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Archive for the ‘Directed by George Stevens’ Category

Quality Street

13 Aug

Quality Street – directed by George Stevens. Costume Drama. 83 minutes Black And White 1937.

★★

The Story: In 1805, a young woman hopes for a proposal from the local doctor, but instead he leaves for The Napoleonic Wars and comes back 10 years later, when, in revenge for his rebuff, she pretends to be her own 20-year-old madcap niece.

~

One wonders why Katharine Hepburn chose to drink this flagon of box office poison, after three flops in a row. Was it because George Stevens was to direct it? He had directed Alice Adams, a hit, and they had had an affair then.

It’s J.M. Barrie, and Maud Adams, Of Peter Pan fame, had starred in it on Broadway in 63 performances. It hardly offers Hepburn room for her trump suit of self-possessed, willful, smart, game women such as she would play in Stevens, Woman Of The Year.

Perhaps Hepburn thought the double roles of Phoebe and Livy would be an acting showcase. But neither female is particularly interesting or true in her hands. Hepburn’s faults as an actress are in full display with them: she puts on airs, she is arch, she is coy. She possessed the terrible trick to summon tears in a second and even control which eye would flow. Her performances all her life tend to be lachrymose, therefore, when only the audience should be.

Of course, there is still plenty in evidence of what we love her for: her remarkable face, her unflinching delivery, her ability to play an upper middle class female, and her ability to get her mouth around such lines as: ‘O, sir, this dictates of my heart enjoin me to accept your offer.’ According to her lights Hepburn snaps the script up like a macaroon. Good for her. Reluctance would have been awful.

The setting is Jane Austen land, and the genre is A Woman’s Film. The women are all in a tizzy about any man who passes who looks dashing. Eric Blore, he of the interminable grimace, as a sergeant is not dashing of course and ends up with the movie’s only authentically human character, the lusty, busty housekeeper, adeptly played by Cora Witherspoon. Estelle Winwood plays the gossip. The exquisite Fay Bainter plays Hepburn’s colluding sister. Franchot Tone plays the doctor beautifully, and looks beautiful doing it.

Maybe RKO thought the Barrie play would show class and tone. She had already played The Little Minister. But the period style stiffens into a pose. A greeting card has more weight. George Stevens, usually a master of screen treatment, films the whole thing as the stage play it is, four square, as fully lit as a cameo. Walter Plunkett’s costumes are frocks from fashion plates, women cradling shawls in the crook of their elbows when no sensible woman would have done so. Actually, Hepburn’s modern American manner is quite out of place in costume pieces, save in Little Women, which requires a hoyden in a long dress. Jo’s an A-level Hepburn character; Phoebe/Livy aint. Quality Street? A curiosity piece.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by George Stevens, Eric Blore, Estelle Winwood, Fay Bainter, Franchot Tone, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Upper Class Romantic Comedy

 

Something To Live For

06 Aug

Something to Live For – produced and directed by George Stevens. Drama. 90 minutes Black And White 1952.

★★★

The Story: An alcoholic actress is rescued by an AA sponsor who falls in love with her.

~

Made between George Stevens’ masterpieces, A Place In The Sun and Shane, this film seems to have no explanation for its existence at all. It is baffling to both to watch it at the time and to contemplate afterwards.

The story destroys it. It was written by Dwight Taylor, an experienced screenwriter, who certainly knew about dipsomania, since alcoholism was rife in his family: his mother was the greatest of all American actresses and alcoholics Laurette Taylor.

The film starts with Ray Milland, an AA doing outreach rescuing (by some inexplicable coincidence) an aspiring actress from a binge. He then 13-Steps her, by falling irrevocably in love with her. She loves acting, but is failing at it. We then learn Milland has a job as an art director in (by some inexplicable coincidence he is failing at it). He also has a pregnant wife and two children (one of whom by inexplicable coincidence turns up at a rendezvous between Milland and the actress). The actress also turns up at a party (by some inexplicable coincidence), which Milland and his wife attend. The wrap-up takes place at the actresses opening night on Broadway to which (by some inexplicable coincidence) his wife at the last minute obtains center-of-the-orchestra tickets. And so it goes.

Perhaps the rockiness of the script defeated George Stevens’ famed treatment and handling, but little of what he does resuscitates the narration. There are his shots through windows and there are his slow fades and there are his usual and unusual angles and set-ups – but none of this can seize the material: it is too slick for talent to grasp.

The problem also lies, as it often did with Stevens, in the casting, about which he could be lackadaisical. The Diary Of Ann Frank is ruined by miscasting the leading role with a teenage fashion model. Max Von Sydow a blue-eyed Swede, good actor though he is, is hardly a Middle-Eastern Jew named Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Elizabeth Taylor could never have been a showgirl we are asked to accept her as in The Only Game In Town.

Here we have three Academy Award actors in the major roles, and none of them belong in them. Teresa Wright as the little wife does her plaintive routine in a thankless role. But casting Ray Milland and Joan Fontaine as the art director and the actress smears the material, making it Englishish. Milland had won an Oscar for playing a drunkard in The Lost Weekend, and he is good here as a reformed alcoholic sexually obsessed with the actress, but, through no fault of his own, his particular vocal projection does not belong in this hard-headed New York City material.

And then there is Joan Fontaine, an actor almost always miscast, except as a country mouse. Her vocal projection is strangled. She always plays the flaxen-haired, vapid, flaccid, fair Rowena of Ivanhoe. The part is really meant for an actor who is willing to exploit her mean streak, as Bette Davis did to win an Oscar for doing the part in Dangerous. But Fontaine falls back on pathos, her stock in trade. (Even her hair-do seems miscast.) Stevens used her in a minor role in Gunga Din, where she is fine, and in Damsel In Distress dancing with Fred Astaire, in whose arms she is completely out of place, as here. Why?

Stevens sometimes used actors who just happened to be on the studio roster and lucking-out, as he did with Shane. But here, at Paramount, the skewed casting is exacerbated by the colliding of coincidence and by the forcing of drinks on the two recovering drunkards. Drinks are thrust at them, dangled before them, shoved on them, poured into their water glasses. Alcoholism does not work that way. Alcoholism is an inner mental condition, a lure in the physical system. It exists as a sovereign space in the imagination. Having once succumbed to the salvation of the first drink, the license to continue is unleashed. It is not a moral or ethical defect nor one of want of fiber, but a chronic disease, like diabetes. The script does not grasp this and the rendering of the material by the director does not show he understands it.

George Stevens was a director with flawless consideration for his audience and what they could do and were very willing to do. I would love to understand why he thought he could do anything for an audience with this cast in this material at all. But it is interesting how each work of a master is not necessarily a masterpiece. For, as W. Somerset Maugham pointed out, only the mediocre achieve a level.

 

 

 

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by George Stevens, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Joan Fontaine, Ray Milland, Teresa Wright, TURGID MELODRAMA

 

Vigil In The Night

23 Jul

Vigil In The Night – produced and directed by George Stevens. Medical Drama. 96 minutes Black And White, 1940.

★★★★★

The Story: Two nurses try to escape their pasts in a cruel and dangerous profession.

~

The five important pre-War directors in American film – George Stevens, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and John Ford – all were permanently affected by it, as were the actors who went.

Robert Montgomery, Tyrone Power, James Stewart, Douglas Fairbanks, Junior, Clark Gable engaged in dangerous action in The War. Sweet Kid Galahad, Wayne Morris, flying a Hellcat off the aircraft carrier Essex, shot down 7 Japanese planes and contributed to the sinking of five Japanese ships. As did the whole nation, all came back solemnized by The War.

Before The War, George Stevens made comedies such as Swing Time, the best of the Rogers/Astaire musicals, Vivacious Lady with Jimmy Stewart, The More The Merrier with Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn, Gunga Din with Cary Grant, and Woman Of The Year, the first and best of the Tracy/Hepburn comedies. During The War, George Stevens filmed Dachau. After The War he never made another comedy.

So the pre-War Vigil In The Night comes as a surprise in Stevens work. It is serious. It is an ER melodrama such as we have seen many a one on TV, set in the nursing profession, with Carole Lombard in a role of the sort she was never known for.

The highest paid actress in Hollywood at the time, she ordinarily played lamé women of a highly volatile disposition in slapstick comedy. Here she is burkad in nurses’ caps and scarves and aprons. She appears to wear no noticeable lipstick or eye makeup. Because she had a scar on her left cheek, her face has a heavy, but matte, foundation. Her blond hair is seldom visible.

The story is from a novel by A.J. Cronin, who, like Keats, Stein, Maugham, W.C. Williams, was a medical doctor, so, written from the inside, the movement of the material rings true as narrative.

If Vigil In The Night had been a masterpiece, the film would have been a masterpiece. But unlike Stevens’ A Place In the Sun and Shane, no visual or narrative power on the part of the director can budge it beyond its convention of well-ordered melodrama. Its convention is honorable and solid, of course. It is narrative-driven. But it cannot escape the many corners of its own story. This story holds the film firmly in hand, and the only escape from it is the question that arises in the viewer as to whether the leading nurse will renounce her profession of nursing for marriage to the doctor who is in love with her.

This is the sole drama for the audience. All the rest of the drama is elected to the screen, moved forward there, resolved there. In Vigil In The Night, there is nothing for us to do. In Shane and A Place In The Sun there is everything for us to do. In A Place In The Sun, the power of the film lies in the director’s ability to leave an immense part of the story literally in the dark, at a distance, over there, for our delectation and voyeurism. To Watch it, a huge amount of imagination is called for, as to watch Shane. To watch Vigil In The Night no imagination is called for. The plot suborns it all.

