Turner Classic Movies August 2021

 A pretty good line-up of classical films.  As always, if you have a question about a film not included in this highly personal list just send me an e-mail and I'll tell you my thoughts on any particular film.

Aug. 1: a great film noir, Hollow Triumph, directed by Steve Sekely in 1948, as well as Mike Leigh's Secret and Lies (1996)

Aug. 3:  Billy Wilder's brilliant Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), Richard Quine's Pushover (1954), all starring Kim Novak.

Aug. 5:  Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1967)

Aug. 6:  Two superb examples of film noir, Otto Preminger's Angel Face (1953) and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947)

Aug. 9:  Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Aug. 14: Jean-luc Godard's Tout va Bien (1972)

Aug. 16:  Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941)

Aug. 17:  Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950)

Aug 19: films by Yaujiro Ozu, including Tokyo Story (1953)

Aug. 22: John Ford's The Long Grey Line (1958)

Aug. 23: Otto Preinger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Aug. 24:  Ernst Lubitsch's early musical The Love Parade (1930)

Aug. 27: Frank Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)

Aug. 28:  John Boorman's Point Blank (1967)

Aug. 29:  Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy (1954)

Aug 30: Raoul Walsh's corrosive White Heat (1949)

Aug. 31: Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933)

J. Walter Ruben's No Other Woman 1933

 No Other Woman is an impressive pre-code B picture, a melodrama and a soap opera with montages by the famous Slavko Vorkapich and intense performances from hard-working Irene Dunne and rough-around-the-edges Charles Bickford.  Dunne runs a boarding house and wants to get out of the steel mill company town where Bickford is a higher-up working stiff in the mill.  They get married and fight and Bickford drinks, until boarder Eric Linden, an amateur chemist, discovers a formula for dyes that makes them all rich, whereupon Bickford takes up with another woman (femme fatale Gwili Andre) and wants a divorce.  Bickford bribes the servants to testify that Dunne was unfaithful, she responds with the lie that Bickford is not the father of their child and Bickford calls a halt to the divorce proceedings.  Meanwhile, the business goes bankrupt and Bickford goes back to the steel mill, where Dunne finds him and they forgive each other.

This emotional roller coaster is directed with impressive speed (the film is less than an hour long) and finesse by J.Walter Ruben, who directed nineteen movies (I have not seen any of the others) before his death at the age of 43 in 1942.  This kind of contentious divorce, with both sides lying, marks this as a pre-code film, as does the double bed for the married couple.  The screenplay is by Wanda Tuchock (who wrote King Vidor's marvelous Bird of Paradise in 1932) and Bernard Schubert from a play by Eugene Walter. Irene Dunne and Charles Bickford each made five films in 1933 while cinematographer Edward Cronjager (who later photographed Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait in 1942) was cinematographer on seven movies that year.

Robert Florey's The Woman in Red (1935)

With Sol Polito as cameraman, Florey was able to give The Woman in Red the right polish and old-money atmosphere of excess and entitlement and capture the right mustiness of decaying grandeur.

--Victoria Wilson, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck (Simon and Schuster, 2013) 

Robert Florey was French and came to America to learn movies in the twenties, starting as a gag man and assistant director, working his way up to director.  He mostly made under-the-radar B movies that captured the class warfare and dark sides of America (see my posts of Feb. 5 and July 27 2016 and April 11 and Decl 13 2019). Woman in Red is an examination of class in America, in the form of a soapish melodrama.  It stars Barbara Stanwyck as Shelby, a rider and stablehand, and Gene Raymond as Johnny, a wealthy polo player.  When they decide to marry they head "home" to Johnny's family on Long Island (the original novel on which the film is based was North Shore by Wallace Irwin), who are by no means ready to receive Shelby into the family.  Shelby and Johnny decide to start their own stable business and Shelby borrows money from Gene (John Eldredge) without telling Johnny and then goes yachting with Gene, a trip during which a chorus girl falls off the yacht and drowns and Gene is charged with murder.  Stanwyck at the last minute confirms that she was the mysterious "woman in red" who saw the whole thing and in an unconvincing ending Johnny forgives Shelby and his stuffy family accepts her.

This was Stanwyck's twentieth film in eight years and she dominates the film with her intelligence,  capturing the character with emotional intensity as she yells at Johnny's haughty family, "you people are horrible!"  for their lack of compassion.

Fernando Alaya's Los Tallos Amargos (1956)

 First of all, kudos to Eddie Muller, who runs the Film Noir Foundation, publishes Noir City magazine, and presents films on Turner Classic Movies in the Noir Alley regular presentation.  An important part of what he does is to find and restore film noir films that have lapsed into obscurity, including Los Tallos Amargos (Bitter Stems) from Argentina, direced by Fernando Alaya in 1956.

