Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2021

 Not much new or unusual, a fair number of B movies (especially Westerns), many solid classics.

Nov. 3  Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) and three excellent film noirs:  Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night (1948), Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1950)

Nov. 5  Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1968) with its marvelous Ennio Morricone score.

Nov. 6 Raoul Walsh's corrosive White Heat (1949)

Nov. 7 Vincente Minnelli's musical Bells Are Ringing (1960), with the marvelous Judy Holliday.

Nov. 12 Jacques Tourneur movies, including Out of the Past (1947)

Nov. 13 Otto Preminger's charmingly bizzare Skidoo (1968)

Nov. 14 Don Siegel's The Lineup (1958).

Nov. 15 John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and Rogers and Astaire in Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee (1934)

Nov. 19 Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959)

Nov. 20 Billy Wilder's brilliant Kiss Me Stupid (1964)

Nov. 22 Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1967) and Michael Powell's glorious The Red Shoes (1948)

Nov. 25 Raoul Walsh's marvelous They Died With Their Boots On (1941)

Nov. 26 A number of Lubitsch films, of which my favorite is To Be or Not To Be (1942)

Nov. 30 Leo MCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957), laughter and tears.

Lionel Shriver's Should We Stay or Should We Go

 "I'll keep it simple, then.  How much better are our lives going to get than they are right now?  What are the chances that everything gets worse from here on out?  Not only a bit worse.  Loads worse?"                  "One hundred percent," Cyril said.

Lionel Shriver, Should We Stay or Should We Go (HarperCollins 2021)

Shriver is one of the few contemporary author whose new books I look forward to.  Should We Stay or Should We Go starts off with an agreement between Cyril and Kay Wilkinson in London that they will commit suicide together when they have both reached 80, thirty years away in 2020; among other reasons they don't want to end up with the dementia that Cyril's father suffered for years, dominating Kay and Cyril's life.  Shriver then gives us a dozen versions of what happens next: Kay goes through with it but Cyril doesn't; Cyril does but Kay doesn't; Kay reveals the plan to her daughter just as Kay turns 80 and Cyril and Kay are committed to Close of the Day Cottages, a horrible nursing home, for the rest of their lives; they voluntarily go to a posh nursing home, Journey's End, where Kay dies and Cyril lives to ninety-three with locked-in syndrome; a drug is discovered --Retorgarifax --that means nobody ever dies; they get frozen by a company called Sleeping Beauties and wake up in a world strange to them, without their love for each other; they both live to 110 and die together peacefully at their own wake.

Each alternate reality is presented both logically and imaginatively: Cyril and Kay go through Brexit (one votes to stay, the other to leave) and the coronavirus and crises with their three children while always maintaining their love for each other.  Shriver examines with intelligence and humor the various ways one can grow older and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so, as one's body changes in ways it is usually impossible to control.

John Farrow's Men in Exile (1937)

Men in Exile is Farrow's first film, made at the B unit of Warner Brothers.  It's an efficient and entertaining B picture, with a lot of plot in its 58 minutes running time.  Dick Purcell is a cabdriver in Miami whose cab in used in a heist and when he's blamed he leaves for the island of Caribo, which is composed of hotels, bars and police stations; it looks very much like the place McGinty fled to in Preston Sturges's The Great McGinty (1941)  Purcell gets a job in a bar/nightclub and falls in love with June Travis, daughter of the owner.  Purcell avoids getting mixed up in the gun-running of an old friend, played by Norman Willis, from stir, which Travis's brother (Alan Baxter) is involed in, while also romancing Willis's wife.  

The style of the film is rather flat; the cinematographer is Arthur Todd, who photographed eight films in 1937 (Farrow directed three films in '37, five in '38 and six in '39), as Farrow devotes his attention to the effective bunch of character actors in the film, including Olin Howland, Victor Varconi and Veda Ann Borg.  The screenplay is by Roy Chanslor, who wrote the novel that Nicholas Ray turned into the film Johnny Guitar (1954).  Farrow was a prolific director of B movies, though unfortunately his films became no more personal when he moved on to bigger budgets later, with movies such as The Big Clock (1948).

Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story (2019)

I'm not going to say much about Marriage Story, except that it is a not-loose-enough remake of Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005), with fewer children at stake, and is made as though D.W. Griffith had never lived. I just want to let readers of this blog know that I do watch some contemporary films, even if I usually end up regretting it.  Marriage Story, unlike Baumbach's earlier film, has only one child at stake, as Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson -- a theatre director and an actress -- battle it out for a divorce and the custody of their child, played by Azhy Robertson.  The Robertson character gets short shrift indeed:  he is supposed to be (I think) about eight years old and has trouble reading, for which he gets no help from either parent.  Johansson and Driver both hire sleazy divorce lawyers (which they had originally agreed not to do) and fight it out in court and in person.  Why this film is called Marriage Story instead of Divorce Story I don't understand, since only the divorce is shown; perhaps Baumbach thinks divorce inevitably follows marriage.  If one wants to see a married couple battle on personal and professional grounds with wit and intelligence I recommend the 1949 film Adam's Rib; it stars Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, was directed by George Cukor and written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin; it's available on DVD and shows up fairly often on Turner Classic Movies. 

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

 Crooks said gently, "Maybe you can see now.  You got George.  You know he's goin' to come back.  S'pose you didn't have nobody.  S'pose you couldn't come into the bunk house and play rummy 'cause you was black.  S'pose you had to sit out here an' read books.  Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books.  Books ain't no good.  A guy needs somebody -- to be near him."  He whined, "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.  Don't make no difference who the guy is long as he's with you.  I tell ya," he cried, "I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."

The deep green pool of the Salinas River was still in the late afternoon.  Already the sun had left the valley to go climbing up the slopes of the Gabilan mountains, and the hill tops were rosy in the sun.  But by the pool among the mottled sycamores, a pleasant shade had fallen.

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (Viking, 1937)

On September 5 I wrote about Lewis Milestone's film of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men; now that I've read the book (a novella of about one hundred pages) I can see how closely the book and the play made from it were followed, at least in terms of the characters and the dialogue.  One thing that was missing in the movie was Steinbeck's constrast between the beauty of the landscape and of nature and the ugliness of human behavior, a contrast that fatally squeezes Lennie and George and their dreams as well as those of the other bindlestiffs (Steinbeck was one himself).

Anthony Powell's The Kindly Ones 1962 and Hilary Spurling's Invitation to the Dance 1977

 I had told Albert I would find my own way to the bedroom, which was some floors up.  It was small, dingy, facing inland.  The sea was in any case visible from the Bellevue -- in spite of its name -- only from the attic windows, glimpsed through a gap between two larger hotels, though the waves could be heard clattering against the shingle.  Laid out on the bed were a couple of well-worn suits; three or four shirts, frayed at the cuff; half a dozen discreet, often-knotted ties; darned socks (who had darned them?); hankerchiefs embroided with the initials GDJ (who had embroidered them?); thick woolen underclothes; two pairs of pyjamas of unattractive pattern; two pairs of shoes, black and brown; bedroom slippers worthy of Albert; a raglan overcoat; a hat; an unrolled umbrella; several small boxes containing equipment such as studs and razor blades.  That was what Uncle Giles had left behind him.  No doubt there was more of the same sort of thing at the Ufford.  The display was a shade depressing.

Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (U. of Chicago Press, 1962)

The Kindly Ones is the sixth volume of Powell's twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time and includes narrator Nicholas Jenkins in its events more than the previous five volumes, starting out with Jenkins's childhood just before the beginning of World War I and returning to 1938 and 1939, as WW II is looming.  This volume is particularly droll, as some of the characters return from Jenkins's childhood, including Albert the cook and cult leader Dr. Trelawney, who gets stuck in a hotel bathroom.  Jenkins meets his old friend Bob Duport at the Bellevue and they have long and amusing conversations as Jenkins worries about whether Duport knows about Jenkins's affair with Jean Templer, who was married at the time to Duport.  Of course Kenneth Widmerpool turns up, already a captain in the army, and won't help hasten Jenkins's call-up as war edges closer..

This is my second time through Dance to the Music of Time and I still have difficulty keeping the characters straight as they come and go, as I make long pauses between volumes.  I highly recommend Hilary Spurling's Invitation to the Dance:  A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time; it includes a character index, a place index and synopses of each volume.  Spurling has also written an excellent biography of Powell, which I briefly reviewed on May 29, 2018.

Harold Daniels's Roadblock 1951

Considering that Harold Daniels directed only a handful of films before retreating to television the artistic success of Roadblock is a tribute to the power of the film noir genre and its icons, including star Charles McGraw, for whom it was one of his few starring roles after years of terrific tough-guy supporting roles in films such as Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946).  McGraw's role in Roadblock is Joe Peters, an insurance investigator who is starved for love and falls for Diane Morley (Joan Dixon) when Morley pretends to be Peters's wife in order to get a cheaper airline ticket.  But Diane wants nothing to do with Joe because, as she says, "I'm in the World Series and you're still in the minor leagues;"  Joe can't buy her a mink coat on his puny salary.  So Diane takes up with sleazy crook Kendall Webb (Lowell Gilmore) while Joe broods for her.  On Christmas Eve Diane is talking to a bartender who is looking forward to going home to his family and everything changes for Diane, as she rushes to Joe and says she loves him and doesn't care about mink anymore.

But it's too late; Joe, desperate for love, has already cooked up a deal with Webb to rob a train full of the insurance company's money.  Joe wants to call if off but Webb convinces him that his relationship with Diane won't last if he can't buy her what she craves.  Fate being what it is the robbery goes wrong and someone is killed.  Joe's partner  Henry Miller (Louis Jean Heydt) figures out what is happening -- Joe had his share of the money sent to him inside a fire extinguisher but Henry knew he already had an extinguisher --Joe slugs him over the head and tries to escape to Mexico with Diane via the dry storm drains of Los Angeles, but they are trapped; Joe is shot and killed and Diane walks off alone, filled with grief, down the dry riverbed.

McGraw effectively plays a vulnerable and gullible man, very different from his gangster roles. Joan Dixon plays a woman looking for the luxuries she never had as a secretary but discovers that it's not what she really wants (Dixon was a Howard Hughes discovery who only made a handful of films.) The cinematography is by Nicholas Musuraca, a master of chiaroscuro and the opressiveness of claustrophobic interiors (his best work for RKO, where Roadblock was made, was Jacques Tourneur's film noir Out of the Past, 1947).  The screenplay was by noir veterans Steve Fisher (who wrote John Cromwell's Dead Reckoning in 1947) and George Bricker (Jean Yarbrough's Inside Job, 1946)

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 1937

 Is there anything left to say about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film Sergei Eisenstein called "the greatest film ever made"?  Yes, including giving credit to the hundreds of people who worked on it and pointing out the superior beauty of its hand-drawn animation compared to today's mechanical computer animation.

Yesterday The New York Times published the obituary of Ruthie Tompson, written by Megalit Fox.  She was 111 years old and had worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of many uncredited women who did so, and was in the "Ink and Paint" Department, tranferring drawings (that were all done by men, a policy at Disney) to animation cels.  Walt Disney seldom gave much credit to anyone but himself, but David Hand was the "supervising director" of Snow White while William Cottrel, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Pearce Pearce and Ben Sharpsteen directed individual sequences.