The astounding thing about it, this being so, is the director’s handling of the material: the almost silent-film opening with its Bela Lugosi music, the angles of the camera, the overhead shots of the operating room, the director’s movement of the cast through wards, his placement of personnel, his characteristic use of windows through which to shoot, the taciturn handling of a bus accident so that, in not quite knowing what is going on, we experience the confusion of the episode, the management of every scene to make it unobtrusively interesting and right for us, shooting the child’s rescue through the slats of the crib, his arrangement of bodies in light, his ability to tell the emotional story through stark movement. From the point of view of treatment, Vigil In The Night is a masterpiece. Otherwise, not.

He produced the film, under the fine, overall production of Pandro S. Berman at RKO with whom he had worked successfully before. And as usual, he edited the picture himself. The only blight on the film is Alfred Newman’s music, which sentimentalizes emotion by supplying sentiment already there. Stevens’ soft spot for polemic also peeks out here – a trait that was to sink him years later.

What you have at the center of all this are four main characters: Carole Lombard as the career nurse, Brian Aherne as the honest hospital physician who must fight the head of the hospital board for healthier conditions, Anne Shirley as Lombard’s sister who doesn’t belong in nursing at all, and Ethel Griffies as the hospital head matron of nursing.

In scene after scene, through imaginative shifting of points of view and position Griffies holds the story in suspense as to the question of whether Lombard and her sister Anne Shirley can escape or redeem their pasts.

Brian Aherne, the archetypical leading man, is an actor of lyrical rather than dramatic strain, which perfectly suits the sexuality of the character he plays, since he needs to not claim Lombard without her express permission. Stevens films him with his eyes lowered in one scene; unusual for a camera to dwell on an actor like that; it suits the character perfectly.

As it should and must, the film retains our engagement because of Carole Lombard.

What is it about her? There was always the sense she was a madcap amateur, with the voice pitched too high.

Not so here. Here she is entirely under wraps, and one is given latitude to respect what she does and is. Quite simply, quite obviously, she was that rare combination of an actor who was both truly beauteous and, behind that, truly appealing.

With her hair concealed, the planes of her face emerge, and they are something to behold. Large, wide-spaced eyes. Mobile mouth. High cheek bones. A long, delicate jaw-line. Slender figure. And the voice, for once, placed low. Regard the slight movement of her exquisite brow. The features are severe; what lies behind them is not.

Technically it is a part hard to do without pushing and thus betraying the virtue we are expected to credit this character to possess, which is that of self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, a capacity for grueling, dangerous work, command in emergency, nobility. None of these does Lombard “play.” We are left to supply them, and we do, willingly. Thus we root for her. She herself makes nothing of them – and makes nothing of making nothing of them, as is right, for they would be already part of her character’s nature, and she and the director knew that the muscle of the story and her movement in a scene did the job. Lombard keeps it simple.

She had chosen the part because the wanted an Oscar. She had been nominated for My Man Godfrey, but she was not nominated for Vigil In The Night at all, and you can see why: the part goes nowhere. No alteration is available to her from beginning to end; no arc. She is superb in it, but superb is all she can be. Still, she is a perfect vessel for Stevens’ direction. Had she lived, one wonders if he would have used her again, as he tended to do with actors.

Stevens tells and lets the actor tell the emotion of the story with movement alone. By this I don’t mean grimace, expression, gesticulation. What I mean is that he makes the dynamic of the scene itself move the actors, not emotionally, but physically, to tell their story. You know what they feel by where and when they walk, how closely they stand to one another. For Stevens, emotion is narration, narration is actor placement, placement dictates scenic content. Stevens was the cameraman of Laurel and Hardy, and knew that their power lay not in jokes or in what they said or in slapstick, but in the collection of drama available inside the wider context of each scene they played. It had to do with the quite careful but unforced allowing of comedy to emerge – you find this over and over in Stevens’ comedies.

You find it here. Finding it here might not be enough to lure you to see this film, but Vigil In The Night is more than a text for screen scholars or students. It is master work by a great film artist. It is a masterpiece of directorial and acting entertainment in which every resource available to render the material for us has been engaged, invented, imagined.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Brian Aherne, Carole Lombard, Directed by George Stevens, DRAMA, Ethel Griffies, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MEDICAL DRAMA, MELODRAMA

 

Vivacious Lady

25 Jan

Vivacious Lady – directed by George Stevens. Comedy. 90 minutes Black And White 1938.

★★★★★

Charlie Chaplin said A Place In The Sun was the best American movie he had ever seen.

What was it that made George Stevens’ films so mesmerizing, so engrossing?

Those closeups of Elizabeth Taylor over the shoulder of Montgomery Clift? Yes, but you saw not just the beautiful eyes of a beautiful seventeen year old girl, you also saw she was in love.

You see the same in closeups of Joan Fontaine and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in Gunga Din.

And you see the same thing here in Jimmy Stewart looking at Ginger Rogers for the first time in Vivacious Lady. Jimmy Stewart told us that he lost his virginity to Ginger Rogers. She would have been 27 and he 30 at the time the film was made. And is that what we’re seeing in his agog eyes? Gratitude? First love? Surrender? It looks so real and dear.

It may just be that Jimmy Stewart was a marvelous actor. For certainly the love-scenes are delicious between them – funny, apt, sincere, clumsy. You just don’t want them to end.

George Stevens directed great comic love scenes. Tender and true. Or did he? When you look at The More The Merrier and you come upon the seduction scene on the stoop, if your heart isn’t filled with the humor of those passes and spurns, you must go back again to be born. How did Stevens do it? Was it luck?

I don’t know what George Stevens had for actors. As a film–maker of comedy before The War he is unrivalled in his visual grasp – he made no comedies after The War because he was the first to see Dachau and film it and the sight of is changed him permanently. His embrace of the actor is like no other, before or after The War. But before the war we have his trove of Americana comedy. Vivacious Lady is Stevens’ gift to us of ourselves.

Charles Coburn was an actor any director would thrill to have. (He won an Oscar later for The More The Merrier.) Coburn plays the heavy father of Stewart. He gives full value and a balance learned from playing many Shakespearean heavy fathers, which require comic high-horse just short of meanness. Beulah Bondi is lovely as his put-upon but shrewd wife. Ginger Rogers is as always willing to play the fool and give us an upside-down game when needed. And it’s great to see Jimmy Stewart deliver a full-on dressing down when the time comes. When someone like that gets angry, watch out!

Like the routine at the end of Woman Of The Year, the Vivacious Lady closing comes too long and too late. But never mind. Just enjoy yourself. When you’ve seen it once, watch how he films it. When you’ve seen it twice, watch how he lights it. When you’ve seen it thrice, watch how he details it. When you’ve seen it never before … just watch.

 
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Posted in Beulah Bondi, Charles Coburn: Screen God: Acting God, Directed by George Stevens, Frank Pangborn, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, Hattie McDaniel, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jack Carson, Jimmy Stewart: Screen God: Acting God, ROMANTIC COMEDY, SCREWBALL COMEDY

 

George Stevens Seminar — The More The Merrier

21 Jun

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 the same category as an actor 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.He took color movies of it, which we have to this day. The only color movies of it.

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.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Charles Coburn: Screen God: Acting God, COMEDY OF CHARACTER, Directed by George Stevens, HIGH FARCE, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, MUST SEE, OSCAR WINNER, PRIZE WINNER, ROMANTIC COMEDY, World War II

 

The More The Merrier

21 Jun

The More The Merrier – produced and directed by George Stevens. Farce. To ease the housing shortage in wartime Washington, a young lady rents out her spare room – but finds herself with an unexpected roommate. 104 minutes Black and White 1943.

★★★★★

That  Peony Of An Actor, Charles Coburn is granted a full George Stevens’ close-up on his fabulous face right early in the picture, so that we may know how close to our hearts are meant to be to him. Later Stevens grants Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea similar close-ups. Stevens was sparing of and famous for these full-face close-ups. He granted Joan Fontaine and Douglas Fairbanks Jr them in Gunga Din and the most famous close-ups ever shot, those of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place In The Sun. On the opposite side, Stevens is also fond of shooting from outside through windows, which, though distant, has the effect of making us eavesdropper-voyeurs and therefore also intimate.

Coburn, an infallible actor, plays Dan Cupid to Arthur and McCrea, which is all we need to know to allow ourselves sit back and enjoy one of the most delightful comedies ever made. But what sort of comedy is it?

Yes, it’s verbally witty and it certainly has broad situations, but it’s not low comedy and it’s not high comedy. Actors never invest their lines with anything but normal human readings. No one wrings a line for all it’s worth. The actors don’t seem to realize that they are doing anything funny.

I’ll clue you in if I may. George Stevens filmed and directed the first movies of Laurel and Hardy. Now the comedy of these two did not fall into any previous movie category. They were not fast-moving like Langdon, Keaton, Chaplin and The Keystone Cops; they did not fall into the category of circus clowns. They were new and they were  inventing a different comedy, a slow-moving comedy. Stevens discovered a camera lens that could film Laurel’s pale eyes, and Stevens further opened up his lens to let these two work things out before the camera, as though the camera were not there. And that is the remarkable impression The More The Merrier provides, although, of course, for that very reason, you don’t realize it – unless like me you saw it when it first came out and several subsequent times since. It’s a Laurel and Hardy comedy without Laurel and Hardy.

