How could the CIA be in bed with the mob? What lunacy is this?
--Max Allan Collins, Better Dead (Tom Doherty Associates, 2016).
This is the eighteenth in Collins's series about private detective Nate Heller. These books vary somewhat in quality but, in general, they are impressive historical re-creations. Heller gets involved with every thing from the Lindbergh kidnapping (Stolen Away, 1992) to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. (Flying Blind,1999). In Better Dead Heller is something of a double agent, working for Joseph McCarthy while reporting to Dashiell Hammett and investigating the death of scientist Frank Olson while trying to recover the CIA file on Joe McCarthy.
At various points I have studied the cases and their times that Heller investigates and Collins seamlessly integrates Heller with real people and places. He perhaps is too influenced by Mickey Spillane -- every woman who meets Heller wants to sleep with him, including the "notorious" Bettie Page, and the violence is laid on rather thickly, though I enjoyed Heller punching out the slimy Roy Cohn in the men's room of The Stork Club for getting Frank Costello to sic his goons on Heller. Heller brings the people and places of the 50's alive -- including Robert Kennedy, who worked for McCarthy's Senate committee --without significantly deviating from the facts. Heller even has jailhouse interviews with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who may have actually passed secrets to the Soviets but whose roles were exaggerated by prosecutor Roy Cohn, using faked evidence.
Collins includes a nicely detailed bibliography at the end for those interested.
Monday, August 15, 2016
Saturday, August 13, 2016
Kent Jones's film Hitchcock/Trufaut (2015)
If the film Hitchcock/Truffaut does nothing other than alert people to the book of the same name (Simon and Schuster, 1967) it will have proven useful. The book came out at a time when Americans had begun to appreciate the artistry of Hitchcock's films as well as their entertainment value, though some of us have always found movies, books et al. not to be entertaining if they are meretricious, i.e., entertainment does not exist without artistry.. In any case, the full-length book came out at a propitious time, the same time (late 60's) as Robin Wood's important Hitchcock's Films (A.S. Barnes and Company, 1965) and Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema (The University of Chicago Press, 1968) appeared with detailed appreciations of Hitchcock's films. The French were somewhat ahead of us, but Chabrol and Rohmer's book about Hitchcock, though published in 1957, was not translated until 1992.
Kent Jones's film, like Truffaut's book, concentrates mostly on the technical aspects of Hitchcock's work and the all-male commentators (Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich et al.) do not address the misogyny of Hitchcock's films, which I have always found to appeal more to men than women, or the complex issues surrounding the manipulation of his audience. It's interesting looking at the excerpts in Jones's film and see how Hitchcock changed the roles of women from his British films, such as The Lady Vanishes (1938), to American films such as Vertigo (1958).
One can get a much deeper and better understanding and appreciation of Hitchcock simply by watching his films (which reveal more each time one sees them) and reading Truffaut's and Wood's books.
Kent Jones's film, like Truffaut's book, concentrates mostly on the technical aspects of Hitchcock's work and the all-male commentators (Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich et al.) do not address the misogyny of Hitchcock's films, which I have always found to appeal more to men than women, or the complex issues surrounding the manipulation of his audience. It's interesting looking at the excerpts in Jones's film and see how Hitchcock changed the roles of women from his British films, such as The Lady Vanishes (1938), to American films such as Vertigo (1958).
One can get a much deeper and better understanding and appreciation of Hitchcock simply by watching his films (which reveal more each time one sees them) and reading Truffaut's and Wood's books.
Josef von Sternberg's Thunderbolt (1929)
I made my first sound film, Thunderbolt, in 1929. It was treated with respect at the box office, but, with one exception, not a single soul noticed my attempt to put sound into its popular relation with the image.
--Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (Martin Secker and Warburg Limited, 1967).
