Turner Classic Movies Dec. 2021

 Yes, there are some films this month with Christmas scenes and allegories.  I recommend Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), John Ford's The Three Godfathers (1948), Mitch Leisen and Preston Sturges's Remember the Night (1940), Leo McCarey's Going My Way (1944), Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955).  All of these are showing at multiple times in December.

Other movies include:

Dec. 1 Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937) with Rogers and Astaire

Dec. 6 Otto Preminger's film noir Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950

Dec. 7 John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945)

Dec. 11 Samuel Fuller's Park Row (1952)

Dec. 13 John Ford's Stagecoach (1939)

Dec. 16 Jean Renoir's Elena et les hommes (1956)

Dec. 18 Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940) and John Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934)

Tom Donahue's Dean Martin: The King of Cool

 TCM's documentary is detailed but superficial; stuck with the foolish title it emphasizes what was perceived as cool about Dean Martin, including the alcohol and tobacco that killed him.  He and Jerry Lewis made 17 films between 1949 and 1956, but Martin wanted to be taken seriously as an actor (though he was a terrific straight man) and Lewis wanted to direct his own films; Martin and Lewis's last two films were their best -- Artists and Models in 1955 and Hollywood or Bust in 1956 -- and they were the only ones directed by a top-notch director, Frank Tashlin. But after years of mediocre directors (producer Hal Wallis felt that the films made plenty of money without necessarily being well directed) Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were ready to move on, separately.

Martin hoped to be taken seriously as an actor in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions in 1957 but it didn't happen, though he went on to terrific roles in Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958) and Bells Are Ringing(1960) as well as Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959).  From then on he played mostly caricature versions of himself on televison, with the so-called Rat Pack in Los Vegas and, most effectively, in Billy Wilder's brilliant widescreen black-and-white Kiss Me, Stupid in 1964. Despite the onslaught of rock 'n roll Martin continued to make record albums in his smooth style and did "celebrity roasts" on tv until 1984.  He died at the age of 78 in 1995., 

Connie Hochman's In Balanchine's Classroom (2021)

Watching Connie Hochman's film I was reminded of something that Balanchine once said, "Only God creates, I assemble."  Hochman's film is a wonderful and fascinating assembly of dance footage, Balanchine's classes and interviews with those who danced his ballets and took his classes, most notably Merrill Ashley, Jacque d'Amboise, Gloria Govrin, Edward Villella and Suki Shorer (who wrote a definitive book: Suki Shorer on Balanchine Technique).   I remarked to Susan that I was disappointed that there was so little shown of Balanchine's classes and she replied that she was pleased there was so much. It's interesting to me that the dancers compared Balanchine to Einstein, Picasso and Mozart when most people have never heard of him, ballet still being a mysterious art to many.  I wonder who would be most likely to enjoy this marvelous film:  those who never heard of Balanchine would probably be mystified by it and those of us who know his work well probably will not hear or see anything new, as much as we enjoy the previously unseen footage. One can't get inside the mind of a genius and Balanchine's comments in class and in interviews were often cryptic, as he emphasized speed, precision, and musicality with metaphors and obscure references for dancers to absorb.  It is clear from the footage that we do get to see that Balanchine quickly could grasp what each dancer could and couldn't do and would often adjust the choreography appropriately.

Most of the dancers who are interviewed are licensed by the Balanchine Trust as repetiteurs, i.e., they go all over the world to stage Balanchine ballets; there is interesting footage of them working with young dancers, passing on their knowledge.   There are also a number of companies that are now run by former New York City Ballet dancers who worked with Balanchine, in San Francisco, Seattle and other cities; many Balanchine ballets will survive.  I did miss hearing from Suzanne Farrell, who revived many ballets for her company in Washington, D. C. (I finally got to see Balanchine's marvelous Don Quixote there) and Peter Martins was apparently not interviewed, though he appeared several times in Hochman's film in archival footage; I think Hochman intelligently wanted to focus on Balanchine and didn't want to get involved in former or current controversies.  

Mervyn LeRoy's Three on a Match (1932)

Three on a Match indicates the power of a studio over a good director (LeRoy) who doesn't have a vision of his own, i.e., Three on a Match is obviously a Warner Brothers picture as much as LeRoy's Quo Vadis (1953) is an MGM film. Three on a Match is also a pre-code film, a combiantion of soap opera and gangster film, including drug addiction as well as extra-marital sex.  The film starts in 1919 when the three leading women are in school and grow up to be Mary (Joan Blondell), Vivian (Ann Dvorak) and Ruth (Bette Davis).  Ruth ends up as a secretary, Mary goes to reform school and eventually becomes an actress, Vivian marries a wealthy lawyer (Warren Willian playing a non-cad).  Times passes as newspaper headlines roll by and Vivian leaves her husband out of boredom --taking her child with her --to live with a low-level gangster, Michael Loftus (Lyle Talbot), and gets addicted to drugs; her husband divorces her and marries Mary and hires Ruth as his governess after he gets custody of his and Vivian's son.  Lyle and his gang (including a young Humphrey Bogart) kidnap Vivian's son and hold him for ransom while they lock Vivian in a tenement room. Vivian leaps through a nailed-shut window with a message of where her son is written on her slip in lipstick.

