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Swimming To Cambodia

17 May

Swimming To Cambodia — directed by Jonathan Demme.  Docudrama. Spalding Grey performs his monologue about his experiences in Bangkok as a movie actor filming The Killing Fields. 82 minutes. Color. 1987.

★★★★★

There sits Spalding Grey in his usual plaid workshirt and jeans with a glass of water and a 5 & 10 spiral notebook and delivers his remarkable take on his life and mind. He is quite beautiful, and the director keeps close up on him, even though he is delivering it, supposedly, in the small space of New York’s Performing Garage. Actually the film is more than a record of a well-rehearsed performance piece, for it includes lighting effects and process shots not offered when one saw it in person. But that’s all right. Also all right are The Killing Fields clips themselves. It’s not a gag-driven monologue, although it is always humorous and sometimes even funny. It is, rather, a crazy education imparted professorially, for he maintains himself seated, dignified in all his indignity and indignation, behind the lecture barrier of the little table. We are being taught something. We all need this restraint placed upon someone who is after all tearing out his hair. For what is interesting is Grey’s fine madness. Which consists of what drives him nuts about himself and the world he inhabits, in this case the international political zoo of the 70s, when Nixon personally put America to a secret war against the Khmer Rouge in Northern Cambodia. Grey is involved in the massacre, and he is also involved in living, concurrent with it, the voluptuous life of a Hollywood production expense account, which also takes him to the wild and pristine beaches of the Indian Ocean, where he swims unto death. Why should we be interested in this? Because Grey is not a moron and is not pretending to a popular simplicity. He is a middle class, middle aged guy whose neuroses are such that they lead him, as neuroses often do, to the truth. He is a responsive actor and he is a telling mimic. And he is willing, for some reason, to experience, before our eyes, excruciation. One is aware, as he does this, that he does this every night, night after night, for an audience to which he would suggest his own resemblance. This is also part of his madness. For it includes our madness in going to see him, night after night, and as we watch we are aware of our own intrusive continued presence at this witty crucifixion. A college graduate. Yes. Literate. Yes. With good diction. Yes. And sane with insanity. If that troubles you, stay away. If it does not trouble you, then you can stand being troubled by his trouble. Just as you can stand being troubled by that of Garrison Keillor, who has the power to entertain you in just the same vein, you see.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Directed by Jonathan Demme, DOCUMENT OF THEATER PERFORMANCE, DRAMA, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HISTORICAL DRAMA, PERSONAL DRAMA, POLITICAL DRAMA, PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR DRAMA, SURVIVAL DRAMA, War Story

 

Love In The Afternoon

16 May

Love In The Afternoon — directed by Billy Wilder. Romanic Comedy. A notorious Lothario and a pretty young music student exchange blisses. 130 minutes Black and White 1957.

★★★

This is one of the creamiest Hollywood romantic comedies and it is also the most revolting. What makes it creamy is its confection by Ernst Lubitsch, here impostured by his devotee Billy Wilder, who makes anew Lubitsch’s light, deft, and magical touch with Viennese Pastry. In his heyday, everything Lubitsch did, whether comedy or musical, was operetta, and he used Maurice Chevalier as one of the consistent ingredients, here now present as Audrey Hepburn’s father, although he does appear old enough to be her grandfather. Never mind: he makes no attempt to crush you into marzipan with his charm, and he is just fine. All he has to do is love her, and, since she is Audrey Hepburn, this is not hard to do. Her gentle sense of fun leavens the dessert. What is hard to take is her antediluvian leading man. Why this actress was set opposite ancient leading men for so much of her young life is a mystery. Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, the presence of only the last of whom can be said to be justified. I suppose it was to sustain her range as an ingénue. For she was a true ingénue, and we did not have another one until Gwyneth Paltrow, so it’s a rarer flower than one might suppose. Although at the time she made this film she was 29, her quality was always 19, and it is so here. However that may be, whom we have opposite her is an actor in an advanced state of decomposition, Gary Cooper. He has lost his slim hips, so while he wears beautiful clothes he does not look good in them. His face did not age well; his visage sags with sadness; he has luggage under his eyes. He is too darned old. And he is such a bad actor. He cannot pick up his cues properly. He cannot do the simplest actor’s task with simple conviction. And we are still asked, aged 57, to swallow his fraudulent naiveté, and the phony supposition that taciturn men are more profound, more honest, and more masculine. (Have you ever known a cowboy who wasn’t a blabbermouth?) He is completely unconvincing as a wealthy internationally renowned roué, a la Porfirio Rubirosa, just as he was in Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. In real life, Cooper was a roué, but that does not mean he will admit to the shame of so being as a character. What one senses underlying his presence is his overweening vanity, his contempt, and his stumbling deliberately to blind us to his lack of natural or even professional ability. He never would accept a movie in which he died; he had always to be the hero. The logical ending to this movie, which the entrancing Audrey Hepburn carries upon her thin Givenchy-laden shoulders, is that he jump off the train to marry her, but no, he sweeps her on the train to become his mistress. Disgusting. Otherwise, the film is charmingly conceived and written, beautifully filmed by William Mellor, who worked with George Stevens so often. The Lubitsch touches have to do with four musicians going through a door and a rolling liquor table, and a hat, and they are endearing. Lubitsch liked people a lot more than Billy Wilder did, and that cannot be taught. But the film is likable, although revolting, and a model for making a smooth confection to perfection.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Audrey Hepburn, DIRECTED BY Billy Wilder, FILMED BY William Mellor, Gary Cooper, High Comedy, Maurice Chevalier, Sex Comedy

 

Without Love

15 May

Without Love — directed by Harold Bucquet. Romantic Drama. An inventor looking for a place to work on an important WW II oxygen mask marries his landlady because neither of them are in love with one another. 111 minutes Black and White 1945.

★★★★

“Perfectly believable as an actor, “Elia Kazan said of him, “completely unbelievable in the scene.” So the time has come to call into question, what sort of an actor Spencer Tracy was and just how good was he.  Without Love is a good context to raise these questions in, and to raise the matter of whether he was really a better actor when he was not acting with Katharine Hepburn. This last is hard to tell, because she exerts a fascination of face, voice, and bearing that is as freakishly special as his is commonplace. Which means she draws focus whenever the two are on the screen together. So you don’t look at him. If you had to answer just What Is He you could say Just an ordinary American Joe, but if you asked the question, What Is She, you’d have to venture lots of answers. An actress and being of any depth would not be among them. And because she is not, she does not offer an occasion for depth in Tracy. He simply follows her suit, plays to her hand, defers to her gifts and lack of gifts, perhaps so as not to show them up and certainly also to level out with her into a balance of style and treatment of the material they shared. Here he plays a man who has been betrayed by a frightening floozy and has sworn off women. But do you ever feel his feelings have been hurt by this? Do you ever feel he is carrying around a wound? Do you ever feel what his relations to women might be, that he fears for himself in involving himself with one? No. You don’t. If he had supplied such a subtext, would that have defied the tone of Philip Barry’s play? What directs his choice to play the piece on the level he plays it – and he has a good many solo scenes particularly at the beginning? Does his swearing off women, off love, really ever cause him to wrangle inside himself, does it cause an interesting difficulty? Nope. He plays the story well he does not play the drama well. Perhaps he considered it beneath him. Was he just lazy? He is charming, fun, convincing, but he has nothing at stake. Katharine Hepburn made three movies of Philip Barry plays, all three of which she had already played in on Broadway. This was the last. Her experience with Without Love was an unhappy one, although it had a run. We find her good in some scenes, and not so hot in others. That she wears polka dot culottes is sometimes more interesting than her acting itself. And she a tendency to tremble that fine chin of hers and to confuse tears with depth of feeling, a habit that remained with her all her life. But she does a great monotone monologue in the proposal scene, and whenever she must be in command she is admirable. More than Tracy, she needs a good director and she does not have one. Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn, support them, and  Felix Bressart is all an actor should be in the role of Tracy’s mentor. Without Love is a curious story for the two of them to engage in, for their relations were non-sexual by this time, and they remained without love for the rest of their intermittent lives together. Is this Film As Unconscious Memoir? This is the third of their pictures. After the first and best of them, Woman Of The Year, they were never sexual again on screen and, in eight more films, never kissed once

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Felix Bressart, Gloria Graham, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Katharine Hepburn, Keenan Wynn, Lucille Ball, Spencer Tracy, WARTIME ROMANCE

 

Ride The Divide

12 May

Ride The Divide. Sports Documentary. 16 mountain bikers run the Continental divide trail in a race of over 2700 miles from Banff in B.C to Mexico. 80 minutes Color 2010.

★★★★

Well, the music is inane, and folks fall into emotionalism, and the roadside restaurants sometimes take over and the actual riding is lost, but what the heck: to recount the grueling is to repeat the tedium, which ingredient is its chief torture. After a while I got used to the beautiful sights passing by, and after a while I stopped being annoyed that the riders were not seeing them or, if they were, were tired of them or were taking them for granted, or that the camera was seeing what could not distract the riders from the slog or give them relief from its trudge. The winner is a young man about to have his first child, and when he finishes he seems ready to become a father, for such are the psychic and spiritual surprises of such a journey. As to the camera crew, there is no way of really capturing the essence of such a ride. In 1979 when I was 44 I biked on a ten- speed silver Nishiki from Jasper B.C. down the panhandle of Idaho, into Utah, then into New Mexico, and on to Columbus. I did the whole thing in camp moccasins, without a hat. I met no other riders on the way, but I met people who spirited me off into many unusual adventures. That is not this. This is a race. But it is the same thing because there is no anticipating the benefit of such a feat before one starts out, because one cannot know if one will finish. A day at a time is the rule. As with life. And as for me – I was just riding. I had no other place to be. It was not a feat until I had done it and even then only a feat in the eyes of those who had not done it. So the rule is that for us human males and females, there are arduous journeys that it is some times opportune to embark on, and this film is a pretty good record of passage of one of them and the mental states endured by those who set out. The defeat by the mind, the conviction the mind erects to discontinue, the logic at odds with the odds, the plebian rationales. One is faced, not with pain or tedium but with one’s own mad mind. No matter. One pedals on. Pedal and pedal and pedal. Six finished. And ten days after he won, the winner’s son was born.

 

 
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Posted in DOCUMENTARY, Sports Documentary

 

Keeper Of The Flame

10 May

Keeper Of The Flame – directed by George Cukor. WW II Melodrama. A gigantic American hero dies and a foreign correspondent tries to uncover the truth about him through questioning his wife.

★★★

To say George Cukor was a so-so director is not to stretch the bounds of praise. He had no sense of narrative proportion. He so loved the beauty and truth of actresses that he lumbered his films with scenes lengthened to glamorize them. For he loved women. What he did not love was men and women. He had no sense of the sexual energy between them, and you will find that most of his films are not about mating. This one certainly is not. So, as a follow-up of Woman Of The Year, by a director who certainly loved men and women, George Stevens, it is a baffling folly. However, in glamorizing Katharine Hepburn it is a triumph – one she carries admirably. With her carved visage, slim figure, and large hands, she is a goddess, not in the sense of a deity but in the sense of something carved out of stone. Indeed she enters the film draped by Adrian, in white like sculpture. It is one of the great opening scenes for an actress ever shot. And that is because the great William Daniels is filming it, lighting it, and choosing the floor-up angle to exalt it. The creator of Garbo in silents and sound, he is a photographer who could make every movie he shot look like a concerto. You’re not consciously aware of it, but each scene in the picture becomes alive and important because he is filming it to make it look like a Greek Tragedy. Which Greek Tragedy? The one in which, as E.B. Browning once said, Cassandra smells the slaughter in the bathroom. It is pointless to expatiate now how this picture could be improved (only to warn the viewer parenthetically that the idea of a fascist threat inside America during WW II was hooey). What one can say is that Hepburn plays all her scenes quietly, her cheeks held still, her sometimes grating volatility left outside the door. She exudes a convincing, mysterious and necessary calm. Excellent is what she is. And for that we can credit Cukor. Spencer Tracy plays the world-famous reporter, her part in Woman Of The Year, and again he is up against Hepburn’s devotion to a cause greater than anything that could lie between them. As in Woman Of The Year with Dan Tobin, she is almost under the control of her assistant Richard Whorf. Both men are played as fruits, which confuses their treachery with their sexual orientation, a combination which is truthful to neither. Are we supposed to hate fruits because they are treacherous or hate traitors because they are fruits? You see the absurdity of the matter. A strong supporting cast is put to abuse; Frank Craven as the doctor, Stephen McNally as the investigative journalist, Margaret Wycherly as the balmy mother of the great man, Howard Da Silva as the doorkeeper whom he saved and who hates him, Percy Kilbride as the smug yokel, Forrest Tucker as the great big jock, Donald Meek as the meek little hotel manager, and Audrey Christie as the newspaper dame whose sexual sallies tell us Tracy is not interested in women of any kind at all. During production, Hepburn and Donald Ogden Stewart the adapter fought badly over this story’s treatment and she won. Too bad. She fancied herself as a writer, but if you read her autobiography, you can see she was not one at all. As with Summertime and other ventures, her interference in the area of story are almost always wrong. It comes out of her desire to control, also known as, wanting to make things better, but in her case it springs from a fear at no place evident in this fine performance, which ends with one of the longest monologs ever to be given to the temptation of an actress to venture out upon. As she emerges from the shadows to do it, Tracy retreats into them. And William Daniels, quite right, has his way.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Audrey Christie, DIRECTED BY George Cukor, Donald Meek, DRAMA, Forrest Tucker, Frank Craven, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Howard Da SIlva, Katharine Hepburn, Margaret Wycherly, MELODRAMA, MURDER MYSTERY, Percy Kilbride, PERSONAL DRAMA, POLITICAL DRAMA, Stephen McNally, TURGID MELODRAMA

 

Woman Of The Year

09 May

Woman Of The Year – directed by George Stevens. Romantic Comedy. A vibrant internationally renown newspaper female reporter and a writer on the sport page fall in love and sort it out. 114 minutes Black and White 1942.

