Gordon Douglas's Mara Maru (1952)

 I have written previously about Gordon Douglas (Nov 7 2014, Apr 4 2016, May 11 2019), a protean director who worked his way up from short films to well-crafted B genre films;  Westerns, science fiction, melodramas, etc.  He also has shown skill directing low-level actors -- as in Mara Maru -- on their way up (Ruth Roman) and on their way down (Errol Flynn).  Mara Maru (the name of a ship) has a story (by N. Richard Nash and Philip Yordan) that is derivative of a number of other Warner Brothers films, particularly John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950), about a search for a missing treasure.  Errol Flynn, whose dissipated appearance works well for his exhausted character, and Ruth Roman, the ambiguous femme fatale, sail with villain Raymond Burr in the Philippines, looking for lost diamonds.  It's a rather rousing film, the diamonds being found at the bottom of the ocean in a typhoon, turning out to be on a cross missing from a cathedral.  

The dark and beautiful black-and-white cinematography is by Robert Burks, who had done Strangers on a Train for Hitchcock the previous year and would go to do Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958).  The intense score, with its hornpipes and other nautical motifs, is by the prolific Max Steiner.  

Turner Classic Movies Jan. 2021

 Some solid classics in January and quite a number of B movies; nothing particularly new or unusual.

Jan, 1 is McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), a serious comedy.

Jan. 2 has Chaplin's brilliant City Lights (1936) and Hitchcock's hypnotic Vertigo (1958)

Jan. 7 there are three brilliant Lubitsch films:  The Smiling Lieutenant(1931), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933)

Jan. 9 has Fritz Lang's corrosive The Big Heat (1953)

Jan. 12 has Welles's great Citizen Kane (1941) and McCarey's lovely Love Affair (1939)

Jan. 13 has Preminger's widescreen black-and-white Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

Jan. 16:  Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956)

Jan. 23: Howard Hawks's Red River (1948)

Jan. 26: Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1963)

Jan. 27: Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930)

Jan. 31: Don Siegel's The Killers (1964)

On Pointe, directed by Larissa Bills

 Veteran producer of documentaries Larissa Bills does an impressive job with this six-part documentary about the School of American Ballet, the school Balanchine started when he first came to America in 1934 and had difficulty finding dancers with the speed and attack he needed for his choreography.  There is something of the style of Frederick Wiseman -- the fly on the wall -- but there is identification of everyone: teachers, parents and students.  The darker sides are somewhat downplayed: those who are not promoted, those who have career-ending injuries, etc.  The students who are interviewed are very articulate about their passion for ballet and the parents are very supportive, even though the students may come from far away and not get home often.  I would have put more emphasis on the costs and the salaries (a check a student gets for a performance is displayed but the actual amounts are blurred), as well as the students who are dismissed or drop out.  At one point in the school's history boys were admitted free, but that is not discussed and does not currently seem to be the case.

The teachers, headed by Chairman of Faculty Kay Mazzo, a former NYC Ballet dancer, are firm but gentle with the students, though as an amateur dancer myself I would like to have seen more than just snippets of actual classes.  The series leads up to Balanchine's The Nutcracker, performed every December since 1954 and uses lots of students from the school in various supportive roles.  The students in The Nutcracker are chosen by teachers Dena Abergel and Arch Higgins, who try to de-emphasize competition, i.e., some who don't get cast are too tall for some parts, others too short.  After the triumphs of The Nutcracker in 2019 On Pointe ends on a melancholic note, as the annual older student workshop performance is canceled and the students head home, with classes continuing virtually. 

Frames by Loren Estleman

 Broadhead chuckled. "Thalberg called Von Stroheim a 'footage fetishist' before he ordered the editors to cut it to two hours' maximum running time.  After months of shooting on location in San Francisco and Death Valley, and part of the cast still in the hospital, the studio scrapped seventy-five percent of the feature."

