Turner Classic Movies July 2021

 Not a great TCM schedule for July -- nothing much new or startling, lots of solid B films -- but plenty of good watching for the Summer.

July 3:  Raoul Walsh's Western The Tall Men, 1955

July 6: Max Ophuls's elegant The Earrings of Madame De..., 1954

July 7:  Samuel Fuller's great war film Merrill's Marauders, 1962

July 8:  Raoul Walsh's funny and moving The Strawberry Blonde, 1941

July 12:  Ernst Lubitsch's lovely So This Is Paris, 1926

July 14:  Howard Hawks's To Have and To Have Not, 1944; Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men, 1952; Preston Sturges's brilliant The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, 1944

July 16:  Fritz Lang's intense Clash by Night, 1952

July 17: Anthony Mann's Western The Man From Laramie, 1955

July 18: Leo McCarey's romantic An Affair to Remember, 1957

July 23:  Arthur Penn's complex Night Moves, 1975

July 24: John Ford's Mogambo, 1953

July 26: Jacques Demy's gorgeous The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964

July 27: Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, 1934

July 31: John Huston's grear (failed) caper film The Asphalt Jungle, 1950

Luis Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe (1954)

 Bunuel saw, as did Defoe, that Crusoe's struggle, often clusy and inept, against conditions on the island, was fascinating on its practical pedestrian level; he records, simply, the flat, absorbing routine of Crusoe's daily life.  Imaginatively Bunuel pierces further, looking into the heart of the man to see there the desolation and anguish of someone isolated from all human contact.

-- Tony Richardson in The World of Luis Bunuel, edited by Joan Mellen (Oxford University Press, 1978)

One doesn't hear much about Bunuel these days and this is the first time I have mentioned him in this blog, mostly because I had seen his films long before I began posting here.  Bunuel made films in Spain and France in the twenties, sometimes collaborating with Salvador Dali, went to Spain and, briefly, Hollywood in the thirties and then to Mexico, where he made dozens of movies in various genres before making his last six films in France in the sixties and seventies.  While in Mexico Bunuel made strange and beautiful personal films with the low-budgets he preferred because of the freedom it gave him.  Robinson Crusoe was producer  Oscar Danscigers attempt to break into the international success with Bunuel's first film in color and English, starring Dan O'Herlihy.  It follows Defoe's novel fairly closely while diverging from Defoe's themes, emphsizing the sexual frustration and absence of God that plague Crusoe in his dreams.  Once Friday appears and helps fight off the cannibals Crusoe asserts himself as master, remembering that the ship that he was originally on twenty-five years before was sailing to Brazil to buy slaves.  

The Locked Room: The Story of a Crime by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1973

 Suddenly he remembered his own experiences in this field.  Almost twenty years ago, right after he got married, he'd been very hard up.  Before Inga -- the cause of the marriage -- was born, his wife had been working for an insurance company.  There she had been able to buy at a discount a great number of cans of unusually foul-tasting consomme damaged in transit.  They'd lived on them for months.  Since then he'd never really liked consomme.  Maybe the loathsome liquid had already been tasted by Kalle Svard or some other expert and found unsuitable for human consumption. 

--The Locked Room by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall (Random House, 1973, translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin)

This is the eighth of ten novels that Wahloo and Sjowall wrote about Stockholm's police, with an emphasis on Detective Martin Beck.  Beck is back at work fifteen months after being shot and in The Locked Room he is investigating and solving the murder in a locked room of Kalle Svard, a reclusive retired worker.  In this investigation he overlaps with The National Homicide Squad in their botched attempts to solve a bank robbery in which a bank patron was killed.  Wahlool and Sjowall contrast Beck's detailed analysis and research with the Keystone-Cops-type of investigation by the Squad and its temporary leader, Bulldozer Olsson, a district attorney who is fascinated by bank robbery.

