Turner Classic Moves Feb. 2017

During Feb. and early March TCM is doing "31 Days of Oscar," in other words, a lot of lousy movies.  I have stated many times that I find the Oscars bogus and dubious.  However, TCM intelligently also includes some pretty good films that were nominated but did not win.  This month there is almost nothing that I have not recommended before so I will simply say that one cannot go wrong watching the films in February with the following directors:  Otto Preminger, John Huston, Preston Sturges, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Douglas Sirk, John Stahl, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Budd Boetticher, Billy Wilder, Anthony Mann, Leo McCarey, Joseph Mankiewicz, Blake Edwards, George Cukor and Max Ophuls.  I also recommend the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the best of which were directed by Mark Sandrich.

I hope to be back listing particular films in March.

New York City Ballet Jan. 28, 2017

The emotion of the ballet {La Sonnambula} comes in a series of nervous shocks, as deeply pleasurable as in a horror story.

What looks to the Prodigal Son like the fun of happy voluptuousness turns into a sickening orgy in which he is systematically degraded, beaten and robbed.

--Arlene Croce, Playbill, Winter 1969

Beneath the new trappings it{Firebird} is the same old unserious , childish, gaudy little ballet.

--Arlene Croce, The Dancing Times, July 1970

There’s no doubt in my mind that the three ballets we saw on January 28 would have been considerably changed if Balanchine had lived beyond 1983, Balanchine believing that ballets were meant to be living and breathing, not stuck as museum pieces such as these three ballets are, as lovely as they may be. As my wife Susan pointed out, these three ballets – La Sonnambula, Prodigal Son, and Firebird – are too similar to be grouped together in a dubious characterization as “short stories.”  All three are somewhat fantastical oneiric period pieces featuring strange and elusive women luring men with their beautiful bourees.  Balanchine’s work was generally as varied as the music he used, from Bach to Stravinsky.

This being said, the ballets were beautifully danced.  Sterling Hyltin was a suitably mysterious sleepwalker and Chase Finlay was effective as the doomed poet in La Sonnambula.  The divertissements and the mazurkas of the guests seemed like a dance of death, presaging the ending, not only of the ballet but of all of us.  The ending of the ballet is inordinately sad, with just the light from a candle indicating the movement of the doomed poet and sleepwalker.

I find Prodigal Son, one of the earliest (1929) Balanchine ballets still being performed, hard to appreciate these days after one has seen Villella and Baryshnikov dance it.  Gonzalo Garcia danced it on Saturday and did a good job, though he doesn’t have quite the presence of some of his predecessors;  Sara Mearns was an effective siren in her limited role but much of this ballet is just plain goofy and weird, especially the “drinking companions,” who slither and crawl.  Interestingly, the endings of Prodigal Son and La Sonnambula are rather similar, with someone being carried sadly off the stage.  Incidentally, there is a scene in the PBS Balanchine biography of Balanchine demonstrating the ending of Prodigal Son to Baryshnikov and Balanchine’s performance is far superior to Baryshnikov’s!

I have only recently begun to appreciate Balanchine’s Firebird, with its similarities to some of his better ballets, especially his marvelous one-act version of Swan Lake.  It’s another period piece by Stravinsky and Balanchine that’s considerably influenced by Russian folk dances and tales. I could do without the Jerome Robbins part of the wizard and his subjects, but I have grown to like the stately wedding at the end.  Stravinsky’s music is somewhat thin compared to the Rieti and Prokofiev of the two preceding ballets on Saturday.  Teresa Reichlen did beautiful bourees as Firebird.

B Movies, Boetticher and Dupont

They have a constant and bleak preoccupation with life and death, sun and shade, and encompass treachery, cruelty, courage and bluff with barely a trace of sentimentality or portentousness.

--David Thomson

Thomson here is talking about Budd Boetticher’s Westerns with Randolph Scott, but it could also apply to the dozen or so B movies he made before he hooked up with Randolph Scott in 1956 to make the bleak Westerns for which Boetticher is best known.  I recently saw Boetticher’s Killer Shark, made for Poverty Row studio Monogram in 1950, and many of his later themes are there to a considerable extent:  the importance of families, the sense of adventure and danger in nature, class conflict.  Roddy McDowell plays a college kid who hasn’t seen his father in years and comes to help him one summer with shark fishing in Mexico (a favorite location of Boetticher’s, who spent many years there later filming  a documentary about bullfighter Carlos Arruza).  McDowell’ father is laid up after a shark attack and Roddy has to go out on his own with a pick-up crew of cutthroats and managing, with the help of his father’s friends, to save his father’s fishing boat, after which he goes back to college with the clear implication he will return eventually to his father’s business and the girl and the country he has come to love

