Plenty of Christmas movies; my favorites are Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), which has Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane) on Dec.1, Ernst Lubitsch's wonderful The Shop Around the Corner (1940) on Dec. 2, John Ford's The Three Godfathers (1946) on the 15th and Remember the Night (1940), written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, on Dec. 20.
Other movies in Dec. include:
Chantal Ackerman's intensely minimalist Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1977) on Dec. 2 (I commented on this film July 7, 2014)
Jacques Tourneur's great film noir Out of the Past (1947)
John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) on Dec. 11.
Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951) on Dec. 13
John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle(1950) and Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941) on Dec. 17
Preston Sturges's Christmas in July (1940) on Dec. 20
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Sunday, November 11, 2018
The B Western: Stage to Chino (1940), Riding Shotgun (1954)
When I was a kid I loved Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies; now I don't care for them because they had motorcars in them and I prefer Westerns --A or B -- that take place on the 19th C. frontier.
Stage to Chino is a nice B Western starring George O'Brien who, for whatever various reasons, was a star in silent films (John Ford's The Iron Horse in 1924, Murnau's Sunrise in 1927) and mostly relegated to B Westerns in the thirties and forties, ending his career back with Ford in Fort Apache in 1948. Stage to Chino was directed by Edward Killy, who directed mostly B films with intelligence and flair. Stage to Chino has something for everyone: comedy (salesman Hobart Cavanaugh saying "I'm in ladies underwear"), music (by The Pals of the Golden West), action and romance. I especially liked the key role played by Virginia Vale, as the woman who takes over her father's stagecoach line and fights for the mail business, helped by postal inspector O'Brien. The film is also something of a study of monopoly capitalism, as a rival stagecoach line resorts to robbery and murder to win the mail contract.
Riding Shotgun is more of a B+ Western, directed by veteran Andre de Toth and photographed by Bert Glennon, who worked often with John Ford; it stars Randolph Scott, an icon of Westerns, and has the themes of many post-WWII Westerns and many of de Toth's film: betrayal and revenge. Many people die in de Toth's film, none in Killy's. Killy's film is in black-and-white, de Toth's in gorgeous color. De Toth emphasizes the solitariness of the Western hero (as in High Noon in 1954 and Rio Bravo in 1959), as Scott is thought mistakenly by the townspeople to be a murderer, while Killy's film has the townspeople working together. Killy's film has important roles for women, while in de Toth's film the women are mostly on the sidelines.
Stage to Chino is a nice B Western starring George O'Brien who, for whatever various reasons, was a star in silent films (John Ford's The Iron Horse in 1924, Murnau's Sunrise in 1927) and mostly relegated to B Westerns in the thirties and forties, ending his career back with Ford in Fort Apache in 1948. Stage to Chino was directed by Edward Killy, who directed mostly B films with intelligence and flair. Stage to Chino has something for everyone: comedy (salesman Hobart Cavanaugh saying "I'm in ladies underwear"), music (by The Pals of the Golden West), action and romance. I especially liked the key role played by Virginia Vale, as the woman who takes over her father's stagecoach line and fights for the mail business, helped by postal inspector O'Brien. The film is also something of a study of monopoly capitalism, as a rival stagecoach line resorts to robbery and murder to win the mail contract.
Riding Shotgun is more of a B+ Western, directed by veteran Andre de Toth and photographed by Bert Glennon, who worked often with John Ford; it stars Randolph Scott, an icon of Westerns, and has the themes of many post-WWII Westerns and many of de Toth's film: betrayal and revenge. Many people die in de Toth's film, none in Killy's. Killy's film is in black-and-white, de Toth's in gorgeous color. De Toth emphasizes the solitariness of the Western hero (as in High Noon in 1954 and Rio Bravo in 1959), as Scott is thought mistakenly by the townspeople to be a murderer, while Killy's film has the townspeople working together. Killy's film has important roles for women, while in de Toth's film the women are mostly on the sidelines.
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2018
My favorite films in the first week of November are Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945). I will get to the rest of the month presently, while continuing to recommend any films by Lubitsch, Ford, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Alfred Hitchcock, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Roberto Rossellini, Frank Borzage.
Other recommended films:
Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952) on the 16th and Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) on the 17th,
Michael Leigh' Secrets and Lies (1996) on the 20th.
Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940) on the 24th.
Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) on the 25th.
Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) on the 30th.
Other recommended films:
Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952) on the 16th and Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) on the 17th,
Michael Leigh' Secrets and Lies (1996) on the 20th.
Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940) on the 24th.
Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) on the 25th.
Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) on the 30th.
Monday, October 22, 2018
American Ballet Theatre Oct. 20, 2018
Most readers of this blog know my preference for NYC Ballet, but Saturday the American Ballet Theatre was performing Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante so we went: my wife Susan, son Gideon, daughter Victoria and me. ABT was performing their brief Fall season at The New York State Theatre --instead of the cramped City Center -- and we had nice seats in row B of the 4th ring, no longer sold by NYC Ballet for subscriptions.
Symphonie Concertante was beautifully and elegantly danced by Stella Abrera, Gillian Murphy, and Alexandre Hammoudi, the lone male in the cast. The music was Mozart's --Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin and Viola -- and there was much lovely entwining of the three leading dancers while the corps did port de bras and tendus surrounding them. This ballet was originally done for students of the School of American Ballet in 1945 and on Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq for NYC Ballet in 1947. My feeling is that it was dropped by Balanchine at NYC Ballet because it was too similar to Symphony in C (use of the corps) and Concerto Barocco (use of two female leads and one male), the former premiering in 1947 and the latter in 1941. Also, Balanchine did a very different sort of ballet to Mozart music in 1956: Divertimento Number 15. Until this week ABT had not performed Sinfornia Concertante since 2007, perhaps because they did not have enough dancers with the requisite Balanchine technique; it requires twenty-five dancers, all of whom performed Saturday with intensity and passion.
Garden Blue was performed next, choreographed by Jessica Lang, a former member of Twylas Tharp's group. It was done to playful Dumky (using Slavic epic ballads) music, Dvorak's Piano Trio No.4 in E minor. There was a somewhat playful aspect to Lang's choreography, very much in the Martha Graham/Paul Taylor school of dance and rather arbitrary in its relationship to the music. The costumes and set were by Sarah Crowner, the costumes unitards of bright colors and the set including strange wing-like constructions that the dancers hid in and behind.
The final dance was Fancy Free, choreography by Jerome Robbins and music by Leonard Bernstein. This piece has always seemed to appeal to those who like Broadway dance and vaudeville, which does not include me. Edwin Denby wrote about it (when it premiered in 1944), "If you want to be technical you can find in the steps all sorts of references to our normal dance-hall steps, as they are done from Roseland to the Savoy: trucking, the boogie knee drop, even a round-the-back done in slow motion." (New York Herald Tribune, April 19, 1944). Denby even points out the parodies of Tudor and Massine in the dance, something not obvious to audiences today. My daughter liked it "because it had a story" (which eventually became part of On the Town, on Broadway in 1944 and in a movie in 1949).
Symphonie Concertante was beautifully and elegantly danced by Stella Abrera, Gillian Murphy, and Alexandre Hammoudi, the lone male in the cast. The music was Mozart's --Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin and Viola -- and there was much lovely entwining of the three leading dancers while the corps did port de bras and tendus surrounding them. This ballet was originally done for students of the School of American Ballet in 1945 and on Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq for NYC Ballet in 1947. My feeling is that it was dropped by Balanchine at NYC Ballet because it was too similar to Symphony in C (use of the corps) and Concerto Barocco (use of two female leads and one male), the former premiering in 1947 and the latter in 1941. Also, Balanchine did a very different sort of ballet to Mozart music in 1956: Divertimento Number 15. Until this week ABT had not performed Sinfornia Concertante since 2007, perhaps because they did not have enough dancers with the requisite Balanchine technique; it requires twenty-five dancers, all of whom performed Saturday with intensity and passion.
Garden Blue was performed next, choreographed by Jessica Lang, a former member of Twylas Tharp's group. It was done to playful Dumky (using Slavic epic ballads) music, Dvorak's Piano Trio No.4 in E minor. There was a somewhat playful aspect to Lang's choreography, very much in the Martha Graham/Paul Taylor school of dance and rather arbitrary in its relationship to the music. The costumes and set were by Sarah Crowner, the costumes unitards of bright colors and the set including strange wing-like constructions that the dancers hid in and behind.
