Turner Classic Movies Feb. 2022

 Feb. 1; There are eleven Kay Francis movies to get acquainted with this actress (see my previous post)

Feb. 1;  John Ford's terrific Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

Feb. 2:  Two by John Ford -- Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and Fort Apache (1948) and one by Hitchcock -- The Wrong Man (1956)

Feb. 3:  Anthony Mann's Western The Naked Spur (1953), with James Stewart

Feb. 4: Michael Curtiz's beautiful The Breaking Point (1950), based on a Hemingway novel

Feb. 5:  Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952)

Feb. 9:  John Huston's Fat City (1972)

Feb. 10:  Otto Preminger's film noir Angel Face (1953)

Feb. 11:  Buster Keaton's marvelous comedy and adventure film The General (1927) and Anthony Mann's period film noir The Black Book (1949), with cinematography by John Alton

Feb. 15:  Preston Sturges's brilliant The Lady Eve (1941)

Feb. 17:  Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) and Joseph Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), with a lovely score by Bernard Herrman

Feb. 21:  Jean-luc Godard's Weekend (1967)

Feb. 26:  Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975), screenplay by Alan Sharp, and John Ford's Stagecoach (1939)

Feb. 28:  Claude Chabrol's Le Ceremonie (1995), from a Ruth Rendell novel, and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937)

William Nigh's Allotment Wives (1945)

 Kay Francis was one of the biggest stars of the early thirties but by 1945 she was working for Poverty Row studio Monogram and the programmer Allotment Wives was her penultimate film before she returned to the stage.  Although Turner Classic Movies shows her films fairly often Francis is relatively unknown today.  What happened?  Simply put I think that Francis was overworked by first Warner Brothers and then Paramount and she seldom had good scripts or good directors.  In 1932, for example, Francis made seven films and only one of them had a good director for her:  Trouble in Paradise was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who knew how to utilize Francis's comedic abilities (Lubitsch also directed Garbo's one successful comedy, Ninotchka, in 1939). Too often Francis was stuck in mawkish soap operas as a glamorous clothes horse and didn't fight for good directors, the way Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck did. 

Allotment Wives starts out as something of a film noir, with Francis running a racket where she uses women she recruits to marry multiple servicemen in order to get money from the ODB (Office of Dependent Benefits), of which Francis and her gang of men take a big cut.  Unfortunately the film quickly swerves into another mawkish soap opera (because Francis was a co-producer for this movie?) as Francis's daughter (Teala Loring) runs away from her posh school and is kidnapped by Francis's rivals.  Violence follows and Francis is killed, as fraud investigator Pete Martin (Paul Kelly), having fallen in love with Kay Francis, rescues her daughter.  The cinematographer on Allotment Wives was Harry Neumann, who photographed fourteen films in 1945, while workmanlike director William Nigh directed two other movies that year. 

Bertrand Tavernier's My Journey Through French Cinema (2016)

 This is not an historical compilation but rather a personal one, as Tavernier (a director himself) travels through his years as a child and through the Occupation of France and into the seventies, talking about his favorite French movies and their actors, directors, composers, editors, cinematographers, all extensively documented with clips from the films.  He is less interested in well-known directors such as Jean Renoir and more interested in names not as well-known outside France, from Jacques Becker though Claude Sautet and including Edmond Greville and Marcel Carne.

When I was in college in the sixties we would almost never go to an American film (lowbrow by definition) but rather something French, Italian, Swedish, Japanese (serious art) and Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise was one of our favorites, a brilliant period film that was made clandestinely during the Nazi occupation of France.  I have not seen the film for many years but plan to see it again soon in the print restored by Criterion.  Things have flipped in the last fifty years, thanks in large part to critics such as Andrew Sarris, who helped one appreciate American films from the classic period (after New Wave directors Godard and Truffaut raved about them) and fewer people see foreign films these days.  Still, Tavernier does successfully demonstrate the impressive accomplishments of actors such as Jean Gabin and directors such as Jean-Pierre Melville and I suggest one seek out the films Tavernier mentions, though some of them may be hard to find.

Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much by Michael Wood

 There is a sense in which Vertigo is so purely a movie -- so purely involved in what movies do -- that we can almost let the plot go.  I don't mean its subject is the movies or moviemaking.  I mean it beautifully and scarily exploits the possibilities of the medium, makes our dependence on them something like an addiction.

-- Michael Wood, Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest, 2015)

There have been many books written about Hitchcock since Rohmer and Chabrol published their important book in French in 1957 and Robin Wood published his influential book in English in 1969, calling Hitchcock an artist.  Michael Wood's book is short and personal, with keen insights into 20 of Hitchcock's 55 films:  The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, Rebecca, Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rope. North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and Family Plot.  Michael Wood does what the best writers on film do:  make one want to see again the films he writes about, no matter how many times one has already seen them, as he spins his theories and his own intelligent observations about the layered tricks, motives and behaviors that Hitchcock puts into his films. 