Boetticher spent his career making B movies of high quality.  Other directors started out with A films and moved slowly down to B films.  E.A. Dupont, for instance, was a considerable success in Germany with Variete (1925) and other films of the silent period, but never had much success after he came to America in 1930 and so became a talent agent from 1939-1951.  Then he returned to filmmaking and made the extraordinary The Scarf in 1950; its use of downbeat rural and urban landscapes reminds one of another beautiful work by an émigré, Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), which also finds a strange beauty in the American landscape and cityscape of deserts and bars (cinematography by Austrian Franz Planer, who did a number of films noir).  Dupont captures not only the visual quality of the outsider American landscape, he also wrote the script that captures the verbal quality, from “I’ll beat the bejesus out of you” to “I’ll turn this moonshine parlor into a mashed potato.”  The suitable scruffy John Ireland, James Barton and Mercedes McCambridge play the outsiders, each in their own way on the run from society.

Blunt,Dearden,Wiseman

One should remember that for Blunt’s generation of homosexual men, friends in innumerable ways provided a support network in a hostile world and defended the individual against the State.

--Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt, his lives (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2001).

I was in graduate school in art history in 1979 when it was revealed that Anthony Blunt was the fourth spy in the Cambridge group of spies that included Philby, Burgess and MacClean.  How could this be, this expert on one of my favorite painters, Nicolas Poussin?  Miranda Carter does an excellent job in her attempt to answer a basically unanswerable question, detailing Blunt’s life and work within the British class system, against which he felt he was rebelling as he passed secrets to the Soviet Union when he worked for military intelligence during and after WW II.  Later, when I worked at "The Nation" I heard James Weinstein, editor of "In These Times", say that he thought the Rosenbergs were guilty and if he had had the chance he, too, would have passed on secrets in the cause of peace.

The importance of Blunt’s  homosexuality in his actions became clear when I recently watched Basil Dearden’s film Victim, from 1961.  This was a shocking film in its time, with the first use of “homosexual” in an English-language film, and portrays a scheme to blackmail homosexuals, who would rather pay than be exposed and possibly go to prison.  “I can’t help the way I am; nature’s played me a dirty trick,” says one blackmail victim.  Homosexuality was a crime in England until 1967, though of course it was very selectively enforced, mostly against the lower classes and not against actors, such as Dirk Bogarde, who starred in Victim.  Bogarde plays a barrister who had suppressed his own homosexuality for the sake of a wife and a career, the film emphasizing the sexual complexity of us all.  The film is crisply photographed in black-and-white (by Otto Heller) and shot on London locations that emphasize the diversity of the city.  In England laws against homosexuality were eliminated in 1967, though they still exist in some states in the U.S.,  essentially no longer enforced since the Supreme Court in 2003 struck down a Texas law against sodomy.

Frederick Wiseman’s recent documentary In Jackson Heights emphasizes diversity.  The different ethnic groups in this Queens neighborhood tend to stay separate when it comes to food, entertainment and religious worship but do come together to solve problems with landlords, police and traffic safety.  There are a fair number of support groups for the LGBT community and Wiseman shows their meetings  as well as those of businessmen struggling to keep their businesses going in the face of encroaching gentrification.  Wiseman does not impose narration on his documentaries and does not even identify individuals.  This is not without its own problems but does keep a viewer involved and paying attention to the details of the people and groups of immigrants who are providing a vivid presence through their hard work and involvement in the community. 

Henry King's State Fair (1933)

Henry King, director of State Fair, and star Will Rogers are little remembered today, though Rogers was one of the top box-office draws in the early 30’s (he died in a plane crash in 1935) and King made movies from 1916 to 1962.  King’s State Fair was eclipsed by two musical versions that followed later (1945 and 1962) and even Rogers’s best films (Steamboat ‘Round the Bend, Judge Priest, Dr. Bull; all directed by John Ford) are considered marred by the presence of Stepin Fetchit, whose complex trickster character has only begun to be appreciated by scholars (the public is far behind).

State Fair is a detailed character study of a farming family, with its pickles and prize pig, at the state fair, where the older children find love and lose it and Mom and Dad win blue ribbons.  Hal Mohr’s cinematography matches studio and location work quite nicely.  The children (Janet Gaynor and Norman Foster) want to stay loyal to their parents (Will Rogers and Louise Dresser) and their rural world but also long to leave and spread their wings with lovers they meet at the fair, the love affairs being relatively explicit in this era before the production code clamped down on such details.  This was a time when Americans were leaving farms for jobs in the cities and the kids hear the siren call of the city while the older generation raises better pigs and improves their recipes and directors such as King began to move away from such charming and folksy stories of rural live to costume and period films.