The Locked Room contrasts Beck's methodical investigation with the guesswork of the Olsson-led squad as both Beck and Olsson end up with the same man as their leading suspect, who gets convicted for the bank robbery -- which he didn't do-- and acquitted of the murder of the man in the locked room who had been blackmailing him, which he did do.  Throughout the novel Wahloo and Sjowall take a close look at Swedish policing and Swedish society, where criminals are not caught and housing is becoming unaffordable. In the course of his investigation the now-divorced Beck meets a woman, Rhea Nielsen, who charms him with her intelligence and independence and who he continues to see, as the personal and professional overlap.

Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind 1956

 Here, in Written on the Wind, a condition of life is being portrayed, and, in many respects, anticipated, which is not unlike today's decaying and crumbling American society.

--Douglas Sirk

When I first saw this movie, thirty years ago at The Museum of Modern Art, I was somewhat suprised that much of the audience was laughing.  Part of it, certainly, was seeing Rock Hudson as a heartthrob not long after his death from AIDS and the revelation that he was gay, part of it was the over-the-top quality of the melodrama itself.  Sirk and cinematographer Russell Metty made a dazzling beautiful/garish film, with the kind of attention to detail and color that, now that just about every film is in color, is rare indeed.  The film, like many of Sirk's films, works on multiple levels, including melodrama/soap opera and an undercurrent of satire.  Hudson and Lauren Bacall are generally in brown, green and gray while the alcoholic husband of Bacall (Robert Stack) and his promiscuous sister (Dorothy Malone) are in yellow, orange and red.  And this really is a drama with music, the score by Frank Skinner adding an additional level of luridness.

Sirk, of course, would use a less garish palette in his more subdued work, especially in All That Heaven Allows (1955), a harsh film about suburbia that morphs into a softly-lit Christmas card with something of a happy ending.  At this point in my life I find I tend to prefer Sirk's black-and-white films, especially There's Always Tomorrow (1955), an ironic title that conveys the suggestion that, even if there is tomorrow we still have obligations and things we shouldn't change, even if we could.

William Asher's The Shadow on the Window 1957

 One of the many pleasures of Turner Classic Movies is discovering overlooked and forgotten B films.  The Shadow on the Window is a surprise from director Asher, who went on to direct 131 episodes of "Bewitched" before his later films with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, including Beach Blanket Bingo in 1965.  Asher was in tune with the zeitgeist  and The Shadow of the Window is one of many films of its time that emphasize what was called "juvenile delinquency" and though it does deal with crime and is dark in details it does not qualify as a film noir in the traditional sense, if only because of its lack of fatalism.  A stenographer (Betty Garrett) has been hired by a wealthy rancher and since she is separated from her husband she brings her seven-year-old son (Jerry Mathers) with her.  While her son is playing outside three young thugs attack the rancher and kill him and when Mathers hears the noise he looks through the window and runs off, traumatized to the extent he can't even talk.  He runs to the highway where some truckers pick him up and take him to the police, where his father (Philip Carey) is a detective.  Since Mathers can't talk the search begins for Garret, taking Carey and associates on a trek thought broken homes (as they were called then) and dive bars to find anyone who would know anything.  Eventually they reach the truckers who picked up Mathers and storm the house where Garrett is being held hostage.  Two of the thugs are dead by then and the last one is shot by Carey, as mother and son are reunited.

I have left out much detail, in what is a B film of only 76 minutes, as the police confront unfaithful husbands and abusive fathers in their search.  Garrett and Mathers, mother and son, had planned to go to Disneyland after her job with the rancher but were interrupted by the young terrorists.  Garrett had been in a number of musicals, including On the Town (1949), before she and her husband had been confronted by HUAC, after which it was hard for her to find work in movies, though later she did a considerabl amount of television, as did the rest of the cast; Jerry Mathers was the Beaver in "Leave It to Beaver" (1957-1963).  The delinquents (John Drew Barrymore, Corey Allen, Gerald Sarraciai) are effective characters and Asher directs vividly the many character actors in the film (Jeanne Ferguson, Diane Delaire, Mort Mills are particularly vivid in small roles). Cinematographer Frank Carson and screenwriters Leo Townsend and David Harmon spent their careers mostly in televison, sharing credit with Asher for the crisp and uncluttered quality of this black-and-white film of terror, policework and family difficulties.  

