Turner Classic Movies May 2022

A fairly quiet month on Turner:  war films around Memorial Day, Busby Berkeley films throughout, Fatty Arbuckle shorts, a tribute to Raoul Walsh.  My recommendations are limited, mostly of films I have not recommended before.  Please e-mail me if you have questions about any film in May

May 1: Otto Preminger's beautiful film noir Laura (1944)

May 4:  John Huston's elegant The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

May 6: Andre de Toth's Western of betrayal Springfield Rifle (1952)

May 8: Mitch Leisen's No Man of Her Own (1950), based on a Cornell Woolrich novel

May 12: Josef von Sternberg's beautiful Shanghai Express (1932)

May 14:  Nicholas Ray's gaudy Party Girl (1958)

May 15: Budd Boetticher's The Killer is Loose (1956)

May 17:  Ernst Lubitsch's delightful The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

May 18:  Raoul Walsh's corrosive White Heat (1949)

May 22:  Joseph H. Lewis's dark My Name is Julia Ross (1945)

May 23: King Vidor's moving Bird of Paradise (1932)

May 29: John Ford's magnificent They Were Expendable (1945)

Well-Schooled in Murder by Elizabeth George

 He felt distinctly uncomfortable and wished for the first time that he had thought far enough ahead to bring Sergeant Havers.  Her working-class background and sartorial nonchalance would have eased them through the superficial difficulties created by his own blasted upper-crust accent and his Savile Row clothes.                                                                                                                                                         -- Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder (Bantam, 1990)

I've never been particularly fond of Agatha Christie's novels (too formulaic) but I find Elizabeth Geroge's novel full of detailed characters, psychological insight and complex plotting, more like P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, two British mystery writers I do like.  Elizabeth George is American, however, and brings an outsider's view to the class differences of English life, exemplified by upper-class Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard and his working-class partner Barbara Havers.  In  Well-Schooled in Murder they are investigating the murder of a scholarship student at a public, i.e., private, school in West Sussex, a co-ed school full of competitive students and ambitious faculty, as well as a headmaster who is most concerned with avoiding scandals and keeping wealthy donors happy.  So far, so routine, but George takes the time to create a significant number of interesting characters among the students, the parents, the staff and the teachers, all of whom have their personal and significant peccadillos that in many cases contributed, directly and indirectly, to the murder and which George limns with precision and style. 

Gordon Douglas's Girl Rush 1944

 Previously on this blog I have written about ten different Gordon Douglas movies and I have referred to him as "protean" because of his ability to work in many different genres, from war movies to science fiction to Westerns.  Girl Rush can best be described as a Western, a musical and a comedy.  It stars Wally Brown and Alan Carney, who are remembered today (if they are remembered at all) as RKO's attempt to produce their own Abbot and Costello; they made eleven movies together.  The film also includes Robert Mitchum (still working his way up after making twenty movies in 1943), at one point in drag as the men bringing women to a mining town during the gold rush have to dress as women so they don't get shot (it's a long story, as the film has a great deal of plot, as well as musical numbers, in a sixty-five minute running time).  Brown and Carney make a good comic team, taking turns as the straight man, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca is a master of lighting (especially in the interior scenes), writer Robert Kent keeps the plot moving swiftly, Frances Langford sings some charming songs by Lew Pollack and Harry Harris, there is some vigorous can-can dancing staged by Charles O'Curran and Gordon Douglas directs with impressive energy. 

Balanchine's Apprentice by John Clifford

 I did begin to notice, though, that with Mr. B's ballets, the more I watched them, the more I saw in them, including the ones I didn't at first like.  I found something new in them every time, and I was never ever bored.  Robbins's steps and combinations were clever, and I enjoyed their inherent drama and theatricality, but they did not have the same depth of Balanchine's works.  I not only discovered different layers in Balanchine's ballets -- I'd find whole new ballets.                                                              -- John Clifford, Balanchine's Apprentice:  From Hollywood to New York and Back (University Press of Florida, 2021)

John Clifford was born in Los Angeles in 1947 of parents who were vaudeville performers when vaudeville was coming to an end.  He started taking ballet classes when he was eleven and was chosen to dance in The Nutcracker when Balanchine presented it in Los Angeles:  he went to New York in 1966 on a scholarship to the School of the American Ballet, Balanchine's school for NYC Ballet dancers, and Clifford danced for the company from 1966 to 1974.  He danced as a principal and soloist in forty-six different ballets and choreographed eight others for the company.  