Thunderbolt, like von Sternberg's earlier Underworld (1927) became something of a template for the many gangster movies that followed it. George Bancroft plays a ruthless gangster whose heart is won by Fay Wray and a stray dog. On his way to the electric chair Bancroft discovers that Wray's lover Richard Arlen, framed by Bancroft for murder, was Arlen's lover before Bancroft arrived on the scene, and Bancroft walks calmly to his death.
Not only is Thunderbolt, like all von Sternberg films, a masterpiece of light and shadow, it is also innovative in its use of sound, adding sound outside the frame as a door opens or as a man walks to his death in the electric chair. von Sternberg continued this use of sound in his later talkies, though only in his penultimate film, Anatahan (1954), did it reach the complexity of Thunderbolt.
von Sternberg is best-known for his films with Marlene Dietrich, starting with The Blue Angel in 1930, but in his earlier films (see my post about The Docks of New York, July 9 of this year) he portrays women in similar complicated and mysterious ways, as he does with Fay Wray in Thunderbolt, interrogated by the police as she sits above them, swathed in furs. Thunderbolt also has an unusually sympathetic view of African-Americans, as musicians and patrons of a nightclub as well as convicts in prison.
--Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (Martin Secker and Warburg Limited, 1967).
Thunderbolt, like von Sternberg's earlier Underworld (1927) became something of a template for the many gangster movies that followed it. George Bancroft plays a ruthless gangster whose heart is won by Fay Wray and a stray dog. On his way to the electric chair Bancroft discovers that Wray's lover Richard Arlen, framed by Bancroft for murder, was Arlen's lover before Bancroft arrived on the scene, and Bancroft walks calmly to his death.
Not only is Thunderbolt, like all von Sternberg films, a masterpiece of light and shadow, it is also innovative in its use of sound, adding sound outside the frame as a door opens or as a man walks to his death in the electric chair. von Sternberg continued this use of sound in his later talkies, though only in his penultimate film, Anatahan (1954), did it reach the complexity of Thunderbolt.
von Sternberg is best-known for his films with Marlene Dietrich, starting with The Blue Angel in 1930, but in his earlier films (see my post about The Docks of New York, July 9 of this year) he portrays women in similar complicated and mysterious ways, as he does with Fay Wray in Thunderbolt, interrogated by the police as she sits above them, swathed in furs. Thunderbolt also has an unusually sympathetic view of African-Americans, as musicians and patrons of a nightclub as well as convicts in prison.
Friday, August 12, 2016
Orson Welles in Italy, by Alberto Anile
The argument over pay with Carlo Ponti and the experience of making the film with Steno put the final nail in the coffin of Welles's love affair with Italy. He had spent six years being criticized for artistic exhibitionism and excessive formalism.
---Albert Anile, Orson Welles in Italy (Indiana University Press, 2013, translated by Marcus Perryman).
Orson Welles was in Italy from 1957 to 1963. He went there to make a film, Black Magic, directed by Gregory Ratoff. He was also fleeing the political climate of the United States, as well as the IRS and Hollywood. In that time in Italy he worked constantly, when he could, on his film Othello, while taking acting jobs to raise money. Anile documents this period thoroughly, mainly through a detailed study of how critics in Italy reacted to Welles. The consensus of the Italian critics was summed up by Umberto Barbaro, writing about Welles's Shakespeare films as "poisoned baroque pies with an obtuse avant-garde style."
There were three major reasons for the Italian attitude toward Welles.
1. He was an arrogant American who did not speak Italian (though he learned while he was there)
2. The Italians were so enamored of their own neorealism they could not understand Welles's stylized films.
3. Dubbing. Films in Italy are always dubbed into Italian and by the time Citizen Kane arrived in Italy in 1948, recut and dubbed, it was barely seen or appreciated.
I must admit to a personal problem with Italian films and the fact that they do not ever use direct sound. Only directors with intelligence and style --I think particularly of Leone and Rossellini -- can overcome this major handicap. I think that the dubbing Welles became used to in Italy affected all his later films: from Othello (1951) on Welles dubbed and re-dubbed, most of the films existing now in multiple versions.