Francois Ozon's Frantz (2016)

 The exception to this rule about remaking Lubitsch is Frantz, the movingly restrained 2016 film by French director Francois Ozon.  Frantz improves on one of Lubitsch's rare misfires, The Man I Killed (Broken Lullaby), by dispensing with its overwrought theatrics and rethinking the storyline, telling it from the viewpoint of the female character and not giving away the reason for the male character's trauma at the beginning.

-- Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Ozon's film is a period piece by a French director, while Lubitsch was born in Germany to Russian Jews in 1892 and did not have to serve in the Great War because he was a Russian citizen.  Both Lubitsch's film, from 1932, and Ozon's film are based on Maurice Rostand's play The Man I Killed, though Ozon's film has a more complicated ending.  In Ozon's film a Frenchman comes to Germany after the end of WWI and Anna sees him leaving flowers at her fiance's grave.  Adrien Rivoire (Pierre Niney) says he had been friends with Anna's (Paula Beer) betrothed in Paris and Anna brings him home to meet Frantz's parents.  Anna and Adrien become attracted to each other until Adrien eventually confesses that he had killed Frantz in the war and tells her to inform her parents, which she does not do; her parents had practically adopted Adrien and when he leaves for France her parents send Anna off to find him.  She does find him but says it is "too late" for them when she finds out he is to marry someone else.  Anna goes back to Paris to look at a Manet painting that Adrien has claimed to see with Frantz and starts talking to a man who is also looking at the painting.

Ozon's film is more romantic and less pacifist than Lubitsch's, though Anna's father does tell his drinking buddies that it is their fault for sending their children off to war.  The film moves slowly and gracefully as Anna and Adrien gradually get to know each other; the lovely cinematography is in widescreen black-and-white, with occasional scenes (mainly flashbacks and fantasies) in color; the exquisite photography is by Pascal Marti.  

Dancing Past the Light: The Life of Tanaquil Le Clercq by Orel Protopopescu

 It is wonderful to catch glimpses of Le Clercq on film, to see her performing the roles she made her own.  Even among the greatest ballerinas who have ever lived, she stands out, an unearthly, yet wittily down-to-earth creature made of air, nerve, and muscle, transcending gravity on the tips of her toes.  With a seemingly effortless grace that is mesmerizing, she goes beyond what we might expect a body to do, as if she is supported by music alone.

--Orel Protopopescu, Dancing Past the Light (University Press of Florida, 2021)

This is a marvelously detailed and footnoted biography of a great dancer, though there is not a great deal of footage of her dancing available, with the significant exception of the last movement of Western Symphony, with Jacques D'Amboise, and available on YouTube. Protopopescu talked to everyone and includes dozens of photos and copies of Le Clercq's correspondence with George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.  Le Clercq's life was intertwined with those two choreographers who made wonderful ballets for her, from Balanchine's La Valse to Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun, though there is little that is new in this biography, which follows Le Clercq's life from her earliest ballet lessons at seven to her time at NYC Ballet, her dance-ending polio in 1956 and her marriage to Balanchine from 1952 to 1969, when Balanchine became besotted with Suzanne Farrell, and Le Clercq's later teaching at The Dance Theatre of Harlem, started by Arthur Mitchell, a former partner at NYC Ballet.

Barbara Pym's Some Tame Gazelle

Some Tame gazelle or some gentle dove,                                                                                                      Something to love, oh, something to love.

--Thomas Haynes Bayly

For now everything would be as it had been before those two disturbing characters Mr. Mold and Bishop Grote appeared in the village.  In the future Belinda would continue to find such consolation as she needed in our greater English poets, when she was not gardening or making vests for the poor in Pimlico.

Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle (1950, Jonathan Cape Ltd.)

When I recently wrote about Pym last year I compared her to Trollope.  After reading Some Tame Gazelle I also find her deadpan humor reminds me of P.G. Wodehouse, and she and Wodehouse have in common that they both have created their own worlds, largely untouched by the outside.  Though Some Tame Gazelle was originally written in 1938, when Pym was at Oxford, it was not published until 1950 and in the United States in 1983, and there is no indication of any turmoil outside the unnamed village where it takes place.

Harriet and Belinda Bede are spinster sisters who live together and are closely involved with their local church, Belinda is still smitten with Archdeacon Hoccleve, even though he married his wife Agatha years ago.  Harriet still fancies Bishop Grote, who returns to England after thirty years in Africa and quickly proposes to Belinda and is rejected (he quickly finds a wife elsewhere in the village) while Mr. Mold, a visiting librarian, proposes to Harriet and is rejected; neither sister cares to give up their freedom for a husband.  While Belinda still thinks about Hoccleve Harriet is usually interested in the latest young curate, including Mr. Donne, who arrives at the beginning of the book and marries a linguistic scholar at the end.  Harriet has also rejected many overtures of marriage from Italian Count Ricardo Bianco and is pleased with the new curate who replaces Mr. Donne. 