★★★★★

Katharine Hepburn met Spencer Tracy making this comic masterpiece, the first and best of their films together. Why best? Because she is so sexy, never more so in any subsequent film with him or with anyone else, and he is in turn and at the same time is emotionally smart about her to protect his heart-on for her. They fall in love at first sight, in their editor’s office, and her face is something to behold as she grasps fully the sexual and romantic power she feels for him and wields over him. He stands back and is amazed by her sexiness, youth, and zest. He follows her from the office, she turns a corner and ambushes him on the stairs and seduces him. Tess Harding is her greatest performances. She and I corresponded briefly about this picture, which I saw when it came out and I was eight, for I understood immediately that this is the sort of marriage I would want for myself – a marriage in which the woman brought something vital from the outside into it from her professional life. This film is the greatest feminist tract ever filmed, the woman raised to the heights of competence, power, wit, kindness, sexuality, admirability, and self-awareness – and the male loving her for all of it. Sydney Guilaroff designed a perfect, sexy shoulder-length hairdo for her that does a lot for her character. That, in the press of her professional responsibilities, she falls short as a wife and mother gives us the foundation of a story which, in fact, ends stupidly. They had no ending when they started making it, and Stevens wrote an ending which proves her to be incompetent at homemaking, in which she is outwitted by three breakfast gadgets. It is a scene out of Stevens’ Laurel and Hardy days; it is a scene out of silent film, a scene based on gags. It is awful for it is a scene disconsonant with the character of Hepburn, who would have risen to the situation of the waffle iron just as she does when she catches the fourth piece of toast flying into the air. The fact is, yeast does not operate that way, toasters do not rocket launch toast, and coffee pots don’t percolate like that – and we already know from the scene in the baseball park that Hepburn was game for anything, and could have learned household chores as fast as she learned and rejoiced in, before her first game was over, the ground rules of a sport she had never witnessed before in her life. The finale is false, for the film is verbal, and their reconciliation needs to be verbal also, not a capitulation on her part, no matter how it is worked out in action. Setting this episode aside, the film depicts the triumph of the female at her best, her most characteristic and complete. She is never the victim, never the little housewife, never the doormat. And Tracy does not want her to be. He loves her even when she is brilliant and says so, and so do I, and so did I when twenty years later I married just such an accomplished female.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by George Stevens, Fay Bainter, FILMED BY Joe Ruttenberg, High Comedy, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Katharine Hepburn, Minor Watson, MUST SEE, OSCAR, Spencer Tracy, William Bendix

 

The George Stevens Seminar — Part 6. Woman Of The Year

09 May

The George Stevens Seminar – Part 6. Woman Of The Year.

Only one item on this week’s seminar – and why is that?

Because it involves one of the most entertaining comedies ever made?

And why is that?

Because it explores the highly and deeply sexual fun and folly of love-at-first-sight.

As we all know, this is the picture that first brought Katharine Hepburn together with Spencer Tracy for a series of nine films, the majority of them comedies, and for a 25 year relationship. In that time she made only 8 other films. And two of them would had been better had Tracy been in them. The African Queen because he was a better actor than Bogart, and Long Days Journey Into Night because Tracy was lower-class Irish.

But this is not a study of them, but of the most quintessentially American director, George Stevens.

He had made two films with Hepburn, but her choosing him for the first of them, Alice Adams, made him the prestige director he remained for the rest of his career. Hepburn came to Stevens with the first 100 pages of Woman Of The Year in her hot little hand, and wanted Stevens to direct it. He saw it was that rare thing, a perfect script, but they were both attached to different studios. And there were 40 pages missing from the ending.

However, on the one hand, Stevens remembered what she had done for him in choosing him for Alice Adams seven years before.

He asked her to bring Woman Of The Year to Columbia where he was contracted. But she had promised it to MGM. But, on the other hand, Hepburn commanded an easy mutual respect with Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, one of the few actors ever to do so. She liked him. They could talk turkey together. So she charmed Mayer to hire Stevens to do it. Stevens didn’t like MGM, and this is the only film he ever made there.

Stevens and Hepburn had had an affair while making Alice Adams and Quality Street, and that affair resumed as Woman Of The Year started. It subsided as the film ended and as Hepburn and Tracy were drawn to one another.

And that attraction is what these two fine actors capture in their first scene together and at once. They have had their first fight together on paper as journalists on the same newspaper. Then they meet!

But the film is important because it houses Katharine Hepburn’s greatest film performance. She plays the sort of newspaperwoman we were all familiar with in those days, Dorothy Thomson and Martha Gellhorn. Led by Mrs Roosevelt, it was an era of strong prominent females, and WW II was to enhance their prominence and strength. We liked such women. With the wars in the Middle East, they have appeared again, bravely, as foreign correspondents.

Steven’s simple camera placement, his ability to let a scene improvise itself within the bounds of its script, his latitude with comedy, his brilliant camera eye, his way with a story such that he surprises us the audience into telling half of it for him – all these are radiantly present and to be found delicious by us all, still.

Honorable, talented, courteous ­– these are the words Fred Zinnemann uses to describe George Stevens.

Why would you miss so rare a spirit, when he is right there, a Netflix away?

 
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Posted in Uncategorized

 

Objective, Burma!

06 May

Objective, Burma! – directed by Raoul Walsh. Action/Adventure World War II Drama. A company of soldiers after completing its demolition mission must walk two hundred miles through the Burmese jungle while tracked by Japanese intent on killing them. 142 minutes Black and White 1945.

★★★★★

Nominated for three Oscars, George Amy for editing, Alvah Bessie for writing, and Franz Waxman for the score, any one of them deserved it, but, apart from Raoul Walsh, the key genius in all this is James Wong Howe who filmed it. One of the great film artists, he brings a raw look to every shot, and every shot tells. Particularly in light of the fact that we always believe we are in a jungle in Burma, when, in fact, it was shot at the arboretum in Los Angeles and at a California ranch. The uniforms and equipment are authentic, not props and costumes, and the combat footage is actual footage from the China-Burma-India Theatre. So we get real parachute jumps and actual glider landing operations of that period, with tanks and trucks and troops pouring out of them in Burma, and takeoffs, too, which Howe’s footage and Amy’s editing match perfectly. Again Errol Flynn is Walsh’s star, and, with all the guns going off, and the peril of the jungle, the sweat, the hunger, the polluted water, he plays the leader of the slogging men quietly, modestly. The subtle shift in his eyes as he sees the dismembered bodies of his men is so great a film moment that we never have to see the bodies at all. Of course, while the other men grow beards during the long arduous trek, Flynn’s jaw remains shaved – but at least it is dirty, sweaty, and drawn. Walsh made many war films, and this is one of the most commanding World War II films by anyone. His supporting cast is admirable, with George Tobias as the company clown, Mark Stevens as the rescue pilot who cannot rescue them, Richard Erdman aged 19 playing a 19 year old, Warner Anderson as the young Colonel who must abandon them to their fate, James Brown as a doughty sergeant, William Prince in his first film, Frank Tang marvelous as the translator, and Henry Hull who speechifies his lines grandiosely, alas. (“All right, boys, no Hamlets in the jungle,” Walsh told them, but Hull didn’t listen. He was always that way, though; after all, he’d acted with Barrymore.) If you like action/adventure films, Walsh was the top director in his day of them. This is one of his best.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, ACTION ADVENTURE, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, EDITED BY George Amy, ENSEMBLE DRAMA, Errol Flynn, ESCAPE DRAMA, George Tobias, Henry Hull, HISTORICAL DRAMA, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Mark Stevens, MILITARY, MUSICAL SCORE BY Franz Waxman, PERIOD: WWI, SURVIVAL DRAMA, War Story

 

Goodbye, Lenin!

05 May

Goodbye, Lenin! — directed by Wolfgang Becker. Comedy/Drama. Children protect their mother coming out of a long coma that the world she knew is no longer. 121 minutes Color 2003.

★★★★★

Winner of innumerable awards, this movie goes on for a good while, and a good job too! Because it needs to evolve through its complications at its own pace, and to force us to wait respectfully for the working out of its theme — which is the use of lying. Here we have a mother lying to her children in a far more profound way than they lie to her, and yet, without their knowing her truth, they lie to save her from her own. The film is neither moral nor political in any way. Its playing is made superb by the actors, particularly Katrin Sass as the mother, an actress who puts me much in mind of Joan Allen. She has the same inner eye. So here is story-telling well-paced and a story quite unusual. We lie to protect those we love. Nothing new in that, save that I do not know of so interesting and just an examination of the matter. Acting is the art of living-it-out — whatever the “it” is. But film is a two dimensional medium, so it is very hard to find characters in a movie one can actually walk around completely to see all sides of. Of course the great master of this is the director Jean Renoir. (The Rules of the Game, French CanCan, et al.) I won’t say the director achieves that here, but I smile with wonder that actors can do as much as they do to make the story move — that they walk in and out of buildings and fry eggs — as though only I were watching them, and no camera at all, and no crew around. What a remarkable feat! Just watch, if you will, the recognition scene between the father and son, how right the older actor is in that passage! How right the girlfriend is in every scene! How right the neighbor with the pile of blond hair downstairs is! Praise be to all actors of all nations. That the piece is in German is no barrier to the craft they execute so daringly and so simply before us and for us.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, FILMED IN GERMANY WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

A Separation

04 May

A Separation — written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. Drama. Life as it is, consequent on a couple’s wanting to separate, who can’t. 123 minutes Color 2011.

★★★★★

The Oscar for the Best Foreign film, thank goodness, and one wonders, first at its astonishing freedom of expression, and then, how come we would have to go to a foreign film to find out exactly how we ourselves behave. I see no English speaking film with this degree of grit, truth of performance, revelation of the human condition of people of any nation, anywhere. The only difference between the people of Iran and us is that some of the females wear a chador; the men dress like me or the guy down the street. The story is an everyday one. The wife of a couple wants to leave the country in order to make a better life for her eleven year old daughter, but the husband refuses to leave with her because he is responsible to care for his senile father who lives with them. I never tell the stories of  movies, and I won’t tell any more of this one, because the value of it registers only through the human colors revealed by its progress; our relation to those colors is what the story actually is. Like the great opening scene of Marlon Brando in Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind, it opens with its characters pleading their cases directly to the camera which acts as the magistrate and therefore us, the audience, and we are thus invited right into the squabble of the story with all its disarrangements, revelations, shifts of truth and human bearing. In terms of acting, what we see here makes Method and Meisner acting look like vanity. It is futile to speculate how such actors are trained in Tehran. Evidently they are not victims of a repressive theocracy. And it is futile, because the result of their work has nothing to do with our yearning for the ideal which the good looking or sexy looking actors Western acting offers us. No. Not here. Here we are unsullied by idealism. This acting affords us a different value entirely: pure participation. Seeing this picture, I realized I was seeing something I had longed to see all my life in film – something that film could provide better than any other medium: the seething truth of the ordinary. I do not go a work of art to be entertained, but to entertain something. And this director/storyteller seems to have set aside his desire to entertain, if he ever had it, but to give us people we can read, and the result is that I dive in and entertain myself vastly. I rejoice in this pleasure. Unlike the couple in the film, we are a perfect match.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, Filmed in Iran in Farsi with English Subtitles, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, MUST SEE, OSCAR, PERSONAL DRAMA, PRIZE WINNER, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Asghar Farhadi

 

Gentleman Jim

03 May

Gentleman Jim — directed by Raoul Walsh. Sports Drama. An Irish roughneck boxes his way to the world championship opposite Francis L. Sullivan. 104 minutes Black and White 1942.

★★★★

“What am I watching this thing for?” I ask myself, for I am full face with a type of picture I am familiar with and which thank goodness is no longer made. The over-the-top smiles and paste-thick Irish accent of Alan Hale cues the question. Oh, yes, I remember now: it’s a movie made in a period when immigrants from Europe were more recent than they are today, a period when we didn’t have the word “ethnicities,” but the word “nationalities.” We didn’t have the word “media,” but in those days there were German language newspapers, and Yiddish and Chinese newspapers, and “Abie’s Irish Rose” was the popular radio show. People were just over from the old country and felt their security depended upon living near one another and loudly holding onto the mores of their motherland. I am first generation myself. John Ford’s films were slathered with an Irishness that no longer exists, and this of Raoul Walsh is also. In the mid 1950s “nationality” dissolved, replaced by the sectionalization of popular music, but until ten years after The War, everyone listened to Bing Crosby, who no longer exists either, although Frank Sinatra does, whose popular territory is certainly bounded with a frontier of nationality. Such nationalist immigrant films as Gentleman Jim are long gone. Barry Fitzgerald is unthinkable today. But I stuck with the film, which is remarkable in several ways. Low-life, high-life, comedy, family drama, action, romance, farce commingle with Shakespearean ease. The huge fight crowds in pre-Boxing Commission days are fabulously unruly, for no one could direct films of mass mayhem like Raoul Walsh. They lend enormous excitement to the fights. The bouts themselves are brilliantly filmed, and it is clear that Errol Flynn is performing them, no easy feat, since Corbett, the father of modern defensive and strategic boxing, had easy feet himself and danced his partners into exhaustion. It is one of the best fight films ever made in terms of the events themselves. Outside that everything is hearty – a blarney shattered by such films as Raging Bull, Someone Up There Likes Me, The Set-Up, and especially The Fighter which put pat to the notion of good healthy family support for their darling of the ring which Gentleman Jim promulgates like a jig. Flynn is perfectly cast in this part, one of many he would play in Walsh’s films. He is highly energized, impenitently boastful, lithe, strong, and Irish as Paddy’s pig, although actually came from Tasmania.  He is very good, and well supported by Minor Watson, Jack Carson, Arthur Shields, Rhys Williams, and William Frawley. As with all Walsh’s films the foundation of the action is romance, but Alexis Smith is incapable of suggesting the sexuality underlying the lady’s interest in Corbett. She is always the lady, never Judy O’Grady. Walsh wanted Rita Hayworth or Ann Sheridan, either of whom would have been better at it. But the key player in this is Ward Bond — so loud and clear for John Ford so long that we never knew what a fine actor he was. The key scene of the film is his reconciliation with Flynn; his sweet shyness is riveting. Going from the brash slugger, Francis L. Sullivan, to the beaten world heavyweight champion, he makes Sullivan into the foolish titan he was. Flynn’s lines about Sullivan’s lying in bed that night, lost, is marvelous piece of film writing. I was born the year Corbett died in the town he lived in, Bayside, Long Island. Corbett Road, I was familiar with. His fights took place in the 1890s, but everyone in the country knew who he was. This was Errol Flynn’s favorite film, enormously popular in its day.  You might check it out to see why.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, ALexis Smith, Arthur Shields, BIO-PIC, BOXING PIC, COSTUME ROMANCE, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, Errol Flynn, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jack Carson, Minor Watson, Period: 19th Century, Rhys Williams, SPORTS DRAMA, Turn of the 19th Century, William Frawley

 

The Color Of Paradise

01 May

The Color Of Paradise — directed by  Majid Majidi. Drama. A father despises his son for being blind. 90 minutes Color 2000.

★★★★★

This is a wonderful picture, difficult for me at first, which is the customary strategy of this director, and then wholly to be surrendered to. Both the freakishness of the boy’s blindness and the dire hatred of him by the father are so off-putting that I knew I must stick with it for the good that might be arrived at — and it sure did come. I cannot imagine where this film was shot once it leaves Tehran. I cannot imagine how they found that boy. I cannot imagine how they found an actor great enough to play that father so thoroughgoingly. It is beyond my comprehension that this film, in its extremes, came to exist at all. The whole thing is a mystery to me, and one that I am grateful for. Of course, watching it, don’t expect a walk in the park. But do expect that your capacity for compassion will be engaged wider even than the director’s, a spaciousness in your being you’ll welcome. Miss it and you miss something of yourself.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, DIRECTED BY Majid Majidi, FAMILY DRAMA, Filmed in Iran in Farsi with English Subtitles, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

The Bigamist

29 Apr

The Bigamist — directed by Ida Lupino. Drama. A man falls into marriage with two quite different sorts of women. 80 minutes Black and White 1953.