Anile covers this period in Welles's life, including Welles's romance with his future wife, Paola Mori, in more detail that any of the other Welles biographers. Anile's book makes it clear that Welles was a brilliant artist who could also be a self-destructive deadbeat.
---Albert Anile, Orson Welles in Italy (Indiana University Press, 2013, translated by Marcus Perryman).
Orson Welles was in Italy from 1957 to 1963. He went there to make a film, Black Magic, directed by Gregory Ratoff. He was also fleeing the political climate of the United States, as well as the IRS and Hollywood. In that time in Italy he worked constantly, when he could, on his film Othello, while taking acting jobs to raise money. Anile documents this period thoroughly, mainly through a detailed study of how critics in Italy reacted to Welles. The consensus of the Italian critics was summed up by Umberto Barbaro, writing about Welles's Shakespeare films as "poisoned baroque pies with an obtuse avant-garde style."
There were three major reasons for the Italian attitude toward Welles.
1. He was an arrogant American who did not speak Italian (though he learned while he was there)
2. The Italians were so enamored of their own neorealism they could not understand Welles's stylized films.
3. Dubbing. Films in Italy are always dubbed into Italian and by the time Citizen Kane arrived in Italy in 1948, recut and dubbed, it was barely seen or appreciated.
I must admit to a personal problem with Italian films and the fact that they do not ever use direct sound. Only directors with intelligence and style --I think particularly of Leone and Rossellini -- can overcome this major handicap. I think that the dubbing Welles became used to in Italy affected all his later films: from Othello (1951) on Welles dubbed and re-dubbed, most of the films existing now in multiple versions.
Anile covers this period in Welles's life, including Welles's romance with his future wife, Paola Mori, in more detail that any of the other Welles biographers. Anile's book makes it clear that Welles was a brilliant artist who could also be a self-destructive deadbeat.
Sunday, August 7, 2016
Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil
After all, we have the paintings.
--Pilar Silva Muroto, curator at the Prado, Madrid.
Pieter van Huystee's film, Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil, is obviously meant as a promotion for the Dutch exhibit this year in Bosch's hometown in the Netherlands; Bosch's best paintings remained in the Prado for its own Bosch exhibit. Films about painters generally are not effective in showing the artist's work primarily, I think, because paintings exist in space and movies exist in time (see my comments on Michael Leigh's film about Turner on Jan 20,2015). So what we get in this film is mostly art historians arguing about which paintings Bosch painted with his own hand while the curators engage in political struggles about who will lend their paintings to whom. There is little discussion about the complex and mysterious iconography in Bosch's paintings and when they do show parts of the paintings they include an overbearing score by Paul M. van Brugge. I'm not sure I expected much more but I do appreciate that I won two tickets to Film Forum for my correct response to their weekly quiz: Peter Singer's Animal Liberation was the book that influenced Unlocking the Cage, a film by Chris Hedgeders and D.A. Pennebaker. I don't get out to the movies much, with a child just about to start kindergarten, but when I do it's most often to Film Forum, with its excellent repertory and new and off-beat programming, shown at times when my wife and I can go and still get home to pick up our daughter.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in Hieronymous Bosch I recommend Ingrid Rowland's piece about the painter -- "The Mystery of Hieronymous Bosch"-- in the August 18, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books; it includes reviews of a number of books about Bosch and some interesting comments about the film.
--Pilar Silva Muroto, curator at the Prado, Madrid.
