Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2021

 A pretty good month of classic films:

Sept. 1 Raoul Walsh's They Died With Their Boots On 1941

Sept. 2 John Ford's Mogambo 1953

Sept. 3 Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard 1950

Sept. 5 Fritz Lang's Moonfleet 1955 and Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be 1942

Sept. 6 Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly 1968

Sept. 9 Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times 1936 and Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance 1937, with Rogers and Astaire

Sept. 10 Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon 1957

Sept. 11 Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success 1957

Sept. 12 Richard Quine's Down a Crooked Road 1954 (film noir), Mark Sandrich's Follow the Fleet 1936 (musical with Rogers and Astaire, music by Irving Berlin), Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth 1937 (brilliant comedy with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant)

Sept. 13 Otto Preminger's Exodus 1960

Sept. 15 Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blonde 1941

Sept. 16 two by Howard Hawks starring Humphrey Bogart To Have and Have Not 1944 and The Big Sleep 1946

Sept. 19 Fritz Lang's Human Desire 1954

Sept. 21 two by Luis Bunuel The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz 1955 and Simon of the Desert 1965, Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night 1955

 NightSept. 22 Andre de Toth's Riding Shotgun 1954, Hawks's Rio Bravo 1959, Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men 1952, Robert Aldrich's Autumn Leaves 1956

Sept. 24 Jacques Demy's musical Young Girls of Rochefort 1967

Sept. 25 Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon 1947

Sept. 26 Anthony Mann's Western The Man from Laramie starring James Stewart 1955

Sept. 29 two superb silent films, Victor Seastrom's The Wind starring Lillian Gish 1928 and Chaplin's City Lights 1931 

Raoul Walsh's Cheyenne 1947

Cheyenne is a Western, a romance, a comedy, a film noir, even a musical, all genres at which director Walsh excelled.  The post-war period was great for all these genres; Cheyenne even reminds one of John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers (1956), having been written by Thames Williamson and Alan LeMay -- the latter wrote the novel The Seachers -- and with music by Warner Brothers stalwart Max Steiner, who also did the music for Ford's film.  The superb black-and-white cinematography for Cheyenne was by Sid Hickox, who photgraphed a number of Walsh's films.

Walsh made poetry out of Western iconography:  the good girl (Jane Wyman as Ann Kincaid), bad girl (Janis Paige as Emily Carson), the bad guy who is trying to be good (Dennis Morgan as James Wylie), the bad guy who leads a gang of stagecoach robbers (Arthur Kennedy as The Sundance Kid) and even an ineffective sheriff played somewhat for laughs (Alan Hale as Fred Durkin) and a stagecoach manager who is a crook (Bruce Bennett as Ed Landers, "the poet" who replaces money in strong boxes with poems).  Almost everyone is pretending to be someone else, as Ed Landers falls for Emily Carson and her suggestive saloon songs and skimpy outfits while Wylie falls for buttoned-to-the-neck Ann Kincaid, who is actually married to Bennett, the poet.  The town of Cheyenne is crowded with drinkers and gamblers while the location shooting (in Arizona) represents the untamed wilderness, where robberies and gunfights take place, away from "civilized" towns. 

joseph Losey's The Go-Between 1971

 Losey's film of L.P. Hartley's novel (which I wrote about earlier this month) has an effectively sparse and elegant screenplay by Harold Pinter, who also wrote Losey's Accident (1967) and The Servant (1963).  None of the important scenes from the novel are omitted, with Losey beautifully capturing "the wind in the trees" (to use D.W. Griffith's term) in Norfolk, England in the summer of 1900 (cinematography by Gerry Fisher)  I was impressed with the cast of Julie Christie as Marian, Alan Bates as Ted Burgess and Dominic Guard as young Leo Colston.  Hartley's novel is written in the first person by the older Leo Colston and Losey intercuts scenes of the older Leo (Michael Redgrave) on his way to re-connect with the older Marian, an effective correlative to the novel's first person narrative of the past.

