  He is relentless in his investigations and doesn't give up until he is completely satisfied about an unusual death and whether it is actually an accident or caused by foul play, following every possible lead.  Simonsen has a daughter, a lover with whom he sort-of lives, and a bunch of neurotic but reliable subordinates.  In The Vanished he investigates the death of a man who has posted pictures of a vanished young girl in his apartment and Simonsen works hard and diligently to find out what happened, while brooding about his own past and future. The novel is especially impressive in its details of the technology now available to law enforcement and the ways in which it is both used and misused.

Terence Fisher's The Last Page 1952.

The Last Page (I prefer the more accurate English title to the lurid American Man Bait) was Terence Fisher's first film for Hammer; he would go on the direct the best of Hammer's horror color films, beginning with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957.  The Last Page takes place mostly in a genteel bookshop in London that is run by Brent and where Diana Dors is a young invoice clerk.  Dors becomes involved with the sleazy Peter Reynolds when she catches him stealing a book and he helps her extort Brent when Brent, who has an invalid wife at home, makes a pass at Dors.  Dors ends up dead and Brent is blamed and goes on the run, helped by Marguerite Chapman who finds out that Reynolds killed Dors and that he is also responsible for the death of Brent's wife.

The film is suffused with melancholy, with its screenplay by Frederick Knott, who two years later wrote Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, as Chapman was Brent's nurse in WWII and Brent hides in a bombed out church after discovering Dors's body in a trunk that was supposed to be full of books. As often in Fisher's films everyone is morally compromised in some way and everyone, with the exception of the amoral monster Reynolds, feels guilty in some way. The gritty black-and-white cinematography is by Walter Harvey -- who photographed seven films in 1952 -- and helps Fisher emphasize the contrast between the two main sets:  the genteel bookshop and Peter Reynold's hangout, the lurid The Blue Club.

Georges Simenon's Les Inconnus dans la maison 1940

 The town itself was no more than a barren landscape which stretched out on all sides of the dark little burrow, with a little stove, furnished with books and bottles of burgundy, in which henceforth Hector Lousat was to live aloof in haughty isolation.

--Georges Simenon, The Stranger in the House  (translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury, Doubleday, 1940)

The Stranger in the House is one of Simenon's "romans durs," though it is not as hard-boiled as some of his other non-Maigret novels and may even have been influenced by Erle Stanley Gardner, as lawyer Lousat comes out of his eighteen-year isolation in the bedroom of his increasingly seedy mansion to defend his daughter's lover from a murder that took place under his own roof.  The novel takes place in the small town of Moulins in central France, where Lousat sneers at his bourgeois relatives and neighbors and where his daughter Nicole -- who had been left with her father when her mother ran off with another man --has been playing increasingly dangerous games with a bad crowd.

Lousat, until the murder, has spent his time reading and drinking but suddenly finds a new purpose and mostly stops drinking long enough to investigate the murder and keep Nicole's lover, Emile Manu, from being railroaded.  Simenon's class-conscious novel vividly brings to life all the denizen of the town, from the shopkeepers to the police and the judges.  With considerable effort Lousat is able to reveal the true murderer, though the only change in his life -- as Nicole and Emile move to Paris -- is to at least have a drink in a bar occasionally.

King Vidor's Bird of Paradise 1932

 Vidor's vitality seems ageless, and his plastic force is especially appropriate for partings and reunions, and the visual opposition of individuals to masses, both social and physical.

--Andrew Sarris 

Joel McCrae plays Johnny, part of a wealthy group cruising around the Pacific; Dolores del Rio plays  Luana, a native girl pledged to the prince of her island group.  Johnny and Luana do not share a spoken language but succeed in communicating their desire for each other, running off together to live and love on another island.  Until, that is, the volcano calls for a sacrifice and the natives find Luana and Johnny and prepare to sacrifice them.  Until, that is, Johnny's shipmates return and rescue the two lovers and take them to their ship.  Johnny wants to take Luana home but when the natives come for her she believes that unless she agrees to  be sacrificed she and Johnny will both die.  The wounded Johnny needs water but Luana feels water in the sink and sees a water cooler but does not know how to use it, so before she leaves for the volcano she bites into fruit and transfers the juice to Johnny's mouth.