McCrea is one of the glories of 40s films: this and Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story and other pictures of that era, ensure our continued enjoyment of him. He is tall, good looking, modest in his craft, and absolutely true in it, But, most important, his sexual energy is available to him, as is Jean Arthur’s to her. This means we have two of the sexiest comedy seduction scenes ever filmed – the scene on the stoup and the scene with the suitcase. The attraction simply works itself out before our eyes easily, naturally, as though we were not watching all the while. The two of them are so infatuated with one another they appear to be drunk. The sexual tension between them is as dear as it is exquisite. And it is hilarious.

Treat yourself to The More The Merrier. And invite anyone you know — after all, the more the merrier. It’s a family film about setting out for war. Garson Kanin wrote it. Stevens and the film were nominated for Oscars. Coburn won it for best supporting player. Stevens won the 1943 New York Film Critics Award for Best Director for it. Immediately upon editing it, he left for the North Africa Campaign – just as McCrea does in the film. Those were the times. And The More The Merrier provided the tincture of human joy that made them bearable.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Charles Coburn: Screen God: Acting God, COMEDY OF CHARACTER, Directed by George Stevens, HIGH FARCE, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, MATING, MUST SEE, ROMANTIC COMEDY, World War II

 

The Diary Of Anne Frank

28 Nov

The Diary Of Anne Frank – produced and directed by George Stevens. Tragedy. Eight people hide in an attic while vicious enemies roam the streets to find them. 180 minutes Black and White 1959.

★★★★

As a film it has lost nothing to time; indeed it takes on power by its set decoration and photography, for both of which it won Oscars. And these are the important Oscars for such a film, since they give to it the feel of documentary. Shelly Winters also won one, and Joseph Schildkraut, who had won one in 1937, who is marvelous, was not even nominated. Lou Jacobi and Gusti Huber, as Mrs Frank, had done it with him on Broadway, and their performances are fresh and strong. Diane Baker and Richard Beymer play modest characters with modesty; every moment tells; we never lose them; we never stop caring about them. With Winters, as an actress, her uncertainty tends to push her art. This makes her always intrusive, and so she is often cast as a pushy woman falling apart.

The use of the Cinemascope camera here in cooperation with a three-storey set, divided by verticals like bars, and the use of full eight-person ensemble scenes bring great strength to what is a director’s movie, which it had to be, since it had no stars and since the material is plotless and storyless, which it had to be, since it actually is a diary. So the direction is purely presentational and as such brilliant beyond expectation. We are never aware of “the direction;” nothing is showy; everything in honored that ought to be.

The difficulty is that one cannot identify with the actor playing Anne. She’s inhumanly pretty and she’s too old. She is never thirteen. In fact the actor was twenty, which is an entire time-zone away from thirteen. And there is something else wrong in that she looks like what she was, a young fashion model. Anne Frank was not a cover girl, but this young woman is a glamor-puss. (To see the part perfectly cast, see the television version.)

I don’t know what Stevens had in mind – a combination of Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn? Did Stevens think to draw focus to her because of her looks? Did he see her as a great new discovery? The problem is you don’t know what you’re getting when you hire an unknown inexperienced actor. Anyhow, the problem is not that she is a fashion model, but that that she relates to a camera in a fashion model way, a way quite different from a movie camera relationship. She knows exactly how to present herself “beautifully,” but that talent is irrelevant to Anne and disconsonnant with her as well. She is so pretty that she has long known how to use the charm of her looks to get what she wants and to get away with behaving as she wishes. Anne Frank was always “behaving” but to do so she had to summon something deep within her defiant nature quite different from the easy victories of a fashion model. Anne Frank was not “pretty,” and the scene where this beauty-actress has to fish for a compliment about her looks is preposterous.

Besides, Anne Frank was a truly funny person; this actress is not. Mind you, the young woman who plays Anne does everything well; she has a right to be proud of her contribution and her work, but, through no real fault of her own, the result of having her in it at all, is that, instead of what we do with the Anne Frank of the book, we have no one to get behind as a human, no one to identify with.

Tremendous vitality pressing outward from inside a difficult girl is the inner truth of the outer truth of the vitality of these eight people caged just because they are Jews inside that loft. Inside a tiny diary is hidden away, as are hidden these eight, the right to live! The injustice of the closet is the mark of this story’s greatness; the movie captures it and us. It is the greatest movie about being closeted ever made. It has not dated. It will never date.

 
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Posted in 1940s, ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Directed by George Stevens, DOCUDRAMA, FAMILY DRAMA, FILMED BY William Mellor, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HISTORICAL DRAMA, Joseph Schildkraut, PRIZE WINNER, Shelley Winters, TRAGEDY, War Story, WARTIME ROMANCE, World War II

 

