Turner Classic Movies Sept. 2018

Nothing particularly new or exciting this month, just a good collection of solid classics, most of which we have seem.

Sept. 2 has Howard Hawks's delightful  Monkey Business (1952) and Chris Marker's short La Jeetee (1962), a beautiful and precise film that was the basis for the bloated Twelve Monkeys.

Sept. 4 has John M. Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934), later remade by Douglas Sirk.

Sept. 5 has Dean Martin (and Jerry Lewis) in Frank Tashlin's Hollywood or Bust (1956) and Martin with Judy Holiday in Vincente Minnelli's lovely musical Bells are Ringing (1960).

Sept. 7 has two excellent films noirs:  Fritz Lang's corrosive The Big Heat (1953) and Byron Haskin's Too Late for Tears (1949)

Sept. 8 has a John Huston late masterpiece The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

Sept. 9 has Josef von Sternberg's elegant The Devil is a Woman (1935) and Anthony Mann's film noir Desperate (1947)

Sept. 10 has Rudolph Mate's fatalistic D.O.A. (1950) and Nicholas Ray's first film They Live By Night (1949)

Sept. 11 has Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and Sept. 12 has Howard Hawks's great Western Rio Bravo (1959), two terrific films that signal the end of the classical era.

Sept. 15 has Otto Preminger's intense Angel Face (1953).

Sept. 16 has two Jean Renoir masterpieces, Rules of the Game (1939) and The Golden Coach (1953)

Sept. 18 has Jacque Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), Preminger's wonderful Carmen Jones (1954), King Vidor's early talkie musical Hallelujah (1929) and Vidor's film of Elmer Rice's Street Scene (1931).

Sept. 19 has one of my favorite Billy Wilder films Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), only superficially vulgar.

Sept. 24 has Joseph H. Lewis's intensely beautiful Gun Crazy (1950).

Sept. 28 has Edgar Ulmer's lovely noir Western The Naked Dawn (1955)

Film Gris, Brainstorm (1965) and Without Honor (1949)

I tend to limit my definition of film noir to the postwar period of chaos and uncertainty and up to the 50's of McCarthyism and the Cold War.  Things that are noirish but don't quite fit into the definition, such as William Conrad's Brainstorm and Irving Pichel's Without Honor, I prefer to call film gris.

I very much admire William Conrad as an actor, both as Marshall Matt Dillon on radio's Gunsmoke and in films such as Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946).  He was always bitter that he did not get the part of Matt Dillon on the TV version of Gunsmoke (he was considered too corpulent), though he did star in two other TV shows and directed many episodes of other series.  Brainstorm was one of the few feature films he directed. Brainstorm resembles Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) in some significant ways (I don't know if Conrad ever saw the Fuller film):  a man (Jeffrey Hunter) pretending to be insane kills the husband (Dana Andrews) of the woman he loves (Arlene Francis) and does actually go insane when the woman he loves doesn't want to wait for him to get out.  Conrad effectively shoots in widescreen black-and-white, with Sam Leavitt as cinematographer (he shot films for Fuller and Otto Preminger), with an intensive opening scene that has Hunter rescuing an inebriated Francis from her car deliberately stalled on the train tracks with a train boring down, though much of the mise en scene reminds one of television.  There are some significant noir signifiers in this film -- a femme fatale, a brooding sense of fatalism -- but the chaotic world is created by the participants, who are barely aware of their roles.

Irving Pichel's Without Honor sits somewhat off to the side during the period of the most successful film noirs; there is no mention of WWII but everyone is struggling to find their way in the post-war world of 1949.  Pichel was primarily a director of B films and he uses his one set (a suburban house) and five actors (Laraine Day, Dane Clark, Bruce Bennett, Agnes Moorhead and Franchot Tone) effectively.  Laraine Day is determined to marry Franchot Tone --both of them have spouses and Tone and his wife Moorhead have two daughters -- and when he says he can't leave his wife Day stabs him and hides him in a closet.  Then brother-in-law Dane Clark comes over, followed by Moorhead and Day's husband, Bruce Bennett, who brings with him a new TV, a common gift to make the wife happy which usually doesn't (see Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, 1956).  Recriminations on all sides ensue, with even the orange grove eventually covered in blood.

Frank Borzage's Green Light (1937)

Frank Borzage was that rarity of rarities, an uncompromising romanticist.
--Andrew Sarris

Frank Borzage's Green Light stars Errol Flynn and is from a novel by Lloyd Douglas -- and I doubt that many people these days remember any of those three names.  Borzage had a long career -- he made his first movie in 1919 and his last in 1959 -- Errol Flynn is known for his swashbucklers and Westerns and Lloyd Douglas for his religious novels made into movies, especially the two versions of Magnificent Obsession (John Stahl in 1935 and Douglas Sirk in 1954).

Errol Flynn was just starting out at Warner Brothers and was given an unusual role, the kind usually given to Paul Muni, of a doctor experimenting on himself to find a vaccine for spotted fever, and he's quite effective in his role (for the record, I much prefer the elegant restraint Flynn showed in the films he made with Raoul Walsh to the hijinks and grinning roles with Michael Curtiz).  Flynn ends up in Montana experimenting on himself because he has taken the blame for the botched surgery by another doctor that led to a patient's death. This film was shown on TCM as part of a tribute to Anita Louse, who plays the daughter of the dead patient and who eventually falls in love with Flynn.

