Turner Classic Movies June 2022

 June has a pretty good selection of films, most of which we have seen before.  There are several films each by William Keighley, William Wellman, and William Seiter, all credible craftsmen; I especially like Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933).   There are also films by Anthony Mann, whose film noirs and Westerns are among the best in those genres.  And there are three films by Chaplin -- The Great Dictator (1940) and Modern Times (1936) on June 3 and Monsieur Verdoux on June 23.  Other films I like in June include the following:

June 4:  Raoul Walsh's corrosive White Heat (1949)

June 6:  Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967)

June 7: James Whale's superior, pre-code Waterloo Bridge (1931) and Howard Hawks's great Western Rio Bravo (1959)

June 9: Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953) and Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)

June 12:  Joseph Mankiewicz's romantic The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), with a superb score by Bernard Herrmann.

June 14:  Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952)

June 20: Buster Keaton's lovely The General (1927

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about any film playing on TCM in June.

Edwin L. Marin's A Study in Scarlet (1933)

 This film version of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887, has nothing to do with the plot of the novel except the character of Sherlock Holmes, played in the film by Reginald Owen, who also wrote the script with Robert Florey, who directed Daughter of Shanghai in 1937 (which I wrote about yesterday), also with Anna May Wong. Wong is the best thing in the convoluted plot but, unfortunately, she is only on screen for about twelve minutes, briefly bringing Marin's sluggish direction to life.  There is plenty of fog in the film, effectively obscuring the cheap sets in this low-budget film from Poverty Row Tifffany Pictures.

Robert Florey's Daughter of Shanghai (1937)

Robert Florey was a prolific director of excellent B-films in the thirties and forties -- of which Daughter of Shanghai is a good example -- before moving to television in the fifties.  Daughter of Shanghai runs sixty-five minutes and is a brisk and complex film that has Anna May Wong tracking down a group of human traffickers who killed her father.  She is aided by a federal officer, played by Korean Phillip Ahn.  Wong moves quickly from San Francisco to the Caribbean, where she finds Charles Bickford running the operation, with the help of J, Carrol Nash and Anthony Quinn.  She is not really a "daughter of Shanghai" but takes that title in order to get a job dancing in Bickford's sleazy cafe from which he runs the smuggling of Chinese into the United States. The plot moves at a fast pace that keeps one from noticing the holes in it, as Ahn and Wong are kidnapped by the traffickers and brought back to San Francisco, where they discover that Cecil Cunningham, a regular buyer at Wong's father's import business, is the real boss of the organization.

Daughter of Shanghai is a title similar to 1931's Daughter of the Dragon (1931), where Wong played the daughter of Fu Manchu and which I posted about earlier this month.  Wong fought long and hard during her career to avoid the role of the exotic Asian, with some limited success, and the irony of Florey's film is that she only played that role briefly, as a dancer, in order expose human trafficking; at one point she even impersonates a man in order to be included among smuggled Chinese.

She Had to Say Yes (1933), directed by George Amy and Busby Berkeley

Earlier this month, in reference to Berkeley's The Gang's All Here I said one would have to see it to believe it; now I have to say the same about She Had to Say Yes, a movie about a clothing manufacturer basically pimping out his stenographers to his clients in order to get more orders.  Some see this pre-code film as an example of Berkeley's misogyny but to me it comes across as a riveting critique of patriarchy. 

Owner Sol Glasser (Ferdinand Gottschalk) thinks his customers are tired of dealing with the firm's models ("hard gold-diggers") so he decides to offer his stenographers to his customers and tells the women that "candy and flowers are okay but you cannot accept expensive presents or money; after all we are giving you a bonus for this completely volunteer work."  Stenographer Florence Denny (Loretta Young) is not a volunteer until salesman Tommy Nelson (Regis Toomey), whom she intends to marry, says she could help build up the nest egg they are saving for their marriage.  In reality Tommy just wants more time alone so he can carry on with stenographer Birdie (Suzanne Kilborn).  When Flo finds out that Tommy is unfaithful she wants nothing more to do with him and takes up with buyer Daniel Drew (Lyle Talbot) to whom Tommy had introduced her.  Then Daniel wants Flo to act seductively with buyer Luther Haines (Hugh Herbert) in order to help Daniel sign a business agreement, which Flo does, along with revealing Haines's perfidy to his wife.