The book is beautifully structured around the thoughts of Belinda --  Was it tonight that he was coming?  Belinda wondered vaguely.  It must be tonight she decided, catching sight of a bowl of exceptionally fine pears on the little table by the window, and expensive chrysanthemums in the vases when there were perfectly good Michaelmas  daisies in the garden.  Dear Harriet, she wasn't really extravagant, only too lavish in her hospitality -- and Belinda misses little of everything that goes on not only in her own household but everywhere else in the village       

The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille

I mean, I was really hot now.  Needless to say, it's not a good idea to make an enemy of a man like this, but what the hell, I had enemies in many high places now:  the IRS, the FBI, The Creek, the Stanhope dynasty and their attorneys, and so forth.  What was one more?

Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast (Hachette Book Group 1990)

Every once in a while I like to take a break from Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope and literary biographies and read a "reading-on-a-train" novel, even though I haven't been on a train (even the subway) in almost two years.  The Gold Coast has everything necessary for such a novel: sex, hate, murder and revenge, as well as a first-person narrative and a certain length -- in this case 719 pages -- that will keep one engrossed for a few hours.  Like most such novels (and DeMille also writes them under various pseudonyms) The Gold Coast is relatively fast-paced and detailed, with a number of vivid characters; in the case of The Gold Coast there is the somewhat wealthy John and Susan Sutter on the north coast of Long Island and their new neighbor Frank Bellarosa, a Mafia kingpin.  The Sutters are gradually drawn into Bellarosa's orbit, a superficially appealing one that is very different from their snobbish friends and family and ends up getting them in serious trouble, the financial and personal problems of the wealthy being a common theme in this kind of populist novel.  

Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley (1947)

 When I was a kid in the fifties a traveling carnival would come to a vacant lot not far from my home in Hudson, N.Y. and my parents told me to stay away.  Anything my parents told me to stay away from I was, of course, attracted to.  So I would sneak away to the carnival when I could and spend my money that I earned from my paper route on cotton candy, dangerous rides and games I knew I could never win.  I was attracted to the whole sleazy atmosphere and fantasized about running away with the carnival to escape my boring life (but ending up "running away" to a New England prep school instead).  Nightmare Alley, based on William Lindsay Gresham's bleak autobiographical novel, beautifully captures the carny life.

I do not agree with those who call this movie a film noir -- it is not fatalistic enough -- instead it is part of a subgenre called carnival noir, a subgenre recently surveyed in Brent Calderwood's article in issue 33 of Noir City, "Step Right Up: The World of Carnival Noir."  The film has an intense screenplay by Jules Furthman and shadowy cinematography by Lee Garmes, both of whose careers date back to 1919 and both of whom worked with director Josef von Sternberg on Shanghai Express in 1932.  Director Edmund Goulding was apparently brought in to direct by star Tyrone Power after working with him on the interesting film version of Somerset Maughm's The Razor's Edge the previous year.  Goulding's direction is workmanlike but lacks the expressionism of a true film noir. Goulding started out as a stage director in England and was known for his directing of actors in his melodramas and soap operas (Dark Victory, 1939).  In Nightmare Alley he directs Tyrone Power effectively in an uncharacteristic role as Stanton Carlisle, a skillful con man and mind reader who eventually destroys himself and his wife (played by Coleen Gray) with grandiosity and greed, against the advice of his Tarot-reading carny partner Zeena Crumbein (a marvelous blowsy Joan Blondell).  Furthman's screenplay is structured almost like a book, with blackouts after each chapter of Carlisle's life, as Garmes's cinematography captures the claustrophobic life of Carlisle and his partner in crime, psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), whose betrayal helps to turn Carlisle into an alcoholic who returns to the carnival as a "geek," biting heads off live chickens.

Cy Enfield's Zulu (1964)

 It's too bad that Enfield was hounded out of America by HUAC, since Zulu indicates that he probably would have been good at making Westerns.  Zulu is about an 1879 battle between 4000 Zulu warriors and 200 British troops.  Enfield's American films (including Underworld Story and Sound of Fury, both 1950) were corrosive views of American racism and capitalism and though Zulu is relatively apolitical it does have equal respect and understanding of each side, just as John Ford's Westerns did. Enfield and cinematographer  Stephen Dade capture the horror of wartime slaughter against the beauty of the landscape with the effective use of the widescreen ratio, editing and well-timed horizontal pans.  And I feel fairly certain that Enfield was very much aware of what was happening in Vietnam at the time he made this film.

Enfield always had a way with actors and in Zulu Stanley Baker (who worked regularly with Enfield, e.g. Helldrivers in 1957) and newcomer Michael Caine play the leaders of the British troops, constantly clashing on tactics and logistics.  We get little idea of the individual Zulu characters but each of the British soldiers is portrayed in considerable detail of their lives and experiences.  And there is one Boer, played by Gert van den Bergh, who has a considerable knowledge about the Zulu and their tactics, both as a mass and as individuals with spears and shields.