Bird of Paradise is a movie that transcends its absurd plot and its imperialist theme and works as a moving fantasy of love between two very different people, both of whom are willing to make sacrifices so they can stay together, at least for a little while:  Johnny's world consists of guns, alcohol and outboard motors, while Luana's is one of arranged marriage and human sacrifice. It is no wonder that they want to establish their own world of privacy and sensuality, allowed in this pre-code film of 1932, beautifully and intelligently directed by King Vidor, who directed many innovative and visually impressive films from 1918 to 1959 (see my posts of July 23 2014, Oct. 30 2014, Feb.28 2016).

Jean-Pierre Melville's Quand tu liras cette lettre (1953)

 When You Read This Letter was made by Melville early in his career so that he could prove his ability to make a commercially successful film (producers thought he was too intelligent to do this!) and he succeeded, allowing him to follow with his more personal and individual films.  Quand... is atypical of Melville's films in some ways, especially its strong female characters, who gradually disappear in his later films. It was made on location in Cannes and has some of the most beautiful black-and-white images ever shot (by cinematographer Henri Alekan, who shot Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast in 1946).  This is not a glamorous Cannes but one where everyone is struggling to make a living; Phillipe Lemaire is a gas station attendant, boxer and gigolo; Yvonne Sanson is a wealthy older woman who drives a huge Cadillac convertible; Irene Galter works in her parents' stationery store and Juliette Greco, Irene Galter's sister, leaves a convent to take over the store when their parents die.

Lemaire has to have sex with whatever woman is in the room with him.  He rapes Galter, who unsuccessfully attempts suicide. and Lemaire is told by Greco he has to marry Irene or Greco will shoot him.  He ostensibly goes along with this idea (this is in many ways a very Roman Catholic screenplay, by playwright Jacques Deval) but tells Greco he really loves her.  Greco's response is somewhat impassive and Lemaire says he will wait for her at a train station, where he is hit and killed by the train Greco is on, perhaps going to meet Lemaire and perhaps going back to the convent, which she eventually does. 

The film is a fascinating mixture of melodrama and film noir, genres Melville loved, just as the looming Cadillac convertible demonstrated Melville's fondness for American cars.  Certainly many elements of Melville's later films are here -- from the trench coats to the guns -- but this is also a film with females as heroes and victims, not just as femme fatales. 

Fair Warning by Michael Connelly

 I got back to the office in the late afternoon and started feeding the new quotes and information from RogueVogue to Emily.  She had already put together a fifteen-hundred-word story, which was generally considered the line at FairWarning when reader exhaustion starts to set in.  But the new stuff was vital.  RogueVogue was one of the two men who created Dirty4 and had sent a killer down the path of death and destruction.

--Michael Connelly, Fair Warning (Little, Brown and Company, 2020).

Michael Connolly is the prolific author of the excellent Harry Bosch novels but also has a number of other series going.  Fair Warning is the third of the Jack McEvoy novels, following The Poet (1996) and The Scarecrow (2009).  Jack's partners in seeking a killer who buys the DNA of women who have a gene that supposedly indicates loose behavior and addiction are fellow journalist Emily Atwater and former FBI agent and former lover Rachel Walling.  Connelly is a successor to Raymond Chandler, capturing  the details of life and death in Los Angeles in the present day as impressively as Chandler did for the forties.   

Now that fingerprints are being questioned as final arbiters of guilt or innocence in trials there is something of a switch to DNA for the final word.  Connelly brings this into question by showing how unregulated the field of identifying and using DNA is and how it can be, like most things, manipulated by those who have something to gain by so doing. Connelly also, within the context of a detailed hunt for a misogynistic "incel" (involuntary celibate), has considerable insight into the lives of journalists today, who have been compelled to do their research on corruption and scams for online publications rather than short-staffed newspapers.

The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrere

This kind of lie just happens on impulse. As soon as it pops out you are sorry, you dream of being able to go back one minute in time, to undo the insane mistake you just made.