Pieter van Huystee's film, Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil, is obviously meant as a promotion for the Dutch exhibit this year in Bosch's hometown in the Netherlands; Bosch's best paintings remained in the Prado for its own Bosch exhibit. Films about painters generally are not effective in showing the artist's work primarily, I think, because paintings exist in space and movies exist in time (see my comments on Michael Leigh's film about Turner on Jan 20,2015). So what we get in this film is mostly art historians arguing about which paintings Bosch painted with his own hand while the curators engage in political struggles about who will lend their paintings to whom. There is little discussion about the complex and mysterious iconography in Bosch's paintings and when they do show parts of the paintings they include an overbearing score by Paul M. van Brugge. I'm not sure I expected much more but I do appreciate that I won two tickets to Film Forum for my correct response to their weekly quiz: Peter Singer's Animal Liberation was the book that influenced Unlocking the Cage, a film by Chris Hedgeders and D.A. Pennebaker. I don't get out to the movies much, with a child just about to start kindergarten, but when I do it's most often to Film Forum, with its excellent repertory and new and off-beat programming, shown at times when my wife and I can go and still get home to pick up our daughter.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in Hieronymous Bosch I recommend Ingrid Rowland's piece about the painter -- "The Mystery of Hieronymous Bosch"-- in the August 18, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books; it includes reviews of a number of books about Bosch and some interesting comments about the film.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
The Murder of Mary Russell by Laurie E. King
Then with an appalling, wet convulsion, the old man went limp. As Clarissa bent over her father, infant wails mingled with the keening sounds of her own abandonment.
--Laurie E. King, The Murder of Mary Russell (Bantam 2016)
I generally avoid pastiches of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (the useful website about mysteries, http://www.stopyourekillingme.com has 23 authors of Sherlock Holmes books listed) --they usually suffer from too little or too much imagination -- but a friend recommended King's books to me as being of fairly high quality. The first few, beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice in 1994, are intelligent novels about Holmes's retirement years and his eventual marriage to scholar Mary Russell. In the later books (King has written thirteen so far) Holmes is sometimes barely seen and King concentrates on the role of Mary and women in post-Victorian England. The Murder of Mary Russell was suggested by Doyle's story "The Gloria Scott" published in Strand Magazine in 1893. In that story a man survives a shipwreck and becomes a blackmailer. The blackmailer's last name is Hudson, the last name of Holmes's housekeeper, though no relationship is suggested in Doyle's story. In King's book this Hudson is Mrs. Hudson's father and the novel is mostly an extended flashback to Mrs. Hudson's childhood in Australia, her life of petty crime and her illegitimate son. Eventually Holmes finds Clarissa Hudson while hunting for her father and hires her as his housekeeper while her son stays in Australia with Clarissa's sister; there are some interesting class-conscious parallels with Samuel Richardson's 18th C, novel Clarissa.
There is an unusual amount of bloodshed in this book, mostly revealed in its aftermath. Also, like too many mystery writers, King often misleads and manipulates her readers; I presume, since it is so common, that readers like this. Generally I prefer genre writers such as John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler, who write in the first person, the reader learning about events as the narrator does. King's novel of mostly flashback is similar to Doyle's novels --especially The Valley of Fear(1914) -- and we get only a glimpse of the young Sherlock Holmes, when he rescues Clarissa from her father; he appears mostly, in King's novels, after the period that Watson writes about and the emphasis is more on his emotions than his ratiocination.
--Laurie E. King, The Murder of Mary Russell (Bantam 2016)
I generally avoid pastiches of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (the useful website about mysteries, http://www.stopyourekillingme.com has 23 authors of Sherlock Holmes books listed) --they usually suffer from too little or too much imagination -- but a friend recommended King's books to me as being of fairly high quality. The first few, beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice in 1994, are intelligent novels about Holmes's retirement years and his eventual marriage to scholar Mary Russell. In the later books (King has written thirteen so far) Holmes is sometimes barely seen and King concentrates on the role of Mary and women in post-Victorian England. The Murder of Mary Russell was suggested by Doyle's story "The Gloria Scott" published in Strand Magazine in 1893. In that story a man survives a shipwreck and becomes a blackmailer. The blackmailer's last name is Hudson, the last name of Holmes's housekeeper, though no relationship is suggested in Doyle's story. In King's book this Hudson is Mrs. Hudson's father and the novel is mostly an extended flashback to Mrs. Hudson's childhood in Australia, her life of petty crime and her illegitimate son. Eventually Holmes finds Clarissa Hudson while hunting for her father and hires her as his housekeeper while her son stays in Australia with Clarissa's sister; there are some interesting class-conscious parallels with Samuel Richardson's 18th C, novel Clarissa.
