Bruce Moody's Movie Reviews

Melancholia – directed by Lars von Trier. Drama. Two sisters faced with their own futility also face the end of the world. 130 minutes. Color 2011.

★★★

An artist must be judged by the atmospheric conditions he himself creates. So that looking at this story, one is at a loss to place one’s compassion on the spectacular catastrophe of the end of the world which it gives us and in the beauty of the aura surrounding that, because no one inside the aura of the piece and whom the aura sets off is human enough to warrant our care. Neither actress possesses intrinsic interest. They want words; they want temperament. Who hired them?

In terms of what they do as actors, we can see them as competent, but there is no special value in either to allow them to stand for all humans about to collide with the great finality. They are flat. They are ordinary. They lack even the interest of simplicity. They lack even the charm of children, as does their child, a numb little boy. No matter how technically proficient they may be, and these two women are proficient indeed, actors in starring roles must stand out on the basis of who they are before they are positioned. Stars gleam; these two do not. Technical proficiency is nice, but, in fact, is not even a minimum standard for stardom. And here, especially, we must see them as special when they are in competition for our very interest with two planets colliding.

Indeed, even on the grounds of technique, we are faced with an inexplicable inadequacy. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s and Kristin Dunst’s parents are played by John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling. But Dunst plays with a flat American accent. If the idea is to present her as without liaison with her family, it is an irrelevant maneuver. For Kiefer Sutherland, who is superb and right, also speaks with his native accent, which might be understandable because he married into this family. The problem is not whether they relate to one another but whether we relate to any of them. But because of the language disparity there is too much sorting out who is related to whom. I don’t know whether Dunst does not have the technical prowess or does not have the energy to speak the Queen’s English, but it does not matter that I rather suspect the latter, because either way the flaw is fatal.

Likewise, they all seem to live together in a big ugly palace – or do they? – for none of them relate to it as a familiar milieu. First you think it is a golf club? Or is it a country hotel? Or a former mansion on hire? So the actors fail to bring us into human relationship with the loss of an Eden because they themselves do not belong in it. We never feel this is their house, their home. It is a failure of acting technique. Eden must be not just exquisite but exquisite to those who are to lose it.

The director’s desire was to present the nature of depression, because it is a state he himself has known. This is justifiable. This is done well. It is well filmed. The story is there, although the script is underwritten. Underwriting is always a form of overwriting, which is why its simplicity always looks pretentious. But never mind. His job is still to make sure the actors come alive in the piece. They don’t. They are adequate. But Adequate is always inadequate, is it not?

Von Trier’s films are heavily influenced by Tarkovsky. They are empty and inert. See Tarkovsky instead.

Top 40 Films 56-60 Reviewed in 2012

61.- Two Lovers – 2008. A man is drawn between two women, one of whom everyone wants him to marry and the other of whom no one wants him to marry. He wants to marry both. Gwyneth Paltrow is one of them. Joaquin Phoenix in another extraordinary characterization.

62.- Waterloo Bridge – 1931. A streetwalker finds true love in the devotion of a Yank soldier in WW I. Mae Clark is just extraordinary in the role. I’d never heard of her, but don’t miss her. Bette Davis emerges.

63.- Wife vs. Secretary – 1936. Snappy Dialogue: “Have you been faithful while I was away?” he asks. “Yes,” she says. “Twice.” Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, and James Stewart command the screen in this nifty comedy.

64.- Wings In The Dark – 1935. What made Myrna Loy so great? Here she plays a stunt pilot opposite Cary Grant as a blind ex-pilot. Melodrama but watchable and Loy is lovely.

65.- Woman Of The Year – 1942. The first of the Hepburn/Tracy duos and by a long shot the best. Don’t miss it. It is the establishing movie for women’s lib, and Hepburn is fun and masterful and sexy in it. They were very funny together. George Stevens directed.

66.- Won’t Back Down – 2012. Backed by the great Rosie Perez and the great Holly Hunter, Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal effort womanfully for school reform. Gyllenhaal is one of our great ones. Don’t miss her. Never miss her. She’s better than a weekend at the spa.

Top 40 Films 56 – 60 Reviewed in 2012

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56.- The Wind Will Carry Us –1999. A documentarian from Tehran finds himself in a rural Iranian village to film its post mortem death rituals, but the old woman simply will not die. Very funny and radiantly beautiful.

57.- Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy – 2011. Gary Oldman takes this story to the screen once again. He is one of the most remarkable actors alive, always dangerous, always true. It’s a John Le Carrée spy thriller. Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds, John Hurt support.

58.- To Rome, With Love – 2012. We have the genius of Judy Davis to amaze us as Woody Allen’s wife, sitting there doing nothing, but stealing every scene. Roberto Benigni, Alec Baldwin and the juicy Penelope Cruz support in four unrelated delightful stories.

59.- Trouble With The Curve – 2012. Clint Eastwood directs and stars as a baseball talent scout, rivaled by his own daughter, Amy Adams, the most versatile actress on screen today. John Goodman, always a welcome presence, supports.

60.- Two-Lane Blacktop – 1971. Warren Oates is the reason to view it, but the story of this road-race has great beauty, fun, surprises, and a great theme. Let’s talk about what it is.

Top 40 Films 51-55 Reviewed In 2012

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The Master – 2012. The stunning Paul Thomas Anderson directs the story of the Philip Seymour Hoffman’s battle for the soul of a cracked guttersnipe played and greatly played by Joaquin Phoenix, in a remarkable characterization.

The More The Merrier – 1943. You cannot do better than George Stevens WWII comedy set in a housing shortage in Washington. The delightful Charles Coburn won an Oscar matchmaking Jean Arthur and Joel McCrae, wonderful actors at their best, certainly in the funniest and most sensual courting scene ever filmed. Treat yourself good. See it.

The Roaring Twenties – 1939. James Cagney gives a performance unique in his career, real, slow, measured and deep. My favorite, Raoul Walsh directed it.

The Talk Of The Town – 1942. An escaped prisoner hides out in the summer home of a famous law professor, and both fall for their landlady. Cary Grant is the escapee. Ronald Coleman the professor, and Jean Arthur the landlady. The great comedy director in charge is George Stevens.

The Tall Men – 1955. Clark Gable at his most iconic and authoritative. Jane Russell and Robert Ryan as well, in one of the most beautiful color Westerns ever made. Raoul Walsh directed.

RADIANT — a book review by Bruce Moody of The Great Stars Series — Ingrid Bergman by David Thomson

★★★★★

I was sitting outside Kay Brown’s office covering for her secretary who was at lunch, and Ingrid Bergman stood out in the antique furnished lobby of the New York headquarters of MCA. She was in a simple suit. In profile, she was as slender as a wafer and as mundane. She stood there, modestly, humbly, quietly, waiting. She had come to see Kay Brown. She needed.

A story Dirk Bogarde tells of her. He kept a beautiful home in England where his actor friends loved to visit and sometimes stay. It was a sort of refuge for them. One day he went out into the garden and saw his guest weeding it. “Ingrid, what are you doing?’ “Waiting for a part,” she said.

The only time I saw Ingrid Bergman was this moment in the late `50s around the time of her Anastasia comeback. It was said she was the only actress in the world who could open a film on her name alone. But she was in need.

She was in need of the thing that kept her going on living – which was being an actress, and to do that she had to act, and to do that she had to get a part, and to do that she had to wait for her agent, Kay Brown.

She had never interested me as an actress. But she does interest David Thomson, which is why he writes about her. But when he writes about her, he sometimes smears his watercolors and one doesn’t always know what he means. They sometimes drip down the page irrelevantly. And that may be because he is actually in love with Ingrid Bergman and cannot therefore see her plain. His judgment is perhaps misted by his amour.

Much, of course, this being David Thomson, is good, richly spoken, witty, and always in a voice arising from great knowledge of film and the fun of film and film business. His statement that she had made 12 movies by 1940 is an important statistic in weighing her arrival in Intermezzo her first American film, which I remember at the time. She appeared so fresh that we all thought she must be inexperienced. Not so.

He has done his homework. He is not always accurate about Ingrid Bergman as an actress, but he is always to be trusted. For instance, he cites several movies she might have made had she not taken up with Roberto Rossellini: A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan), Lola Montez (Ophuls), Vertigo (Hitchcock). The idea of her being in any of them is preposterous. For he does not seem to understand the sort of actress Ingrid Bergman was. But he does understand the glamour that obscured him from that knowledge. And his investigation of the films she actually did make with Rossellini is helpful, loving, perspicacious. You can’t do better than to read him, on these matters.

Ingrid Bergman was an actress of the old school, who usually played everything to the second balcony. Biographically she had a fine relationship with her father, who died when she was young, but provided for her training and support as an actress. She probably wanted to be an actress more than to act. Her stance of being an actress was terribly important. More important than being a character. She understood her charm well. No one ever could lower their eyes with such effect. No one could resist her bashful smile. No one photographed so well in full sun.

When she was to appear on radio playing famous women of history, she was sent for accent coaching to the great actress Mildred Dunnock, who was a master at accents. When Mildred Dunnock suggested that she drop her accent to play these parts, Ingrid Bergman said she would not do it. “People like me for my accent,” she said, and the session was over.

That’s the sort of actress Ingrid Bergman was. Aware of her power and unaware that it limited her. When she tried to stretch her craft with Rossellini, she could not do it. She ruined his career; she admits it.

She was radiant. She drew you in. Aside from Casablanca and Notorious her vehicles are no longer watchable, and sometimes neither is she. When her youth faded, when she returned to America a matron with four children to support, her talent, which was a sort of grandstanding “naturalness,” flattened out to a single power, which she had always had and which was still great – her power as a woman.

Even so, people remembered they had loved her. They forgot she had made them do it. She still had her audience. Which is what being an actress necessitates.

Thomson’s book on her brings to bear the business and technical background that helped make Ingrid Bergman a star. It is very good in this regard. His book on Bette Davis is better, because his critical acumen fires fewer potshots at Davis, so his aim is sometimes inaccurate here. But as a brief and yet penetrative examination of this lady, you don’t want to deprive yourself of visiting Ingrid Bergman with him. What David Thomson says about films and film people is always arresting, always worth reading, and always enjoyable to read.

A simple, good, and necessary list of Ingrid Bergman’s pictures closes the book, along with a list of further readings about her.

The Top 40 Films 46-50, Reviewed On moviemoody.com in 2012.

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The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus – 2009. Heath Ledger subbed by cutie-pies Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell in a whirwind, entertaining fantasy.

The Iron Lady — 2011. Meryl Streep in her most extraordinary impersonation, Margaret Thatcher in her heyday and dotage. The craft of acting at its finest.

The Ladykillers – 1955. Alec Guiness and Peter Sellars arrange a robbery headquartered in the home of a little old lady, played to perfection by Katie Johnson, who steals the show.

The Last Station – 2010. The seductive Helen Miren takes this film and enlarges it with the truth and power of her performance. She and Christopher Plummer play the Leo Tolstois in their last days.

The Life Of Pi – 2012. Ang Lee directed this exquisite parable of an adolescent boy adrift in a lifeboat alone with a Bengal tiger. Can they, since they are both mammals, come to terms?