The men in this film are often inebriated and aggressive to the women.  When a buyer says to stenographer Maizee (Winnie Lightner) that he's from Missouri she says "I'm from the Virgin Islands" and kicks the buyer down the stairs.  At the end Tommy socks Daniel; Florence denounces them both, saying "you men treat women as if we were the dirt under your feet; I wouldn't trust you as far as you could throw a piano,"  then sadly and inexplicably accepts Daniel's offer of marriage as "the lesser of two evils," making it clear how few choices she has. 

This was Berkely's first directorial effort and he was assigned editor George Amy to help him.  Berkeley is mostly remembered for his often bizarre choreography in the early thirties but also directed non-musicals in the thirties and forties before returning exclusively to choreography in the fifties and sixties.  

New York City Ballet, May 21, 2022

 In the second act, a wedding march leads to an eighteenth-century-style diversion (the youthful Symphony No. 9 for strings) with a tender pas de deux.  Its subject is the fulfilled dream of love foretold in the first act, and it ends with the most ravishing protracted dying fall in all ballet.                --Arlene Croce on Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, The New Yorker (5/16/77)

I don't have a great deal to say about A Midsummer Night's Dream that I haven't said in three previous posts (5/28/16, 5/28/17, 6/01/19) but it was wonderful to see this beautiful ballet again, as artistic directors Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan have been doing a superb job of keeping Balanchine's ballets in good shape since they have taken over from Peter Martins.  Not only are the ballets in good shape so is the music under music director Andrew Litton, who conducted Saturday's performance, in which Indiana Woodward and Andrew Veyette were exquisite in the second act divertissement.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is somewhat unusual among Balanchine's ballets in that casting can sometimes make a difference and Saturday afternoon the casting was close to perfect, including Unity Phelan as Titania, Chun Wai Chan as her cavalier. Daniel Ulbricht as Oberon and Taylor Stanley as Puck (who hammed it up at an acceptable level).  The children from the school as butterflies and fairies were delightful, rehearsed and supervised by Dena Abergel and Arch Higgins, and the corps was terrific in its speed and attack. 

No matter how many times I have seen a Balanchine ballet I always see something new each time.  This time I particularly noticed the details of the first act, where the Shakespeare story seems to dominate but actually takes much less time than the lovely dancing of Titania, her cavalier, her retinue, as well as Hippolyta (an impressive Emily Kikta) and her hounds. 

George Cukor: A Double Life by Patrick McGilligan (1991)

The unmovable camera [in the early days of sound] may have dictated another unusual aspect of Cukor's approach.  Throughout his career -- as he did in the days of codirecting -- Cukor often relied on someone else to "suggest" the camera setups.  It was not unusual to find a Hollywood director who did not peer through the camera lens; many, astonishingly, never did.  However, it was certainly unusual to find a director who delegated the actual placement and camera angles to someone else as regularly as Cukor did.                                                                                                                                                                         -- Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life (St. Martin's Press, 1991)

When I first became interested in movies I enjoyed Cukor's films for their humor and the performances of his actors.  Gradually, however, it became apparent that Cukor was extremely dependent on his script writers and his cameraman and had little or no visual style, i.e., once one has seen one of Cukor's films there is nothing new to be discovered in seeing it again.  Cukor directed Katherine Hepburn beautifully in ten movies and his movie with Garbo, Camille (1937) was one of Garbo's best. But in his musicals (A Star is Born, Les Girls, My Fair Lady) there was little dancing and the singing performances were handled by someone else. As McGilligan makes clear, Cukor was more of a craftsman than an artist.

McGilligan struggles with Cukor's homosexuality, something Cukor revealed only to his "secret unit" of friends and of course to the young men he regularly paid for sex.  Some people think Cukor got his reputation as a director of women because of his sexuality; he was supposedly fired from Gone  with the Wind because Clark Gable felt that the women in the cast were getting too much of his attention.  McGilligan's book is fully researched and well-written but he can't seem to find a relationship between Cukor's homosexuality and his work as a film director (perhaps there is none?).  Cukor came to Hollywood in the early sound era after success in theatre direction and McGilligan does a superb job of limning Cukor's work in the context of the film business and changing mores of the world from Cukor's stage work in the twenties to his final film (Rich and Famous) in 1981.

