Turner Classic Movies September 2022

 September has a pretty solid line-up of films, but since most of the ones I like have been shown before on TCM you can look them up on this blog and if you don't find them send me an email and I'll tell you what I know and think about them.  The list here is just the major highlights.

Sept. 1:  Blake Edwards's marvelous visual comedy The Party (1968)

Sept. 4: Ernst Lubitsch's brilliant To Be or Not to Be  (1942)

Sept. 5:  G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929), starring Louise Brooks and Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance, a wonderful musical comedy starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

Sept. 12: King Vidor's great silent film The Crowd (1928)

Sept. 13:  Jean Renoir's American film The Woman on the Beach (1947)

Sept. 16:  Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Sept. 18: Walsh's Manpower (1941), with Marlene Dietrich and Edward G. Robinson

Sept. 23: Nicholas Ray's great film noir In a Lonely Place (1950)

Sept. 24:  Budd Boetticher's beautifully austere Western Ride Lonesome (1959)

Sept. 26: Ermanno Olmi's soaring The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

Sept. 27: Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street  (1945)

Harold Kress's Apache War Smoke (1952)

 Harold Kress was primarily an editor, Apache War Smoke being one of the only three films he directed, in 1951 and 1952.  Not surprisingly the film is well edited, especially in the more active scenes of Apache attacks on a stagecoach station in the Southwest, with the staff and stagecoach passengers fighting off the attackers.  The enclosed spaces of the station are beautifully photographed in black-and-white by the estimable John Alton, whose brilliant cinematography was most effectively used in the films of Anthony Mann, such as Raw Deal (1948).  The script was written by Jerry Davis, who worked mostly in television, based on a story by Ernest Haycox, who also wrote the story that was the basis for John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).

The cast includes Hank Worden, a member of John Ford's stock company, and stars Gilbert Roland, an outlaw known as Peso, and Robert Horton as Peso's estranged son Tom. who manages the stage station.  Relations between the passengers become complicated and tense, with Apaches attacking the station in search of a murderer; gold from the stagecoach locked in box in a storeroom; a triangle of Tom, Nancy (stagecoach passenger and Tom's former lover, played by Barbara Ruick), and Lorraine (Patricia Tiernan), passing through with her soldier father.  Fanny Wilson (a vibrant Glenda Farrell), another stagecoach passenger, is a former lover of Peso's. Also present is Cyril Snowden (Gene Lockhart), a rather pompous employee of the stagecoach company who turns out to be pretty handy with a rifle. 

The film effectively demonstrates the tensions between the pioneering stagecoach routes and the Native Americans in a part of the country where there is no official law yet, as well as the tensions between those who follow the law and those who choose not to do so.  Kress's biggest achievement is not so much the effective battle scenes as creating individuals beneath the surface of the somewhat stereotyped characters, especially considering that the film is only 67 minutes long. 

Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie (1995)

 Chabrol was one of the most enigmatic directors.  A fringe instigator of the original New Wave, he managed to create a world for himself -- some private Hollywood -- in which it was possible to produce a stream of subtle studies of human motivation.                                                                            

  -- David Thomson

Claude Chabrol was one of those directors whose films to which I always looked forward: he made more that fifty films between 1958 and his death in 2010.  He didn't always get the scripts or the actors or the money he wanted but he always persevered to make the film, including more that a dozen that I would call masterpieces, among La Ceremonie, from his late period, based on Ruth Rendell's Judgement in Stone and Jean Genet's The Maids.  The title refers to the march to the guillotine, though in this case it is a march to the death for a bourgeois family  (mother, father, two children) who hire a maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), and treat her condescendingly and patronizingly. Sophie, who manages to hide the fact that she is illiterate, becomes friends with a postal clerk Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) who encourages Sophie to rebel.

