Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor

 If one doesn't have the stomach to read Blake Bailey's biography of Philip Roth one can read Benjamin Taylor's slim volume about his friendship with Roth, where Roth's misogyny is on full display.  Roth comes across like a college freshman who never matured, making endless snobbish remarks and telling unfunny jokes while blaming others for the fact that he never received the Nobel Prize he felt he deserved.  At one point Taylor tries to interest Roth in the films of the great director Douglas Sirk but "we got no further than the overheated credits to Written on the Wind.  'What do you see in all this Hollywood dreck, Ben? I really want to know.'  His own tastes run to Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray and Fellini."  To me this is conclusive evidence that Roth's view of the world is quite limited and lacking in a sense of irony about himself and everyone else. Taylor's praise of Roth's late works are unconvincing;  I think only The Plot Against America (2004), an alternate history, is at all successful.

Turner Clasic Movies October 2021

 Because it's October there are a fair number of horror films this month.  I recommend all the horror films directed by Jacques Tourneur as well as those directed by Terence Fisher and those produced by Val Lewton.  There are also a number of other good films in October:

Oct. 3 Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), an impressive melodrama about making movies.

Oct. 5 Minnelli's Band Wagon (1953), a somewhat melancholic musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958), a sort of gangster film/musical

Oct. 6 John Ford's beautiful and moving How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Oct. 8 Mark Sandrich's Follow the Fleet, with Rogers and Astaire dancing to Irving Berlin music.

Oct. 11 Rudolph Mate's corrosive film noir D.O.A. (1950)

Oct. 13 Godard's Breathless (1961) and Andre De Toth's Pitfall (1948)

Oct. 15 Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941)

Oct. 18 Ernst Lubitsch's brilliantly funny Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Oct. 20 Michael Powell's A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Oct. 25 Jean Renoir's masterpiece The Rules of the Game (1939)

Oct. 29 Raoul Walsh's politically perceptive A Lion is in the Streets (1953)

Oct. 31 Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

William G. Hole, Jr.'s Hell Bound 1957

 As usual Eddie Muller did an excellent job of introducing Hell Bound on his weekly Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies, putting it in the context of the work of low-budget producers Howard W. Koch and Aubrey Schenck as well as the history of film noir, coming to an end with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly in 1955 and Orson Welles's Touch of Evil in 1958.  By 1957 and 1958 the memory of WW II and even the Korean War was fading and more and more movies were being made in color and widescreen because of the competition of TV, war memories and black-and-white being important elements of film noir.

With the low-budget Hell Bound in 1957 film noir goes out with exaggerated elements of cynicism and darkness.  It starts out with an off-kilter film by Jordan (John Russell) projected for a mob boss to raise money for a complicated heist of drugs from a navy ship.  The mob boss donates his girlfriend Paula (former Playboy bunny June Blair) to help with the plot, though when Paula takes her shoes off (which she often does) to seduce Jordan he just slaps her down, eventually stabbing her and substituting his own girlfriend after Paula falls for ambulance driver Eddie (Stuart Whitman).  Jordan gets a layout of the ship he plans to rob and then kills the crew member he paid for it.  He also recruits a health officer and a junkie to help with his complicated plot, the health officer paid off and the junkie blackmailed. The heist does not go well. 

The sleaziness of the film is considerably enhanced by the decrepit locations where the film takes place, especially a junkyard of Los Angeles streetcars piled high(the LA trolley system was abandoned under pressure from freeway builders and car manufacturers), a powerful symbol of the changes happening to Los Angeles in the fifties. 

Barbara Pym's Excellent Women 1952

 I am tired, I said to myself, as I walked upstairs, and my face is quite grey.  Nobody must come near me.  I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian.  I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women.  But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs. Gray; sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew.  Perhaps it might after all be my duty to marry him, if only to save him from being too well protected.

-- Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (Penguin, 1953)

One of the pleasures of reading the London Review of Books is discovering new authors, as I did when reading Alison Light's review of Paula Byrne's biography of Barbara Pym, a writer who was unfamiliar to me, though I was vaguely aware that Philip Larkin was an admirer of her novels.  Excellent Women is written in the first person by spinster Mildred Lathbury, daughter of a clergyman and very involved in volunteer work in and about her Anglican church.  The novel is very much of its time and place --post-WWII London -- but more relevant than ever for its clear-eyed role of women in society and their relationships with the men who run things.  Mildred mildly flirts with men, including Rocky Napier (who lives with his wife just below Mildred's apartment; they share a bathroom), anthropologist Everard Bone (a name that reminds one of one of the funniest moments in Howard Hawks's 1938 film Bringing Up Baby), and her clergyman Father Malory, who lives with his sister Winifred.  She also mourns an unrequited love from her youth and is determined never to marry, especially as she watches the diastrous attempted couplings around her.

