Turner Classic Movies April 2021

Not surprisingly, since it is Oscar month, there are a number of excellent classic films and some "white elephants" (the latter I will not be recommending.)

April 1:  George Cukor's intelligent comedy, Adam's Rib (1949) and Howard Hawks's great war film Air Force (1943)

April 2:   Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959; John Steele Gordon discusses Robert Traver's novel in the March 2021 issue of "The New Criterion."); Leo McCarey's marvelous comedy The Awful Truth; Vincente Minnelli's lovely and melancholic The Band Wagon, 1953.

April 4: Chaplin's The Circus (1928) and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941).

April 5: Frank Borzage's moving A Farewell to Arms (1932) and Minnelli's Father of the Bride (1950)

April 6: Truffaut's first film The 400 Blows (1959)

April 7: Fritz Lang's first American film, the corrosive Fury (1936)

April 9:  King Vidor's early sound musical melodrama, with an Afro-American cast Hallelujah (1929)

April 11:  Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959)

April 14:  Mox Ophuls's elegant La Ronde (1950) and Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941)

April 16: Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939)

April 18: Anthony Mann's Western The Naked Spur (1953)

April 19: Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939)

April 20:  Roberto Rossellini's neo-realist Paisan (1946)

April 23:  Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) and Michael Powell's passionate The Red Shoes (1948)

April 25: Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937, one of the best Astaire/Rogers films), John Ford's Western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

April 26: John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951)

April 29: Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942, a very funny and very serious wartime film)

 

The Man in the Balcony by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1968)

 The police had at last go hold of a loose end of thread, and with the aid of the well-oiled and ruthlessly efficient investigation machinery they soon unraveled the relatively simple tangle concerning Igemund Fransson's past.  They had already been in touch with about a hundred persons:  neighbors, shopkeepers, social workers, doctors, army officers , clergymen, temperate adminstrators and many others.  The picture cleared up very quickly.

Per Wahloo and Maj Sjorwall, The Man in the Balcony (translated by Alan Blair, Random House, 1968)

This is the third of the Wahloo/Sjowall police procedurals, with Martin Beck the most important of the police. Little girls are being killed in parks in Stockholm and the police are getting nowhere until Beck remembers a call several weeks ago about a man standing on a balcony whose description sounds like the vague description they have of a possible suspect.  But the only thing they know is that the caller was a woman named Andersson and there are over ten thousand Anderssons in Stockholm.  So the methodical search begins for the witness and they only find her by accident, when a young police officer hears someone in a delicatessen referred to as "Mrs. Andersson."

The Man on the Balcony is a riveting story of the routine length the police have to go through to solve a crime, something still common in these days of cell phones and computers, as well as the personal toll it takes on the lives of the policemen, of whom there are never enough.  The authors also continue their critique of Sweden in the sixties, including the burden of homelessness caused by "bungled community planning that has resulted in an acute housing shortage."

Honeyland, directed by Liubomir Stefanon and Tamara Koteuska (2019)

 The best allegories are those that are clear first as narratives, with the allegorical part slightly underneath.  This is true of Honeyland, as an older woman (Hatidze Muratova) lives with her dying mother alone in the beautiful mountains of Macedonia.  She makes her living harvesting honey from wild bees and sells it in Skopje, twelve miles away.  At some point during the three years that this film was made a Turkish family arrives and lives in their trailer near Hatidze and quickly realize that she is making money from the honey of the wild bees.  They start beekeeping themselves and don't listen to Hatidze's advice to take only half the honey and leave half and the bees start to die.  The Turkish family abuses their children and their cattle, who start dying, and after taking and selling as much honey as they can they leave and Hatidze has to start all over again with what bees remain.

This is an effective documentary somewhat in the style of Frederick Wiseman, i.e., no narration or titled identification.  It reminds one of two low-key fiction films about attempts to make money with natural resources while renewing them and keeping them alive, which Hatidze does instinctively:  Victor Nunez's Ulle's Gold, with Peter Fonda (1997) and Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) about Italian peasants.  Hatidze manages to keep going, chopping firewood for the winter and listening to music on a radio for which she has built a jerry-rigged aerial.  This is a somewhat slow-moving documentary which pays off one's patience with beautiful detail.  