41 – 45. Top 40 Films of 2012 Reviewed in moviemoody.com

Talk To Me – 2007- Don CHeadle does a wonderful turn as a mephistophoclean dj.

Thank You For Smoking – 2006 – Aaron Eckart and William H. Macy as a tobacco PR guy and the senator opposing him are brilliantly funny in this superb satire.

The Artist – 2011 – It won many awards and has all the beguiling charm of a silent screen comedy – which it is.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – 2012. What fun. A bunch of British retirees can’t afford to live in England any more, so they are beguiled to India by a wild young man, Dev Patel. Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkerson, Judi Dench, and other stars amuse no end.

The Color Of Paradise – 2000 – A difficult beautiful picture about a blind boy and his father who is ashamed of him. Not to be missed.

36-40. The Top 40 films reviewed on moviemoody.com in 2012

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Shortbus – 2006. An early madness directed by John Cameron Mitchell. Sex rampant is the coat of arms here, so don’t pretend it isn’t. If you ever wondered how you would behave at an orgy, you may never find out by watching this. All you have to do is behave at an orgy.

Snatch – 2000. Brad Pitt plays a bad Brit in this low-life gangster caper-comedy. Brad Pitt is an actor who can do no wrong except to wear a shirt and tie. He is excruciatingly funny.

State Of The Union – 1948. One of Frank Capra’s few post WW II pieces, and an excellent one. With Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as a couple headed for the White House, with a powerhouse performance by a barely out-of-her-teens Angela Lansbury.

Swimming To Cambodia – 1987. Jonathan Demme directed this docudrama of Spalding Grey performing his great sit-piece. Don’t miss this master at play.

Swing Time – 1936. George Stevens directed this, probably the best of the Rogers and Astaire white telephone musicals. Gerome Kern wrote the score (“A Fine Romance.” “Pick Yourself Up,” “Just The Way You Look Tonight”), and it contains as the jewel in its crown, the greatest romantic dance number ever put down in film. Excellent Extra Feature, too.

31-35 Top 40 Best Movies Reviewed in 2012

31.- Penny Serenade – 1941. Well, Cary Grant was up for Oscars twice, and never for a comedy, and this is one of those times, and you can easily see why. I recommend that you do. The remarkable George Stevens directed it, sufficient reason in and of itself.

32.- People Will Talk – 1951. A prominent professor is attacked by a bigoted colleague. Cary Grant again. Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve et al) directed.

33.- Roadhouse – 1948. Not to be missed for the character Ida Lupino creates. So funny. So true. Richard Widmark does one of his crazies, and Cornell Wilde plays sensitive hero. Celeste Holm immediately after her Oscar win.

34.- Rock Of Ages – 2012. Tom Cruise as the rock and roll superstar pushing fifty – a sort of combination of Iggy Pop and Robert Newton, a walking Parnassus Of Sex, his jewelled crown a codpiece of rubies. It’s an astonishing turn by an astonishing actor – who once again throws himself into a role hook, line, and sinker. His joy in his craft is abounding. His actor’s imagination is unfathomable. He is not to be missed. Nor is Paul Giamatti in one of the funniest scenes ever.

35.- Seven Men From Now – 1956. One of the great Budd Boettecher Westerns. Randolph Scott is super, as is the sumptuously beautiful and endearing Gail Russell. Surprising, witty and imaginative.

26 – 30 THE 40 TOP REVIEWED FILMS ON MOVIE MOODY OF 2012

Here’s a few more to pick over. You won’t regret spending time with any of them. None of them are earth-shattering, but then you don’t want your earth shattered all the time, anyhow.
~ ~ ~

Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels –1989. A brilliant gangster comedy from Great Britain.

Lockout – 2012. The remarkable Guy Pearce, upon whom I am writing The Guy Pearce Papers, as an examination of excellence in modern acting. Keep up with him. This is a sci-fi hootnanny. Here he is a smart-mouthed superhero, and brings it off proudly.

Marly And Me – 2008. Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. I look at them and am filled with wonder and admiration for their craft. There is a dog involved.

Objective Burma – 1945. A favorite director of mine, Raoul Walsh, frequently worked with Errol Flynn. This is tip-top WW II movie, a demolition tale using actual footage from the Burma campaign.

Old Joy – 2007. An odd and necessary story about two hippy pals ten years later. You will find it tender and endearing.

Top 40 Films Reviewed on moviemoody.com in 2012 – 21 – 25

21.- Hedwig And The Angry Inch – 2001. An extraordinary performance by the author of his sexual immolation before us all, and we are the benefactors of the fire.

22.- I Remember Mama – 1948. George Stevens masterpiece. His first film after his war experiences. Set in the San Francisco of his youth, he offers an American classic with Irene Dunne at her best. A must.

23.- In This Our Life – 1942. Bette Davis in one of her best and most extreme performances as the bitch you have to love. John Huston’s second movie. Charles Coburn and Davis are brilliant together as fatal flirts. Olivia DeHaviland and Hattie McDaniel costar.

24- Killing Them Softly – 2012. Brad Pitt lends his great skill and charm to this hit man, aided by James Gandolfino. Pitt, within his range, is one of the finest actors alive.

25.- Lincoln – 2012 – Steven Spielberg with the resplendent words of Tony Kushner brings Lincoln personal and up-close. Sally Field plays Mary Todd with rapt attention to detail, and Daniel Day Lewis brings forth another virtuoso characterization. This is the picture of the year, unless you don’t count The Beasts From The Southern Wilds. Both are best seen in movie houses.

Best 40 Films Reviewed in 2012 – 16-20.

All of these pictures are available to order at your local library for free.

End Of Watch – 2012. A brilliant cop/buddy picture with Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña bantering in a cop car. Oscar-worthy work.

Enemies, A Love Story – 1989. The cast includes Judith Malina, Margaret Sophie Stein, Lena Olin and The Great Anjelica Huston, the last two of whom were nominated for Oscars for this film. Paul Mazurksy directed it.

Flight – 2012. Denzel Washington presides over the excitement of this examination of a rash salvation move by a passenger jet pilot to save it from a crash.

Frozen River – 2008. Melissa Leo is an actress to clutch to our hearts as a natural standard-bearer of her craft. You have met the woman she plays before; you have never known her till now. Don’t miss it.

Gunga Din – 1939. George Stevens is never better than when outdoors. This is a famous action adventure show with Cary Grant, Ray Milland, Joan Fontaine, and Victor McGlaglen. It’s a lot of fun and good watching for the whole family.

Have a look and see if you might contribute a small sum to the donations tag on moviemoody.com

Dear ones, here more of the best films I reviewed in 2012. Watch ‘em, and let me know you how like ‘em.

11. – Buck – 2011. A Documentary about a horse-whisperer – and what a guy!

12. – Coriolanus – 2012. Ralph Fiennes is quite great as the most difficult of all Shakespeare’s heroes.

13.- Dark Command – 1940. he is re-united for the first time since The Big Trail with Raoul Walsh who discovered him, and he is also reunited with Claire Trevor his costar in the hugely popular, Stagecoach. She plays a lady of property, and Wayne plays the sidekick of George “Gabby” Hayes who runs an itinerate dentistry. Wayne’s voice sidles through the film so unobtrusively that he steals every scene he is in.

14. – Diary Of A Mad Black Woman – 2005. Have you never seen Tyler Perry? You mustn’t miss him, and this is a classic example of his masterful wit. Don’t hold back. He doesn’t. It is low comedy at its funniest.

15. – Elegy – 2008. Mis-titled badly, so don’t be misled. Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley and Dennis Hopper explore modern love and sex and desire and the whole bottle of madness.

Again, I love the craft of acting, and that’s what I love writing about best. Every one of these films is acted remarkably in one way or another. From Cary Grant who always underacts to Robert Newton who never underacts.

40 Best Films Reviewed In 2012 On moviemoody.com. Films 6-10

Amazing Adventure – 1937. Light Comedy. Cary Grant. Here he is in the last of his tuxedo roles, and it is a perfect moment to take in the sort of actor he was. Read about that on moviemoody.com, and check out the movie and see if you agree.

Argo – 2012. International Thriller. Ben Affleck is not supposed to be everybody’s favorite, except when the big-hearted lug plays a part like this – a docu-caper, being the actual story how eight members of the American Embassy hid out at the Canadian Embassy and were spirited out of Iran by the mad scheme of a fake movie being shot there. Yes, it actually happened. Affleck directs.

Autumn Reunion – 2007. Drama. Many years after he saved them from the gas chamber, three Jews reunite in Canada with their savior. A stirring grown up movie, beautifully told and acted by Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne, and Max Von Sydow.

Big Brown Eyes – 1936. Comedy. Fast talking dames like Joan Bennett should be framed and hung in the Smithsonian. This is vintage perfection. Cary Grant plays her slippery boyfriend. If you like His Gal Friday, this should entertain you no end. Raoul Walsh directed it handily.

Blackbeard, The Pirate –1952. Swashbuckler. Robert Newton raves through this technicolor high-seas tale, with the sumptuous Linda Darnell aboard with the hoard. Directed by Raoul Walsh who had directed Errol Flynn’s piracies. Don’t deprive yourself. The bows and furbelows in Newton’s beard alone are with the price of admission.

Did you think of making a donation? Take a look at the upper right hand corner of this blog.

These films are easily obtained at your public library. For free. Check it out.

The 40 Best Films I Reviewed In 2012

I reviewed over 200 films in 2012, and rather than say what was the best and second best and so forth – denominations which have no meaning to me nor maybe to you either – I thought I would list all those I felt possessed various kinds of merits.

Some of them came out in 2012. Some, as you can see, hale from years past, although not past my past, since I am contemporary with all but one of them, Waterloo Bridge of 1931.

The main focus of these reviews is the acting. That’s what fascinates me, and that’s how I aspire to be useful to you. I like exploring that craft. In the process, I hope we both may benefit.

Some of these movie reviews are more about a particular actor and what that actor’s quality and craft might be. I mean, who has ever heard of Big Brown Eyes of 1936, but you might want to read there about Cary Grant as an actor. Besides, both he and the film are quite entertaining.

This year I wrote a series of reviews of Bette Davis films, and in doing so had a good deal to say about her craft, too, and what happened to it. But I here included only one, In This Our Life. If you want to know about my notions of Davis’s development as an actor, you can go back and look her up in particular pictures on moviemoody.com .

This was also the year I wrote The George Stevens Seminar, because he seems important, momentous, and moving. None of that seminar is on this list, although each film is associated with a section of it, but some of the films he made are reviewed here, so be sure not to miss Shane and A Place In The Sun and The More The Merrier.

I also began The Guy Pierce Papers. But these are a series of reviews of this fine actor’s films, a series which shall continue over the years, as I bring in his films for you. Talking about a single actor over time is helpful to me to articulate what I can about The Actors Craft. Some of it is hunches. Some of it I know from experience as an actor. Some of it is as plain as the nose on your face.

Guy Pierce’s work is worth dwelling upon, and I hope you learn something about the rubric of the craft by reading about him. To find him and his pictures, just go to the index on the right of the blog.

This month, I am going to give you brief precis of these pictures, maybe five at a time, so you can figure out for yourself if you might fancy them.

