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Archive for the ‘Felix Bressart’ Category

The Shop Around The Corner

03 Dec

The Shop Around The Corner – Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Romantic Comedy 1 hour 33 minutes Black And White 1940.

★★★★★

The Story: Much ado about two young folks who bicker but, unbeknownst to one another, are writing pen-pal love letters to one another all along.
~
It’s always been a great story, and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is but its extreme variant. Here we do not have nobility and rapiers and Dogberry. Instead, we have MittleEuropean pastry by its greatest chef, Ernst Lubitsch. If we are not in Vienna we are in Budapest, and if not there, at least in the high season of that Hollywood middle-class bliss, light comedy. With a truth all its own.

It’s a perfect Christmas movie. For it works itself toward snow and galoshers, and decorating the holiday shop window as a plot twist.

Margaret Sullivan has top billing because everyone in those days adored her; indeed Jimmy Stewart in his early acting days had a crush on her, but his friend Henry Fonda married her. Yet Lubitsch focuses his camera on Stewart, for as we all know to our joy he was one of the great comic actors of film.

Comic actor?

Yes, but not the Jerry Lewis sense. You might better say, or I might better say “an actor of comedy of character.” Which is to say he appears to be unwitting in his effects, although a master of them.

Well, he’s marvelous for actors to watch, and endearing to us all. In Stewart’s delivery, when he wants, there is something inherently humanly humorous. What is it, would you say?
His attack on the material is preceded by a resident forgiveness. It simply has not gone out of date. But why do we root for him? Of course, he’s an accessible type, but with the most sensual of mouths. Skinny. With a voice like the spring on an old screen door.

In all this, I must stop. I am raving. For he is is surrounded by tip-top actors. Joseph Schildkraut as the unctuous nephew of the boss played with hearty bluster by Frank Morgan and by that true-blue actor Felix Bressart as Stewart’s buddy in the shop.

The Shop Around The Corner is generally considered to be a perfect film. It is thought of as Lubitsch’s greatest comedy, one of the greatest comedies ever made.

Is it, though? Join the line and find out. Or find out again. I saw it when it first came out in 1940 and remember it fondly. I saw it again last week and, as you can see, remember it fondly.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, COMEDY OF CHARACTER, Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Felix Bressart, Frank Morgan, Jimmy Stewart: ACTING GOD, Joseph Schildkraut, Margaret Sullavan

 

Without Love

15 May

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

★★★★

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

 

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

 

A Song Is Born

08 Oct

A Song Is Born – Directed by Howard Hawks. A musical academic researching jazz falls foul of manipulative nightclub singer. 117 minutes Color 1948.

* *

You will have the memorable chance to hear Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Mel Powell, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnett, Louis Bellson, and Louis Armstrong jam together in a picture which you will find impossible to remember otherwise. Goldwyn paid Hawks a quarter of a million to direct it and it cost well over two million and it resembles a high school varsity show. Hawks jammed it between Red River and I Was A Male War Bride, and to film it we have the man who filmed Citizen Kane, Gregg Toland no less, but the picture is nothing other than a series of gaudy setups, which is what Goldwyn liked for his Danny Kaye series. Production stopped every day so Hawks could listen to the boys play, and so Kaye could go to his psychiatrist, which is perhaps why in this picture, except for a few facial gesticulations, he is not funny once. His voice is placed just under his nasal passages and is perpetually plaintive. Of course, Danny Kaye was not an actor at all, but an entertainer, a zany in the line of The Marx Brothers, Jonathan Winters, and Robin Williams, He was separated from his wife at the time this was made, and she, Sylvia Fine, wrote all his riffs. The writing seems astoundingly dull, although by Brackett and Wilder, although it didn’t when it fueled  Hawks’ Ball of Fire of which this is a remake..  But the War had intervened, and that changed everything. This sort of naive hokum was passé. It’s a lazy film, using the exact same script, set, setups, cameraman, and even Mary Field, excellent as Miss Totten once again. One can only talk around this movie; it defies criticism. Except perhaps to say that Steve Cochran and Virginia Mayo, neither of whom Hawks wanted, do just fine in it. Hawks made Mayo go to a warehouse and yell to lower her voice, which didn’t work, but she is dressed up and hair-doed as a Hawks woman, and she gives us a dame of fine sexual insolence such as we have come to rely on from Hawks. She watched Stanwyck’s performance in the earlier film over and over, but she does just fine on her own; it’s one of her best screen performances. A cast of brilliant supporting players, Felix Bressart and F. Hugh Herbert among others, founder when they are acting, and the musicians founder when they are not playing, but when they are you will hear Lionel Hampton do duets with Armstrong and with the redoubtable Goodman, and for a moment things almost seem worthwhile. For a short time, it was the number one box office draw in the nation. The Death Valley of the 50s was about to begin.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Danny Kaye, Directed by Howard Hawks, F. Hugh Herbert, Felix Bressart, Gangster Comedy, MUSICAL NUMBERS, Steve Cochran, Virginia Mayo

 

Portrait Of Jennie

16 Sep

Portrait Of Jennie – Directed by William Dieterle. Ghost Story. A bum artist becomes a genius through visitations from a long-dead girl. 86 minutes Black and White 1948.

* * *

An actress of minute talent, Jennifer Jones loomed large in the films of the 40s, and my tendency is to dismiss her, as it is to dismiss Gene Tierney, as an actress without content, and it’s not fair to what talent they do possess. I always felt Jones was rather dopey, and yet she’s pretty good here and perfectly cast for two reasons, because the girl, after all, is a ghost and has no content, and because the picture was produced by Jones’ husband David O. Selznick. Selznick was a producer, but he was actually an auteur. He was a man of robust energy, great charm, appeal, generosity, honesty, experience, fun, and skill, but once a picture was in train he became a horror of intrusiveness.  Interfering, writing, rewriting, reshooting, redirecting, memoing up the wazoo, riding his people like a slave driver, with no consideration for anyone – what was he up to? In every case what he was up to, without knowing it, was making the picture about himself. He did not want to make a picture, he wanted to be the picture. His most famous example of this is Gone With The Wind: Scarlet O’Hara is exactly like Selznick himself – charming, ruthless, sexually without morals, ambitious, overwhelming, fun, attractive, in love with the wrong person, and so deserving you can deny nothing to him. Scarlett’s story is Selznick. Each of his films was like this, and Portrait Of Jennie is another one still, although by the time it is made Selznick had come to the frayed end of his stories. Each human being has more than one story in him, and this one is the story of a man who creates an ideal girl and how she in turn makes him creative. This is what he had done in his actual life. Moreover, Selznick casts as the girl the woman he had stolen from her husband and made his magical mistress and muse and movie star, Jennifer Jones. Here he even sets her up with a story with her very own name, Jennie. Jones has to travel in a year from age 12 to age 25, and she does it well right up to the clumsy finale. She uses the trick of keeping her mouth open to suggest ingénue appeal, but she does it good. A supporting cast of astounding strength is asked to atlas-up this edifice of a feather: Ethel Barrymore with her voice of pained patience, huge eyes, and old amusement, the greatly lively Cecil Kellaway as the art dealer, David Wayne as a bright mick, Lillian Gish as a nun, Florence Bates as a heartless landlady, Henry Hull and Felix Bressart. They’re all just fine. Selznick often used Joseph Cotton in his films, an actor of deeply suburban genius and no rival sex appeal whatever. He is most carefully miscast as the artist.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Cecil Kellaway, Ethel Barrymore, Felix Bressart, Ghost Story, Henry Hull, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotton, Lillian Gish, ROMANTIC DRAMA

 
 
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