Turner Classic Movies March 2021

 Not much new or surprising, but plenty of Hitchcock and other classicists.

March 3:  Alexander Mackendrick's corrosive The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

March 8: John Huston's Wise Blood (1979)

March 10:  several films by Gregory La Cava, including Fifth Avenue Girl (1939)

March 11:  James Whale's elegant period piece The Great Garrick (1937)

March 14:  Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms (1932)

March 15:  Robert Bresson's austere Diary of a Country Priest   (1951)

March 16: Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride (1950)

March 17: John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) and The Searchers (1956)

March 20:  Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

March 22:  Robert Aldrich's Autumn Leaves (1956)

March 31: Vincente Minnelli's widescreen melodrama Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

Balanchine's Prodigal Son (Feb. 25, 2021)

 Prodigal Son is told, since it is about good and evil, in two kinds of pantomime:  the dry, insect-like, insect-quick, elegance and filth of atheism, and the fleshy biblical vehemence -- so Near Eastern and juicy -- of sin and forgiveness, the bitter sin and sweet forgiveness.  Still bolder as an image seems to me the leisure in the pacing of the scenes, which transports the action into a spacious patriarchal world, like a lifetime of faith.

--Edwin Denby, Ballet (August 1952)

Prodigal Son, done for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1929, is the second oldest of surviving Balanchine ballets -- only Apollo from 1928 is older;  Choreography by George Balanchine A Catalogue of Works, lists Prodigal Son as the 94th of the total of 425 ballets by Balanchine.  This ballet is included in NYC Ballet's current digital season, that runs from Feb. through June, and is danced by Daniel Ulbricht and Teresa Reichlen, who are terrific in their roles as the prodigal son and the siren,  The original prodigal son was Serge Lifar and I have seen it danced by a number of others since it was revived in 1950 for NYC Ballet, including Edward Villella and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and my favorite of the sirens I have seen is Suzanne Farrell, usually an austere and somewhat distant dancer who as the siren was a passionate temptress.  

Like many of Balanchine's ballets Prodigal Son is obviously from a particular time and place while simultaneously being timeless.  The narrative style, which Balanchine never completely abandoned, even has a book by Boris Kochno, a rarity in Balanchine's work, and scenery and costumes by Georges Rouault.  The impressive and powerful music is by Prokoviev, who conducted the original performance.

Anthony Powell's Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960)

Moreland, like myself, was then in his early twenties. He was formed physically in a 'musical'  mould, classical in type, with a massive, Beethoven-shaped head, high forehead, temples swelling outwards, eyes and nose somehow bunched together in a way to make him glare at times like a High Court judge about to pass sentence.  On the other hand, his short, dark, curly hair recalled a dissipated cherub, a less aggressive, more intellectual version of Folly in Bronzino's picture, rubicund and mischievous, as he threatens with a fusillade of rose petals the embrace of Venus and Cupid; while Time in the background, whiskered like the Emperor Franz-Josef, looms behind a blue curtain as if evasively vacating the bathroom.

--Nick Jenkins describing his friend Hugh Moreland in Casanova's Chinese  Restaurant by Anthony Powell (University of Chicago Press, 1960). 

This fifth of twelve volumes in Dance to the Music of Time takes place mostly in the thirties, with a look backward to the late twenties, when Moreland and Jenkins had first met.  The thirties were important years in many of the characters -- Morland, Jenkins, Maclintick and their various spouses, friends and lovers -- younger characters are getting married, middle-aged ones are getting divorced, older ones are dying.  Parties, lunches and dinners are going on non-stop; some people love them and others hate them. Composers, painters and writers are creating new works as modernism is reaching its peak.  The major subjects are the abdication of Edward VIII and the Spanish Civil War, with most people on one side or the other.  There is a strong undercurrent of the approaching war in Europe, which is compared to a Ghost Railway, "moving at last with dreadful, ever increasing momentum towards a shape that lay across the line."

Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was conceived as a roadshow epic but by the time it was released the roadshow was effectively dead and MGM did not want to release the original version of three hours, cutting it to 125 minutes, eliminating two of the four stories.  One would love to see a restored complete version but, alas, apparently the footage has not survived.  I do admit that reading about this cut footage makes one feel that it might not have made the film better; the cut footage seems to be mostly comedy while the film that now exists is a melancholy film of loss by an aging and old-fashioned director, comparable to John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Chaplin's Limelight (1952).

