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Archive for the ‘Guy Kibbee’ Category

Gone With The wind

24 Jun

Gone With The Wind – directed by George Cukor, Sam Wood, Victor Fleming, Alfred Hitchcock*. Costume Drama. 221 minutes Color 1939.
★★★★★
The Story: A spoiled determined Southern belle takes on the prewar South, The Civil War, The Reconstruction and jeopardizes her entire love-life in the process.
~
I saw Gone With The Wind in 1939 when it first came out. My mother took my brother and me to a matinée at the Roosevelt in Auburndale on Northern Boulevard, Queens. In the intermission, a drawing won you a piece of thick white china with a double red rim.

I have seen it maybe four times since.

I remember the first time because of the film’s longueurs. I didn’t understand the history, and of course I was not interested to understand the love stories. I was six. But I understood the characters, and I understand them now in the same way as then, for they are clearly drawn.

Belle Watling was a woman outside society, but of big heart. Mammy was also of big heart and a firm disciplinarian who understood tradition better than anyone. Prissy was a foolish fish flopping about. Laura Hope Crews was an overstuffed bird with discombobulated feathers who never stopped cheeping. Thomas Mitchell was the impractical loving father. Harry Davenport was a big hearted and practical spirit. Ward Bond was a dumb cop. Barbara O’Neil was the serious practical mother. The O’Hara sisters of Anne Rutherford and Evelyn Keyes were squawking, jealous jilted sisters. Leslie Howard was the milksop aristocrat focus of all love attention. Olivia de Havilland was the benign spirit. Rhett Butler was a virile charming gunrunner crook. And Scarlet O’Hara was the vixen about whom all the others circled.

The rest of it bored me.

But what I did also understand, and this was all I understood on a gut level, was the huge change from the pastel organza of the sunny and lazy life of Tara, Twelve Oaks, and The Old South into the serious hard-working, and dark red rep décor of The Reconstruction.

The next time I saw it was also a matinée. At the Bayside, Queens. I was preteen. Those were the days I left a movie to stumble into the daylight but still be in the film, in its values and color and mood and lesson.

This time I knew it was a great film, because I knew it was all about Melanie Wilkes. It was about goodness, and how it prevails over selfishness and self-centeredness, with its love and its kindness. What had not gone with the wind was the strength of that gentleness. Oh, if only I could be good! Seeing Olivia de Havilland I thought I could be. I was mistaken.

If I ever saw it again in a movie house, I don’t remember. It’s a wonderful film to see in a picture palace, because of the reach of its history, its settings, its human content, its character types, and its length. Indeed, its very intimacies are spectacular.

The third time I saw it, I knew it was all about Scarlet and about home.

I saw it again yesterday in my little old-peoples living room on VHS tape.

The color had bleached into yellows. And this time I felt the falseness of the production scenes with their painted drops. The film is well produced, though, the musical theme remains moving, everyone is perfectly cast, Hattie McDaniel remains a wonder.

Things that stirred me before now didn’t, such as the keen folly of Thomas Mitchell’s death and Oona Munson’s speech. Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler, though from Savannah, does not speak with a Southern accent. The famous boom shot of Scarlet crossing the open-air hospital of wounded Confederacy soldiers registers as phony, because neither Atlanta, nor any other city, ever had that wide an expanse of dirt as a street. It had once set me agog. No more.

But this time, yesterday, now I knew the film was brilliantly about a dysfunctional relationship.

And a perfect illustration of one. It was not about Scarlet’s misguided love for a man who might lust for her but never love her. Or rather, that was just the flimsy foundation of just how badly two people could contrive to get along, which was the real story unfolding. Scarlet and Rhett always said or did the wrong thing to one another at the right time.

I’ve loved my versions of Gone With The Wind. None of them are amiss. I recommend the picture to all. Clark Gable, for once, looks wonderful in period costumes, a mountain of masculinity, his humor charmed by the selfish hell-cat Vivien Leigh so aptly gives us. Two survivors who adore that quality in one another.

Does she win him back when, on another day, back in Tara, she figures out how to?

Why, of course she does.

• Did you know — Hitchcock, who at the time was under contract to Selznick to make Rebecca, story-boarded the Ward Bond scene with the women tatting as they await the results of their husbands’ raid on the encampment. Check it out. It’s a perfect Hitchcock suspense scene.

 

Gold Diggers Of 1933

19 Apr

Gold Diggers Of 1933 – directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Musical. Will three chorus girls land rich husbands? 97 minutes, Black and White 1933.

★★★★★

In writing a review of a movie I saw two days ago, I have to look up on Google to remind myself what the the heck the story was. Oh, yes, I remember now. It is, let us say, pleasingly forgettable.

For why should we not forget it? The point of the Warner Brothers Musicals is the appeal of the stark contrast of a striking presentation with the ordinariness of the story and the actors. At MGM Judy Garland was many things but ordinary was never one of them. Alice Fay and Betty Grable and Shirley Temple at Fox were lavishly unordinary. Rogers and Astaire frolic through the vast white telephone art deco concoctions at RKO, and you can mistake neither of them, together or apart, for anyone else at all.

But here at Warners we have the endearing Joan Blondell, someone leaning over the backyard fence for a good gossip. We have Ruby Keeler whose musical comedy talent verges on the indiscernible. She carefully watches her feet when dancing, and her singing voice makes a rusty bedspring glad it doesn’t sound worse. But she’s sufficiently pretty and has the correct specific weight to play opposite the collegiately cute Dick Powell, who does have talent, and also has the smarts to sing and act with such conviction as to completely elude embarrassing himself.

What we want is these perfectly accessible folks skirting around the sets and gesturing in odd counterpoint to them. For what is also going on is the Busy Berkeley kaleidoscopical monstrosities of choreography to give the lie to ordinariness at every glance. You think Warner Brothers is the out-at-elbows studio of the ‘30s? Nah. Here’s production values up the wazoo.

We return to the Warners musicals for the juxtaposition of the modest talents of the performers counterpoised against the immense immodesty of the regimental use of the females of the chorus numbers for which these musicals remain famous. Escapism knows no more distant exit than these deliriums.

Things start with the witty Ginger Rogers singing the great lampoon song, “We’re In The Money,” which was the Depression era mock-anthem. This in a movie which is to end in another production number, the funeral march of : “The Forgotten Man, ” the dirge of the impecunious.

Ginger is somewhat sidelined by the story of chorus girls eating beans while waiting for a part, for they are Aline MacMahon as the cynical funny one, Ruby Keeler as the star, and the one-in-between, Joan Blondell, who recites rather than sings the words to “The Forgotten Man,” and does so with enormous effect.

Probably the most popular songwriter American ever had was Harry Warren, and so the score also includes ”In The Shadows When I Sing To You.” That lovely actor Warren William injects a dose of realism as the out-of-town interloper, and a strain of actual elegance. But we don’t go to Warner’s movies for elegance. We go for the energy of the vulgar. It’s a great energy. Sometimes it frightens me. Sometimes I like it. Here, I like it.

 
 
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