Class distinctions are clear-cut in La Ceremonie, with Jeanne and Sophie watch variety shows on TV while their employer Madame Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) and her family watch Mozart operas. One can see this film as Chabrol saw it, as Marxist, but also as a warning about everything from keeping guns in the house to making sure you employees are properly vetted (both Sophie and Jeanne were suspected of murder) and not taking your bourgeois life for granted, though even if you do all these things one can never be certain of anyone's motivations.   The low-key cinematography for La Ceremonie is by Bernard Zitzerman and the effectively sparse score is by Mattieu Chabrol, Claude Chabrol's son. 

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder and the Movies by Paul Fischer

 Lizzie was certain Thomas Edison had something to do with her husband's disappearance.  Everyone knew he stole credit that wasn't his and Louis had vanished eight months before Edison had suddenly unveiled "his" Kinotoscope, so similar to Louis's invention.  Adolphe, too, was certain his father had been "eliminated."  It was said, after all, that Edison sometimes worked with Allan Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, whose squads infiltrated unions and violently broke up labot movements, whose armed watchmen could be relied on to do whatever it took to protect the financial interests of their clients.                                                                                                                                                                 Paul Fischer, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Fischer makes a good case for Louis Le Prince as the inventor of the motion picture; his patents in America and Europe in 1890 were the first from a number of inventors working on this same idea.  But Le Prince disappeared in 1890 and no trace of him was ever found, therefore Louis's wife Lizzie could not invoke the patents until 1897, when Louis was declared officially dead and Thomas Edison had succeeded in manipulating his own patents in order to declare himself the inventor of motion pictures and to sue anyone who exhibited films as infringements on his invention (which was actually developed by Edison's employee William K. Dickson).  Le Prince's first film, Roundhay Garden Scene, was produced in 1888 but shown only to friends and not publicly shown.

Fischer's book is partly a defense of Le Prince as inventor of motion pictures -- including a great deal of technical detail -- but is also a history of others who were working towards the same end, including those we may have heard of, Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers, as well as those we may not have heard of, William Friese-Greene and Etienne-Jules Marey.  Fischer's research is both deep and wide, from the France of Le Prince's birth to the time he spent in America and, mostly, in England, including the names of all his helpers and assistants.

Budd Boetticher's Westbound (1959)

Westbound is often ignored as a Boetticher Western because it does not have the single-minded and austere quality of the Ranown Westerns that Boetticher made around the same time, including Ride Lonesome, also made in 1959, that were written by Burt Kennedy and produced by Harry Joe Brown.   But Westbound is an excellent Western even if it is outside the cycle of Boetticher's more personal films.

Westbound stars craggy Randolph Scott as a Union officer in 1864 who is assigned to run a stagecoach company in Julesberg, Colorado that will make daily shipments of gold from California to the East to help the Union Army.  Julesberg is run by Southern sympathizers who will do all they can to stop Scott, including destroying stagecoaches full of innocent civilians. Scott also has to deal with his former lover, played by Virginia Mayo, who is now married to the town boss, as well as with Karen Steele, who is married to a disabled Union soldier, played by Michael Dante. The movie is beautifully photographed in Warnercolor, with its emphasis on greens and blues, by veteran cinematographer J. Pervell Marley, whose career began in the twenties and includes Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (1941).

When Scott has to shoot it our with the town boss's hired guns he is surprised to see the town's citizens show up to help (another rebuke of High Noon).  Virginia Mayo decides to head back East while Karen Steele, whose husband has been killed by the hired guns, stays to run the stagecoach station and hopes that Scott will eventually return, as he rides off at the end.