-- Loren Estleman, Frames (Tom Doherty Associates, 2008)

I've read most of Estleman's excellent series about Detroit private detective Amos Walker; Frames is the first of his series about a film archivist in Los Angeles.  In some ways it reminds me of Nicholas Ray's film In a Lonely Place (1950) in that it deals with those on the fringes of Hollywood films:  extras, costumers, etc.  Valentino is a UCLA film student who buys a very run-down theatre to restore to its former glory, which goes back to the days of silent films.  In the theatre he finds an uncut version of Erich Von Stroheim's Greed (1924), originally eight hours of which only the two-hour cut version has survived, a great missing treasure of the silent film era. Unfortunately there is also a skeleton with the cans of film and the police won't release the film until they can find out who was murdered and aren't interested in Valentino's complaints of how valuable and fragile the nitrate film is and how it needs to be immediately transferred to safety stock.  There is considerable suspense as Valentino gets help from the younger student Fanta, an internet expert, and the older professor of film history Kyle Broadhead as they try to solve a decades-old murder before the complete print of Greed deteriorates.

One who doesn't know who Erich von Stroheim was might feel somewhat adrift in this book, but Estleman helpfully includes a useful bibliography and filmography about von Stroheim, Greed and silent film.

On the Move by Oliver Sacks

I had yearned for a house of my own, such as I had rented in Topanga Canyon back in my UCLA days.  And I wanted a house by the water so I could put on swim trunks and sandals and walk straight down to the sea.  So the little red clapboard house on Horton Street, half a block from the beach, was ideal.

--Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (Knopf, 2015)

Sacks's autobiography is both annoying and charming, as autobiographies tend to be.  He is rather full of himself, always lived alone, had no sex for thirty-five years (apparently from 1973, when he was forty, to 2008) and was slow to come to terms with his own homosexuality.  Meanwhile, he published a number of books that effectively combined populism with technical neurology, investigating again and again how the mind works and helping all those he could, while at the same time suffering from shyness and an inability to recognize faces.

Sacks (1933-2015) was a solitary person who nonetheless worked closely with a number of good editors, especially Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, where many of his best essays appeared.  At various points in his life Sacks took lots of drugs, including LSD, which he felt helped him to understand the mind and how to use drugs to help his patients, especially the use of L-dopa to open up the imprisoned minds of of those for whom consciousness had been suspended for many years, something he explored in the book Awakenings, published in 1973.

Sacks was always intellectually curious, which helped overcome his shyness and his risk-taking adventures on motorcycles and hiking.  But what especially comes through in this autobiography is his compassion for his patients and his relentless attempts to understand what is going on in their minds. 

Paul Wendkos and David Goodis's The Burglar (1957)

 I give credit here to writer David Goodis, who adapted his own novel for The Burglar.  The film was made in Philadelphia and Atlantic City by producer Louis Kellman in the hopes of turning the area into a major film production location.  Paul Wendkos, who had worked with Kellman on documentaries, was given his first chance to direct and made an intense film noir on a very low budget.  The films stars Dan Duryea, as the weary leader of a gang of burglars, Martha Vickers, and Jayne Mansfield in her first film.  Wendkos knew Goodis lived in Philadelphia and commissioned him to write the script, which reflects Goodis's sympathy for those down and out and those on the fringes of society.

Nat (Duryea) escaped from an orphanage and got taken in by a burglar who taught Nat his trade and when the burglar died Nat promised to take care of his mentor's daughter, Gladden, played by Mansfield.  Gladden cased the joints that Nat's gang robbed and is eventually sent to Atlantic City to avoid the lurid looks of the other members of the gang; Gladden of course is in love with Nat ("I tore apart my pillow with my teeth thinking of you").  Gladden is seduced by a crooked cop who hooks up with Della (Vickers), who in turn seduces Nat in an attempt to find a valuable necklace that Nat's gang stole. This story of shifting loyalties and betrayals, combined with Wendkos's brash style (considerably influenced by Orson Welles, with its elements of The Lady from Shanghai as well as an opening newsreel like that in Citizen Kane), makes for an effective and fatalistic film noir at a time, more that ten years after the end of World War II, when the film noir was sputtering out.  Credit also goes to cinematographer Don Malkames, a veteran of B films, including Edgar Ulmer's St. Benny the Dip (1951).

