The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book by Arlene Croce

I was going to write about Follow the Fleet (1936)  in detail but after reading the chapter on it in Croce's book I decided to keep my remarks brief and recommend the book to anyone interested in the Astaire/Rogers films, i.e., anyone interested in dance.  Though I generally believe in the director as the main author of a film there are many exceptions. Certainly director Mark Sandrich has a considerable role in the film but so do Astaire and his co-choreographer Hermes Pan, composer Irving Berlin, screenwriters Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott, cinematographer David Abel, co-star Ginger Rogers and others.

I was a little nervous that my eight-year-old daughter would not like Follow the Fleet because she remembers Shall We Dance (1937) more for the comic turns of Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton than for the dancing, but  I turned out to be wrong:  Horton and Blore are not in Follow the Fleet but there is still some excellent, albeit complicated, humor, including a monkey that carries Astaire's flowers to Rogers after they have a misunderstanding; my daughter thought the dancing exquisite. Harriet Hilliard is also in the film as a singer (she was singing in Ozzie Nelson's band at the time), singing two marvelous Irving Berlin songs that are important in establishing her character:  "Get Thee Behind Me, Satan" and "I Am Here But Where Are You."  The dancing is varied and wonderful, from ballroom dancing to goofy comedic dancing to the elegant finale, in evening clothes, of two gamblers about to kill themselves and instead sing and dance to "Let's Face the Music and Dance."  Croce gives detailed analyses of all the dances as well as their place in all the Astaire/Rogers films.  I recommend reading Croce's book (it's available, though it was originally published in 1972) both before and after seeing the movies.

Turner Classic Movies July 2020

The highlight of July on TCM is the 34 movies directed by John Ford, six or seven of them every Friday night.  Ford is the greatest of directors and my favorites include The Searchers (1956), How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Sergeant Rutledge (1960); I recommend every Ford film.

Other films in July include:

July 1: Top Hat (1935), directed by Mark Sandrich, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, songs by Irving Berlin

July 5:  Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) and Jacques Rivette's complex Paris Belongs to Us (1961)

July 7:  Samuel Fuller films, including Pickup on South Street (1953)

July 8: Ernst Lubitsch's marvelous Ninotchka (1939), starring Greta Garbo.

July 12:  Chaplin's The Idle Class (1921) and The Kid (1921).

July 14:Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967)

July 16:  Howard Hawks's musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

July 19: Ingmar Bergman's film of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1975)

July 22:  Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

July 25:  Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950), from Hemingway's To Have and Have Not.

July 29: Preston Sturges's brilliantly funny The Lady Eve (1941) and Jacques Tourneur's Western Wichita.

Nine Sinatra Songs by The Miami City Ballet

Tharp handled the heroics of exhibition ballroom dancing and period nostalgia with refined wit, bearing no trace of pop satire or camp.
--Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2003).

Nine Sinatra Songs, streamed this week,  was danced beautifully by Miami City Ballet, with no attempt to update this 1982 dance by Twyla Tharp.  Each song -- from Strangers in the Night to My Way -- was danced by one couple with all couples dancing separately on the stage together for the finale.  This dance is a period piece, with Oscar de la Renta costumes and an overhead revolving globe.  The movements were both balletic and modern, as is often true of Tharp's choreography, and suggested narratives in the lyrics of the songs as well as movements that were implicit in the music. Each short dance suggested the entire history of a relationship, from meeting to romance to separation, from ecstasy to melancholy.  My particular favorite movement of beautiful timing was when, during That's Life, the man takes off his jacket just before his partner leaps into his arms.

Live at Lincoln Center NYC Ballet June 22

Live at Lincoln Center decided not to show the complete Coppelia from the New York City Ballet 1978 recording because of the Chinese doll in the second act, considered "racially insensitive."  No matter, because the third act, choreographed by Balanchine and the only act shown, is all new to this venerable ballet that goes back to Petipa and the 19th century.  It was beautifully danced by Patricia McBride and Helgi Tomasson, with support from the corps and the young girls from the school.  The third act is another example of Balanchine celebrating the individual and the couple, as well as their roles in society; see my post of May 28, 2018, the last time I saw this ballet live.

