INSIDE
Even during the Great Depression it was not uncommon for a person to take in two movies a week. This makes sense. Movies were only about a nickel, although a good double feature might run a dime. And there were tons of talent. Great actors included Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, Jean Harlow, Jean Arthur, James Cagney, Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn. The writers were often excellent, in particular Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges, and Herman Mankiewicz. And the familiar name of the director hinted at a style one could expect from the likes of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra.
The same dramatic genres existed then as do now: horror, gangsters, westerns, romantic comedy, police shows, political melodrama. And most of all, just as it is today, was crap. Some of the movies, however, were terrific crap. And others were simply terrific.
Of all the genres, the most conservative, and occasionally out and out reactionary, in the social message conveyed was--and remains--the horror film. During the 1930s, most of these types of films were productions of Universal Pictures. The movies were often directed by Tod Browning or James Whale and frequently starred Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney. Yet in the classics of the period (Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, The Werewolf of London, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) it was not the monster who threatened society. It was invariably the scientist. It was the lonely academician turned empiricist who risked the end of the world because he tried to play God, or because in his search for truth his ambitions became too great, or because he had the temerity to behave as if rules and laws did not apply to him. And it was always the scientist who was squashed, either by his own creation or by the local town folk.
Gangster films of the era (mainly produced by Warner Bros.) were no more radical than the horror films. But they certainly did have a style that was distinct. Storylines were as contemporary as the morning's radio bulletin, clothes were sleek and pricey, dialog careened across pool tables and bar stools, power was flattered by the camera, and there was a genuine sense of "This is actually happening!" And the outlaw was rarely beaten by society. It was the hoodlum's personal weakness that did him in. A perfect example of this occurred in the original Scarface, a Howard Hawk's film released in 1932. The law is neither stronger nor morally better than actor Paul Muni's character. The reason he dies is because he is pathologically committed to individualism and somewhat incestuously to his sister. Scarface not only dies. He dies slow.
Perhaps the most conservative of all the gangster films of the 1930s was William Wellman's Public Enemy. The year is 1931 and James Cagney has been turned into a tough guy by a cruel and indifferent society. Cagney's character has no need to be Number One. All he wants is to be loyal to his fellow criminals. When this loyalty gets him shot by a rival gang, he staggers, gasps, and mumbles, "I ain't so tough." It turns out he was just a sweetheart who died at the hands of duty.
MGM didn't make many horror or gangster films. In the 1930s, they preferred the theme of social responsibility. Mr. Social Responsibility in American cinema at the time was director Fritz Lang. His most interesting film was Fury, starring Spencer Tracy. Our hero is the near-victim of a wrongful hanging and spends the rest of the movie becoming as vicious and cruel as the mob upon which he demands his vengeance.
Probably the least collectivist-oriented of the alleged left wing of 1930s Hollywood was Frank Capra. Aside from having the good sense to exploit the ruralisms of actors such as Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, Capra was remarkable for the way he made even the mistakes of his leading characters seem like exercises in power. And of course the good guys always won. But in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941), the collective is saved by the individual hero, usually against the contrived will of itself. Frank Capra Jr. would bring this theme on into the late 1970s with the unreleased classic, Billy Jack Goes to Washington.
The big daddy of Depression-era filmmakers, the king of em all, yall, was John Ford. His skies, mountains and deserts were as large as the real things and told stories about themselves by just standing there. Most actors placed in front of such nature would have been dwarfed, but when Ford used the South (Tobacco Road) or the West (My Darling Clementine), the nature of those regions magnified the physical and internal characteristics of such actors as John Wayne and Henry Fonda. What made this in many ways conservative director so popular with the sons and daughters of the progressive movement was the way in which communities informed the strengths of the individual. In Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad-Henry Fonda reaches a point of transcendence or perhaps supernatural proclivities only as a result of having absorbed a series of events that have (or will have) affected other people much more than they have himself. In My Darling Clementine, Wyatt Earp-Henry Fonda does not truly endear himself with the town folk until he is persuaded to participate in a community dance. He doesn't want to do it, and when he finally relents, he is rigid as a pipe, but the crowd melts for him and he steals the show. These incidents--and there is at least one in every major John Ford film, including The Informer, Stagecoach, and How Green was my Valley--are not accidents. They are deliberate conventions to show the director's view of the way power works in the world.
The same dramatic genres existed then as do now: horror, gangsters, westerns, romantic comedy, police shows, political melodrama. And most of all, just as it is today, was crap. Some of the movies, however, were terrific crap. And others were simply terrific.
Of all the genres, the most conservative, and occasionally out and out reactionary, in the social message conveyed was--and remains--the horror film. During the 1930s, most of these types of films were productions of Universal Pictures. The movies were often directed by Tod Browning or James Whale and frequently starred Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney. Yet in the classics of the period (Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, The Werewolf of London, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) it was not the monster who threatened society. It was invariably the scientist. It was the lonely academician turned empiricist who risked the end of the world because he tried to play God, or because in his search for truth his ambitions became too great, or because he had the temerity to behave as if rules and laws did not apply to him. And it was always the scientist who was squashed, either by his own creation or by the local town folk.
Gangster films of the era (mainly produced by Warner Bros.) were no more radical than the horror films. But they certainly did have a style that was distinct. Storylines were as contemporary as the morning's radio bulletin, clothes were sleek and pricey, dialog careened across pool tables and bar stools, power was flattered by the camera, and there was a genuine sense of "This is actually happening!" And the outlaw was rarely beaten by society. It was the hoodlum's personal weakness that did him in. A perfect example of this occurred in the original Scarface, a Howard Hawk's film released in 1932. The law is neither stronger nor morally better than actor Paul Muni's character. The reason he dies is because he is pathologically committed to individualism and somewhat incestuously to his sister. Scarface not only dies. He dies slow.
Perhaps the most conservative of all the gangster films of the 1930s was William Wellman's Public Enemy. The year is 1931 and James Cagney has been turned into a tough guy by a cruel and indifferent society. Cagney's character has no need to be Number One. All he wants is to be loyal to his fellow criminals. When this loyalty gets him shot by a rival gang, he staggers, gasps, and mumbles, "I ain't so tough." It turns out he was just a sweetheart who died at the hands of duty.
MGM didn't make many horror or gangster films. In the 1930s, they preferred the theme of social responsibility. Mr. Social Responsibility in American cinema at the time was director Fritz Lang. His most interesting film was Fury, starring Spencer Tracy. Our hero is the near-victim of a wrongful hanging and spends the rest of the movie becoming as vicious and cruel as the mob upon which he demands his vengeance.
Probably the least collectivist-oriented of the alleged left wing of 1930s Hollywood was Frank Capra. Aside from having the good sense to exploit the ruralisms of actors such as Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, Capra was remarkable for the way he made even the mistakes of his leading characters seem like exercises in power. And of course the good guys always won. But in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941), the collective is saved by the individual hero, usually against the contrived will of itself. Frank Capra Jr. would bring this theme on into the late 1970s with the unreleased classic, Billy Jack Goes to Washington.
The big daddy of Depression-era filmmakers, the king of em all, yall, was John Ford. His skies, mountains and deserts were as large as the real things and told stories about themselves by just standing there. Most actors placed in front of such nature would have been dwarfed, but when Ford used the South (Tobacco Road) or the West (My Darling Clementine), the nature of those regions magnified the physical and internal characteristics of such actors as John Wayne and Henry Fonda. What made this in many ways conservative director so popular with the sons and daughters of the progressive movement was the way in which communities informed the strengths of the individual. In Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad-Henry Fonda reaches a point of transcendence or perhaps supernatural proclivities only as a result of having absorbed a series of events that have (or will have) affected other people much more than they have himself. In My Darling Clementine, Wyatt Earp-Henry Fonda does not truly endear himself with the town folk until he is persuaded to participate in a community dance. He doesn't want to do it, and when he finally relents, he is rigid as a pipe, but the crowd melts for him and he steals the show. These incidents--and there is at least one in every major John Ford film, including The Informer, Stagecoach, and How Green was my Valley--are not accidents. They are deliberate conventions to show the director's view of the way power works in the world.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
You have to willingly suspend a bit more than your disbelief to enjoy this movie, but if you are ready to do so, you are in for one of the best rides of your life.
First, you must forget that you remember Fred MacMurry from the TV show "My Three Sons."
Second, you must forget that you have never found Barbara Stanwyck attractive.
Third, you must forget that you tend to think of Edward G. Robinson as always playing a bad guy.
Finally, you should try to put the anachronistic voice-over narration out of your mind altogether and just focus on the dialogue.
If you can handle all of that, you will certainly love this motion picture.
Fred plays an insurance man named Neff, which fits, since screenwriter Raymond Chandler (the Shakespeare of detective fiction) was once in the insurance racket. (The original novel, of course, was written by James M. Cain.) All he cares about are sales. Sign them up on the line that is dotted and you'll keep the bosses off your jacket and out of your late model car. Unfortunately for him, he runs into Babs, who plays Phyllis Dietrichson, a spoiled wife of a cynical businessman who just doesn't appreciate all the perks of being wealthy. Phyllis would like to have the old boy murdered and lures Neff into a scheme to off the crotchety coot. If the police can be convinced that the death was by suicide, then the price goes up to $100,000 and Fred and Barbara can retire down Mexico way, playing the banjo and slugging back gin fizzes all the live long day. A pretty sweet deal, figures Neff, even though he doesn't actually cotton to a cold blooded murder. But what the hey? A toasty broad like Phyllis doesn't come down the tracks every day, although the midnight train to Croakville just might and the two schemers carrying out their plan with some sophistication.
Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), as with most everything else written by Chandler, relies less on plot than character ambiance. This is not merely film noir; this is insurance noir, or California noir, or even locust noir. California is, you will see, just a hotbed of soulless souls trying to find their way home beneath the desperadoes under the eaves, many of whom look like crucified thieves (and pardon the lift, Warren). A body grows numb from the palm trees, sunshine and baked freeways. A mind grows blind from the easy living. The heart turns hard and the money looks as fresh as Ellie Mae Clampett sunning herself down by the cement pond. Shadows box with the moonlight while bloodless humans take the elevator to the penthouse to confess their sins on the way out the window.
Edward G. Robinson takes the movie and runs with it, leaving the viewer wishing for more. He's brought in to ravel a series of plot twists that never go anywhere and it does not matter one bit because just watching that man stand there waiting for a telephone conversation to wrap up is more exciting than real life outside southern California could ever be. Here he is, as Barton Keyes, lecturing his idiot boss on the facts of life and death in the insurance business:
Come now, you've never read an actuarial table in your life, have you? Why, they've got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how committed: by poison, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison, subdivided by *types* of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth; suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from *steamboats*. But, Mr. Norton, of all the cases on record, there's not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train. And you know how fast that train was going at the point where the body was found? Fifteen miles an hour. Now how can anybody jump off a slow-moving train like that with any kind of expectation that he would kill himself? No. No soap, Mr. Norton. We're sunk, and we'll have to pay through the nose, and you know it.
That bit of monologue should tell you all you need to hook you through the lip with this movie. Then go sit down and read the collected works of Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West. You'll want to move to Los Angeles immediately just to see if it's all true, which it is. Frank Zappa's house can be yours for nine million.
First, you must forget that you remember Fred MacMurry from the TV show "My Three Sons."
Second, you must forget that you have never found Barbara Stanwyck attractive.
Third, you must forget that you tend to think of Edward G. Robinson as always playing a bad guy.
Finally, you should try to put the anachronistic voice-over narration out of your mind altogether and just focus on the dialogue.
If you can handle all of that, you will certainly love this motion picture.
Fred plays an insurance man named Neff, which fits, since screenwriter Raymond Chandler (the Shakespeare of detective fiction) was once in the insurance racket. (The original novel, of course, was written by James M. Cain.) All he cares about are sales. Sign them up on the line that is dotted and you'll keep the bosses off your jacket and out of your late model car. Unfortunately for him, he runs into Babs, who plays Phyllis Dietrichson, a spoiled wife of a cynical businessman who just doesn't appreciate all the perks of being wealthy. Phyllis would like to have the old boy murdered and lures Neff into a scheme to off the crotchety coot. If the police can be convinced that the death was by suicide, then the price goes up to $100,000 and Fred and Barbara can retire down Mexico way, playing the banjo and slugging back gin fizzes all the live long day. A pretty sweet deal, figures Neff, even though he doesn't actually cotton to a cold blooded murder. But what the hey? A toasty broad like Phyllis doesn't come down the tracks every day, although the midnight train to Croakville just might and the two schemers carrying out their plan with some sophistication.
Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), as with most everything else written by Chandler, relies less on plot than character ambiance. This is not merely film noir; this is insurance noir, or California noir, or even locust noir. California is, you will see, just a hotbed of soulless souls trying to find their way home beneath the desperadoes under the eaves, many of whom look like crucified thieves (and pardon the lift, Warren). A body grows numb from the palm trees, sunshine and baked freeways. A mind grows blind from the easy living. The heart turns hard and the money looks as fresh as Ellie Mae Clampett sunning herself down by the cement pond. Shadows box with the moonlight while bloodless humans take the elevator to the penthouse to confess their sins on the way out the window.
Edward G. Robinson takes the movie and runs with it, leaving the viewer wishing for more. He's brought in to ravel a series of plot twists that never go anywhere and it does not matter one bit because just watching that man stand there waiting for a telephone conversation to wrap up is more exciting than real life outside southern California could ever be. Here he is, as Barton Keyes, lecturing his idiot boss on the facts of life and death in the insurance business:
Come now, you've never read an actuarial table in your life, have you? Why, they've got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how committed: by poison, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison, subdivided by *types* of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth; suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from *steamboats*. But, Mr. Norton, of all the cases on record, there's not one single case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train. And you know how fast that train was going at the point where the body was found? Fifteen miles an hour. Now how can anybody jump off a slow-moving train like that with any kind of expectation that he would kill himself? No. No soap, Mr. Norton. We're sunk, and we'll have to pay through the nose, and you know it.
That bit of monologue should tell you all you need to hook you through the lip with this movie. Then go sit down and read the collected works of Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West. You'll want to move to Los Angeles immediately just to see if it's all true, which it is. Frank Zappa's house can be yours for nine million.
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
Hemingway has never translated well to the screen, so it is just as well that scenarist Jules Furthman, co-writer William Faulkner and director Howard Hawks decided to pay little attention to the inspiration for To Have and Have Not (1944) and instead simply focused on telling a great story well.
It would be reasonable for people my own age and younger to do a polite roll of the eyes about the nostalgia component that has been attached to this movie for decades. This was the motion picture that brought Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall together for the first time, both on film and in real life. Bacall was all of nineteen and Bogart was, well, not nineteen. The original story took place in Cuba, but Hawks caved into to the FDR administration and moved the plot to Martinique, in what was then German-controlled Vichy France. It's quaint that Harry calls Marie "Slim" and that Slim calls Harry "Steve." Then, of course, we have the hipster dialogue, as when Slim says, "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow."
People do not talk that way much nowadays and if memory serves they never have. Nothing about that matters at all. No one has asked me if I've ever been stung by a dead bee, either, but it works great when Walter Brennan asks it repeatedly in this movie.
So the tendency is to roll the eyes politely. But once that impulse has been placated, the viewer is in store for the treat of a lifetime. Oh, the movie may lack the intensity of Casablanca, with which it is often compared. The ending may feel a bit unresolved, especially since the real wrap up ended up in another Bogart and Bacall spectacle called Key Largo. None of that will matter much if at all to a contemporary watcher because the damned majesty of the two leads together (and the remarkable sexual tension) as well as the commaraderie between Bogart and Brennan, and the sweetness between Brennan and Bacall, snaps your eyes forward and leaves your mouth agape.
It should also be pointed out that, give or take the propaganda impact of an anti-Nazi movie during World War Two, we were after all fighting fascism and this movie makes it clear that Harry Morgan (Bogart) has nothing but contempt for the Fascist regimes. We don't make all that many great films with that subject matter these days, probably because the war has been over a while and there's a tendency to assume that it cannot happen here despite the fact that is has happened here. It is not a gun or a bullet or a grenade that forces innocents into a gas chamber. It is a hard heart that kills. And we as a nation have been slipping into that hard-hearted stance for a long time now, ossifying just a little more with every real or imagined injustice. Whether it's a bum crawling across an alley on his way to the dumpster or an immigrant crawling across Sonora looking for a community, some of us yield to the temptation to perceive these folks as aggressors. All it takes is some small band of psychopaths in foreign garb blowing up buildings in the name of their own private deity and the fear of the unknown, a xenophobia of genesis, sets in. I can't speak for everyone, but I've felt that temptation myself. I have even given into it on occasion, and I should know better. To get myself back in shape, I reminisce with old movies such as this one, and I strain to regain the insight that once came so effortlessly.
I confer the same blessings onto you.
It would be reasonable for people my own age and younger to do a polite roll of the eyes about the nostalgia component that has been attached to this movie for decades. This was the motion picture that brought Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall together for the first time, both on film and in real life. Bacall was all of nineteen and Bogart was, well, not nineteen. The original story took place in Cuba, but Hawks caved into to the FDR administration and moved the plot to Martinique, in what was then German-controlled Vichy France. It's quaint that Harry calls Marie "Slim" and that Slim calls Harry "Steve." Then, of course, we have the hipster dialogue, as when Slim says, "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow."
People do not talk that way much nowadays and if memory serves they never have. Nothing about that matters at all. No one has asked me if I've ever been stung by a dead bee, either, but it works great when Walter Brennan asks it repeatedly in this movie.
So the tendency is to roll the eyes politely. But once that impulse has been placated, the viewer is in store for the treat of a lifetime. Oh, the movie may lack the intensity of Casablanca, with which it is often compared. The ending may feel a bit unresolved, especially since the real wrap up ended up in another Bogart and Bacall spectacle called Key Largo. None of that will matter much if at all to a contemporary watcher because the damned majesty of the two leads together (and the remarkable sexual tension) as well as the commaraderie between Bogart and Brennan, and the sweetness between Brennan and Bacall, snaps your eyes forward and leaves your mouth agape.
It should also be pointed out that, give or take the propaganda impact of an anti-Nazi movie during World War Two, we were after all fighting fascism and this movie makes it clear that Harry Morgan (Bogart) has nothing but contempt for the Fascist regimes. We don't make all that many great films with that subject matter these days, probably because the war has been over a while and there's a tendency to assume that it cannot happen here despite the fact that is has happened here. It is not a gun or a bullet or a grenade that forces innocents into a gas chamber. It is a hard heart that kills. And we as a nation have been slipping into that hard-hearted stance for a long time now, ossifying just a little more with every real or imagined injustice. Whether it's a bum crawling across an alley on his way to the dumpster or an immigrant crawling across Sonora looking for a community, some of us yield to the temptation to perceive these folks as aggressors. All it takes is some small band of psychopaths in foreign garb blowing up buildings in the name of their own private deity and the fear of the unknown, a xenophobia of genesis, sets in. I can't speak for everyone, but I've felt that temptation myself. I have even given into it on occasion, and I should know better. To get myself back in shape, I reminisce with old movies such as this one, and I strain to regain the insight that once came so effortlessly.
I confer the same blessings onto you.
BLACKBOARD JUNGLE
Ah, to be uncool now that Death stands outside the bedroom window rattling his chains, a disappointed grin glowing yellow beneath the self-created smog.