Gregory La Cava's Bed of Roses 1933

 Bed of Roses is another pre-code comedy/drama about moving between classes by director La Cava (see my post of March 12).  Constance Bennett (a Miriam Hopkins lookalike) plays Lorry Evans and Pert Kelton (a Mae West soundalike) plays Minnie Brown, two prostitutes just getting out of prison; Minnie picks up her next customer just outside the prison gates.  They try to steal money from two "ump-chas" (as Minnie calls them) on a steamboat and Bennett jumps in the river to escape the authorities, where she is picked up by cotton barge owner Dan (Joel McCrae).  She steals money from Dan and seeks out the wealthy Stephen Paige in New Orleans, where she impersonates a reporter. interviews Paige (John Halliday), gets him drunk and then blackmails him into putting her up in an apartment, where she lies in a bed covered with fabric roses.  Dan finally tracks her down and proposes to her; she leaves Paige but fears that Dan will find out her past and goes to work in a department store, though eventually reconciles with Dan.

All this and much more takes place in a brisk sixty-five minutes, as Lorrie moves from poverty to wealth and eventually to the working class, while Minnie marries one of the chumps they had met on the boat.  The witty and sometimes bawdy script is by Wanda Tuchock and the cinematography is by veteran Charles Rosher, who had started photographing films in 1915 and continued for fifty years.  Incidentally the crew on Dan's barge are all African-Americans and treated with dignity, as is Mildred Washington as Lorrie's maid. La Cava's film benefits from his lively direction as well as the dialogue he contributed to the script.

Changes in Baseball 2021

 It looks as though the DH will not be required in the National League this year, though I think that will happen eventually, unfortunately.  However double-header games will be seven innings and in extra-inning games each extra inning will start with a runner on second base, an absurd idea that goes against the beauty of baseball; ending the game as a tie after nine innings would be slightly preferable. 

As for the new rules being tried out in the minor leagues (I am particularly annoyed at the demise of the Staten Island Yankees, which played in a beautiful park at reasonable prices; one can only hope some independent team will take it over) I find most of them dubious at best.  The biggest problem is not that games go on too long but that there are too many homeruns and strikeouts.  And, of course, too many relief pitchers, though I don't think requiring a pitcher to pitch to at least three batters or get the last out of the inning is the solution.  I again suggest expanding the strike zone to what it once was (and if the technology to call balls and strikes is successful in its trial in the Class A Southeast League that's one change I might support).  And bring back the spitball, so every pitcher doesn't eventually require Tommy John surgery.

As for base stealing, I don't think the rules being tried out in Class A are at all necessary, i.e., requiring the pitcher to step off the rubber to throw to first and only allowing him to do it twice; on the third try it's a balk unless the baserunner is thrown out, rather a strange and contrived rule.  I am all in favor of attempted steals but they are not rare because the pitcher throws over there too much but because the analytics show that it is not worth the risk, just as sacrifice bunts are rare.  I think runners can learn to steal and hitters can learn to bunt; circumstances change based on who the runner, the pitcher and the catcher are.  In the same way we do not need new rules banning the shift (threatened by MLB) or requiring all infielders to stay on the infield dirt (being tested in AA):  instead of trying to always hit homeruns against the shift it would be effective, for a number or reasons, for batters to learn how to hit to the opposite field.  As for games being too long I suggest that the rule against the batter stepping out of the batter's box be enforced. The average length of a baseball game in 2019 was three hours and five minutes, while in the 1970's it was two hours and thirty minutes.  Part of this is certainly due to more relief pitching but there has been more time recently for batters stepping out of the box and the time between pitches.  Simply start enforcing the rules against batters stepping out of the box and the current rule -- in effect, believe it or not -- that pitchers have twelve seconds to deliver the ball after they receive it.

The Queen's Gambit, novel by Walter Tevis, internet series by Scott Frank

 She had heard of the genetic code that could shape an eye or hand from passing proteins.  Deoxyribbonucleic Acid.  It contained the entire set of instructions for constructing a respiratory system and a digestive one, as well as the grip of an infant's hand.  Chess was like that.  The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility.  You saw deeply into this layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another.

Walter Devis, The Queen's Gambit (Random House, 1983)         

The queen's gambit is an opening in chess where white offers black the chance to capture a pawn; whether or not black accepts determines what may happen next.  Perhaps Tevis meant Beth Harmon, the main protagonist of his novel, to represent the queen.  The novel sees Harmon from the inside, in the sense we get details of what she is thinking as she plays her games, from the orphanage where she learns the game from the janitor to her eventual world championship.  Scott Frank sees Harmon more from the outside, played beutifully and intelligently by Anya Taylor-Joy.  Frank takes full advantage of the relatively new way of adapting novels, i.e., as an internet series, in this case seven episodes totaling over six hours of screentime, including almost everything in the novel (which takes about the same amount of time to read).  My problem with the internet series is that it doesn't give us the details of Harmon's matches to the extent that Tevis does, presumably because much of the audience would not have patience for that.  My own relationship with chess has been off and on.  I learned it from a neighbor when I was very young and eventually played it with my son Gideon, who was somewhat passionate about it for a time, but neither of us made the effort to go into the details and history of the game.  I think when I was younger I was attracted to the geometric beauties of the game but soon realized the psychological pressure of a game where there is no chance involved and one mistake can cause one to lose the game.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons some chess champions go mad (or may have been partly mad to begin with).