This all-Balanchine recording also includes the fourth section of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, a marvelous exploration of Balanchine's interest in folk dancing, in this case a ballet version danced with maximum intensity by Damian Woetzel and Wendy Whelan.  Also shown were Alexandra Asanelli and Nilas Martins in the lovely "The Man I Love" from Balanchine's Who Cares, to Gerhwin music, and the adagio movement from Balanchine's Concerto Barocco to Bach's D Minor Concerto. I have always particularly loved this adagio, since it is the only part of the ballet with a male dancer in a role I always fantasized I could do; it does have difficult lifts but no complicated turns or jetes; the two leads are Maria Kowroski and Rachel Rutherford.

Encore (1951)

This is the last, and the least, of three genteel adaptations of Somerset Maugham stories (see my posts:  Quartet on June 7, 2016 and Trio June 11, 2020).  "The Ant and the Grasshopper" was directed by Pat Jackson and written by T.E.B. Clarke; "Winter Cruise" directed by Anthony Pelissier and written by Arthur Macrae; "The Gigolo and the Gigolette" directed by Harold French and written by Eric Ambler. All three segments are competently directed and well acted, by Nigel Patrick in the first, Kay Walsh in the second and Glynis Johns in the third.

Slight changes were made from the Maugham stories, particularly in "The Gigolo and the Gigolette", where the title makes no sense, since left out is Maugham's back story of what the two leading characters did before their current high-diving stunt.  Also left out, mostly, is Maugham's bite and his mordant sense of humor, from the short story of The Gigolo and the Gigolette:  There was an Italian countess who was neither Italian nor a countess, but played a beautiful game of bridge.

I rather liked this anthology film, but it added little and subtracted a bit, especially the ironies of the British class system, from Maugham's stories, all three of which can be read in less time than it takes to watch the movie.









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Lincoln Center at Home: Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream

I appreciate what Lincoln Center and The New York City Ballet are trying to do with showing filmed versions of ballets, including Balanchine's, if even they are an inadequate substitute for the real thing they do have considerable value, especially for seeing dancers long retired and being able to study the endless complications of Balanchine's choreography.  And now that I am again taking (virtual) ballet classes it inspires me to see dancing at this incredible level of speed and attack.

I don't have a great deal to add about A Midsummer Night's Dream that I haven't already said in my previous posts about it (May 28 2016, May 28 2017, June 1 2019).  I still do regret that Balanchine ended up shortening the second act but the 1986 version did include the wonderful divertissement, here danced exquisitely by Adam Luders and Merrill Ashley, with Ashley seeming to float through the air as Luders seems to effortlessly lift her.  The first act, of course, follows Shakespeare's play closely, with dance and gestures and mime.  The playful Puck was energetically danced by Jean-Pierre Frohlich and the children from the school were delightful as the busy butterflies.  Ib Andersen was a noble Oberon to Maria Calegari's Titania and Jock Soto was an impressive cavalier.  In the first act I was particularly impressed with Victoria Hall as Hippolyta and her grand jetes, as well as the simple beauty of her just standing, with her leg devant, beautifully turned out with pointed foot.

Balanchine used the music of Mendelssohn brilliantly, not only the incidental music for the play, but four additional works by the composer.  The superb conducting was by Robert Irving.

Thomas Carr's The Desperado 1954

Only a fool sticks his neck out for somebody else.
--Sam Garrett (Wayne Morris) in The Desperado (script my Daniel Mainwaring)

The Desperado comes at the end of the era of B movies, especially Westerns as the Western was moving to TV.  The film stars Wayne Morris, Jimmy Lydon, and Beverly Garland, all of whom were about to go on to long TV careers, along with director Thomas Carr, who had been directing B movies for some time.  The script is by Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote the impressive film noir Out of the Past (1947), a script filled with changing alliances and treacheries, common themes in Mainwaring's work..

Tom Cameron is battling the carpetbagger soldiers (the "bluebellies") in Texas in the early 1870's when he has to flee his hometown and leave behind his girlfriend Laurie (Beverly Garland).  On the trail he runs into gunslinger Sam Garrett (Wayne Morris) and they head to town when Tom's father is killed.  They are accosted by bluebellies and blamed for a killing that Ray Novak (Rayford Barnes) commits and blames Tom for, since Ray fancies Laurie.

The film is filmed in black-and-white by journeyman cinematographer Joe Novak, who mostly worked in TV, and captures effectively the dusty trails and primitive conditions of Texas during the reconstruction period.  There are many examples of Western iconography in the film, including shootouts, cattle drives and stagecoaches, as well as iconic actors, including Dabbs Greer and, especially Lee Van Cleef, who plays twins, each of whom is shot in a gun duel by Tom, who has been taught how to shoot by Sam, who is allowed to leave town unmolested by the sheriff because he never shot an unarmed man, and Laurie and Tom are happily reunited.