Los Tallos Amargos is a beautiful (black-and-white cinematography by Ricardo Younis) and intriguing film about Alfredo Gaspar's (Carlos Cores) inability to live up to his German father's ambitions for him, so he turns to scheming and separating fools from their money, with the help of Liudas (Vassili Lambrinos), a bartender.  Gaspar settles for a smaller share of the profits so that Liudas can bring his family over from Europe.  Gaspar overhears a conversation between Liudas and a bargirl (Aida Luz) and concludes that Liudas is a liar and a cheat and kills his with a hammer, burying him in his backyard.  And then Liudas's son shows up. 

There are certainly elements of the film noir here, though the mood is one of greed rather than fatalism, with heavily ironic twists and turns that remind one of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  There is a vivid dream sequence of Gaspar's childhood and also a happy love affair between Gaspar's sister and Liudas's son.  Alaya does an excellent job of directing the actors in their emotional intensity.  

I have never seen any of Ayala's other films after the fall of Peron (who strictly monitored content) though I wonder if they are as populist as Muller claims; after all, many America films were successful  artistically and commercially.

 

Richard Wilson's Man with a Gun (1955)

 Man with a Gun is an intense Western about love and violence.  The low-key Clint Tollinger (Robert Mitchum) is hired by a town dominated by a cattle baron(Joe Barry) and his gang to be the "town tamer," a term I had never heard in any other Western.  Mitchum gets more and more violent when he finds his former wife Nelly (Jan Sterling) in the town and she tells him his daughter is dead.  After Tollinger burns down the cattle baron's saloon in anger the baron comes into town and shoots him and is in turn shot by a local homesteader, Jeff Castle (John Lupton) who had feuded with Tolliver when Castle's fiancee (Karen Sharpe) seemed to fancy Tolliver.

The film is filled with veteran chacter actors --Leo Gordon, Claude Akins, Emile Meyer -- and photographed in blackand-white by Lee Garmes, who worked on his first film and 1918 and did a number of films with Josef von Sternberg in the thirties The film takes place almost entirely in the town of Sheridan which, as Tolliver says, has a large cemetary for such a small town, and Garmes uses curtains and other devices to separate Tolliver from the citizens of Sheridan who hired him.  The subtle score is by Alex North and the film is written by N.B. Stone, Jr. (who wrote Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, 1962) and director Richard Wilson, who directed a handful of films in the 50's after working with Orson Welles for many years.

Major League All-Star Baseball Game 2021

 Tuesday's all-star game was an exercise in tedium.  Once upon a time, I believe, the receipts from the game went to the fund for verteran's pensions but I have been unable so far to determine whether that is still true, if it ever was.  And the league that won the game received home field advantage in the World Series, which is no longer the case.  Some players are fortunate enough to get a bonus if they make the all-star team but that is a small number.  And before there was interleague play we might not always be able to see the players from the other league than the one in which one's favorite team was from.  Yes, it was fun to see Shohei Ohtani pitch a 1-2-3 inning and then lead off for the American League team (0 for 2) but beyond that it was home runs and strikeouts as usual.  There were no attempts to steal bases, no bunts (sacrifice or otherwise), no hit-and-run plays; basically little of the strategy that makes the game beautiful.

Added to the tedium of the game itself was the poor televising and poor announcing.  Fox claimed they had fifty or more cameras at work but few of those were actually trained on the field:  we seldom saw the fielding shifts or even the entire field.  And Fox trivialized the game by having players talk on mikes even while the game was going on!  The play-by-play was often absent while Joe Buck and the practically mute John Smoltz repeated the same cliches endlessly:  "he can do it all"  "he takes it to the next level"  "he's a hitting machine"  "he has a world of talent" and even the gramatically dubious "he plates a run," with little or no insight into the game or the players. 

The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith

 "No," Walter said, and in the next second wanted to change his answer.  His mind see-sawed horribly between telling the whole story now, and concealing as much about Kimmel as he could.  But what if Kimmel told it all tomorrow.  Walter felt he was the victim of some complicated game, a slow gathering of nets that had suddenly dropped on him and drawn tight.

--Patricia Highsmith, The Blunderer (Coward McCann, 1954)

The Blunderer starts and ends with murder and becomes a psychological study of class and obsession, with a gay subtext, themes common to many of Highsmith's novels in this, her third book.  Walter Stackhouse is a well-off suburban lawyer and Melchior Kimmel is an intelligent immigrant struggling with his bookstore in Newark, N.J.  What they have in common includes a dislike of their wives, as Kimmel kills his wife while Stackhouse is accused of doing the same in a similar modus operandi.  Between them is cop Lawrence Corby who manipulates them against each other in his attempt to find out if either or both are guilty.  Details of Stackhouse's suburban life is explored, as all his friends are questioned by Corby and begin to believe in his guilt.  Stackhouse does not help himself by lying to his new girlfriend, a relationship he feels forced into by his wife's suspicion.