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as it now exists consists of two chapters.  In the first Holmes is wanted by a Russian ballerina (played by Tamara Toumanova) to father her child and in the second he tries to help a woman to find her missing husband.  The first part is comedy with underlying seriousness while the second is melodrama with underlying comedy; both deal with Holmes's attitude to women, who he claims not to trust.  In the first part he spurns the ballerina's offer by hinting that he and Watson are lovers, in the second part he is outwitted by a German spy, Gabrielle Valladon (Genevieve Page) by whom he seems to be smitten, especially admiring her for her intelligence.

The film is a beautiful period piece, the second part being filmed on location in Scotland, as Holmes (Robert Stevens), Watson (Colin Blakely) and Valladon look for Gabrielle's husband.  Holmes's ratiocination leads them to discover what's going on but he is completely bamboozled by Gabrielle;  his brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee), of the foreign office, has to explain to him who Garbrielle is.  Even Queen Victoria (Mollie Maureen) makes an appearance.  Gabrielle is arrested and returned to Germany in an exchange of spies. When Holmes finds out later that she was caught and executed in Japan he insists that Watson tell him where the cocaine is hidden.

Billy Wilder wrote the script with I.A.L. Diamond, the widescreen cinematographer was Christopher Challis, the superb art direction by Alexander Trauner and the lovely score was by Miklos Rozsa, who did the score for Wilder's Double Indemnity in 1944. 

Henry Cornelius's Genevieve (1953)

 Henry Cornelius will be best remembered for Genevieve, a luminous comedy of the outdoors, a film glowing with a Defoe-like sense of property.

--Andrew Sarris

Genevieve was one of the few movies I saw as a kid, since I was not allowed to go to movie theatres (too expensive and too many perverts my parents said). But my father was an enthusiastic member and sometime officer of the AUHV -- Automobilists of the Upper Hudson Valley -- and would drag my mother and the three kids to regular "old car meets," which in my memory happened almost every Sunday but were probably less often.  In any case, sometimes at these meetings, if they had the proper interior space, they would occasionally stop talking about their vintage cars and show a 16 mm, print of Genevieve.  The film is about an annual London to Brighton and back again rally of old cars.  In retrospect it's rather amusing to me that the old car fanciers in the film act like children in their possessiveness and affection for their cars; at one point Alan McGim (John Gregson) has a fight with his wife Wendy (Dinah Sheridan) and spends the night with his car Genevieve -- a 1904 Darracq -- instead of with Wendy.

Genevieve is certainly meant to be funny (and occasionally is) but, like much British humour it has dark undercurrents. McGim is still annoyed that Amber Claverhouse (Kenneth More) had once dated Wendy and when they both get inebriated they make a bet that McGim in his Darracq can beat Claverhouse in his Spyker back to London and they both cheat and backstab, including calling the cops on each other, all the way there, with Wendy and Claverhouse's girlfriend Rosalind (Kay Kendall) somewhat unwilling participants. There are some touching moments, including Rosalind playing the trumpet at a dance party and Alan and Wendy stopping during the race back to listed to an elderly man describe how he proposed to his wife in a car just like Genevieve, and their are some good turns by British character actors, especially Joyce Grenfell as a hotel proprietress. 

Director Henry Cornelius was South African and his directing career was short:  only five films before his untimely death at age 44 in 1958.  The film was written and produced by William Rose and the cinematographer was Christopher Challis.  The filming was mostly on location and the colour was lovely, Challis having worked previously with Powell and Pressburger.

Frank Borzage's Bad Girl (1931)

 Bad Girl was an early sound film success for Frank Borzage, who had made the beautiful silent films Street Angel (1928) and 7th Heaven (1927); it is another of Borzage's films about the struggle of two lovers to survive under difficult circumstances, in this case The Depression.  Eddie (James Dunn) and Dorothy (Sally Eilers) meet in Coney Island.  Dorothy models wedding gowns under the gaze of sexually harassing male customers and bosses, while Eddie repairs radios. Neither of them has much money but decide to get married after spending a night together (this being a pre-code movie there is sex hinted at).  They start married life in a one-room flat and when Dorothy wants to go back to work Eddie feels his manhood threatened.  When Dorothy finds out she is pregnant Eddie takes the money he had saved for his own radio shop and buys a fancier flat without discussing it with Dorothy.  They fight, each wanting the child but thinking their spouse doesn't. 