Losey was American, chased out of America during the McCarthy years after making a number of excellent genre films, especially The Prowler (1951), and settled in England, resuming his career with a number of low-budget films.  His view of the English class system, as it was in 1900 and continued to be, was precise and accurate, especially in his films with Pinter.  Twelve-year-old Leo was from the middle class and enjoyed his summer with his mate Marcus (Richard Gibson) of the aristocratic Maudsley family, until he was given the task of bringing secret messages between Marian and farmer Ted Burgess and can't understand why Marian is engaged to Lord Timingham (Edward Fox) instead of marrying Burgess. The clash of classes ends in disaster for the Maudsleys as well as for Leo and Burgess.

Sam Raimi's The Gift (2000)

 Director Sam Raimi (not to be confused with bass-baritone opera singer Sam Ramey) has been directing movies since 1985, including most recently the first three Spider-Man films (2002-2007), but has spent most of his time since 2013 as a producer.  He is mostly known for his "horror" films, starting with The Evil Dead in 1981, but also made the excellent heist movie A Simple Plan in 1998.  The Gift is a somewhat supernatural piece of Southern Gothic, with an excellent cast of Cate Blanchett, Katie Holmes, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Rubisi, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, Gary Cole, J.K. Simmons.

Cate Blanchett plays a widow with three young children who manages to get by with fortune telling.  Katie Holmes is murdered and the violent husband of Swank, Keanu Reeves, is convicted of the murder.  Blanchett, however, has visions of someone else being the killer and, at some risk to herself, tracks down the murderer by going back to the scene of the murder, a gloomy pond surrounded by cypress trees.

The moody cinematography is by veteran Jamie Anderson and Raimi effectively captures the details of the denizens and details of a small Southern town, where sex and violence predominate and even jobs are unsafe, Cate Blanchett's husband having died in a factory explosion. 

Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941)

 Don't forget the Western is not only the history of this country, it is what the Saga of the Nibelungen is for the European.

-- Fritz Lang

Western Union is a tense and colorful Western, with an unusual depth of field in the early days of Technicolor, cinematography by Deward Cronjager and Allen M. Davey.  It is about, among other things, the building of a telegraph line from Omaha to Salt Lake City, which involves a fair amount of tricking the Native Americans into giving up their land.  The film was shot in Arizona and Utah in landscapes beautifully filmed by Lang and his crew.  There are a number of themes common to Lang's films, including dual identities --Randolph Scott/Vernon Shaw is a former outlaw, Robert Young/Richard Blake is an apparent "tenderfoot" who is really a superb horseman, bad guy Baron MacLane/Jack Slade disguises himself as an Indian, etc. -- and there is an element of destiny in the building of the telegraph line and the sacrificial death of Vernon Shaw at the end, an unusual fatalistic ending for a pre-war Western.

This film shows clearly Lang's roots in the expressionism of his early silent films in Germany, including the use of shadows in crowded scenes, which effectively include a fair number of grizzled veterans as cowboys:  John Carradine, Chill Wills, Victor Kilian, Francis Ford.  This was one of three Westerns Lang made in America, the other two being The Return of Frank James (1940) and Rancho Notorious (1952).

The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley

 Cricket is more than a game, they say, or used to say; it is sn attitude of mind, a point of view.  I don't know about that.  You can think of it as a set of ritual movements, or as a ballet, a ballet in a green field, a ballet of summer, which you can enjoy without knowing what it's about or what it means.  At least that is how I should recommend other people to enjoy it -- ballets are not for me.  I like facts.  In those days I knew the facts about cricket and I can still repeat some of them parrot-wise.  It is like knowing the figures of a sum without being able to add them up.  At least, if I added them up, they wouldn't have made a game of cricket as I used to know it.

--L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (copyright 1953, New York Review Books)

The Go-Between is a beautifully written book looking back to the summer of 1900 --nearing the end of the Victorian age and the beginning of the Edwardian -- as told by the twelve-year-old Leo Rosten as the much older Leo looks back at himself as a young boy.  spending the time with his school chum Marcus at Marcus's family's estate.  It evokes the peaceful summer of a boy of twelve having fun, at least until Marcus's older sister Marian convinces Leo to take messages to and from Ted, a local farmer.  Leo becomes gradually unhappy about being the messenger and gets suspicious about what's going on, especially once Marian is about to get engaged to Lord Trimingham and Ted attempts to tell Leo about "spooning." The one time the upper and lower classes get together in Brandham Hall, where Leo is staying, is an annual cricket match, where Leo catches a ball hit by Ted to win the game, after which everyone gathers around to sing.