Payment in Blood by Elizabeth George (1989)

 "Dad?"  Barbara repeated.  He gave no answer. She walked into the room, lowered the volume, and turned to him.  He was asleep, his jaw slack, the tubes that fed him oxygen askew in his nostrils.  Racing magazines covered the floor near his chair and a newspaper was open over his knees.  It was too hot in the room, in the entire house for that matter, and the musty smell of her parents' ageing seemed to seep from the walls and the floor and the furniture.  This mixed with a stronger, more recent scent of food overcooked and inedible.                                                                                                                                       -- Elizabeth George, Payment in Blood (Bantam Dell, 1989)

This is the second of George's novels about posh Thomas Lynley and his working class partner at Scotland Yard Barbara Havers, who in this book are assigned to investigate a murder in Scotland among an acting and producing group gathered for rehearsals.  A continuity in the novels involves Lynley's infatuation with Lady Helen Clyde, who turns up in Scotland, sleeping with one of the actors, and not only provokes Lynley's jealousy but his jealousy interferes with the investigation of the murder, as well as a second murder in Scotland.  There are too many suspects and too many red herrings for my taste but George gradually moves to the most likely candidates, with Havers and Lynley both considerably influenced by their respective backgrounds, as everyone in the acting group has a secret in the past or in the present. George's prose is as rich and detailed as in the other two books in this group about which I have posted, and she deftly portrays the complex history and psychology of her characters. 

The New York Yankees vs. The Seattle Mariners Aug. 9, 2022

 Yes, there were some base running mistakes by the Yankees on Aug. 9:   in the tenth inning Andrew Benintendi wandered off second base and was picked off; in the eleventh inning Michael Andujar was doubled off second when Aaron Hicks hit a line drive to the second baseman; in the twelfth Isiah Kiner-Falefa was thrown out at second trying to stretch a single after Jose Trevino was caught in a rundown off second. While announcer Cameron Maybin was making consescending remarks that the game looked like Little League it occurred to me that perhaps they don't have a "ghost runner" in Little League extra innings like they do in Major League Baseball, a runner on second base to start each extra inning.  This rule was supposed to be gone this year but they kept it -- and I fondly hope this is the last year they have it -- because of the compressed schedule due to the late start of the season.  It  can only be disorienting for a runner to be on second base when they did not earn their way there and feeling the pressure that one is in "scoring position" and it is important to score first if you are the visiting team; the Yankee base running mistakes were all related to the goofy rule of the "ghost runner."

Part of what is going on here is related to the attempts to make games shorter.  As I have previously said, all that needs to be done is to enforce the rules that currently exist:  the pitcher has to pitch within twelve seconds of receiving the ball when there are no runners on base and batters are not allowed to step out of the batter's box unless time is called (and a few other exceptions, including a passed ball and a wild pitch).  If one ever gets the chance to see a recorded baseball game from the fifties one will see that batters almost never stepped out of the box, unlike now when it is common for a batter to step out after every pitch, which makes it often impossible for the pitcher to pitch within twelve seconds, i.e., both rules need to be enforced. 

Frank R. Strayer's Blondie in Society (1941)

Blondie in Society is the ninth of twenty-eight Blondie movies made by Columbia Pictures between 1939 and 1950, of which twelve were directed by Frank R. Strayer and seven were written by Karen DeWolf, who made Blondie in Society, along with veteran cinematographer Henry Freulich, who photographed five films in 1941.  The verbal wit and physical comedy of this film may even have been influenced by brilliant comedy writer Preston Sturges, whose first two directorial efforts were released in 1940.

Blondie is played by Penny Singleton and Dagwood by Arthur Lake, as in all the Blondie films.  Trouble starts when police and bank officials show up at the Bumstead residence suspecting that someone had forged Dagwood's signature on a check  for fifty dollars.  Dagwood says he wrote the check as a loan for his friend Cliff (Chick Chandler), a dog breeder.  Unfortunately he forgot to tell Blondie about the loan after she had counted on that money for a bicycle for their son Baby Dumpling, a new washing machine and a permanent for herself.  Blondie insists that Cliff return the money immediately but Cliff doesn't have the money so he gives Dagwood a Great Dane named Chin Up White Tie for Dinner instead.  Then chaos and entropy ensue, including Dagwood being attacked by a woman with a broom when Chin Up eats the pies cooling on her window.