A plot-line can be dependent on conflict between us and them. That approach legitimizes any number of trashy squirm flicks, most of such dribble indicating a lot less imagination and guts than Blackboard Jungle. Glenn Ford plays the prototypical square, the war vet with wounded pride, yet the whore with a heart of gold. Because his wife Ann (Anne Francis) suffered a miscarriage before the story began, ole Glenn wants to reach the souls and minds of troubled high school kids who might otherwise be denied the divinity of his presence. (If that sounds a bit far-fetched, I guarantee you it plays out with more honesty here than the sniveling cynics who have populated the majority of teen movies by the likes of, say, John Hughes, a hack if ever such existed and whose ability to retain fame after death mystifies me more than the properties of enhanced uranium.) The juvenile delinquents--as the written warning at the top of the movie terms them--have other ideas, as befits the members of a crowded urban data factory where the institutional goal appears to be to warehouse the young folks until (and if) they reach the age of maturity. These kids do not obsess over Halloween, Christmas, New Year's Eve, Graduation Day, or any other conventional celebration. What they care about is using rebellion as a means. What Glenn Ford, as Richard Dadier (Daddy-o), cares about is proving to himself that he possesses what it takes to motivate the students' interest in getting an education. It will not surprise you to learn that he teaches English.
What sets this movie apart from a hundred other films about what a bunch of little monsters the kids are and how impotent the educational system is to combat them lies in its inspirational yearning to connect sympathy from even the worst of the kids without vomiting up phony sentiment. Daddy-o may be ex-military, but he isn't a Michelle Pfeiffer or a Jim Belushi looking to beat sense into these kids. On the contrary, Ford takes several unwarranted beatings with better grace than any "cool" teacher could muster.
The worst of the kids, Artie West (Vic Morrow), comes across with complete believability, so much so that when he tries to con Ford into believing his innocent act, we cringe a bit when the teacher sees through his malarkey. A very young Sidney Poitier earns every good word ever written about him as a complex student named Miller, part antagonist, part future Temptations singer, part leader, part friend.
The one thing that unites every character here is that none of them give a warm glass of spit about being cool. These folks struggle to survive, usually in spite of one another. Cool doesn't enter into it. Naturally enough, that lack of concern and effort paradoxically makes even the worst of them hip, which is always better than cool. Hip waltzes with passion, while cool skips to a superficial dance. Hip implies an unspoken knowledge, an awareness of how the game is rigged. Cool comes from the asshole who rigged the game in the first place. Hip can be tasted. Cool can be worn.
Glenn Ford, for all his infernal squareness, develops a type of hipness. It comes to him when he shows the class a cartoon movie of "Jack and the Beanstalk," a device he uses to get the kids to identify with various fictional characters. Vic Morrow, for all his murderous inclinations, spells hipness out to Daddy-o that a stint in reform school or prison will be a swell way to beat the draft. Poitier is hip to what his future probably holds, but he refuses to knuckle beneath the artificial pressures of ghetto life, so he has taught himself both piano and auto repair. He also exudes a smart kind of fearlessness that falls just short of bravado. We know from the second we meet him smoking in the boys room that he is the one kid on school who can back up the bullshit.
The tension that director and screenwriter Richard Brooks works out of Ford and Poitier together threatens to snap at any moment, so watching those two relatively young men at what may have been their respective primes shakes the viewer out of any somnambulance he or she may be stifling. At the outset, Ford tries to play Poitier by enlisting him as a type of narc. Poitier does not care to be anyone's Mod Squad stooge, yet he feels antagonized by the racial tension coming from the Irish students against the Latinos and the Blacks. Meanwhile, Ford has to put up with the misguided efforts of his fellow faculty member caricatures (cynic, lush, debutante, etc) while hoping that his wife doesn't blame herself if the child they are expecting does not come to term.
In short, the movie that no less than John Lennon claimed as an inspiration to him when he saw it way back in 1955 holds up better today than craven crapola such as Dangerous Minds or The Principal. It may not be cool, but it sure do be hip, satchmo.
A plot-line can be dependent on conflict between us and them. That approach legitimizes any number of trashy squirm flicks, most of such dribble indicating a lot less imagination and guts than Blackboard Jungle. Glenn Ford plays the prototypical square, the war vet with wounded pride, yet the whore with a heart of gold. Because his wife Ann (Anne Francis) suffered a miscarriage before the story began, ole Glenn wants to reach the souls and minds of troubled high school kids who might otherwise be denied the divinity of his presence. (If that sounds a bit far-fetched, I guarantee you it plays out with more honesty here than the sniveling cynics who have populated the majority of teen movies by the likes of, say, John Hughes, a hack if ever such existed and whose ability to retain fame after death mystifies me more than the properties of enhanced uranium.) The juvenile delinquents--as the written warning at the top of the movie terms them--have other ideas, as befits the members of a crowded urban data factory where the institutional goal appears to be to warehouse the young folks until (and if) they reach the age of maturity. These kids do not obsess over Halloween, Christmas, New Year's Eve, Graduation Day, or any other conventional celebration. What they care about is using rebellion as a means. What Glenn Ford, as Richard Dadier (Daddy-o), cares about is proving to himself that he possesses what it takes to motivate the students' interest in getting an education. It will not surprise you to learn that he teaches English.
What sets this movie apart from a hundred other films about what a bunch of little monsters the kids are and how impotent the educational system is to combat them lies in its inspirational yearning to connect sympathy from even the worst of the kids without vomiting up phony sentiment. Daddy-o may be ex-military, but he isn't a Michelle Pfeiffer or a Jim Belushi looking to beat sense into these kids. On the contrary, Ford takes several unwarranted beatings with better grace than any "cool" teacher could muster.
The worst of the kids, Artie West (Vic Morrow), comes across with complete believability, so much so that when he tries to con Ford into believing his innocent act, we cringe a bit when the teacher sees through his malarkey. A very young Sidney Poitier earns every good word ever written about him as a complex student named Miller, part antagonist, part future Temptations singer, part leader, part friend.
The one thing that unites every character here is that none of them give a warm glass of spit about being cool. These folks struggle to survive, usually in spite of one another. Cool doesn't enter into it. Naturally enough, that lack of concern and effort paradoxically makes even the worst of them hip, which is always better than cool. Hip waltzes with passion, while cool skips to a superficial dance. Hip implies an unspoken knowledge, an awareness of how the game is rigged. Cool comes from the asshole who rigged the game in the first place. Hip can be tasted. Cool can be worn.
Glenn Ford, for all his infernal squareness, develops a type of hipness. It comes to him when he shows the class a cartoon movie of "Jack and the Beanstalk," a device he uses to get the kids to identify with various fictional characters. Vic Morrow, for all his murderous inclinations, spells hipness out to Daddy-o that a stint in reform school or prison will be a swell way to beat the draft. Poitier is hip to what his future probably holds, but he refuses to knuckle beneath the artificial pressures of ghetto life, so he has taught himself both piano and auto repair. He also exudes a smart kind of fearlessness that falls just short of bravado. We know from the second we meet him smoking in the boys room that he is the one kid on school who can back up the bullshit.
The tension that director and screenwriter Richard Brooks works out of Ford and Poitier together threatens to snap at any moment, so watching those two relatively young men at what may have been their respective primes shakes the viewer out of any somnambulance he or she may be stifling. At the outset, Ford tries to play Poitier by enlisting him as a type of narc. Poitier does not care to be anyone's Mod Squad stooge, yet he feels antagonized by the racial tension coming from the Irish students against the Latinos and the Blacks. Meanwhile, Ford has to put up with the misguided efforts of his fellow faculty member caricatures (cynic, lush, debutante, etc) while hoping that his wife doesn't blame herself if the child they are expecting does not come to term.
In short, the movie that no less than John Lennon claimed as an inspiration to him when he saw it way back in 1955 holds up better today than craven crapola such as Dangerous Minds or The Principal. It may not be cool, but it sure do be hip, satchmo.
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
For anyone needing evidence that nothing new has happened in American cinema in more than a while, we offer a recent remark by actor Dustin Hoffman to the UK Independent: “I think right now television is the best that it’s ever been and I think that it’s the worst that film has ever been – in the 50 years that I’ve been doing it, it’s the worst.”
The first half of Hoffman's statement is spurious--television does not exist, at least not in the sense of historical interpretation implied by the observation. "Television" today harnesses youth-oriented technology in its drive to maintain an ahistorical experience for the viewer. High Definition, Netflix, satellite transmissions, internet access: we are a long way from a box with rabbit ears, at least in terms of science. In terms of art or whatever "best" may mean, the comparison breaks apart because on one side we have an emphasis on story and on the other the thrust is technique.
But the knife in Hoffman's words mostly applies to movies. And that is one experience that is kicking to hang on to the tradition of its presentations while making concessions to the mode of communication. Despite the near death of the drive-in theater, the omnipresence of the multiplex, the alleged convenience of online streaming, nothing yet has been able to wipe out the magnificence of sitting in a darkened cinema with cold popcorn, overpriced soda splashing into your lap, sticky concrete beneath your feet, an idiot child kicking the back of your seat, a fat man wearing a plumed hat taking the spot directly in front of you, and a date with a cell phone obsession parked clingingly next to you, all juxtaposed against your own internal anticipation that the motion picture about to appear on the giant screen in front of you will reveal itself to be the most marvelous example of cinematic pulchritude ever imagined by mankind. That you have inadvertently wandered into a screening of something like Fast and Furious 7 is beside the point.
The technological progression in movies that birthed the "blockbuster" has reduced shooting times from one hundred days to closer to twenty. We've also seen a profusion of reboots, franchises, specialized documentaries, mass produced romantic comedies and a bane of animated features, all of which seem to lack a certain "organic" nature that film-goers once took for granted. Of course, some people used to complain that "talkies" would be the death of the art form, too, just as my great-grandparents fretted that television would kill off the movie theater in the same way it did radio. But the introduction of audible dialogue into motion pictures furthered the expansion of the story (after the initial novelty wore off), whereas special effects do not inherently expand anything beyond superficiality.