Ballerina Boys, directed by Martie Barylick and Chana Gazit

 Most parodies are written out of admiration rather than contempt.  It is hard to make the mimetic effort unless one has enough sympathy to identify with the parodee.

-- Dwight Macdonald, Parodies (The Modern Library, 1960)

I'm not sure but that, for parodies to really work, and get their effects in the same way the object parodied works and gets its effects, there has to be a controlling vision commensurate in certain key respects with the original one. 

-- Arlene Croce on Peter Anastos's parody of Jerome Robbins:  Yes, Virgina, Another Piano Ballet, for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (The New Yorker, May 7 1977).

When I tell some people that I take ballet class I am often asked (mostly by men) if I wear a tutu.  I usually respond that I don't, but men in Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo do.  As founder and choreographer of  The Trocks (as they are often called) Peter Anastos says in this documentary, part of American Masters on PBS, "We were trying to upend traditional ballet but we were also trying to affirm traditional ballet."  My family gets tired of my statement "the best comedy is the most serious," but The Trocks are serious, beautiful and funny, with the men in drag and dancing on point.  Of course many Balanchine ballets make me laugh with pleasure at the intricate choreography and some of his ballets (Union Jack, for instance) have intentional humor that The Trocks use in tribute (Stars and Stripes), but mostly what The Trocks do is to skewer the warhorses, such as Giselle and Swan Lake, which just need a little push to become effective parody in the affectionate and beautiful dancing by The Trocks.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo has been successfully ahead of its time, starting shortly after the Stonewall riots in 1969 and surviving to dance in the 50th anniversary celebration of that significant event, in a more inclusive world.

The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

 Pat couldn't look at a fllight of stairs without imagining someone falling down them.

--Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith (St. Martin's Press 2009)

There are a couple of different ways to write the biography of a writer, each of them problematic.  One can write about the life without going into too much criticism of the work, or one can write mostly about the work and use the life as something of a backdrop.  The Talented Miss Highsmith is unusual in that the life and the work are combined in complex ways to produce what Schenkar calls "Highsmith country."  Highsmith, a lesbian who was in the closet to some but out to most of her friends and lovers, of which there were many, in relationships that were usually short-lived and ended in acrimony and later revived as platonic friendships.  In 1952 Highsmith published the novel The Price of Salt -- a lesbian story with a relatively happy ending -- under a pseudonym, after being warned her writing career might come to an end otherwise.   It was published in 1990 under Highsmith's name; she died in 1994.

Highsmith published 22 novels and 9 short story collections, including one novel published after her death.  Schenkar finds the common themes in these novels --starting with the first one, Strangers on a Train, published in 1950 -- especially the idea of "doubles" two individuals reflecting the values of each other. Highsmith lived in Europe from 1962 until her death in Switzerland.  Her original move to Europe was to be near a lover but she stayed there, in England and France, because her novels were more successful outside of America and most of the film adaptations of them were made in France and Germany, after Hitchcock's film of Strangers on a Train in 1951.

Schenkar takes an unusual thematic approach to Highsmith's life -- chapter titles include "Les Girls" and "The Real Romance of Objects" -- though she does make regular refernces to other chapters  "(see "The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 5")."   Schenkar does, however, include a chronological appendix -- "Just the Facts" -- of Highsmith's life from her birth in Texas to her move with her mother and stepfather to New York and her graduation from Julia Richmond High School (all girls) and Barnard College and her years writing comic books before writing Strangers on a Train at Yaddo, the artist's colony, to which Truman Capote recommended her.

Balanchine's Vienna Waltzes

 Balanchine's treatment of the waltz takes us to the core of its appeal.  In waltzing we lose and recapture our balance more precipitately than in other forms of dancing, and since the momentum keeps pulling us, we want to do it again and again.