They are all available for free from your public library. Netflix has most of them, too.

By the way, on the blog site, at the right top. is a place for DONATIONS. If you read these reviews and are helped and entertained and enlightened by them, do you think you could find your way to droop in a sum? – no amount too small, none too large.

Thank you.

~ ~ ~

A Late Quartet – 2012

A Place In The Sun – 1951

A Private Function – 1984

A Separation – 2011

Air Force – 1943

Amazing Adventure – 1937

Argo – 2012

Autumn Reunion – 2007

Big Brown Eyes – 1936

Blackbeard, The Pirate – 1952

Buck – 2011

Coriolanus – 2012

Dark Command – 1940

Diary Of A Mad Black Woman – 2005

Elegy – 2008

End Of Watch – 2012

Enemies, A Love Story – 1989

Flight – 2012

Frozen River – 2008

Gunga Din – 1939

Hedwig And The Angry Inch – 2001

I Remember Mama – 1948

In This Our Life – 1942

Killing Them Softly – 2012

Lincoln – 2012

Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels –1989

Lockout – 2012

Marly And Me – 2008

Objective Burma – 1945

Old Joy – 2007

Penny Serenade – 1941

People Will Talk – 194

Roadhouse – 1948

Rock Of Ages – 2012

Seven Men From Now – 1956

Shortbus – 2006

Snatch – 2000

State Of The Union – 1948

Swimming To Cambodia – 1987

Swing Time – 1936

Talk To Me – 2007

Thank You For Smoking – 2006

The Artist – 2011

The Beasts Of The Southern Wild – 2012

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – 2012

The Color Of Paradise – 2000

The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus – 2009

The Iron Lady ­– 2011

The Ladykillers – 1955

The Last Station – 2010

The Life Of Pi – 2012

The Master – 2012

The More The Merrier – 1943

The Roaring Twenties – 1939

The Talk Of The Town – 1942

The Tall Men – 1955

The Wind Will Carry Us –1999

Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy – 2011

To Rome, With Love – 2012

Trouble With The Curve – 2012

Two-Lane Blacktop – 1971

Two Lovers – 2008

Waterloo Bridge – 1931

Wife vs. Secretary – 1936

Wings In The Dark – 1935

Woman Of The Year – 1942

Won’t Back Down – 2012

What delight!

A charming and funny Christmas story from your own beloved blogger moviemoody.com.

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If you already have a Kindle gizmo, good.

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Here’s how it goes! A nine year old boy naughty, of course, and greedy for Christmas goodies, goes through his own night before Christmas with his family, opens his stocking Christmas morning, and then, going downstairs, what does he find under the Christmas tree among the glittering plenty?

Well, just you wait and see.

Christmas Day In The Morning is a good old-fashioned Christmas story that entertains the whole family. It’s fun to read out loud. It’s fun to hear it read. It’s fun to read on Kindle. Even the baby Jesus plays a part.

Christmas Day In The Morning stands next to Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas In Wales and The Night Before Christmas as a perennial yuletide favorite. A happy and humorous wassail of the season.

The author’s work has appeared in The National Lampoon and The New Yorker. He is the author of prize-winning poems and criticism and books. If you like what you read here on movie moody.com, you will love Christmas Day In The Morning, and so will all you love as well.

Find it by going to

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What delight!

A charming and funny Christmas story from your own beloved blogger moviemoody.com.

It’s on Kindle. It’s only $2.99.

If you already have a Kindle gizmo, good.

If not, all you need to do to get your free Kindle application is go to Amazon and following the free Kindle application directions — for mac or PC.

And then go to http://amzn.com/B00AA59P5G and there you will find Christmas Day In The Morning.

Here’s how it goes! A nine year old boy naughty, of course, and greedy for Christmas goodies, goes through his own night before Christmas with his family, opens his stocking Christmas morning, and then, going downstairs, what does he find under the Christmas tree among the glittering plenty?

Well, just you wait and see.

Christmas Day In The Morning is a good old-fashioned Christmas story that entertains the whole family. It’s fun to read out loud. It’s fun to hear it read. It’s fun to read on Kindle. Even the baby Jesus plays a part.

Christmas Day In The Morning stands next to Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas In Wales and The Night Before Christmas as a perennial yuletide favorite. A happy and humorous wassail of the season.

The author’s work has appeared in The National Lampoon and The New Yorker. He is the author of prize-winning poems and criticism and books. If you like what you read here on movie moody.com, you will love Christmas Day In The Morning, and so will all you love as well.

Find it by going to

http://amzn.com/B00AA59P5G

Here’s the best Christmas present you could give yourself and me and another.

It’s the story of a rather naughty and perfectly greedy little boy of nine who opens his Christmas presents to find among them — of course — a lump of coal.

Christmas Day In The Morning is a short KINDLE book, about 30 pages, a story really, nostalgic and funny, rather like Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales – a story for children, grownups, and the whole family. Great for reading out loud. Just go to:

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And, tomorrow, on Black Friday it’s free!

It’s my newest, sweetest baby, and it welcomes your care and attention. Please read it for free or buy it — love it, give it to your friends.

And when you love it, well, then toot and tout your joys and put up a review. And tell your friends about it and buy it for them and everything! Help others you don’t know find it by reviewing it. Speak up for this little book. Your response means everything to me – yes, both to me and to its sales.

I do hope you love Christmas Day In The Morning. It’s a warm-hearted, humorous tale that may bring you back to your own Christmas mornings.

So Happy Holidays!

Make them more happy still with Christmas Day In The Morning.

And with my hug from afar.

Love ya,

Bruce

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Hey, everyone, I will be giving us a series of reviews on the interesting and talented actor Guy Pearce. He is one of four great modern actors (among whom are Joan Allen and Lee Pace) who fascinate me. I want to you to love them and be amazed by them, as I am.

Guy Pearce was born 5 October 1967, which makes him as of 18 October 2012, today, 45 and a Libra.

He is of English/Australian origin. When he was three, he left England with his older sister, who is mentally impaired, and his mother, a teacher, to live in Australia. His father, a test pilot, died in a crash when he was nine.

In Australia at 15, he became a prize-winning body builder and a soon a teen TV throb. To this day he is part of a rock band. He is long married and has no children. He has worked for 25 years as an actor, and appears on the stage frequently in his homeland.

You perhaps have seen him in:

L.A. Confidential

The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert

Factory Girl as Andy Warhol

The King’s Speech as King Edward VII

The Hurt Locker

Mildred Pierce [Emmy for Best Supporting Actor]

Death Defying Acts as Houdini

Memento

The Proposition

Rules Of Engagement

The Count Of Monte Cristo

A Slipping Down Life

And many other films. I won’t write preliminary essays as I did in The George Stevens Seminar, but simply write the reviews. At the bottom of each I will talk briefly about the sort of role he played in it. For he is an actor of considerable versatility.

To start that process, I offer a little piece about actors roles, which follows, itself followed by a review of the new Horror Film, Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark.

Why should I be thinking you might want to read about this actor?

I write of him and send to you my views because I imagine you to be interested in the art of acting itself.

It’s a curious art. That man of the theatre, Voltaire, called it the most beautiful, the most difficult, and the most rare of all the arts. And so I believe it to be.

But here we have an actor who seems to embody the craft to an unusual degree. Because it seems he can do almost anything – rare – as Voltaire told us.

Actors fall into certain categories, or roles as they are sometimes called.

Supporting Actor
Jeune Premier or Ingénue
Leading Man, Leading Woman
Character Lead
Personality Star
Character Star
Star

Do all actors fall into all categories? Can they play in all categories?

Meryl Streep, for instance, is not a leading lady. She does not have the personality for it. But, boy, is she is ever a Character Star. One doesn’t want to see her be herself. One wants to see her be someone else.

Katharine Hepburn is a Personality Star, but she does not play Characters. When she plays The Madwoman Of Chaillot, she is great, but she is not mad – what she is is The Madwoman of Hartford.

Marlon Brando might have been a Jeune Premier as a teenager, but he has more weight to his essence to sustain it, whereas Tom Cruise, a very good actor, is probably always a boy, or Jeune Premier.

There are no hard and fast rules about these things, but these categories help us see something about acting, and they help us see what each actor is suited to and not suited to.

Guy Pearce seems to fall into more of these categories than any modern actor I know of.
Character Star, Supporting Actor, Jeune Premier, Character Lead, Leading Man, Star.

So I thought you and I might like to go on this journey together with him, and take a look at this remarkably versatile actor’s work. We do it for our enjoyment and entertainment – and for the amazement of both of us at the miracle of acting itself.

The George Stevens Seminar – Part 14 – Conclusion.

What happened to George Stevens in the films that ended and exhausted his career?

Did something go wrong with him?

I think the progress of Stevens last work is towards a grandeur of social consciousness for which his instrument was not well suited and could not compass. Issues, not bigger than his talent, but of another sort, commanded him. His talent is poetic not polemic. From the last half of Giant on, he is engaged in what is Right, except that he is wrong for what is Right.

I wish it had not happened, but it probably had to happen, for he felt responsible for what he saw in Dachau. He was repulsed by the suffering – the dead and the dying and the decrepit and the diseased – and so he therefore took himself to be no different from the Nazis who had caused that suffering. It was in him too. He was just like them. He faced himself and he did not like what he saw. What he did not see was that the Nazis were not repulsed by the people they tortured and killed; they were not repulsed by suffering; they liked it. But Stevens, in his immediate lack of compassion for what he saw, did not recognize or know that repulsion to horror is a natural first response to it. He felt irresponsive and therefore irresponsible. And so, responsible.

Amends had to be made.

Except amends cannot be made.

But still the result was the deed of honesty of Giant Part 2, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. The preachment of the last half of Giant, about bigotry and the persecution of minorities, lead to a second persecution story, The Diary Of Anne Frank, also about the Jews, and then to the most famous persecution story of all, The Greatest Story Ever Told.

In this, it lead to subjects outside of American subjects –– and outside America which were his true and only realm and place. Holland? the Holy Land? and a movie shot in Paris? His films then also forsake simplicity for the simplistic. Stevens at best is a front porch type of director. He is a great director of comic or serious love stories. That is all, but it is enough to make him our great director because he does it so greatly. It is enough, also, because that was what his talent was most truly for.

What happened to George Stevens after the colossal collapse of The Greatest Story Ever Told is that he seems to have wandered. He seemed to want to make another film, and eventually he did so, but it was an odd choice. It was a job-of-work film, the story, considerably lacking in grandeur, of a gambler and a showgirl in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra was set to do it, and Elizabeth Taylor then applied for the job, and when Sinatra dropped out and Warren Beatty was signed, naturally Elizabeth Taylor would have been wrong to play opposite Warren Beatty at any time, and by this time many years had gone by since Giant. Besides, Elizabeth Taylor was a trophy woman, not a showgirl. She never really could convincingly play someone who had a job. She was the show or she was nothing. She was too fat and too old and too short and too wrong for it. Besides, with her, the film had to be made in Europe so she could keep her eye on Richard Burton and make use of the tax haven they needed for their vast revenues. When she heard they were considering Julie Christie, she confronted Stevens, and, well, you know what Our Liz was like – there was no talking back to her. Besides, she had served Stevens well in the past. Everyone threw up their hands and said, “Okay, it’s all wrong but we’ll try it anyhow.” None of them had ever read Macbeth.