--Emmanuel Carrere, The Adversary (Picador,  2000, translated by Linda Coverdale) 

Jean-Claude Romand was a first-year med student in Lyon and did not take his finals that year.  He never actually returned to classes but was able to register as a second-year student for the next twelve years, learning to be a doctor without ever receiving any credits or taking any exams; even he was surprised he could get away with this. He then married Florence, his sweetheart, had two children and pretended, for eighteen years, that he was a researcher at The World Health Organization across the Swiss border in Geneva.  He spent his days reading medical journals and driving around and often on week-ends pretended to attend medical conventions and simply stayed in the airport hotel watching television.  For money he had his friends and family give him funds to invest, money he used for his family to live on.  Of course this couldn't last and his life was about to be exposed when friends asked for their money and interest to be returned.   In 1993 he killed his wife, his two children (aged seven and five) and his parents, setting his house on fire but saving himself.  Sentenced to life in jail Romand was freed on parole in 2019.

Carrere tells this story in great detail, based on meticulous research; none of Romand's close friends or relatives apparently ever questioned who he was or what he did and even his wife never called him at his "job."  This is an extremely depressing story, suggesting how little we may know compared to what we think we know. The details of Romand's life and deceptions are hard to believe, much less comprehend, but the last chapters of the book are about Carrere's personal involvement with Romand while Romand was in prison and serve little purpose, as Carrere has no way to determining the truth of much of what Romand tells him.

Jerry Lewis's Smorgasbord 1983

 I don't want to get into the discussion of why the French like Jerry Lewis and many Americans (especially film critics) do not, except to say that a "comedy" does not have to be funny; the best comedies are the most serious.  This is true of Smorgasbord, the last film Lewis directed, as it is of much of Lewis's work, including his films with Frank Tashlin, which I have written about extensively in this blog.  Smorgasbord is also a final film, a farewell that is underestimated and misunderstood as much as the final films of John Ford (Seven Women, 1966) and Charles Chaplin (The Countess from Hong Kong, 1967), also summations of their careers that were considered "old-fashioned."  I don't think that anyone who doesn't already care, at least somewhat, for Lewis is going to have their mind changed by Smorgasbord, but those of us who found beauty and humor in Lewis's career -- culminating with The Nutty Professor (1963) -- appreciate this summation and farewell to directing.

Like Chaplin in Limelight (1952) Lewis in Smorgasbord is anticipating his own death, though he is unable to make it happen:  he tries to hang himself but the rope is too long; he tries to have himself shot by rigging up a gun to the door but when the ice he ordered from room service arrives he has forgotten to leave the door unlocked; he tries to drive his car off a cliff but gets stuck on a hill; he tries to set himself on fire but after pouring gasoline on himself in a remote spot finds he doesn't have a match, etc.  Lewis goes to see an analyst (Herb Edelman, playing the straight man) but keeps slipping on the floor, until he finally returns wearing swim fins.  Throughout these ventures Lewis and cinematographer Gerald Perry Finneman use the entire frame (common in Lewis's work), with important things happening on the edges. Throughout the film several motorcars are destroyed in various ways for various reasons, one of the numerous references to Laurel and Hardy, where destruction was a major element in their comedy. 

In the same way that John Wayne's politics are being forgotten as appreciation is growing for his films directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford perhaps we can finally begin to forget, at least to some extent, the obnoxious show-biz personality of Jerry Lewis and appreciate the films he made with Frank Tashlin and the ones he directed himself. 

Maigret's Mistake by Georges Simenon

 Up until about ten o'clock on Monday Louise Filon had been at home alone.  She had eaten tinned lobster and drunk a little wine.  Apparently she had then gone to bed, since the bed had been found unmade; not untidy, as if she had slept with a man, but simply unmade.

--Georges Simenon, Maigret's Mistake (Maigret se trompe, Penguin, 1953, translated by Howard Curtis)

After reading Patrick Marham's biography of Simenon it is hard to resist the influence of Simenon's own life on this marvelous story of the killing of a former prostitute who became the mistress of a renowned brain surgeon.  The contrast between the murdered Louise Filon and the arrogant surgeon Professor Gouin is extensively explored by Simenon, always interested in class conflict; Professor Gouin has many female admirers while Louis Filon's boyfriend is a struggling musician.  Most of the novel is Maigret observing and talking to various possible suspects, as he tries to understand Professor Gouin's attraction to women of lower class and their attraction to him.  The novel is fascinating for its exploration of the conflicts and differences between the classes.