★★★

The story is told as voice-over, rather than as drama, which means that the scenes which the actors engage in do not reach beneath a conflicting narrative mode. The story is just a Hollywoodization of the subject of Bigamy anyway, which means the subject has no recognizable human content, only an approval rating. We are supposed to see that these are all just very nice people in a pickle. The only female director of her era, why was Lupino involved? Maybe because the movie is anti-heroic for the male. It’s her penultimate picture as a director; she does a beautiful job with The Trouble With Angels, but that’s it. As an actress Lupino was common without having the common touch, unlike, say, Stanwyck. As wife # 2, she is by turns hard-bitten and sentimental in her choices, and never less than neurotic. So, as an audience, we are supposed to believe what is said about her here rather than how she really appears to be, and we feel cheated. “Damaged goods” is a good description of her ambiance. And true enough, no one could make the romantic utterance, “Ya kill me,” and actually land the line without making one laugh. As an actress, she’s an odd presence in films. Confine your attention to her brilliant performance in Roadhouse or in High Sierra. As wife #1, Joan Fontaine, who once won an Oscar in a leading role, is a sympathetic performer — or, perhaps one should say a pathetic performer. One usually pities her rather than one feels for her, but here she is asked to play the part of a competent, smart, business woman, very much in charge of herself, and she does a pretty fair job. Two more Oscar Winners star here: Edmond O’Brien, who walks through the part, and Edmund Gwenn who overacts the inspector sadly – but then he is given dismal lines. We are supposed to approve of his disapproval of the bigamist, and I don’t, for I do not accept Santa Claus as my moral compass. So it is a B-picture without the energy of vulgarity that often gives B-pictures vitality. One hoped for more, but this is the era of studio collapse; they move towards competing with the lowest common denominator TV had to offer, and it finished them.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, CRIME DRAMA, Directed by Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn, Edmund OBrien, Ida Lupino, Jane Darwell, Joan Fontaine

 

Blackbeard, The Pirate

28 Apr

Blackbeard, The Pirate — directed by Raoul Walsh. Swashbuckler. A beautiful woman conceals a treasure from a bloodthirsty pirate who is concealing it from another bloodthirsty pirate. 99 minutes Color 1952.

★★★★

Robert Newton, he of the twitch, the wink, the tic, the double-jointed gesticulation, commands the screen here and yar-me-hearties his way through this film’s tics, twists, winks, and gesticulations. The plot is a galumphry of costume jewelry, as is the treasure which Linda Darnell carries about her person, which is stupendous. Stupendous eyes, stupendous lips, stupendous décolletage, oh my goodness is she something to behold. Really at the peak of her beauty, the galleon rocks a little every time she appears in one of her unlikely outfits. But Darnell, with plenty to meet the eye, was a very good actress, from the time she started as a teenager from Texas, in Blood And Sand where she and Anthony Quinn and Rita Hayworth are the only credible performers, next to the flaccid work of Tyrone Power, who very well might have made this picture, too, save that no first class swashbuckler would wish to play opposite Newton who slashes every actor to bits with the scimitar of his scene-stealing eccentricities. Keith Andes would be the victim of Newton here, but he stands up fine against him, and one wonders why Andes did not have a bigger career. Actually Newton seems to be acting all by himself most of the time, which means his performance might be bushwhacked by a shrewd character actor, and such an one exists in the form of Skelton Knaggs, a devious lackey, who pickpockets the camera in every scene he appears. Newton’s furbelows extend right down to bows in his beard, but this smart little performer undoes every one of them. Irene Ryan plays Darnell’s loyal disloyal maid; Alan Mobray a worthy, Torin Thatcher Sir Harry Morgan, William Bendix the first mate, and Richard Egan the hero’s chum. Raoul Walsh, who directed Errol Flynn to fame in similar high-seas Spanish Main costume pieces is the perfect director for this material except that Newton’s presence in it makes the vessel list to the starboard, founder, and sink. Walsh directed whatever they threw at him, which meant that, unlike Hawks or Hitchcock or Stevens or Wyler, his art suffered from the relentlessness of the bad material of major studio movies of the 50s on. Walsh could supervise rewrites well, but making something better does not mean making it good. Although romantic foundations always ground his stories, for seven decades Walsh triumphed in action films, some of the most famous ever made. While we don’t think of him as a director of comedies – Jack Pickford said of him, “Your idea of comedy is to burn down a whorehouse” – but comedy is always the chaser in his pieces, and Blackbeard, The Pirate is no exception. Walsh was a master entertainer. If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get. I like it myself. I think you might too.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Alan Mobray, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, Irene Ryan, Keith Andes, LINDA DARNELL, Robert Newton, Skelton Knaggs, SWASHBUCKLER, Torin Thatcher, William Bendix

 

Lockout

26 Apr

Lockout — written and directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger. Sci-Fi Action. A prison breakout in space. 95 minutes Color 2012.

★★★★★

Why is he one of the great film actors of our time? Well, for one, there is his application – complete application to the key he has chosen in which to play a role. (And for another there is his discernment of what the right key is. Back to application:) Not every good or great actor has it; it’s an ingredient in the work or it isn’t. What application means is that before the first note struck there is no doubt, there is no seeking out the way; there is complete commitment and forward movement. The actor asks nothing from the audience. But what he gives to them is a character for them to trust. He is selling apples, not grapefruit. He has thrown himself into it. He is there. Proactive. Among a variety of positive ingredients of his talent, it is a characteristic of the craft of Guy Pearce. So it is easy to see why a producer would want him to tell a tale. It is why the entire film of The Hurt Locker depended upon how by-the-rules Guy Pearce lightly played the opening sequence: the entire film streams out of that performance and was unthinkable without it. In the case of Lockout he is the principal player, the hero. Here he plays a jocular Buck Rogers in a comic book in film form, a superhero with a witty mouth for a cape. Pearce’s understanding how to deliver these jokes as throwaways is the critical counterpoint to the heavy, head-on, non-joke situation of The President’s daughter held hostage by creepy Scottish escapees in an outer space prison where inmates are injected to sleep their sentences out, but are actually used for dastardly experiments. You know the sort of thing. Is there another actor alive who could play it so well? Yes. Robert Downey Junior, but Pearce has better diction; he is more audible. At his most sub-rosa he doesn’t murmur. Because this is the case, he and the girl can remain dialoguing and not get swallowed up by the special effects. The writer/directors let Pearce keep the comebacks coming, and thus the characters are not lost, as they so often are when such films bear down on their finales and the rocket ships start zooming. His fine physical shape and prowess authenticate the role as well. So what is he? He is perfectly cast, that’s what he is. He is so perfectly cast you don’t even think about it. He is so perfectly cast you go along for the ride through to the end and beyond, even though without him in it you would not watch such a movie at all, and without him in it, you would have movie at all.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, Sci-Fi

 

Two-Lane Blacktop

25 Apr

Two-Lane Blacktop — directed by Monte Hellman. Road Picture. Two cars race across the U.S. to Washington D.C. 102 minutes. Color 1971.

★★★★

The resuscitation of this film appears like King Tut’s tomb, for it is presented with all its golden burial items: two discs, with extras, and the full screenplay, and a booklet of reviews and notices and appreciations of yore. I did not see it when it came out. The first time I saw Rudy Wurlitzer who wrote it we were both stark naked in the locker room when we were undergraduates at Columbia together and the last time I saw him was in his place on East 14 Street (am I right?) where a very pregnant Viva was banging at his door unceasingly. This piece and Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid had received all sorts of interesting attention, (“Rolling Stone” articles hardly qualifies Two-Lane Blacktop for underground classichood: After all, the screenplay was publish in its entirely in Esquire), and envy won the day, and I declined to attend. This was foolish, for the film is simple and good. I am not quite sure it should have been made in color, but it is. But I also stayed away because James Taylor was in it, and I objected to singing stars in high drama, although I saw Pat Garrett which had two of them, and Rudy and I talked about that too, but more of that elsewhere. The James Taylor music was of a younger generation, and my romantic days were over, and I was bitter, although there was a song, “Fire and Rain,” sung in a big plain style that moved me wholly then, although I didn’t know who was singing it or who had written it. I figured James Taylor was a mellow fellow, and also Jello. I figured he was too accessible. And I didn’t like his nasty face. You see, I was wrong all along. With his young man’s voice, James Taylor (an enneagram 6, I do believe) is still doing what he did then; he has not evolved – but that’s because he was born evolved. He was born as what he was meant to be – a voice — although he certainly has husbanded his gifts – and here he is only 22, and he doesn’t sing at all. What is there to object to? I’ll tell you what. He is not an actor, and there are two other principles in the piece who are not actors either. They can’t speak lines. Regarding cars, you never believe a word that mechanic says about engines. What you do believe is his and Taylor’s taciturnity. But it is a silly bias to imagine that people who are quiet are more profound than those with a lot to say. The trouble is that there is one real actor in the piece, and it is so noticeable such that when Warren Oates appears everyone else disappears, because he really belongs up there and the others don’t. Wurlitzer has written a marvelous part for him, the part of a know-it all fabulist whose dreams of grandeur and great accomplishment actually formulate the story and underpin the truth of the piece. I was held by it. The director is extremely shrewd in his disposition of his “performers”, and it is his pleasure to wring many variations on his theme, turning it inside out and upside down without ever betraying its integrity. Everything in Two-Lane Blacktop seems just and fair – and also eccentric since it is a picaresque adventure in which Dulcinea goes along for the ride. The picture is better now than it ever could have been before because it is free of the trappings of its fad — the hollow halo of its alternate lifestyle. All my annoyance is gone. If yours is too or was never there to begin with, take a ride with these four. There’s something here to learn, and, like me, you could do a lot worse. By the way, the extra disc and bonus materials are fabulous — the best I have ever seen offered for a film.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, ACTING STYLE: YOU-COULD-DRIVE-A-TEAM-OF-HORSES-THROUGH-THE-PAUSES, ROAD MOVIE

 

Papillon

24 Apr

Papillon — directed by Franklin J. Shaffner. Drama. Prisoners in a French Jungle Prison plan an escape. 155 minutes Color 1973.

★★★

Papillon does not hold up as well when it came out. The interiors are sound stage stuff, and they are overlit. And, if we are to take the native Indians on Honduras seriously, what on earth is Victor Jory doing there in all that makeup? Strong as such, the script is by Dalton Trumbo and reflects his stand for independent action by individuals, which is heartening and impractical at the same time. The picture has the virtue of being shot in sequence, first in Spain, then in Jamaica, but the direction is ragged and the execution of the principal escape is noticeably improbable. Dustin Hoffman resuscitates his stage performance of 1966 in The Journey of the Fifth Horse, a fuddy duddy fussbudget he was to put in play again in Rainman. Hoffman is the least affectionate actor in the world. He is not interested in acting a character; what he is interested in is playing an actor playing a character. This means he is interested in being noticed for his “acting,” which is why he does not really qualify for character parts and why he is not to be taken seriously in Tootsie and Rainman. So once more we get Hoffman’s automaton, a fancy characterization that never leaves the studio easel. The result is that he does not really relate to his co-star, which leaves Steve McQueen to carry the picture. McQueen is a limited but interesting actor of great technical cleverness and masculine sex appeal for both genders. He has beautiful wary blue eyes in a small eventful face in a well-shaped head. Here he and Hoffman wear rot-tooth dentures and a ruination of clothes, which help, but one never puts money down on their partnership in escape. For all his carryings on, Hoffman is just no fun. His plaintive whine is designed to elicit pity, but it inspires exasperation instead. On the other hand, McQueen’s other-side-of-the-tracks tuning aid him forcefully in being this pertinacious underdog who refuses to stop escaping. The film is his and it remains one of the proudest efforts of his craft.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, CRIME DRAMA, Dustin Hoffman, ESCAPE DRAMA, Steve McQueen, Victor Jory

 

Buck

23 Apr

Buck — directed by Cindy Meehl. Documentary. The life of celebrated horse-trainer Daniel “Buck” Brannaman. 89 minutes Color 2011.

★★★★★

I give this 5 stars, but it annoyed the dickens out of me, and I’ll tell you why.  That irritation was my own fault. It was  the fault of my expecting to see something be one thing and finding it to be something else. The expectation was the error. What I expected to witness was the work of “horse whispering,” but what I saw instead was a documentary about a horse whisperer. This latter was what the director probably intended, and that “whisperer” is a quite wonderful person, Buck Brannaman, and time in his company is really well spent. There are various ingredients to his story here. His life as a celebrated rope-trick child performer with his brother Smokie. The abusive childhood inflicted by his violently insane father. The removal of the father from them and their subsequent loving foster care. His marriage and fatherhood. His life on the road giving clinics on Western horse training to horse owners of all kinds. And the documentary technique of the director, which, even without my expectations, would have infuriated me, because of its stupid modern penchant for short shots, genre scenes, samples of, and the like, with the result that nothing is dwelt on, nothing is developed. Human attention span is not short for fascination. We need to linger longer on all of this or some of this. The director, as a result, has produced a superficiality. Fortunately the people encountering Mr. Brannaman are of a depth and perspicacity and modesty and humor that their testimonials have marvelous weight. But we are never shown at any length or with any penetration the thing for which Mr. Brannaman is nationally famous in horse circles and why we are watching him in the first place, which is the firm gentling of horses. We do witness, although not in depth or with any directorial patience, the calming of an insane stallion. The horse is golden and beautiful and probably brain damaged. It is also a lethal weapon and nearly kills its trainer before our very eyes. It was oxygen deprived and orphaned at birth, so it was never taught manners by the herd. It should have been put down at that time. Now it is a killer. Brannaman is actually able to saddle and ride it. But the horse is unaccountable and a savage and must be shot. All of this gentling is accomplished by the use of small flags on ends of long wands. that work like antennae on a snail. We are never once told how that works, and why it is the tool. Instead we are given Brannaman skills as calf roper-duo with his teenage daughter in competition. She’s a lovely girl and his wife is a beauty and good to meet. But I want to understand his craft. Clearly it has to do with his attitude towards the animals – never to treat them with impatience or contempt – and these approaches are the approaches I need to better learn towards humans. You can bribe a dog, but never bribe a horse or a child. The man has a calling applicable to us all, and there is clearly a great deal more to it than the director has given us. My annoyance is justified at this film, and so are its 5 stars for bringing this man, a characteristic American, before us to meet and be rewarded by himself and his skills.

 
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Posted in ANIMAL DOCUMENTARY

 

Dark Command

22 Apr

Dark Command — directed by Raoul Walsh. Western. All Kansas is saved from the dread Will Cantrell by an illiterate con man. 94 minutes Black and White 1940.