The Only Game In Town was the last of his three failures. I saw it when it came out. Everything that could be missing was missing, including Las Vegas.

If you look at Stevens’ story at this time, what occurs to you also is that he was defeated by the boundaries of Hollywood itself. He was limited by the choice of the sort of stories that came to Hollywood and the actors who worked there. His career was top-heavy. He was too successful.

Perhaps he didn’t realize that?

What else mightn’t he not have realized?

Now, George Stevens, by a sort of silent personal attrition, was the sort of person who could get anything he wanted. He was very strong. He knew, and everyone knew, what a film master he was. And people were perfectly willing to make movies with him even after failure. Because not only do Hollywood people know that movies are a crap shoot, they also attract people who like a crap shoot. What you see in a George Stevens’ film is consummate craft becoming great film art. Stevens knew he had this craft. He knew how to make films. He knew how to make them his way. He knew how to cut a script the night before. He knew how to prepare. He knew how to overshoot, and to use that footage to piece together in the cutting room the film he wanted. He understood audiences and trusted them. What he did not know, perhaps, was what was meant when you saw huge and ahead of the title when the credits came on: THE GEORGE STEVENS PRODUCTION OF. Maybe I am wrong about this.

When he was shooting The Diary Of Anne Frank and it was pointed out that it had no star, he said something like, “Well, I guess I’ll have to be the star.” But somehow I still don’t think he realized that, as with only a few other directors – Hitchcock, Kazan, Ford, Zinnemann – his name alone could open a picture. It did not seem to occur to him that his own skill and craft were sufficient: he did not need stars. But he was stuck with star-mentality. He used movie stars to cast his pictures and he sometimes cast them carelessly, and they are sometimes unnecessary. He also sometimes cast them incorrectly and oddly.

For instance, he wanted Montgomery Clift to play Shane. Clift was a huge star at that time, but a crazier idea cannot be imagined. He also wanted Katharine Hepburn to play the wife, which is equally nuts. Katharine Hepburn and William Holden as her husband meet Montgomery Clift as Shane. To contemplate it is enough to give one a stroke. In the end, when all that fell through, his casting was quite off-hand. He asked for the contract players roster at Paramount and – Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, and Jean Arthur – quickly and luckily checked off three names.

In taking on Shane, Stevens in his own mind was just taking on a job of work. He had a contract with the studio and he had to make a movie. Giant was another matter. He instigated it, and he was no longer under contract. The book was well known, and many actors vied for the leads. The problem in casting was the age range the leads went through, going to 50. Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly were not about to appear to be 50, nor did they have the technical know-how to do so. Elizabeth Taylor had to politic Stevens for the role. I suppose Stevens could not foretell that Elizabeth Taylor, although the most beautiful woman in the world, was not particularly vain, so being 50 was nothing to her – that wonderful anecdote about her saying to Stevens at the shoot in Marfa, “Oh, yes, George, but what happens when I am no longer Technicolor-pretty and Technicolor-young?” No one who is vain about their looks could make such a remark.

The casting of the male lead may have come first, and actors in the middle age range were considered, John Wayne, for instance, who would have been marvelous as Jordan Benedict ten years before, as would even better have been Joel McCrae. But with Taylor, aged 23, in the role they were looking for younger actors for Jett Rink than Robert Mitchum and for Benedict. Trouble was there was a scarcity of young straight leading actors. Rock Hudson was not one of them, either, and the film suffers from it. He was not straight but the role carried it because the role said he was, and Elizabeth Taylor carried it, because she was able to play her love for him as a swain and a husband.

Stevens, strong as he was, could not envision casting outside Hollywood’s limited casting possibilities. Besides, if you have Elizabeth Taylor you can’t have an unknown playing opposite her. And if you cast her first, you can’t cast Joel McCrae opposite her, even though it is the more important role and needs to be cast first.

Stars…if available…not always an advantage.

The Diary Of Anne Frank on the other hand had no stars in it. You could cast anybody as Anne. A big campaign to find an unknown went on. For funny-looking little 13 year-old Anne Frank, he cast a girl with no acting experience at all – but she was a cover girl! – on every fashion magazine in the world! What standard was seducing him here? Her presence is completely in conflict with Anne Frank and how everyone knew she looked. Well, he saw the movie, mistakenly, as a romance, while all it is, at most in that regard, is a crush. The movie failed badly. If you watch the excellent BBC version of “The Diary Of Anne Frank,” you see what the casting and playing of that part should have been. What was wrong with Stevens? Had he lost his casting sense?

The Greatest Story Ever Told is jammed with stars, and, with the exception of Sidney Poitier, none of them add a single thing to the story of Jesus, an unknown outsider wandering through the desert with a cortege of unknown outsiders. These are good actors, but what did he think Van Heflin or José Ferrer or Charlton Heston had to offer that would not overbalance the material, or Brooklynite Shelley Winters (one of the few Jewish people in it)? He casts Max Von Sydow, an Ingmar Bergman company member, as Jesus. Such blue eyes, too! Von Sydow is better than good in the part, but better-than-good does not mean right.

Finally, the mad admixture of Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty, both of them admirers of Stevens, but, opposite one another, miscast. Why? Because the picture, again, is a romance, but they were the sort of people who in love and sex both did the choosing — yet no comedy is made from that conflict.

In his days with the studios, Stevens’ films were perhaps cast for him. But as an independent producer, while he seems in firm mastery in all matters, he seems not so in the casting. This either means either that casting never was one of his strengths, or that he felt that the telling of the story, at which he was the greatest living master, was more consequential than the human beings called upon to enact the drama in the story. If so, in this he was wrong, and his, perhaps unconscious, laxity in or shunting aside of proper casting, I believe, confirmed the decline of the life of his work and leading to the ending of his career.

It may have also ended because by the time he finished The Greatest Story Ever Told (surely the worst title for a movie ever made), he would have been worn out. It was way over-budget; it was way over schedule. (His friends Jean Negulesco and David Lean towards the end had to shoot scenes for him.) It was the most expensive movie ever made in America. The public hadn’t come. His inspiration may have gone threadbare.

And his energy too. For film direction is a young man’s gig. It’s an enormous undertaking. Directing a film is pole vaulting over an Everest, and you may not, particularly after the failure of your touch with your last three films, have wanted to dare the daunting venture again.

Stevens was still much in demand as a director after The Only Game In Town, and various projects presented themselves. But nothing was started. He had worked on Giant for no salary, but his percentage of the profits must have been hearty. He probably did not have to work to pay the bills, and he certainly could fill the role of director emeritus marvelously. He died at 70 in 1975.

~ ~ ~

About the last part of his fine work I write with a regret he himself may not have felt. After all, he had a lot of successes under his belt, and those failures were not the first he had ever had.

For, of course, I write of him at all, not because of what might have been, but because of those vibrant masterpieces which still hold our love, awe, and delight. His work as a whole is a gift to us, and the central portion of his work is his great gift of that gift.

Woman Of The Year, Penny Serenade, The Talk Of The Town, The More The Merrier, I Remember Mama, A Place In The Sun, Shane, and the first half of Giant are why I write here.

I write because he is the film director whose work is still the most poetic of any American director, and, because it is, it speaks deeply to me. Beauty is the path in. Beauty is the sweet knife to the heart.

He is also the master of the American subject. He is the film poet of its possibility. No other director can touch him in this regard. When you walk down a street with George Stevens you awake to what you forgot was always there and nowhere else.

His films speak also to the outsider watching them.

Are all Americans outsiders?

In Europe countries are called states. But in The United States regions the size of European countries are called states, giving the sense that each state is a sovereign country, and so the inhabitants of each state become outsiders to all the other states, each one itself being sovereign, regionally particular, and hugely distant geographically. Are we all outsiders to one another? With our racial and religious distinctions, ethnic differences, heritage and nationality heterogeneity, are we not all outsiders?

As an outsider, as of the first generation of immigrants, I saw myself in his films about outsiders. By seeing them, I was allowed in. The poetry of them showed me the way into America. He opened up the America in me.

And I too could love as those who loved Elizabeth Taylor loved. I too was allowed that beauty in me to be.

His films also joined that love with palpable sexuality.

They awoke capacities in me dormant. I saw them as a young man, and they brought with those capacities, also out of that dormancy, a responsibility to them and to that love and for it.

~ ~ ~

When I play a piece of classical music for a friend, I always want them to feel in it just what I felt. For that’s what I play it for: the beauty it arose in me. It is a foolish ambition, since everyone will feel what they do. Nevertheless, I want them to be exactly like me at that moment.

I feel the same way about George Stevens work. That is why I write this. I want you to see his pictures; I want you to see his work. I want you to love it. But I also want you to love it exactly the way I loved it — pricelessly. I want you to see it and be thrilled as I was. And to find in it exactly the beauty I know is still there.

Yes, I know I am fool in wanting that.

But it is the only gift I have to offer.

And, fool as I am, it is why I have written all this for you.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The George Stevens Seminar – Part 13. The Diary Of Anne Frank.

The is the first of three final unsuccessful movies Stevens made, and the last work of our seminar. If you remember we began this seminar series with a discussion of his work during World War II and with the film that comes after this I Remember Mama. At the time he started The Diary Of Anne Frank he had three immense successes behind him, A Place In The Sun, Shane, Giant. He was probably the most powerful director in Hollywood. He could ask for what he wanted and get it. The Diary Of Anne Frank justifiably was an enormous international best selling book, which it remains to this day. Who would have thought it could fail as a film? After all, George Stevens was directing it. The picture got rave reviews but the public did not come.

He took three years to prepare, shoot, and edit this film. And the groundwork works for it marvelously. The Amsterdam exteriors were shot by no less a photographer than Jack Cardiff. The body of the film was shot by William Mellors, who had filmed with Stevens in The War, on D Day, the liberation of Paris, and the day Dachau was opened. He also filmed Stevens’ A Place In The Sun for which he won an Oscar, as he did for this.

And, although it was shot in Cinemascope, because it depicts narrow confinement, it perhaps benefits as none of his other films of this time do, by being sceen in the narrow confines of a TV screen.

Stevens and his son met with Otto Frank at the original Amsterdam house. Evidently it was the first time Mr. Frank had been back. He took them upstairs to the loft where the eight had hidden some thirteen years before. Stevens copied the entire building and built it, one storey above the other at Fox in Hollywood. It was huge. It was set on springs, so it would actually shake during bombing scenes.

The film took six months to shoot, and the cast was kept close to the work the entire time, and the set was kept quiet at all times. Stevens could actually play the German music for them to prepare, which he would also turn on while they shot, as he would the the dreadful sirens of the Green Police and the big bells of the cathedral nearby.

I saw Schildkraut do it on the stage, and he is really better in the movie. Susan Strasberg had a grating stage voice an important detail, since it made her difficult as a person, as was Anne herself, and it demoted her prettiness, which in any case at the distance of the theatre was not in evidence as strongly as it is in another actress here.