I recommend Scott Frank's series if one is interested in the personalities and social aspects of being a successful championship chess player.  If one is more interested in the history, strategies and details of the competitive game I would recommend Tevis's intense novel.

Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee (1934)

 For "Night and Day" Astaire adapted his stage choreography, and no more thrilling or musical dance had ever been presented on the screen.

--Arlene Croce

The Gay Divorcee (an e was added to the Broadway play The Gay Divorce) only has ten minutes of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing, but the dancing is exquisite and holds the movie together.  This is a musical comedy and perhaps has too much comedy, but Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore (the last two from the original Broadway production) have excellent timing and are often quite amusing.  Unfortunately "Night and Day" is the only Cole Porter song saved from the original play, Though the added songs are okay the final song, "The Continental," goes on much too long.  My guess is that since this was the first starring vehicle for Rogers and Astaire (after their brief appearance in Flying Down to Rio the previous year) RKO was trying to play it safe with lots of comedy and a big production number --obviously influenced by Busby Berkeley -- at the end.  After the success of The Gay Divorcee we saw a lot more of Astaire and Rogers dancing, though never quite enough.

I find it interesting that when Astaire dances alone, as in "Needle in a Haystack," we see more of his ballet background than we see when he dances with Ginger Rogers, not a highly trained dancer.  I was particularly impressed with Astaire's cabrioles when he dances in his hotel room before he goes off looking for Ginger, whom he had first met at customs when her skirt was caught in a locked trunk.  There's always a story underneath their dances, as in "Night and Day" when they begin to know and care for one another.  They meet at a resort where married Rogers has hired a co-respondent in order to get a divorce and, of course, she is led to believe that Astaire in playing that role actually played by Erik Rhodes.

A kind word for Mark Sandrich, who directed the five best of the ten Astaire-Rogers films and whose relatively low-key direction allowed the dancing -- and the comedy -- to delight us. The marvelous Art Deco sets were by Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark;  Hermes Pan helped Astaire with the choreography.

Allan Dwan's Chances (1931)

 Chances is among the most remarkable of all World War I films.  Romance counterpointed to scenes of combat is a conventional mixture, but Dwan's seamless presentation communicates both poignancy and horror. 

--Myron Meisel, American Directors Volume I (McGraw-Hill, 1983)

Dwan's name is unknown to most filmgoers but in his long career (1911-1961) he directed over 400 films ( his earliest films were silent short Westerns), many of which were low budget, high quality movies, and we know how aware Dwan was of D.W. Griffith because Dwan assisted Griffith on his great epic Intolerance (1916).  Chances is some ways reminds one of Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) in its story of a romance compromised by war.  Jack (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) and Tom (Anthony Bushell) are both in love with Molly (Rose Hobart) when they are called to the war's front in 1914, with Tom thinking he is engaged to Molly when she actually loves Jack and they consummate their relationship when Jack goes on leave.  Jack brings back a picture of Molly which Tom thinks was meant for him and Tom is devastated when Jack tells him the truth, just before they go into battle.  Tom is shot and Jack risks his own life to save him.  Tom dies and Jack loses an arm, as he returns to Molly in a London fog like the one in which they first met.

Dwan directs with confidence and intelligence, directing the actors to express themselves with facial expressions and body language and keeping dialogue to an effective limit.  The film's seventy-minutes move quickly as it goes from foggy London to a party at a country estate to the war in France (the horror of the war is shown in mostly nighttime shots) and back to London.  Working with cinematographer Ernest Haller (who photographed ten movies in 1931) Dwan creates impressive moods using tracking shots that imprison the actors within their limited enviroments.

Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972)

 It is little wonder that Stravinsky Violin Concerto has proven a perennial favorite.  There is something for everybody: brilliant solo work for dancers and the violin soloist, wonderful ensemble passages for both the corps and the orchestra, and a range of sentiments capable of stirring the audience in many different ways.

--Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky and Balanchine:  A Journey of Invention (Yale University Press, 2002)

Before or after watching Stravinsky Violin Concerto -- there are two days left on the New York City Ballet site -- I highly recommend Joseph's book, with his incomparable knowledge of both dance and music and his perceptive understanding of the complex and creative partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky.

Stravinsky Violin Concerto combines many of Balanchine's interests and influences, from classical ballet to folk dancing and neoclassical variations.  As in all Balanchine's ballets there is also an underlying story, especially in the two pas de deux arias, a story of love, separation and reconciliation.  Sara Mearns and Taylor Stanley dance the first aria, Sterling Hyltin and Ask la Cour dance the second one and the ballet is both serious and playful simultaneously, with each couple expressing their relationship while also emphasizing their independence and their relationship to the rest of the world, represented by the sixteen members of the corps.  I sometimes say that the whole world is in a particular ballet, though in Stravinsky Violin Concerto it's more like the whole world of ballet, from the earliest court and folk dances through classical ballet and modern dance.  The steps which, as I've said before, seem to take place between notes of the music, are often classical or based on classical steps but include more modern elements, including flexed feet, turned in legs and various levels of contortion.

The dancers for this performance were fortunate to be coached by Karin von Aroldingen, who was part of the original performance in 1972 and danced the ballet many times. The Stravinsky music was conducted by Clotilde Otranto and the violin soloist was Kurt Nikkanen.  Also included in this presentation is a discussion about the ballet with dancers Russell Janzen, Sara Mearns, Claire Kretchsmar and Repertory Director Rebecca Krohn, as well as a tape of Krohn teaching the ballet to Kretchsmar. 

Gregory La Cava's The Age of Consent (1933)

 La Cava's talents as a metteur-en-scene largely focused on describing the contrary milieus of bare survival and excessive opulence.

--Roger McNiven, American Directors (McGraw-Hill, 1983)

Gregory La Cava is a superb director of ambiguities who is little known to most filmgoers; even his best known film, My Man Godfrey (1936), is seldom seen these days.  La Cava can be very serious and very funny in the same film, as he is with The Age of Consent, a pre code film from 1933 about college students that could be made today, as brains and sex drives clash.  Michael Harvey (Richard Cromwell) and Betty Cameron (Dorothy Wilson)are college sophomores who want to get married, but Betty thinks they should wait until they graduate.  Michael is annoyed, so when he sees townie waitress Dora Swale (Arline Judge) lift up her stocking and adjust her garter he agrees to come home with her.  They get drunk and it is broadly hinted that they had sex together; they fall sleep, her father comes home and says Dora and Michael have to get married or Michael will go to jail (it is suggested that Dora is a minor but we are never actually given any ages).  Meanwhile, Betty has gone on a drive with Duke Galloway (Eric Linden), who picks up girls by demonstrating the seat cushions in his new car --  "just like a hotel, but you don't have to check in"-- just before the judge arrives to marry Michael and Dora.

Mr. Swale (Reginald Barlow) thinks Michael has been corrupted by college, where so-called "free love" is promoted and when Dora asks "what about my happiness?" Swale says that is irrelevant, because it's a matter of right and wrong.  Dora says "what if what you think is right is actually wrong?"  Betty and Duke are in an accident and everything gets more of less sorted out, though as Betty and Michael leave on their honeymoon it is a question whether the marriage will work, just as Michael's professor and Betty's landlady had once been in love but grew apart and now, twenty years later, each is on their own as they bid farewell to Betty and Michael.

This efficient film, slightly more that an hour long, leaves open the question of happiness, something one has to find on one's own;  there's not a formula that works for everyone.  It's from a play by Martin Flavin, screenplay by Sarah Mason, and the crisp cinematography by J. Roy Hunt, one of nine films he photographed in 1933. 

Catching Up

 I've been keeping up with the subjects of this blog but not posting much so far this month, so here's what I have been doing.

