Turner Classic Movies June 2021

 A good month for classic films, highlighted by 24 movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock on June 26 and 27.

June 1: two musicals directed by Vincente Minnelli, Band Wagon (1953) and Brigadoon (1954)

June 5: Joseph Lewis's masterly Gun Crazy (1950) and two comedies directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, I Was a Male War Bride (1949) and Monkey Business (1954)

June 6:  Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933) and Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937), one of the best Rogers/Astaire musicals.

June 7: Vincente Minnelli's great melodrama Some Came Running (1958) and Hawks's great Western Rio Bravo (1959)

June 8: Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958) and Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

June 11: Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) starring Marlene Dietrich

June 14: Victor Sjostrom The Scarlet Letter (1927) starring Lillian Gish

June 16: King Vidor's vivid Northwest Passage (1940)

June 17:  Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937)

June 19:  John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

June 20:  Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953)

June 26-27:  Twenty-four films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, including The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Vertigo (1958)

Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves 2013

 Kelly Reichardt is the contemporary director most influenced by the minimalist director Robert Bresson, especially Bresson's last four films in color (Susan Sontag once wrote that it is hard to imagine Bresson's films in color and his last four films were different in various ways from his earlier work).  There are even scenes of ecological atrocities early in Reichardt's films that echo a slide show in Bresson's penultimate film The Devil, Probably (1977).  Night Moves is about three idealistic eco-terrorists who decide to blow up a dam that is killing fish.  Everything happens from the point of view of the terrorists:  Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), Dena(Dakota Fanning) and Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), to the extent one feels sympathetic to them when they almost have to stop the explosive timer when campers turn up near-by and when Josh and Dena are stopped by the police when driving away from the scene.  The terrorists barely have a moment to celebrate their success when they hear that they accidentally killed a sleeping camper. Dena starts to freak out and Josh has to quiet her, as he and Harmon go into hiding, the focus staying on the three terrorists without ever showing any police investigation.

The title Night Moves is the name of the boat that is packed with explosives (fertilizer) to blow up the dam, though most of the film takes place in the darkness of night, away from the day jobs of Josh, Dena and Harmon, who are a lover's triangle that adds pressure to their relationship, as each member of the group has their own reasons for their actions.  Reichardt effectively keeps emotional displays to a minimum as Josh, Dena and Harmon sit in their truck and hear the explosion.

James Whale's The Kiss Before the Mirror 1933

 Universal loved Whale for his horror films (Frankenstein 1931) but found him too erudite and intellectual, i.e., too English, otherwise, so for the film The Kiss Before the Mirror, a film about adultery and murder from a play by Ladislas Fordor, they gave him a minimal budget, a sixty-seven minute running time and some left-over sets.  Nonetheless, with the help of cinematographer Karl Freund (who shot F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, 1924) the English James Whale made a low-key, pre-Code masterpiece of expressionism and camera mobility.  Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) kills his wife Lucy (Gloria Stuart) while she is disrobing for her lover (Walter Pigeon) and is defended by Paul Held (Frank Morgan in an unusually serious role). While defending Walter his lawyer begins to suspect his own wife (Nancy Carroll) and follows her to a tryst with her lover.  Paul apparently feels that if he can get his friend Walter off on a temporary insanity plea he can them safely kill his own wife.

Of course not all goes as planned when Paul points a gun at his wife during his defense of Walter and she faints.  Whale's nightime shots are appropriately sinister and in the courtroom he pans 360 degrees to show the interest of the spectators and all the participants in the trial.  The film is very much on the side of the adulterous women, who feel ignored and slighted by their husbands. 

Philip Roth The Biography by Blake Bailey

"It was not for lack of love that I did not marry any of those women [Ann Mudge, Barbara Sproul, etc.]. I did not marry who would have married me.  I did not marry them because none was a finagler, a cheat, or a manipulator made by panic who would have her man no matter what."