In 2004 I sat in just such a movie theater waiting for Fahrenheit 9/11 to play. The Coming Attractions started up first, of course, and I sat with a somewhat horrified gape pressed onto my mouth as the "new and improved" version of The Manchurian Candidate was splashed in pieces upon the screen. I felt my fists getting tight and I might have thrown something at the projectionist had it not been for the fact that the other people I was there with--all of whom were half my age--groaned in unison, one of them muttering something about the lack of originality in Hollywood. It feels good to know you are not the only Luddite in the room.
A few movies have had such an impact on the public that the idea of remaking them--even with an eye towards making them more contemporary--revolts the informed cinema fanatic. Would you remake Casablanca, Raging Bull, Patton, M*A*S*H? These films are specific to either historical events or people and updating them would somehow cheapen the original impact. Contemporizing the films would, I suspect, dumb down the audience. It would unquestionably infuriate most lovers of the originals. But most of all, these movies have no need to be rebooted because they translate to any time period inhabited by sentient beings. The same is true of some movies without the constrictions of history. Jules and Jim, Goodfellas, The Bicycle Thief, Jaws: new technology would do nothing to improve the experience of enjoying these movies. One of the funnier segments of Robert Altman's The Player occurs when Buck Henry pitches the idea of a new movie to the producer: The Graduate II.
So even though Hoffman speaks in absolutes regrettably reminiscent of a Donald Trump speech, he makes his point at a time in our presumed evolution when a lot of people have sort of shrugged their shoulders and decided that the real fun is to be found on TCM or on the DVD shelves of the local Zia Records Store.
The original (1962) Manchurian Candidate (and how I loathe the need for that adjective) stars Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey as returning Korean War veterans who, along with several of their co-soldiers, have been brainwashed by the communists. Harvey, being the most susceptible to the programming, has been selected as a future assassin. His character is decidedly unlikable, except when he is in the company of his mother, played by Angela Lansbury. She oozes such glowing yellow evil that Harvey actually comes to life when she is in the room.
We do not understand The Manchurian Candidate too quickly. We see something bad happening, we recognize its implications, we ache for the nightmares the brainwashing creates, but it takes a while for the viewer to fathom what is happening. The various flashback scene devices director John Frankenheimer developed add to the challenge of getting things straight in our minds--and that is just as it should be because it aids the telling of the story for us to go through a state of confusion similar to that of the characters onscreen.
I do not want to give away too many details of the film here, but I do want to encourage you to watch the movie. As pure propaganda, nothing beats it. If one were looking to start a new Cold War, this film could launch such a thing all by itself. It also works as satire, as when James Gregory's character, a stooge U.S. Senator, claims to have the names of 207 members of the communist party who have infiltrated the U.S. Defense Department. If Sinatra's acting falls a bit short of his singing abilities, he's still better here than he was in From Here to Eternity, where he was far from a failure. Lansbury's performance devastates, Leslie Parrish is likeable, and the Chinese psychiatrist will keep you up nights wondering how you know what you think you know.
Epistemology is really what the movie is about and that remains one of the best reasons to go out of your way to see The Manchurian Candidate. You will be able to ignore the fact that Sinatra's girlfriend, played by Janet Leigh, comes across in her opening moments as if she is a spy for the KGB and exits having contributed next to nothing.
Leigh
Maryland is a beautiful state.
Sinatra
This is Delaware.
Leigh
I know. I was one of the Original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this straight. Nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter.
Sinatra
I guess so. Columbus is a tremendous football town.
What you will not ignore is how fast you attach your own emotions to these otherwise engaging characters and how engrossed you become in yearning for their salvation.
Once you have seen this movie, you will never have seen anything quite like it.
The first half of Hoffman's statement is spurious--television does not exist, at least not in the sense of historical interpretation implied by the observation. "Television" today harnesses youth-oriented technology in its drive to maintain an ahistorical experience for the viewer. High Definition, Netflix, satellite transmissions, internet access: we are a long way from a box with rabbit ears, at least in terms of science. In terms of art or whatever "best" may mean, the comparison breaks apart because on one side we have an emphasis on story and on the other the thrust is technique.
But the knife in Hoffman's words mostly applies to movies. And that is one experience that is kicking to hang on to the tradition of its presentations while making concessions to the mode of communication. Despite the near death of the drive-in theater, the omnipresence of the multiplex, the alleged convenience of online streaming, nothing yet has been able to wipe out the magnificence of sitting in a darkened cinema with cold popcorn, overpriced soda splashing into your lap, sticky concrete beneath your feet, an idiot child kicking the back of your seat, a fat man wearing a plumed hat taking the spot directly in front of you, and a date with a cell phone obsession parked clingingly next to you, all juxtaposed against your own internal anticipation that the motion picture about to appear on the giant screen in front of you will reveal itself to be the most marvelous example of cinematic pulchritude ever imagined by mankind. That you have inadvertently wandered into a screening of something like Fast and Furious 7 is beside the point.
The technological progression in movies that birthed the "blockbuster" has reduced shooting times from one hundred days to closer to twenty. We've also seen a profusion of reboots, franchises, specialized documentaries, mass produced romantic comedies and a bane of animated features, all of which seem to lack a certain "organic" nature that film-goers once took for granted. Of course, some people used to complain that "talkies" would be the death of the art form, too, just as my great-grandparents fretted that television would kill off the movie theater in the same way it did radio. But the introduction of audible dialogue into motion pictures furthered the expansion of the story (after the initial novelty wore off), whereas special effects do not inherently expand anything beyond superficiality.
In 2004 I sat in just such a movie theater waiting for Fahrenheit 9/11 to play. The Coming Attractions started up first, of course, and I sat with a somewhat horrified gape pressed onto my mouth as the "new and improved" version of The Manchurian Candidate was splashed in pieces upon the screen. I felt my fists getting tight and I might have thrown something at the projectionist had it not been for the fact that the other people I was there with--all of whom were half my age--groaned in unison, one of them muttering something about the lack of originality in Hollywood. It feels good to know you are not the only Luddite in the room.
A few movies have had such an impact on the public that the idea of remaking them--even with an eye towards making them more contemporary--revolts the informed cinema fanatic. Would you remake Casablanca, Raging Bull, Patton, M*A*S*H? These films are specific to either historical events or people and updating them would somehow cheapen the original impact. Contemporizing the films would, I suspect, dumb down the audience. It would unquestionably infuriate most lovers of the originals. But most of all, these movies have no need to be rebooted because they translate to any time period inhabited by sentient beings. The same is true of some movies without the constrictions of history. Jules and Jim, Goodfellas, The Bicycle Thief, Jaws: new technology would do nothing to improve the experience of enjoying these movies. One of the funnier segments of Robert Altman's The Player occurs when Buck Henry pitches the idea of a new movie to the producer: The Graduate II.
So even though Hoffman speaks in absolutes regrettably reminiscent of a Donald Trump speech, he makes his point at a time in our presumed evolution when a lot of people have sort of shrugged their shoulders and decided that the real fun is to be found on TCM or on the DVD shelves of the local Zia Records Store.
The original (1962) Manchurian Candidate (and how I loathe the need for that adjective) stars Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey as returning Korean War veterans who, along with several of their co-soldiers, have been brainwashed by the communists. Harvey, being the most susceptible to the programming, has been selected as a future assassin. His character is decidedly unlikable, except when he is in the company of his mother, played by Angela Lansbury. She oozes such glowing yellow evil that Harvey actually comes to life when she is in the room.
We do not understand The Manchurian Candidate too quickly. We see something bad happening, we recognize its implications, we ache for the nightmares the brainwashing creates, but it takes a while for the viewer to fathom what is happening. The various flashback scene devices director John Frankenheimer developed add to the challenge of getting things straight in our minds--and that is just as it should be because it aids the telling of the story for us to go through a state of confusion similar to that of the characters onscreen.
I do not want to give away too many details of the film here, but I do want to encourage you to watch the movie. As pure propaganda, nothing beats it. If one were looking to start a new Cold War, this film could launch such a thing all by itself. It also works as satire, as when James Gregory's character, a stooge U.S. Senator, claims to have the names of 207 members of the communist party who have infiltrated the U.S. Defense Department. If Sinatra's acting falls a bit short of his singing abilities, he's still better here than he was in From Here to Eternity, where he was far from a failure. Lansbury's performance devastates, Leslie Parrish is likeable, and the Chinese psychiatrist will keep you up nights wondering how you know what you think you know.
Epistemology is really what the movie is about and that remains one of the best reasons to go out of your way to see The Manchurian Candidate. You will be able to ignore the fact that Sinatra's girlfriend, played by Janet Leigh, comes across in her opening moments as if she is a spy for the KGB and exits having contributed next to nothing.
Leigh
Maryland is a beautiful state.
Sinatra
This is Delaware.
Leigh
I know. I was one of the Original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this straight. Nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter.
Sinatra
I guess so. Columbus is a tremendous football town.
What you will not ignore is how fast you attach your own emotions to these otherwise engaging characters and how engrossed you become in yearning for their salvation.
Once you have seen this movie, you will never have seen anything quite like it.
KEY LARGO
The bruises to my ego no doubt will fade, just as the cuts to my moral cranium will blend back to normal, but despite all my protestations as to what a monumental artistic and popular success is that movie known as Key Largo (1948), as it happens, Lisa Ann, known to loyal readers as the long suffering roommate, may have been closer to the truth when she pronounced the movie "Very stupid." She called it a "vanity movie," the equivalent of some weak and overdone story that tried to sell tickets based on the glam and glitter of stars Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Edward G. Robinson. "I have been to musicals," she declared, "on a brick and mortar stage that were more realistic. The costume designer was only interested in the women looking perfect and the men looking dapper throughout the wind-machine hurricane punctuated by that overpowering music score (Max Steiner). There was no duress in this movie except the delivery of the lines."