Eventually Clifford wanted to concentrate on choreography and felt he needed to get away from Balanchine's orbit in order to choreography independently.  He returned to Los Angeles in 1974 and started a company in a city that was not that interested in ballet; his company survives as a very small company called Los Angeles Dance Theatre, subsidized by Warner Brothers, for whom Clifford choreographed Casablanca, based on the Warner Brothers movie. 

Clifford's book mostly sticks to his years with Balanchine at NYC Ballet and the works of Balanchine and Robbins.  Clifford emphasizes the ballerinas he partnered -- Kay Mazzo, Allegra Kent, Melissa Hayden and others -- but also writes about Suzanne Farrell and Gelsey Kirkland, who at the time he was there had problematic relationships with the company and with Balanchine.  Lots of detail about Balanchine's ballets and his creation of them are included, including the difficulties with Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir, which Balanchine choreographed on Clifford and Karin von Aroldingen.

Clifford seemed to aspire to run NYC Ballet after Balanchine's death in 1983 but the board decided on Peter Martins (Balanchine had never actually designated a successor).  Clifford was barred from the company by Martins and became a repetiteur of Balanchine's ballets for other companies around the world.  Clifford said working and teaching Balanchine's ballets has given him a broader view of Balanchine's genius and brought him a great deal of satisfaction.  Clifford's ballets also are performed internationally.

I saw Clifford dance many times after I started seeing NYC Ballet in 1970; he was a dynamic dancer of Balanchine's and Robbins's ballets.  One thing he does not mention in this book is the considerable work he has done tracking down tapes of Balanchine's work, including a video of Suzanne Farrell in Concerto Barocco from Canadian television, which we have been able to watch during the many months when NYC Ballet was unable to perform live because of the pandemic. 

The King's Painter: The Life of Hans Holbein by Franny Moyle (2021)

The weather in the winter of 1526 and 1527 was atrocious.  According to the chronicler Edward Hall, the first few months Holbein spent in England were dismal:  November and December suffered "aboundans of rayne."  If nothing else the country was living up to Erasmus's description of it as damp.  There was no let-up in the new year, with a daily deluge of bitter wet, and 16 January was notable for "such a grete rayne that there ensued greate fludds which destroyed corne, feldes, and pastures."                                        -- Franny Moyle, The King's Painter (Abrams Press, 2021)

Moyle's book is a successful combination of biography, history and art connoisseurship of 16th century painter Hans Holbein and the court of Henry VIII, where Holbein did most of his impressive portraits.  Holbein (sometimes called "the younger" because of his artist father with the same name) was born in Germany, moved to Switzerland where he established himself as a painter of religious subjects until the Reformation began and he started doing portraits as religious patronage started to dry up.  Holbein did a portrait of Erasmus, who recommended him to Henry VIII in England.  Holbein spent two years in England, returned to Switzerland for four years and then came back to England until his death in 1543 at the age of 46.

Holbein was a Renaissance (Nothern version) man in more ways than one, doing everything from portrait painting to interiors of houses to book illustration and designing of jewelry.  As Moyle writes: "Holbein's extensive oeuvre serves up a series of coordinates that chart one of the most fascinating eras in the history of Europe, England and the evolution of Christianity.  Through Holbein one meets the humanists rediscovering Europe's classical heritage, the entrepreneurs in the vanguard of publishing and communications, those in the forefront of religious debate and reformation, and the men and women holding the reins of political power.  And we see this era through the creative eyes of Holbein.

Joseph H. Lewis's Cry of the Hunted (1953)

The director's somber personality has been revealed consistently through a complex visual style. -- Andrew Sarris on Joseph H. Lewis

Lewis's complex visual style is beautifully on display in Cry of the Hunter, with the help of the chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography of veteran Harold Lipstein filmed on location in a swamp (where Lewis's great Gun Crazy also ended), where Lt. Tunner is chasing down escaped convict Jory (Vittorio Gassman).  Tunner is a fish out of water as he chases Jory from asphalt of Los Angeles to the swamp water of Louisiana.  Tunner and Jory represent two side of what a man can be, as they both have dedicated wives who support them in their dangerous careers, one criminal and one law-enforcement, and at one point Tunner is so thirsty he drinks swamp water, passes out, and dreams of a weird relationship with Jory.  Tunner is helped in his search for Jory by the intense Goodwin (William Conrad) and the local sheriff (Harry Shannon), who are both ready to shoot-to-kill.

Tunner, after meeting Jory's passionate wife Ella (Mary Zavian), develops a sympathy for Jory and they end up helping each other out as they seek a way out of the swamp:  Jory rescues Tunner from quicksand and Tunner helps Jory recover from an injury as Tunner's cynicism falters; eventually he mentors Jory during Jory's last year in prison.  There's too much redemption and too little fatalism to call this a film noir -- as were the earlier Gun Crazy in 1950 and Lewis's later The Big Combo (1955) -- but it is an impressive meditation on the influence of background and environment. 