Buster Keaton's The General (1926)

The General is a great parabola flung against the skyline, lifting on a first long curve that seems destined to go on forever, then gently and ominously curling in space to retrace its passage until it lands without loss of force in the hand that has set it in motion.
--Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (Knopf, 1975)

We are always looking for films that our whole family (ages eight to seventy-two) can enjoy and comedies are usually the best bet, so after sitting through Airplane (1980, with more directors than laughs, at least for me) and Peter Bogdanovich's Noises Off (an unfunny filming of a play, redeemed only slightly by Carol Burnett and Michael Caine) it was a delight for us to rediscover Buster Keaton's The General.  Airplane and Noises Off are what I call anarchic humor, with jokes piled on willy-nilly without regard for the situation.  The General is an elegant period film that I find quite funny, as an unstoppable Buster Keaton, rejected by the Confederate army, single-handedly chases his locomotive, The General, after it is stolen, with his love Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) aboard.   I have always said that the best comedies are not necessarily funny -- and Keaton's brilliant deadpan comedy does not appeal to everyone - but The General is also beautiful in its re-creation of an actual Civil War incident that includes romance and battlefield action.

I will not try to describe the many jokes and gags in the film because they are elaborately set up in the detailed narrative ; I will just mention that Keaton was obviously familiar with D. W. Griffith's films, not only because of relationships to Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) but also because of Keaton's appreciation of "the wind in the trees" as his train traverses the landscape, moving from Confederate territory into Union territory.  At one point Keaton hides under a table where Union officers are plotting and when one general burns a hole in the tablecloth one can see just Keaton's eye peeking out, with the one eye expressing a combination of curiosity and concern; then there is a cut to what Keaton is seeing, Annabelle as captive, framed as an iris shot through the hole in the tablecloth.

Cleanup by Sean Doolittle.

In the past two weeks, most of the major news outlets had been to town.  Everybody seemed to love the story: a disgraced officer, a battered checkout girl.  Crooked cops and organized crime.  A bloodbath in the frozen heartland.  Worth assumed it must have been a slow month.
--Sean Doolittle, Cleanup (Bantam Dell, 2006).

I first heard of Sean Doolittle in an issue of Noir City, Eddie Muller's excellent e-magazine, where he was interviewed at length.  Cleanup is a good example of how crime and violence take place outside the big urban areas, fueled by crooked cops and part-time drug dealers.  It is also something of a romance, between checkout girl Gwen Mullen and screwed-up cop Matthew Worth, working class characters who are struggling to find their way in Omaha, looking for love and finding it in the wrong places, as Matthew rescues Gwen from an abusive relationship and ends up inadvertently stealing drug money.  Doolittle's writing is crisp, sometimes darkly funny and sometimes surprising and violent, with lots of detailed characters around the edges.

George Cukor and Somerset Maugham's Our Betters 1933

Our Betters is more of a film by Somerset Maugham than by director Cukor, who follows Maugham's brittle play without adding or opening it up, except for one distant view of a tennis court, with the women in long dresses and the men in long pants.  Maugham's play was written in 1917 but not performed until after WW I for fear of offending the Americans, the play being about wealthy American women who marry impoverished British nobility:  the women get a title and the men get the money. The play and the film from it have a mordant humor, rather like a darker and more melancholic Noel Coward, as (Pearl) Constance Bennett comes home from her wedding and, before even changing out of her wedding dress, overhears her new husband making love to his mistress and assuring her that nothing will change.  So Pearl takes up with an older man (Minor Watson) and when she is caught making love to a gigolo (Gilbert Roland) her sugar daddy says to her, "If I leave you you'd have nobody but your husband.."

Obviously this is a pre-code film, with its cavalier attitude to marriage.  Our Betters was shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of Pride Month and was introduced by host Dave Karger, who said "one can't do better than Somerset Maugham and George Cukor."  Rather than talk about how their sexuality affected their work, in this film and others, Karger put most of the emphasis on the last five minutes of the film, in which Tyrell Davis appears as an obviously queer dance instructor, with painted lips and cheeks.  He also gets the last line in the film as Pearl and Minnie, a duchess (the superb Violet Kimble-Cooper) embrace, "Ah, what an exquisite spectacle, two ladies of title kissing one another."