Giant

24 Sep

Giant –­ produced and directed by George Stevens. An upper class girl from Maryland moves to her Texas husband’s huge ranch and confronts his way of thinking. 3 hours and 21 minutes Color 1956.
★★★★
Two elements destroy the picture. The first is that Rock Hudson as Jordan Benedict is miscast. He has no heterosexual energy coming off of him and the role needs it. Internally Hudson is limp, both in his craft and as a male temperament. Although externally he has presence and looks, if you like them, and he is well directed scene by scene, which carries him through the picture, and although he does as good a job as he can, there is nothing sexual coming off of him towards Elizabeth Taylor who plays his mate, and insofar as the picture is the story of this relationship, the picture fails. Hudson in real life had a sense of humor but as an actor, seems to have none, which is why Tony Randall was brought into his comedies. This means that he is never able to see his character as funny, peculiar, ridiculous, to be taken with a grain of salt at certain times, the sort of humorous self-knowledge that Cagney brought to a character. Hudson’s Benedict has no point-of-view, only a bias. All this means that the part remains a role and never becomes a character. And it also means that the relationship must be created by Taylor alone, who, of course, has considerable humor, a mischief, a sense of fun, a knowing flirtatiousness, a firmness of mind and principle, generosity, will, kindness, grace, a confident bad temper, and tact. Although the most beautiful woman in the world, as she does in other films, she also goes after her man and lands him. She loves animals and feels strongly for the underdog. She has both the allure of sexual gusto and motherliness to offer. She has all this naturally, which is to say she has everything to make her part work, and she is simply perfectly endowed for the role. And she has one other gift, for she is that rare thing, a true Romantic Actress. (Think of young Vivien Leigh as another.) She is so good in the part, she forces you simply by loyalty to her vantage point on him to believe in the marriage itself. But in fact because of Hudson it is hollow. And, at any rate, it is not her story that is being told, but his. He is one whose challenge it is to change both in his marriage and in his life. Much as we admire the Taylor character throughout, our focus must be on that. The change involves Hudson’s character eventually coming to accept three stranger Mexican-Americans as human beings. Until that becomes evident, we are treated to what may be the best performance Elizabeth Taylor ever gave on film – by which I mean the performance most ideally, fully, and completely suited to her instrument as a mature actress – just watch her carefully in the doorway scene at the marriage of her sister. Of course, the difficulty with watching Elizabeth Taylor as an actress is that her beauty is a spotlight so blinding that it hypnotizes us out of realizing what a marvelous actress she is. In both halves of the movie, it is clear at every moment that the picture is unthinkable without her. For if you think of Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly who were both considered ahead of her for the role, you can see that they could never have played the second half of the film, because they would not know how to allow Leslie be older. Maturity was never their line. It is also easy to overlook Elizabeth Taylor’s talent because she is physically so composed. She is not an eccentric actress, she is a concentric one, so much so that when she gestures she appears to gesticulate. In her stillness of composure and her certainty of her effects, it is also easy to overlook her talent when placed against actors trained by the Method into physical volatility, such as Carroll Baker and James Dean, who are always moving, stewing, twitching, fingering a prop. In this way Taylor herself is marginalized. They are wonderful actors. Baker, who was older than Taylor who played her mother, is unerring as a defiant, saucy teen-ager. But in the second half, one senses one is being presented with the structure of a false front and that we have gone around the back of the facade of Riata itself and are looking at the bare framework of a put-up-job. The script becomes too spare and obvious, defying Stevens’ renown for letting the audience rise to the occasion and do its own work. Mercedes McCambridge with her voice like an automobile accident plays Hudson’s jealous sister, and dies early, but generally everyone but Hudson is marginalized. All the Mexican-Americans are wallpapered. Other actors emerge from adjoining rooms, say a few lines, and return. Chill Wills is missing a scene between himself and Jane Withers, who creates a wonderful arc from a shy plump girl with a crush on Hudson to a loud Texan matron taking over a ballroom by shaking her white fox fur stole. She is also never given a scene. The wife of Dennis Hopper is sadly miscast and sets one’s teeth on edge by being allowed to play a Goodness Madonna, and Sal Mineo appears without our opportunity to understand him as a character at all, and the same is certainly true of Alexander Scourby who plays his Mexican-American grandfather. All these remain unexamined, unexamined not in terms of exposition (which they do not need) but in dramatic scenes sufficient to give them and the story life. Yes, in the second half, it becomes grievously apparent that there is a problem with the script, when even the character of Jett Rink is marginalized, given insufficient screen time. In the first half, Jett Rink, played to a fair-thee-well by James Dean, gives you a picture of the character work he might have done had he lived. For he ruthlessly creates a piece of prison-trash – mean-spirited, resentful, disloyal, cowardly, vicious, and whining. But Dean’s performance, in the second half of the film, as he knew, does not stand up. A bum in vicuna, a dull, sly, nasty drunk, consumed with self-pity in a ceaseless tirade against those who have more than he has and whom he claims have wronged him and wrested him of his rights, he is just the same as he was when he was 20. So he is also best in his pre-intermission scenes, particularly because the make-up is bad after that, when the three stars simply add radiator paint to their hair to be fifty. Actually as the younger Jett, he seems older than the older one, but what Dean needed was not to repeat his physicalization of the younger Jett, which he does, but to give the character polish, take away the slouch, the slyness, the shy little boy, the weasel. After all, we know this is a man bent on self-improvement, on losing his Texas accent, on night-school. Dean needed to give Tycoon Rink a suavity with no loopholes but one, his continued envy of the Benedict family. Anyhow, Dean didn’t think of it and maybe couldn’t have played it if he had thought of it. So his babyish playing of the scene between him and Carroll Baker doesn’t quite come alive on his part, for he plays it as a toddler tugging a female’s skirts to be cute. So, as with the others, the Dean character is set aside as well. For after the intermission, the film’s aesthetic collapses into polemic. This means that each character now Stands For Something, that Something being A Predictable Outcome. The dialogue exchanges become formulaic to that end. They lack personal flavor, and the comedy with which the second half begins doesn’t play, well directed filmicly as it is, because, although Taylor can remain in the moment with these scenes and make her character fully funny, Hudson does not have the talent to give the character the intelligence that would have made him attractive to us or the humor that would have made him see Jordan Benedict as maybe dumb or even silly in such scenes. Nothing really works richly, even though pretty much everything is convincingly played. The idea that Jordan Junior, played by Dennis Hopper, would have sought out Jett Rink in the middle of a banquet to sock him in the kisser for a racial insult to his wife is preposterous. He wouldn’t have done it there. He wouldn’t have done it at all, because he had never met Jett Rink and would have known him only in terms of his father’s prejudice against him. He also would have known not to let his wife go to the hotel beauty parlor to begin with, since by this time, he and she would have expected this prejudice to exist in public places in Texas. This leads to a fistfight in a wine cellar between Rink, who is flaccidly drunk, and Hudson, who is too flaccid inside himself to hit Rink, who in any case is too small for his weight class. The whole thing ends up with a theatrical gesticulation of some wine shelves being knocked over. Fistfights and failed comedy and polemic is the deterioration of the second half of Giant. Everything is sidelined for a preachment. And, yet, for a three-and-a-half hour film to come out at the end to be a polemic against prejudice is meritorious and had a great effect at the time, for sure. That it should be a prejudice against Mexican-Americans gave it, at the time, a force greater because more general than a specific prejudice against Jews or Negros. But I don’t think it is honest. For what Stevens felt in Dachau in 1945 when he saw and filmed the corpses was not “prejudice.” What he felt was horror. But the horror of prejudice we are never given in Giant. We see only a man, Benedict, being prejudiced. We never see prejudice from the vantage point of those who are victims of it. We never see inside a single Mexican-American. We never see the bodies pile up in their souls as they are dismissed and marginalized. For, of course, Stevens himself has marginalized them in his film. Even the fight in the café is not about the three old helpless Mexican people. It is only and always about Benedict, and even Taylor’s coda about him being her hero, and that it being all he ever really wanted to be, has nothing to do with prejudice. Taylor is so marvelous doing the scene that you cannot but go for it, but the final image of the black calf and the white sheep and the dark toddler and the gringo toddler in the floor crib is so crude as to be self-cancelling. Yes, you believe Taylor’s maturity in marriage, and her evenhandedness. It’s in the tone of her voice because it’s in her nature. But in Giant we are told to concern ourselves not where tolerance is, but where it is not, and its theme peters out in the over-broad gesture of it script, becomes lost in spaciousness, breadth of land, spectacle of vulgar riches, and the length of the film itself. Apart from Carroll Baker, no one but Taylor seems absolutely right for their roles – and the film is not about her. She is essentially a leading woman here, in a Myrna Loy part. Dimitri Tiomkin’s score lumbers along as the film lumbers along. William Mellor filmed it beautifully. But it is as empty as the ‘50s. It seems that Stevens has abandoned depth of character and dramatic situation for vastness of morality play on the one hand and for the minutiae of preparation before and the minutiae of editing afterwards on the other. There is not enough filling in the sandwich. It is as though actors and drama were now mere tools of his vision. But actors are not tools. Indeed, they are not even movie stars, even when they are Elizabeth Taylor. No. Inside a movie they are characters, or they’d better be and they’d better be kept so. The film was enormously popular, the top grossing film in the history of Warner Brothers. The public loved it and still does. The ‘50s were a spendthrift age, an age of tasteless excess. Giant is the fins on its Cadillac. But Stevens did direct it. So it also is a Cadillac.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Carroll Baker, Chill Wills, Dennis Hopper, Directed by George Stevens, Elizabeth Taylor: SCREEN GODDESS, ACTING GODDESS, FAMILY DRAMA, FILMED BY William Mellor, James Dean, Jane Withers, Mercedes McCambridge, MUSICAL SCORE by Dimitri Tiomkin, Rock Hudson

 

Shane

20 Sep

Shane –– produced and directed by George Stevens. Western. A stranger pitches in to help some homesteaders in Montana and finds himself caught up in their struggle and destiny. 118 minutes Color.

★★★★★

Sam Peckenpaugh said it is the greatest Western ever made, and it probably is, for this reason: Westerns both begin and end with it. For it is a movie about how we see Westerns. It is told through the eyes of an eight year-old boy. He sees the Western hero as we as all have seen him and desired him to be, gone to Westerns to contemplate, desire, and idolize him. What’s important is that the boy is eight; he is at that stage where his pheromones are open to drink in what he must become as a male, what is inherent in the gender, where the gentleness of a gentleman is housed and demonstrated. As Alan Ladd plays it, he is nothing if not a gentleman. For him guns are the last resort, and Stevens, who had seen World War II and its guns and the criminality that war is, uses a cannon when guns go off to shock the audience into the knowledge that a gun is dreadful. And by hooking Elijah Cook Junior up to a jerk line that knocks him backward off his feet violently when he is shot, shows that when a man is shot a life dies in a crude, sudden, ugly way. Stevens sets it under the mountains of The Grand Tetons, which he films with a telephoto lens to bring them forward as cold, distant Gods sitting in their tremendous chairs watching the little doings down there in the vast valley, and he mats his adversarial faces as beautiful against a scripture of clouds scrawling across a huge blue sky. Never in a film has spectacle and intimacy been so strikingly joined. Jean Arthur brings to a close her great film career playing the pacifist wife laboring in dirty shirts to make a home for her husband and boy. She is so naturally plaintive that you cannot but respect her decency in that and in her attraction to Shane himself. Van Heflin as her homesteader husband fills the role with full value. He is one of those actors, like Charles Coburn, who satisfies a part by never slacking and never overloading it. He is a lesson to all actors of how modesty of technique can achieve the role of moral authority that a certain role requires. When Shane takes down Jack Palance (in his first screen role), it is Brandon DeWilde as the boy spying agog who stands in for us as we have always been spying, adoring the Western hero in films, prizing the gun-skills, justifying the slaughter because of its elegance and daring and aim. We have watched Westerns all our lives as DeWilde’s Joey watches Shane. We call ourselves into question because of the habit. How real are these heroes in us and to us? Westerns changed forever after Shane. Cowboys could no longer sing once this song was sung.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Alan Ladd, Ben Johnson, Brandon de WIlde, Directed by George Stevens, Edgar Buchanan, Elisha Cook Junior, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jack Palance, Jean Arthur, Loyal Griggs, MODERN WESTERN, MUSICAL SCORE by Victor Young, MUST SEE, OSCAR WINNER, PRIZE WINNER, Van Heflin

 

A Place In The Sun

13 Sep

A Place In The Sun – produced and directed by George Stevens. Romantic Tragedy. A young man aspires to love and success and is waylaid. 122 minutes Black and White 1951.

