New York City Ballet, Feb. 26 2022

 The Steadfast Tin Soldier is a dance and not a puppet show.  The dance is continuously absorbing, stringent even in its moments of coyness.                                                                                                          --Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, Feb. 9 1976

Derogatoriness, obscenity of every description, is one of the two great driving forces behind Prodigal Son; the other is the belief in forgiveness and salvation.  They are tandem forces, each indispensable to the other.                                                                                                                                                                  --Arlene Croce. The New Yorker, Dec. 29 1980

It was not our original intention to attend three NYC Ballet performances in February; it just worked out that way because of changes in the schedule.  In any case it did give us some insight into the range of Balanchine's dances, from the most austere to snazziest. 

Prodigal Son was choreographed in 1929 to a powerful Prokofiev score commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes and is the earliest of Balanchine's works still performed.  It was often rather overwhelmed by the power of its male leads, especially Mikhail Baryshnikov and Edward Villella, but on Saturday was danced by the subtle Daniel Ulbricht, who acted and performed beautifully, with soloist Miriam Miller effective as the sexy and cruel siren.  This is one of Balanchine's ballets that he seldom fiddled around with; it even still has the original decor by Georges Rouault.  It gives one the opportunity to see an early ballet by Balanchine that tells a story (libretto by Boris Kochno) and can be seen simultaneously as a period piece and a transcendent modern ballet.

The Steadfast Tin Soldier is a charmingly sweet and sad pas de deux between a paper doll (Erica Pereira) and a toy soldier (Anthony Huxley) from a Hans Christian Andersen tale, with music by Bizet (Jeux d'Enfants).  My ten-year-old daughter didn't like that Balanchine swept the doll into the fire in the fireplace at the end, with only her heart surviving, as the soldier rescued it and returned to formation.

Pavane is a rare Balanchine piece for a solo dancer; done on Patricia McBride originally for the Ravel festival in 1974 (I was there) to Ravel's Pavane Infante pour une Defunte.  Saturday it was danced by Sterling Hyltin, whose hair was down and echoed the movements of the scarf she held wrapped around her as she did her pique turns. It is an elusive and mysterious ballet.

The last ballet was Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, which we were seeing for the second time this month and which my daughter loved even more than when we saw it on Feb. 5.   We all felt that Sara Mearns danced the lead role with great attack and passionate intensity, Tyler Angle tapped beautifully and the ballet demonstrated what a brilliant sense of humor Balanchine has when he's inclined to show it.                 

Razorblade Tears by S.A, Crosby (2021)

 "People like Isiah and Derek and your mama didn't deserve to die the way they did.  And the people that killed them don't deserve to live.  I can't speak for Buddy Lee, but that's what keeps me going," Ike said.    

"Revenge?" Tangerine asked.  Ike smiled ruefully.                                                                                   "No, hate.  Folks like to talk about revenge like it's a righteous thing but it's just hate in a nice suit," Ike said.

--S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears (Flatiron Books, 2021)

Razorblade Tears is something of a sophisticated retread of Blacktop Wasteland (which I wrote about in December), in this case Black and white ex-cons are seeking the killers of their gay married sons when the police are having no success.  Fathers Ike and Buddy Lee feel guilty for how they treated their sons in life and do everything they can, with the help of the trans woman Tangerine, to find the murderers while also finding out a great deal about their sons, from talking to their friends to investigating gay bars.  As the violence and destruction escalate Ike and Buddy Lee become friends in the unfriendly environment of Virginia.

 Razorblade Tears is a vividly written story about how some Blacks and whites can get along if motivated, as Ike and Buddy Lee are, by mutual guilt, anger and love for their children. 

Turner Classic Movies, March 2022

 Not a month for much new or unusual but plenty of solid classical films, many of which I've recommended previously.  Feel free to contact me if I missed anything about which you are curious.

March 1: Billy Wilder's impressive The Lost Weekend (1945)

March 2: Douglas Sirk's eye-popping  Written on the Wind (1957)

March 3: Chaplin's intense Limelight (1952) and Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960)

March 5: John Ford's lovely She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

March 6:  Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and Preston Sturges's  The Great McGinty (1940)

March 21: Chaplin's The Circus (1928) and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth  (1937)

March 22: two excellent musicals, Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee, with Rogers and Astaire (1934) and Ernst Lubitsch's The Merry Widow (1934).  Also,  Howard Hawks's Air Force (1943) and John Ford's moving and beautiful How Green Was My Valley (1941)

March 25:  Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

New York City Ballet, Feb. 19, 2022

 The Four Temperaments is one of the earliest works in which the elements of logic are arrayed in a form so brilliantly consequential that they nearly become the whole show.  The relationship between the continuity of the piece and its subject (melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric) is truly a magical one, consisting of a dance logic Balanchine has made look uniquely ritualistic.

Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, Dec. 8 1975

It is not just the second act that he gives us but a medley of the second and fourth acts, and no fourth-act finale has ever been so spectacular as the wheeling and diving of Balanchine's flock and the terrible isolation of his lovers as they withstand the fury of cosmic winds.

Arlene Croce on Balanchine's one-act Swan Lake, The New Yorker, June 11 1979

Another wonderful night at NYC Ballet, with Balanchine's Swan Lake, Sonatine, and The Four Temperaments, as well as Peter Martins's version of the Black Swan Pas de Deux from Martin's own full- length Swan Lake. 

The Four Temperaments has a score that Balanchine commissioned from Paul Hindemith in 1940 and choreographed in 1946.  I have occasionally tried to find the various temperaments in the named sections of the piece but I am now convinced that, like most of Balanchine's work, it is meant to be understood by what's in the music and the dance itself, dance that resembles ancient civilizations -- Egyptian, Sumerian, etc -- and builds to an intense and soaring finale.  The ballet was originally done in elaborate costumes but now exists in practice clothes as pure dance, connected to a propulsive score.  The Four Temperaments was danced by mostly corps members and soloists who danced their hearts out, while principal Russell Jazen did a marvelous job with the phlegmatic variation, helped by Christina Clark, Savannah Durham, Marjorie Lungren, and Clara Miller, the four of them entering doing beautiful grand battements.

Sonatine, choreographed by Balanchine to the music of Ravel in 1975, is a lovely wisp of a piece, a pas de deux by Indiana Woodward and Anthony Huxley.  It has the sweet intensity of many pas deux of Balanchine's, demonstrating both interdependence and independence. Sonatine was followed by the Black Swan Pas de Deux from Peter Martins's full-length Swan Lake, with Tiler Peck doing the thirty-two fouttes perfectly and Jovani Furlan partnering her. 

The last ballet was Balanchine's one-act Swan Lake, leaving in most of the best music and dancing (based on Ivanov's original) and leaving out most of the mime and dancing that makes the four-act productions so tedious. Megan Fairchild was a marvelous Odette:  fluttery but magnificently strong and emotional; Gonzalo Garcia was a superb Siegfried, stalwart but broken-hearted at the end.  The Tschaikovsky music was elegantly conducted by Clotilde Otranto.

All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine by Terry Teachout

 Rooted in my seat, eyes wide with astonishment, I asked myself, Why hasn't anybody ever told me about this?  And what kind of man made it?

For the most part ballet and modern dance have retreated to the periphery of American cultural consciousness, just as dance criticism has all but vanished from the pages of American magazines; you don't have to know who Balanchine was, or what he did, in order to be deemed culturally literate.  Most of my acquaintances regard my love of dance as a harmless idiosyncrasy, and when I assure them that Balanchine was every bit as important as, say Matisse, they look at me as though I tried to tell them that Raymond Chandler was as important as Proust.

Terry Teachout, All in the Dances (Harcourt, 2004)

While many people see Balanchine's The Nutcracker every year how many them return, with or without their children, to see the range of Balanchine's ballets at New York City Ballet?  I took music humanities and art humanities as part of the core curriculum at Columbia but there was no dance humanities and no mention of the brilliant ballets of Balanchine being performed by NYC Ballet fifty blocks south.  I was fortunate to know someone who knew Arlene Croce, the noted writer on dance, and was introduced to Balanchine's choreography in 1971 wondering, as I watched Balanchine's Symphony in C (music by Bizet), why had I never heard of this genius.  From then on I attended NYC Ballet performances every chance I could, trying to catch up on this incredible art form in the same way I did with movies after seeing Citizen Kane at MoMA several years earlier.  I never missed a new Balanchine ballet because I knew I would almost always be surprised and delighted by what I saw; during the last ten years of his life (he died in 1983) Balanchine produced some of his greatest ballets, including Vienna Waltzes, Mozartiana and Union Jack.