There is an unusual amount of bloodshed in this book, mostly revealed in its aftermath. Also, like too many mystery writers, King often misleads and manipulates her readers; I presume, since it is so common, that readers like this. Generally I prefer genre writers such as John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler, who write in the first person, the reader learning about events as the narrator does. King's novel of mostly flashback is similar to Doyle's novels --especially The Valley of Fear(1914) -- and we get only a glimpse of the young Sherlock Holmes, when he rescues Clarissa from her father; he appears mostly, in King's novels, after the period that Watson writes about and the emphasis is more on his emotions than his ratiocination.
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Don Siegel's The Line-Up (1958)
Siegel's most successful films express the doomed peculiarity of the antisocial outcast. ... the final car chase in The Line-Up and the final shoot-up in Madigan are among the most stunning displays of action montage in the history of American cinema.
--Andrew Sarris
Like many of the great directors of the classical era Don Siegel worked his way up, eventually doing montage (small editing jobs) on Warner Brothers films --including Casablanca --before he started directing. Most of his movies were low-key efforts done under the radar, often between television jobs. He got the job directing The Line-Up because he had done the pilot for the TV series, which ran on CBS from 1953 to 1960.
The Line-Up movie has an impressive script by veteran Sterling Silliphant and excellent location (San Francisco) cinematography by Hal Mohr, who worked with Sam Fuller and Fritz Lang, among many others. The film comes at the end of the film noir cycle, bringing the genre out of the physical night and darkness (the film takes place entirely in the daylight) into the psychological darkness of Dancer, played by Eli Wallach as a subtle and ingratiating psychotic. Dancer's job is to retrieve the heroin inadvertently smuggled in by unsuspecting steamship travelers from Hong Kong, who thought they had simply gotten a good deal on some Chinese art. Dancer and his partner, played by Robert Keith, have something of a homoerotic relationship, with Keith even at one point saying "women have no place in society" because they are too weak.
Siegel made one of his best films, Madigan, in 1968 before he teamed up with Clint Eastwood and eventually lost his way. American films began to require bigger budgets and bigger stars and the relatively modest virtues and craftsmanship of a film such as The Line-Up have mainly survived on TV, if they have survived at all.
--Andrew Sarris
Like many of the great directors of the classical era Don Siegel worked his way up, eventually doing montage (small editing jobs) on Warner Brothers films --including Casablanca --before he started directing. Most of his movies were low-key efforts done under the radar, often between television jobs. He got the job directing The Line-Up because he had done the pilot for the TV series, which ran on CBS from 1953 to 1960.
The Line-Up movie has an impressive script by veteran Sterling Silliphant and excellent location (San Francisco) cinematography by Hal Mohr, who worked with Sam Fuller and Fritz Lang, among many others. The film comes at the end of the film noir cycle, bringing the genre out of the physical night and darkness (the film takes place entirely in the daylight) into the psychological darkness of Dancer, played by Eli Wallach as a subtle and ingratiating psychotic. Dancer's job is to retrieve the heroin inadvertently smuggled in by unsuspecting steamship travelers from Hong Kong, who thought they had simply gotten a good deal on some Chinese art. Dancer and his partner, played by Robert Keith, have something of a homoerotic relationship, with Keith even at one point saying "women have no place in society" because they are too weak.
Siegel made one of his best films, Madigan, in 1968 before he teamed up with Clint Eastwood and eventually lost his way. American films began to require bigger budgets and bigger stars and the relatively modest virtues and craftsmanship of a film such as The Line-Up have mainly survived on TV, if they have survived at all.
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