--Philip Roth, quoted in Philip Roth The Biography by Blake Bailey (W.W, Norton & Company, Inc. 2021)

Ah, yes, the girls.  It keeps coming back to the girls.  No matter how loftily we may wish to elevate our sights and vouch that only the Work matters, the sheer volume of acitivity in Roth's erotic life as recorded in Blake's compendium, the turnstile whirl of passing infatuations (while certain lovers loyally remain in the corner of the frame), makes that a tough go.  Girls. women, devoted mistresses, literary groupies, other men's wives, writing class students. famous actresses (not only Ava Gardner but Mia Farrow), one-night stands, sex with prostitutes in London, handjobs in Bangkok, orgies in Prague ("as he picked his way upstairs amid the copulating bodies, he was bitten on the ankle") it all makes for an R-rated sizzle competing with the feature attraction.

James Wolcott, "Sisyphus at the Selectric," London Review of Books. 20 May 2021

After I finished Blake Bailey's 800 pages of Philip Roth's biography and started to struggle with what to say about it I received the latest issue of London Review of Books with Wolcott's 8,000 word review.  I've always liked Wolcott's writing (I dropped my subscription to Vanity Fair when he no longer appeared there) and his review is intelligently written and perceptive (it is easily found on-line) in its attempt to reconcile Roth's life and work.  Roth went around with a big chip on his shoulder for being Jewish and a womanizer and never could understand why he did not received a Nobel Prize.  Whatever one may feel about the relationship between an author and his work there is no doubt that Roth used his novels to skewer his wives (from two diastrous marriages) and his enemies, real and imagined.  It is also true that Roth was quite generous with some of his friends and mistresses and played a major role in getting a number of Eastern European writers published in English during the Cold War.  I have certainly enjoyed some of his books --from Portnoy's Complaint to The Great American Novel to The Plot Against America -- novels where he doesn't grind his axes or lose one in a hall of mirrors.  And no doubt, like most writers he was a product of his time (as Harvey Weinstein said, "things were different then") but was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to transcend it. 

Edward L. Cahn's Main Street After Dark (1945)

 I've written about a number of Edward L. Cahn's films on this blog.  He started as an editor at Universal in the silent days and went on to direct a number of excellent films there in the thirties (including Law and Order and Afraid to Talk in 1932) and then got on someone's bad side and was fired, turning to MGM in the shorts department before turning to features again with Main Street After Dark and then turning to Poverty Row low-budget films, never losing his visual skills, making eleven films in 1961, for instance, before dying in 1963.

Main Street After Dark is an unusual film noir, made while the war was still on and starring later icons of the form Dan Duryea and Audrey Totter.  They are part of a gang run by their mother, played by Selena Royle.  They specialize in getting sailors drunk before relieving them of their wallets.  Once Totter's husband Lefty (Tom Trout) gets out of stir he escalates the operation until Lefty kills a bar owner on the owner's way to the bank with his receipts.   Detective Lorrgan (Edward Arnold) confronts the family in their home when ultraviolent light reveals that the family has touched the money that Lorrgan had given to soldiers.  There is a brief didactic ending about stopping crime, betraying the films origin in MGM's "Crime Does Not Pay" series.  Main Street After Dark is 56 minutes long, obviously intended for the bottom of a double bill, but Cahn uses his excellent cast (Hume Cronyn plays a crooked pawnbroker) and his florid visual style (Jackson Rose was the cinematographer) to portray a dark (the film takes place mostly during nighttime) and dangerously claustrophobic space that gradually closes in on the criminal family.

Murder at the Savoy, by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall (1971)

Living "out in the Hills" has always been looked down upon by the Malmo bourgeoisie, but many Kirsberg residents were proud of their section and enjoyed living there, even though their homes not infrequently lacked modern conveniences or in general were below average, since no one bothered to maintain or repair them.  People who ended up in the poorest apartments either weren't wanted in the smarter residential areas or weren't considered to be in need of a higher standard of living.  It was no accident that many of the foreign factory workers who'd come to Malmo during recent years lived in this area.