Terry Teachout died last month at the age of 66.  I read him in every issue of Commentary, where he wrote every month, as critic-at-large, about music, film and theatre, though he never wrote about ballet that I know of, perhaps because of editor John Podhoretz's opinion "ballet being thought, for reasons that elude me, to be high art, rather than the ludicrous kitsch some of us believe it to be."  I wonder if Teachout tried to take his editor to see some of Balanchine's ballets, as he did with many others.  No matter, he has written a thoughtful and intelligent book about Balanchine, though he saw his first Balanchine ballet in 1987, four years after Balanchine's death, the astoundingly beautiful Concerto Barocco to the music of a Bach concerto for which Teachout had played one of the solo parts in high school.  Teachout eschews technical ballet terms (he is writing a book he wishes he had read after his first Balanchine ballet) but effectively uses his music background to emphasize the incredible musicality of Balanchine's ballets. 

Kenji Mizoguchi's The Loyal 47 Ronin (1941-42)

Such opacity in a film could be seen as an artistic failure.  Yet once one has overcome the initial hurdles of understanding, this is not the case with The Loyal 47 Ronin.  On the contrary, with or without the inserted close-ups, the rigour and sweep of the film's mise en scene becomes exactly what is notable and wonderful about it, the reason I go back to The Loyal 47 Ronin, on the rare occasions it is shown publicly, as to a precious and compelling masterpiece.

-- Mark Le Fanu, Mizoguchi and Japan (British Film Institute, 2005)

I watched this incredibly beautiful film recently on Turner Classic Movies (it is also, somewhat surprisingly, available on HBO Max) and found its black-and-white elegance as lovely as von Sternberg, its camera movement as assured as Preminger's, its narrative of a story well-known in Japan elusive as history itself.  The story, which takes place in 1701, has been made into dozens of films in Japan, and is about the loyalty of the Ronin, samurai whose master, Asano, has been condemned to seppuku (harakiri) because of a violation of protocol in Edo, the capital, where he attacked Lord Kira. The samurai, led by Ooshi (Chojuro Kawarazki), wait for a year, planning to kill Kira for vengeance.  Almost all the action and violence is off-screen and ends with the samurai bringing the head of Kira to Asano's grave and submitting themselves to the shogun for punishment, the film concluding with all the samurai being condemned to seppuku and walking one-by-one to their ritual suicide. 

The film, originally made in two parts, runs for almost four hours and includes many fascinating details, all filmed in long-shot and usually with a slow-moving camera (cinematography by Kohei Sugiyama), including Asano's wife's ritual hair-cutting and Ooshi's family bidding him good-bye, as well as the fiancee of one of the samurai disguising herself as a man in order to try to free her betrothed. There seems to me little evidence that this film endorses the bellicosity of Japan's government at this period, even though that was what the Japanese government hoped to get when they commissioned the movie.  It seems to me that it questions bushido (the samurai moral code) more than it endorses it, as Mizoguchi's films generally question traditional social roles in Japan.

The Woman in the Woods by John Connolly

 Events move fast in a gunfight, particularly when the participants are in close proximity, as Herb Caldicott had learned to his cost.  The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted just thirty seconds and left six of the nine participants dead or wounded at the end.  So by the time Parker had retrieved his gun , and was ready to fire, Louis was already slumped against a tree, bleeding heavily from one wound to his right shoulder and a second to his groin; Quayle and Mors were disappearing into the woods with most of the book; and the yard was bathed in the glow of fire.  Somewhere in the old house, Owen Weaver was screaming.

John Connolly, The Woman in the Woods (Emily Bester Books/Atria, 2018)

I have written comments on a number of John Connolly's books in this blog.  His main character is private detective Charlie Parker, who has led an unusual life of victories and defeats, beginning with the murder of his wife and daughter.  There is a fair amount of the supernatural in the Parker books, with alleged appearances and phone calls from the dead, which the living might be imagining.  Sometimes the supernatural elements can be intriguing and sometimes just annoying; in The Woman in the Woods they are minimal and I think the book is better for that, as Parker is hired to find out who a woman who is buried in the woods is and what happened to the child she bore just before her death.  He follows leads from Maine to Indiana and from local police to houses of refuge for battered women and picks up the trail of a man named Quayle and a woman named Mors, an evil pair in search of an important and powerful book.

Although to a certain extent Parker is the good guy he is not without his demons and a sometimes irrational anger about those who are not up to his standards; in other words he is human, always struggling to the right thing and overcome his weaknesses.  As usual Connolly creates complex human beings -- there are quite a few in this novel -- and the vivid effects of their occupations and environments. 