--Arlene Croce

I have posted previously about Vienna Waltzes, on September 26 2016 and July 4 2020.  The 2020 post was in response to the beginning of NYC Ballet's digital season and this week Vienna Waltzes represents the end of the digital season, with live performances to resume, we hope, this September.  The 2020 film was from 1983, the year of Balanchine's death, and the current performance is from 2013.  Indeed, the cast is different but this beautiful ballet continues, with a changing cast.

The first part is Tales from Vienna Woods, music Johann Strauss II, with Rebecca Krohn and Tyler Angle as the lead dancers, coming together and splitting apart, with other couples.  The second part is Voices of Spring, music by Strauss II and the only part of the ballet danced en pointe, led by Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley.  The third part is Explosion Polka, with music again by Johann Strauss II, a light-hearted romp, with Erica Pereira and Sean Suozzie. The fourth section is The Gold and Silver Waltz, music by Franz Lehar and led by Teresa Reichlen and Ask la Cour.  The final part has music from Ricard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, with Maria Kowroski and Jared Angle at the beginning and then the rest of the cast joining them in a swirling finale.

Each episode suggests a different period of the 19th Century and each emphasizes dancers alone, in a pas de deux and as part of a group, as well as each section representing a different time of year, with the first three parts "outdoors" and the last two "indoors," as well as all sections representing pursuits of love as Balanchine sees it. 

Unfortunately there is no credit give for the director of those behind the camera, but Vienna Waltzes is beutifully filmed in full shots of the ballet, with a very occasional closer shot with a zoom lens.  It probably goes without saying that ballet, like baseball, does not film well and those who have never seen ballet live are missing out on at least some of its beauty, of which we were reminded during NYC Ballet's digital season.

William Berke's Street of Sinners 1957

 To paraphrase Sam Peckinpah, a Western can be anything and anything can be a Western.  William Berke made 90 films in his 20-year career and most of them were B Westerns with 12-day shooting schedules and budgets of around $100,000, which brings us to Street of Sinners, a film about crime and juvenile delinquency that has some of the trappings of the Western, with cars instead of horses.  Fortyish George Montgomery plays a rookie cop out to reform a corrupt street, controlled by bar owner Nehemiah Persoff, who serves liquor to minors and recruits teenage girls for prostitution.  This gritty film uses a very limited amount of sets, which are lit and photographed by cinematographer J. Burgi Contner for maximum sleazy effect (he was the cinematographer for Edgar Ulmer's Moon Over Harlem in 1939).  This cynical film holds out little hope for the girls and boys on the street, a number of whom die -- by suicide or murder -- or for the cops who want to clean things up.

The Abominable Man by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

        He tried to think of something soothing, but his thoughts kept coming back to Harald Hult, sitting there in his desolate impersonal apartment, alone and with nothing to do, wearing his uniform on his day off.  A man whose life was filled with one thing -- being a policeman.  Take that away from him and there'd be nothing left.                                                                                                                                          Martin Beck wondered what would happen to Hult when he retired.  Maybe he would just sit quietly by the window with his hands on the table until he withered away.

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Abominable Man (translated by Thomas Teal, Random House 1972)

In this seventh Martin Beck mystery by Wahloo and Sjowall the "abominable man" is Chief Inspector Stig Oscar Nyman, killed by a bayonet while sick in the hospital.  He had some subordinates who were loyal to him while most felt as Detective Kollberg did, "Nyman was one hell of a bad policeman.  He was a barbaric son of a bitch of the very worst sort."  Digging into Nyman's record Martin Beck finds many complaints about Nyman's behavior, one in particular from a policeman, Ake Eriksson, whose wife died while in custody due to Nyman's behavior; all of the complaints were dismissed when Nyman and his subordinates denied any misbehavior.   The Swedish cops are worried about their own lives and finally track down Eriksson, who has fled to the roof of an office building and is picking off cops with a rifle.  Martin Beck volunteers to go up on the roof to stop and subdue.

 The Abominable Man is a detailed critique of policing in Sweden in the guise of a superb roman policier; each of the Wahloo/Sjorwall novels deals with some part of Swedish society and its problems, with Martin Beck usually at the center, problems that today continue in Sweden, the United States and elsewhere.