Pym has been compared to Jane Austen, but I find her observant and comical views of everything, including the Church, to be more akin to the novels of Trollope, full of compassion and understanding. Mildred sees that people can act like fools and even admits she can at times be foolish herself, but she understands the complex reasons that sometimes we have little choice in our behavior. I find the title, Excellent Women, to be ironic, as often women have fewer choices than men.

As far as I can determine none of Pym's novels have been made into movies.  In their time they might have made excellent Ealing comedies; today's audience might find their wonderfully droll humor too subtle. 

Leslie Selander's Tall Man Riding 1955

 Tall Man Riding is a pretty good B Western, starring Randolph Scott, a mainstay of Westerns throughout the 50's, culminating with the seven films he did with director Budd Boetticher starting in 1956.  The screenplay by Joseph Hoffman is tightly structured (from a novel by Norman Fox; one benefit of making Westerns is that they are seldom compared to the original source story or novel) and filmed on location, with "the wind in the trees," by veteran cinematographer Wilfrid Cline, who photographed five films in 1955, including Andre De Toth's Indian Fighter.  B veteran Selander's direction is workmanlike and impersonal.

Scott plays a man returning for revenge on the man who (literally) whipped him and broke up his romance with Dorothy Malone (one year away from her extraordinary role in Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind).  The other woman, a saloon singer played by Peggie Castle (from Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, 1953), saves Scott's life with her superb shooting and is gunned down by her bad-guy lover John Baragrey.  In Westerns what is iconography and what is cliche' depends on how effective it is.  In Tall Man Riding there is one particularly impressive shoot-out that takes place entirely in a dark room, with only muzzle flashes visible.  Unfortunately there is a "happy" ending that's all-too-common in B films, with Scott ready to ride off alone before changing his mind and going inside with Malone. 

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time 1936

 Dorothy Fields's colloquialism was perfectly suited to her adult view of sexuality, which is delightfully embodied in "A Fine Romance."  The first verse, sung by Rogers to Astaire in Swing Time, is the quintessance of her style, at once slangy and elegantly-turned -- not to mention warm-blooded:  "We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes, / But you're as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes."

Terry Teachout, "The Two Female Giants of the American Songbook," Commentary, Sept. 2021

One's favorite Astaire/Rogers film depends on how much one enjoys the comedy of these "musical comedies," often embodied by Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, and whether one prefers Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin or George Gershwin.  The dancing, choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan, is always wonderful, though there is never quite enough of it.

In Swing Time the comedy is often ineffective -- Eric Blore has only a small part with too many reaction shots and Horton is completely absent; director George Stevens works hard and mostly unsuccessfully to get laughs with Helen Broderick and Victor Moore but the two actors do most of the laughing themselves. The dancing, however, is lovely and so are the songs by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, especially "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance."  The dances are effective in expressing the increasing love between Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in spite of their betrothals to others and are closely interwoven with the often absurd plot. There is also a dance for Astaire in blackface "Bojangles of Harlem" which might make one uncomfortable today but is an impressive homage to dancer Bill Robinson, as Arlene Croce says, "it is homage, not impersonation."  The comedy might not be at the level of the Rogers/Astaire films directed by Mark Sandrich (especially Shall We Dance, 1937) but the dancing is exquisite.

Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina by Georgina Pazcoguin

 He [Peter Martins] used this production as a vessel to promote most of the cast (alas, not moi).  I had not been promoted for my contibutions, and all I had left was a bruised ego and this mess of trauma I'm still trying to work through.  I had my legs splayed and breasts fondled onstage by my colleagues.  I threw my body down the stairs repeatedly.  I had my anatomy once again shamed, this time for not being curvy enough.

--Georgina Pazcoguin, Swan Dive (Henry Holt and Company, 2021)

Being a ballerina is not for every girl or woman; reading Swan Dive causes one to believe that it is something one does because one has to do it:  the life is all-consuming and the financial rewards are limited for most dancers (about $65,000 a year for corps members in NYC Ballet) and one's career as a dancer ends somewhere between 30 and 40 years old and only lasts that long if one can avoid serious injury.