Charles Brabin's Washington Masquerade 1932

 Thanks as always to Turner Classic Movies for showing the relatively obscure Washington Masquerade; as was demonstrated by the late Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise and film historians generally films often rest in obscurity for reasons having nothing to do with artistic quality; the derided films of the past are sometimes the masterpieces of today or tomorrow.

Washington Masquerade seems to be something of a cynical precursor to Frank Capra's 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, both Lionel Barrymore in Brabin's film and James Stewart in Capra's have the first name of Jefferson and though I could find no evidence of Capra being familiar with Brabin's film I did find that one of the writers, John Meehan, on Brabin's film had also been a writer for Capra's 1931 The Miracle Woman.  Interestingly the good and the bad in Washington Masquerade are the same person, Lionel Barrymore, while in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington James Stewart is the good guy and Claude Rains the bad guy.

Lionel Barrymore is less hammy than usual as Jefferson Keane in the Brabin film, which has only three main characters:  Barrymore as Jefferson Keane, Karen Morley as Consuela Fairbanks and Diane Sinclair as Keane's daughter Ruth.  Keane is a reform candidate for the Senate and gets elected-- he wants to socialize natural resources -- but as a widower he gets caught in Consuela's honey trap and marries her, against the advice of Ruth.  Then Consuela pleads poverty and convinces Keane to resign from the Senate and take a no-show job for a corrupt lobbyist.  Keane is about to be indicted for corruption at the same time he discovers that Consuela has a lover and Keane ends up confessing to the Senate committee that he took a bribe; the exertion of his speech causes a heart attack and Keane dies. 

Barrymore, Morley and Sinclair are effective in this somewhat stagey version of Henri Berstein's play The Claw.  Brabin's direction is relatively passive (he started making films in 1911 and made his last one in 1934) and we get little of the long takes and the deep focus of cinematographer Greg Toland that we see later in the films he did with John Ford and William Wyler, and especially in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.  What we do get in the pre-code Washington Masquerade is an unusual honesty about the corruption and the power of lobbyists in Congress. 

The Return of New York City Ballet: Feb. 5, 2022

The only connection to Faust that I can see is in its visionary use of classic feminine types... The choreography here is diabolical and at the same time angelic; we think of poor Faust offstage. suspended between Heaven and Hell.

Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, Feb. 11 1980 on Balanchine's Walpurgisnacht Ballet

In this amazing slow-motion adagio, a girl enters standing on the shoulders of four men, who then manipulate her body in a series of passes through space, high overhead or around their waists like a belt or low over the floor on which the questioner stretches himself, hoping for a moment's contact.

Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, May 19 1975 on Balanchine's Ivesiana 

It was exciting indeed to return to NYC Ballet after almost exactly two years away.  We had to show proof of vaccination and wear masks but the ballets were wonderful; it was nowhere near the same when we spent two years watching ballets on YouTube, even though there was a fair amount to watch, thanks to John Clifford as well as NYC Ballet itself posting videos.

The first ballet on the program was Balanchine's intense Walpurgisnacht Ballet, originally choreographed for a production of Gounod's Faust in 1975 for the Paris Opera Ballet and performed separately for NYC Ballet in 1980, when it was danced by Suzanne Farrell, Heather Watts, Stephanie Saland, Judith Fugate, Kyra Nichols, with Adam Luders as the sole male dancer in the cast; this Saturday it was danced by Sara Mearns, Erica Pereira, Kristen Segin, Mary Elizabeth Sell and Russell Janzen.  Sometimes this ballet is considered one of Balanchine's "hair down" ballets, as the last part has the women dancing at incredible speed with their hair flying about, capturing the revelry of Walpurgisnacht, when dead souls and demons come out.  Its intensity on Saturday was impressive and when I asked my daughter if she liked the performance she said "I didn't like it, I loved it!"

She also loved the last piece on the program, Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, which Balanchine did originally for Broadway's On Your Toes in 1936; the music is by Richard Rogers and the ballet (which is largely tap) was added to NYC Ballet in 1968.  Tyler Angle and the-about-to-retire Teresa Reichlen danced the leads with speed and subtlety, helped immensely by eighteen members of the corps in often hilarious support, especially the policemen danced by KJ Takahashi, Cainan Weber and Andres Zuniga.  Reichlen literally lets her hair down in this ballet, from one of four Rogers and Hart shows that Balanchine choreographed in the 1930's, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue looking timeless, helped in part by a refurbishment two years ago.