Highsmith's novel is a corrosive view of America in the fifties, a country of bored suburbanites, unhappy marriages, people who repress their feelings and violent police who will stop at nothing to coerce a confession.

Ernst Lubitsch's So This Is Paris (1926)

So This Is Paris, a complex story of love and marriage, is as fizzy and delightful as a glass of the best champagne.  Suzanne Girard (Patsy Ruth Miller) looks across the street and sees a half-naked man dressed as a sheik, as in the novel she had been reading.  This excites and annoys her so she asks her husband Paul (Monte Blue) to go across the street and give the man (Maurice Lalle, played by Andre Beranger) a thrashing.  Paul goes across the street and the door is answered by Maurice's wife Georgette (Lilyan Tashman) who is an old flame of Paul's. Maurice returns Paul's cane and he and Suzanne are taken with each other; at one point they have a fight and Maurice takes a vase of flowers and throws them one at a time at Georgette in mock anger while Paul is asleep, dreaming a Freudian dream of his cane being forced down his throat!  When Paul goes to an artist's ball with Georgette the radio announcement of their winning of a Charleston contest is heard by Suzanne and she rushes off to the ball in disguise, revealing herself to Paul after he flirts with her, as Georgette takes up with another man and Maurice is arrested because the police think he is Paul.

Of course Lubitsch sets this jazz-age story, with its exuberant ball seen as almost orgiastic, in Paris; he was considerably influenced by Chaplin's A Woman of Paris (1923), a unique Chaplin film of love and betrayal.  Lubitsch's film is more of a comedy but, like most good comedy, is ultimately a serious film about love, loyalty and the varieties of human behavior.

Cop Killer by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall

 The great increase in the number of violent over the last decade is, in my opinion, largely due to the fact that policemen invariably carry firearms.  It is a known fact, and can be demonstrated with statistics from many other countries, that the incidence of violent crime immediately increases when the police force sets, as it were, a bad example.

--from Detective Lennart Kollberg's resignation letter in Cop Killer by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall (Random House, 1975, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal)

This is the ninth (of ten) Martin Beck series by Wahloo and Sjowall.  Beck is continuing to be annoyed by the incompetent police hierarchy and the slacking patrolmen of Stockholm's police force.  Cop Killer is not mainly about a policeman's death but about Beck's attempt to find the killer of Sigbrit Mard in Malmo.  It happened that the cop killer had stolen a car that turned out to belong to Sigbrit Mard's killer and Beck was able to put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle, even though the Malmo police had already arrested another man for the crime. And the cop killer was caught only because his girlfriend had accidentally given away his location after he had escaped from a botched attempt to capture him.

The whole story is as fatalistic as a Fritz Lang film and suggests that the police in Sweden are only able to catch violent criminals with the help of luck and the ratiocination of Martin Beck of The National Homicide squad in Stockholm.  Wahloo and Sjowall continued to effectively combine fascinating police manhunts with withering criticism of Swedish society in the 1970's, much of which continues to be valid and relevant today, not only for Sweden but for our own country.

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense by Edward White

 Hitchcock stands alone in the Hollywood canon:  a director whose mythology eclipses the brilliance of his myriad classic movies.

Edward White, The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock (W.W. Norton, 2021)

There are currently many books about Hitchcock.  The best analysis of his films is Robin Wood's 1965 Hitchcock's Films and the best biography is Patrick McGilligan's from 2004.  Edward White's book is the best attempt so far to combine Hitchcok's life and his films.  The twelve lives range from "The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up" to "The Man of God" and include essays on everything from Hitchcock as a fat man to Hitchcock as a Londoner.  White explores every rumor and theory about Hitchcock and is even able, to a certain extent, to separate the stories about Hitchcock (many of which he promoted himself) from something near the truth, e.g., Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut that it was his original idea to reveal the important plot twist in Vertigo (that Judy and Madeleine are the same person) when he did, whereas White's research shows that he had to be persuaded by Paramount executives.  And White shows that Hitchcock could even be his own worst enemy. e.g.. his late films (Torn Curtain 1966 and Topaz 1969) often have their artistic quality compromised because of his relationship with Universal, just as some of his early American films (Rebecca 1940, The Paradine Case 1947) were compromised by his relationship with producer David O. Selznick.

White does bring to light, with many examples, Hitchcock's passion for detail, including costuming (even if the designer was Edith Head) to art direction (even if the art director was Henry Bumstead) and how it extended to and affected his personal and family life.  White's book will certainly add to one's viewing of Hitchcock's films, adding another layer to their impressive quality as both art and entertainment.