The biggest problem with the film is the mushy religiosity espoused by Lloyd Douglas in the person of a minister who tells Flynn that he will need to get a "green light" of some sort and he will know what to do.  The fine cast includes Warner Brothers regulars Cedric Hardwicke, Margaret Lindsay and Walter Abel, the score is by the reliable Max Steiner and the cinematography is by Byron Haskin, who was soon to become a director.  Borzage made a much better film that same year, History is Made at Night, but must have felt some sympathy for Lloyd Douglas because Borzage's last film, The Big Fisherman (1959) was also from a novel by Douglas.

Sean Doolittle's Lake Country

Before Mike could turn, something hard and heavy slammed into his head.  He was a three-million-candlepower spotlight flaring white, then fading to dark.  He was an empty gun floating to the bottom of a cold black lake.  Then he was nothing at all.
---Sean Doolittle, Lake Country (Bantam Books, 2012)

Doolittle is one of the best current crime writers:  his books are elegantly plotted and crisply written.  Even if Doolittle's books were not original paperbacks I would still see him as the heir to John D. MacDonald and other crime writers who pioneered the paperback (John D. MacDonald published twenty-one Travis McGee novels -- which I reread every few years -- but also more than thirty other crime novels).

Doolittle's books are set in very specific locales with very specific denizens.  In Lake Country it's Hennepin County Minnesota and a news reporter, a bartender, a kidnapped college student, two army buddies suffering PTSD and two collectors for bookies. Doolittle shows a certain amount of compassion for every character he portrays, most of them caught in webs of their own making and everyone trying to escape.  Doolittle is quite good, as MacDonald was, on the details, from what people's homes are like to what they prefer to drink.  Everyone is driven by their background and by fate, some escaping it while others yield to it.

As Hitters Pile Up K's Fans Catch Up on Z's by Tyler Kepner

This is the first baseball season in which there may be more strikeouts than hits.  And it turns out that maybe the fans aren't as enamored of home runs as some people thought, especially when the alternative is strikeouts.  Attendance is getting lower and, as Yogi Berra said, "if people don't want to come to the ballpark you can't stop them."  The players say that they are just giving the front office what they want:  power pitching and power hitting.  As Kepner says in yesterday's New York Times, "With that formula, at times, comes a lack of nuance from a game that should have so much to offer -- daring base runners, far-ranging fielders, pitchers finding ways to last deep into game."

The question becomes, of course, what can be done about this.  I think banning the shift would be a mistake; rather, hitters should learn how to beat it by hitting to the opposite field and bunting.  These days there is almost no bunting for hits or even very many sacrifice bunts.  I would also suggest deadening the ball, with home runs even being hit these days on check swings; make the home run a dramatic exception instead of the routine way of scoring runs.  This would also enable pitchers to go deeper into the game --as not everyone has to be overpowered -- and perhaps even cut down on the now-routine Tommy John surgery.  Further thoughts and suggestion to come.

Ernst Lubitsch's Love Parade (1929)

Also tossed into the mix was Ernst's fondness for Viennese and Hungarian musicals from the Strauss-Kalman-Huszka cycle of composers.
--Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch Laughter in Paradise (Simon & Schuster, 1993)

In the recent course I took, Mad About Musicals, there was little discussion about Lubitsch's four musicals, all made from 1929-1934.  The course was a relatively short one and it was hard to shoehorn in Lubitsch's films, all made before the Production Code had taken full effect; the titles of such songs in The Love Parade as "Nobody's Using It Now" and "Anything to Please the Queen" give one a pretty good idea of the racy content and the complex relationship of the queen (Jeanette MacDonald) and the slightly unwilling consort (Maurice Chevalier).  There is little dancing in the movie, the dancing being done by vaudevillians Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth who, when Lane starts to tell her the one about the farmer's daughter, says "I am the farmer's daughter." Lubitsch looks backward to vaudeville and operettas (represented especially by soprano MacDonald) and forward to the more conservative musicals of Rogers and Astaire and Vincente Minnelli, which  also integrated singing and dancing into their plots (Minnelli later switched to the creative freedom of more liberal melodrama.)

Leonard Bernstein An American Musician by Allen Shawn

We could use a Leonard Bernstein today, if only to do Young People's Concerts, of which Bernstein did fifty-three from 1958 to 1972, all of which were televised.  Several of these concerts were shown on Turner Classic Movies recently, as well as several Omnibus shows on which he appeared, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth.  These shows were not condescending but reveled in the complexities and beauties of music, from jazz to Broadway to classical.  We have taken our children to LOS (Little Orchestra Society) Kids and to Bruce Adolphe's Meet the Music concerts and we have enjoyed them, but they seem to shy away from the intricacies of the history of melody and counterpoint, the kind of thing that Bernstein could explain so well.  As Shawn says:  "to talk about music rivetingly to those who have no training in it, while also teaching and inspiring those with more knowledge, and all the while not falsifying the music itself, was a great accomplishment." (Yale University Press, 2014).

When I go to a classical concert or an opera these days I see a sea of grey heads.  Music should be a requirement of all schooling, as it was for me at Columbia and my son at Stuyvesant, very much exceptions these days when everyone is too busy taking reading and math tests.  Of course one cannot make money by learning about music but it can certainly enhance one's enjoyment of life.  Music was Bernstein's life and though, as Shawn suggests, he might have spread himself too thin by composing and conducting, by working for films (he did the music for Elia Kazan's On the  Waterfront, 1954) and doing ballets (Fancy Free, choreographed in 1944 by Jerome Robbins) and theatre (West Side Story, 1957) as well as concert works and masses, his work was never meretricious and Bernstein never neglected his rigorous approach to conducting.