This DVD has a full account of its filming by those involved. The background and its production is honored, as is the director, Mr. Frank, the diary, and Anne Frank herself.

Shelly Winters is discussed in detail, her unruliness and lack of confidence. I remember coming to her West Side apartment door at exactly this time. “Oh just look at me!” she cried. She was in curlers. She was on the phone with her agent and beckoned me in; I was delivering a contract. “Well, I did Diary Of Anne Frank,” she said into the phone, “and that didn’t work out.” I was a delivery boy; she was concerned with her hairdo: she had not been nominated yet for the Oscar she won: miscalculations in every direction.

The film is disastrously miscast.

The film is also perhaps the greatest example of Stevens’ constant subject of The Outsider.

Miscasting the outsider would continue with the next picture, his greatest effort and greatest failure. I don’t know what went wrong with Stevens. He had been affected by The War; he spoke of this and Shane to be his War films. Perhaps he had become too serious about his seriousness and so lost scope. Perhaps his due date was up.

The George Stevens Seminar  – Part 12 – Giant

Mildred Dunnock had played Elvis’s mother in Love Me Tender, and certain scenes had to be reshot. In rehearsal for a play in New York, she was flown first class fast to Hollywood to do the takes and get back. The return trip was one of those luxury flights on which everyone had a Pullman bunk to sleep the night. She entered and took her seat. The plane did not take off. And it kept not taking off. “It was clear it was being held up for ‘Them’.” Of course, it still did not take off.

When they got on the plane, their excuse for their lateness was that Mike Todd had to go to a local Jewish Delicatessen for corn-beef sandwiches, which he passed around for everyone. “Great for your sex life,” he said handing one to Mildred Dunnock one. She declined.

His conduct remained as the flight went on. “He took the orange rind and he threw it on the floor,” Millie said, meaning it in both the figurative and the literal sense. But, while Millie was known by the actors on the plane, being an Actors Studio actor and familiar to the New York gang, it was Rock Hudson, whom she did not know, who gentlemanly took her under his wing as protection. In the morning Todd gave full particulars as to the fucking he and Elizabeth Taylor had done in the bunk the night before. “Elizabeth Taylor would quiet him,” said Millie, “‘Now Mike,’ she would say, and play sleepy.”

They were on their way to the world premier of Giant.

~ ~ ~

The Roxy was built by a man called Roxy and, seating over 5,000 people, it was the biggest movie house in the world – until, having built it, he built a bigger one, Radio City Music Hall. The Roxy no longer stands, but it was a very great picture palace, quite different in style from Radio City, which was Art Deco. Known as the Cathedral Of The Motion Picture, the Roxy featured a soaring golden, Spanish-Moorish auditorium, and a lobby in the form of a vast columned rotunda called the Grand Foyer, plus on the mezzanine the world’s largest oval rug. Off the rotunda was a long entrance lobby that led to the theater’s main entrance at the corner of Seventh Ave. and W. 50th St.

The theater included a rising orchestra pit which could accommodate an orchestra of 110, which was the largest permanent symphony orchestra in the world, and a pipe organ with three consoles which could be played simultaneously.

The film projection booth was recessed into the front of the balcony to prevent film distortion caused by the usual projection from the top rear wall of a theater. This enabled the Roxy to have the sharpest film image for its time.

The Roxy presented major films in programs that also included a male chorus, a ballet company and a line of female precision dancers, the Roxyettes. Elaborate stage spectacles, fresh each week, accompanied the feature film.

The Roxy was a Picture Palace Madness. In it lobbies rose into the interiors of vast turbans, studded with decorations. Surfaces were encrusted, balconied, parapetted, ramparted, gilded, silvered, bronzed, coppered, jeweled. Bulbous lobbies lead not into the theatre but into other bulbous lobbies, as into endless coming attractions. Carpeted staircases swept up and around to balcony upon balcony. Acres of excess. Lakes of luxury. In the Depression, going to a movie was an incursion into regality.

~ ~ ~

I was a James Dean lover and was hit badly by his death. East Of Eden, was the only film of him that had been released at the time of his death; Rebel Without A Cause had been released the week of it. In any case, the release of Giant was long in coming. I had no idea of the story, or what his relation in it with Elizabeth Taylor might be. So I bought a ticket to the world premier.

I took a girl who had become a friend the summer before on the Cape where we both worked waitering. To her, I think the premier meant nothing, which was all right with me, because I cared enough for two. Peering over and around a big crowd, we waited inside the lobby to watch celebrities walk the carpets and into the theatre. A rush of appreciation and recognition went up as each one arrived. Virginia Mayo – I was struck by her radiant complexion, as I was of that of Natalie Wood – maybe it was world premier makeup, but if it was it was teacup lovely. Ethel Waters capacious in brown. On they came one after another. As each one passed, a breaker of sound rose and crashed, swept toward and through us. Who would it be? On we waited for the next one. Who would it be?

It was time for the movie to begin. It was time to go inside.

But clearly nothing was going to happen. Clearly the movie was not going to start until it did happen.

Then, finally it happened.

It was them. It was them the movie had been waiting for to start.

Like a glacier calving, the rush down toward the ocean of them grew in bulk, moved a huge wave of itself in their direction as they made their way slowly and against and inside the mob as against an element. They were surrounded by uniformed theatre guards and ushers. They were surrounded by the police, who actually separated Todd and her, a cordon who pressed forward further and further against a crowd wild to get at them. No, not them. Her. To get at her. She stood in a white ball gown, her hair shoulder length at the center of a maelstrom, calm and frightened. People reached over the arms of the guards to get at her, to touch her, to realize themselves with the autograph of contact with her. She moved slowly in the center of this storm, she herself an island of calm fear, phalanxed inside the reef of linked uniformed arms. Bit by bit the guards pressed their pod toward the entrance to the theatre, a jewel inside the ring of their forbiddance. She looked back for him. I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life as her face.

People wanted to touch her with their hands – for the same reason as I with my eyes – to prove to themselves that such a creature actually existed.

~ ~ ~

There are many stories about Giant, how it was cast, what happened during the three years of its making, and people’s response to the death of James Dean, which took place after his last scene was shot. But all of that is present in books and a lot of it is also present in the many fine Extra Features that accompany the DVD. My task is not that. My task is not scholarly. My task is critical. And my bent is to look more at the acting. My task is to offer the film as a film to you as I see it today.

What I saw this time round is that what has happened to Stevens in Giant and his three subsequent films is that he has taken on social issues larger than his ability to experience them on film. He has also lost his touch in casting. He has also lost his touch with characters and drama. And lost his touch with the script. And he does not realize any of this because he seems preoccupied only in the preparation and editing. I assume all this because of the results on the screen.

In the case of casting Giant, one has to take who was available at the time and out of various contractual jails. They thought of Robert Mitchum for the James Dean role – but Dean campaigned for it and got it. Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly both were asked to do it, but declined, and Elizabeth Taylor had to make a pitch for the part. She was 23 and in advanced pregnancy, but Stevens had worked with her before and knew her worth.

As to the male lead, the problem was there seemed to be no Hollywood actors at the time who were young enough and who were also straight enough and had weight enough and talent enough to play the role. George Nadar, Tab Hunter? Clark Gable wanted to do it, but he was too old. William Holden was middle-aged looking. Tony Perkins? A boy. Tony Curtis? Too urban. Paul Newman? He might have been good. What was really needed was Joel McCrae, who would have been perfect for it, since he had the looks, the horsemanship, the humor, the heterosexual glint. Perfect. Too old. John Wayne was considered, and might have been Jim dandy. Also too old. You would have thought there would be somebody around at the time, but look for yourself. Who was there? Rock Hudson got it, and his presence in the film all but empties it. Here as elsewhere, Rock Hudson as an actor is fatuous.

~ ~ ~

Working with slow-working Stevens had frightened all the production houses away from the project, and Ferber’s novel had also offended a great many people. It had been very popular, but no one would buy it. Then she and George Stevens and Henry Ginsberg formed a company to produce it, except they would charge themselves no salary. Jack Warner knew a good deal when he heard it, so he backed it and gave his studio and its financial and technical resources for it.

~ ~ ~

The film took longer and longer to make. It was three years in production. It goes hugely over budget. Without his knowing it, letters go back and forth as Warner Brothers calculates how to take the film away from Stevens. But of course, they cannot do it. Legally they can, but what good would it do? They have to let him finish it. They do, and then it takes a year alone for him to edit it. And when it is done, it is three and a half hours long. Not since Gone With The Wind has an audience been asked to sit through a film so long. They preview it one Wednesday night in San Diego at a surprise showing, without intermission. The audience is rapt. They love it. Fred Zinnemann makes a few suggestions about scenes to be taken out, and Stevens removes them. Jack Warner does not like the film, but the local folks in Marfa, Texas, where it was shot have been used in it, and made part of it, and words gets around. Texans love it. The world has been waiting for it. Everyone loves it.

Two things remain at the core of its success. One is that for all its size it is about a normal American marriage and a normal American family, that is, a marriage with many of its difficulties and threats of breaking down, and a family with foibles in all its members. And the other thing is the character played by Elizabeth Taylor who remains outspokenly true to her principles. She a women’s-libber, and women of that post-war era knew what it was to be a woman of independent mind.

The American side of it might also have caused its success, by which I mean that its sermon against prejudice speaks to an overriding sense of fairness in the American character, a fairness which predates the Constitution and brought it into being. If a Texan can be fair-minded, well, then, anyone can. So it’s the story of a Texan, and by inference Texas itself, becoming American.

What we have, then, is another story from George Stevens about an outsider, in this case a story of an outsider becoming an insider – an outsider becoming an insider by bringing other outsiders inside with him, all this predating the films of Stanley Kramer.

But it seems to me that beginning in its second half, I see a director losing the knowledge of himself, not being aware of his frayed sense of casting and the absolute necessity for a strong script. He wrote to his collaborator afterwards how grateful he was that they did not have to rewrite the script every night as they had done on all their other films. Too bad, because it is exactly what Giant required.

~ ~ ~

The DVD which I watched Giant on offers excellent assessments of Stevens and others involved. Jane Withers is particularly cogent and fun. Elizabeth Taylor is not present at all. The entire effort is supervised by George Stevens Junior.

At a teenager, George Stevens Junior was brought into the entertainment business by his father, just as George Stevens himself was brought into it by his actor parents, and they by the well-known actress who was George Stevens Junior’s great-grandmother. So we are hearing someone speak of a family business, one which, understandably they are not inclined to speak of with much critical rigor. George Stevens Junior clearly loved his father. He admired him and admired his work, and was right to do so. He has balance and much to offer and good stories to bring us.

~ ~ ~

What you will see in Giant is a small family story about a small family, but their story has giant repercussions. What does that mean? Does it mean that the lessons of acceptance, which are the Rock Hudson character’s torment in this film, convert everyone in Texas in a ripple effect that stops as it slaps the border of New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Mississippi?

No.

It only means that one man alone learns acceptance, but what he does is learn it on his own terms. As he looks at the different colored skins of his grandsons in their crib, he remarks on the racial distinction between them in the same terms as he did before. Watch the alarm on Elizabeth Taylor’s face as he does this. Then watch it change. The diction of the distinction Hudson makes is as always his own. But the tone is new.