"Did you feel bad about the Indians?" I asked.
"Of course, I did. The Indians were not given proper attention. If you're going to call them out with any importance, you need to explain why you're calling them out, especially with Indians."
She was not impressed that one of the Seminoles was played by Jay Silverheels.
"They did not get the respect they deserved. Do you realize how many people at the time watched that movie and said, 'Stupid Indians.' Back in those days, the American Indians were viewed very poorly. A lot of the popular conceptions of Indians comes from movies like this. It really reinforces the stereotypes."
The last time I watched Key Largo was fifteen years ago. I loved it. A friend of mine and I walked around together sparring back and forth as McCloud and Rocco. "What's one more Johnny Rocco in the world, more or less?" Or "Why don't you show the storm your gun, Rocco?" "Yeah! More! That's what I want." Or even "You filth." Or especially, "What I believed was that we were fighting to save a world in which there would be no need for a Johnny Rocco."
Then again, lots of movies have great dialogue.
"There's no symbolism, no moral parallelism, no point to any of it," she said with an indignant swing of her head.
I don't quite hold with this degree of vitriol about the John Huston-directed film. But I have learned to listen to the LSR, because to not listen often feeds my detriment. Sometimes I even think hard about what she says, especially when we disagree.
I don't quite agree with the "no symbolism" argument. But maybe that's just a semantic distinction. Think of it instead as personification. Just as the mountain in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (also directed by Huston, also starring Bogart, and also from 1948) was itself a character in the movie, so was the storm in Key Largo a central player, an invisible heroine bent on trying to crush the villains, even if she had to wipe out everyone else to get the job done. On the other hand, that sort of contrivance may strike contemporary audiences as corny, maudlin, or just plain stupid.
I'm even willing to grant that the performances by Bacall and Bogart were self-serving. And if the Nora Temple character had little to do besides fawn over old memories and romantic visions of the impending future, I can only counter that I found more depth in her gaze than in the theatrics of any one else in the movie.
As to the cast, Robinson's Johnny Rocco truly terrifies, at least to my way of thinking. That may be why some people don't go for this film with the enthusiasm I brought to it. After all, Rocco threatens to shoot an old man for praying, murders a cop in the coldest of blood, ridicules a returning war veteran, dangles Scotch in front of his concubine just for meanness, and plans on flooding the American economy with counterfeit currency. He is, according to the movie, exactly what we were fighting against in World War II.
That's a little bit of a problem. If you want to argue that the parallel is Rocco to Mussolini or Hitler, it doesn't quite float. Oh, both sides of that coin were hell bent on conquest and may indeed have been pure evil, but the writer and director did pull back from making that parallel clear, probably from fear of pissing off too many Italian-Americans. (And if you doubt that theory, remember that in "The Untouchables" TV show, not even al Capone himself was portrayed as Italian, and for precisely the same reason.)
Again, to give Lisa Ann her credit, certain aspects of the movie do fail to hold together. Too much of the struggle does come across limping rather than charging and those fifteen years since I last saw Key Largo have had their effect on me. Perhaps I've succumbed to a stand-off between fatalistic Phil and moralistic Mershon. I don't know. Let us just say I liked the movie a bit more than she did. And even if you reading this remain true believers of the justified mythology of the brilliance of Bogart and Huston, you may do well to consider that some heroes exist in small part for purposes of self-criticism.
Hoping you are the same.
"Did you feel bad about the Indians?" I asked.
"Of course, I did. The Indians were not given proper attention. If you're going to call them out with any importance, you need to explain why you're calling them out, especially with Indians."
She was not impressed that one of the Seminoles was played by Jay Silverheels.
"They did not get the respect they deserved. Do you realize how many people at the time watched that movie and said, 'Stupid Indians.' Back in those days, the American Indians were viewed very poorly. A lot of the popular conceptions of Indians comes from movies like this. It really reinforces the stereotypes."
The last time I watched Key Largo was fifteen years ago. I loved it. A friend of mine and I walked around together sparring back and forth as McCloud and Rocco. "What's one more Johnny Rocco in the world, more or less?" Or "Why don't you show the storm your gun, Rocco?" "Yeah! More! That's what I want." Or even "You filth." Or especially, "What I believed was that we were fighting to save a world in which there would be no need for a Johnny Rocco."
Then again, lots of movies have great dialogue.
"There's no symbolism, no moral parallelism, no point to any of it," she said with an indignant swing of her head.
I don't quite hold with this degree of vitriol about the John Huston-directed film. But I have learned to listen to the LSR, because to not listen often feeds my detriment. Sometimes I even think hard about what she says, especially when we disagree.
I don't quite agree with the "no symbolism" argument. But maybe that's just a semantic distinction. Think of it instead as personification. Just as the mountain in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (also directed by Huston, also starring Bogart, and also from 1948) was itself a character in the movie, so was the storm in Key Largo a central player, an invisible heroine bent on trying to crush the villains, even if she had to wipe out everyone else to get the job done. On the other hand, that sort of contrivance may strike contemporary audiences as corny, maudlin, or just plain stupid.
I'm even willing to grant that the performances by Bacall and Bogart were self-serving. And if the Nora Temple character had little to do besides fawn over old memories and romantic visions of the impending future, I can only counter that I found more depth in her gaze than in the theatrics of any one else in the movie.
As to the cast, Robinson's Johnny Rocco truly terrifies, at least to my way of thinking. That may be why some people don't go for this film with the enthusiasm I brought to it. After all, Rocco threatens to shoot an old man for praying, murders a cop in the coldest of blood, ridicules a returning war veteran, dangles Scotch in front of his concubine just for meanness, and plans on flooding the American economy with counterfeit currency. He is, according to the movie, exactly what we were fighting against in World War II.
That's a little bit of a problem. If you want to argue that the parallel is Rocco to Mussolini or Hitler, it doesn't quite float. Oh, both sides of that coin were hell bent on conquest and may indeed have been pure evil, but the writer and director did pull back from making that parallel clear, probably from fear of pissing off too many Italian-Americans. (And if you doubt that theory, remember that in "The Untouchables" TV show, not even al Capone himself was portrayed as Italian, and for precisely the same reason.)
Again, to give Lisa Ann her credit, certain aspects of the movie do fail to hold together. Too much of the struggle does come across limping rather than charging and those fifteen years since I last saw Key Largo have had their effect on me. Perhaps I've succumbed to a stand-off between fatalistic Phil and moralistic Mershon. I don't know. Let us just say I liked the movie a bit more than she did. And even if you reading this remain true believers of the justified mythology of the brilliance of Bogart and Huston, you may do well to consider that some heroes exist in small part for purposes of self-criticism.
Hoping you are the same.
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION
When we think of the great detective and mystery writers of our time, we could start with Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the genre stylistically, then move on to the great popularizer Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (the two finest classic hardboiled writers), the dime-store Dostoyevski Jim Thompson, the erudite Elmore Leonard, and of course John D and Ross MacDonald. Women have done equally well in the field, as proved by the works of Margery Allingham, Ruth Rendell, Frances Fyfield, Patricia Highsmith, Denise Mina, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie.
That last name is, for me, the most uncomfortable inclusion here because I've always found that Christie's characterizations came through in wordiness rather than in behavior and thought, but maybe that's just my problem. Certainly the fans of Marple and Poirot would disagree.
All the same, I had resisted watching one of the most celebrated movies based on a Christie plot, that being director Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957). The loss was my own. The movie is amazing. It is also occasionally gasping for its own breath at one moment and lumbering up a flight of stairs at the next, but that's all right because the payoffs tip the scales of justice in favor of the viewer.
Originally a stage play (a fact which is clear within the first few minutes--we can even tell when the acts begin and end), Wilder molded the screenplay into an infrequently stilted set of dialogues that remain charming, chilling and often hilarious.
Charles Laughton plays barrister Sir Wilfrid, an aging, feisty heart patient addicted to brandy, cigars and chicanery in the courtroom. Prim and proper loving servants surround him with protection which he resists with varying degrees of success. At a time when his health suggests he should be taking calcium shots and sponge baths, he insists on taking a case brought to him by a solicitor. We learn that Leonard Vole, a nasty American type played by Tyrone Powers, is about to be arrested for murdering his benefactor, the widowed Mrs. French. Vole's wife is played to devastating perfection by Marlene Dietrich. It is she--and only she--who can make or break the case for the defense.
So far this probably sounds hokey. And it is. You might also throw in the descriptors contrived, cliched, weary and predictable. You also may feel free to toss in the word "remarkable" because it is remarkable that Wilder and his cast were able to take this premise to the edge of the hole that leads to the center of the earth and then threaten to push us all inside.
The best way to describe Dietrich's performance is that she plays a cold-blooded Eva Braun type about whom we are stunned to find ourselves care deeply. Powers ricochets from over-acting to understated magnificence, often in the same scene. And Laughton's crestfallen manner near the conclusion is enough to distract you from an impending sentence for income tax evasion. The story itself has more twists than a desert rattler and fangs just as lethal.
Nothing in the cinematography will last the ages. The film work itself is so staid that it virtually called forth the French New Wave movement singlehandedly.
Yet I am certain you will enjoy this movie. You will never forget Marlene Dietrich as long as you live. You may even reconsider the value of the writings of Agatha Christie.
That last name is, for me, the most uncomfortable inclusion here because I've always found that Christie's characterizations came through in wordiness rather than in behavior and thought, but maybe that's just my problem. Certainly the fans of Marple and Poirot would disagree.
All the same, I had resisted watching one of the most celebrated movies based on a Christie plot, that being director Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957). The loss was my own. The movie is amazing. It is also occasionally gasping for its own breath at one moment and lumbering up a flight of stairs at the next, but that's all right because the payoffs tip the scales of justice in favor of the viewer.