Readers of this blog know my distaste for most current computer-animated feature films, a combination of too realistic in some ways but not in others, excessive details in some cases and abbreviated details in others.  The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs depends on stylization, necessary to keep the number of drawings limited by running the film at fifteen frames per second (as opposed to the standard 24 frames a second of sound films).  I was somewhat astonished at the beauty of the film, beauty that comes not only from the hand-drawn animation but from the fairy-tale limited story, from the original by the Brothers Grimm.  Disney and his team follow the original story quite closely with some interesting additions and changes: the dwarfs do not have individual names in the original story, the prince has not met Snow White before her death, the Queen is not a stepmother but Snow White's actual mother, the forest creatures do not exist in the original story.  I do think giving the dwarfs names and personalities made the film more effective, i.e., funnier before Snow White's "death" and sadder after it.

The multi-plane beauty of Snow White has a warmth not found in computer-animated films, in the same way that the digital restoration of Citizen Kane substitutes convenience for the warmth of 35 mm. film and in the way that the replacement of nitrate film with acetate, for convenience as well as safety, also decreased the beauty of films. 

Alfred E. Green's Parchute Jumper 1933

Alfred E. Green directed six films for Warner Bros. in 1933 and the cinematographer on Parachute Jumper, James Von Trees, photographed seven films in that year.  The speed with which these films were made is relflected in the plot of Parachute Jumper: the film is a Depression comedy, a romance, and a violent gangster film, with plenty of sex suggested, as well as a flipping of the bird and the sound of a toilet flushing (this is a pre-Code film).  Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Frank McHugh and Bette Davis make a charming and hungry (they even steal a fish from a cat) menage a trois, with Fairbanks supporting them first by wing-walking and jumping from planes, then chauffeuring for man-hungry Claire Dodd and finally smuggling in drugs from Canada for gangster Leo Carrillo. Bette Davis is blonde and vulerable, and called Alabama because of her Southern accent.  This seventy-two minute film shows us much about the struggle for jobs and the risks people will take, as well as the indifference of the wealthy and the crooked, in 1933.

Yankees 1 Rays O Oct. 3, 2021

 Not only does the New York Times not publish box scores but I can't find them anywhere else either.  Perhaps I'm being too cynical to suggest that one reason for this is that box scores traditionally include the time of the game and Major League Baseball perhaps doesn't care to reveal that all their dubious attempts to reduce the time of games (don't throw balls to give an intentional walk, force relief pitchers to pitch to three batters, etc.) have failed to speed up the game; it even appears that the ridiculous idea of starting every extra inning with a runner on second base will not be continued.  As I have said many times before:  just enforce the existing rules that limit the time of a pitcher to throw the next pitch to twelve seconds and don't allow the batter to step out of the batter's box except in an emergency.

Don't get me started on how badly baseball is televised (see earlier posts on this subject), causing me to usually listen to games on the radio.  Unfortunately Yankees radio announcer John Sterling is even worse than bombasic television announcer Michael Kay, who can't even keep track of the score,e.g., in a recent game with the Rays ahead 3-0 Anthony Rizzo hit a solo homerun and Kay bellows "tie game!"  Unfortunately mellow announcer Ken Singleton, who did very few games this year (he was usually replaced by the squeaky voices of Paul O'Neill and David Cone) has now "retired," though my guess is he was forced out because his low-key intelligence makes Kay look like the fool he is.

Oh yes, about the game.  It was a pitchers' (plural) duel, the Rays and the Yankees both using six pitchers and the hero was not Aaron Judge's ground ball in the bottom of the ninth but Tyler Wade's pinch running.  The wonderfully named Rougned Odor hit a bloop single in the ninth and was replaced by Tyler Wade, who tagged up at first on Gleyber Torres fly ball out and advanced to third on Anthony Rizzo's hit.  Aaron Judge hit a ground ball to second, slowed down somewhat by the pitcher, enabling Wade to beat second baseman Brandon Lowe's throw home with the winning run.