Yaujiro Ozu's An Inn in Tokyo (1935)

An Inn in Tokyo is a dark but beautiful film about looking for work and love in pre-war Japan, made as a silent film because Ozu did not yet trust the technology of sound recording (Chaplin was the only American director who was not yet using sound in 1935). Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) is looking for work in a wasteland of factories and not finding it, as his two young sons accompany him in his search.  Eventually they run out of money and have to choose between dinner and an inn and end up in the rain with no place to stay.  Fortunately Takeshi runs into an old female friend, Otsune (Choko Iida) who at that point loans him money and helps him find a job.  Meanwhile Kihachi has met Kumiko (Kazako Ojima) and her young daughter.  Kihachi convinces Kumiko to give up her job as a "hostess" and when Kumiko's daughter gets sick Kihachi steals money to pay the hospital bills and turns himself into the police, asking Otsune to take care of his two sons.

An Inn in Tokyo, like all of Ozu's film, is low-key but intensely emotional.  In his sound films, e.g. Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu does not move the camera at all but in 1935 there are still a few tracking shots and a few of the "pillow shots" (quiet shots of trains, laundry drying, etc. with no people in sight) that become more extensive later, offering a brief interlude between emotional scenes.  Although Ozu almost always dealt with relationships within families An Inn is Tokyo is considerably more pessimistic than his post-war films. 

Baseball 2022

 

This past week two very opposite points of view about baseball appeared in The New York Times:  Tyler Kepner's "A Season That Seemed Out of Reach Lands Safely in Our Gloves" and Matthew Walther's "Save Baseball by Nationalizing It;" the latter I think I think may have been intended as some sort of joke or parody, with its condescending conclusion: "Just as tourists who would never think of themselves as interested in art visit the National Gallery or the Metropolitan Museum because doing so seems suitably highbrow, perhaps one day they might go to baseball games out of some inchoate sense that it will be educational and enriching."

Baseball throughout its long history has had its ups and downs and has constantly been criticized as too slow, as Kepner writes, "every generation considers itself faster-paced than the last, so baseball, which makes you wait for the action, is an easy target."  Certainly part of the problem is that baseball does not televise well and only being at the game can one see its many beauties (I prefer to listen on the radio, where I can see the game in my mind's eye) but Kepner intelligently points out that one important element of baseball is that it is played every day and that trends come and go -- from the juiced-up ball that came in after the Black Sox scandal in 1919 to the introduction of the designated hitter in the 70's to the dubious use of so-called "analytics" these days -- but the game is fundamentally the same; I even saw a squeeze bunt yesterday in the Mets/Nationals game and the stolen base seems to be returning! 

Baseball, like ballet, has a beauty in its slowness as well as its action, its adagios and its allegros, and it is the complex relationship between the two that's a significant element in the beauty of each.  As Kepner writes: "Baseball is easy to love, if you let it -- as easy as catching an apple off a branch at the start of a new season."

The Rhapsodes: How 1940 Critics Changed American Film Culture by David Bordwell

 The first barrier was recognizing film as a valid popular art.  Already some of Hollywood's admirers put story first and recognized that the liveliest film was often the unpretentious comedy or melodrama.  Prestige pictures, especially literary adaptations, were no guarantee of vitality.  What makes this vitality possible, Feguson maintained, is a discrete technique.                                                                                        -- David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Bordwell's book is about four America film critics who wrote in the 1940's:  James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber and Parker Tyler.  There were not many full-time film critics in those days and these writers had other overlapping and helpful interests: Agee wrote books and scripts, Ferguson was an expert on jazz, Tyler was interested in Freud and Jung and also wrote poetry, Farber was a painter.  Bordwell's short book does a good job of describing the lives, the writing and the critical approaches of these critics who were influential beyond the actual numbers of their readers, though Agee did write film reviews for Time magazine for several years.

I do think Bordwell, who has written excellent books on Hollywood technique and Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu, overestimates the influence of these critics on those who followed -- Andrew Sarris, for instance, was more influenced by Eugene Archer and a number of French critics -- though there is no doubt that the four critics cited by Bordwell paved the way for later serious and analytical film writers.  Bordwell does quote significantly from the writings of Ferguson, Agee, Farber and Tyler but there are now books that have collections of these writers' articles, including collections of Farber and Agee in The Library of America. 