Originally a stage play (a fact which is clear within the first few minutes--we can even tell when the acts begin and end), Wilder molded the screenplay into an infrequently stilted set of dialogues that remain charming, chilling and often hilarious.
Charles Laughton plays barrister Sir Wilfrid, an aging, feisty heart patient addicted to brandy, cigars and chicanery in the courtroom. Prim and proper loving servants surround him with protection which he resists with varying degrees of success. At a time when his health suggests he should be taking calcium shots and sponge baths, he insists on taking a case brought to him by a solicitor. We learn that Leonard Vole, a nasty American type played by Tyrone Powers, is about to be arrested for murdering his benefactor, the widowed Mrs. French. Vole's wife is played to devastating perfection by Marlene Dietrich. It is she--and only she--who can make or break the case for the defense.
So far this probably sounds hokey. And it is. You might also throw in the descriptors contrived, cliched, weary and predictable. You also may feel free to toss in the word "remarkable" because it is remarkable that Wilder and his cast were able to take this premise to the edge of the hole that leads to the center of the earth and then threaten to push us all inside.
The best way to describe Dietrich's performance is that she plays a cold-blooded Eva Braun type about whom we are stunned to find ourselves care deeply. Powers ricochets from over-acting to understated magnificence, often in the same scene. And Laughton's crestfallen manner near the conclusion is enough to distract you from an impending sentence for income tax evasion. The story itself has more twists than a desert rattler and fangs just as lethal.
Nothing in the cinematography will last the ages. The film work itself is so staid that it virtually called forth the French New Wave movement singlehandedly.
Yet I am certain you will enjoy this movie. You will never forget Marlene Dietrich as long as you live. You may even reconsider the value of the writings of Agatha Christie.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.
Henry Fonda as Tom Joad
Just as novelist John Steinbeck conveyed the rhythms of barren frustration in his militant and passionate novel, so did director John Ford etch in charcoal via aspect ratio 1.37 : 1 the shadows dripping from the cobwebs around the eyelids of the Joad family on their way from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the great west Eden of California. Agony inches along every frame of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), daring and taunting any viewer to dare engage in supportive hope for the family sacrificed like the Son of God on the cross of the Great Depression.
One can think of this movie as an allegory of the migration of eager talent seeking the unimagined glory of Hollywood, but that crap is only fodder for press releases. The Grapes of Wrath was no press release. It was the artful use of pained reality as propaganda. Jane Darwell as Ma Joad teeters on the edge of banal sentiment every five minutes. But Ford knew how to slap the smirks off the cynics' faces. He used Henry Fonda as a morbid ghost of promise, just as he would do similarly six years later with the same actor in the role of Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine.
Tom Joad is an ex-con. While he's been away, he's grown tough, just as the rich man has grown fat and the poor people back home have grown isolated from their own collective potential. These people have endured the happy populism of William Jennings Bryant and his cross of gold. What they want is to stand on land that belongs to them, hoist their hands to their hips and breathe the air they love. Just as in Steinbeck's novel, the value here is in switching one group of owners for another. Steinbeck and Ford aren't opposed to ownership or the essence of property. What they despise is some invisible hand of guidance wearing down the working man and taking away his chances. That said, there's not much point at this late date to idolize either man as some kind of radical in his profession. What both men were, however, was astute, stuck to details like a nail in a horse's shoe. And it is details that stirred the poison passion of readers and audiences alike. Fonda alone pulls off role of the struggling thinker pitted against a life that allows little time for self-awareness or reflection.
Again, the tendency toward over-sentimentalizing heartache wears thin on a cynical viewership. Nonetheless, anyone alive today who heard parents and grandparents telling stories of the "old days" would do well to consider the panicked isolation this movie masterfully recites.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."
Henry Fonda as Tom Joad
Just as novelist John Steinbeck conveyed the rhythms of barren frustration in his militant and passionate novel, so did director John Ford etch in charcoal via aspect ratio 1.37 : 1 the shadows dripping from the cobwebs around the eyelids of the Joad family on their way from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the great west Eden of California. Agony inches along every frame of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), daring and taunting any viewer to dare engage in supportive hope for the family sacrificed like the Son of God on the cross of the Great Depression.
One can think of this movie as an allegory of the migration of eager talent seeking the unimagined glory of Hollywood, but that crap is only fodder for press releases. The Grapes of Wrath was no press release. It was the artful use of pained reality as propaganda. Jane Darwell as Ma Joad teeters on the edge of banal sentiment every five minutes. But Ford knew how to slap the smirks off the cynics' faces. He used Henry Fonda as a morbid ghost of promise, just as he would do similarly six years later with the same actor in the role of Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine.
Tom Joad is an ex-con. While he's been away, he's grown tough, just as the rich man has grown fat and the poor people back home have grown isolated from their own collective potential. These people have endured the happy populism of William Jennings Bryant and his cross of gold. What they want is to stand on land that belongs to them, hoist their hands to their hips and breathe the air they love. Just as in Steinbeck's novel, the value here is in switching one group of owners for another. Steinbeck and Ford aren't opposed to ownership or the essence of property. What they despise is some invisible hand of guidance wearing down the working man and taking away his chances. That said, there's not much point at this late date to idolize either man as some kind of radical in his profession. What both men were, however, was astute, stuck to details like a nail in a horse's shoe. And it is details that stirred the poison passion of readers and audiences alike. Fonda alone pulls off role of the struggling thinker pitted against a life that allows little time for self-awareness or reflection.
Again, the tendency toward over-sentimentalizing heartache wears thin on a cynical viewership. Nonetheless, anyone alive today who heard parents and grandparents telling stories of the "old days" would do well to consider the panicked isolation this movie masterfully recites.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."
THE LITTLE FOXES
Lillian Hellman adapted the screenplay for the 1941 cinematic release of The Little Foxes from her own 1939 play of the same name. At the time, Hellman admitted that elements of the behavior of the Hubbard family came from her observations of her own family. Putting Hellman's words in the hands of director William Wyler (Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, Mrs. Minniver) was a formula for success. With Bette Davis acting the role and speaking the lines Hellman wrote for the character Regina Hubbard Giddens, The Little Foxes blew apart every mannered nuance a heartless profiteer could feign.
The plot centers on the Hubbard brothers battling sister Regina over the right to fleece Regina's estranged but temporarily returned husband Horace. The husband suffers from some debilitating illness, but his mind still contains riches which suggest that he made his money the old fashioned way, or at least the way it's written about in history books. But the plot really is of no concern, at least as far as I'm concerned. Indeed, I first saw the movie at a theater in Boston, where it was introduced by a local movie critic who urged us to ignore the political or class battle happening here and to focus on the soap opera aspects of the story. Naturally, I refused to do what the effete snob wanted me to do and instead dove right into the class struggle elements. But in truth, the realization to which Regina's daughter Alexandra comes is the complete technical knock-out this film delivers without flinching. Regina believes she has sheltered Alexandra (played by Teresa Wright) from the wicked nature of the world. What she has actually done, of course, is to inadvertently school the girl in an understanding of how coercion works. When the daughter threatens to reveal what she has realized (that her mother is a calculating passive murderess), the entire structure of power within the family slips back on itself and the rancid brothers eke away into the night, just as Regina (we trust) discovers how it feels to be ruled by her former captive.
The intricate complexities of this masterful movie deserve to be enshrined. It is certainly director Wyler's best (if least celebrated) work. And it went a long way toward instilling the image of Bette Davis as a lethal ingenue. After all, Jackie DeShannon did more than just develop a catchy phrase when she co-wrote "Bette Davis Eyes."
The plot centers on the Hubbard brothers battling sister Regina over the right to fleece Regina's estranged but temporarily returned husband Horace. The husband suffers from some debilitating illness, but his mind still contains riches which suggest that he made his money the old fashioned way, or at least the way it's written about in history books. But the plot really is of no concern, at least as far as I'm concerned. Indeed, I first saw the movie at a theater in Boston, where it was introduced by a local movie critic who urged us to ignore the political or class battle happening here and to focus on the soap opera aspects of the story. Naturally, I refused to do what the effete snob wanted me to do and instead dove right into the class struggle elements. But in truth, the realization to which Regina's daughter Alexandra comes is the complete technical knock-out this film delivers without flinching. Regina believes she has sheltered Alexandra (played by Teresa Wright) from the wicked nature of the world. What she has actually done, of course, is to inadvertently school the girl in an understanding of how coercion works. When the daughter threatens to reveal what she has realized (that her mother is a calculating passive murderess), the entire structure of power within the family slips back on itself and the rancid brothers eke away into the night, just as Regina (we trust) discovers how it feels to be ruled by her former captive.
The intricate complexities of this masterful movie deserve to be enshrined. It is certainly director Wyler's best (if least celebrated) work. And it went a long way toward instilling the image of Bette Davis as a lethal ingenue. After all, Jackie DeShannon did more than just develop a catchy phrase when she co-wrote "Bette Davis Eyes."
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS
It feels presumptuous and even a bit pretentious to recommend Elevator to the Gallows (1958), given that virtually every critic of note and individual enlightened movie-goers everywhere already know for themselves what a sad delight director Louis Malle's elegant tragedy remains even after so many years. It also feels altogether bewildering deciding where to begin discussing the lauds and accolades this bizarre and brilliant picture continues to earn. Liberated somewhere between film noir and European art cinema, Elevator to the Gallows has been burdened with the New Wave or Nouvelle Vague label, an unfair weight to the extent that this film may well deserve a category unto itself.