The film is based on a novel and play by Vina Delmar and it is mainly just the two characters, with support from Dorothy's friend Edna (Minna Gombrel).  The camera is fairly static but does move quickly when the out-of-sync characters do, as they miscommunicate and are often late.  There is an element of comedy in this (Delmar later wrote Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth in 1937), as when Eddie signs up for a prizefight and in order to go four rounds (at $10 a round) he tells his opponent in a clinch that he needs the money for his baby and his opponent goes easy on him.  Borzage shows considerable sympathy for a working class couple struggling during hard times, just as he did later in A Man's Castle (1933), as the couple struggle to communicate honestly with one another. 

Frank Borzage's Moonrise (1948)

 Frank Borzage was that rarity of rarities, an uncompromising romanticist....Many of Borzage's projects, particularly toward the end of his career, were indisputably trivial in conception, but the director's personality never faltered, and when the glorious opportunity of Moonrise presented itself, Borzage was not stale or jaded.

--Andrew Sarris

Moonrise was made at Republic Pictures, home of low-budget Westerns which occasionally did a prestigious picture, including Orson Welles's Macbeth and John Ford's The Quiet Man.  Moonrise is made rather cheaply but poetically so -- a train arrives and all we see of it are smoke and shadows -- most of the film taking place on the backlot and at night; the cinematography is by John Russell, who did Welles's Macbeth the same year and later photographed Samuel Fuller's Park Row (1952) and Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).

Moonrise was shown recently on Turner Classic Movies during Black History Month because of the importance of actor Rex Ingram, who plays Mose, an isolated man who convinces Danny Hawkins (Dane Clark) not to isolate himself from society after he kills a man who mocks him about Danny's father, who killed the doctor who wouldn't come to help his wife when she was sick.  Danny is a social misfit in love with Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell), a schoolteacher, and the lovers regularly rendezvous in a deserted and decrepit antebellum mansion.  The film is moody and accurately captures the oppressiveness of a small town but Borzage possesses neither the cynicism nor the sense of fatality that would make this a film noir, rather, Borzage's romanticism, going back to the silent days in such films as Seventh Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928), always allows for redemption. 

Being Lolita: A Memoir by Alisson Wood

In many ways I still want to be like Lolita.  To create something beautiful from something so terrible is my deepest desire.  When I teach Lolita, I try to make my pain have a purpose, to impact my students in supportive, meaningful ways -- in the ways I wish had impacted me.  I can't change what happened to me.  I try to do the little I can to make sure what happened to me doesn't happen again.

Alisson Wood. Being Lolita (Flatiron Books, 2020)

An English teacher seduces Wood in high school by first having her read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, suggesting to her that it is a "love story," which it obviously is not, though it is unclear if the teacher believed in this completely wrong interpretation of the novel or merely used it a  tool of seduction.  High schools and colleges have cracked down considerably on student/teacher relationships, now almost always banned because of the imbalance of power: high school students are dependent on teachers for college references, college students for graduate school references.  Every day one reads about teachers who have crossed the line; just after finishing Wood's book I received an e-mail from Phillips Exeter Academy, from which I graduated in 1965 when it was still all male, stating that a Princeton professor who had been giving seminars at Exeter is being currently accused of inappropriate attention at Princeton (though not at Exeter, which has its own history of scandals.)

Wood's book is sometimes painful reading, as Wood gradually fights her way out of the relationship when she goes to college, one she chooses in order to stay close to the teacher, who promises to marry her, but even when she turns eighteen insists the relationship be kept secret in order to protect his job.  In my experience growing up in a lower-class home I was taught that those in authority -- teachers and clergy especially -- were to be obeyed and not questioned, which makes it easier for predators to get away with their crimes.  I first heard about Wood's book on Jamie Loftus's Lolita podcast, which includes a thorough examination of Nabokov's brilliant novel and its unreliable narrator and pedophile Humbert Humbert.

Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

 Kiss Me Deadly is a film noir to end all film noirs, which in a way it was; it was one of the last true film noirs of the cycle that began after WW II and eventually ended in 1955 with this corrosive essay about the anger, violence and fear of nuclear war that lay not too far beneath the placid surface of Eisenhower America.  Some of the things I like best about Kiss Me Deadly include:

The titles, which roll upward, alerting us to the many off-kilter elements of the film, including everything from Velda's ballet barre to Hammer's early answering machine using a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

It captures the diversity of 1950's America, the film including Greeks, Italians, gay men and women and a significant number of African-Americans, including a boxing promoter (Juano Hernandez), a singer (Mady Comfort) and a bartender (Art Loggins).

An unusual number of important roles for women: Cloris Leachman, Gaby Rogers, Maxine Cooper.

An impressive number of top-notch character actors: Percy Helton, Jack Elam, Strother Martin

An impressive script by A.I. Bezzerides from Mickey Spillaine's novel (which the script undermines and parodies).  It effectively uses cultural and mythical references, including Caruso and Cerberus 

A superb performance by Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, capturing the character's sleazy charm as well as his general cluelessness.

Black-and-white cinematography by Ernest Laszlo who, as he did in D.O.A.(1949), captures the darkness of Los Angeles even in the broad daylight, using different camera angles to capture the confusion of Hammer as he tries to figure things out.

The direction of Robert Aldrich, as he uses violence as Hammer's way of finding out things until Hammer and his girlfriend themselves become the victims.

The ending. The movie originally released ended with Hammer and Velda in a beach house that blows up; now Aldrich's original ending has been restored, with them both making it to safety in the ocean, suggesting that life will begin all over again after a nuclear war, as it did later in Roger Corman's marvelous Teenage Caveman (1958).

The Dirty South by John Connolly

 Shire grimaced.  Only his best efforts, combined with certain assurances from Pappy Cade and promises from Little Rock of a further sweetening of tax arrangements, had kept Kovas from bolting to Texas after the Kerrigan killing.  Another female corpse would lead to serious financial and reputational damage for all concerned.

-- John Connolly, The Dirty South (Atria, 2020)

Connolly's novels about Charlie Parker are among my favorite genre books and I have posted about others of them in 2015 (Jan 4, Nov 10) and 2018 (April 3, Oct. 18).  The Dirty South takes place in Arkansas in the 90's, a flashback to when Parker is still looking for the murderer of his wife and daughter.  He follows clues to Cargil, Arkansas, where out of a moral obligation he stays for a time to help investigate the murder of three Black girls.  The town is small and impoverished and controlled by the Cade family, who are trying to downplay the murder investigations in order to lure a big company to a poor town in which some people will get rich.   Cargil is full of redneck characters who do all they can to hinder Parker's relationship with independent police chief Evander Griffin, though Parker does get help from some of the few decent people left in the town; most of the decent population had left long ago.  When Parker's life is threatened he brings in his loyal and violent assistants, Angel and Louie.  Parker helps solve the murders and moves on to Mississippi, looking for whoever killed his family.

Connolly does an excellent job of creating the details and denizens of Cargil, as well as the racial attitudes and class antagonisms of the South.  Every character has hopes and dreams as well as nightmares, in a town that many find impossible to escape,

Charles Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

 Charles Kaufman is a member of the Stanley Kubrick/Terrence Malick/David Lynch school of if-it-makes-no-sense-it-must-be-profound filmmakers.  Certainly Kaufman's latest film makes no sense but it can indeed be beautiful to look at, thanks to cinematographer Lukasz Zal.  Young Woman (as she is called in the credits) Jessie Buckley and Jake (Jessie Plemons) have been together for six weeks when they drive, in a snowstorm, to visit Jake's parents on their farm.  Jake's parents are weird and get both younger and older during the visit.  Young woman has to go home because she has work the next day and on their drive home Jake takes a side road to his old high school, where they see the old janitor we've glimpsed without any information earlier in the film, and a ballet danced by Unity Phelan and Ryan Steele in the otherwise deserted school.  The film then ends with a much older Jake accepting the Nobel prize, with young woman (now made up as older woman) present in the audience.  

The film reminds me of a bull session in my college dorm; yes, at one point Jake says "there's no such thing as objective reality" as he and young woman, on their drives, discuss everything from Wordsworth's poems to John Cassavetes's films. The movie does have almost everything, including a kitchen sink, a washing machine in a scary basement, dead frozen lambs, music from Oklahoma and an animated pig.