The final dance was Fancy Free, choreography by Jerome Robbins and music by Leonard Bernstein. This piece has always seemed to appeal to those who like Broadway dance and vaudeville, which does not include me. Edwin Denby wrote about it (when it premiered in 1944), "If you want to be technical you can find in the steps all sorts of references to our normal dance-hall steps, as they are done from Roseland to the Savoy: trucking, the boogie knee drop, even a round-the-back done in slow motion." (New York Herald Tribune, April 19, 1944). Denby even points out the parodies of Tudor and Massine in the dance, something not obvious to audiences today. My daughter liked it "because it had a story" (which eventually became part of On the Town, on Broadway in 1944 and in a movie in 1949).
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Mark Robson's Roughshod (1949)
Whenever I go with my seven-year-old daughter to some crummy new piece of animation I think of how movies once appealed across age and gender differences. Case in point: Roughshod. The film has a young kid (nicely played by Claude Jarman, Jr.), a handsome older brother (played by Robert Sterling) and a sexy woman (Gloria Grahame) on a trip to California, pursued by a bad guy (John Ireland). The film takes place mostly outdoors among rocks and forests, photographed with dappled chiaroscuro by cinematographer Joseph Biroc. Although the film has a noir mood (it was written by Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote Out of the Past, 1947) it does have a happy ending of sorts, after all the bad guys are killed (as well as some of the good guys), and Claude Jarmen, Jr. is taught his ABC's by Gloria Grahame.
This is a B Western, well crafted by director by Mark Robson, after his apprenticeship with Val Lewton (The Seventh Victim 1943 ) and before his bloated later films (Peyton Place 1947 et al.)
Three Private-Eye Novels
I read a fair amount of genre novels, mostly hard-boiled mystery, because, as Paul Auster says, they contain some of the best contemporary writing. They also require a certain formulaic element that allows for artistic freedom, in the same way the Western has done for filmmakers.
At the Hands of Another was written by in 1983 by Arthur Lyons (Lyons died in 2008) and is in many ways very much in the Raymond Chandler tradition: it is written in the first person, is part of a series about private eye Jacob Asch, takes place in Los Angeles, is elegantly written with low-key humor and minimal violence. It also is critical of the scamming that goes on when lawyers and doctors operate together to defraud, and includes a femme fatale who seeks Asch's help and abandons him after he helps her.
John Connolly's A Game of Ghosts (2017) is the sixteenth in his series of books about private eye Charlie Parker (yes, he likes jazz). Connolly is Irish and his novels are rather gory and overlaid with supernatural and fantasy elements and the assumption that evil exists and that Parker and his assistants, Angel and Louis, are among those sometimes called upon to root it out. Connolly writes, in his typically poetic way, influenced in style and subject by Milton, "it was another imperfect solution, but then it was an increasingly imperfect world."
Lyons writes in the first person, Connolly in the third, and Steve Hamilton, in Dead Man Running (2018) combines the two. The first-person part is Alex McKnight, who is yanked from his Upper Peninsula Michigan home to Arizona by the FBI: a serial killer will only talk to McKnight. Serial killers are not very interesting but McKnight's fish-out-of-water pursuit of the killer after he escapes reminds one of a Geoffrey Household novel, in McKnight's attempt to deal with a foreign landscape. It's an impressive outing by Steve Hamilton to go beyond the Upper Peninsula and expand what McKnight --and the reader -- know.
At the Hands of Another was written by in 1983 by Arthur Lyons (Lyons died in 2008) and is in many ways very much in the Raymond Chandler tradition: it is written in the first person, is part of a series about private eye Jacob Asch, takes place in Los Angeles, is elegantly written with low-key humor and minimal violence. It also is critical of the scamming that goes on when lawyers and doctors operate together to defraud, and includes a femme fatale who seeks Asch's help and abandons him after he helps her.
John Connolly's A Game of Ghosts (2017) is the sixteenth in his series of books about private eye Charlie Parker (yes, he likes jazz). Connolly is Irish and his novels are rather gory and overlaid with supernatural and fantasy elements and the assumption that evil exists and that Parker and his assistants, Angel and Louis, are among those sometimes called upon to root it out. Connolly writes, in his typically poetic way, influenced in style and subject by Milton, "it was another imperfect solution, but then it was an increasingly imperfect world."