★★★★

Shall we consider the matter of John Wayne? Here he is ae. 32, handsome as all get out, slender of hip and tummy, tall in the saddle and looking good there, and with that brow even out-furrowing Gable’s. This director, Raoul Walsh, discovered him in 1930, changed his name from Marion to John and from Morrison to Wayne, and in his early 20s put him, in white buckskins, as the hero of one of the greatest Western ever made, The Big Trail. Now The Big Trail was shot in Cinemascope, or a thirty-years-too-soon wide screen version like it, but movie theatres refused to install the screens, so the film, although popular never remade its nut, and Wayne was relegated to B Western for ten years — until Stagecoach, after which he was an A-list star. Another ten years would go by until Red River when John Ford recognized that Wayne could actually act. But with Dark Command in 1940 he is re-united for the first time since The Big Trail with Walsh, and he is also reunited with Claire Trevor his costar in that hugely popular movie. She plays a lady of property, and Wayne plays the grifter sidekick of George Hayes who runs an itinerate dentistry. Wayne’ voice sidles through the film so unobtrusively that he steals every scene he is in. He really knows his business by this time, and is no longer the callow youth in buckskins. He has not yet become the taxidermied version of himself he sometimes arranged to be later nor has he developed that walk of a pigeon-toed panther. He is an extremely passive actor and a very good one. You can still see how beautiful his mouth is. He is sexy because he is sexually innocent. He’s a young man and a happy actor. Opposite him Walter Pidgeon, of all people, has been brought in to play the sociopath Will Cantrell. In a way it’s smart casting, because no one in town suspects that mousy schoolmaster is the dread raider. However, a vigilante is still not a part Pidgeon can craft, but fortunately the story takes care of him. It’s a role that succeeds by the reputation of what people say about him. His mother is movingly played by Marjorie Main, and Walsh gives full value to her. And the wonderful Claire Trevor, fresh from her success in Stagecoach, plays the mettlesome and sharp society girl who is the love interest of both men, another of Walsh’s terrific independent women. A young Roy Rogers with his beautiful mobile face plays her brother, and it’s fascinating to watch him at this boy-stage, although he is 29. Porter Hall plays the dithering foof who fouls up the denouement beautifully. Watch what happens when an actor simply lets his mouth hang open. Anyhow, it’s Wayne’s movie and an interesting one from the hand of Walsh, who knows exactly how to set up a shot, how to direct scenes of panic and mayhem so you think people are really going to get hurt, and how to ravish you with the sight of midnight horses.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Claire Trevor, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, George 'Gabby' Hayes, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, John Wayne, Marjorie Main, MUSICAL SCORE by Victor Young, PERIOD: Post Civil War, Porter Hall, Walter Pidgeon, WESTERN

 

Wings In The Dark

20 Apr

Wings In The Dark — directed by James Flood. Action/Adventure Melodrama. To prove  the efficacy of blind instrument flying, a blind pilot … 75 minutes Black and White 1935.

★★★★

What made Myna Loy the great star of the 1930s? A melodious speaking voice? Yes. A long-legged slim figure that made her look tall and fabulous in calf-length clothes? Yes. Those restful wide-spaced yes? Yes. A talent for under-playing? Yes. The sweetest mouth in the world? Yes. But I think it was something else. I think it was the alternate sexuality of devotion. It is a sexiness that does not make demands on our endurance. Why? Because it itself endures. It does not flame up and it does not burn out. It is a quality that women in the audience could admire without envy because it represented marriage. It is a quality that men in the audience could admire without fear because it was settled. It led to the domestication of Loy’s talent in wife-roles for the rest of her life. Female transatlantic flyers were much in the news in those days, and this film, one of several aviatrixes Loy played, had Amelia Earhart on set as adviser, and Loy said she was charming, but was not called upon to do much. Loy was taken up for her first flight by famed daredevil pilot, Paul Mantz, who performed the stunts, and she flew upside down in an open cockpit. For Loy plays a barnstorming aviatrix performing trick flight for crowds at fairs – and I was born in 1933, before the days of airlines, and I remember my father taking me to see just such displays. When a plane flew over Queens in those days we all went out of the house to look. Loy marshals her talent to help Cary Grant, a blind-flying pilot-pioneer who actually has gone blind. Loy describes the film, one of 23 she made in three years, as not one of her best, but it has its charms and excitements. One of the charms is Grant who of course is interesting to watch and to hear. But he does have the tendency of the style of the period, to monotonize certain speeches. That’s to say, he will choose a basic emotion, and play it under everything he says, so that it loses variety and inflection and becomes a recitation. Actors don’t seem to do that much any more, but it was one of the riffs of the ‘30s. You can hear it in his high-minded offer to commit suicide. He pitches his voice up an octave and keeps it in that noble, fake-ingenuous realm from beginning to end. It was the sort of stroke that the journalists of the period would call hokum, the journalists of the period being much more satirical and sharp-tongued than those of today. (Rosco Karns is brilliant as an example of it here.) But that high-mindedness was a notion of the age nobly to stalk above fate. It’s also interesting to note how action/adventure works. In the first part of the film, you have wonderful character exchanges, talk, revelation, humor, but when the action/adventure takes over in such a movie, character, dialogue, everything, is swallowed up by the action and the excitement of the action. We know it’s going to turn out well, that’s doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the danger at the time, the thrill and suspense of that. Improbability doesn’t even factor into it. Only the peril. And in this case it’s very well handled by Flood and by cinemaphotographers Oscar-winning William Mellor on the ground, and in the air Dewey Wrigley. An action/adventure film is a story in the finale of which all humans are devoured. Except, of course, at the end when they are regurgitated for the fadeout.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, ACTION ADVENTURE, Cary Grant: Screen God, Dean Jagger, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Myrna Loy, Rosco Karns

 

Big Brown Eyes

20 Apr

Big Brown Eyes — directed by Raoul Walsh. Comedy. A NYC cop and a manicurist turned reporter foil a Chopin-playing jewel fence. 77 minutes Black and White 1936.

★★★★

You like fast-talking dames? Check out Joan Bennett as the gum snapping, dialogue snapping manicurist that Cary Grant can’t stop chasing. She can’t stop mistrusting him, and it’s no wonder: Cary Grant as a New York City flatfoot? – never! He is both very good in the part and also quite unbelievable. Why? I don’t know. It’s not his accent, which is maybe lower class Bristol and maybe not, and at least is he is never in uniform. In fact, he is a plainclothesman, in really beautiful suits in which his figure looks great. No, it’s hard to pinpoint it, except there is that about Cary Grant which suggests a man who even when taking a bath wears a tuxedo. The dialogue is rich with comebacks, wise-cracks, and quick-draw ripostes – very much in the style of the 30s, and is really a style that has gone out of style, but in its heyday, here is a great example of its fun. They spray the picture faster than a tommy gun. If you like smart talk, alà His Gal Friday, take a gander at this gander and his goose. Bennett is terrific as a classic Walsh heroine, testy and full of personal ability and wit. Walter Pidgeon plays the smarmy sophisticated fence, and he is just wonderful. Unequalled in savoire faire, Pidgeon was released here and in Dark Command to play villains, not what we remember him for, but here he is just grand. Lloyd Nolan is a gun-crazy henchman devoted to cut flowers, and Walsh’s scene with him in a luxe bathroom arranging American Beauty Roses as he gets murdered is heaven-sent. But I say too much. If I don’t watch my lip, Nolan will come alive and gun me down too. But I aint no squelch, I ain’t I tell ya, I’d never rat on nobody. Don’t shoot, I didn’t mean it. Bang. Argh. Crash. I’m under da daisies. And if you watch Lloyd Nolan closely, so is he.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, BROAD COMEDY, Cary Grant: Screen God, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, Gangster Comedy, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Joan Bennett, Lloyd Nolan, Walter Pidgeon

 

A King And Four Queens

19 Apr

A King And Four Queens — directed by Raoul Walsh. Western. A handsome grifter works his charms on four lovelies and their mother-in-law for a boodle. 86 minutes Color 1956.

★★★★

He drank a lot and screwed any lady who turned up in his dressing room. He could write his own ticket. He was Clark Gable, the sexiest man in Hollywood – and one of the things that made him sexy was his humor – the wry look, the brow furrowed with amusement at female goings-on, and the crackle in his voice that relished the game, its losses and its folly. All this is in full play with Gable in this well constructed and tightly written piece. He is given a first class actress to oppose his ambitions for her money. Jo Van Fleet is the mother of four wretched bank robbers three of whom have burned to death, while one escaped. She sits on their buried booty and she waits for a son to return – except she doesn’t know which son it is, for the bodies were unrecognizable – and their four wives wait with her, not knowing either. Van Fleet was a curious actress, powerful in dispute, but with the sensitivity of a barstool. And yet her scene with Gable shot in bed is really as brilliant a piece of subtext playing as you will ever see. She scorns Gable, wounded though he is, but she longs with unmentioned pain for news of one of her sons. She is, rare for her, touching. Gable admired her professionalism; he himself had his lines down pat first thing; he also asked her scenes to be edited down, because she was stealing the show; it couldn’t be done and still make sense. Somehow the two of them keep the story going, along with Eleanor Parker who entertains herself with common sense and a simple wardrobe. The first symptom of the demise of Hollywood studios in he ’50s was the failure of costuming, and this is a good example of it. Technicolored to death, the other three wives make plays for Gable, and it is a tribute to his gifts and his nature, weathered and real, that he can tell each of them off without shaming them or looking like a prig. Gable, a mountain of masculinity – but with a jocular eye. An actor who never fails us. An actor who loved acting. If you want to see what an actor who is perfectly confident in his craft looks like, look at Gable in this period of his work, in his 50s. It’s late Beethoven. It’s really something to behold. The direction by Raoul Walsh never falters, always tells the story hard and clear. The picture, aside from the spectacle of its opening ride through wild terrain, is an indoor Western. Alex North wrote a terrific score and the great Lucien Ballard filmed it.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Clark Gable: SCREEN GOD, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, Eleanor Parker, Jo Van Fleet, MASTER PHOTOGRAPHER: Lucien Ballard, WESTERN

 

The Tall Men

18 Apr

The Tall Men — directed by Raoul Walsh. Western. A couple of hold-up men get hired by a victim to lead a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, along with the victim’s lady friend.  122 minutes Color 1955.

★★★★

What do we see Westerns for anyhow? Raoul Walsh’s The Tall Men answers part of this this question most satisfactorily. He directed one of the five greatest Westerns ever made, The Big Trail, a wagon train story which brought young John Wayne in pale deerskin to the screen. It’s a better movie than this because it is about driving people and this is about driving livestock. But livestock are still very interesting, and there are 5,000 cattle here, in huge sweeps and runs and stampedes and herds, and there seem to be almost as many horses. Vast gangs appear to stop this drive and a whole tribe of Sioux Indians in full feather attempt to trap and destroy it. And all of this is set against the most spectacular mountains and deserts and valleys of the West, places you’d never get to see unless you were in a Western itself (in this case Durango, Mexico, 600 miles south of the border). And all these places giant and miniaturize the herds, the gangs and tribes, and the drivers themselves, and to these places none of the characters pay the slightest attention. But we do. Because we love to see Westerns for just such things. And because director Raoul Walsh has a singular eye for them. We also see Westerns because there is a hero: “He’s a man who you always wanted to become when you grew up, and when you were old were sad because you didn’t,” as Robert Ryan describes Clark Gable, and, boy, is he on the money. There is never a doubt about Gable’s leadership, authority, practicality, experience, or common sense about people. He has tremendous dignity and care for others, which gives him an underlying sweetness. He also has a deeply ingrained confidence in himself as an actor — lovely to see. As with all Walsh’s films the picture is grounded in a romance, in this case with Jane Russell. Jane Russell was a person directors loved to work with because she was down to earth, such a good sport and so easy to get along with, but she was not much of an actress, or, rather really not an actress at all. She was kept in a cage by Howard Hughes who owned her contract on the understanding he would support her her whole life if she allowed him to. To say that he seldom let her out to learn her craft is perhaps ingenuous, when the truth is that she was probably not inherently an actor at all. She mugs, she grimaces, she cannot say a single line convincingly. She is frightened. And therefore defensive. She had a wonderful smile, which radiates all through Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but is not on view here, although her justly famous figure is. Everything she does comes out broad, and thus she misses the humor inherent in the lines. She sings good though. The picture is one of the most beautiful color films ever made, but Leo Tover who filmed it, and Walsh, keep all color out of it, save the shades of red associated with Russell, a blanket, a pink blouse, a gaudy red party dress, a dark red cape. It’s a brilliant stroke and is the kind of spectacle only the vast, cattle-colored landscape of the West can make telling. There are long sequences of Gable and Cameron Mitchell, his unruly brother, riding in deep snow, and they are unforgettable because there is no other color but snow. The film is somewhat defeated by its costumes, a trait of color film after 1950, so Gable’s hat is store-bought-new as is his midnight blue shirt. His hair is never out of place. But he is a superb actor; he takes every scene at full value and makes it real and right, while other actors (except for Robert Ryan) founder with the improbabilities of the script. To say there is a plot or story here would be to detour your expectations. Cows are taken from one place to the next; certain episodes stall them; that is all. But that is almost all that is needed to make an heroic and engrossing Western for you.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Cameron Mitchell, Clark Gable: SCREEN GOD, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, FILMED BY Leo Tover, Jane Russell, PERIOD: Post Civil War, Robert Ryan, WESTERN

 

A Serious Man

13 Apr

A Serious Man — written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. Drama. 109 minutes Color 2006.

★★

This is a Woody Allen movie without Woody Allen – but with the characteristic Coen cruelty of temperament which Woody Allen mercifully does not possess. That cruelty was arresting in early pictures such as Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing, and in Fargo held at bay by the presence of Frances MacDormand, an actor whose real humor displaces all such pretentious nonsense – pretentious because the Coen brothers have done nothing to earn such cruelty. For them it is simply pretend, a pose, a fad, like wearing a neckerchief to tell folks you’re a cowboy. This story is a Neil Simonized Job story of an ordinary middle class Jewish college teacher beset by every woe imaginable. It is very well acted and produced and directed, of course. However, I found it tiresome because the teacher is written as a schmuck, a man who can never speak up for himself not just because he is surrounded by loudmouths but because the part is written that way – which is not good enough. I don’t mind a character being bulldozed; I don’t mind Bob Hope being bulldozed by Bing Crosby, but in A Serious Man I don’t believe it. I believe the Coen brothers think it’s funny or tragic or both, whereas it is simply phony and annoying. If you are infuriated by a fly, get out of bed and find the fly swatter. Of course, there are some telling characters, who, while not real outside of a cartoon, give value for your buck: the neighbor lady with the mummy eyes and the wife’s boyfriend. But his search for counsel or consolation with his rabbis is a put up job. He is never really looking for God, nor does he stumble upon God, nor is he even tempted by God. He goes to temple as one goes to a barbershop, as a form of social neatness. The Coen boys have not had much to offer for many years now. I have seen all their movies, but I have, I believe, now seen all I am going to see.

 
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Posted in PERSONAL DRAMA, Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

 

Gunga Din

12 Apr

Gunga Din — produced and directed by George Stevens. Comic Action Adventure. 117 minutes Color 1939.

