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.
Friday, August 12, 2016
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.
Friday, July 29, 2016
Turner Classic Movies August 2016
Lately I have been tending to avoid films that I have recommended previously. If you want detail about any films in August that I don't include here please leave a comment or send an e-mail
Two master stylists on Aug. 4: Erich Von Stroheim's silent film The Wedding March (1928) and Josef Von Sternberg's first talkie Thunderbolt (1929).
August 10 has two intelligent King Vidor films, H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) from a John Galsworthy novel and Comrade X, strongly influenced by Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939). On March 13 is Vidor's Citadel (1938).
On August 12 is Henry King's State Fair (1933) with a wry and folksy Will Rogers, at that time a big star.
Also on August 12 are two moving films by the romantic Frank Borzage, Lucky Star (1929) and Street Angel (1928)
Two extraordinary melodramas on August 14: Vincente Minnelli's dreamlike Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) and Nicholas Ray's period gangster film Party Girl (1958). Both films are beautiful examples of the use of the widescreen and color.
August 15 has John Ford's exquisite How Green Was My Valley (1941)
August16 includes one of the few films Jean Renoir made in America, Swamp Water (1941).
On August 17 there is Phil Karlson's corrosive film about political corruption The Phenix City Story (1955) and two excellent war films: Anthony Mann's Men in War (1952) and Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet (1951).
On the 22nd is John Ford's elegant war film about victory and defeat They Were Expendable (1945)
On the 23rd are two films by New Wave director Jean-luc Godard: Contempt (1963) and Masculin-Feminin (1966)
The 28th has Mitch Leisen's Easy Living (1937), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges.
On the 29th are two elegant love stories, Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939) and Max Ophuls's Earrings of Madame De.. (1939), especially for those, such as myself, who love tracking shots and long takes.
The 31st has Minnelli's intense Some Came Running, with an impressive score by Elmer Bernstein.
Two master stylists on Aug. 4: Erich Von Stroheim's silent film The Wedding March (1928) and Josef Von Sternberg's first talkie Thunderbolt (1929).
August 10 has two intelligent King Vidor films, H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) from a John Galsworthy novel and Comrade X, strongly influenced by Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939). On March 13 is Vidor's Citadel (1938).
On August 12 is Henry King's State Fair (1933) with a wry and folksy Will Rogers, at that time a big star.
Also on August 12 are two moving films by the romantic Frank Borzage, Lucky Star (1929) and Street Angel (1928)
Two extraordinary melodramas on August 14: Vincente Minnelli's dreamlike Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) and Nicholas Ray's period gangster film Party Girl (1958). Both films are beautiful examples of the use of the widescreen and color.
August 15 has John Ford's exquisite How Green Was My Valley (1941)
August16 includes one of the few films Jean Renoir made in America, Swamp Water (1941).
On August 17 there is Phil Karlson's corrosive film about political corruption The Phenix City Story (1955) and two excellent war films: Anthony Mann's Men in War (1952) and Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet (1951).
On the 22nd is John Ford's elegant war film about victory and defeat They Were Expendable (1945)
On the 23rd are two films by New Wave director Jean-luc Godard: Contempt (1963) and Masculin-Feminin (1966)
The 28th has Mitch Leisen's Easy Living (1937), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges.
On the 29th are two elegant love stories, Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939) and Max Ophuls's Earrings of Madame De.. (1939), especially for those, such as myself, who love tracking shots and long takes.
The 31st has Minnelli's intense Some Came Running, with an impressive score by Elmer Bernstein.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Lady on the Train (movie,1945) and Girl on a Train (book, 2015)
We're back to our usual alternatives: do we want suspense or surprise?
Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967)
People freely use Hitchcock's name without any understanding of the difference between suspense and surprise. Paula Hawkins's book The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2014) and Charles David's film Lady on the Train (Universal, 1945) both traffic in surprise more than suspense, deliberately misleading and manipulating the reader or the viewer. Of course there is a long tradition of this in the B movie and detective fiction, a tradition I don't much care for.
Lady on the Train was one of Deanna Durbin's last films before she retired (at the age of 27) and moved to France with David, who directed the film. The film is intelligently directed and photographed --by Woody Bredell -- much like a film noir, most of it taking place at night in dimly lit hotel rooms and nightclubs. Durbin was trying for more grown-up roles after years of playing the-girl-next-door and was rather successful at it in this film and the previous year's Christmas Holiday, directed by film noir specialist Robert Siodmak and photographed by Bredell. Universal claimed that audiences did not buy Durbin in this kind of role, even though the movies had a fair amount of singing. Perhaps it did not help that both these films were downbeat about Christmas, with murder scenes taking place in front of Christmas trees, though in Lady on the Train Durbin sings a lovely version or "Silent Night" over the phone to her father. Durbin continued to complain, justifiably, about bad material and bad directors but Universal was deaf to her complaints.
Paula Hawkins book falls into that dubious genre of Gone Girl (see my entry from 5/6/14) with an unreliable narrator (because she was usually inebriated) and plenty of information withheld from the reader. Even though there are three different narrators --Megan, Rachel, Anna -- men are often designated by simple pronouns, the better to keep their identity hidden until the (slightly) surprise ending.
Both Hawkins and David use the train motif well: both have women spying something happening out a train window that initiates their actions. Deanna Durbin, however, does not go to the police but rather to the author of the mystery she is reading on the train, to solve the murder. Rachel, in The Girl on the Train, goes to the police and immediately becomes a suspect.
Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967)
People freely use Hitchcock's name without any understanding of the difference between suspense and surprise. Paula Hawkins's book The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2014) and Charles David's film Lady on the Train (Universal, 1945) both traffic in surprise more than suspense, deliberately misleading and manipulating the reader or the viewer. Of course there is a long tradition of this in the B movie and detective fiction, a tradition I don't much care for.
Lady on the Train was one of Deanna Durbin's last films before she retired (at the age of 27) and moved to France with David, who directed the film. The film is intelligently directed and photographed --by Woody Bredell -- much like a film noir, most of it taking place at night in dimly lit hotel rooms and nightclubs. Durbin was trying for more grown-up roles after years of playing the-girl-next-door and was rather successful at it in this film and the previous year's Christmas Holiday, directed by film noir specialist Robert Siodmak and photographed by Bredell. Universal claimed that audiences did not buy Durbin in this kind of role, even though the movies had a fair amount of singing. Perhaps it did not help that both these films were downbeat about Christmas, with murder scenes taking place in front of Christmas trees, though in Lady on the Train Durbin sings a lovely version or "Silent Night" over the phone to her father. Durbin continued to complain, justifiably, about bad material and bad directors but Universal was deaf to her complaints.
Paula Hawkins book falls into that dubious genre of Gone Girl (see my entry from 5/6/14) with an unreliable narrator (because she was usually inebriated) and plenty of information withheld from the reader. Even though there are three different narrators --Megan, Rachel, Anna -- men are often designated by simple pronouns, the better to keep their identity hidden until the (slightly) surprise ending.
Both Hawkins and David use the train motif well: both have women spying something happening out a train window that initiates their actions. Deanna Durbin, however, does not go to the police but rather to the author of the mystery she is reading on the train, to solve the murder. Rachel, in The Girl on the Train, goes to the police and immediately becomes a suspect.
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Dick Bellamy and Rober Mapplethorpe
Judith E. Stein's book Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016) and the recent film Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures on HBO, directed by Randy Barbato and Ferton Bailey, raise many questions that are worth discussing, though impossible to answer definitively: what is art, how is it made and discovered, what is the role of the dealer, and so on.
I knew Dick Bellamy as a tennis partner, not as an art dealer, though I had studied art history and worked at Artforum magazine. He was a skillful player and had a sweet temperament, i.e., he didn't mind winning but mainly just loved to play. He was especially adept at putting spin on the ball and working with a partner in doubles. According to Stein's book he was "risible, inexperienced and at times self-destructive." He was an unusual art dealer in that he sometimes would turn down a buyer as not suitable to own a particular artist's work. He was always short of money and was most successful when he ran The Green Gallery from 1960 to 1965 with the support of Robert Scull. There he showed minimalism, pop art and conceptual art when those movements barely had names. Artists included Warhol, Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Donald Judd. To what extent he "discovered" these artists is difficult to say, i.e., perhaps some of them would have become known anyway, just as many of the artists he showed are now forgotten, for many different reasons. Because he was essentially not good at business he gravitated at the end to living near and representing sculptor Mark di Suvero. According to Stein, Bellamy was an alcoholic, a distant father, an unfaithful lover. He died in 1998 at the age of 70.
Robert Mapplethorpe was a controversial photographer who specialized in homoerotic photographs. I saw the Sandy Daley film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced at MoMA in 1971, with a soundtrack provided live by Patti Smith, with whom he lived for several years. Mapplethorpe was influenced by religious imagery (he was brought up as a Roman Catholic in Queens) in his search for what he called "truth" (which did not stop him from re-touching photographs), with a particular interest in black men (who reminded him of classical bronzes) and their penises. For most of his artistic career Mapplethorpe was not represented by a gallery; not only were his photographs sometimes shocking (though not always; he also photographed flowers, though in distinctive ways) photography was not yet accepted as an art form. Mapplethorpe's social life was completely blended with his professional life and he died with AIDS in 1989, at the age of 42.
I knew Dick Bellamy as a tennis partner, not as an art dealer, though I had studied art history and worked at Artforum magazine. He was a skillful player and had a sweet temperament, i.e., he didn't mind winning but mainly just loved to play. He was especially adept at putting spin on the ball and working with a partner in doubles. According to Stein's book he was "risible, inexperienced and at times self-destructive." He was an unusual art dealer in that he sometimes would turn down a buyer as not suitable to own a particular artist's work. He was always short of money and was most successful when he ran The Green Gallery from 1960 to 1965 with the support of Robert Scull. There he showed minimalism, pop art and conceptual art when those movements barely had names. Artists included Warhol, Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Donald Judd. To what extent he "discovered" these artists is difficult to say, i.e., perhaps some of them would have become known anyway, just as many of the artists he showed are now forgotten, for many different reasons. Because he was essentially not good at business he gravitated at the end to living near and representing sculptor Mark di Suvero. According to Stein, Bellamy was an alcoholic, a distant father, an unfaithful lover. He died in 1998 at the age of 70.
Robert Mapplethorpe was a controversial photographer who specialized in homoerotic photographs. I saw the Sandy Daley film Robert Having His Nipple Pierced at MoMA in 1971, with a soundtrack provided live by Patti Smith, with whom he lived for several years. Mapplethorpe was influenced by religious imagery (he was brought up as a Roman Catholic in Queens) in his search for what he called "truth" (which did not stop him from re-touching photographs), with a particular interest in black men (who reminded him of classical bronzes) and their penises. For most of his artistic career Mapplethorpe was not represented by a gallery; not only were his photographs sometimes shocking (though not always; he also photographed flowers, though in distinctive ways) photography was not yet accepted as an art form. Mapplethorpe's social life was completely blended with his professional life and he died with AIDS in 1989, at the age of 42.
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