In between Walpurgisnacht Ballet and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue were Jerome Robbins's Moves, from 1984, and The Unanswered Question, an excerpt from Balanchine's Ivesiana -- music by Charles Ives -- from 1954.  The Ives piece is slow and beautiful, as four dancers (Gilbert Bolden III, Preston Chamblee, Christopher Grant, Alec Knight) manipulate Ashley Laracey around Harrison Coll without ever letting her touch the floor or Coll, the strange choreography elegantly implied by the strange Ives music.  Moves is subtitled A Ballet in Silence and has some lovely dancing, especially in the pas de deux, but suffers from a lack of compelling structure.

This was the first of three NYC Ballet performances we will be seeing this month (not our original intention, but we had to keep changing tickets as the schedule changed) and Susan, Victoria, Gideon and I are delighted that NYC Ballet has returned.

The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA's Challenger Disaster by Kevin Cook

NASA had developed a peculiar kind of attitude:  if one of the seals leaks a little and a flight is successful, the problem isn't so serious.  Try playing Russian roulette that way:  you pull the trigger and the gun doesn't go off, so it must be safe to pull the trigger again.

-- Richard Feynman, Nobel prize-winning physicist

Kevin Cook's book is a flatly-written story about the explosion of the Challenger in 1986 but it is full of details about those who died and their lives, with emphasis on Christa McAuliffe, who has a middle school named after her that we are considering for our daughter.  I don't think Cook comes across any new information that makes this story "untold," but he does gather a great deal of information about the flight of the Challenger and the political pressure from the Reagan administration to launch when it was too cold and the greed and arrogance of Morton Thiokol, who made rocket boosters that failed. 

Hobart Henley's Night World (1932)

 Night World is a Prohibition story from near the end of Prohibition and a pre-Code film from near the end of the pre-Code era; this 58-minute film is a comedy, a gangster movie, a romance, a musical and a soap opera that takes place during a single night at Happy's (Boris Karloff) speakeasy, as Mae Clarke and an inebriated Lew Ayres find each other, fall in love, nearly get killed and decide at the end of the night to get married and move to the South Seas.  The doorman at Happy's, who waxes philosophically with an Irish cop about how people are starving for things other than food, is played by Black actor Clarence Muse as a sympathetic and intelligent man who is quite concerned about his wife, who is in the hospital. 

Lew Ayres plays Michael Rand, who drinks because his mother killed his father and was acquitted at her trial.  His mother, played by Hedda Hopper, shows up at Happy's and says how much she hated her husband and dislikes Michael, after which chorus girl Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke) listens to him sympathetically while gangster Ed "my-place-never-closes" Powell (George Raft) harasses her between dance numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley, where the camera goes between the legs of the chorus girls. Meanwhile drunken patron Tommy (Bert Roach) wanders around asking everyone "are you from Schenectady?"  This fascinating 58-minute film is written by Richard Schayer and directed with punch and speed by Hobart Henley, whose penultimate film this was; he stopped making films at the age of 46 after making 57 films, of which 11 were made after sound came in. 

Lewis Seiler's Over-Exposed (1956)

 Over-exposed has perhaps a double meaning:  the photographs Lila Crane (Cleo Moore) takes in night clubs as well as the skimpy outfits she wears doing it.  Cleo Moore is an icon for those who love B movies; she made seven with low-budget director Hugo Haas alone.  Columbia Pictures hoped she would be their own Marilyn Monroe and though she dyed her hair blonde she never had good scripts or good directors, though Over-Exposed suggests that she has skill and acting potential, even under the slack direction of Lewis Seiler, whose penultimate movie this is, after working since the twenties on relatively low-budget films in various studios.  

The film is unusual for its time, as Lila Crane meets dipsomaniac photographer Max West (Raymond Greenleaf) as he photographs her at the police station when she is picked up as a B-girl.  She gets him to teach her photography and she becomes a successful night club and fashion photographer.  She meets newspaper reporter Russell Bassett (Richard Crenna) who tries and fails to get her to go with him to Europe as his photographer.  When she hits bad times because of a photo that a gossip columnist steals from her and publishes she tries to blackmail a crime boss with an incriminating picture she took.  The crime boss kidnaps her and she is rescued by Russ.  The central figure of a female entrepreneur in a film of 1956 is rare and, in this case, effectively portrayed by Cleo Moore, even if the ending is somewhat ambiguous.