~ ~ ~

When I first saw this film, I had come to it with my love for James Dean in high gear. We were the same age. What he was in Rebel Without A Cause and especially East Of Eden was inside me. I saw the beauty of my own hurt seeing his. And I saw the resourcefulness of his charm in escaping from it. So I was disappointed by what I saw on the screen. He was not that young man at all in Giant. In Giant, he was a cantankerous, self-pitying, inconsiderate, insensitive drunken snake.

He and I were just about the same age – but now the James Dean in me has died away. It probably would have left him too, for had he lived he would be over eighty. And looking at the film again after so many years, my James Dean expectations of The Roxy are gone too, just as The Roxy is gone, and I see how fine he was in this performance in the first part of the film. I see how weak Rock Hudson was, as he was in everything, but I saw that even then. But I see a quite different performance from Dean than the one I didn’t see then. And I am glad I do.

What I did not see then is how great an actress Elizabeth Taylor was at this period of her life. Her character is the ground of the picture. She makes it so as naturally as breathing. Her beautifully modulated voice, at this range of playing, is a template of her talent. She is 23 and she will never be better in a film.

As to my romantic attraction to her … ah, well. That remains.

This was the first of the three times I was to be with her in my life. I can see her still, even more vividly than when five years later I sat opposite her as we talked in a cafeteria. No, I still see that young woman, with that crowd cycloning around her, in the lobby of The Roxy, turning to look. Not at me. And I looking.

Forget that? Forget, along with James Dean and the rest of the way I saw that picture back then?

Why would I?

Why would anyone want to? I see her still.

Her standing there.

And I – still looking.

~ ~ ~   ~ ~ ~   ~ ~ ~

The George Stevens Seminar –– Part 11 — Shane

He was awarded The Irving Thalberg Award  for it this year, and nominated for an Oscar as Best Director. Brandon DeWilde was nominated as Best Supporting Actor. It won one for Loyal Griggs for cinema-photography, as certainly it should, for it is a film of great beauty, lit with Rembrandt lighting to dismay the musical comedy lighting most color Westerns were filmed in at the time.

The film was revolutionary in all departments, but Stevens really had no idea it was to turn into The Great Classic Western when he made it. It was an assignment, and he just gave himself fully to it. It is a perfect example of the fact that for an artist there is no such thing as art, only craft.

Indeed Stevens seemed to have lost his common sense in casting at this time, a loss which ruined his final four films. In this case he wanted Montgomery Clift to play Shane and William Holden to play the farmer, all of which would have unthinkably crazy. Anyhow each of them dropped out of the project, and Stevens simply asked to see the contract players list at Paramount, and cast Alan Ladd and Van Heflin, and there was Jean Arthur who had always done good work for him, and so he used her. I don’t know how they landed with Brandon DeWilde upon whose particular acting honesty and openness the story depends; he had had a very big success in Member Of The Weddng in New York, and was to make the film of it with Fred Zinnemann. Anyhow here he is, God bless him. The greatness of the film emerged from Stevens’ careful pre-production preparation, his long rigorous editing procedures, and the shooting of takes from every angle possible, giving him a lot to choose from. Victor Young’s score is excellent and modest. The art and set decoration is top notch.

The film must be seen in connection with A Place In The Sun, his other masterwork at this time, in that both films had as their focus the beauty of a human being. In A Place In The Sun it is Elizabeth Taylor whom we see-through Montgomery Clift’s eyes as the ideal of beauty and all that is desirable and delightful in life. Stevens’ camera dotes on her. And the structure of the film is a comment, a pointing to, one of the reasons we go to film, that reason being the privilege to gloat on a face so beautiful we would never have access to it otherwise than in the permissive dark of a movie house. The same is true with Shane.

Here the beauty is male, Alan Ladd, blond in blond buckskins, and the one doting is also male, in this case an 8 year-old boy played by sweet honest Brandon DeWilde.

What does it mean to adore beauty? What does it mean in the human being to have an aesthetic sense? What does it mean to idolize another human?

Allowing us to is one of things a movie does. And these are the matters presented and, of course, not answered by these two great films. But this is what we are offered to enter into and regard.

When the film was finished Paramount thought it was just another Alan Ladd movie. Shane had gone well over budget, and Alan Ladd movies never made more than a little over 2 million. They were going to give it small release. They tried to sell it to Howard Hughes for the cost. That fell through. Then they previewed it. When, having seen the audience’s response, they opened it at Radio City Music Hall, it became the biggest money maker of the year.

Why is that? Because George Stevens had a great faith in an audience’s ability to participate and finish a film by its attention to it. He did not consider an audience to be elite, but he did know that audiences had a tremendous collective intelligence and care as they watched a picture. He counted on it. He counted on the intelligence of this engagement to arise and participate.

One reason we are reading about George Stevens films here, and these two in particular now, one reason why Shane and A Place In The Sun retain their modernity and power, one reason why we have access to them in our souls still is because he let them belong to us.

Their power, beauty and magic remain — undiminished in their mystery and delight to this day.

The George Stevens Seminar – Part 10. A Place In The Sun.

When screened for him, Charlie Chaplin said it was the best American movie he had ever seen.

It constitutes with Shane, the apex of George Stevens’ career. It’s odd to think of a film director having an apex. Titian didn’t have one. Neither did Beethoven. But film direction like ballet is a younger man’s game. The energy it takes to produce and direct a film is titanic, for it includes his own and everyone else’s art around. Anyhow, with these two films he achieved the highest point any American film director had attained, and his accomplishment generally stands true today.

For me it does. For it is for these two movies in particular that I embarked on this seminar to bring them to you, to bring all his best work. And to give you some sense of the biography that formed it.

He had been reared in a popular acting family in Oakland, going back to his grandmother, and when his parents moved to Hollywood to find work in film, he started a photography business, and eventually jumped over the wall into the studios themselves, starting as an assistant cameraman on Rex The Wild Horse Westerns (Westerns were what he loved best to make) and then filmed and directed a new type of comedy team, Laurel and Hardy in some thirty-five films.

He became a major director when Katharine Hepburn chose him for Alice Adams. He directed the best Rogers and Astaire musical and other comedies, dramas and entertainments of the 30s, at the end of which he made four strong films, beginning with the first Hepburn Tracy picture, Woman Of The Year.

During The War Eisenhower charged him with recording D-Day and the campaign in Europe, so newsreels of the period that you see are what his group took. He also took virtually the only color film of the war on his home camera, and his scenes at Dachau are stunning in their horror.

The war influenced him greatly, and when he came back he made two serious films, and the third, this one.

It won six Oscars: Direction, Screenplay, Editing, Score, Costume Design, Cinemaphotography. Best Director from the Directors Guild Of America. It is the first film ever to win The Golden Globe as Best Picture.

When Elizabeth Taylor, aged 17, walked into the commissary at Paramount where this was made, a hush fell over the entire room. All her film work had been done at MGM. No one at Paramount had ever seen her in person. The silence stood stark still until Billy Wilder dispelled it by hollering out, “How the hell did she ever get into the movies!”

It is her greatest performance on screen, not because she is not as good in The Last Time I Saw Paris, but because the film as a whole is a masterpiece.

I first saw it in London in 1952 where it was playing in a big movie house in Piccadilly Circus. I was dumbstruck. I had never seen anything like it. For one thing, it was the most beatuiful film I had ever seen, and for another, its message of a great life-experience being more important than any law, revealed an overriding human truth, which I knew was true, but which I had never before seen stated. I gathered my American exchange student friends and saw it again.

Famous for its triple dissolves and its revolutionary camerawork by Stevens’ WW II cameraman, William C. Mellors (who won Oscars for it and for Stevens’ The Diary Of Anne Frank), Stevens edited it, not with a moveola, but in a screening room by projecting the rough cut next to the footage, full screen.

There is a good deal more to say about it which I shall not say. It was enormously successful at the time on all counts. But it still is.

It is a film anyone, teenage and up, can watch. Even on the small screen it holds up, although on the big screen it has a power like no other film. It contains the most famous kissing scenes ever shot. Accompanying by Franz Waxman’s beautiful borrowed theme, these scenes are filmed, however, with the lips never shown meeting, but always shrouded by dark, by a shoulder, by a shadow. All the more romantic, somehow, all the more beautiful, all the more loving.

It influenced my life, greatly, and it still does. For one thing, it completely expanded my aesthetic sense. I hope it may do yours.

I wish I could stop desiring to convey its reverberations on my soul. But I can’t. I don’t want to.

To do that I would simply have to stop writing here at all.

By the early 40s Stevens could write his own ticket. Harry Cohn begged him to come to Columbia, saying he would never bother him, he would never even speak to him, if he would only come there and work. But Stevens said that he would value Cohn’s experience and point of view, and Stevens did go, and Cohn did not bother him.

He was to make three pictures there with Cary Grant, Penny Serenade, The Talk Of The Town. and The More The Merrier. The last of these, however, did not have Grant in it, thank goodness, for he was not available, and it really needed a middle-class regular American Joe to play Joe. (Could Grant ever play a character called Joe?) Instead it had Joel McCrea, who Katharine Hepburn said was in he same category as Bogart and Tracy, and so he was.

Jean Arthur made three pictures with Stevens, The Talk Of The Town, The More The Merrier, and her last picture, Shane. She  was tiny, but unlike most tiny women actually looked good in clothes. Like Margaret Sullavan and Kay Francis, she had a catch in her voice, but that wasn’t all that was appealing about her, for she was naturally endearing and a highly susceptible comedienne.

Stevens was eager to get into WWII, for this was 1942. He left for service before The More The Merrier opened at Radio City Music Hall, as had his other two Columbia Pictures. Like them, it was an enormous critical and popular success.

WWII took Stevens into North Africa, into the Normandy Landing, and eventually to Dachau when it was first liberated.

When the War was over, he came back to Hollywood and scheduled a comedy with Ingrid Bergman. He couldn’t bring himself to make it. Katharine Hepburn always scolded him for not making comedies, for which he had such a gift.

The War had changed him.

The More The Merrier is the last comedy he ever made – and one of the best.

It’s a model for study, for camera arrangement and for directorial latitude to allow natural human comedy to arise between and on the faces and in the bodies of performers. The director has to have tremendous strength, patience, and the ability to watch in order for this rare and essential relation to arise. Perhaps no one has ever done it better than George Stevens.

The George Stevens Seminar Part 7

He made three films with Cary Grant, all of them extremely successful and all of them quite different from each other. Gunga Din is a huge action/adventure piece with Grant as a ne’r-do-well. Penny Serenade is a marital drama with Grant as a n’er-do-well, and this piece, The Talk Of The Town, is a modern comedy with Grant as a n’er-do-well.

The latter two are half of a quartet of films Stevens made just before The War, and, in a way, they are sad to examine since after The War he never made another comedy. Katharine Hepburn scolded him for making no more comedies; and well she might have, for one of those four was The Woman Of The Year, the first and best of her Spencer Tracy films.