W. Somerset Maugham's Trio 1950

Trio has two directors --Ken Annakin and Harold French -- of its three segments but unlike Quartet (see my post of June 7, 2016) the three parts of this anthology film stay close to Maugham's stories, as Maugham himself was one of the screenwriters, along with R.C. Sherriff, best known for his screenplays for director James Whale.

The first two segments are as short and simple, genteel and elegant as the stories themselves. Directed by Ken Annakin The Verger (English term for church attendant) is about a man (played quietly and intently by James Hayten) who is given the sack by the new vicar because he can neither read nor write and is not interested in learning to do so.  One of the churchwardens says, "It is the most amazing thing I ever heard," cried the general.  Do you mean to say that you've been verger of this church for sixteen years and never learned to read or write?" Hayten accepts his fate, becoming wealthy by investing the money has saved in a string of tobacco shops, after walking home without finding a place to buy cigarettes.

Annakin also directed the second segment Mr. Know-All.   Nigel Patrick plays an obnoxious and overly friendly jewel expert on a ship from San Francisco to Yokohama;  his cabinmate says "I was prepared to dislike Max Kelada [Patrick] even before I knew him." While having dinner with a diplomat (Naunton Wayne) and his wife (Anne Crawford), who have been away from each other for two years, he offers to look at Crawford's necklace after Wayne says it cost $18.  As Patrick looks at the necklace he sees a stricken look on Crawford's face and immediately says the pearls are fake.  When Patrick returns to his cabin there is a thank-you note there from Crawford.

The third episode is Sanatorium, directed by Harold French.  There are people who say that suffering ennobles. It is not true.  As a general rule it makes men petty, querulous and selfish; but here in the sanatorium there is not much suffering, writes Maugham. Sanatorium is something of a soap opera and something of a comedy.  It takes place in a consumption sanatorium in Scotland, where some of the residents can't wait to get out and others would just as soon stay indefinitely or until they die.  There's lots of squabbling over who gets which room, who will be someone's bridge partner, and who is cheating at chess. Visitors come and go but most of the residents are alone, forgotten or abandoned by their families.  One couple, played by Michael Rennie and Jean Simmons, want to get married, even though the doctor suggests that this would cause possible death.  They go ahead anyway, with a dying patient reconciling with his wife at the wedding.

Maugham himself introduces each segment with his slight stammer, suggesting that Sanatorium is autobiographical; one of the characters, a prodigious reader, is named Asheden, the name of Maugham's 1927 autobiographical spy novel. Maugham was a successful playwright before writing novels and each segment in Trio is rather like a short play.

The Judge's House by Georges Simenon

The quality of the Maigret novels begins with one of the simplest but most telling test of any writer, the ability to convey basic physical reality:  heat, cold, hunger, satiety, light and dark.  This is a huge strength of Simenon's.  He is always precise and evocative about weather and seasons.
--John Lancaster, Maigret's Room, London Review of Books, 4 June 2020

He glanced outside. The bottom halves of the windows in the Café Francais were frosted.  Above the frosted section, all you could see were the bare trees on the square and the rain, the never-ending rain..
-- Georges Simenon, The Judge's House, (La Maison du juge, 1942), translated by Howard Curtis, 2015..

Maigret has fallen into disgrace and transferred to Lucon, a remote coastal town where the main occupation is farming mussels. A judge is seen trying to get rid of a body and no one, not even the judge, knows who the dead man is.  Maigret slowly begins to question everyone in the town and secrets, from mental illness to illegitimate births, begin to emerge about the judge and his family.  The judge admits a previous murder, the investigation of which takes Mairgret briefly back to Paris and then to Versailles, but it turns out to have nothing to do with what happened in Lucon.  Simenon describes Maigret's investigation in detail, as he gradually learns that everyone is lying about something and every lie is a piece of the puzzle that Maigret works diligently to solve.

Lincoln Center at Home: American Ballet Theatre

Lincoln Center at Home showed a performance from 1978 of Fokine's Les Sylphes to Chopin music orchestrated by Benjamin Britten, Petipa's pas de deux from Don Quixote to the music of Leon Minkus, Balanchine's Theme and Variations to the music of Tschaikovsky and Fokine's Firebird to the music of Stravinsky.