★★★★★

Seeing Elizabeth Taylor aged 17, as Angela Vickers sail into a mansion, you know she belongs there and you want to belong there with her. For Angela Vickers takes it all for granted. Like Daisy in The Great Gatsby, she has money in her voice. She has the silver chinks. She has everything and she gives everything, so the film naturally and inevitably slants towards her. Shelly Winters as the working class trull is given the opposite: neither sex appeal nor charm nor sympathy. She is brought into performance from beginning to end like the melted ice cream she serves and seems to be enduring morning sickness from the start. A self-pitying, sulky, nauseous look distorts her visage, a quart bottle of platitudes ready to pour. Washed around by his mother, Anne Revere and the two young women with whom he becomes involved, Montgomery Clift as George Eastman is a piece of driftwood shoved by every eddy. His body is flaccid and stooped. His face stares at us and reveals nothing but the hurt he might feel for a passing dog. His beauty registers as great but uneventful. One can read anything into his beautiful eyes, or nothing. For he cannot seem to summon any temperament. But the story is his, and so one reads, not George, but what happens to him. He stands there while it happens, not a character but a circumstance. His entire story, that is, points to Angela Vickers, as the only visible point of life, and the picture aims at what she promises to us all by her very existence on earth. Eastman is a character fostered by a magnate uncle who recognizes his resourcefulness; nepotism aside, George clearly could have succeeded in business on his own merits. And finding work he can do well and rise by is enhanced by his relations to Angela Vickers who has the sureness of her effect on men to go out for what she wants, as she does from their first big scene. We see her willfulness and her will,. We would call her spoiled, but she isn’t because she’s so kind, so happy to be alive, so generous, so gravely honest, so bright, and above all so loving. All the fun in life is lodged with her, all the beauty, all the romance. And never before or since on the screen have these qualities been so resplendently visible. Our hearts go out not to Clift or Winters, but to this wonderful girl, and to her baffled sadness and the life-long love that like a melody sings through it right to the end and beyond. Taylor’s performance throughout is gloriously right, natural, spontaneous, and her final scene is one of the greatest pieces of acting ever filmed, the finest piece of acting she ever did, and the most lyrical. Indeed, the whole film plays like something sung. It brings into being a beauty wider than either of the two beautiful faces of its leads or their romance. Did he kill her? Is he guilty. The priests says yes, of course. But the film says that the question is irrelevant. For it says that his love was a life experience so great that death is not in competition with it at all. Guilt, death, they are not even the same frame. Life has an inherent celebration in it, despite everything. Revealing this to us makes A Place In The Sun the most deeply life-loving film ever made. And the most beautiful.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Anne Revere, COURTROOM DRAMA, Directed by George Stevens, Elizabeth Taylor: SCREEN GODDESS, ACTING GODDESS, FILMED BY William Mellor, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MATING, Montgomery Clift: SCREEN GOD, MUSICAL SCORE BY Franz Waxman, MUST SEE, OSCAR WINNER, PRIZE WINNER, ROMANTIC DRAMA, TRAGEDY

 

The More The Merrier

01 Sep

The More The Merrier – produced and directed by George Stevens. Farce. To ease the housing shortage in wartime Washington, a young lady rents out her spare room – but finds herself with an unexpected roommate. 104 minutes Black and White 1943.

★★★★★

That  Peony Of An Actor, Charles Coburn is granted a full George Stevens’ close-up on his fabulous face right early in the picture, so that we may know how close to our hearts are meant to be to him. Later Stevens grants Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea similar close-ups. Stevens was sparing of and famous for these full-face close-ups. He granted Joan Fontaine and Douglas Fairbanks Jr them in Gunga Din and the most famous close-ups ever shot, those of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place In The Sun. On the opposite side, Sevens is also fond of shooting from outside through windows, which, though distant, has the effect of making us eavesdroppers and therefore also intimate. Coburn, an infallible actor, plays Dan Cupid to Arthur and McCrea, which is all we need to know to allow ourselves sit back and enjoy one of the most delightful comedies ever made. But what sort of comedy is it? Yes, it’s verbally witty and it certainly has broad situations, but it’s not low comedy and it’s not high comedy. Actors never invest their lines with anything but normal human readings. No one wrings a line for all it’s worth. The actors don’t seem to realize that they are doing anything funny. I’ll clue you in if I may. George Stevens filmed and directed the first movies of Laurel and Hardy. Now the comedy of these two did not fall into any previous movie category. They were not fast-moving like Chaplin and The Keystone Cops; they did not fall into the category of circus clowns. They were new and they were  inventing a different comedy. Stevens discovered a camera lens that could film Laurel’s pale eyes, and Stevens further opened up his lens to let these two work things out before the camera, as though the camera were not there. And that is the remarkable impression The More The Merrier provides, although, of course, for that very reason, you don’t realize it – unless like me you saw it when it first came out and several subsequent times since. It’s a Laurel and Hardy comedy. McCrea is one of the glories of 40s films: this and Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story and other pictures of that era, ensure our continued enjoyment of him. He is tall, good looking, modest in his craft, but absolutely true in it, But, most important, his sexual energy is available to him, as is Jean Arthur’s to her. This means we have two of the sexiest comedy seduction scenes ever filmed – the scene on the stoup and the scene with the suitcase. The attraction simply works itself out before our eyes easily, naturally, as though we were not watching all the while. The two of them are so infatuated with one another they appear to be drunk. The sexual tension between them is as dear as it is exquisite. And it is hilarious. Treat yourself to it. And anyone you know. It’s a family film about setting out for war. Garson Kanin wrote it. Stevens and the film were nominated for Oscars. Coburn won it for best supporting player. Stevens won the 1943 New York Film Critics Award for Best Director. Immediately upon editing it, he left for the North Africa Campaign – just as McCrea does in the film. Those were the times. And The More The Merrier provided the tincture of human joy that made them bearable.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Charles Coburn: Screen God: Acting God, Directed by George Stevens, Grady Sutton, HIGH FARCE, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, HUMAN COMEDY, Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, MATING, Middle Class Romantic Comedy, MUST SEE, World War II

 

The George Stevens Seminar –Part 8 — Penny Serenade

11 Jul

The George Stevens Seminar – Part 8 – Penny Serenade

Imagine Irene Dunne, the epitome of the suburban, playing opposite Cary Grant who is entirely without class restriction of any kind, save that the one thing he is not is suburban.

How did the audiences of the time accept it? Yet as soon as they appear together on the screen they do. And it has nothing to do with any particular sexual chemistry between them. She does not get to Hollywood until she is thirty-four, and here she is 45; Grant is 8 years younger than she, and how is it possible the audience accepted her playing someone 25? But they do. She was 40 when she played eighteen year-old Magnolia Hawks in Showboat? No one was bothered.

The camera does not tell the truth; it selects the truth it desires to tell. And audiences tell the truth to the film that it wishes to see there. Audiences set aside whatever interferes with their desire to be entertained. Penny Serenade is a case in point.

The film starts and the audience says, “Oh, she’s married to him. Okay, Why not? And – oh, he’s married too. All right, I’ll buy it –” despite the fact that the one thing obvious about Cary Grant from first glance to last was that he was not the marring kind. (That he was married five times proves it.) But the audience knows these two people and likes them and is resolved to get as much for their ticket as they can. The audience has also grown up along side them; the contemporaneity of their own lives coincides with them.

Looking at this film now, this is no longer the case. The entertainment we seek from such films is no longer as personal in its partnership with these two. What we find is the craft of two actors to beguile us through a piece over which we may no longer shed the tears their contemporaries shed. Indeed, another reason for the acceptability of these two is the sensation of surprise the audience may have felt when confronting these two renowned comedians in a film with the title of a comedy suddenly playing a heavy melodrama. Such a surprise can be offensive, or, as in this case, pleasingly collusive. The film was a big hit.

As you watch it just pay attention to the opening scene and how the director handles it. Set the story aside, set the acting aside. Just pay attention to how the camera moves, or doesn’t move, what the director allows to pass before it as Irene Dunne and Edgar Buchannan play it out. The director is always the narrator. He does not write the story, but he does tell it. “And then…and then…and then…” is his job, the task of liaison, of linking story parts, and of extending them or shrinking them, and of exploring diversions, and of meeting the audience half-way. This last was one of George Stevens’ chief interests and intentions and his conscious craft. Watch how he strikes a balance with this material to keep the weeper it is in the audience and out of the picture itself. He is the one who holds us. Take a look at yourself as you watch this picture and watch how he does it.

 
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Posted in Directed by George Stevens

 

Penny Serenade

11 Jul

Penny Serenade – directed by George Stevens. Women’s Weeper. A married couple try raising a family and are met with internal and external obstacles. 119 minutes Black and white 1941.

★★★★

If you can prepare yourself to suffer through the insufferable Irene Dunne and through this gluey soap opera, there are splendid rewards. Edgar Buchanan as the crusty sidekick and family friend has such perfect timing and governance of his instrument that none of it is noticeable. What a treat he is! And there is the beautiful Beulah Bondi as the adoption official. She hardly moves a muscle, but boy does that project itself as the truth of movement of each situation her character is in. Finally there is Cary Grant in another of his skillful light hearted rapscallion roles. There are movies Grant has not been particularly notable in, but this certainly isn’t one of them. He carries the film on the shoulders of his believability. You go along with it because he brings validity to every scene, a validity already in him. A true cinema actor, whose instrument defined screen acting for his era, modest in its effects, attentive, and personal. He plays in this film probably the greatest scene he ever played in movies. We do not think of Grant as an emotional actor, but it is a long scene, of great emotional power. Despite the fact the writing is banal, his sustainment and modulation of the emotion of this scene, which culminates in an enormously long speech is one of the greatest I have ever seen in film. Watch his body. It scarcely moves. Think of how Sean Penn would have over-miked it, good as he is an actor. In his life, Grant never won an Oscar, but was nominated twice; this was one of those two times. Dunne is 6 years older than Grant, and isn’t convincing as a 20 or even 30 year old. Grant and she had had two big successes together before this, and it must have been hard for her. She was at this moment in her career at the peak of her popularity, as a result of those two hit comedies. In her day the age of certain actresses did not necessarily count as determining their casting, once their hold on the public was secure. Dunne was never a jeune fille; she was a woman, in the way that Susan Sarandon always was a woman and Julia Roberts never has been. So, she was already a grown-up and could be cast as one, her real age being irrelevant. There is something to be said for her as a screen presence. Not having much of sense of humor helped her in being a foil for the rapscallions playing opposite her. She sometimes condescended to be lady, which was both ghastly and futile: Greer Garson had seized the throne. But, as here, she was one of the few stars who could actually play a good woman; Colbert could do it too. Loretta Young could not. Think about it. Meryl Streep could do it; Glenn Close could not. But Glenn Close could play a saint, and so could Loretta Young. If you want to see Irene Dunne at her best, see Showboat or, another George Stevens film the wonderful I Remember Mama, a perfect role for her, suitable to her age and stolidity, a part in which she is simply superb. She is a very good example of a hard-working actress who took her craft seriously and was sometimes moved by the tides of studio casting into waters where she could barely swim. If in this film she suffers too daintily, that may be as a corrective to the lugubrious nature of the material, a weeper, like her famous one with Charles Boyer, remade many years later with Grant and that other lady actress Deborah Kerr.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Cary Grant: Screen God, Directed by George Stevens, Edgar Buchanan, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Irene Dunne, WOMEN"S WEEPER

 

The Talk Of The Town

10 Jul

 

The Talk Of The Town – directed by George Stevens. Comedy Of Justice. An escaped prisoner hides out in the summer home of a famous law professor, and both fall for their landlady. 118 minutes Black and White 1942.