What you find here is Stevens’ unforced comic style, a style which does not depend on gags or jokes or physical comedy, though Grant was a great physical comedian, but comedy of human response, which Stevens had learned watching Stan Laurel in the many comedies of his he filmed and directed. The first-meeting scene of Hepburn and Tracy is a sterling example of this. And in The Talk Of The Town, Grant’s physical alertness ups the ante in every scene. Watch for it. Grant, as an actor, is always on his toes. He is always leaning into the scene, and this physical force-field from him drives the comedy of the picture. It means he is always slightly intrusive, even when he does not mean to be, and this intrusiveness is the key element playing through the entire story as the determining ingredient of the lives all the characters.

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?

The George Stevens Seminar — Part 4 – Regarding The Greatest Story Ever Told

So the question arises, why would anyone want to make a Biblical Epic?

Pardon me, the question I should ask is: why would I, or anyone, want to watch one?

That’s the more realistic question, since, at the time it came out, a fan of him, I did not attempt to see George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told. There were two reasons for this, the first one of which I have already answered by asking the second question, but the second reason is that the director seemed to have gotten above himself in the last part of Giant. It is the same reason I did not see The Diary Of Anne Frank when he made it. I had seen the Broadway production and I had read the book, and that too seemed an odd sort of subject for a director, whose mastery of contemporary themes in A Place In The Sun and Shane, it seemed to me, should have gone in a direction more gratifying to me personally. The fact was, that I understood the director to be no longer interested in me personally. I treasured him. I would not trash him by attending such films any more.

A Biblical Epic?

A New Testament Epic, in particular.

What is the problem with the New Testament as a story suitable for filming?

The problem is that the “story” of Jesus, AKA The Greatest Story Ever Told, does not have a story at all to tell. It has episodes, it has quotations, it has sermons, it has some miracles, it has a trial scene, and an execution for a crime, and the fact that from this execution of a criminal, many religions and a huge celebrity are raised. But the life of Jesus itself has no story.

Stevens himself recognized this. For, many years later, he said he had seen some of the film again, and that if he had to do it all over again he would do it exactly the same way, but he called it “an exposition.” In the rubric of drama that term means a scene where you learn facts about a character’s past. The “attention, attention must be paid,” scene in Death Of A Salesman, where Linda Loman tells her sons their father is trying to commit suicide, is such a scene. There is no action. There is simply the giving of information and the effect of it on the boys. In this sense, the story of Jesus is not a story of someone; it is a story about someone. It is information. In The Greatest Story Ever Told nothing happens.

Jesus is a person who – from the time he was 12 and was noticed as an ocean preaching to a drizzle in the temple – disappeared from view until he was 30. What happened to him during that time is not known, but it is speculated that he entered training with Essenes, which would be something like the Sufis, in which training something very big would have happened to him indeed, although not something about which a drama could be made. That is to say, he underwent at least one spiritual transformation and probably more. That was the happening, and the only happening, but after that until the time he died, nothing happened to him whatsoever. For he was an already fully realized being.

What happened happened only to the people around him. Because something happened to their characters, you could make a story about Thomas or Andrew or Judas or Peter, but not one about Jesus. They were changed. He was not.

So there is no story. There is only a record, a record by the people to whom the happening happened. He himself wrote nothing.

The record recounts miracles and sermons and parables and sayings and actions and his death. There are events. There is information.

But, except for the temptation in the wilderness (as Milton knew) there is no drama. Because there is no conflict within the person of Jesus. Jesus himself is beyond all persons.

And that is what Hollywood Biblical Epic filmmakers seem not to see. I guess they make Biblical Epics because they are celebrity freaks, and, next to God, Jesus is the biggest celebrity ever. So they think everyone wants to know his inside story. And they’re right. Everybody does. But there is no inside story. The story is over before the record begins. Unlike the Buddha’s, Jesus story is a foregone conclusion. His stuff has happened before it is noticed to be important enough for anyone to pay attention to it. And this is the great difficulty in dramatizing Jesus: as a dramatic character, it has no arc. He does not begin somewhere and end somewhere else. And another problem: he is already too discovered.

An additional problem arises, with the original novel: The New Testament.

In George Stevens’ case, here, his script depends upon The King James’ Version, which is very beautiful – in a church. But in a movie house it does not ring true. And for a very simple reason. Which is that in Biblical Epic, no one is allowed to speak like a normal human being. Hollywood Epic diction does not allow normal contractions. A character does not say, “I’m going back to Galilee.” Instead, they are made to say, “I am returning unto Galilee.” Now at the time, in 30 A.D., when someone wanted to go back to Galilee, they’d say, “I’m off to Galilee,” just as we would now. They would not engage in fancy locutions, and if they did, folks would, as now, consider them to be nuts and boring.

Of course, written as a text, “unto Galilee” sounds special and exalted. It is part of glorious high church Jacobean literary usage – not that any 17^th Century person would use it in ordinary parlance. Written, it is divine. Spoken, it is foolish.

So when we watch a Biblical Epic we always wonder why these people are so stifled in their diction. What is wrong with them? Why are they such sticks? Is that what meeting with the guru does to folks?

And it is also true that Jesus did not preach in The King James Version, beautiful as it is. He spoke in the diction of his day, which would have been the same as ours: simple. For I don’t believe that he was one of those horse’s ass preachers we see in our tents and TVs. “Suffer the children to come unto me,” is a gorgeous way of saying what probably at the time was said simply. It is so gorgeous; in fact, that it shrouds the dramatic possibilities of the situation that probably inspired it.

A bunch of folks are gathered around Jesus to hear what he had to say, and the kids are getting rambunctious, and the fathers tell the mothers to get the brats out of there. But Jesus says, ”No, let them come right here,” and he sets them forth as examples of the innocence of approach which he counsels their parents to find in themselves, the easiness of the light of God. So, in fact, the grandeur of the language restrains drama when spoken, it does not inspire it. When you read The King James’ Version of The Bible, the language induces a spiritual experience; it does the same in church; in a film it squelches it and makes it suspect.

Of course we are always gratified to hear the beautiful words once again and uttered by a trained performer of beautiful words. But, while this is nice, it has no necessary relevance to the content of drama.

The light of God.

That’s the subject of Christ’s life, and his message is that it is in us all right now. And that the name of it in Earthly terms is Love.

So the question is: does the movie produce the presence of God in us. That is to say, is it scripture? Is De Mille’s The Ten Commandments scripture? And, if it isn’t, what is the film doing up there?

Was George Stevens experiencing the presence of God as he took all those years to make this movie?

I don’t think so.

And does the movie induce it?

I don’t feel it.

I don’t sense Stevens to have been a man of much spiritual élan. I like him, I respect him, he is a Fine Artist to be sure, I admire him, and wish to pass along his legacy of beautiful things to everyone. He is a decent man and a man of character. But I do not see in him a man of a particularly Christian or even spiritual texture.

Finally, the task becomes how to cast such a film, a film whose focus is Jesus. What actor can play this part?

In making this film, Stevens was mightily influenced by the religious art of the Renaissance, and often by Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro, an off screen side light with heavy black shading to frame faces, with a key light under the eye. But what failed to register in Stevens’ interest in this is that Rembrandt, alone among Biblical painters, used real Jews for his models.

Casting was one of Stevens’ strong points, but here you look at the casting with wonderment. Is there a single Jew in this cast? Shelly Winters has a moment in a scene as the Woman Without A Name, and Ed Wynn is perfect as the blind man made to see, but who else? Roddy MacDowell as an apostle? Dorothy McGuire as Mary? Van Heflin? Do they seems Jewish? Where is Edward G. Robinson, Sam Jaffe, Hedy Lamar, Luther Adler, Lauren Bacall? Are we back there in the Holy Land in 32 A.D., with the Jews? Never. So the film is wanting in the right actors, good as those people in it are.

And this has always been the case with Biblical Epic. For, not only the supporting players, but how do you cast Jesus?

Jeffrey Hunter?

The noble Jim Casaviel?

Are they, do they look Jewish; do they even look Middle Eastern?

Or, in this case, Max Von Sydow, a towhead blue-eyed blond?

With dyed hair. Or a wig. Or darkened up.

Or was he meant to look Sephardic?

Sydow is excellent, mind you, in bringing an important gravitas to the part.

But that’s it.

If it was so hard to find a Jewish actor (Paul Newman being unavailable, undesirable, miscast?), why was it not so hard to have found Joseph Schildkraut way back when?

And, once you have cast anyone as Jesus, how can he be expected to embody a person of such advanced evolution, when no one knows what that really is. Granted, an actor does not play I Am The King. Or I am The Savior. The cast around him plays You are the King, You are The Savior. But that’s in the theatre, which does not present the actor and the audience with the danger of The Closeup. In a movie, in order to play Jesus, you really do have to evince an already enlightened being. For people were not transformed by what Jesus said, but by what he was when they came in contact with him, as we in the movie theater are invited to do now. But where is it in this film? You have to see it.

What happens is that all these problems forbid dramatic excellence or even possibility. And since they do, what results is amateurism, even on the level of George Stevens, which is a very high level indeed. These wants reduce the film to the level of a church pageant.

Now, there is nothing wrong with a church pageant. In a church pageant, the performers go through one or another event of Christ’s life, the birth at Christmas, the death at Easter. The children get dressed up and perform it. Or the adults get dressed up and perform, as I saw once performed, at the monastery of San Luis Obispo by the Teatro Camposito, The Temptation In The Wilderness with a brilliant and beautiful actor in gold lamé and hung like the very dream of seduction, and a Jesus whom no one remembered. Or performed last year in Richmond, California, where the Hispanic church put on a full scale production, which began in Church with the disciples and Gethsemane, continued into the parking lot where among parked cars Veronica wiped Jesus with the handkerchief, and went on to the baseball diamond where the three crosses were erected on home base, and where the three actors hung in the cold while hundreds of parishioners watched.

Why did they watch?

Because to watch something so amateur is so difficult that we undergo the suffering we see? And Epics take so long.

Because it is an entertainment and entertainments are rare in church?

Because it is good to encounter the events in a different way than purely literary or sermonized ones?

These are the reasons to go to see a Biblical Epic?

One’s own aesthetic suffering.

The entertainment.

The embodiment.

And, perhaps, but probably not, for a direct experience of the presence of God.

A direct experience of the presence of God might occur because such experiences occur while in groups, such as a congregation.

But probably not, because The Passion was not what Christ preached. He was not a sadist. And because a congregation is not the same as an audience in a picture palace.

Their expectation is different.

And, finally, why in Biblical Epics is Jesus always presented as having no sense of humor?

In any case, I think it is unlikely that George Stevens considered any of this or even had a chance to consider it.

So one wonders what he wanted from his audience with this material. He had a very great and highly developed sense of the audience’s participation in telling a story and in responding to a scene. He is famous for this, was aware of it, and it is obvious in most of his comedies or dramas.

But his sense of this was filmic rather than spiritual. He made pictures whose stories could be made into something personal to the audience, as well as to him, but how is this material personal to him I fail to see, except as an exercise in technique.

To learn how to light the last supper so that it reflected The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost, took him several hours of meditation before the set, but did The Trinity actually happen once lit or was it a self-referential camera trick merely?