The film is crisply shot (by Sol Polito, who photographed 8 films in 1932; LeRoy directed 6) and edited (by Ray Curtis) and packs a great deal into its running time of 63 minutes.  Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak have the biggest roles; Bette Davis's potential had yet to be discovered, though she is quite intense in her relatively small role.

Otto Preminger's Skidoo (1968)

 Despite the impulse toward disintegration so apparent in much of the film, Preminger's visual control is fully evident throughout Skidoo.

-- Chris Fujiwara, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber and Faber 2008)

What an interesting cast Skidoo has -- Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, Doro Merande, Groucho Marx; members of Preminger's stock company:  Arnold Stang, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford; the youth contingent:  John Phillip Law, Alexandra Hay, Austin Pendleton, Luna; also Geroge Raft, Slim Pickens, Cesar Romero and Frank Gorshin -- in Preminger's attempt to reconcile the hippies of 1968 with the Mafia and the old fogeys based on his own experience of LSD under the tutelage of Timoth Leary.  He effectively uses the music of Nilsson (who even sings the credits at the end, down to the last assistant director) and the vivid cinematography of Leon Shamroy (who photographed Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It in 1956, another intensesly colorful film in  a widescreen ratio).

I found the movie quite funny in its exploration of the relationship between hippies and adults, with Preminger showing an understanding for the reasons behind each group's behavior.  But whether one finds this film amusing (Preminger's only previous comedy was the droll The Moon is Blue in 1953) or not is to me irrelevant, since even the best comedies are not necessarily funny in their examinations of the absurdity of life and how people behave.  Skidoo is certainly a product of its time but also looks optimistically ahead toward reconciliation, with the last shot showing Austin Pendleton (in his first movie) as a draft dodger and Groucho Marx (in his last film) as  a Mafia boss escaping turmoil and peacefully sharing a boat and a joint.

William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

If anyone is nostalgic for the 80's I recommend William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A., in which Friedkin's main interest was in doing a car chase, with a car going the wrong way on the freeway, which Friedkin felt outdid the chase in The French Connection (1971). Friedkin briefly soared with that film and with The Exorcist (1973) before petering out, along with Peter Bogdanovitch and Francis Ford Coppola, in the short-lived Director's Company.  To Live and Die  in L.A. has everything an 80's film needs:  bright and neon colors (courtesy of Dutch cinematographer Robby Muller), a morally ambiguous cop (William Petersen) and a morally ambiguous criminal (Willem Dafoe), foot chases and car chases, gunfights and fist fights. indistinguishable and morally ambiguous women, a pop soundtrack courtesty of Wang Chung, and gritty Los Angeles locations. 

My favorite part of To Live and Die in L.A. is a fascinating examination of Eric Masters' (Dafoe) attention to detail in printing counterfeit twenty-dollar bills.  For an example of an excellent film about  U.S. Treasury agents tracking down counterfeiters I suggest Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947), with John Alton's beautiful black-and-white cinematography.

Philip Roth's When She Was Good (1967)

 "And what's wrong with my family that isn't with yours, Roy?  Look, you, if you don't want to marry me," she said, "because someone has begin to tell you that I'm not good enough for you, well, believe me, you don't have to."

Lucy Nelson in Philip Roth's When She Was Good (Random House, 1967) 

When She Was Good takes place in the Midwest during the 40's and 50's and there's nothing Jewish about it.  How much, if anything, Roth knew about the Midwest is unclear, though he did attend graduate school at the University of Chicago, but I found that his satirization of small-town America in that era (when I was growing up in a small town) is eerily accurate, from the social standing of an assistant postmaster to family quarrels, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and chronic alcoholism.  The main characters are Lucy Nelson (apparently based on Margaret Martinson Williams, Roth's first wife), her mother Myra, her father Whitey, her eventual husband Roy Bassart and his parents and uncle.

The novel has an impressive structure, flashing back to Lucy's death and following her through school and to a local college, until she returns home in the first year, pregnant.  She gradually grows mad as she learns that her long-absent father is now in jail in Florida and starts feeling that everyone is against her, as she flees into a snowstorm,  In other word, it's a melodrama -- via Dreiser out of Henry James -- that would have made a good Douglas Sirk film; unfortunately Roth considered Sirk's films to be "Hollywood dreck," according to Roth's friend Benjamin Taylor.