Ballet.  I have been taking ballet classes twice a week virtually with the 92nd St. Y.  They are wonderful for many reasons, especially the concentration required; it keeps one's mind off the pandemic.  I also continue to watch ballets on YouTube, especially NYC Ballet, now doing a Spring "season," based on three sides of Balanchine:  the narrative, the classical and the neoclassical.  I have already posted about the narrative, Prodigal Son, and this week watched the magnificent Theme and Variations, with lead dancers Andrew Veyette and Tiler Peck.  This was originally done in 1947 for Ballet Theatre to the last movement of Tschaikovsky's Suite # 3 and in 1970 Balanchine added choreography to the first three movements.  I think Theme and Variations works best in the context of the entire suite, the misty and oneiric first movements lead up to Theme and Variations, both explosive and realistic, based as it is on Russian classical style that Balanchine learned as a youth.  In any case we do have this wonderful performance of Theme and Variations; I have said "the whole world is in this ballet" when talking about the complete suite, but I also think it is somewhat true of the final movement, a brief aria plus twelve variations and a repeated polonaise. I might write more about this wonderful ballet but for the moment Veyette does the repeated tours en l'air and pirouettes marvelously and Tiler Peck is radiant in her variations.  One still has a couple of days to see it; on Thursday we will have the neoclassical Stravinsky Violin Concerto.  Along with the Tschaikovky piece is a fascinating tape of Repertory Director Kathleen Tracy working with dancer Joseph Gordon in rehearsal.

Baseball.  In my last post I wrote about the state of baseball in 2021 and I must admit some anxiety about the upcoming season.  For the last few years there have been more strikeouts than hits in Major League Baseball; will the ball be deadened enough to change that?  I recently watched a Mets Spring training game between the Mets and the Marlins where in the ninth inning Mets pitcher Steve Nogosek walked three batters and struck out three batters; not a single ball was put in play!  

Movies.  We are always looking for films that the four of us would like.  Recently we watched Vincente Minnelli's Bells Are Ringing, from 1960, which my daughter didn't care for (answering services and bookies, what are those?) but the rest of us found charming, especially Judy Holliday (her last movie before her untimely death.)  Filmed on studio sets in widescreen and gorgeous color by cinematographer Milton Krasner (who worked with Minnelli on many of his films) from a Broadway play it has script and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolf Green and music by Jule Styne.  There is little dancing in the film but Minnelli uses tracking shots to give Holliday and co-star Dean Martin a feeling of movement in the minimal choreography.  This was the last musical for producer Arthur Freed, who had led a unit at MGM dedicated to musicals.

Books.  I just finished the fifth volume of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time and have been reading David Reynold's marvelous Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.  I interrupted that to read Michael Connelly's superb The Law of Innocence, a fascinating mixture of police procedural and courtroom drama.  Lawyer Mickey Haller is arrested for murder and gets his half-brother Harry Bosch and two ex-lovers to help defeat the case, as he defends himself.  Connelly is vivid as usual in portraying the details of life and incarceration in Los Angeles (see my previous posts about Connelly novels) and the personalities on both sides of the law. 

Baseball 2021

 I've watched a couple of Spring Training games and I am hopeful, but not optimistic, that some things might change.  One thing I think will not change is the poor TV coverage; it is already evident that we will not see more of the field or the game.  In the Spring games I have watched so far it more often than not seems as though there  are only three players in the game for long stretches: pitcher, catcher and batter, as well as the home plate umpire.  More often than not when the team on the field puts on a shift we don't even get a shot of it, the reasoning is apparently because they don't want to take the paying ads behind the catcher out of our view.  And of course the common shot of the batter and the pitcher is shot with a telephoto lens from centerfield, totally distorting the distance between the two players. The announcers on the Yankees and the Mets are little help; they are usually too busy talking about their favorite movies and what they are planning to have for dinner.  Vin Scully was right to work alone. 

Okay, so TV is not a good way to see the game, since one actually doesn't "see" much that way.  The question becomes whether we will actually get to see games in person (especially minor league games, which I prefer for their convenience and reasonable prices) and, if so, what will we see.  Will it be another year of homeruns and strikeouts or will the commissioner actually do something to "deaden" the ball and bring back the excitement and beauty of the game, with stolen bases, hit-and-run plays, sacrifice bunts, etc.? I recommend Meredith Wills's piece in Sports Illustrated about attempts to deaden the ball; meanwhile I will suggest, again, a number of other things that can be done:  expand the strike zone to what it was for many years, i.e., the top of the shoulders to the knees; raise the pitching mound back to 15 inches and, most importantly, make the spitball legal again.

I have suggested previously that fair balls hit into the stands be considered outs, or at least foul balls, and that the designated hitter be abolished.  But since these things are unlikely to happen I suggest MLB institute some kind of educational effort so that people, especially young people, can learn the subtleties of the game, as well as its aesthetic beauties, something announcer and former pitcher David Cone has said is being overlooked in the emphasis on analytics.  Why emphasize such dubious statistics as Wins Above Replacement when most fans don't even understand ERA or slugging percentage?