--Wahloo and Sjowall, Murder at the Savoy, (Random House, 1971, translated by Amy and Ken Knoespel)

I recommend this sixth Martin Beck novel for those who are envious of Sweden's "safety net," which isn't always effective for foreigners who live there, or even for all Swedes. Beck and the understaffed police force are trying to figure out who murdered Viktor Palmgren, an industrialist who was involved in some very shady businesses and was murdered by a man who shot him during a lunch at the Savoy in Malmo and then left through the window.  Detective Martin Beck is sent from Stockholm to help solve the murder and gets nowhere; too many people hated Palmgren, even (or, especially) his wife.  They had no clues, not even what gun was used; someone who fit the killer's description took a ferry to Copenhagen but the police sent to meet the ferry stopped for lunch on the way and missed it.  Eventually the package that the man on the ferry had thrown overboard washed up on the beach and the family that found it brought it to the police, who were able to determine what pistol it had contained, an unusual make of target weapon which Beck was able to trace through gun clubs.  It turned out that one of the users of that make of gun had not only lost his job when Palmgren closed a factory, but also he had been evicted from an apartment building owned by Palmgren when, after losing his job, he couldn't pay the rent.  

Murder at the Savoy captures all the sleaziness of ruthless businessmen in Sweden, along with their "traveling secretaries" (prostitutes who go on business trips with them). Beck and his staff talk with many of Palmgren's associates in both legal and illegal businesses, as well as many people who suffer because of their Palmgren's greed; it's a grim and fascinating tour of one aspect of Swedish society. 

Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Preminger is a director who sees all problems and issues as a single-take two-shot, the stylistic expression of the eternal conflict, not between right and wrong, but between the right-wrong on one side and the right-wrong on the other, a representation of the right-wrong in all of us as our share of the human condition.  In the middle of the conflict stands Otto Preminger, right-wrong, good-bad, and probably sincere-cynical.

--Andrew Sarris

 Anatomy of a Murder is a terrific courtroom drama, distinguished as much by what it leaves out as what it includes, focusing on the issues in the trial and not including anything about jury selection as well as leaving out final arguments as redundant.  It is based on a book by Robert Taver that is narrated in the first-person by defense attorney Paul Biegler (played by James Stewart in the film), defending army lieutenant Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), who murdered the man who allegedly raped Manion's wife (Lee Remick).  The murder itself is not shown and everything we learn about it is from the testimony of witnesses.  The film is filmed on location in northern Michigan in black-and-white by veteran cinematograper Sam Leavitt, written by Wendell Mayes (who wrote several films for Preminger) and with an effectively low-key score by Duke Ellington.

Though the film does not have a narration everything is seen from Biegler's point of view; the audience learns things as he learns them and he mounts an insanity defense with the help of old lawyer friend Paul Emmett McCarthy (Arthur O'Connell), who has given up drinking to help Biegler. The judge is played elegantly by non-actor Joseph Welch (who accused Joseph McCarthy of having no decency) and George C, Scott, in his third movie, plays assistant prosecutor Claude Dancer, who traps himself by asking a question he did not already know the answer to.  Preminger effectively uses long takes to capture the details of the trial, using two-shots to capture the interaction between lawyers and witnesses.

S. Sylvan Simon's I Love Trouble (1948)

 She was a lovely thing, standing beside a low-cut Packard convertible, the dim-light from the entrance-way softening the hardness about her mouth.  She was wearing a cornflower blue dress under a nice set of furs -- the furrier probably closed the sale and then retired.  The hair was somebody's eight-hour day, and it was as theatrical as a glob of greasepaint.  But I liked it.  And there was nothing synthetic about the deep golden glow of her skin.  I thought I could smell her all the way over to the steps.  From there she smelled nice.  She smiled and said, "Do you like me?"