Wendkos made several more good genre films (The Case Against Brooklyn, 1958, and the Fred MacMurray Western Face of a Fugitive, 1959) before switching to Gidget movies and television.

Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity, directed by Roger Memos (2015)

This film was made when Marsha Hunt was 98 (she's still around) and most of it consists of her talking about her career and what happened after she was blacklisted in 1950, with supporting comments from Victor Navasky, Norman Lloyd, Valterie Harper and others.  She started making B pictures for Paramount in the thirties -- she made seven films in 1936 -- and then went on the character parts for MGM, with an impressive ability to disappear into her character.  Just before she was blacklisted in 1950 she made some of her best films, some of the few of hers I have seen. working on relatively low-budget independent films with excellent directors:  Anthony Mann's 1948 Raw Deal (a terrific film noir), Edgar Ulmer's Carnegie Hall (1947) and Andre de Toth's  None Shall Escape,1944, a brilliant film that foresaw the Nuremberg trials).

Hunt is impressively vibrant and reflective, describing in non-bitter detail how some of the blacklisted behaved while she stuck to her guns that she had done nothing wrong other than supporting the first amendment and donating to political causes that had nothing to do with the communist party.  She was able to continue working in theatre and television and eventually, when she retired, devoting herself to the United Nations and combatting world hunger. 

Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen (2002)

I'm gradually catching up with Ken Loach's films, sometimes referred to as social realism, sometimes as neo-realism (see my posts of July 16 2017, March 26 2018, Sept. 3 2020).  I tend to see them as influenced by De Sica in their sympathy for those on the fringes of society and by Bresson in the use of non-professional actors.  Sweet Sixteen takes place in Greenrock, Scotland, where Liam (Martin Compston) and his friend Pinball (William Ruane) are trying to make money any way they can, including selling stolen cigarettes.  Liam wants to have a place to live with his single-mother sister and his own mother, currently in prison on a drug charge.  When Liam steals drugs to sell from his abusive grandfather he attracts attention from the local syndicate boss, who recruits him to sell drugs in his large organization.  But everything soon goes wrong and his mother, when she gets out of prison, doesn't want to stay in the flat provided for Liam by the drug czar and leaves to live with a fellow addict.  As Liam turns sixteen his whole world has fallen apart and he doesn't know where to turn.

Loach, writer Paul Laverty and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd paint an intelligent and sympathetic portrait of young people in Scotland who have nowhere to go and have to struggle on their own with the often grim reality of the world, constantly stymied by authorities and bureaucracies. 

David Fincher's Mank (2020)

 I enjoyed David Fincher's Mank as something of a take on 1930's Hollywood, though one would be mistaken if one took it too literally.  For one thing, it seems to suggest that Herman Mankiewicz was solely responsible for the script of Citizen Kane, even though this theory of Pauline Kael's has been thoroughly debunked numerous times (see my posts of Feb.5, 2018 and Nov. 13, 2019 as well as Joseph McBride's posts at wellesnet.com).  And even if this theory were true it wouldn't make any difference, since most of the great Hollywood directors -- John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, et al. -- did not write their own scripts but collaborated quite closely with those who did.  And, for that matter, how different is David Fincher's film from his father Jack's script (Jack died in 2003)?

Mank is beautifully filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt and has quite an interest in the 1934 race for governor of California, when Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, insisted that his employees donate to the campaign of Frank Merriam, the Republican candidate, and even produced fake newsreels and radio ads undermining socialist candidate Upton Sinclair.  Herman Mankiewicz was a regular gambler and lost his bet to Mayer that Sinclair would win, later denouncing Mayer during dinner at San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, the alcoholic Mankiewicz never afraid to burn his bridges, especially when inebriated.