Book Log

Lee Child’s Night School (Delacorte Press, 2016) is the 21^st book in his Jack Reacher series.  This one has Reacher still in the army, assigned to a group of intelligence officers who are tracking the activities of a terrorist group in Germany in 1996.  Reacher is the analytical one in his “night school,” as well as the best street fighter “because he enjoys it.”  The only other member of the group who comes alive as a character at all is Dr. Marian Sinclair, perceived by Reacher as “all toned arms and dark nylons and good shoes” and with whom he has an affair.  The plot is more complex than usual, with a number of groups chasing what the terrorists are trying to buy, though Reacher and his group is not sure what that is.  Each Reacher novel takes place in a different location and here it is Germany, with extensive and sometimes confusing overlapping of authority, and Reacher’s usual ability to cut through the complexities of details to the essentials.

Michael Connelly’s The Wrong Side of Goodbye (Little Brown, 2016) is the 24^th in his Harry Bosch series.  In this excellent procedural Bosch is both a cop, working unpaid for the San Fernando police department, and a private detective, choosy about what cases he takes.  Connolly, like Raymond Chandler, has a strong feeling for the details of life in Los Angeles and how all those details connect via freeways and streets.  Harry has strong memories of his time in Vietnam, memories that have an important role in the private case he handles in The Wrong Side of Goodbye.  He also has a knowledge of the diverse population of Los Angeles, an intense love for his daughter, and an appreciation of Vic Scully, the Los Angeles Dodgers announcer.  Bosch knows how to use all the resources of the police department and how to make intelligent guesses based on his years of experience.

Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper Collins, 2016), by J.D. Vance, a hillbilly who went to Yale Law School, is interesting in itself but also in the context of the recent election: “Whenever people ask me what I would most like to change about the white working class I say ‘the feeling that our choices don’t matter.’”  Many hillbillies were lured to the Midwest for jobs after WWII and left their support system of family and church behind.  When the jobs started to disappear those who made the trip were cast adrift and divorce, abuse and drug use became common. Vance was fortunate that he had a grandmother who looked out for him and held him to the high standards that she knew he was capable of.  But what about those not so fortunate?  Vance is as unclear as most of us what those without luck and a supportive relative can do, though extensive job training, better schools and free college tuition could certainly help.

A Thousand Cuts:  The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies (The University Press of Mississippi,2016) by Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph.  Things have changed since that day in the 70’s when I went to see a secret screening of Vertigo, the Hitchcock film that was out of distribution and could not legally be shown.  Somehow Hitchcock’s lawyers heard about the showing and showed up to stop it.   Now one can see Vertigo (voted in a Sight and Sound poll as the greatest film ever) on DVD anytime one chooses to do so!  A Thousand Cuts interviews the people who saved films which were often unavailable otherwise.  When I was writing an article about Billy Wilder’s remake of The Front Page (1974) the original film version, made by Lewis Milestone in 1931, was completely unavailable.  But collector and film scholar William K. Everson had a print of the Milestone version and was kind enough to show it to me in his apartment.   One can only hope that the movies that survive on film can still be saved, with the help of companies such as Turner Classic Movies and individuals such as Martin Scorcese.

Don Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954)

Siegel’s most successful films express the doomed peculiarity of the antisocial outcast.
--Andrew Sarris

Although acting as a mob, the prisoners in reality are loners who have a variety of motives for inciting the revolt.

--Judith M. Cass

Don Siegel’s Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) is a depressing movie to see today; prison conditions are worse than ever, as private prisons cut budgets in order to increase profits.  Siegel’s film was in some ways ahead of its time, with its integrated prison population and its integrated guards; the guards all have to work additional jobs to supplement their meager pay of $50 a week.  One prisoner makes the astute observation that prisons will not get better until everyone realizes that they could conceivably end up in prison one day.  In fact the movie was made by producer Walter Wanger after he spent for four months in prison for shooting an agent that he thought was having an affair with Joan Bennett, Wanger’s wife at the time.

Siegel and his cinematographer Russell Harlan show an intense black-and-white environment where all characters –prisoners and guards alike –are various shades of grey.  The warden (Emile Meyer) has to keep telling the press that the prison has all kinds of people in it, just as on the outside.  Even after the warden and the governor save the lives of the guards by agreeing to the modest demands of the prisoners  –nothing more than what the warden had long advocated, including job training – the agreement is repudiated by the state legislature, which insists that the leader of the riot (Neville Brand)is to be put on trial.  Siegel does a superb job of showing the riot itself as well as the conflicts among the prisoners on one side and the politicians on the other, in an all masculine world; women are often talked about but the only time there are any shown is at the very end when the guards are released to their wives.