In the special feature disc is a sequence of Stevens describing the execution of John The Baptist, which he tells from the point of view of Herod and which takes place all in one long sequence, an anonymous dancer in Loie Fuller veils, perhaps Salomé, flitting in and out from an orgy in the next room, the veils and the music dead to him, Herod a lost soul at the end of it.

But is this what we get when we see it? Not I. It is a very good film sequence in theory, but it is too far away in the distance to register from the point of view of Herod, as played by Jose Ferrer, who had it well within his range to play such a scene, and it is over-edited.

Does his insistence on spectacular setting and landscape in this film actually empower the scenes with spiritual content? I like them. They are amazing. But for me they bear no relation to a particular spiritual moment.

I don’t sense George Stevens had any natural affinity for this material, save as an unconscious opportunity to make another big Epic Middle Eastern movie out of doors in Arizona, as he had once done when he was in his 20s, and directed on horseback the rousing tale called Gunga Din. What a lot of fun he had then! What a lot of fun it is to see that movie! In this movie, there is not a trace of fun and not a trace of human comedy. And because of that and because Stevens had such a sense of human comedy you might say there is nothing really human in this movie at all.

He seems to have confused Christianity with Jesus, and to have some sense of Christ as a Christ, but no sense of him a spiritual being or as Jesus, a human who ate.

Why does he make this film?

Was it the attempt of a senior director for a last great adventure?

Did his seriousness of intent put him above himself? The broad base of the mountain of I Remember Mama, A Place In The Sun, and Shane – did that base lead to the foggy peak of grandeurs at the end of Giant? And then on to “important” subjects, such as The Diary Of Anne Frank and this?

And in those grand and important subjects was he reaching past exclusively American themes to world themes and to make movies for international audiences – which he had never done – unless Gunga Din set in the Middle East could be considered international? Was he shooting, God help him, for the “universal”?

For does he really have a relation to this Biblical material beyond reverence for it? That is to say, does he have a personal exploration necessitating this material?

Well, then did C.B DeMille have one in his Biblical Epics? I don’t sense one. And do you really have to have a spiritual affinity with the Bible to make a Biblical Epic then? Otherwise, you’re not allowed?

You know, speaking of DeMille, George Stevens had a tremendous effect on the Directors Guild in bringing down DeMille during the McCarthy hearings. DeMille wanted to depose liberal Joe Mankiewicz from the chair, and gathered a secret cabal to force through a vote and to elbow through a second loyalty oath. But Stevens, who was not politically active, nonetheless came to the meeting, and there was DeMille deliberately mis-pronouncing the ‘Un-American” Jewish names of Fred Zinnemann and Mankiewicz and other Jews in order to prejudice the vote, when Stevens got up and stopped it cold as the conspiracy it was. John Ford stood up next and said, “CB, I admire your work.  No one can do what you do. You are part of the great history of this industry. But I don’t like you.” John Huston did likewise. De Mille was defeated because George Stevens had the character to stand up to him.

So the question is: did Stevens make a Biblical Epic to outdo DeMille even at his own game of Biblical Epic?

If so, he  did not succeed. Stevens attempted to costume this film in the clothes that might have been worn at the time; he didn’t want the usual Hollywood Biblical outfits. But The Ten Commandments is not just a better acted picture, but a better costumed one, for the simple reason that the actors look comfortable in their costumes and here they look uncomfortable. Did he try to out-De Mille and fail?

Did he even think of that?

Well, whatever the reason, in making such a film he had a challenge, you say?

But I say a challenge is an insufficient and transitory reason to transact a work of art. For every work of art is a challenge. And in art a challenge is never personal. Only technical.

So where in this material lies Stevens’ personal exploration? Where is his soul? Where is his fun?

George Stevens had seen and recorded on film the extermination camp of Dachau shortly after its liberation. He was thunderstruck. He never forgot it. He never understood it. Is this film an extension of Anne Frank in a pleading not to kill Jews, a pleading against bigotry?

Katharine Hepburn in urging Stevens to make comedies again after World War II may have been right, in that with Giant, with Anne Frank and with this picture he has burdened himself with a solemnity beyond his artistic temperament.

But The War had a deep effect on his personal temperament, which, nonetheless, may have not been consonant with his artistic temperament. So did he have a really selfish reason for directing this film? If not, why bother

And do I have a selfish or spiritual exploration to make necessitating my seeing it?

The answer is probably no. For two reasons, one is that I do not go the movies for spiritual awakening, and, two, I am a fallen-away Christian with an active spiritual practice belonging to no religion.

Such movies as Biblical Epics draw huge crowds. This one cost $20,000,000 to make and did not draw huge crowds. It took six years to prepare, nine months to shoot, involved thousands of extras, and a city built in the desert to house them, and Stevens was paid $1,000,000 to make it, the highest salary any director had ever achieved. It was made at the same time as Cleopatra, which cost $40,000,000 but made back its nut on foreign rights alone. Why Stevens’ picture failed I do not know. No sex, no gore, no battles? No Burtons?

No interest in his execution of the material?

The day of Biblical Epics was over?

Until the rise of computer generated effects, perhaps the latter was so. Or perhaps the public’s disappointed curiosity in Cleopatra spoiled Epics for everyone else. The general public was sated?

Anyhow, my concern is not with the general public and what they want or do not want. My concern is solely with the person who is reading this at this moment. My concern is solely to open the door.

To what?

To the work of George Stevens and to the possibilities of the nature of the person whose work bears that name.

That’s why we are considering this film before his great dramas and comedies, which chronologically preceded it.

The Greatest Story Ever Told. It’s the worst title ever conceived for anything. We are at a disadvantage from the very first word. We are considering it now, so as not have to do so later. We are getting it out of the way.

But the main disadvantage we are at is that the film is available on DVD and not in the movie theatre. For the spectacle of this film is huge. To hope to digest it one must see in a movie house. And all I can do is talk about it here as I have seen it on my TV screen, where George Stevens had no idea when he made it that it would ever play. Many movies work on TV screens. But some don’t. Titanic is a film which on TV simply looks footling.

And this film on TV is impossible to estimate.

We are considering it now because all of his other films can be seen well enough on TV. Yes, they can. This one alone cannot.

It is the only film of him, I would hope one day to see in a movie house, where I saw all the others. Not to see it there, no view of it can be fair.

2 X 4 –– Directed by Jimmy Smallhorne. Drama. An Irish immigrant faces his homosexuality. 89 minutes Color 1998.

* * * * *

A brilliant film – beautifully photographed in Dublin and the Bronx, where immigrant Irish males come to make their fortunes in manual labor and entrepreneurial schemes and scams. Dark and wild, the story tells the coming of age of a powerful alpha male already in his thirties as he grapples with nightmares and day-mares of an inner homoerotic torment. It is brilliantly acted by everyone in it, each character completely convincing in his milieu. The direction and editing are astonishing. The film shows male frontal nudity and scenes of sexual congress, all coincident to the scenes themselves. Jimmy Smallhorne plays the principal character with complete realism, and he also directed. If you are looking for pornography and the license of a happy-go-lucky gay lifestyle, this is no more that than a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie is a movie by Ingmar Bergman. This picture stands by itself as a masterpiece of no previous genre. Very interesting, completely eccentric, entirely authentic, and told with a narrative skill that is uniquely cinematic. It won the Sundance Award for cinema-photography.

Cirque De Soleil: Dralion & Naubia. Circus Performance Films

* * * * *

The success of these two films and of the entire Cirque enterprise is based on two factors: human agility playing with gravity. In Dralion even the clown balances on his base viol while his partner does all she can do to prevent seven vari-colored flimsy handkerchiefs from floating to the ground. Dralion brings Chinese performers and ancient circus acts before us, and they appear so young as to be children. They seem so happy in their skills and dedication. The boys eager virile, the girls modest and shy, but one watches with amazement as their acrobatics and balancing and tumbling zip along before us. They desire nothing so much as to excel. In Naubia our grand finale consists of troops leaping off trampolines and running up the walls of a building. The trapeze aerialists take one’s breath away. They leap into gravity and are caught just short of death. And so it does not need too much notice to observe that the setting for all of this, as it has always been with Cirque, is a hell-realm. The well-practiced bravery of all these artistes is performed in an atmosphere of mordant music, usually two singers held aloft, and the more female voice in both shows is that of a male. The costumes exceed nightmare. The aura is of the basest sexuality and is everywhere and over everything:the equipoise of perfection executed in the poison gas of sleaze.  The makeup is powerfully infernal. The lighting is the illumination of Hades. And the characters are gryphons of monstrosity. Except for the clowns who, of course, are always terrifying in their madness and make-up, and nonetheless all the more funny because of that. All is macabre; every performance is The Day Of The Dead. And, in a way, this is just – for gravity can kill you, and these performers are coming close to it every time they mount the long cloths. Even those who simply juggle (simply! What a foolish word to use about it!) risk degradation if they fail. Tricking gravity is the spectacle here, and these shows make the most of it in imaginative, death-defying beauty and wonder.

Why am I writing these movie reviews?

By now you may have gathered where my interest lies and where it does not lie.

It lies almost exclusively in the craft of acting. Because I love the craft of acting and I love actors.

It lies secondarily in the craft of film narration. Because I love a good story.

Movies are a story after dark. It’s a primordial human requirement. And narration and acting are ways that requirement are honored.

I am not interested in horror, sci-fi, guns, drugs, violence, super heroes, gangs, fantasy, animation, children’s films, or crude comedy of any era. So I stay away from those films. I am not interested in keeping current. Rather I am interested in seeing only what I imagine I will enjoy. And, although I sometimes remark that a family might enjoy seeing a certain film at home together, I don’t speak of what I suppose the general viewer may like or not like. I have no notion about the general viewer, no knowledge of that category, and, between you and me, no belief in it.

The function of criticism is praise. So the word I most want to say is Hallelujah.

And I say it a lot. And you will have noticed that I give most films high marks, for I usually see a film because there is someone or something associated with it that I already like. I have no platonic notion about The Perfect Film. I have no standard in me that must be met. My criterion for a film is Did it accomplish what it apparently set out to do? So a B picture could as easily get give stars from me as an A picture could.

My criterion for an actor varies with the kind of actor before me. There are many good schools of acting, and in a sense each good actor is a school. For each good actor has something to suggest about human nature, for that is the actor’s master task.

Now, there are four current actors about whom I cry Hallelujah. They are four of the greatest actors I have ever seen, and I have seen actors for seventy years. I want to share them with you. I want you to know these four actors’ work and to appreciate them, too. I want you to love and enjoy them just as I do, and love and enjoy their craft, just like me. Naturally I know that’s not quite possible. But I am going to highlight them for you each time I see them play, so you may have a good time too, and perhaps see what I see.

Three of them are:

Joan Allen

Guy Pearce

Lee Pace

The fourth is to be revealed at some time in the future. But it is a female.

The three current reviews star each of these actors.

Lee Pace in Ceremony

Joan Allen in Death Race

Guy Pearce in The Road

Thanks for reading moviemoody.com. Your interest and appreciation mean the world to me.

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Love ya,

Moviemoody.com

The art of acting is the most difficult, the most beautiful, and most rare of all the arts.

–  Voltaire