--Roy Huggins, The Double Take (1946). Black Curtain Press

I was hoping that S.Sylvan Simon's film of the Roy Huggins's The Double Take, called I Love Trouble, would make more sense than the confusing plot of the Chandleresque novel.  This was not to be, probably because Huggins wrote the screenplay and director Simon made little effort to clarify the plot of private detective Stuart Bailey's attempts to check out the background of Ralph Johnston's (Tom Powers) wife.  Stuart Bailey, played by a world-weary Franchot Tone, is surrounded by women -- Janet Blair, Janis Carter, Adele Jerrgins, Lynn Merrick -- who look rather alike in their forties haistyles and dresses; only his feisty secretary Glenda Farrell stands out.  Simon's use of locations in Venice and Santa Monica, California effectively portray an atmosphere of isolation and menace, especially Buster Buffin's Buffet, on the shore, where Bailey is the only customer and clam chowder the only thing on the menu.

I Love Trouble is filled with good girls and bad girls, good guys and bad guys (including John Ireland and Raymond Burr, in his fourth film), double-crosses and betrayals, fistfights and gunfights, car chases and shadowing on foot, energetically directed by Simon and concluding with a somewhat unsatisfactory "happy" ending, the bane of B movies in their attempts to be film noirs. 

They Won't Believe Me, directed by Irving Pichel (1947)

 Although They Won't Believe Me does not have the trappings of many film noirs -- shadowy photography, references to WW II -- it does have a mood of fatalism and betrayal that puts in squarely in the film noir category; at one point Robert Young says, "fate has dealt me one from the bottom of the deck."  It's also a film of collaboration, including major contributions by producer Joan Harrison (who worked with Hitchcock on a number of films), writer Jonathan Latimer (crime novelist and writer of The Glass Key, 1942), cinematographer Harry J. Wild of Murder My Sweet (1944) and composer Roy Webb, who did the music for ten films in 1947, including Out of the Past.  Major contributions were made by actors Robert Young as Larry Ballantine, Susan Hayward as Verna Carlson, Jane Greer as Janice Bell and Rita Johnson as Greta Ballantine.  Veteran director Irving Pichel, a sometime actor himself, got superb performances from the cast, which also includes a number of effective character actors, such as Don Beddoe and Frank Ferguson.

Robert Young does a great job against type as the amoral Larry Ballantine, who almost leaves his wife Greta for journalist Janice Bell, until the wealthy Greta buys him a partnership in a brokerage firm and Larry just doesn't show up for a trip out of town with Janice.  At the brokerage firm he meets secretary Verna Carlson, who rescues him from a scolding by his boss, and they fall in love, sort of.  Once Greta finds out about Verna she sells Larry's role in the firm and says they are leaving for California and if he doesn't want to go he will be left without a job or money, so he leaves Verna and goes to an isolated ranch with Greta, without even a telephone.  Larry is bored and contacts Verna; she picks him up at the general store and they head for Reno so Larry can get a divorce,  On the way their car crashes and Verna is severely burned and is unrecognizable, so everyone thinks it is Larry's wife who has died. Larry now realizes he can freely kill his wife and goes back to the ranch, where he finds his wife has committed suicide and he dumps her in the water at the bottom of her favorite waterfall.  Meanwhile Larry's boss at the brokerage film, who had fancied Verna, is looking for her with the help of Janice, and the cops discover Greta's body when they search the ranch.  Larry goes on trial for the murder of Greta -- the film is narrated by him on the witness stand -- and he has one last ambiguous meeting with Janice in jail, but before the jury's decision is announced Larry is shot trying to escape, or perhaps attempting suicide.  The verdict is "not guilty."