★★★★★

George Stevens was 17 when he jumped over the wall of the Hall Roach Studios in the ’20s. What he found on the other side was a Western, Rex, King Of The Wild Horses, and its sequels. As assistant cameraman he went off into the rugged mountains and made up movies, and ever after he said that the Western was his preferred genre. What this gave us is, of course, Shane but it also produced The Greatest Story Ever Told, shot in those settings and Gunga Din a sort of Eastern Western, situated in spectacular mountains and in a frontier fort and a remote town, and with a host of bloodthirsty savages. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, authors of His Gal Friday, wrote the story, which, naturally therefore, has one of a trio of soldiers of the Raj wanting to get married and the other two sabotaging his immanent retirement by engaging all of them in putting down the Thugees, a tribe of native killers – read The Taliban. To say there is a plot to this were to rearrange the meaning of that word, for the movie is one thing after another, a comic scene at the fort, followed by a big battle scene, comic scenes back at the fort, another battle scene, another comic scene back at the fort, and so forth. The battle scenes are as funny as the comic scenes, for Stevens had learned gag comedy at The Roach Studios so the movie resembles Indiana Jones, or rather Indiana Jones resembles Gunga Din, for Jones kept up with Din by aping it in scene after scene. Stevens’ visual imagination in devising interesting and entertaining slaughters was unequalled. They involved thousands of actors and, to insure no one as hurt, they had to be carefully imagined, very slowly rehearsed, then repeated a bit faster, then faster still, then shot at full speed. But Stevens also knew what to look at with his fort scenes, where the comedy depends not on gags but on the expressions on actors’ faces. Each of the sergeants – Douglas Fairbanks Junior is Scottish, Victor McLaglen is Irish, and Cary Grant is Cockney – has rich comic scenes to play, and from the start they are all involved in comical branagans. Grant has his lust for booty, McLaglen a darling elephant, and Fairbanks the milksop Joan Fontaine. Stevens knows exactly what to look at with his camera, which is manned by the great Joe August, who even gives us an in-tight Place-In-The-Sun closeup of Fontaine. Abner Biberman and Eduardo Ciannelli play the outright villains outrightly. And Sam Jaffe is just lovely as the waterboy, Gunga Din, a middle-aged man who saves the day and who is the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s poem from which the picture is loosely derived. They originally wanted the great child actor Sabu, so Jaffe said he played it exactly as Sabu would have, and he’s just marvelous. The film has never been out of circulation since its immensely popular first showing in the year of the movie miracles, 1939. Alfred Newman’s music is rousing, and the thousands of troops on the parade grounds and threading through huge mountains is spectacular. Cary Grant is especially gratifying in, for him an unusual, lower class part and also a dopey one. There are comic effects on his face you will never see in any other film. All you need do is sit back and look at him to be entertained. He was lower class in origins, and it shines through with a warm, particular and special wit. Stevens seldom moves his camera so the adventure takes place without intrusion, and he seldom used reaction shots, so the energy between actors is never broken. It is one of the most “complete” films ever made, and remained a George Stevens’ favorite.

 
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Posted in Abner Biberman, ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, CAMERAMAN: Joseph August, Cary Grant: Screen God, Cecil Kellaway, COMIC ACTION ADVENTURE, Directed by George Stevens, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Eduardo Ciannelli, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Joan Fontaine, MUSICAL SCORE BY Alfred Newman, Sam Jaffe, Victor McLaglen, VICTORIAN PERIOD, WRITTEN BY: Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur

 

The Men Who Stare At Goats

09 Apr

Men Who Stare At Goats — directed by Grant Heslov. Comedy. Mind control, the paranormal and such rise up in the military and take over. 96 minutes Color 2009.

★★★★★

The Men Who Stare At Goats is a drollery. For me, what’s funny in it is how seriously every actor plays his part in a piece that demonstrates that the Sixties never went away. Clooney gives a creamy performance as a talented psychic in training, and the more earnest he is, the funnier he is. I did not laugh out loud. But I was amused out loud. I smiled in the dark, and that was enough. Yes, the Sixties, which were trashed by lentils and dope and a lack of a sense of humor – a condition for which George Carlin was the antidote that never took. I like this movie. Get high on acid and set everyone free is its prescription. It would work, if what life needed was a prescription. Ewan McGregor plays the credulous reporter tagging along and overtly cowardly and incorrect at every point, and therefore believable. It’s wise casting, since everyone else in the cast is around 50. You don’t want a boy in that role; what you want is a failed writer in his middle thirties. We also have big-hearted Jeff Bridges as the teacher of the psychics, and he is no end of entertainment. Kevin Spacey plays the Basil Rathbone part of the venomous villain, with his usual peculiar comic quirk. I had no expectations of this piece when I entered the theatre: I found it to be a delicious slice of tart pie.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, COMEDY, Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Light Comedy, Parody

 

Mirror Mirror

07 Apr

Mirror Mirror — directed by Tarsem Singh. Fractured Fairy Tale. The wicked stepmother seizes the spotlight and Prince Charming as well. 105 minutes Color 2012.

★★★

Of all the actresses who desired to play Scarlet in Gone With The Wind there were only two who would not have been ridiculous in the part, Bette Davis and Vivien Leigh, and for the same reason: they were not alone in possessing the temperament of hellcats, but they were alone in having the skill in their kit to bring to the part a sense of period. Exactly what that is, is hard to declare, except in its absence. Its absence is notably present in the performance of Julia Roberts as the Wicked Queen. She seems to have no sense of the genre in which she is performing, a costume drama at the least. She also astonishes and dismays one by adopting at once the cracked ice of condescension, an obvious and amateur choice which wrecks the role at the outset by giving it no place to go. Julia Roberts – no one can say they knew her after she was a pretty woman, because, now of a certain age, she is still one. But for years she coasted along on the white sailboat of her smile.  To do that all she needed to do was be a gal. But that won’t wash any more, and she is now cast in character parts while having perhaps no actual skill at playing a character. All those years I waited for the genius of her brother, Eric Roberts, to break through, a mistake on my part to be sure. Now I want her to discover her craft. Less harm is done to the film by her here, because the style of it begins in fairyland camp and shifts to Bullwinkle somewhere along the line. That is to say it becomes dialogue dependent rather than style dependent, and the dialogue is vernacular. So, when the prince appears, one soon sees that the actor does not have a prince in him and does not have the pronunciation of one either: the word “adieu” is pronounced “adyou” not “ado”; the poor actor fails with his opening sequence. Fortunately the character he plays is a jerk, so it does not matter much, except that it defies the necessary tone. And in a piece like this, it is the tone that must engage. Without it you can’t really buy into the enchantment; moreover, the script and these performances are in rash countermand to the visual style of the picture, which is glorious. The costumes are the last masterpiece of  the late Eiki Ishioka and must be seen at once. The sets, the wigs are lavish to a degree, imaginative and surprising and fun, as are the narrative conceits. As is the animation when it occurs and the special effects, particularly that of The Beast which the crew has made into a terrific griffon. Snow White is quite right for the part, a lovely young actress Lily Collins, and she is assisted by Nathan Lane as a pusillanimous courtier and by seven very sexy dwarfs, all of whom are jolly good and all of whom survive the mishmash nicely. Of course you want the Queen to be thwarted and you want Snow White to save herself with her magic dagger. And you love Snow White floating through the snowy woods in a billowing May dress, and the Prince in his floor length coat swashbuckling about is a treat that never palls. That is, you root more for the visual effects than the characters, and you wonder that, despite the film’s stated promise, nothing new about that wicked queen has been revealed either by one mirror or by two.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Fractured Fairy Tale, Julia Roberts, Nathan Lane

 

Jack Lemon Collection: Special Features. Documentary.

06 Apr

Jack Lemon Collection: Special Features. Documentary.

★★

If a disservice could be performed against Jack Lemon and actually take, this would be it: “He was such a nice guy.” What a dreadful thing to say when it is all that is being said. The tone is of a group speechifying at a wake. None of it tells anything either about Jack Lemon or about his craft, none of it penetrates into his nature or his work. What I mean is, watching him, the first thing one would notice after noticing his speed and dynamic variation of delivery, is his breath control. Watch how he breathes. And how what he is doing is governed by that. Wonder how it is his comic personality halted at the level of a Harvard senior: a mastery of affable glibness as a survival style. Often foolish, always clean-cut. What do those choices tell one? Who do they please? His father, the baker? Whom do they not offend? At a time when the torn undershirt of Marlon Brando was the cynosure of all eyes, where does this skimming boater hat arrive from? With Jack Lemon, there is so much to contemplate and explore, and none of it is touched upon here. There is an every-day soul here that no one knows and no one even thinks of looking at, perhaps because the effort is arranged by Lemon’s son, Chris, and no one wants to make a misstep or offend a sacred memory or chip at a memorial. However, for me, at the time, Lemon was not an Everyman figure and Judy Holiday was certainly not a voice I would wish to court. He only became interesting to me in Save the Tiger and in later roles, the JFK role and even the little bit in Hamlet, and certainly the Glengary, Glen Ross role. I have not seen the movie of his Long Day’s Journey Into Night, because, of course, he is miscast as a matinee idol, but now I want to. I think he would bring an Irish madness to it worth witnessing. He was a likable man, but James Tyrone is not, so I wonder what, if anything happens or can happen with his playing him. I am interested to honor with the brain of my heart what Lemon offered. I wish I could say the same for this documentary of him.

 
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Posted in DOCUMENTARY, Jack Lemon

 

Roadhouse – 1948 version

05 Apr

Roadhouse – 1948 version — directed by Jean Negulesco. Noir. A sexy chanteuse is brought into a nightclub run by two war buddies, both of whom fall for her. 95 minutes Black and White 1948.

★★★★★

Ida Lupino is 30 when she makes this, her greatest film performance. The more hard-bitten, the ruder, the more insolent she is, the more you go along with her and care about her. She brings to the picture a twitching sexuality and the nuance of humor behind her eyes and a presence with the other performers that win her a posthumous Oscar here. When, years later, I told Celeste Holm how much I loved this picture when it came out, she told me it was junk, and, of course, it is; it is pulp, but then, then, most Hollywood films were. She said this perhaps because, after her Oscar, she is kicked to the side as a sidekick here in a thankless role. But I loved her in it. I loved everyone collectively and individually in it when it came out. Cornell Wilde with his sweet and masculine nature playing the stalwart, until he has a furious scene packing a suitcase. Richard Widmark as the unpredictable maniac. Expect the film to fall apart between the arrest and the trial scene — because there is no evidence — but expect also a superbly played finale. And rejoice in Ida Lupino. Listen to her sing “Again” and “One For The Road” – what aplomb, what wit, what negotiation of her cigarette! Nothing like it has been seen on the screen before or since, and the last shot of her in the picture is a review of that sad truth. The film is closer to Gilda in its triangle, in its nightclub setting, in its boss/lackey set-up between Widmark and Wilde, in its beat-up lady with a past. What makes it noir is not Widmark, but the presence of a woman working at a job no man could do, when during the War she would have worked at a defense plant, the males away. By which I mean, even as a nightclub singer, she would have wielded a power the return of the warriors reft her of. Both men are adolescent. Lupino alone is grown-up, too grown-up: she is without hope. And this is what makes it noir. She is a walking doom. Take it as Lupino’s polemic on the entertainment industry of which she was a knowing adjunct in Hollywood, but also take it as a bone deep characterization. Watch her weariness, her irony, listen to her skeptical grunts, her use and release of her sexual power as a barrier, and above all her wit in every move. “Wit is educated insolence,” as Aristotle said. Take Lupino’s work here as a great piece of method acting outside the Method, and don’t miss this richly comic performance.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Celeste Holm, Cornell Wilde, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Ida Lupino, MUSICAL NUMBERS, NOIR, Richard Widmarck

 

The Deep Blue Sea – 2012

04 Apr

The Deep Blue Sea — directed by Terence Davies. Romantic Drama. A woman gives her life for a man who loves her but not exactly as she wishes. 98 minutes Color 2012.

★★★

Its leads are three very good actors, of whom two are miscast. I saw this play with Peggy Ashcroft in London in 1953. Then I saw it in New Haven with Margaret Sullavan. Then in the first movie with Vivien Leigh. Now here with Rachel Weisz. Of the first three actresses playing Hester (shades of The Scarlet Letter?) only Ashcroft had the chops for the part. And all three actresses were over 40. A Phaedra story, the boy friend, associated with the husband and betraying him, must be much younger in years and energy. It’s important that all this be so, for it represents the last chance the woman has for great love. Their age difference makes her situation teeter on the brink, for if she loses that love, she will be a middle aged woman with no skills and no access to polite society, on her own in the world and no chance for love again. So to cast Rachel Weisz in this part is to lose all of that, for she is a 30 year old beauty with many years of beauty before her and she is smart and interesting. She is much too young for the part, and the boyfriend is the same age as she is. So it is with astonishment that I discover that Rachel Weisz is actually over 40. But, boy, oh boy, she does not appear to be. So what we have here instead with this actress is a woman who probably has never known sexual desperation, for she is an actress so beautiful she can pick and choose, and one who cannot or does not choose to carry the physical requirement for the part which demands exhaustion, shoulders and spirit too bent with the wisdom of the facts to be able to go on living. Also miscast is Simon Russell Beale, another good actor, but one who possess no competition for the Weisz character; he is too old looking; he is too white bearded; he is too out of shape. And he is also presented as a disloyal mama’s boy in scenes very well played by Ann Mitchel as dame bitch – scenes not in the play and accorded to the film only to demonstrate his unattractiveness to Weisz, his wife – the result being that his character is a foregone conclusion as soon as he appears, and presents no force in the play. This is one of several miscalculations on the part of the director/rewriter, errors which make his part incoherent, since he is presently presented as a kindly person indeed. The entire drama then must fall on the boyfriend and on Weisz. The boyfriend is played by Tom Hiddleston who is 30, and he is well cast, but we are not given anything in the script now to suggest what the Weisz character would see in him, save that he is young, good looking, and a great lay, none of which add up to a grand passion on their own. Kenneth More, who played it with Ashcroft and Leigh, brought to the character a lot of fun, a naughty energy, the lawlessness of a gambling rake and libertine, a big difference from the stuffy world of Judge Sir William and Lady Collyer from which Hester has come. But the real difficulty with the story would seem to lie in the material itself: a Grand Passion ending. In a Grand Passion one is in love not with the other, but with the feeling of passion inside oneself. A Grand Passion is the desire to possess the life of another, to devour that life, to have that life become one’s own. It is very convincing. And means you cannot call your soul your own – which is why you wish to die from it. But none of the characters have any inkling of this. Each in his own way wants it to be over, that is all. So one looks upon this passion here, which is photographed as through a veil or film, with a certain impatience and remove. We experience enormous empty spaces between these characters, unexplored by the script and director, but symptomized by the pauses between the lines. He has taken depth for granted. But we cannot. And he ends the story incorrectly with Weisz standing at the window of a bright new day, when the original play closes as it began with her stuffing the door with rags so that the suicidal gas she is about to turn on again will finally kill her.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: YOU-COULD-DRIVE-A-TEAM-OF-HORSES-THROUGH-THE-PAUSES, Filmed in England, PERSONAL DRAMA, Rachel Weisz, ROMANTIC DRAMA

 

A Damsel In Distress

03 Apr

A Damsel In Distress — directed by George Stevens. Musical. A fan-plagued hoofer seeks refuge in an English castle with two chums and falls for the lady of the manor. 93 minutes Black and White 1937.