Many characters come and go in Mank, though Orson Welles's appearances are few, as  are producer John Houseman's, but Gary Oldman as a shambling Herman is at the center of everything as he works on the script of Citizen Kane, eventually sharing an Oscar with Welles for screenwriting in 1941 and dying in 1953.

Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1965)

 Martin Beck took the night train and arrived in Vaxjo at 6:30 a.m.  It was still dark and the air was mild and hazy. He walked through the streets and watched the city awaken.  At a quarter of eight he was back at the railroad station.  He had forgotten his galoshes and the dampness had begun to penetrate the thin soles of his shoes.  He bought a newspaper at the kiosk and read it, sitting on a bench in the waiting room with his feet up against a radiator.  After a while he went out, looked for a cafe which was open, drank some coffee and waited.

--Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo. Roseanna, translated from the Swedish by Lois Roth (Random House, 1967)

Every six or seven years I reread Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett.  This year I've been inspired by Wendy Lesser (see my post of Oct. 16 this year) to reread the ten detective novels of Sjowall and Wahloo, that I have not read since they originally were published from 1965 to 1975.  Part of their appeal, like the other four writers I mentioned, is that the detective work was done before cell phones and computers but, also, Wahloo and Sjowall are engaged politically, their work includes details about the good and bad in Swedish society.

Roseanna is the first in this series, with Inspector Martin Beck the lead detective.  He is an interesting and flawed character, stuck in a marriage "that had slipped into a fairly dull routine" and constantly nauseated by crowds, subways and coffee.  A girl has turned up dead in a canal and it takes many weeks before they can find out who she is.  Sjowall and Wahloo follow Beck's investigation in fascinating detail until they finally find out who she is and what she was doing on a canal boat.  When they find out who she was -- a tourist from America -- they have to track down what boat she was on, who else was on it and if any of the other passengers have photographs or film.  They only find a lead suspect by accident, as a  policeman sees a customer in a cafe whose photograph with Roseanna was widely distributed by Beck and his staff.  They then track the suspect for weeks and finally bait a trap with an undercover policewoman.

Solving the mystery only makes Beck feel melancholic, for both the policewoman they put in danger and for Roseanna herself:  "They had all sat in their offices in Motala and Stockholm and Lincoln, Nebraska, and solved this case by means that could never be made public.  They would always remember it, but hardly with pride."

La tete d'un homme: novel by Geroges Simenon, film by Julian Duvivier

"Don't forget that Radek had nothing to expect from life.  He was not even sure he could hold out until his sickness swept him away.  Perhaps he would be reduced to jumping in the Seine one night when he no longer had enough small change to pay for his cafe au lait."

Maigret speaking in Georges Simenon's La tete d'un homme (1931)

 La tete d'un homme was one of ten novels about Inspector Jules Maigret that Simenon wrote in 1931 and the third to be made into a film (see my post of June 8, 2016 about La nuit du carrefour).  Director Duvivier took Simenon's novel and reassembled it into a more linear form, with Maigret's role somewhat diminished, though the story remained unchanged.  Simenon's novel starts with Maigret engineering Joseph Heurtin's escape from jail, with Maigret convinced that Heurtin did not do the murder for which he was convicted -- no motive -- and that Heurtin would lead him to the real murderer.  The film begins with the murder, for which a man named Radek has cleverly framed Heurtin.  Heurtin does lead Maigret to Radek and a cat-and-mouse game, reminiscent of Dostoevsky, begins.

Duviver uses wipes and tilted camera angles to achieve the disorienting effects of Simenon's prose, where nothing is quite what it seems.  Maigret is played by Harry Baur, an actor in a number of Duvivier's films, and the murderer Radek is effectively played by Valery Inkijinoff.  The cinematography is by French veteran Armand Thirard. The film is one of dozens made from Simenon's novels.