Edgard G. Ulmer's Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

 Ostensibly drawn to the visual possibilities of the script, Ulmer quickly threw himself into the project, working together with the experienced German-born art director Ernst Fegte, who helped transform the drab interiors of the Centennial Building into a dynamic and visually-striking space -- a world in which Russian constructivism and German expressionism merge.                                                                                 -- Noah Isenberg on Beyond the Time Barrier in Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014)

Ulmer made Beyond the Time Barrier for $125,000 at the abandoned 1936 Centennial Fairgrounds in Fort Worth, Texas, working quickly with stars Robert Clark and Darlene Tompkins, known mostly for their work in TV.  The Film has impressive visual style with an emphasis on triangles; even the wipes are triangular.  Clark is an air force major who flies a new plane accidentally into the future, 2024, where a plague has destroyed most the Earth's population and the remainder is living underground, except for the wealthy who have moved to Mars and Venus.  Clark is held prisoner until he manages to escape with the help of the mute Tompkins who can read his mind and with whom he has fallen in love.  Tompkins is killed in the escape attempt and Clark manages to escape back to 1960 by flying in the opposite direction of his individual flight.  When he arrives back to 1960 Clark has aged sixty-four years and attempts to convince the authorities that they have to stop testing nuclear weapons, the residual effects of which will cause a plague in the future.  It is not clear if the authorities believe him and the films ends with the Secretary of Defense saying "gentleman, we have a great deal to think about."  The film reflects the wide fear in the 50's and 60's of the possibility of World War III, something Ulmer particularly felt, having lived through World Wars II and III, which produced in him a deep skepticism about the arms race and science in general   

Stanley Donen's Give a Girl a Break (1954)

 As for Donen's relatively personal musicals, Royal Wedding and Give a Girl a Break are peculiarly somber affairs with only intermittent flashes of inspiration.                                                                                  --Andrew Sarris

One of the reasons why I prefer Donen's more personal musicals -- i.e, the ones he did not co-direct with Gene Kelley, who co-directed On the Town and Singing in the Rain -- is because I am not particularly charmed by Kelley's overbearing dancing.  Give a Girl a Break has at least one dance that is particularly beautiful, as Marge and Gower Champion dance on rooftops to "It Happens Every Time" by Burton Lane and Ira Gershwin. The other dances and dancers in the film, especially Bob Fosse (who did his own choreography) and Debbie Reynolds, have some lovely dancing somewhat burdened by Fosse's hat and some bizarre special effects.

Susan thought that Give a Girl a Break was claustrophobic and nightmarish and to a certain extent I agree with her:  this is a "musical comedy" without much comedy and I don't think Eric Blore would have helped.  The theatre where a musical is being staged and the small apartments where dancers live are cut off, just as the dancers are, from the outside world, as the women competing for a part in the musical -- Debbie Reynolds, Marge Champion, Helen Wood -- spend all their time studying for auditions and depend of the support of the men in their lives. This intriguing musical is a vivid combination of surreal fantasy images and a somewhat dreary realism. 

Andre de Toth's Pitfall (1948)

 Andre de Toth's most interesting films reveal an understanding of the instability and outright treachery of human relationships.                                                                                                                --Andrew Sarris

de Toth's film is a very unusual film noir, exposing the dark side of "the American dream" (an absurd term that should be abolished as soon as possible, by the way).  John Forbes (Dick Powell) fantasizes about chucking his dreary insurance job and heading for the South Seas but his wife Sue (Jane Wyatt) will have none of it, since John has a solid job and they have a young son, Johnny (Tommy Forbes). So restless John falls for Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) when he visits her to find out what gifts were given to her by thief Bill Smiley (Byron Barr), who was bonded by Forbes's company; Mona gives John an exciting ride on the speedboat that she doesn't want to give up.  Meanwhile the sleazy private dick J.B. MacDonald (a terrific Raymond Burr), who had investigated Mona for Forbes, is also smitten by her.  J.B. beats up Forbes in Forbes's own driveway and it is only when Mona goes to visit Forbes does she find out he is married. 

Things go downhill from there, as MacDonald gives Smiley (after he gets out of jail) a gun to go after Forbes while J.B. nicely does the packing for Mona so they can flee Los Angeles; Forbes shoots and kills Smiley while Mona kills MacDonald.  Mona goes to jail and Forbes goes back to Sue who agrees to "try again" in an ambiguous ending after two people are killed and one goes to jail because of Forbes's mistake. de Toth and cinematographer Harry Wild capture the routine dreariness that Forbes feels as his affair with Mona is limited to afternoons in dark Los Angeles bars until he has to hide in his own house when it's attacked by Smiley.  Mona is an unusually sympathetic femme fatale who had become involved with Forbes without knowing he was married and had only become involved with Smiley because, as she says "he was the only man who was nice to me; very few are."

 Forbes feels and the furtivenss