* * * *

Everyone badly wanted Joan Fontaine fired from this, and one wonders why they cast her to begin with if she could not dance, but George Stevens put his foot down, and he was right. Fontaine was young and vulnerable, only 19, and she and her career would have crumbled. As it is, she said that the film set it back four years. Actually she dances well enough in the one number she has with Astaire, but it is carefully staged on woodland turf where Hermes Pan’s choreography has an excuse to be limited. Otherwise she’s rather dear. The difficulty is that Astaire’s partners always needed to dance comic turns as well as romantic ones because that’s where the love-drama was stated and resolved, and this could not happen with Fontaine or later with Joan Leslie or Paulette Goddard. Comic dance was Astaire’s forte. He had come from many Broadway years in a brother/sister act whose dances were not romantic but comic. When you look at Astaire’s solo turns in film you can see that most of them are humorous in energy and, when partnered, necessary to the love story. Recall how Ginger Rogers supplied the dance argument that set up the dramatic foundation of their courtship. With Rogers and Astaire, romance begins with comic dance bickering. George Stevens had already directed Rogers and Astaire in Swing Time, their best musical, but Astaire wanted to make a musical without her. He was tired of and afraid of fixed partners, such as his sister Adele had been and Rogers was becoming, and Rogers wanted to do her own films too, so Astaire made Damsel, and it was a financial failure, his first. but it’s too bad it is not more often seen. It failed perhaps because it needed an American girl: Rogers is ur-American but Fontaine is English; Rogers also is classless because she is show-biz, while Fontaine is clearly UC.  Also the love plot is thin, made up for by excellent supporting people, including Reginald Gardiner who at one point hilariously sings grand opera.  The Gershwins wrote the score, which gives us  “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” and “A Foggy Day In London Town,” and spiffy comic numbers. These Astaire dances with two very experienced vaudevillians, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and the three of them are super together, particularly in a production number in an amusement park, which won Hermes Pan the Oscar that year for Dance Direction. Gracie Allen was that punned combination of innocence and an empty head that produced unintended wisdom, such as would later become Marilyn Monroe’s stock in trade, and George Burns is the studio couch on which she bounces. Stevens’ skill in direction is seen right away in the most exuberant dance Astaire ever filmed, actually performed in moving traffic – and later in the moving traffic of a party as Astaire and Montagu Love sit on castle stairs strategizing the love-plot. P.G. Wodehouse wrote the book, for in those days he did libretti (even, if you will, that for Showboat). The most interesting aspect of the picture in a way is the most relaxed and natural performance of Astaire’s career. This means that he is more internally visible and does less mugging, a holdover from his long-installed stage technique, such that his presence on the screen is humanly comic. Stevens had a way with actors, which was mainly to leave them alone and let them do what they really wanted. This gave all his many comedies a free-and-easiness priceless to this day. The movie is a charmer. Give yourself a treat.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by George Stevens, Fred Astaire: Screen God, George Burns, Gracie Allen, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Joan Fontaine, MUSIC BY George and Ira Gershwin, MUSICAL, Reginald Gardiner

 

Annie Oakley

02 Apr

Annie Oakley — directed by George Stevens. Western. A country lass can shoot the thorns off a rose at 50 paces. So she joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. 90 minutes Black and White 1935.

*

This is a George Stevens production???!!! — the George Stevens who directed Alice Adams and The More The Merrier and Shane and Woman Of The Year? Inconceivable! It is a movie barren of distinction, save for the slight truth Preston Foster gives it as the bragging sharpshooter Annie loves. It’s a marvelous part, and later on Howard Keel would also be excellent in it, as a man whose pride is hurt and who misconducts himself because of it. The roles are great but the script is so poor even Stanwyck looks like a bad actress, which she wasn’t. She was an actress of limited range and disposition, sure, but she had the common touch and a beautiful carriage and natural presence and surety of execution, all of which counted for a lot in her work — in any actor’s work. Alas, the film is puerile, and one wonders at the aesthetic degradation studios felt they had to drag their audiences into in order to snare them. In real life, Annie Oakley was a woman of parts, smart and able and of fine disposition, and she had a long career. Oakley wasn’t even her name; it was Moses; she changed it to have more show-biz potency. Why didn’t Stevens make a film about the fun of that? Stanwyck is able to convey Annie’s youth — as a teenager — but, of course, she is incapable of creating a character — that was not her forte and why should she? — she already herself had enough character for twenty — and besides the script gives her so little to work on. And as to the director — oye! — who would have thought that he would one day direct A Place In The Sun. And yet why should I feel such dismay? As Somerset Maugham said, “Only the mediocre maintain a level,” and George Stevens certainly was not that. I should keep in mind that he directed a hundred films I never saw and never hope to see. That this was one of the forgettable ones is forgivable and then some.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE, ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Backstage Drama, Barbara Stanwyck: THE QUEEN, Directed by George Stevens, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Preston Foster, Turn of the 19th Century

 

Swing Time

01 Apr

Swing Time — Directed by George Stevens. Musical Comedy. A runaway-groom meets up with a dance instructor who wont give him a tumble. 104 minutes 1936.

* * * * *

Oh, you may say that Fred Astaire couldn’t act, and in one sense it’s quite true. He seems awkward and embarrassed saying lines. On the other hand, everything he does as an actor is apropos, and every move he makes is a dance, just as with that other Broadway hoofer James Cagney; like Astaire, Cagney is never not dancing. Which means that Astaire’s acting is always physically animated. If there is any problem with his acting, it may be that he is never still, never grounded in his lines. Swing Time is accompanied by a terrific commentary by John Mueller, who takes us through a good deal of what went on to make this piece the greatest of Rogers/Astaire musicals — which has to do with Astaire’s grueling rehearsal work, freedom from chance in the dances, his staff, and the nature of the picture itself. It is directed by George Stevens who was one day to direct Shane and A Place In The Sun and The More The Merrier and who brings to the picture an angle of vision and an allowance for acting excellence in the principals which unify it. Of course, it is a white telephone musical, which means that it is essentially a film in which only the dances are serious art: the rest is flip. This is as it should be, because Astaire is interested in discovering and firming up the musts of movie dance. His discoveries rule to this day. The film contains wonderful numbers of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, including a most endearing version of “The Way You Look Tonight” which you will never forget. And at one point Astaire applies blackface and does a shadow dance with 24 chorus girls 12 in black, 12 in white, and then dances to a triple black and white rear projection of himself. Minstrel shows embody and celebrate an exuberance which our negro entertainers alone possess: blackface gives performers freedom: that is what is being enlarged on here, and, because it is respectful at heart, it would be offensive to be offended by it.  Rogers, beautifully dressed for all her numbers, is liquid in Astaire’s arms. She had a wonderful figure, graceful arms, strong square shoulders, a flexible back. And of course she could actually act, so she moves the spoken drama along while Astaire moves the dance drama along. Dancing he led her; not-dancing, she led him, so to say. At the end Stevens directs them in the most beautiful romantic dance ever filmed. A valuable suggestion Mueller gives is to watch the dances in slow motion. What a treat! To actually see for oneself what went into these intricate, witty dances!  Astaire’s body was a genius. That body is the ur of American movie musicals.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by George Stevens, Eric Blore, Fred Astaire: Screen God, Georges Metaxa, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, Helen Broderick, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MUSICAL, MUST SEE, Singing & Dancng Musical, Uncategorized, Victor Moore

 

Alice Adams

31 Mar

Alice Adams — directed by George Stevens. Family Drama. A young woman’s mother strives to upgrade her daughter’s social status. 99 minutes Black and White 1935.

★★★★★

Katherine Hepburn was 27 when she made this, and she went on starring in movies until she was 87, and you can understand why. She is an actress without repose. Even when acting repose she is actively doing it. Mind you, she has a very good script here and a first-class director, George Stevens, whose breakthrough film this was. Hepburn had played a series of high-strung, mettlesome, sophisticated girls, but here she plays an ordinary small town girl who wants to better herself. Alice Adams is a girl who loves her crude working class father, but takes after her mother who strives. She puts on airs, tells lies, and hides things to conceal her drab family background. The only result is that she is snubbed and picked on by the town’s worthies; she is not invited to other girls’ soigné parties, and wears handmade organdy when she is, and is a wallflower there. Why should we care about this pushy phony? It’s because in our lives when we were young we all wanted to be someone else, someone better, someone more popular. And because Alice is also kind and tactful, and, when home, direct and earnest, and because Hepburn herself is those things. So, well though we might wonder how tall, dark, handsome, Fred MacMurray, broad of shoulder, with wads of money, magnificent in tails, can stand this pushy dame with her coyness and strained lyricism and little half-laugh, it is because we see through her to Hepburn’s quality and harpsichord sensitivity to the truth about love. Booth Tarkington wrote the novel, and it’s a good one. The director and actress fought for the novel’s ending in which Alice has to go out and drudge as a secretary, but the studio forced this one on them, so it ends with a lecture. Except for Fred Stone as the father who sustains a whine of self-pity that is pitiless, the film is well cast and acted, especially with Ann Shoemaker as the mother, and Frank Albertson as the crude and rightly annoyed brother. Miss Hattie McDaniels is excruciatingly funny as a hired maid at a family dinner meant to impress McMurray, and she is but one example of Stevens’ quiet comic sense which infiltrates and supports many scenes: the look on the face of humanity is what Stevens is a master director of: a waiter asked to play a love song for the fifth time running.  As well as a sense of American mise-en-scene: you really feel you are walking down a small town street and not a back lot. As well as a stunning grasp of lighting, set to fit a mood: Alice coming back into the unlit shabby foyer from that wretched ball. As well as a revulsion to reaction shots in lieu of duets and closeups which enter the spirits of those explored: Hepburn and MacMurray’s kiss. How can Stevens like Hepburn so? For the same reason we do. Hepburn can create all that is false , affected, and pretentious about Alice, but she can also reveal how her feelings are hurt by the failure of her own folly, and how she is touchingly trapped in a cycle of groundless hope. Stevens’ strongest suit as a director was, better than any other director of his time, the creation of Americana: longing set against its conflicting background. The places we see are the places we knew. And the things hoped for are the hopes we hoped. This will eventually reach its fruition in his masterwork, A Place In The Sun. But here, for the first time, a master gathers his powers together.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Ann Shoemaker, Charley Grapewin, Directed by George Stevens, FAMILY DRAMA, Fred MacMurray, Hattie McDaniel, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Katharine Hepburn, ROMANTIC DRAMA

 

The George Stevens Seminar — Part V

30 Mar

The George Stevens Seminar — Part V

How he started in films was to jump over the wall as a teenager. Hal Roach stood on the other wide of the wall making fast and loose silent comedies. He soon became assistant cameraman, then cameraman, on many projects including 34 Laurel and Hardy silent and early sound. Laurel and Hardy would have no one else.

The important thing to remember about Stevens is that it was as a cameraman that he took his first training, and as such made many many films. All his films reflect this strongly.

Presently (in 1935) he found himself at RKO and on the other side of a coin toss. He was an in-house director of stock comedies. Katherine Hepburn was recently off her first Oscar for Morning Glory. Would RKO let him direct the new Katherine Hepburn film or would William Wyler do it? He didn’t know this at the time, but rumor has it that they tossed the coin until he won. It was a big upgrade for him and the result is Alice Adams, which I will presently review here. The sound effects of this film alone are worth your attention to it. Here is the ring of Americana without tears which we find later in A Place In The Sun and Shane.

He was to have an affair with Hepburn and direct her in two more pictures, among them the first and best of the Tracy/Hepburn comedies, Woman Of The Year.

Soon enough, for some reason, he was asked to direct a Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire musical Swing Time (1936), thought by me and wise others to be the best of their musicals. It ends with the greatest romantic dance sequence of that era.

He went on to direct another Astaire musical, this one with Joan Fontaine, a young woman who could not dance at all.

And he also directed a lousy version of the Annie Oakley story, with Barbara Stanwyck.

These last two are not part of our study, although I will review them. Nor are any of the other pictures he directed during the 30s.

And finally he directed Gunga Din (1939), a rip-roaring Mesopotamian Western, with Cary Grant, with whom he later made two other highly successful and interesting films.

That’s the list. So the only three you need to see to make sense of this seminar are

Alice Adams

Swing Time

Gunga Din

Variety could offer you no more.

Enjoy.

 

 

 
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Posted in Directed by George Stevens

 

I’ll Cry Tomorrow

29 Mar

I’ll Cry Tomorrow — directed by Daniel Mann. Drama. A young stage performer takes her first drink and all is lost. 117 minutes Black and White 1956.

★★★★

As singer Lillian Roth, Susan Hayward flails about in the first half of this film and then comes alive in the second as a charming drunk. Hayward was one of those repulsive actors — Shelley Winters, Jack Palance were others – who are grating in everything they do, especially in parts in which they are called upon to be sympathetic or endearing. If you want to see what endearing really is, take a look at the Story Conference short in the Special Features which brings us Lillian Roth herself in 1933, a delightful beauty with good clear eyes a fine voice and a spirit you can fall right into. Hayward physically is stiff as an actress and gesticulates rampantly and meaninglessly as she sings, whereas Roth, when she sings may use the same bold gestures, but they suit her and are natural to her.  You can always see Susan Hayward reaching her marks on the soundstage floor. She is never motivated; she is always driven. She is perpetually locked for a fight. In fact, her energy is so pronounced it is masculine – despite the fact that she has a good figure and a pretty face. Both these are enhanced by Sydney Guilaroff, whose perfect hairstyles for her bring a great deal to the character – as they do for Jo Van Fleet, another repulsive actor, who plays Hayward’s stage mother. Of course, Jo Van Fleet is a very good actress, and just how much better than Hayward is determined perfectly in the great confrontation scene between them. Our belovèd Margo and Eddie Albert, Ray Danton, and Richard Conte support the actress, who improves as the drunk scenes loosen her up, invite her to be flexible and less actory, and even funny. Much head tossing goes on as she hits and rises from the skids, but there are other scenes – especially those in AA – which are simple and moving. Daniel Mann directed actresses toward Oscars – Shirley Booth, Anna Magnani, Elizabeth Taylor – and there are times here which justify Hayward nomination for it that year. Hayward would have taken as her cue to play unpleasant characters onscreen that permission given by Bette Davis who mastered the art and paved the way. There are times in this gritty performance which must bow to her powerful predecessor in thanks.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Eddie Albert, Jo Van Fleet, Margo, PERSONAL DRAMA, Richard Conte, Susan Hayward

 

Seven Men From Now

27 Mar

Seven Men From Now — directed by Budd Boettecher. Western. A widower on a mission of retaliation. 78 minutes Black and White 1956.

★★★★★

A really extraordinary piece, beautifully directed and filmed in the Alabama Hills of California with their astounding rock formations and bosky river and desert and stupendous views of the Sierras, all of which adds the frame of indifferent nature to the stark story. Randolph Scott, a vision of rectitude and reticence almost psychopathic, meets up with a couple on their way to California. Both parties have their mission, but neither know what it is. The secret is revealed as the journey progresses through a landscape which no one registers and which influences everything. Lee Marvin is brilliant as the antagonist who meets up with these three. His confidence as an actor is amazing, and watch for the bit of business he executes after he shoots his last man down. The heart of the picture lies with Gail Russell, a wonderful actor of great beauty, so soft and endearing; no actress of her day had a more natural appeal. The simplicity of the material and the economical handling of the story and the wit of the writing and the consistently imaginative narration of the photographer and the great skill of the performers make it one of the best Westerns ever made. Be prepared for a pleasant surprise as you watch it. Suitable for the whole family, as films were in those days. (The additional material is excellent. too.)

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, DIRECTED BY Budd Boetticher, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Psychological Western, Randolph Scott: Movie God

 

In Old Arizona

16 Mar

In Old Arizona — directed by Raoul Walsh and Irving Cummings. Western. 97 minutes Black and White 1929.