★★★★★

I laughed a lot and I loved it. Grant is really good as a lower class type  (which is what he was), a rabble-rouser, a trouble-maker, and general bad boy from the other side of the tracks. He is sly and outspoken and not a gent – but bright and seeking justice. The great matinee idol Ronald Coleman plays the academic legal wizard in whose house he takes secret refuge. And Jean Arthur is the befuddled landlady. She’s just wonderful – exasperation was her comic specialty. As a comedy, like all comedies, the script has a serious center (for a dramatic version of the story see Lang’s Fury), and the legal eagle and the con become friends and expatiate on the law. The film is beautifully shot and the supporting people are first class: the great Glenda Farrell once again as the town floozy, Edgar Buchanan as the foghorn voiced lawyer pal of Grant, Charles Dingle as the contriving factory owner. The themes continue on into A Place In The Sun and Shane. It is, as are most of Stevens’ films, a story of values – not American values, but values in a broader sense, such as, in this case, fairness in love and law. But all this Stevens is able to weave back and capture us by a small town American flavor, the familiar collisions of Main Street, the flimsy bias of free people, the barking of dogs on a hot summer night under the elms. He had a genius for it. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Cary Grant: Screen God, Charles Dingle, Directed by George Stevens, Edgar Buchanan, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jean Arthur, Light Comedy, Ronald Coleman

 

Woman Of The Year

09 May

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

★★★★★

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

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

 

Gunga Din

12 Apr

Gunga Din — produced and directed by George Stevens. Comic Action Adventure. 117 minutes Color 1939.
★★★★★
George Stevens was 17 when he jumped over the wall of the Hall Roach Studios. What he found on the other side was a Western, Rex, King Of The Wild Horses, and its sequels. As assistant cameraman he went off into the rugged mountains and made up movies, and ever after he said that the Western was his preferred genre. What this gave us is, of course, Shane but it also produced The Greatest Story Ever Told, shot in those settings and Gunga Din a sort of Eastern Western, situated in spectacular mountains and in a frontier fort and a remote town, and with a host of bloodthirsty savages.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, authors of His Gal Friday, wrote the story, which, naturally therefore, has one of a trio of soldiers of the Raj wanting to get married and the other two sabotaging his immanent retirement by engaging all of them in putting down the Thugees, a tribe of native killers – read The Taliban.

To say there is a plot to this were to rearrange the meaning of that word, for the movie is one thing after another, a comic scene at the fort, followed by a big battle scene, comic scenes back at the fort, another battle scene, another comic scene back at the fort, and so forth.

The battle scenes are as funny as the comic scenes, for Stevens had learned gag comedy at The Roach Studios so the movie resembles Indiana Jones, or rather Indiana Jones resembles Gunga Din, for Jones kept up with Din by aping it in scene after scene. Stevens’ visual imagination in devising interesting and entertaining slaughters was unequalled. They involved thousands of actors and, to insure no one was hurt, they had to be carefully imagined, very slowly rehearsed, then repeated a bit faster, then faster still, then shot at full speed.

But Stevens also knew what to look at with his fort scenes, where the comedy depends not on gags but on the expressions on actors’ faces. Each of the sergeants – Douglas Fairbanks Junior is Scottish, Victor McLaglen is Irish, and Cary Grant is Cockney – has rich comic scenes to play, and from the start they are all involved in comical branagans. Grant has his lust for booty, McLaglen a darling elephant, and Fairbanks the milksop Joan Fontaine.

Stevens knows exactly what to look at with his camera, which is manned by the great Joe August, who even gives us an in-tight Place-In-The-Sun closeup of Fontaine. Abner Biberman and Eduardo Ciannelli play the outright villains outrightly. And Sam Jaffe is just lovely as the waterboy, Gunga Din, a middle-aged man who saves the day and who is the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s poem from which the picture is loosely derived. They originally wanted the great child actor Sabu, so Jaffe said he played it exactly as Sabu would have, and he’s just marvelous.

Alfred Newman’s music is rousing, and the thousands of troops on the parade grounds and threading through huge mountains is spectacular. Cary Grant is especially gratifying in, for him an unusual, lower class part and also a dopey one. There are comic effects on his face you will never see from him in any other film. All you need do is sit back and look at him to be entertained. He was lower class in origins, and it shines through with a warm, particular and special wit.

Stevens seldom moves his camera so the adventure takes place without intrusion, and he seldom used reaction shots, so the energy between actors is never broken. It is one of the most “complete” films ever made, and remained a George Stevens’ favorite.

The film has never been out of circulation since its immensely popular first showing in the year of the movie miracles, 1939.

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

 

A Damsel In Distress

03 Apr

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

* * * *

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

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

 

Annie Oakley

02 Apr

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

*

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

 

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

 

Swing Time

01 Apr

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

* * * * *

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

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

 

Alice Adams

31 Mar

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

★★★★★

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

 

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

 

The George Stevens Seminar — Part V

30 Mar

The George Stevens Seminar — Part V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice Adams

Swing Time

Gunga Din

Variety could offer you no more.

Enjoy.

 

 

 
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Posted in Directed by George Stevens

 

The Greatest Story Ever Told

13 Feb

The Greatest Story Ever Told — directed by George Stevens. A prophet appears in the ancient Middle East and is believed and followed and then beset by political superstition.

3 hours and 19 minutes, Color, 1965.

★★★

It is not fair of me to review this film, for I have not seen it in a movie theatre, but only on my TV, which, while it is fairly large, cannot do justice to the size of the screen for which it was made. When Stevens was asked to choose between Panasonic and super-Panasonic, he chose the latter, although only two such cameras were available. Others were soon found. And the film was made as a story dependent upon its narration for a huge broad screen. Stevens had been a cameraman for years before he became a director, and he could combine the integrity of his material with the size of the canvas upon which he painted. The sort of the story and its telling were intrinsic to the size of the screen. The one had to do with the other, and to see this film on a TV screen is simply for most of it to fail to register as story. Or so I imagine. It may not be the Greatest Film ever made but it must be the most gorgeous. After research in the Holy Land, Stevens made it in remote Arizona settings which resembled that land of long ago. The flooding of Lake Powell was halted so it could be filmed as the Sea of Galilee. The settings are vast and panoramic and are meant, I believe to buoy up the power of the actions on the screen into a spiritual or at least other world dimension, and this I think they may succeed in doing. The individual scenes are made with Stevens’ unerring sense of beauty; he was inspired by famous paintings and their lighting; many interiors are dark and mysterious, lit for chiaroscuro and for effects which his simple camera setups were primed. Max Von Sydow is fine as Jesus as an actor, but no one else comes up to be as good as to be even bad. Great actors like Van Heflin look as uncomfortable in their sandals as everyone else; God, their feet must have hurt. The crowd scenes are just like all Hollywood crowd scenes, a lot of people shaking their fists in the air at the same time unconvincingly. No one is at home their costumes. The actors pause portentous eons between syllables, except for Jose Ferrer who mercifully picks up all his cues and for Claude Rains who gets on with it also. Charlton Heston is well cast as the humorless John The Baptist and delvers his lines through his stentorian teeth like a baleen whale in a vomitorium. Sal Mineo is marvelous as a cripple who is able to walk; his is the best performance in the film and probably of his career. Sometimes the old sermons are moving, but the picture does not seem to be, except once, when Sydney Poitier picks up the cross from Jesus’ stumbled back and helps him along with it. Much of the heart of the film seems to be kept at a distance, a beautiful distance, true. The miracles are all off to one side, never shown; only their effect is shown. The effect of Jesus on his apostles is never shown, always granted. Eventually, the film got out of control, and Jean Negulesco shot the Jerusalem street scenes and David Lean cast and shot the Claude Rains sequence. Alfred Newman scored it with ancient instruments, his own score, and Handel’s Messiah which is quite grating. Some day if I have the chance I will see this film in a movie house. William Mellor, Stevens’ favorite photographer shot it, and there isn’t a scene in it that isn’t rapturously beautiful. From a camera point of view. Whether from a human point of view and a narrative point of view, I wonder.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: YOU-COULD-DRIVE-A-TEAM-OF-HORSES-THROUGH-THE-PAUSES, Angela Lansbury, BIBLICAL EPIC, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, Claude Rains, David McCallum, Directed by George Stevens, Donald Pleasence, Dorothy McGuire, Ed Wynn, John Wayne, José Ferrer, Joseph Schildkraut, Martin Landau, Max von Sydow, Pat Boone, Paul Stewart, Richard Conte, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia, Roddy MacDowell, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Telly Savalas, Van Heflin

 

The George Stevens Seminar — Part 3

23 Jan

The George Stevens Seminar — Part 3

It’s quite simple.