It can be a wild ride, both good and bad, for a ballet dancer, as Pazcoguin makes clear in this detailed book about her life as a dancer with NYC Ballet.  Pazcoguin is of mixed race (her dad is Filipino and her mother Italian)from Altoona, Pa. and started out at the Allegheny Ballet Academy, eventually doing an audition in Pittsburgh and getting a scholarship to the School of American Ballet at 14, leading to the corps of NYC Ballet and eventual promotion to soloist, while butting heads constantly with artistic director Peter Martins over everything from casting to moonlighting on Broadway.  She gradually began to feel that she was not getting the roles she deserved, in part because of her race, and helped to initiate Final Bow for Yellowface to promote diversity in ballet.

Pazcoguin is particularly foulmouthed for a ballerina, at least as we have seem them in the memoirs of such principal dancers as Suzanne Farrell and Merrill Ashley, but perhaps it's time for the pendulum to swing the way corps members talk to each other and express their anger and frustration.  Pazcoguin is full of highs and lows, the highs being when she is actually dancing roles she loves (such as Anita in West Side Story) and when she spends time with her fellow dancers sharing feelings, the lows when she is injured, miscast, or having to talk to the dour and authoritarian Peter Martins.  Martins quit in 2018 after accusations of harassment and abuse surfaced and as Swan Dive ends Pazcoguin is hopeful about her role with the new regime at NYC Ballet, but she now has a real estate license and is ready, if necessary, for her next season.

Richard Quine's Drive a Crooked Road 1954

Quine wrote Drive a Crooked Road with his friend Blake Edwards, both having started out as actors at Columbia Pictures.  Edwards always had a skill for comedy (my favorite of his films is The Party,  1968), though he did make a handful of melodramas.  Quine also worked mostly in comedy, though with less commercial and artistic success than Edwards.  Quine, however, made two excellent films noirs in 1954:  Pushover and Drive a Crooked Road. 

Drive a Crooked Road has an impressive performance by Mickey Rooney, who was constantly trying to reinvent himself after he was let go by MGM in the late forties.  In the Quine film he plays a lonely young man, living in a rented room full of second-place car racing trophies and working as an auto mechanic, just the kind of guy who can be lured by beautiful Dianne Foster to drive the getaway car in a bank robbery by slick operators Kevin McCarthy and Jack Kelly.  Rooney is so desperate for love he never even thinks he is being conned and plans that he and Forster will take his share of the stolen loot to Europe, where he can race in important auto races.

The film is an example of what I would call suburban noir:  it takes place mostly in the suburbs of Los Angeles during the daytime, with its inevitable existential violent ending taking place at night.  Foster is the mistress of McCarthy and has complicated feelings about how Rooney is being used, i.e., she is not the typical femme fatale of film noir.  Rooney's performance is a masterpiece of grim fatalism; without actually saying much his expressions convey the deteriorating hope of someone lost in the shuffle of 50's America.

Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother 1927

 Today most people have seen few silent films and when I tell people my favorite film is D.W. Griffith's Intolerance from 1916 they look at me as if I were demented.  In 1949 James Agee wrote an article for Life magazine called "Comedy's Greatest Era." about Harold Lloyd, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon.  Few of the films by those men were available at that time and it was not until the 70's that they began to emerge again; Chaplin and Lloyd controlled their own films and gradually began to release them; Keaton made a deal with distributor Raymond Rohauer to release Keaton's films (which produced lines around the block at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan) and only Langdon languished in obscurity.  Now most of these films are available in decent prints on DVD and I recently watched Lloyd's The Kid Brother with my two children and my wife Susan, who found the film too contrived.  Gideon, Victoria and I found it both funny and touching.

The Kid Brother is clearly influenced by rural romances such as D.W. Griffith's True Heart Susie (1916) and Henry King's Tol'able David (1921).  It not only has lovely location shooting ("the wind in the trees," as Griffith was fond of saying) but also chases influenced by Keaton and emotion influenced by Chaplin.  Perhaps its gags are hung on too slender a narrative thread, like the runaway closeline that Lloyd pursues to rescue his father's Sunday shirt, and perhaps the final chase goes on too long, but much of the film is not only funny but beautiful, as Lloyd uses his brain and occasionally his fists to win the girl, played by Jobyna Ralston; at one point the camera moves vertically higher and higher with Lloyd climbing a tree to follow Ralston as she moves farther and farther away.  The long chase on a deserted ship is highlighted by Lloyd putting his shoes on a monkey (played by Jocko, who was also in Keaton's The Cameraman in 1928) and the villain thinks it's Lloyd coming around the corner. 