Lloyd Corrigan's Daughter of the Dragon (1931)

 The lurid, pre-Code Daughter of the Dragon continues TCM's excellent series of Anna May Wong films.  In this film Wong portrays the daughter of Fu Manchu (Warner Oland) who has returned to London to get even with the Petrie family, whom he blames for the death of his wife and son.  Fu Manchu poisons Sir John Petrie's pipe tobacco but is shot before he can kill Sir John's son Ronald (Bramwell Fletcher) and tells Ling Moy (Wong) to finish the job.  Ling Moy can't kill Ronald because she's fallen in love with him but Fu Manchu's coterie insist she must do as her father ordered.  She proceeds with the attempt and along the way falls in love with Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa), who works for Scotland Yard and who kills Ling Moy when she attacks Ronald.

This is one of several Fu Manchu films from the early thirties, based on Sax Rohmer's successful novels.  Daughter of the Dragon is photographed by Victor Milner, who later worked with Lubitsch and Preston Sturges, with dialogue by Sidney Buchman, who wrote screenplays for Frank Capra and others.  Anna May Wong plays a complex character, capable of falling in love but ultimately loyal to her father. Director Corrigan made films in the twenties and thirties but then switched exclusively to acting.  Most of the film takes place at night and in dark tunnels and basements, with intense scenes of fear and violence. 

Busby Berkely's The Gang's All Here (1943)

 One has to see The Gang's All Here to believe it.  After being a "dance director" on Warner Brothers movies in the 30's (42nd Street and Footlight Parade, both from 1933) Berkely gets a chance with Fox to do this extraordinary musical for those of us that think that too many musicals have too little music and dance.  In The Gang's All Here the music never stops in this story about WWII New York and Brazilian dancer Carmen Miranda, who sings and dances in the most opulent number "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat," in which 80 female dancers dance with bananas as big as canoes, though most of the dancing is done by Berkley's camera, as it gracefully glides through the bananas and shoots kaleidoscope shots from overhead.  Star Alice Faye gets to sing some intimate songs by Harry Warren and Leo Robin, including "No Love, No Nothing" as she does the ironing at home while waiting for her sweetheart to return from the war and "A Journey to a Star" on the Staten Island Ferry as she gets to know soldier James Ellison who, strangely, neither sings nor dances.

The film also includes Charlotte Greenwood, who does some great dancing and at one point picks up her cat thinking it's a telephone in this musical comedy without enough comedy, even though Eugene Palette and Edward Everett Horton give it a good try, along with too many manglings of the English language by Carmen Miranda.  The final number is the hallucinatory "Polka Dot Polka," which seems to be an influence on Kubrick's finale for 2001: A Space Odyssey.  

Because of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals had changed considerably since Berkeley's time at Warner Brothers.  In The Gang's All Here Berkeley does make a slight reference to Astaire/ Rogers with the dancing team of Tony and Sally DeMarco but Berkeley's style is on the way out and Gene Kelly is on the way in (his first movie was in 1942) but Berkeley goes out with excessive and impressive style.  

Chester M. Franklin's Toll of the Sea 1922

 The reasons for seeing Toll of the Sea do not include Chester Franklin's direction, the prolific writer Frances Marion's story (Madam Butterfly in China) or the acting of Kenneth Harlan and Beatrice Bentley; the two reasons for seeing this film are the subtle performance by Anna May Wong (seventeen at the time and in her first starring role) and the two-color Technicolor (red and green) cinematography of Ray Rennahan and J.D. Ball   This is the earliest surviving film made with this color process and is quite beautiful, with almost all the static shots being exterior shots including ocean waves or masses of trees.

The film is in some ways offensive even by standards of the time, as Lotus Flower (Wong) rescues Allan Carver (Kenneth Harlan) from the ocean, they fall in love and marry "Chinese style" (whatever that means) and Carver returns to America and marries his sweetheart Barbara (Beatrice Bentley). Barbara convinces Allan to return to China and tell Lotus Flower the truth and Lotus Flower gives Barbara and Allen her toddler son (Allan is the father) and drowns herself in the ocean. 

Anna May Wong's performance is subtle and touching, as when she thinks she is going to America she gets dressed up in 19th century clothes based on an old book of fashions she has and when Allan returns she wears an elaborate bridal gown to meet him, radiating happiness that quickly turns to sadness.   

Serenade: A Balanchine Story by Toni Bentley

 She lifts her arms from about his neck, and it flies loose and high as she turns her face, her whole torso, away from him, twisting deeply out from her waist while her hips and legs stay beside him:  her claim made, her body open wide to you, the audience, announcing her victory.               