After George Stevens went to WW II, heading up the task force assigned to film the European campaign, he came back to Holly wood and told Ingrid Bergman he could not make the comedy with her he had promised. Or any comedy at all.

But more than that, his own pictures engaged in more serious subjects, as in A Place In The Sun, and Shane, and he seemed to lose more and more a grasp of individual human comedy as, in the last part of Giant, in The Diary Of Anne Frank, and The Greatest Story Ever Told, his films became more elevated, like a huge mountain, its summit shrouded in fog.

Does he come to suffer from toxic seriousness?

Here, then, in D-Day To Berlin, is George Stevens himself before us. What is the face we see? What has happened?  Consider him. He is a human being, not just an important Hollywood person.

Of course, all this would be an idle speculation and not even before us were he not a very great film director, indeed, as a director of American subjects, the greatest of all American film directors.

Is that true?

It might be, and that is why his work is worth investigating here. That is why his work is worth looking at now. That is why, even in his work in the 1930s, certain films have not dated.

We have already looked at the first film he made after The War, I Remember Mama, a war film if there ever was one, since WW I is not even mentioned in it.

Do you ask the question, why did George Stevens not make film noir after The War? For that is the period, 1945-1950, when it came into existence as an expression of national shell shock, as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was then called? He had good reason to make such films.

In making your next film to watch, D-Day To Berlin, he is in his favorite element, the outdoors. And he is heading up a film crew — in this case the unit Eisenhower had made him a Lt Colonel to run — its task to film the European theatre of war, which he is ideally suited to do, since, almost alone among major Hollywood directors, he came into movie directing from years of work as a cameraman. This is the film that captures what he saw, went through, and survived.

When he finished his work in 1945, he came home and did not look for work, but played golf and said nothing. He never looked at the film he had taken which we see now in D-Day To Berlin.

What happened to the film directors who went to WW II?  What happened to the actors?

Oscar Wilde once said, “It is always wrong to be innocent.”

 

 
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Posted in Directed by George Stevens

 

George Stevens – D-Day To Berlin

23 Jan

George Stevens – D-Day To Berlin. Documentary. The only color footage of The Allied Expeditionary Forces in the European campaign. 46 minutes Color Filmed 1943-45.

* * * * *

In early 1943, after Stevens finished the delightful comedy The More The Merrier, about the housing shortage in Washington, he enlisted. He entered the service as a major, went to North Africa with a crew towards the end of the fighting there, briefly went to Persia, and then to England, where Eisenhower assigned him to film the European campaign. He was in charge of a group which included writers already established such as Irwin Shaw and William Saroyan and a group of master Hollywood cameramen and technicians. All these proceeded to produce the black and white footage, which was then sent to London and made by Frank Capra in to the black and white movie documentaries with which we are still familiar as the film records of the war in Europe. It was clear to Eisenhower and to everyone else that the signal corps was incapable of doing a proper job of this. So Stevens and his “Stevens’ Irregulars” did it. However, for his own purposes, Stevens took along a 16mm home camera with non-fading color film, and these reels he sent home to his wife Yvonne in California as each was shot. They remained in Stevens’ attic until his son, George Stevens junior, translated them into this 1994 documentary. The D-Day landing is filmed as he came over to Normandy. He filmed the big surrenders of the generals, the liberation of Paris, the capture of 500 German prisoners, the largest underground factory in the world at Nordhausen where the V-2 rockets blitzing London were made, the entry into Dachau where the crematorium bodies lay in piles and drifts, the meeting of Bradley’s Twelfth Army with the Russians, Berchtesgarten Hitler’s mountain retreat, and then Berlin. Just as Stevens had made True Glory with Carol Reed and Garson Kanin in London which won the Oscar documentary that year, so he also stayed until the end of 1945 in Europe to make with Budd Schulberg the documentary The Nazi Plan which was used as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial. But all that is in in black and white. All of this is in color. There were over 38,000 prisoners at Dachau, 6,000 of whom were dying of typhus. Stevens saw it and filmed it, and when he came back to Hollywood never made a comedy again.

 
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Posted in Directed by George Stevens, DOCUMENTARY, Filmed in France, Filmed in Germany, MILITARY, MUST SEE, World War II

 

The George Stevens Seminar – II

13 Jan

The George Stevens Seminar — II

We’re going to start backwards.

Not from his last film, The Only Game In Town, which I have not seen since it came out, but which was clearly incorrect.

Elizabeth Taylor cajoled Stevens into letting her play it, when, in fact, she was both too old, miscast, and sexually achemical with Warren Beatty. The film was supposed to be a story about an older man and a younger woman. But with Taylor who was older it turned out the other way round, which skewed the script. Also she was to play a Las Vegas showgirl, which is preposterous on two counts, the first is that, even if she was in good figure, which she was not, she was never a showgirl type, and second and most important, Elizabeth Taylor never could play anyone who had a job. She was a trophy or she was a power beauty. She never worked for a living. Looking like that, 9-to-5 is unthinkable. Every actor has a limitation. Finally, because her husband, Richard Burton, was making a film in Paris, The Only Game In Town had to be made there too. So you see.

No, we’re going to start with the films during and after The War, that is to say, with I Remember Mama and From D-Day To Berlin.

George Stevens was born in 1904 in Oakland into a family that went generations back in the theatrical profession. His father and mother had their own theatre company in San Francisco, and Stevens hung around the theatre, liked it, and learned. He read plays, he listened to audiences, sometimes he had to play a role. When movies came in, his parents’ company faltered, and they had to move to Los Angeles for his father to get acting jobs. Stevens had to quit high school to ferry his dad to auditions, but presently Stevens himself got work as a second cameraman, and by 1922 he was working full time shooting Westerns. At age 9, he had been given a brownie and took many pictures. He even had a small photography business. He had an eye and developed it. By 17 he was behind a camera, learning. He was an autodidact: he read voraciously, he went to the theatre, to the movies of the day, he investigated new film stock and tried new ways of camera-seeing.

Presently he started working with a brand new team, Laurel and Hardy, and became their favorite. They brought something very different to movies from slapstick or gags or keystone cops comedy, and eventually Stevens moved in the direction which is technically called comedy-of-character. He became a director and directed many two-reelers, graduated to features and in 1933 moved to RKO where he directed Alice Adams, starring Katherine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray. He directed many films in the 30s. After he directed The More The Merrier he quit movies and went to War. He was 38.

Eisenhower gave him the job of filming D-Day. Stevens possessed the only sound color camera to film the landing. With it, he went on to film army movements right up to opening the gates of Dachau, whose horrors never left him.

After The War, he came back to Hollywood, did not look for work, and the first film he contracted to do was I Remember Mama*. That’s going to be the first film we look at.

The second is From D-Day To Berlin*.

Then we’re going to skip ahead to his next to last picture, the great 20 million dollar failure of The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Then his second picture after The War, A Place In The Sun*.

Then his Third picture after The War, Shane*.

Then Giant.

Then The Diary Of Ann Frank

After that, we’ll take a look at some of his pre-War work:

Alice Adams*

Annie Oakley

Swing Time*

Gunga Din

Penny Seranade

Woman Of The Year*

The Talk Of The Town

The More The Merrier*

Certain of these films are HIGHLY RECOMMENDD, MUST SEE, 5-STAR films, so if you want to have as good a time as I am going to have, those with asterisks are the ones. They will be found for free at your library, and they are all available at Netflix. All the other films, save one, Annie Oakley, are well worth watching.

So here we go!

Welcome George Stevens!

Just look below and there you will find  I Remember Mama.

 
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Posted in Directed by George Stevens

 

I Remember Mama

13 Jan

I Remember Mama — directed by George Stevens. Comedy/Drama.  The love of a mother for her family forges a life for them in pre-WW I San Francisco. 134 minutes Black and White 1948

* * * * *

Stevens had been a cameraman all during the 20s and his technical grasp of filmmaking is unparalleled by any American director of his time, so just watch how he gives what he gives you – if you can, for his scenic power is so engrossing one cannot detach from the gift itself to pay attention to the wrappings which are an integral part of it. He will make you a voyeur by making you listen through a window. He will make you an eavesdropper by allowing you to hear what two characters standing on a street with their back to you are saying. He will hold you at the distance respect requires as a woman retreats across a barnyard and fades into the unapproachable solitude of widowhood. Or he will bring you so close up into the face of two characters that you are actually a part of the speechless energy between them. He will allow you in. He will keep you at bay. He will let you watch something in the corner. He is always aware of you, always wanting your participation and understanding, but he won’t hammer it home. He will often catch you in with the unexpected. He always has something for you, but he let’s you do your part by yourself. I saw this when it came out and it presents the ideal mother. She is played by an actress I don’t ordinarily like, Irene Dunne, but here I not only admire the actress I admire the character. The film is divided in chapters, each one recounting an episode of heroic devotion to her children. None of them are cloying, although the number of them might be said to be. Dunne’s playing is impeccable, and so is her accent, as are all of the Norwegian accents. She wore padding and no make-up. She was nominated for an Oscar for this. Nicolas Musuraca, famed “master of light,” filmed it. He was nominated for an Oscar for this. Barbara Bel Geddes played the elder daughter and narrator. I identify with this character because were I a female I would be her type, and because, like me, she is a writer. She was nominated for an Oscar for this. When Jessica Tandy turned down the role of the shy aunt, Stevens said, “Let the script girl play her,” so the script girl did, and a long career was born. Ellen Corby was nominated for an Oscar for this. Oskar Homolka had played Uncle Chris on the stage with Mady Christians and Marlon Brando, and when he is on camera Stevens gives him full sway in bringing to life this crusty, rude, frightening character. He was nominated for an Oscar for this. Save for Bel Geddes, the children in the film tend to be little Hollywood child actors, but it would be not before long that Stevens found Brandon de Wilde. Barbara O’Neil, Florence Bates, Edgar Bergen, Rudy Vallee, Cedric Hardwick, Philip Dorn fill out and give depth to the cast.