Louis Malle was twenty-four when he filmed this movie, using street lights and other natural forms, as well as a baby carriage to hold the camera during the semi-famous string of scenes where Jeanne Moreau as Florence Carala walks the late night streets in somnambulist semi-paralysis in search of her beloved, Julien Tavernier, played with understated flair by Maurice Ronet. Twenty-four years old--and there are life-times within this movie. Moreau had been a big deal stage actress prior to this, her first feature appearance, yet she moves from worry to disappointment, denial to acceptance, rejection to commitment and finally dissipation, all constructed around the simple phrase "Je t'aime" because her strikingly lovely face transmogrifies with each crack in the sidewalk as she staggers with dignity from one locale to another in search of Julien, the man who has murdered her husband and whom she erroneously suspects of deserting her for a younger woman.
In point of fact, Julien works for Mr. Carala, a big time arms dealer who has made a fortune in the Indochina war and more recently in Algiers. Tavernier has served Carala's interests in both wars as a paratrooper, somewhere along the way falling in love with his boss's wife. After shooting Carala with the victim's own gun and staging the scene to look like a suicide, Julien--who has many traits of a secret agent (from the Maxwell Smart school of spying)--discovers that he has left behind a clue that will blow his cover. Intending to make a quick return to the crime scene, he leaves his car running and double parked, then gets stuck in the elevator over night after the building's power is cut off. His car is stolen, of course. The two thieves are a young couple, Veronique (the kind of fool who's afraid of everything, yet loves the excitement of being bad) and Louis (a good-bad-but-not-evil lad who would have turned the heads of the girls in the Shangri-Las). They encounter a German couple at an out-of-the-way hotel and decide to have Louis impersonate Julien. A rather ugly crime transpires, and the police suspect Tavernier of a double murder, one which he did not commit. The former paratrooper finds himself in the unhappy position of having as his only alibi that he did not kill the German couple because he was stuck in an elevator after murdering his employer so that he and the widow could live happily ever after.
It spoils nothing to share the plot here because the exquisite majesty of this movie carries the plot on its own shoulders. The aforementioned sequences of Moreau along the night streets of Paris, the smoke ring chains of Mile Davis' improvised soundtrack, the lovesick stupidity of Louis and Veronique bungling their own suicides, and the general decadence of the upper class and their immediate underlings who have to stay schnockered to live through the evil banality of their daytime existences, the crumbling confidence and malignant hostility that Julien Tavernier uses to mask what turns out to be about as substantial as an expensive paint job over a rusted out jalopy: these are the visual elements that keep our eyes focused on the screen as the story unwraps in front of us.
Because of the perfect use of natural light and shadow, as well as the moral darkness of the characters, Elevator may remind the viewer of the film noir movement, while more erudite viewers than myself have suggested that this film is a contender for the first ever French New Wave cinema production. That sort of information may be nice for those who build lists. For the rest of us, however, what matters is that Louis Malle had never made a feature-length movie before this one [he would later direct Pretty Baby (yawn), Atlantic City (hooray!) and My Dinner with Andre (double secret yay!), among others], yet somehow managed to convey generations of experience and knowledge that decades of revisiting still struggle to fathom.
Louis Malle was twenty-four when he filmed this movie, using street lights and other natural forms, as well as a baby carriage to hold the camera during the semi-famous string of scenes where Jeanne Moreau as Florence Carala walks the late night streets in somnambulist semi-paralysis in search of her beloved, Julien Tavernier, played with understated flair by Maurice Ronet. Twenty-four years old--and there are life-times within this movie. Moreau had been a big deal stage actress prior to this, her first feature appearance, yet she moves from worry to disappointment, denial to acceptance, rejection to commitment and finally dissipation, all constructed around the simple phrase "Je t'aime" because her strikingly lovely face transmogrifies with each crack in the sidewalk as she staggers with dignity from one locale to another in search of Julien, the man who has murdered her husband and whom she erroneously suspects of deserting her for a younger woman.
In point of fact, Julien works for Mr. Carala, a big time arms dealer who has made a fortune in the Indochina war and more recently in Algiers. Tavernier has served Carala's interests in both wars as a paratrooper, somewhere along the way falling in love with his boss's wife. After shooting Carala with the victim's own gun and staging the scene to look like a suicide, Julien--who has many traits of a secret agent (from the Maxwell Smart school of spying)--discovers that he has left behind a clue that will blow his cover. Intending to make a quick return to the crime scene, he leaves his car running and double parked, then gets stuck in the elevator over night after the building's power is cut off. His car is stolen, of course. The two thieves are a young couple, Veronique (the kind of fool who's afraid of everything, yet loves the excitement of being bad) and Louis (a good-bad-but-not-evil lad who would have turned the heads of the girls in the Shangri-Las). They encounter a German couple at an out-of-the-way hotel and decide to have Louis impersonate Julien. A rather ugly crime transpires, and the police suspect Tavernier of a double murder, one which he did not commit. The former paratrooper finds himself in the unhappy position of having as his only alibi that he did not kill the German couple because he was stuck in an elevator after murdering his employer so that he and the widow could live happily ever after.
It spoils nothing to share the plot here because the exquisite majesty of this movie carries the plot on its own shoulders. The aforementioned sequences of Moreau along the night streets of Paris, the smoke ring chains of Mile Davis' improvised soundtrack, the lovesick stupidity of Louis and Veronique bungling their own suicides, and the general decadence of the upper class and their immediate underlings who have to stay schnockered to live through the evil banality of their daytime existences, the crumbling confidence and malignant hostility that Julien Tavernier uses to mask what turns out to be about as substantial as an expensive paint job over a rusted out jalopy: these are the visual elements that keep our eyes focused on the screen as the story unwraps in front of us.
Because of the perfect use of natural light and shadow, as well as the moral darkness of the characters, Elevator may remind the viewer of the film noir movement, while more erudite viewers than myself have suggested that this film is a contender for the first ever French New Wave cinema production. That sort of information may be nice for those who build lists. For the rest of us, however, what matters is that Louis Malle had never made a feature-length movie before this one [he would later direct Pretty Baby (yawn), Atlantic City (hooray!) and My Dinner with Andre (double secret yay!), among others], yet somehow managed to convey generations of experience and knowledge that decades of revisiting still struggle to fathom.
CLEO FROM 5 TO 7
Summer time has almost arrived and the living's easy. We may be a month away from the official start, but tonight's feature will ignore that because we are talking about Agnes Varda's new wave classic Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962). I hope you folks haven't grown tired of the recent emphasis on the French New Wave. One of my problems with life is a tendency to fixate my focus, as it were, and Varda's film remains worthy of obsession.
The movie begins June 21, as the sun--so we are told--passes from Gemini into Cancer, a fact that does not endear the fretting Cleo much to reality because hers is a world that only mimics such illusions as pain and grief. She is a pop singer, crooning out tunes written for her by a pianist composer and lyricist. Not even a chanteuse may avoid death, or its antecedents, and as the movie begins we learn that Cleo (Corrine Marchand) believes herself to have stomach cancer. The fortune teller's tarot cards don't quite confirm this suspicion, but they certainly fail to rule it out.
This startlingly well-framed and vibrant movie runs in the real time between five and seven, the hours when, as French legend holds, lovers come together. But Cleo hasn't interest in things as potentially tragic as real love. She hides within the safety of a sterile flat with a maid and two kittens, plus the frequent drop-in of assorted visitors, including a boyfriend who can't be bothered with drawing close, a girlfriend who works as a nude figure model for struggling sculptors, and the girlfriend's beau, a film projectionist who treats them and us to a clever short film within the film, one starring director Jean-Luc Godard and actor Anna Karina.
I began the previous paragraph with the statement that this movie is well-framed. Agnes Varda was originally a still photographer. Perhaps nothing in still photography bores a viewer as much as a well-composed image. In a moving picture, however, especially one that moves along with the click of the clock, the composition of extended shots is nothing short of unnerving. The overwhelming documentary feel of Cleo From 5 to 7 transforms the audience's center of gravity with the colliding poetry of visuals that dance along like iambic pentameter. Whether the frame holds a man's face as he proceeds to swallow live frogs or the countenances of Cleo and Antoine punctuated with the visage of an old woman waiting to board the street car they are standing upon, every twenty-fourth of a second of this movie--each frame of film--declares itself an unselfconscious portrait of Parisian mischief. Try as she might, Cleo cannot escape the impending harshness she imagines around every corner, upon every cobblestone, within each line of transient dialogue. Walking through a cafe, she drops a coin in the jukebox slot to fill the room with one of her own recordings, only to be met with a remark from a woman to a man about not being able to hear because of the "noise."
Things really happen in this movie, just as things really happen in Breathless and The 400 Blows. It is not how things happen but how what happens is told that distinguishes much of French new wave from other movements. It certainly distinguishes Varda and her work from the rest of the new wave. Despite the nearly androgynous sensibilities of Godard and Truffaut in, respectively, Masculin Feminin and Jules et Jim, they yearn for balance, whereas Agnes makes no such concession. This movie is about a woman, by a woman, and for the feminine part of both men and women. Femininity is not a glandular condition. It is a reflection of the pre-existing ideas that other people possess about a given person in a particular place and time. That reflection--and it's no coincidence that so many mirrors populate this movie--comes in large part from pop culture, the very culture that created the character Cleo purports to be. She uses and gets used in turn. What she cannot do, somehow, is hurt others, even though she remains convinced--at least until she meets Antoine--that the world exists to do her in. The doctor she meets at the film's conclusion delivers his prognosis with the detachment a biology freshman might bring to a dissected frog.
Yet Cleo still has Antoine. She has him for another hour. Then his train leaves for Algiers.
The movie begins June 21, as the sun--so we are told--passes from Gemini into Cancer, a fact that does not endear the fretting Cleo much to reality because hers is a world that only mimics such illusions as pain and grief. She is a pop singer, crooning out tunes written for her by a pianist composer and lyricist. Not even a chanteuse may avoid death, or its antecedents, and as the movie begins we learn that Cleo (Corrine Marchand) believes herself to have stomach cancer. The fortune teller's tarot cards don't quite confirm this suspicion, but they certainly fail to rule it out.
