Film Journal

While my wife Susan is recovering from a broken leg we are watching some movies I have taped from Turner Classic Movies.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  The dances are always wonderful in their films -- though there are never enough of them -- because they are choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan and the director has little to do with them.  That being said, their best "musical comedies" are directed by Mark Sandrich, who had a knack for comedy.  Top Hat (1935) was directed by Sandrich and has wonderful comedy (with the help of Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick), lovely music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and exquisite dancing, especially to "Cheek to Cheek" and "Isn't It a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?"  Before Top Hat Astaire and Rogers made Roberta (1935), the film that effectively made them a team, as they shared billing with Randolph Scott and Irene Dunne.  The film was directed by the impersonal William Dieterle and Dunne sang Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which I loved, though but Susan did not care for Dunne's warbling.  Astaire and Rogers become a couple in that film with the delightful "I Won't Dance."

Run of the Arrow (1957) was written, produced and directed by Samuel Fuller; it is a story about a Southerner (played by Rod Steiger) who is bitter at the end of the Civil War and goes to live with Native Americans in the West which is not yet officially part of the United States.  The cinematography is by Joseph Biroc (who often worked with Fuller and Robert Aldrich, among many others), who beautifully captures the isolated beauty of the West. Fuller's film works as an effective genre film --soldiers versus Indians -- but also as a parable about loyalty and country and where one belongs; at one point soldier Brian Keith tells Steiger about Phillip Nolan, the "man without a country." itself a parable by Edward Everett Hale. Fuller ends his film with a title card "the end of this film will be written by you," more true now, in our divided country, than ever. 

I admire Dean Martin, especially in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) and Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958), but he was often his own worst enemy, being remembered as the dipsomaniac host of various roasts and a member of the Rat Pack.  Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) shows Martin brilliantly making fun of his own image, being stranded in Climax, Nevada on the way from Las Vegas to Hollywood and becoming desperate because if he goes a night without sex he gets a headache.  Kiss Me, Stupid is beautifully filmed in the unusual format of widescreen black-and-white, capturing the claustrophobia of small-town America as well as its obsession with celebrities and success.  Whether one finds Wilder's film funny or not (I do) it is an intelligent observation by a foreigner (Wilder is Austrian) of America's hypocrisies and celebrity obsession and is even more relevant today than it was in 1964.

Frank Tashlin's Hollywood or Bust (1956) was the last film Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made together:  Lewis wanted to direct himself and Martin wanted more serious roles (though as the straight man he was funnier than the clown).  Unfortunately Martin and Lewis had finally found their best director, Frank Tashlin, and they had just made their best movie with him, Artists and Models (1955); Hollywood or Bust showed the strain of their increasing hostility to each other. Tashlin did use this tension somewhat effectively as Martin and Lewis traveled across country in a motorcar they had won in a raffle, Martin to a job and Lewis to meet Anita Ekberg.  There are many of Tashlin's cartoonish elements and satires of consumerism in Hollywood or Bust (at one point Lewis's dog drives the car), the title referring to the portion of the female anatomy that Tashlin saw some American men obsessed with, including Malcolm Smith, played by Lewis.  As Martin and Lewis drive across the country they see mostly young and lissome young women in scanty outfits waving at them as they go by; the one older woman they give a ride to pulls a gun on them and steals their car.  Tashlin's use of eye-popping primary colors is enhanced by VistaVision, which produces a fairly high-definition image.


King Vidor's Street Scene (1931) is an effective adaptation of Elmer Rice's play.  Vidor does not make the mistake of many film adaptations of "opening up" things and instead sticks to the one set of the exterior of a New York apartment house in a struggling neighborhood.  People come and go and stick their heads out the windows but Vidor never goes into any apartments:  when a husband comes home to shoot his wife and lover we only see the window as the lover attempts to escape.  Vidor was an innovator with early sound films -- particularly Hallelujah in 1928 (see my post of July 23, 2014) -- and worked closely with cinematographer George Barnes to move the camera and vary the shots to capture the dynamics of the streets and people moving in and out of the apartment building.