After The War, Stevens came home shell-shocked and did nothing, but eventually formed a company with Frank Capra and William Wyler. A great post WW II trilogy emerged. Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life is about the home-front. Wyler’s The Best Years Of Our Lives is about home-coming. Stevens’ I Remember Mama is about home, the thing fought for and the values that made the fight prevail, set even before WW I, in the city George Stevens grew up in at the time he grew up in it.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Barbara Bel Geddes, Barbara O'Neil, Cedric Hardwick, COMING OF AGE DRAMA, Directed by George Stevens, ENSEMBLE DRAMA, FAMILY DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, FILMED BY: Nicolas Musuraca, Florence Bates, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Irene Dunne, Oskar Homolka, Period: 1910-1914, Rudy Vallee

 

The George Stevens Seminar – I

12 Jan

The George Stevens Seminar — I

I’ve been writing about Howard Hawks’ pictures for a while, and there’s a couple of good ones still left to put before you. And I will do that, but all the while I have been looking forward to giving you George Stevens. Why is that?

Partly because I like him better as a person than Hawks, who does not interest me at all, either in his life or in the values he brought to his films – with one exception: his desire and ability to actually create living dramatic scenes on screen and to sacrifice everything toward that end. Otherwise there is only one picture of his which I would see over and over again and already have, and that is His Gal Friday. It is a film made entrancing by the dovetailing of the performances of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. Two other pictures come to mind: Bringing Up Baby with Katharine Hepburn and I Was A Male War Bride with Ann Sheridan, and two more. Cary Grant is in all of them. You see the problem.

But the subject is George Stevens. And it is the subject because my relations with his work are far more personal. I saw the Hawks films when they came out in the late 30s and I saw the Stevens films at the same time too. But the Stevens films influenced my life, from Woman Of The Year at the start of The War to Shane after it, and the Hawks films did not.

I saw in Woman Of The Year the sort of marriage I myself, eight years old, decided to have because of it, and did have when the time came for it twenty years later. I didn’t want to marry a housewife; I wanted a spouse who would bring something professionally rich into the marriage. I had a brief correspondence with Katherine Hepburn years later thanking her for this, but I might very well have thanked George Stevens instead. For this involved something more than marriage counseling. It had to do with the treatment of the characters themselves and the way they were held by Stevens’ camera. It had to do with how he gave them to us. And the various ways he gave them to us.

This went on through the 40s and after The War, from which he emerged a Lt. Colonel and played a significant role documenting it. A Place In The Sun is a picture that exercised an enormous influence on me personally as a standard of the ambiance of romance. And Shane inculcated me with the mystery of influence itself, a young male drinking from an older male and thus learning of his own code and his own boundaries.

My life’s mysteries were explored by this director as by no other. They were the mysteries I needed to explore, and, even before I knew his name, Stevens was the mentor, the psychopomp who drew me into their realms and out again.

His work was also the most American of all the directors of his era. It captured the ordinary, everyday sound and movement of life here, and made that sound music.

So I’ll be bringing him to you and glad I am to do so. Check him out. He’s easy riches.

 

 
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Posted in Directed by George Stevens

 

Swing Time

04 Oct

Swing Time – Directed by George Stevens. Musical. Two dancers and their lovers at cross purposes. 103 minutes Black and White 1936.

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Swing Time is accompanied by a terrific commentary by John Mueller, who takes us through a good deal of what went on to make this piece the greatest of all Rogers/Astaire musicals — which has to do with Astaire’s grueling rehearsal work, freedom from chance in the dances, his staff Hermes Pan, and the nature of the picture itself. It is directed by George Stevens who was one day to direct The More The Merrier, Woman Of The Year, Shane, and A Place In The Sun and who brings to the picture an angle of vision which unifies it by personalizing the performances. Of course, it is a white telephone musical, which means that it is essentially a film in which only the dances are serious art: the rest is flip. This is as it should be, because Astaire is interested in discovering and firming up the essential musts of movie dance. His discoveries rule to this day. The film contains wonderful numbers of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, and at one point Astaire applies blackface and does a shadow dance with 24 chorus girls, 12 in black 12 in white, and then dances to a black and white rear shadow projection of himself. Minstrel shows celebrate an exuberance which our negro entertainers alone possess: blackface gives performers unheard of freedom: that is what is being celebrated here, and, because it is respectful at heart, it would be offensive to be offended by it. “Never Gonna Dance” is considered to be the greatest dramatic-romantic dance ever filmed, and Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields won the Oscar for “The Way You Look Tonight,” and we are also treated to “A Fine Romance,” “Pick Yourself Up And Start All Over Again”. Rogers, beautifully dressed for all her numbers, is liquid itself in Astaire’s arms. She had a wonderful figure, graceful arms, strong square shoulders, a flexible back. And of course she could actually act, so she moves the spoken drama along while Astaire moves the dance drama along. Dancing he led her; not-dancing, she led him. The most valuable suggestion Mueller gives is to watch the dances in slow motion. What a treat! To actually see for oneself what actually went into these intricate, witty dances! Astaire’s body was a genius. That body made American movie musicals! Excellence upon excellence was his credo, never more so than here.

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Posted in 1930s, ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Classic Movie Musical, Directed by George Stevens, Eric Blore, Essential Musical, Fred Astaire: Screen God, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, Helen Broderick, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Interesting Special Effects, MUST SEE, PRIZE WINNER, Singing & Dancng Musical, Victor Moore

 

Swing Time

22 Mar

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

* * * * *

Swing Time is accompanied by a terrific commentary by John Mueller, who takes us through a good deal of what went on to make this piece the greatest of all Rogers/Astaire musicals — which has to do with Astaire’s grueling rehearsal work, freedom from chance in the dances, his staff, and the nature of the picture itself. It is directed by George Stevens who was one day to direct Shane and A Place In The Sun and The More The Merrier and who brings to the picture an angle of vision and an allowance for acting excellence in the principals which unify it. Of course, it is a white telephone musical, which means that it is essentially a film in which only the dances are serious art: the rest is flip. This is as it should be, because Astaire is interested in discovering and firming up the musts of movie dance. His discoveries rule to this day. The film contains wonderful numbers of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, including a most endearing version of “The Way You Look Tonight” which you will never forget. And at one point Astaire applies blackface and does a black and white shadow dance with 24 chorus girls 12 in black 12 in white, and then dances to a black and white rear shadow projection of himself 3 times. Minstrel shows project and celebrate an exuberance which our negro entertainers alone possess: blackface gives performers unheard of freedom: that is what is being celebrated here, and, because it is respectful at heart, it would be offensive to be offended by it.  Rogers, beautifully dressed for all her numbers is liquid itself in Astaire’s arms. She had a wonderful figure, graceful arms, strong square shoulders, a flexible back. And of course she could actually act, so she moves the spoken drama along while Astaire moves the dance drama along. Dancing he led her; not-dancing, she led him. — so to say. The most valuable suggestion Mueller gives is to watch the dances in slow motion.  What a treat! To actually see for oneself what actually went into these intricate, witty dances!  Astaire’s body was a genius. That body made American movie musicals!

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Posted in 1930s, ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Classic Movie Musical, Dance & Dancing, Directed by George Stevens, Essential Musical, Fred Astaire: Screen God, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Light Comedy, MUST SEE, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Annie Oakley

17 Dec

Annie Oakley — directed by George Stevens — a country lass can shoot the thorns off a rose at 50 paces. So she joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

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This is a George Stevens production???!!! — the George Steven who directed Alice Adams and The More The Merrier and Shane and Woman Of The Year? Inconceivable! It is a movie devoid of distinction, except for the slight truth Preston Foster gives it as the boasting sharpshooter Annie loves. The script is so poor even Stanwyck looks like a bad actress, which she wasn’t. She was an actress of limited range and disposition, sure, but she had the common touch and a beautiful carriage and natural presence and surety of execution, all of which counted for a lot in her work — in any actor’s work. Sorry, but this film is puerile. One wonders at the aesthetic degradation studios felt they had to drag their audiences into in order to snare them. In real life, Annie Oakley was a woman of parts, smart and able and of fine disposition, and she had a long career. Why didn’t Stevens make a film about the fun of that? Stanwyck is able to convey Annie’s youth — as a teenager — but, of course, she is incapable of creating a character — why should she? — she already herself had enough character for twenty — and besides the script gives her so little to work on. And as to the director — oye! — who would have thought that he would one day direct A Place In The Sun.

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Posted in Backstage Drama, Barbara Stanwyck: THE QUEEN, BIO-PIC, Directed by George Stevens, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MATING, Turn of the 19th Century, WESTERN

 
 
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