For me, of course, Theme and Variations was the outstanding ballet on this program.  It was originally done by Balanchine for American Ballet Theatre in 1947 and in 1970 became part of Balanchine's Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3 for the New York City Ballet, where it is an astounding climax to Balanchine's choreography for the entire suite.  This staging, originally broadcast on PBS in 1978 focused mainly on the leading dancers, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland, who were at the peak of their careers and who were terrific together, Baryshnikov executing the difficult tours en l'air followed by multiple pirouettes perfectly.  Unfortunately the camerawork lost the forest for the trees and missed a great deal of the complexity and speed of the corps.
Fokine's Les Sylphes dates from 1908 and is unusual in being dreamlike and almost all adagio.  It was elegantly danced --to Chopin music orchestrated by Benjamin Britten -- by Ivan Nagy, Eleanor D'antuovo, Rebecca Wright, and Mariana Tcherkaasy.  Fernando Bujones and Natalia Makarova danced the pas de deux from Pepita's Don Quixote, almost something of a circus act to Leon Minkus's music, with Makarove doing pas de cheval before balancing beautifully on pointe. The last ballet was a rather tedious Firebird, to the Stravinsky score, with the exception of an impressively regal Cynthia Gregory in the title role.

To me what was most interesting about this program was how clearly it demonstrated the influence on Balanchine by Fokine and Petipa and how far beyond them he went with his brilliant and complex choreography.

Contemporary Movies

I just wanted to mention a few contemporary movies I have seen recently, since some readers have suggested I only write about movies from the classic era, which is somewhat true because I usually post about films I like, for one reason or another. The three movies I write about today look as though D.W. Griffith never lived, by which I mean not only are they derivative but they are murky and make no narrative sense, even on their own terms or Antonioni's:  "all movies should have a beginning a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order."

James Gray's Ad Astra is a poor man's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Brad Pitt goes off to Neptune to find his renegade father and bring him home but his father, for rather unclear reasons, ends up drifting off into space after years of an unsuccessful attempt to find life beyond earth.  This is a one man show, as is all too common in contemporary films, with a wooden performance by Pitt and a lot of space-traveling hardware.

Hirokazu Koreeda's Shoplifters is something of a Japanese version of South Korean director Bon Joon Ho's Parasite, this time about a family of lower class criminals who seem to be only marginally related and kidnap a very young girl to help them with their shoplifting, which they apparently need to do in order to have enough to eat. Eventually they get caught and go their separate ways.  The film takes mostly in a tiny cramped room where the "family" lives, with one of the children reading and sleeping in a closet, and in various shops where they refine their shoplifting skills. Most of the time it is difficult to be clear about what is happening; though there are subtitles this may be at least partly due to the language barrier.

Andrew Patterson's Vast of Night takes place in New Mexico in the fifties and is a too subtle version of films of that period, such as Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space (1953), though Patterson's film doesn't actually show any aliens, just suggests them by sound.  Much of the film takes place in a small radio station where the unusual sounds are heard by DJ Jake Horowitz who starts investigating with his younger colleague Sierra McCormick and a tape recorder.  In spite of its virtuoso tracking shots this would have made a pretty good radio show, rather like Wyllis Cooper's Quiet, Please, which ran from 1947-49, with most of its episodes available on the internet.

The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini by Joe Posnanski

Power.  That is why I wanted to be like Houdini, right.  For me, it's all about power.  I had felt so powerless as a child. I wanted to be able to do things no one else can do.  Instead, I couldn't do anything that everybody else could do.  I was not engaged.  I had learning disabilities.  I was dyslexic.  I was told when to go to bed, when to eat.  But. for now, for just a minute, I had control.
--Paul Cosentino, quoted in The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini by Joe Posnanski (Avid Reader Press, 2019)

Posnanski's breezy book is something of a biography of Houdini --trying to find the truth among the myths -- but it is also about the appeal of magic and why Houdini is remembered when many other possibly better magicians are mostly forgotten.  I was fascinated by Houdini when I was a kid and reading Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat (see my post last month) has somewhat revived my interest in magic.  What appealed to me was Houdini's ability to escape, not only from handcuffs, shackles and jail cells, but from his Jewish roots and his small town background.  When I was young my parents dragged me to "old car meets," which bored me, all these old guys fascinated by antique cars, so I would bring along my magic tricks when I was ten and eleven and show them to a usually very small audience;  this entertained me and gave me some power over these adults.  I was particularly good at card tricks and sleight-of-hand and, of course, would never reveal how I did my tricks.

Posnanski travel through the increasingly small world of magic and reads all the available literature.  Magic, of course, works only live and in person, television making it too easy to cheat, and with the death of the great Ricky Jay there is little stage magic about except occasionally in small theatres and to a certain extend in Las Vegas.  I continue to work on my card tricks.