Her triumph is short-lived, Balanchine never stops anywhere:  dancing's only permanence, only stability, is progression.  But if any notion of coupledom or resolution appears imminent, he muddles the waters immediately.                                                                                                                                       -- Toni Bentley, Serenade: A Balanchine Story (Pantheon Books, 2022)

Toni Bentley danced with the NYC Ballet from 1975 to 1984 -- a year after George Balanchine died -- when she retired after a hip injury.  She danced Balanchine's Serenade to Tschaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C many times and her book gives on a sense of what it is actually like to be in the cast, minute by minute and even second by second.  She also includes a great deal of history, alternating with the detailed descriptions of the choreography, starting with the first performance in 1934 just after Lincoln Kirstein brought Balanchine to the United States and going forward, as well as going backward to the choreography of the great Marius Petipa in Russia and Balanchine's early days as a dancer and choreographer.  

The only other book I know of that is dedicated to the details of one particular ballet is Robert Maiorno's and Valerie Brooks's Balanchine's Mozartiana:  The Making of a Masterpiece (1985).  Though Maiorno was a dancer for NYC Ballet he never danced in Mozartiana, though Balanchine allowed Maiorno and Brooks (a journalist) to observe his choreography.  Bentley's book of course is very different, Serenade as a dance seen from inside it and including a great deal of detail not only about the ballet itself but about the dancers who danced it, the lighting, the costume changes over the years and everything else about this great ballet.  And Balanchine is always there, "a single mortal man spinning generations of mortal women into visible immortality, swirling, swooning, running, running, running into unending time with him."  I have seen Serenade many times but I am only just beginning to understand its mysterious beauties.

I also want to mention that Bentley provides an excellent and detailed bibliography and has chosen superb photographs; I particularly like the two of Maria Calegari in the same pose in Serenade, one from 1974 and one from 1984, where in the later one her arabesque is extending to infinity. 

New York City Ballet April 30, 2022

The extraordinary program consisted of three ballets by Balanchine -- Divertimento No. 15, Allegro Brillante, The Four Temperaments -- and Jerome Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun.

Unpredictable and fantastic the sequences are in the way they crowd close the most extreme contrasts of motion possible -- low lunges, sharp stabbing steps, arms flung wide, startling lifts at half height, turns in plie, dragged steps, reverences and strange renverses; then an abrupt dazzle of stabbing leaps or a sudden light and easy syncopated stepping.                                                                                                                         -- Edwin Denby, "The Four Temperaments," Dance News (Dec. 1946)

It is the ballet that, more than any other, defines the idealism of the classical style as Balanchine sees it.  Of course, we know that perfection is impossible -- that no cast will ever completely realize the vision that Balanchine holds before us -- but it is important to feel this as the tension of idealism, and not as the strain of inadequacy.                                                                                                                                                 -- Arlene Croce on Divertimento No. 15, The New Yorker (Jan. 30, 1978)

There have been a number of improvements at NYC Ballet since Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan took over, particularly in the casting, as we saw on Saturday, including Unity Phelan and Indiana Woodward in Divertimento No.15, Sterling Hyltin in Afternoon of a Faun, Tiler Peck in Allegro Brillante and Ashley Hod in The Four Temperaments. 

Three of the four ballets in this program were from the 50's and one, The Four Temperaments, from the 40's, but they all looked both modern and classical, in excellent shape and beautifully danced.  My ten-year-old daughter (who takes regular ballet classes) was particularly fond of Allegro Brillante because of its speed and all the steps it contained (Balanchine once said that in thirteen minutes it contained everything he knew about classical ballet).  Divertimento No. 15 is the only surviving ballet Balanchine did to Mozart's music, Allegro Brillante is to Tschaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 3 in E-flat major and The Four Temperaments is done to a score by Hindemith that Balanchine commissioned himself and paid for with money he earned from Broadway shows he choreographed.  The music for Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun is by Debussy and the ballet is influenced by but quite different from Nijinsky's original ballet of 1912.

Each ballet from this program took us into a different world, from the world of 18th century courtliness in Divertimento No. 15 to two dancers in a dance studio in Afternoon of a Faun, a world of 19th century classical ballet in Allegro Brillante and finally to the rituals of perhaps a vanished civilization in The Four Temperaments, all evoked by intense solo dancing, pas de deux and an impressive corps de ballet.