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War by Scott Anderson

 In 1944 the United States was seen as a beacon of hope and a source of deliverance throughout the developing world, the emergent superpower, that in the postwar era envisioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt would nurture democracy across the globe and dismantle the obsolete and depised rule of the European colonial powers.... Just twelve years later, though, the United Nations was already beginning its long slow slide into irrelevance, and rather than dismantling the European colonial empires, in many places the United States was paying for their maintenance.  Instead of fostering the spread of democracy, the United States was overthrowing democratic governments -- in Iran, in Guatemala -- that it deemed communist-tilting or otherwise unreliable.

-- The Quiet Americans by Scott Anderson (Doubleday 2020)

Anderson follows the years 1944-1956 through the lives of four "spies" for the CIA: Michael Burke, Frank Wisner, Peter Sichel, and Edward Lansdale.  Whatever good these four tried to do --in Asia, South America and Europe -- during this period was often circumvented and overruled by Allen Dulles, CIA director, and John Foster Dulles, secretary of state.  Anderson points out that intelligence gathering was neglected in order to do more infiltration and sabotage, because that was expensive and garnered more money for the Central Intelligence Agency.  And when there was the kind of attempted revolution in Hungary -- the kind of thing the CIA had been trying to do throughout Eastern Europe -- Eisenhower sat on his hands while the USSR crushed it.

Time and time again the United States totally forgot that it once fought off a colonial power  as it backed the wrong side because of the fear of communism.  Anderson's book ends about 1961, when JFK starting sending troops to Vietnam and supported a coup against South Vietnam leader Ngo Dinh Diem, and we all know what happened after that, not only in Vietnam but subsequently in Iraq and now Afghanistan, as Islam and "the war on terror"  have replace communism as our bete noire, at the cost of many lives and trillions of dollars. 

Francis Searle's Cloudburst 1951

 There are several good things about Cloudburst, including leads Elizabeth Sellars as Carol Graham and Robert Preston as John Graham; it was common in low-budget British films of this period to use an available American star to improve the film's grosses in the U.S.  The film takes place in 1946 as Carol and John had helped each other in the resistance, Carol even being tortured to turn against John and refusing.  John, who continues to work in cryptology, is looking for a school for his about-to-be-born child and a lot to build a house on, when his pregnant wife is run over by two murderers on the run.  John beomes dedicated to finding the two murderers and killing them. 

This is an intelligent plot for a film noir and is written by Leo Marks, a cryptology expert in WWII, from his original play; he later wrote the extraordinary Peeping Tom (1960) for Michael Powell.  The low-budget black-and-white cinematograhy is by Walter J. Harvey, who photographed five films in 1951 for Hammer Films previous to their entry into baroque horror films.  Robert Preston, who was mostly working in TV in these years before The Music Man, gives an intense performance as a man who feels he has nothing left to live for except to kill the man and woman who murdered his wife.  Unfortunately the film is directed by Francis Searle, a Hammer regular who turned out four or five low-budget pictures a year.  The cheapness of the film is shown by -- among other things--shoehorning in scenes of decoding which have little to do with the plot and bring the movement of the film to a stop. One can only wonder what Cloudburst might have been like if it had been directed by Fritz Lang, who did the similar-themed Rancho Notorious in 1952, a film of  "hate, murder and revenge."

Lewis Milestone's Of Mice and Men 1939

 Milestone's Of Mice and Men has a lot going for it:  veteran Norbert Brodine's beautiful black-and-white cinematography; Aaron Copeland's effective score; superb acting, particularly leads Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr.; and Eugene Solow's script, which fairly closely follows John Steinbeck's novella and the play based on it. Andrew Sarris described Milestone as "a formalist of the Left" and the film is sympathetic to the farmworkers it depicts and their relationship to the farm owner -- though little of the farmwork, "bucking barley," is shown -- with the emphasis on the workers and their dreams.  But everyone's dream is thwarted, including the owner's daughter-in-law (Betty Field), who only married in order to get away from the farm and is accidentally killed by Lennie (Chaney), who suffers from mental illness and is protected by George (Meredith), as they both dream of getting a farm of their own.

Milestone portrays a rotten system well but it is unclear how he himself feels about it and whether he thinks anything can be done; in the same way he seems to criticize war in All Quiet on the Western Front,  another technically impressive film, and later took an opposite view of war in the pro-Soviet The North Star (1943). I don't deny some of Milstone's films are impressive -- though I prefer films with a stronger point of view by the director -- and he does an excellent job with the actors in Of Mice and Men, including Leigh Whipper, an African-American actor whose character is treated with great dignity at a time when that was rare in Hollywood.