I'm not one to worry about so-called "spoilers," since knowing the plot in advance usually will enhance rather than diminish my enjoyment of a movie, book, ballet, etc. but I will limit my comments here because the plot here is so brilliantly detailed and the performances so superb that I would find it  difficult to capture the combined intelligence of the screenplay and mise-en-scene verbally; a good print is available on YouTube. For the time being I just want to praise -- in addition to DeWolf's screenplay and Strayer's direction -- the excellent casting and performances of the character actors who so beautifully support Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton:  Jonathan Hale as J.C. Dithers, Dagwood's agressive boss; Edgar Kennedy, of the "slow burn," as the veterinarian who takes care of Chin Up; William Frawley as Waldo Pincus, who has his own Great Dane named Hamlet's Soliloquy; Charles Lane as the washing machine salesman, who has a demonstration machine attack him; the juveniles Larry Simms as Baby Dumpling and Danny Mummert, the sharp-tongued Alvin, Baby Dumpling's friend. Excellent, as usual, is the Bumstead's dog Daisy, played by a mixed breed terrier, poodle, cocker spaniel.

The film ends with Blondie taking Chin Up White Tie to a dog show with a $500 prize and when Chin Up won't allow himself to be shown Blondie rouses him by beautifully singing Joyce Kilmer's Trees, put to music by Oscar Rasbach, and wins the prize.

William Keighley's Journal of a Crime 1934

 Journal of a Crime just makes it under the wire as a pre-Code film, the Code going into effect later in 1934.  It is written by F. Hugh Herbert and Charles Kenyon and based on a play by Jacques Duval.  It is basically a two-person story:  Francoise Moliet (Ruth Chatterton) kills her husband's (Adolf Menjou) mistress, Odette Florey (Claire Dodd) and gets away with it when they catch a bankrobber, Costelli (Noel Madison) who had killed a bank teller and was hiding in the theatre where the murder of Odette took place as the play that Mr. Moliet had written was in rehearsal; Costell is blamed for also shooting Odette and is sentenced to death.  Paul Moliet doesn't turn his wife in and just lets her guilty conscience gradually destroy her health, as Paul even takes in Odette's dog and Francoise goes to Costelli in his jail cell to confess to him; Costelli doesn't care and only wants to know how Robinson Crusoe ends, since his tattered copy is missing the ending.

Francoise eventually decides to turn herself in but, as she is walking to the district attorney's office she rescues a child from being hit by a car;  she herself suffers a severe brain injury and when she recovers she cannot remember anything of the past.  The film ends with Paul taking Francoise home.

This admittedly contrived plot is beautifully acted, with complete conviction by Chatterton (whose film acting career ended in the thirties) and dapper Menjou (who acted in Chaplin's A Womam of Paris in 1923 and made his last film in 1960).  Keighley, who directed mostly routine films (from 1932 to 1953), works with cinematographer Ernest Haller to keep his camera mobile, as Paul continues his writing career while Francoise stays miserably at home.

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne

 One of the main reasons for Pym's many rejections was the closure of the commercial circulating libraries, where for a small fee readers could rent out books at a time when buying books was still costly.  This had been the key not only to Pym's own voracious consumption of fiction as a young woman, but also to her wide readership back in the fifties.                                                                       -- Paula Byrne, The Adventures of Miss Barara Pym (William Collins, 2021)

It is always a pleasure to discover a new writer whose books give one pleasure.  I first heard of Barbara Pym in Alison Light's review of Byrne's biography in "The London Review of Books" 29 July 2021 and have now posted comments about three of her novels on this blog.  Pym published six books from 1950 to 1961 and then faced only rejection from not only her own publisher but more than twenty others to whom she submitted manuscripts; she was considered old-fashioned and her books were not considered particularly profitable (if Byrne unearthed any actual sales figures for Pym's books she doesn't share them with us). Finally Pym was able to get additional books published after "The Times Literary Supplement" did a survey in 1977 of the most under-rated and most over-rated novels of the 20th century and Pym's name was the only one listed as under-rated by two of the people surveyed, Philip Larkin(who had long been a supporter) and Lord David Cecil, English professor at Oxford (from which Pym had graduated). Pym died in 1980 and had four books published posthumously that had not been accepted by a publisher.