★★

Walsh loved the new sound technology. And so he decided to direct the first outdoor talkie. Off to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks he went with a crew. He was to direct and star as the Cisco Kid. He shot a lot of film, and driving back from Bryce, his car hit a hare, which flew up into the windshield and struck him, shattering the glass and blinding him in one eye. He was no longer a movie star. He lost his left eye. Irving Cummings finished the film. But the departure of the stage and big spectacle of the West with which the film began and which became the earmark of his subsequent Westerns were in place. He himself is in all the distance shots, but Buddy Roosevelt was cast as the Cisco Kid, though Buddy broke a leg, and was replaced by Warner Baxter who won the Oscar for the best actor of the year for this performance. Baxter actually looks ridiculous in Cisco’s hat and rig; but he has a lot of fun with the character. The cues are not Hollywood Crisp yet, but the actors are physically sound in their movement. But that’s not why one watches this milestone film. People were amazed at the picture; it caused a sensation: sound actually faded as people walked away, just like in real life! Walsh recovered, wore an eye patch for the rest of his life, and went right back to work, no trouble. “I would direct Victor McLaglen as Litle Red Riding Hood!”  He went on to become one of film’s greatest directors, though not of this one, and in two years was to direct the greatest Western I have ever seen, The Big Trail. The public was fascinated with Baxter’s voice and with that of Edmund Lowe who plays the jackass soldier from Brooklyn full of himself set to track Cisco down. Lowe is good at it, but amusement with him flags as the dialogue scenes go on interminably, camera in one place, terrified to move because of the static sound equipment. Musical interludes pad the lack of action. All these scenes were directed by Cummings. In fact the film is largely given over to this actor and his lengthy wooing of Cisco’s girl, a mercurial and mercenary conchita played with much posturing by Dorothy Burgess. On the xylophone of human emotions she is able to strike a note. Lowe strikes another. Of course, it is being filmed by one of the great cameramen, Arthur Edeson, later to film Casablanca. But the film feels like one long screeching halt. All that happens is a huge hesitation of sandwich-filling between the crust of the stage hold-up at the start and the stale bread of the finale. One wishes Walsh had directed it all. Or is it too late for wishes? I think so.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: YOU-COULD-DRIVE-A-TEAM-OF-HORSES-THROUGH-THE-PAUSES, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, Edmund Lowe, FILMED BY Arthur Edeson, Warner Baxter, WESTERN

 

They Drive By Night

15 Mar

They Drive By Night — directed by Raoul Walsh. Drama. Two truck driver brothers shoot for independence hauling fruit until two women try to put the brakes on them. 97 minutes Black and White 1940.

★★★★★

Raoul Walsh would rehearse the scene, set up the camera, call “Action,” and walk away and not look at the shoot at all. People wondered why he did this, but it’s real simple. George S. Kaufman did the same thing directing Broadway hits. He would go to the back row of the theatre and close his eyes. He knew and Walsh knew that if the thing sounded true it was true. The balance and breath and rhythm of a scene was all calculable aurally, once he had blocked it. Any corrections needed, and reshoots, could be made perfectly by an ear undistracted by the actors’ appearance or behavior or by his own hopes for it. This is George Raft’s best performance in film. He benefits enormously by the film being shot in sequence. He’s a tough guy but not a gangster, and his inner response to the adventure he is on is the liaison between the halves of the picture. For the picture is really two stories Siamesed together. The focus of the first one is Ann Sheridan. Now, Ann Sheridan is an actress I cannot take my eyes off. Unlike the female stars of today, Ann Sheridan actually was a woman. She has a luscious mouth, beautiful hair, searching eyes, a low voice, an excellent thing in woman. She is in full charge of her femininity and vulnerable and truly smart. Films were seldom built around her but she is always good humored about her role and in her role. To see her at her best see I Was A Male War Bride opposite Cary Grant. She was “everything,” said Howard Hawks its director. Here she is fast-talking, stoic, and wise. Her acting method sets her as a first class exemplar of 30s/40s female style. It isn’t method but it fits and it registers perfectly. The film itself is sharply written, with the snappy repartee of the era that is still so entertaining to see and fun to act. Allan Hale is always attributing this wit to his wife Ida Lupino, who never actually says a witty thing and who is a focus of the second half of the story. She is playing a role Bette Davis played in an earlier Paul Muni version, Bordertown; when Davis was asked if it bothered her, she said “No.” That’s because Lupino on screen is never not neurotic; those big desperate eyes are always in the madhouse; Davis, however neurotic her eyes were, could have other things in them. Without being a great actress, Lupino is a very effective one: see her at her brilliant best in Roadhouse. She’s very good here, and you must not complete your days without seeing her famous courtroom scene and her committing a murder in a floor length ermine trench coat. She is always costumed predaciously in furs or silky as a reptile or both. Raft is a very balanced and steady instrument, while Humphrey Bogart, a more volatile and sensitive instrument, was not a star at this point. He was a middle-aged actor who for ten years had been playing dispensable second leads. His next film with Walsh, High Sierra changed all that forever. The film is a perfect example of Walsh’s strengths as a director. Action/Adventure was his specialty, but the films were always about a man striving toward a woman. As here. Arthur Edeson shot it, Milo Anderson did the gowns, Adolph Deutsch did the score: top Warner Brothers talent all around. It was a big hit, and it still is.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, ACTION ADVENTURE, Alan Hale, Ann Sheridan, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, FILMED BY Arthur Edeson, George Raft, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Rosco Karns

 

The Roaring Twenties

15 Mar

The Roaring Twenties — directed by Raoul Walsh. Gangster Drama. A WW I vet can’t find work and so starts up a bootlegging business which gains control of him. 106 minutes Black and White 1939.

★★★★★

Warner Brothers laid on the A-team for this one. Milo Anderson did the clothes: the ladies’ song costumes place a premium on our tolerance for the tacky, but they are right on the money and the period. Ernest Haller shot it; the same year he shot Gone With The Wind for which he won an Oscar, most of Bette Davis’s big films, Mildred Pierce, and later Rebel Without A Cause. And that sweet toughie Raoul Walsh directed it. It was made the wonder year of 1939, and would have won the Oscar any other year, had Oscars ever been given out for gangster flicks. The picture is set up as a March Of Time documentary of a period 15 years before it was made; it is a montage interspersed with montages – brilliantly shot by Don Siegel and organized by Byron Haskin. They are simply tremendous. Big male character talents fortify the story from the bottom up, topped off by Paul Kelly as the nasty ur-don, and Frank McHugh as the star’s pal played by James Cagney. Walsh and Cagney loved working together, and this picture is Cagney’s supreme performance as a motion picture actor. Until I saw it I never thought Cagney could act at all. All I ever saw in him was a bully with a tommy gun for a heart. And for the most part in his career, that is what he is. I steered clear of him. But in this piece he is quite something else besides. One sees him as if for the first time. For here he is — with his dancer’s wrists and carriage. He is open, he waits, he responds, his feelings are hurt, he ponders before he speaks, he does not fall back on his rapid timing for every reaction, he wants something he can’t have and doesn’t know he can’t have it, that is to say, for once, he isn’t entirely smart, he is a mess. You can’t take your eyes off him – because he is so real and because his body is fully alert and engaged. It is a pity this side of him was not ever used elsewhere again. Humphrey Bogart plays his crumby army pal, excellent especially in two execution scenes. And Jeffrey Lynn is the third musketeer, the one who gets the girl. She is played by Priscilla Lane, who has full lips and a sweet soft open look, rather like Betty Grable. She does her own singing, although the lip-sync is slightly off, as it is with Gladys George who plays Panama Smith, in a sketch of Texas Guinan. She is superb in the subtlety of her response in her every scene: she is an actress who can tell a story without spelling it out. But it is the director, of course, whose triumph this is. Look at the way he sets up his shots for the crowd scenes, the saloons, the brawls. Look at the time he gives to the love scenes – as an action director he is unique in taking his time for these and in giving equal range and ambiguity to all parties concerned. But what is especially powerful is his sparing use of close-ups and his refusal to do reaction shots. If two people are on camera, they are both always in frame, no matter which point of view is cut to. This means that you can always see the response of both actors at the same time and you never have a break in the animal energy between them. Kurosawa later used to do the same. McHugh and Cagney improvised their scenes together and you can see the freshness of them. Cagney, Walsh, Bogart and especially Frank McHugh rewrote the script as they went along and had a grand old time, and you can enjoy it in the choices, large and small, that animate the scenes as they unfold. Snappy dialogue throughout. Walsh’s first film at Warner’s and first of four with Cagney. The film actually speaks for a moral rather than a chronological era, and the era is not over. It was a huge hit. It still is. Don’t miss it.

 

 
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Posted in 1920s, ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, DIRECTED BY Raoul Walsh, FILMED BY Ernest Haller, Frank McHugh, GANGSTER DRAMA, Gladys George, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, PERIOD: WWI, Priscilla Lane

 

Talk To Me

14 Mar

Talk To Me — directed by Kasi Lemmons. Backstage Bio-drama. A wild-talking ex-con shoots for a job as a DJ on a stuffy Washington radio station. 118 minutes Color 2007.

★★★★★

This beautifully written and directed picture ought not to surprise, since its star Don Cheadle has fostered a number of interesting projects in the past, except that one finds him here far to right of the mode of Hotel Rwanda, and its saintly hero. Cheadle has the eyes of a saint, so it’s natural for him to be cast as the good boy getting even better. However, in this piece he is cast as the devil incarnate. He dresses like a circus and he talks like one too. It’s a really brilliant turn, and it stays in the delightful realm of a horse movie until the character, Petey Greene, who is a real-life person, must go on air to calm the rioters on the death of MLK. The film becomes very moving, nowhere more so than in the performance of Martin Sheen as the head of the station. At which point the story focuses on Petey Greene’s mentor, Dewey Hughes, who wants to raise Petey to national prominence as a stand-up performer of black palaver. His manager is played by another superior actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, always fascinating to watch. (You will remember him from Dirty Pretty Things.) It’s interesting for me to see him act through his eyes, for it’s through the strength of the daring of their big open vulnerable plains that everything is delivered. With Cheadle, his eyes are where everything is hidden. He allures with half-lids. Dancing between these two is Taraji B. Henson, whose Afros get huger with every scene and who scallywags through the film with brilliant spontaneity doing a female impersonation that is extremely funny and always on target. The director has commanded all sorts of forces to her aid, and they all do well: the costumes of the period of the late 60s and the riots and the lighting of the black actors to register their skin tones for us properly. I found it quite satisfying, and as with Cheadle’s other efforts both gripping and educational. Educational. Is that a bad word? Not for me. For me it means an experience that is both humbling and enlarging.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Backstage Drama, BIO-PIC, Chiwetel Ejiofor: MASTER ACTOR, Don Cheadle, Martin Sheen

 

Young America

12 Mar

Young America — directed by Frank Borzage. Melodrama. A small down Peck’s Bad Boy gets into worse and worse Dutch every time he does a good deed. 70 minutes Black and White 1932.

★★★

The 8th of Spencer Tracy’s pre-MGM feature films, and it is interesting to see him, aged 32 already cast as a middle-aged Babbitt with a grouch. Essentially the film is about the boy, played by Tommy Conlon and his pal Nutty, played by the penny-whistle voiced Raymond Borzage. Ralph Bellamy does an odd turn as the judge who lets all the boys off, even though Conlon borrows folks’ cars at will. They are all open convertibles and in driving them no one seems to notice that he is only 13. A local lady of good intention, played by Doris Kenyon, figures Conlon isn’t a bad boy after all and, against her husband Tracy’s incensed objections, decides to take him into her home. More than this you have not sinned enough to be told. Interestingly, though, most of the film is focused on the boys, particularly in scenes with Borzage’s grandmother played by a sterling actress, Beryl Mercer, who really knows how to hold the screen and to hold her emotion in check while draining us of ours. She gives us a lesson in screen craft. As does Tracy, of course, for he never hedges his bets; he is relentlessly mean and hard-headed; he is furious with his wife and the boy; he uses his instrument honestly and thoroughly, and never asks for popular sympathy. How he did this, without histrionics, is a secret he brought from his cradle to his craft. For, it is perfectly easy to go berserk with a feeling, or to milk it, or underplay it, but to find the right key for it and hit it – not as common as Tracy makes it seem. These films are interesting particularly because Tracy is the leading actor in all of them, a situation which did not prevail when he signed with MGM and became Clark Gable’s sidekick. It was only after a good while at MGM that Tracy took leading roles, but when he started in film at Fox, leading man’s how he was cast and that’s what you’re seeing here.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Ralph Bellamy, Spencer Tracy, YOUTH DRAMA

 

Up The River

11 Mar

Up The River — directed by John Ford. Farce. A swaggering con and his moron sidekick bust out of the slammer to help a pal with his goil. 92 minutes Black and White 1930.

★★★

Fox had to make a gangster picture fast, so they sent John Ford to look for a new face in New York, giving him tickets to five Broadway plays. The first one he saw was The Last Mile, and instead of going to the other four, he went back four times to see Spencer Tracy who was the star of it. Ford caught a matinee of another play while he was there, and found his supporting player. So both Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart make their screen debuts in this film — which is not a gangster film at all but a comedy set in and out of a Utopian prison, where all the inmates are gutter roses and weep when reminded of their mothers and whence Spencer Tracy may make a break whenever he likes. The problem with the film is that its director celebrates what is dumb – and this seems to be the basis of Ford’s popularity. Ward Bond, uncredited turns up as a dummy bully, and all the prisoners are witless. Tracy’s sidekick, Dannemora Dan, played by Warren Hymer, is so stupid that when he comes out of an IQ test listed as “moron,” he is proud of the denomination, and we are supposed to think this is funny. This prison has females in it, and one of them falls for Bogie, who is a society boy who accidentally got on the wrong side of the law. Actually Bogie was a society boy, and it’s also interesting to see three other things one was not often to see from him again. One was how tiny he was, short and slight. This feature was adjusted by not shooting him in full in future films, or not shooting him in contrast with much taller people and things. He makes the mistake of chewing gum in his opening scene, but stops it soon. And he walks with that bowed-arms stride of his already. And when he is angry he is really frightening, Duke Mantee in the making. The second thing is that his basket shows, as does that of Hymer. Well, these are pre-code films and the guys hung loose, I guess. The third thing is his sunny smile. It’s radiant – who’d a thunk it? Tracy plays the know-in-all BMOC, smug and deceptive, and honest to his marrow. It fit right in with Ford’s Irishness in all things. Ford talked down to all his characters and to his audiences, just as much as those do-gooder society matrons distributing the benison of their contempt do. Everyone in Ford films is treated as dumb. The least common denominator is Ford’s whole orchestra, both on the screen and in his audience. I am not fooled: I do not mistake it for the common touch. Everything Ford does is backed by the inherent bully in him. The film was a big hit, and Fox signed Tracy to five-year contract, and he was on his way.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, BROAD COMEDY, Directed by John Ford, Gangster Comedy, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Humphrey Bogart, Jane Darwell, Low Comedy, Spencer Tracy, Ward Bond

 

When Willie Comes Marching Home

10 Mar

When Willie Comes Marching Home — directed by John Ford. Farce. A patriotic soldier longs to get into the WW II action and then does so. 82 minutes Black and White 1950