Frank R. Strayer's Blondie Plays Cupid 1940

 I find the Blondie series, especially the twelve earliest films (there were 28 in all, between 1939 and 1950) directed by Frank Strayer, charming, funny, moving and sometimes a bit hokey.  Strayer is good at physical comedy -- there is a bit in Blondie Plays Cupid where Dagwood gets stuck to a freshly painted chair, strongly influenced by Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (1924) and another where Dagwood tries to climb a ladder from which he had just fallen, breaking all the rungs on the way down.  But there are also many elements of sweetness among Blondie (Penny Singleton), Dagwood (Arthur Lake), Baby Dumpling  (Larry Simms) and Daisy their dog (though I could do without the reaction shots of Daisy), as they leave the city to stay in the country with Aunt Hannah (Leona Roberts) and Uncle Albert (Spencer Charters) on the 4th of July, after Blondie had confiscated Dagwood and Baby Dumpling's firecrackers.

Strayer and his writers (Richard Flournoy and Karen DeWolf) pack a great deal of plot into a sixty-eight minute film, as Blondie and Dagwood are picked up on their walk from the bus by Millie (Luane Walters) and Charlie (Glen Ford, early in his career) on their way to get married, a marriage interrupted by Millie's father (Will Wright) because Charlie had promised him an oil well on his property that has not yet materialized.  Dagwood is enlisted to spirit Millie out of her house but goes in through her father's window instead, though all ends well when Baby Dumpling throws a stick of dynamite that he thinks is a firecracker and that starts the oil gushing, as Dagwood and Blondie reconcile.

One can read my posts about Strayer's other Blondie films: five in 2018 and two in 2020.

Henry S. Kesler's Five Steps to Danger 1956

 Although introduced by Eddie Muller on Turner Classic Movies as a film noir Five Steps to Danger only marginally fits in that genre.  It does have a sense of fatality, as Ann Nicholson (Ruth Roman) and John Emmet (Sterling Hayden) meet at a car repair shop; Emmet's car is sold and he gets a ride with Nicholson, about whom he knows nothing, but she's headed to Santa Fe and he is on his way to Texas. Five Steps to Danger seems more like "Cold War noir," as director Kesler made few movies but did direct twenty-six episodes of "I Led Three Lives," a  TV communist spy drama that probably helped him to get financing for the low-budget (except for the two stars) Five Steps to Danger, which was beautifully framed and filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer Kenneth Peach, a veteran of B movies and televison.

Ann and John are followed by the cops, who try to arrest Ann for a murder.  Ann and John fight them off and escaped handcuffed together like Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), as Ann tells her story about escaping from Germany with some secret information about nuclear bombs (the "Macguffin," i.e., the device that motivates the plot).  It becomes hard to tell the bad guys from the good guys but Ann and John finally figure out who are the commie spies and who are government agents when the scientist to whom Ann is delivering the information turns out to be an imposter; a college dean and Ann's doctor are also working for the commies. Although this film is very much of its time it also transcends it, as strangers Ann and John gradually learn to trust, understand and help each other, though the "happy" ending is somewhat inconsistent with the film noir motifs that precede it. 

World Series 2021

 I don't have too much to say about this year's World Series, as it continued the current trend in the game of strikeouts and home runs, with not much in between, as every game except the fifth had more strikeouts than hits  The most impressive effort was by the Houston Astros in game five, when they scored nine runs without a home run and the most dubious was Braves manager Brian Snitker taking pitcher Ian Anderson out of game three after five no-hit innings (yes, I know he had his reasons).  Most of the games were close to four hours long with as many as a dozen pitchers used and only Braves pitcher Max Fried going as many as six innings, in game six. 

Once again we had to put up with TV announcer Joe Buck, with an occasional intelligent remark from John Smoltz; I found I was able to "see" more with ESPN radio announcer Dan Shulman, effectively low-key in the manner of Vin Scully.  Buck belongs to the bombastic announcer style of Yankee announcers Michael Kay and John Sterling, rooting for their team to win and trying to impress with their questionable assertions.  The best post-season announcing team only did one game, a White Sox/Astros game for the MLB network:  Bob Costas, Buck Showalter and Jim Kaat, with much intelligent analysis and the ability to sometimes be quiet and let the game speak for itself.

Incidentally it was a pleasure to see how well catcher Travis d'Arnaud played for the Braves in this World Series, batting .292 and doing a superb job of handling the pitchers.  d'Arnaud is part of a long line of former Mets, including Nolan Ryan, who were traded or discarded by the Mets and had impressive careers thereafter.