As fascinating and beautifully written as Byrne's book is and as useful as she found Pym's diaries (from which she quotes frequently) -- she has been very influenced by Pym's style -- it remains a question as to how important the life of a writer is to the understanding and appreciation of her work.  There is a great deal of information in Byrne's book about Pym's Nazi lover as well as her many failed relationships with men, who were often homosexual, married or otherwise unavailable. I read biographies of artists because I am fascinated about their ability to accomplish so much in this world that defeats the efforts of many of us.  Pym had a particularly complex life, filled with happiness as well as sadness, but she managed in her novels to create a world of her own, filled with requited and unrequited love in a small slice of England, with characters vividly alive. 

Alfred L. Werker's At Gunpoint (1955)

 Fred MacMurray has never gotten his due as an actor; though he made successful soap operas (Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow, 1956), comedies (Remember the Night, 1940, written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitch Leisen) and film noir (Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, 1944) he seems unfortunately remembered mostly for his TV program My Three Sons (1960-1972) and his awful movies for Disney (The Shaggy Dog, 1959).  MacMurray also starred in seventeen Westerns, mostly low-budget films with journeymen directors, with the exception of the excellent The Texas Rangers, directed by King Vidor in 1936.

Alfred L. Werker was one of those journeymen directors who made a number of superb Westerns in the fifties (see my previous posts), including At Gunpoint.  Werker's film is seen as something of an imitation of Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952), but I see it as more of a response to Zinneman's film, just as Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) is.  High Noon was written by Carl Foreman, a blacklisted writer who was understandably bitter about how his friends had deserted him, just as the townfolk in the film deserted sheriff Gary Cooper.  In Werker's film the townspeople try to get shopkeeper Jack Wright (MacMurray)to leave town after killing a bank robber, when the remaining members of the outlaw gang kill a new sheriff and threaten the entire town.  But Jack sticks to his guns, even when his brother-in-law Wally (James O'Hara) is killed (the gang thought he was Jack).  Jack gives an inspiring talk to the town about the importance of community and at the last moment the townspeople and his wife Martha back him up.

At Gunpoint was written by Daniel Ullman and photographed in color and cinemascope by Ellsworth Fredericks, both of whom were involved with many Westerns on film and on television.  MacMurray is strong and forthright as the shopkeeper who won't back down, even though he barely knows how to use a gun.  Martha is played with intelligence and subtlety by Dorothy Malone.  Walter Brennan is the chess-playing doctor who stands by MacMurray when no one else will and the rest of the cast includes character actors John Qualen, Skip Homeier and Whit Bissel.  Werker's direction is precise and graceful.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

 About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion.  And this same widening gulf -- which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich -- will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along line of social stratification, less and less frequent.  So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.         --H,G. Wells, The Time Machine (Signet Classics, originally published in 1895)

The main body of Wells's book is in quotations, as The Time Traveller (as he is called) explains the details of time travel and his visit to the year 802,701, where the world has evolved to the working Morlocks who live underground and the peaceful Eloi, who fear the Morlocks as cannibals.  The Time Traveller returns to the Victorian era to tell his fellow scientists what will happen in the future, which the scientists are skeptical about until The Time Traveller shows them vegetation he brought back from the future and then disappears with his time machine three years later.  

When I read this book as a child I missed out completely on its didactic quality; now Well's warning about increasing class differences seems more relevant than ever, as studies show it becoming more and more difficult to transcend the class one is born into and the so-called middle class is being squeezed out.  One can still read this as an adventure story, as The Time Traveller examines the world of 802,701, dallies with Weena, a female Eloi, and finds museums devoted to the past, where everything has crumbled to dust, though the tone is indeed pessimistic.