Chaplin's The Idle Class 1921

 The Idle Class was one of Chaplin's last shorts; he had already made his first feature, The Kid, the previous year but owed First National another short.  There are those who like Chaplin's shorts better than his features (my eight-year old daughter is among them) either because of or in spite of the fact that they are mostly gags strung together with minimal narrative unity and little sentiment; the endings being relatively happy.  In The Idle Class the ending is somewhat ambiguous and the gags are mostly not all that funny.   But there is at least one gag that is Chaplin at his most brilliant:  Chaplin plays a dual role, as a wealthy dipsomaniac as well as his tramp character, and they happen to look alike; at one point the wealthy man's wife walks out on him and leaves a note that she won't be back until her husband stops drinking.  The husband puts this note down on the table, turning his back, and starts to shake for a bit, is he crying or is he laughing?  He turns around and is shaking a cocktail shaker! The brilliance is not just the movements of Chaplin but the beautiful timing, giving one just the right amount of time to wonder what the reaction to his wife's letter is.

There is much about class relationships in this short film, including the tramp being taken for a thief just because of how he looks, to the tramp wrecking everyone's game of golf while he plays everyone else's balls with a lovely balletic swing and having to extricate his wealthy lookalike from a suit of armor with a can opener.  There is even a wistful fantasy sequence where the tramp imagines he is rescuing Edna Purviance on a runaway horse and she is so grateful she falls in love with him.  In the final scene Chaplin kicks Edna's pompous father in the butt and runs away at top speed.

The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon by Patrick Marnham

 Perhaps the most enduring mark left on Simenon by the occupation of Liege was an ambivalence toward conventional ideas of right and wrong.  This became one of the major themes of the Maigret books; it might almost be called the "message" of the Maigret saga.  On the whole Commissaire Maigret finds criminality easy to understand and adopts a frankly sympathetic attitude towards many of his clients.  His first question is not "Who committed this crime?" but "Why was it committed", and in order to answer, he has to understand the person who committed it.

--Patrick Marnham, The Man Who Wasn't Maigret (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1993)

I've been reading more of Simenon's Maigret novels (there are seventy-five) lately and, though they are fairly short and compact I have been finding them much more satisfying than most contemporary crime novels.  I think one of the reasons for this is the comment of Simenon's son John: "my father did not believe in evil"; motives in Simenon's novels are often complex and sometimes strangely mysterious. 

How useful the biography of a writer is to a reader of his work is questionable, though Markham finds many influences on Simenon's work in his life, from his relationship to his parents and wives to the influence on Simenon of the occupied countries he lived in during world wars I and II and to the many love affairs he had (he claimed he slept with 10,000 women, while one of his wives said it was more like 1000, often with her approval).  One of the reasons I read biographies of artists is to try to learn how they were able to accomplish so much in spite of all their neuroses and difficulties.  As usual this biography gives little insight into the creative process, with Simenon apparently going into a trance-like state when he wrote.  Simenon learned his craft by writing pulp novels, as many as forty-four a year when he first started; the year Maigret appeared, 1931, Simenon wrote eleven  Maigret novels. Aside from the Maigret novels Simenon also wrote more than 100 novels he called romans durs  "hard" novels, as brilliant as the Maigret novels, though considerably more downbeat. 

Simenon led a turbulent life, sometimes living with three women at a time and moving often, from Belgium to France to the United States, which he liked for a while, until Joseph McCarthy came along and Simenon abandoned his plan to become an American citizen.  His last years were spent in Switzerland where, in 1972, he stopped writing novels and published twenty-two volumes of autobiography, much of it fictionalized; Marnham does a pretty good job of separating the fact from the fiction in these volumes, few of which have been translated into English.

The Maigret novels now all exist in new translations from Penguin. I have my favorites, of course, but the quality is consistently high and I recommend them all. 

Sergio Leone's C'era una volta il West (1968)

 Once Upon a Time in the West is Sergio Leone's best film:  a mess of double-crossing stars, manic close-ups and Rothko-like masses of color and space.  

-David Thomson

Sergio made Once Upon a Time in the West thinking it would be his last Western, and the melancholy one notices in the film , besides referring to a world vanishing in the face of an upcoming civilization, is somehow his own melancholy.  For this reason, unlike in Sergio's previous films, I thought about devising a sense of softness and weariness that would surface in the music.  There are neither trumpets, nor anvils, nor animal sounds. Instead, I used distended strings to dilate time, and Edda Dell'Orso's voice underpins the character of Jill.