When They Won't Believe Me was re-released in 1950 it was cut from 95 minutes to 80 and only recently was the cut restored.  I haven't seen that latter version for some time but I do feel fairly certain that the major cut was a scene when Larry and Verna flee from Greta and on their way to Reno stop at a beautiful lake for a swim.  Larry had convinced Verna to impersonate Greta and take $25,000 from her account and at that point Verna gives Larry the check, which Larry, to Verna's pleasure, tears up.  This scene makes Larry seem slightly less of a heel, which perhaps was why it was cut.  In any case, director Pichel deserves considerable credit for how he directed the actors, especially Robert Young and Susan Hayward, in their complex relationships between love and greed. 

NYC Ballet Spring Gala, directed by Sofia Coppola

 Sofia Coppola and cinematographer Phillip La Sourd made a lovely film for the virtual Spring gala of New York City Ballet.  Though I am generally not fond of excerpts of ballets the ones that are included here whet one's appetite for the return of the ballet -- we fervently hope -- in the fall (we have tickets for October).  The film is beautifully structured, starting with black-and-white solos and pas de deux backstage and on the promenade of the New York State Theatre to the finale of the glorious last movement of Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15 in color and on the usual ballet stage.

It starts out with a new and expressive solo for dancer Anthony Huxley, choreographed by Justin Peck to the melancholy music of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, capturing the isolation and even the frustration of a dancer during the pandemic.  This is followed by a pas de deux by Ashley Bouder and Russell Janzen to Stravinsky's Duo Concertant,choreographed by Balanchine.  Janzen was intelligently articulate in today's New York Times:  "It's a contained world.  Intimate, so a natural Covid-era ballet.  To dance this ballet is to inhabit a world of your own making."

Next comes a pas de deux from Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer, with music by Brahms. It is from the first part of the ballet, before the women change to pointe shoes, and all its earnest and fleeting romanticism is captured by Maria Kowroski and Ask la Cour on the promenade of the theatre.  This is followed by an elegant solo from Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering, danced by Gonzalo Garcia to the music of Chopin.  For the finale Coppola shifts to color and a full cast for Divertomento No. 15 to the music of Mozart:  principals Tiler Peck and Andrew Veyette; soloists Emilie Gerrity, Lauren King, Ashley Laracey, Unity Phelan, Daniel Applebaum; corps member Andrew Scodato.  This last movement of the Balanchine ballet is danced full-out by the cast on the main stage, with the viewer as the audience as the curtain goes up at the start and down at the end.  There is no applause to be heard, the dancers missing us (we see them briefly after the curtain comes down) as much as we miss them.

The Fire Engine That Disappeared by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1970)

 Ten yards away stood a long dismal figure, a pipe in his mouth and hands thrust deep down in his coat pockets.  This was Frederik Melander of the Homicide Squad in Stockholm and a veteran of hundreds of difficult investigations.  He was generally known for his logical mind, his excellent memory and immovable calm.  Within a smaller circle, he was most famous for his remarkable capacity for always being in the toilet when anyone wanted to get hold of him.  His sense of humor was not non-existent, but very modest; he was parsimonious and dull and never had brilliant ideas or sudden inspiration.  Briefly, he was a first-class policeman.

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Fire Engine That Disappeared, (Random House, 1970, translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate)

This is the fifth novel about Stockholm policeman Martin Beck by Sjowall and Per Wahloo, though in this novel Martin Beck has rather a small part, as all the members of his squad work for months to solve the problem of an apartment house that blows up when a man is killed while attempting suicide, with a bomb and gas destroying a building and killing some its tenants.  The squad works together, from bullying veteran Gunvald Larsson to rookie Benny Skacke, who hopes to be commissioner some day, but make little progress until their major suspect turns up dead in Malmo, having died before the apartment fire, and where a local policeman helps track down who was actually responsible.

This book in the series emphasizes the personal lives of the Homicide Squad, of whom some are happily married, some unhappily married and some not married at all, and how their love lives affect their work.  The Fire Engine That Disappeared is full of the irony that Wahloo and Sjowall use effectively to portray not only the working of the Homicide Squad but also the lives of Swedish citizens who are affected in greater and lesser ways by both the criminals and police.