★★

It seems incredible that this World War II comedy was made in the year it was, five years after the War itself was over, but there it is, gawky and out of place, and too old for its own mental short pants – as is its star, Dan Dailey, who is clearly 35 when he plays Willie, the boy who wants to go to war. Dailey was one of show business’s most valiant performers, and he brings to the tale his huge ingratiating smile and his mastery of physical comedy time and time again, as he falls, faints, collapses, and dances about to escape the nips of a nasty dog. He has the lanky agility of Ray Bolger, and it almost saves the film. For the problem with the picture lies in how many areas? Aside from being out of date, the story is clearly a bad imitation of Preston Sturges’ masterpiece, Hail The Conquering Hero, of five years before. That might work – save for the treatment by the director. For, while the story is droll, what John Ford thinks is funny, aint. Or at least I am too hoity-toity to find it so. Ford finds patriotism funny. Ford finds drunkenness funny. He finds brawls funny. And he finds stupidity funny. And maybe they are – but Ford’s touch is ham-handed. His wit is on the level of The Three Stooges, not Preston Sturges, for Ford is beer-brained and out to please the lower orders – only. In fact, he is a dreadful snob. Five years later, he was to submit Mr. Roberts to the same wrecking ball of this sort of wit, until Henry Fonda put his foot down and Ford was taken off the film and replaced by Mervyn LeRoy. As soon as Ford enters a room, the mental climate lowers. You find this over and over again in his pictures. There is a terrible disconnect in him between what he thought entertainment was and what people are. Like all artists he saw entertainment as an idealization. But, lying behind that there’s got to be the guts of reality, and where they should be in Ford I find delusion and cowardice. I think of Stagecoach as one of the greatest films I have ever seen. And among its virtues is one that When Willie Comes Marching Home also possesses – pace. Ford knew how to move things forward, he knew where a camera should be placed in a scene to make it simple and clear and arresting, and he has a sense of broad spectacle. These are no small gifts. Ford started way back in the silents. But talkies changed film radically, no more so than with comedy. Drama changed somewhat, but comedy changed completely – from physical wit to verbal. This is why silent comedy is still watchable. But Ford didn’t change with it. He is a bum making films about bums and talking down to them all the while he does it. I feel in him a very gifted, hard-working hypocrite and bully. And I don’t like him.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, BROAD COMEDY, Colleen Townsend, Dan Dailey, Directed by John Ford, Evelyn Varden, Farce, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MUSICAL NUMBERS, William Demarest, World War II

 

D.O.A. [1950]

09 Mar

D.O.A. [1950] — directed by Rudolph Maté. Crime Drama. A businessman finds himself poisoned, and he has only a short to find out why and by whom. 83 minutes Black and White 1950.

★★★★★

Two world famous photographers made this, and made it well. Ernest Laszlo actually shot it, while Maté directed it. So it’s well worth seeing. Not noir, but shot as though it were, of course, for that was cheap and fun. It’s star, the poisoned, is played by Edmund O’Brien. It’s not easy to think of him as a leading actor. In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Charles Laughton version, he is young, slim, handsome, and luscious as the poet Villon. But that’s not how we remember him. We remember him like he is here, as a guy with a cockeyed face, stout, jowly, pompadoured, and never-could have-been-handsome. And yet here he is, as he often was, in a leading role and eventually to win an Oscar. You have to ask yourself how this could have come to pass. But then all you have to do is to place him next to Pamela Britton as his gal Friday. What do you get? He is a born film actor. She is not a film actor at all. And it’s true she was actually a road company touring actress in Broadway musicals, and her technique is exactly that. Which is to say infuriating. Always over-extended, falsely vulnerable, routine. Always counting on the role rather than the character. You wonder how O’Brien could have endured long scenes with her, but he plays them as a human sacrifice. For, while the story is marvelous, the screenplay is over-written, and so we have, for instance, a long, wordy love-scene that would make you rather die of poison than marry the girl. But the story itself is well told, though it should have been cut by those European directors. When you think what makes a top director, you must turn to those who rewrote what they darn well pleased the morning of the shoot: Hawks, Walsh, Stevens. That’s what pushes them over into greatness. Something emerges on the sound stage that day that is more real than what is on paper. Dimitri Tiomkin scored it with his usual slow marches and swells, so we are never left in doubt as to what we are to feel. If you see it, tell me this: in the scenes where O’Brien learns he is poisoned, would he not better have played it completely the opposite to the way he does? You see, instead of watching him, I watched the doctors who are watching him, and they are doing nothing but watching him. Suppose O’Brien had gotten much stiller. A drinker and a philanderer, I think he might have become baffled or thoughtful, or very quiet somehow. Just a thought. The actors’ choices…mmm… particularly in a script where the emotion is extended over long passages of dialogue. Is the first qualification for a screen actor the ability to be a quick study? I wish someone would do a quick study of the matter. Quick studies: Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Henry Fonda. Slow study: Jimmy Stewart. Help me, someone! Anyhow, D.O.A. is not a waste of time, and if you’ve run out of noir, take a gander, why doncha?

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, CRIME DRAMA, Edmund OBrien, Ernest Lazslo, Luther Adler, MURDER MYSTERY, PERSONAL DRAMA

 

Trapped [1949]

08 Mar

Trapped [1949] — directed by Richard Fleischer. Crime Drama. T-Men use a con to round up those $20 counterfeit bill plates, but he cons the cons and they con him and he cons them back, and con and con and con. 78 minutes Black And White 1949.

★★★★★

Another film listed as noir that is not. But good anyhow. It’s a police procedural of sorts, with sexy Lloyd Bridges (father of  the Fabulous Baker Boys) as the gum-snapping con. The director was to go on to direct many big pictures of his era, and even though this is a B-flick, it shows a strong hand and good story-telling instincts. Barbara Payton, as Meg Dixon, plays his loyal moll and she is very good. She’s a sort of poor man’s Virginia Mayo (although so was Virginia Mayo), and she, because she loves him so much, provides a realistic sympathy for the crook, which the audience would not share without her – not as easy to do as it looks. A secondary character played by John Hoyt carries a lot of the story, and supplies a certain necessary coldness of intent to it. He was to go on until old age, as an actor on TV, with a huge career there and in films as a supporting and sub-supporting player – an honorable profession. This is what it means to be a born actor. It means that God gives you a call, and casting directors give you one too. The film is shot noir-dark, and is good to look at, and the story keeps hopping. It’s a nifty movie, but it has none of the post-War depth noir captured, no sense of the lost soldier, the home-front betrayal. Never mind. It’s just fine like it is. Check it out.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Barbara Payton, CRIME DRAMA, DETECTIVE STORY, GOVERNMENT AGENCY ENFORCEMENT DRAMAa, John Hoyt, Lloyd Bridges

 

The Hitchhiker

07 Mar

The Hitchhiker — directed by Ida Lupino. Drama. Two men are abducted into the desert of Mexico by a deranged killer. 71 minutes Black and White 1953.

★★★★★

This is thrust, as so many others are, into the category of film noir, with which it has nothing to do. That’s just a sales strategy. But it is just as well, for, because of the interest of folk in noir, attention is then paid to a picture which otherwise is uncategorisable. Ida Lupino was a very gifted director; any film she set her hand to is worth seeing. In this case, one can imagine the influence of the long association she had with the great Raoul Walsh, who directed her in a number of films, and who became a like-minded friend and mentor. Like him, she moves the action along licketty-split; the pace never lets up; her sense of camera position is superb. Her sense of human frailty is superb. She even gives us one small scene in which two actors speak Spanish, and it is not translated. You have to lean forward into that scene, and wake up your silent film eyes, to interpret its value. The two kidnapped men are played by Frank Lovejoy and Edmund O’Brien, middle class guys with thickening waists and probably buddies from The War, eight years before. The sizzling live-wire at the center of the film, however, is William Talman, as the madman with the gun. He’ll scare the liver out of you. The Hitchhiker was famous in its day and has come down as a classic. What that means is that you are supposed to take a visit to the museum. But of course, with The Hitchhiker you’ll be thrilled by what you find there. In its day, it would have been programmed as a B-picture, the lower half of a double bill. It’s a pity they don’t make B-pictures any more. All we get is Important Films straining to be blockbusters, instead the B-film strove only to provide proficient entertainment, and sometimes, as in this case, surpassed that really admirable aim.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by Ida Lupino, Edmund OBrien, ESCAPE DRAMA, Frank Lovejoy, PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR DRAMA

 

Whistle Stop

06 Mar

Whistle Stop — directed by Léonide Moguy. Drama. A femme fatale returns to the small town she came from and plots gather around her. 85 minutes Black and White 1946.

★★★★

George Raft was the stupidest person ever to become a movie star. Here he is again with his mausoleum eyes, mask of monotone, and tie-tucked-into-the-belt paunch. His constant implacability made him a star. Here he plays a small town moocher whose girlfriend returns from the big-time and he finds he still can’t live up to her. But who in the world ever could? She is Ava Gardner after all. Ava knew she could not act, and I imagine she was seldom wrong about anything. She wants the big time, and, goodness knows, a girl like that deserves it, indeed can hardly avoid it. Gardner is very well cast. There is often a girl in every generation or so in every small town, who drives men crazy with lust. She can’t help it; she was born that way. I won’t name the one who was mine, but I would offer her my hand to this day. Such was Ava Gardner and such does she play, and not play badly either. Granted you can see her pause to remember her lines, but then so does George Raft. And it is true that they goddess her up with smashing clothes, which she wears like a dream. They alone are worth the ticket of entry. Victor McLaglen plays Raft’s dumb buddy and he has sensational scenes, which I won’t spoil for you by previewing. He had already won an Oscar for The Informer, and looking at him you wonder that he is an actor at all, but he is, let us say, a type of actor. A thing. Wallace Beery’s follow-up. We have Charles Drake and also Carmel Meyers, famous silent film vamp, excellent as the madam. The picture also gives us Florence Bates in a homey mother role, and it’s nice to see her out of the tiaras of society dowagers and in an apron making stew. She’s very good. Tom Conway is the villain with the mustache and that killer look of destruction in his lower eyelid, possessed also by his brother George Sanders; he is Raft’s vile competition for the favors of Gardner. And, well, it’s all a stretch, as you can see, but absolutely watchable. It was a B-film, but her presence in it led immediately to The Killers, which made Gardner a superstar. Before that she had tiny parts or walk-ons from 1942 on. The fact was that once on the screen, here, in a great big part with her hair like that, there was no watching anyone else whatsoever, bad actress or not. It was clear that with Ava Gardner acting was immaterial. Even trivial. And, ah, she is 23! She was just starting. Looking at the woman, you knew right then she was never never going to play mothers. When her career was over 45 years later she said she had never done anything in film to be proud of. Too bad. In that she was wrong. For she was, if ever there was, the very thing we always wanted from someone: The Proud Beauty, her chin lifting just so as she enters a room with an expectation for delight as she crosses it. Someone we can admire from afar; someone who was made for that.

 
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Posted in Ava Gardner, Charles Drake, Florence Bates, George Raft, Kitchen Sink Drama, MELODRAMA, Tom Conway, Victor McLaglen

 

Enemies, A Love Story

05 Mar

Enemies, A Love Story — directed by Paul Mazursky. Drama. A widower who has remarried and taken a mistress finds himself predicamented with the reappearance of his first wife who has not died after all. 119 minutes Color 1989.

★★★★★

I have not seen all Paul Mazursky’s movies. But they all have the ring of truth in them, even such appalling nonsense as Tempest. Do I make myself clear, then, when I say that I have seen enough of them to want to see them all, but nevertheless do not look forward to seeing any more of them because the one at hand here must be his masterpiece. I have three complaints about it. The first is that I do not understand how any of the characters make a living. The second has to do with the fact that the relation of these characters to the concentration camps, which all four characters have survived, never works, never happens; in the novel it probably does. And the last is that Ron Silver is gravely miscast, for he is a cold actor. He would be perfect for Mamet which Mazursky discovered him performing in New York, but not here. Inside him is complete ice. This does not make him a bad actor, for he is a very good actor, even here, and I have always enjoyed him in other parts, playing those ferocious lawyers and intellectuals at which he was so good. Here he has passionate relations with three women, and he relates to each of them sexually and to each as a predicament, but never to any of them as women, as human, not once. You don’t even know that he actually likes women. The story, the script, has to tell us that he cannot make up his mind; it is never revealed in him. He is always on remote. Or rather, since he is not telephoning in his performance, he is always removed. The film achieves its greatness because of all the female actors, which include Judith Malina, Margaret Sophie Stein, Lena Olin and The Great Anjelica Huston, the last two of whom were nominated for Oscars for this film. Huston has the greatest scene in the film; I won’t tell you what it is; you will have no trouble recognizing it once it is before you. Lena Olin brings into being a woman so sexually vibrant she drives men crazy – because she is actually crazy. It is a performance remarkable for its explosiveness and for the unwavering courage of the actor to bring her to us. In her power, talent, and smile, she reminds me of the great Judy Davis.  What first struck me about this piece was how exactly right the director and designer got the period of 1947 over forty years later in 1989. I lived in Queens in the 40s, I knew those dingy apartments, those fire escapes, those laundry-draped streets, the cramped shops with their smells and the sidewalk life, and the God-awful summer heat. I remember Coney Island well from those days. In the extras, Mazursky tells how he did it, and this was fun for me to see. His production designer, Pato Guzman, deserves highest marks for the interiors. They are exactly right. They don’t look like sets. They don’t look like settings. I remember every one of them. They were 1920’s places actually, for none were built during the Depression, of course, and none, of course, during The War. Anyhow the story pinballs the Ron Silver character around between the women, all of whom he can sexually gratify but none of whom he can satisfy by finally choosing. That is the comedy and the tragedy of the Isaac Bashev Singer story and the actresses and the director, the photographer, the editor, and the scorer have made a masterpiece. Is this a recommendation? You choose. Me? – I’ve said enough.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Anjelica Huston: SCREEN GODDESS, DIRECTED BY Paul Mazursky, DRAMA, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Judith Malina, Kitchen Sink Drama, Lena Olin, Ron Silver

 

We Need To Talk About Kevin

04 Mar

We Need To Talk About Kevin — directed by Lynne Ramsay. Drama. A mother rears a bad seed child. 112 minutes Color 2012.

★

Portentously simple, this film purports to have us believe that the mother does not learn that her child needs a good spanking. What we get instead is floating curtains, and opaque cuts, and dialogue overlaps, and tell-tale country songs. The story is told as though the director had not heard that motion pictures had even been invented, for the entire piece is told in terms of almost immobile stills. So the film is pictorial but lacks motion. It moves from one stalled stall to the next. The three actors who play the youth are good, but their scenes never convince because the main actor Tilda Swinton is miscast as a pliant, supine, co-dependent, doormat before this child’s depredations. Swinton is an actor of genius but only in the right role, and walking around with a blank stare and her mouth hanging open does not work, or rather the distance it takes us is not very far. Swinton is a being of more mettle than this, which means by definition she cannot play this drab. The question is then both that we lose patience with the fact that she does not lose patience, and we lose patience with the story itself. One cannot get either to the bottom of her character or to that of her son. One cannot even try. John C. Reilly is grand as the jolly husband, a part whose jingle bell shakes one note, though Reilly, as usual, makes it seem if not more at least other. The director appears to have come down with a terrible case of Ingmar Bergman. And there is nothing to do for the entire project but recommend a long bed rest and full quarantine.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: YOU-COULD-DRIVE-A-TEAM-OF-HORSES-THROUGH-THE-PAUSES, FAMILY DRAMA, Tilda Swinton ACTING GODDESS

 
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