Cory Finley's Bad Education (2020)

 This is the time of year when movie ten-best lists are emerging.  I do look at these lists to see what I may have missed during the year and try. to some extent, to fill in the gaps.  In most cases the contemporary films I haven't seen aren't any better than the ones I have, most of them looking as though D.W. Griffith had never lived.  I did find an exception this year, however, on Richard Lawson's (of Vanity Fair) list:  Bad Education.  This is film is playwright Cory Finley's second film (his first was Thoroughbreds in 2017, which I haven't seen); it's a beautifully structured film successful both as a human drama and as implied criticism of many of our questionable educational practices.  It takes place on Long Island in 2004 when school superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) and accountant Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) stole more than eleven million dollars from the school's budget, mostly to buy luxury houses and cars and take exotic vacations.  

The film was written by Mike Makowsky, who had been in middle school in Roslyn when the scandal broke, and photographed by Lyle Vincent, whose garish color cinematography captures Long Island as effectively as Janney's accent.  The real heroine of the story is school newspaper reporter Rachel Bhargava (Geraldine Viswanathan), who exposes Tassone's embezzlement even after he threatens her when she inadvertently knocks on the door of his Park Avenue apartment, an address where a supposed supplier had received money.  The key to Tassone's success as an embezzler was his ability to recruit good teachers that helped get students into Ivy League colleges which, in turn, made the school district popular and helped hike the cost of houses, the head of the school board being a real estate wheeler-dealer.  That high SAT scores and admission to an Ivy League school are positive symbols of an education is what leads to scandals such as the recent briberies in California and this film is an example of where such distorted views can lead and the damage that results. 

The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr

"And do you think I like what I am doing?" asked Dr. Fell.  "Do you think I like one word I've said or one move I've had to make?  Everything I've told you about the woman and her private witch-cult and her relations with Farnleigh was true.  Everything.  She inspired the murderer and directed the murder.  The only difference is that she did not kill her husband.  She did not make the automaton work and she was not the person in the garden."

John Dickson Carr, The Crooked Hinge, Penzler Publishers (originally published in 1938)

Kudos to Otto Penzler for publishing The Crooked Hinge, part of his estimable publishing effort to bring back out-of-print mysteries.  John Dickson Carr, an American who lived mostly in England, published seventy-five novels between 1930 and his death in 1977.  Many of these novels are "impossible" or "locked room" mysteries which strain plausibility, something that adds to one's pleasure reading them today.  Unfortunately most of Carr's work remains out-of-print currently, never having the readership of Agatha Cristie or other contemporaries, possibly because his "detectives," such as Gideon Fell, didn't interest Carr as much as the details of the puzzles and the personalities involved.  The Crooked Hinge is wonderfully detailed and complex, proceeding from an incident during the sinking of the Titantic to an imposter posing as Sir John Fairleigh and an automaton two hundred years old.  

Turner Classic Movies Dec. 2020

Plenty of Christmas films, Hitchcock and Laurel and Hardy this month.

Dec. 3 is Rudolph Mate's corrosive film noir D.O.A. (1950)

Dec. 4 is Fritz Lang's beautiful period piece Moonfleet (1955)

Dec. 5 is Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) with downbeat Christmas elements.

Dec. 6 is Howard Hawks's musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe

Dec. 8 is John Ford's Mogambo (1953)

Dec. 10 is Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940)

Dec. 12 is Ford's The Three Godfathers (1949).

Dec. 13 is Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Judy Garland sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas") and Leo McCarey's moving Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

Dec. 16  is Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)

Dec. 17 Otto Preminger's film noir Angel Face (1953) and Leo McCarey's Going My Way (1944)

Dec. 18 Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night (1940, written by Preston Sturges)

Dec. 20 is Lubitsch's lovely The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Dec. 23 is Douglas Sirk's ironic Christmas card All That Heaven Allows (1955).