Lyons writes in the first person, Connolly in the third, and Steve Hamilton, in Dead Man Running (2018) combines the two. The first-person part is Alex McKnight, who is yanked from his Upper Peninsula Michigan home to Arizona by the FBI: a serial killer will only talk to McKnight. Serial killers are not very interesting but McKnight's fish-out-of-water pursuit of the killer after he escapes reminds one of a Geoffrey Household novel, in McKnight's attempt to deal with a foreign landscape. It's an impressive outing by Steve Hamilton to go beyond the Upper Peninsula and expand what McKnight --and the reader -- know.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Two Films by Seth Holt
"His virtues are things of bits and pieces," wrote Andrew Sarris of Seth Holt. This is true of Holt's last two films, Danger Route (1967) and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971), both recently shown on Turner Classic Movies. Holt died, at the age of 47, before finishing the latter film; it was completed by Michael Carreras. Holt was championed by "Movie' magazine as a director trying to break out of the genteel tradition of British films, as was Michael Reeves, who died at 27. Both directors were considered guilty of what critic Robin Wood called "the fallacy of bad taste" in their attempts to make personal genre films with limited budgets.
Danger Route was one of the many films of the 60's that attempted to cash in on the James Bond phenomenon. Jonas Wilde, played by Richard Johnson (who looks a bit like Sean Connery) was something of an anti-Bond, not using any gadgets and killing people with his bare hands. He doesn't seem to take much pleasure in sex except to the extent he can use women to accomplish his goals, as he does here with a rather frumpy-looking Diana Dors, who is the housekeeper of a mansion Wilde is trying to break into. There is a lot about US-England rivalry and a great deal about class conflict in Danger Route, Wilde eventually being betrayed by his friends and even his shack job (Carol Lynley). One friend, attempting to kill Wilde, says how much he resents those in the upper classes who run the intelligence operations, "unless you're in the upper classes you'll always be a sheep, never a shepherd"
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, from Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, fits in nicely with Hammer Studio's roster of horror films. In 1959 Terence Fisher made The Mummy for Hammer and Fisher was by far Hammer's best director of horror, his films being rather cerebral period pieces about Frankenstein, Dracula, et al. Holt was much less comfortable with this kind of material, though he gets credit for playing it straight (with the slight exception of naming a character Tod Browning, the name of the original director of Dracula), with the help of Valerie Leon, playing a modern reincarnation of an exotic Egyptian "Queen of Darkness." Holt's film follows the basic blueprint of most Mummy films from 1932 to the present: a Mummy comes to life in an attempt to retrieve items stolen from a tomb. The film takes place in the present day, though it is quite stylish and if it weren't for the modern motorcars and purple shirts it could almost be Edwardian.
Danger Route was one of the many films of the 60's that attempted to cash in on the James Bond phenomenon. Jonas Wilde, played by Richard Johnson (who looks a bit like Sean Connery) was something of an anti-Bond, not using any gadgets and killing people with his bare hands. He doesn't seem to take much pleasure in sex except to the extent he can use women to accomplish his goals, as he does here with a rather frumpy-looking Diana Dors, who is the housekeeper of a mansion Wilde is trying to break into. There is a lot about US-England rivalry and a great deal about class conflict in Danger Route, Wilde eventually being betrayed by his friends and even his shack job (Carol Lynley). One friend, attempting to kill Wilde, says how much he resents those in the upper classes who run the intelligence operations, "unless you're in the upper classes you'll always be a sheep, never a shepherd"
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, from Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, fits in nicely with Hammer Studio's roster of horror films. In 1959 Terence Fisher made The Mummy for Hammer and Fisher was by far Hammer's best director of horror, his films being rather cerebral period pieces about Frankenstein, Dracula, et al. Holt was much less comfortable with this kind of material, though he gets credit for playing it straight (with the slight exception of naming a character Tod Browning, the name of the original director of Dracula), with the help of Valerie Leon, playing a modern reincarnation of an exotic Egyptian "Queen of Darkness." Holt's film follows the basic blueprint of most Mummy films from 1932 to the present: a Mummy comes to life in an attempt to retrieve items stolen from a tomb. The film takes place in the present day, though it is quite stylish and if it weren't for the modern motorcars and purple shirts it could almost be Edwardian.
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