Leo plays an unwitting role in Marian's mother discovering Ted and Marian together in the middle of a celebration of Leo's thirteenth birthday, a disaster for all concerned, as Leo has a nervous breakdown and has little memory of subsequent events, including Ted's suicide.  There is a moving epilogue as many years later Leo seeks out Marian, still living in the same town, who says there "was nothing mean or sordid in what we did, it was the fault of this hideous century we live in."

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

--Prologue to The Go-Between

Alfred E. Green's The Goose and the Gander 1935

 It's definitely time to retire the term "screwball comedy," which is basically meaningless and useless.  Do such so-called screwball comedies as Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby(1938), Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), and Gregory LaCava's My Ma Godfrey (1936) actually have much in common?  My answer is no, not in the way such genres as the Western, the film noir and the horror film do.  But then, I am a splitter and not a lumper and LaCava's exploration of class values, McCarey's story of marriage and divorce and Hawks's celebration of irresponsibility do not seem related in any way (except, perhaps, that they are all funny, though even that is not a unanimous reaction).

Which brings us to Green's The Goose and the Gander.  Green was a workmanlike director for Warner Brothers who directed five movies in 1935 (I have posted about five other of his movies).  The script for The Goose and the Gander was by Charles Kenyon and could have made a quite funny movie,i.e., if it had better direction and a better cast.  The only adept member of the cast is Kay Francis; her ability at comedy was not usually exploited except by the brilliant Ernst Lubitsch in 1932's The Trouble in Paradise, and in Green's film she often has amusing lines but hams it up too much.  The only cast member who is consistently droll is Genevieve Tobin, who plays Betty, married to Ralph (Ralph Forbes) but having a fling with Bob (George Brent).  Kay Francis plays Georgiana, formerly married to Ralph, who schemes to get him back by revealing Betty's fling with Bob.  To add to the confusion there is also the married jewel thieves, Connie (Claire Dodd) and Lawrence (John Eldredge), who have stolen jewels from both Betty and Georgiana.  It all gets sorted out at the jail after everyone is arrested (the film has many similarities to Bringing Up Baby), where Bob and Georgiana declare their love for each other.  

W.S. Van Dyke's Guilty Hands 1931

 Kay Francis was a once-popular actress in the thirties who is largely forgotten today.  There are those who say that her decline in the forties, when she was reduced to working for Poverty Row studio Monogram, was due to her fights with studio bosses, her slight lisp, the excessive importance she put on the clothes she wore in films, etc., but my own feeling is that most of her movies were not that good, for the simple reason that she almost never worked with good directors.  In 1932 she was directed by Ernst Lubitsch in the stylish comedy Trouble in Paradise; this is the only time she worked with a great director (and she complained about being billed second to Miriam Hopkins) and she was elegant, sexy and funny but never chose, as Bette Davis did, to demand better directors.

Guilty Hands was directed by W.S. Van Dyke, who was known as "One-Shot Woody'' because he never did more than one take and always stuck to his budgets.  Guilty Hands has elements of sloppiness and continuity problems but is satisfying in a number of ways, including clever plotting by screenwriter Bayard Veiller and over-the-top acting by Kay Francis and Lionel Barrymore (who, according to some sources, had a hand in the directing). Because this is a pre-code picture there is a fair amount of lust and passion displayed as lawyer Barrymore plans to kill the bounder (Alan Mowbray) who is about to marry his daughter (Madge Evans) and almost gets away with it.  Barrymore chews up the scenery while Francis, whom Mowbray plans to keep as his mistress after he marries Evans, works hard to prove Barrymore is the murderer, while a thunderstorm rages outside Mowbray's isolated mansion accessible only by boat.

For an intelligent analysis of Kay Francis's career I recommend Jeanine Basinger's book The Star Machine.

Andre de Toth's Passport to Suez (1943)

 Andre de Toth's most interesting films reveal an understanding of the instability and outright treachery of human relationships.