--Ennio Morricone

C'era una volta il West can also be translated as "there once was a West," and Leone's film is a mythopeic film about the myth of the American Western, i.e., the myths of the Western as seen by a European.  Of course it is not just Sergio Leone's film, he had a great many collaborators, including Sergio Donati, a regular writing partner, and writers Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci (who were also directors), composer Ennio Morricone and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli.  Also, the film was shot in techniscope, a non-anamorphic widescreen format that used two widescreen images per frame, allowing for an unusual depth of field.

Many have called this film "operatic," not only for its slightly incoherent plot-- though not quite as incoherent as the shortened American version I saw at the New Amsterdam on 42nd St. in 1968 -- but also for its revenge theme and the fact that composer Ennio Morricone wrote the music before Leone shot the film.  It's a very stylized film, bordering on mannerism for its combined closeness and distance from its sources, everything from John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) to Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952), but literally soars over them all, just as Leone's camera soars over the train station when Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arrives in Flagstone. There are many wonderful iconic moments in the film, my favorite being Jill's ride through Monument Valley, where John Ford shot many of his films, with Ennio Morricone's music (with Edda Dell'Orso's voice) on the soundtrack, emphasizing what complications are to come in Jill's life.

Lloyd Bacon's Office Wife (1930)

Lloyd Bacon directed 130 films, beginning in 1922.  He was workmanlike and his best films depended on good screenplays, such as Frank Tashlin's for Bacon's The Good Humor Man (1950, see my post of Sept. 22, 2016).  Office Wife, however, has a mediocre screenplay, by Charles Kenyon, but does have an interesting number of tracking shots (without dialogue) for a film from the early sound area, though its main interest these days is the loose morality of a pre-code film.  The film starts out with an apparent lesbian (Blanche Friderici in a man's suit and tie, smoking a big cigar) getting a new writing assignment from publisher Lewis Stone, to write about the importance of a secretary as an "office wife."  Then Stone's secretary (Dale Fuller) faints when she hears that Stone is getting married and she is replaced by Dorothy Mackaill (a star of silent films who made only a handful of sound films).

Of course Mackaill falls in love with Stone and then she feels she has to resign, since she knows Stone is married.  Mackaill's sister, (played by Joan Blondell,  whose liveliness  is to the sound era what Mackaill's beauty was to the silent era) finds out that Stone's wife (Natalie Moorhead) has been unfaithful to Stone and has asked for a divorce and Stone and Mackaill cement their relationship with a kiss on the beach under the moon.

Mackaill and Blondell live together and Bacon and cinematographer William Rees never miss a chance to show their legs or the two women in their underwear.  The typing pool is all women, of course, and the executives are all male, perhaps offensive now but accurate enough in 1930 (even well into the sixties graduates of Vassar and Smith went to secretarial school first before trying to break into publishing.)

D.W. Griffith: The Father of Film by Kevin Brownlow and David Giles

Griffith's privileged moments are still among the most beautiful in all cinema.  They belong to him alone, since they are beyond mere technique.  Griffith invented this "mere" technique, but he also transcended it.
-- Andrew Sarris

While I was watching this documentary I wondered for whom it was made:  if one has seen Griffith's films there was nothing new and if one had not could these excerpts and talking heads convince one to do so?  There is nothing like seeing Griffith's films in original nitrate prints, projected by a variable-speed projector and accompanied by live music, all of which I was able to do in 1975 when The Museum of Modern Art showed all of Griffith's work on the 100th anniversary of his birth.  One can only hope that MoMA might do this again in 2025, the 150th anniversary. Meanwhile a number of Griffith's films are available on Netflix, as long as one realizes that one is only seeing an approximation of what the films actually look like.  There was a point in film history when classical films had absorbed all of Griffith's techniques and his films seemed to some "old-fashioned," but most current films are lacking both in technique and emotion and look as if D.W. Griffith had never lived.

Whether one has seen Griffith's films -- my favorites are True-Heart Susie for its intimacy and subtlety and Intolerance for it epic quality and brilliant editing -- or plans to see them I suggest one read the essay on Griffith in Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema (1968) and the perceptive chapters on Griffith in Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By (1968).