-- Andrew Sarris 

de Toth made five films in his native Hungary before emigrating to America via England at the beginning of WWII.  His first film in the U.S. was Passport to Suez for the B-unit at Columbia, an experience that allowed him limited freedom and convinced him to work mostly with smaller, independent producers who allowed him more independence in exchange for limited budgets.  Passport to Suez was one of the Lone Wolf B movies from the novels by Louis Joseph Vance; Warren William appeared in ten of them, after starting out as one of the cads of pre-code films in the early thirties. The Lone Wolf was Michael Lanyard, a thief turned private detective.

de Toth quickly sharpened his directing skills with the improbable plot of Passport to Suez, about a Nazi plot to blow up the Suez Canal.  The cast included the feisty Ann Savage (later the star of Edgar Ulmer's Detour in 1945) as a femme fatale as well as a somewhat dissipated William, Lloyd Bridges and Sheldon Leonard. de Toth keeps his camera relatively quiet (cinematography by L. William O'Connell), observing the characters taking chances and making decisions for better or worse, a style he refined though a number of impressive genre films, especially Westerns and crime films.  My own favorites are Springfield Rifle (1952), Crime Wave (1954) and Day of the Outlaw (1960), all of which have protagonists stuggling with conflicting loyalties. 

The Terrorists by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall (1976)

 Then he said magnanimously to Martin Beck, "Don't sit there thinking about all that now.  Violence has rushed like an avalanche throughout the whole of the Western world over the last ten years.  You can't stop or steer that avalanche on your own.  It just increases.  That's not your fault."

Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, The Terrorists (Pantheon, 1976, translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate)

It leaves one feeling melancholy, reading this last of the ten Martin Beck novels by Wahloo (who died just after it was published) and Sjowall (who died in 2020).  The combination of intensive plots, insight into personalities and analysis of Swedish society is unique, simultaneously of its time and timeless.  The books go in chronological order and we get to know Beck and his colleagues in the police well (I have a particular fondness for the gruff and cynical Gunvald Larsson) and the satire of Swedish  bureaucrats is both funny and depressing for the effect on Swedish citizens, especially the poor and helpless.

In The Terrorists Beck and his staff try to prevent the assassination of a visiting American politician and succeed, only to see the Swedish prime minister gunned down by a young girl who felt so helpless she thought she had nothing left to lose, even after Beck had tried to help her after she was arrested for robbing a bank and was beaten by police.  Beck himself is disillusioned with his job, divorced and alienated from his children, but finding some degree of happiness with a new lover.  We can only speculate what might have happened to him if Wahloo had not died and the series had continued.

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter (2020)

 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money [written by Keynes and published in 1936] is a liberating book because it reframed the central problem at the heart of economics as the alleviation of inequality, pivoting away from the demands of production and the incentives facing the rich and powerful that had occupied economists for centuries.

--Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace (Random House, 2020)

The Price of Peace beautifully combines the life of Keynes and his thoughts and analyses of economic policies, through the two world wars of the twentieth century.  Unlike many economists Keynes constantly thought about the effects of his economic ideas on the real world, regardless of the beauty of their mathematical calculations.  Carter's elegantly written book follows the formation and influence (or, often, the lack of it) of these ideas on policy makers.  Keynes was married to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova and close friends with members of the Bloombury Group; he believed strongly that economic and monetary policy could make life better for everyone.

Carter details how Keynes's attempts to solve post-WWI economic problems -- such as giving money to Germany that they could use for reparations -- were stymied by Woodrow Wilson and how FDR used Keynes's ideas to lessen the impact of the Depression.  The last third of the book details how America viewed Keynesian ideas as "socialist" during the cold war and how most recent Presidents misused Keynes's ideas to spend mony on wars (Vietnam, Iraq, etc) rather than to promote welfare and equality;  Carter also explains how credit default swaps led to a diastrous recession.

At the moment we seem to have a President who understands Keynes and is willing to spend the money necessary to improve not only our infrastructure but our lives and our equality, but we shall see how successful he is.  Meanwhile, I highly recommend Carter's book for understanding the important role of Keynes in the economies of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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