This startlingly well-framed and vibrant movie runs in the real time between five and seven, the hours when, as French legend holds, lovers come together. But Cleo hasn't interest in things as potentially tragic as real love. She hides within the safety of a sterile flat with a maid and two kittens, plus the frequent drop-in of assorted visitors, including a boyfriend who can't be bothered with drawing close, a girlfriend who works as a nude figure model for struggling sculptors, and the girlfriend's beau, a film projectionist who treats them and us to a clever short film within the film, one starring director Jean-Luc Godard and actor Anna Karina.
I began the previous paragraph with the statement that this movie is well-framed. Agnes Varda was originally a still photographer. Perhaps nothing in still photography bores a viewer as much as a well-composed image. In a moving picture, however, especially one that moves along with the click of the clock, the composition of extended shots is nothing short of unnerving. The overwhelming documentary feel of Cleo From 5 to 7 transforms the audience's center of gravity with the colliding poetry of visuals that dance along like iambic pentameter. Whether the frame holds a man's face as he proceeds to swallow live frogs or the countenances of Cleo and Antoine punctuated with the visage of an old woman waiting to board the street car they are standing upon, every twenty-fourth of a second of this movie--each frame of film--declares itself an unselfconscious portrait of Parisian mischief. Try as she might, Cleo cannot escape the impending harshness she imagines around every corner, upon every cobblestone, within each line of transient dialogue. Walking through a cafe, she drops a coin in the jukebox slot to fill the room with one of her own recordings, only to be met with a remark from a woman to a man about not being able to hear because of the "noise."
Things really happen in this movie, just as things really happen in Breathless and The 400 Blows. It is not how things happen but how what happens is told that distinguishes much of French new wave from other movements. It certainly distinguishes Varda and her work from the rest of the new wave. Despite the nearly androgynous sensibilities of Godard and Truffaut in, respectively, Masculin Feminin and Jules et Jim, they yearn for balance, whereas Agnes makes no such concession. This movie is about a woman, by a woman, and for the feminine part of both men and women. Femininity is not a glandular condition. It is a reflection of the pre-existing ideas that other people possess about a given person in a particular place and time. That reflection--and it's no coincidence that so many mirrors populate this movie--comes in large part from pop culture, the very culture that created the character Cleo purports to be. She uses and gets used in turn. What she cannot do, somehow, is hurt others, even though she remains convinced--at least until she meets Antoine--that the world exists to do her in. The doctor she meets at the film's conclusion delivers his prognosis with the detachment a biology freshman might bring to a dissected frog.
Yet Cleo still has Antoine. She has him for another hour. Then his train leaves for Algiers.
GRAND HOTEL
Many contemporary viewers approach Grand Hotel (1932) with considerable trepidation. With a name like that and being located in Berlin between the two World Wars, one gets a feeling that this is nothing at all like "Dynasty" or "Knotts Landing," where at least the shallow people are so bloody attractive.
Well, ye boys and girls, it's time to come clean. Grand Hotel is so great a movie that it not only stands on its own two rather colossal feet but even goes so far as to create an entirely new way for audiences to enjoy a motion picture. Hell's Bells and Heck's Becks, the first motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences (The Jazz Singer) had only been released five years earlier and along comes this incredibly large movie with virtually no plot at all, at least not in the way that we would think of plot until thirty-eight years later when Robert Altman came along and gave us a whole slew of movies shorn of trivials such as a traditional storyline. One of Grand Hotel's darker characters sums this plot up quite well when he says, "People come, people go, nothing ever happens."
Of course, plenty happens, but not in a connect-the-dot manner. And everything that happens is invariably something other than what it initially appears to be. Take for instance John Barrymore. He plays the Baron. One problem he has is that he is not really a Baron. Another problem is that he hasn't any money. An even bigger problem is that he is a hotel thief sent by a mean guy to whom he owes a lot of money to go steal Greta Garbo's pearls. But Barrymore, who in this film really is a thief, in the sense of stealing every scene he's in, turns out to be quite honest and even heroic. Stranger yet he falls in love with Garbo (which isn't all that strange except for the way it happens here) and comes to the defense of Mr. Kringelein, who just happens to be played by John's brother Lionel Barrymore. You couldn't find two more unlikely looking brothers if you searched through a hundred years of film. John the baron thief honest guy is so freaking suave and classy that you realize instantly that people such as Bogart and Cary Grant and yes even Marlon Brando would have been unthinkable had Barrymore not been there to show them the way. As the sad and touching man who believes himself to be terminally ill, Lionel gives new meaning to the idea of humility and courage, so much so that various cinematic nebbishes as Woody Allen, or the fictional George Costanza or George McFly could not have existed without Lionel happening first.
We're obviously off to a great start. We have Garbo uttering her famous line, "I want to be alone!" We have the Barrymore Boys supporting one another. You'll never guess what else! Joan Crawford is here and sonofagun if she ain't a real breathtaking beauty. Now anyone who ever sat through all two hours of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane will be delighted to proclaim that Joanie was a lot of things and that beautiful ain't quite the first thing to come to mind and who tells you that is right. But dammit all back and forth if I could even believe it was Crawford playing the gorgeous stenographer until the roomie looked it up for me halfway through the feature. She hadn't learned all that hyperbolic screeching and hideous over acting that would later plague all those who got within spitting distance. Here she's a really gem and we don't go far or long before we hope she and the Baron will hook up big time. Early on John and Joan trade barbs and innuendos so hot and fast it'll get you psychologically aroused before your body even knows what's happening. Just as true, when she gives in a little bit to the evil General Director Preysing, also known as Wallace Beery, you just want to die inside and for real because these people are so excitingly exact that there is no question they really do come and go and one hell of a lot happens. When Lionel stands up to Beery, saying in effect, "You can't fire me you fat fuck because I'm already dead!' around my house we all stood up and cheered Lionel and dropped our pants to moon Beery.
Believe it or not, we're just getting started. The Baron falls for Garbo, saving her from a life of suicide. She falls back for him, which makes his attempted tryst with Crawford a mite sticky, but he's able to pawn Joan off on Lionel while Beery stomps and snorts. Garbo's character, Grusinskaya the dancer, suffers from what used to be called manic depression and the Baron is just the mania she needs. If I tell you much more it would ruin the experience and what's more mere words don't do any good at this point because when Vicky Baum's rewrite of William A. Drake's play doesn't dazzle you, director Edmund Goulding's amazing beautification of the hotel will spin your head around just as fast as the characters come and go. With great subtlety Goulding even manages to give each character his or her own theme music accompanied by the sense that the music is being played by an orchestra somewhere down near the ballroom. Gouldin would continue to direct movies for decades but the closest he ever came to capturing the glory of Grand Hotel was in 1939 with Dark Victory.
Earlier this year Warner Bros released a restored version of Grand Hotel on Blu-Ray (eeks, ooh!) and it's readily available on standard DVD as well as showing up occasionally on TCM. The main thing you need to know is that this does not look like an old movie despite it being eighty-one years old. A lot of that is due to the timelessness of the acting. A good bit of it can be attributed to the decent if not spectacular restoration job. But the main reason this movie still packs them in is because that ironically nonexistent storyline grabs you be the belt and collar and just keeps swinging you back and forth until you learn to love the ride.
You want to know what's really old about this movie? The fact that it's so good. At the risk of sounding like an oldster my own damned self, I have to stand on a box and declare that today we do not have anyone appearing in pictures who can hold the jock strap of John Barrymore. That's mostly because we don't have an impressive gaggle of actors, although we sho nuff do have our share of movie stars. You know what movie stars are? Movie stars are the cretins that Rod Stewart used to fuck when he could still get it up. Movie stars are Tom Cruise and Megan Fox, Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl, Seth Rogan and Lindsay Lohan. Actual great actors alive today (unless somebody passed away while I was trying to figure out this list) would be Meryl Streep Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Emma Thompson, Patricia Arquette, Annette Bening, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Connelly, Joan Allen, Charlize Theron, Christian Bale, Johnny Depp, Bob Hoskins, Ned Beatty, Warren Beatty, Alan Arkin, Javier Bardem, Bill Murray, Jodie Foster (even though she's retired), Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Sissy Spacek, Julie Christie, Chris Cooper, Ed Harris, Max von Sydow, Edward Norton, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro, at least half of whom are over fifty years of age. There's lots and lots of great real actors around and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Lots of great scripts are written all the time and once in a while those scripts actually make it to the screen. There's all kinds of great young directors out there as well as a few of the old masters. So why can't we get another movie made that's maybe even half as enjoyable as Grand Hotel? After all, they say anyone can make a movie these days.
Well, ye boys and girls, it's time to come clean. Grand Hotel is so great a movie that it not only stands on its own two rather colossal feet but even goes so far as to create an entirely new way for audiences to enjoy a motion picture. Hell's Bells and Heck's Becks, the first motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences (The Jazz Singer) had only been released five years earlier and along comes this incredibly large movie with virtually no plot at all, at least not in the way that we would think of plot until thirty-eight years later when Robert Altman came along and gave us a whole slew of movies shorn of trivials such as a traditional storyline. One of Grand Hotel's darker characters sums this plot up quite well when he says, "People come, people go, nothing ever happens."
Of course, plenty happens, but not in a connect-the-dot manner. And everything that happens is invariably something other than what it initially appears to be. Take for instance John Barrymore. He plays the Baron. One problem he has is that he is not really a Baron. Another problem is that he hasn't any money. An even bigger problem is that he is a hotel thief sent by a mean guy to whom he owes a lot of money to go steal Greta Garbo's pearls. But Barrymore, who in this film really is a thief, in the sense of stealing every scene he's in, turns out to be quite honest and even heroic. Stranger yet he falls in love with Garbo (which isn't all that strange except for the way it happens here) and comes to the defense of Mr. Kringelein, who just happens to be played by John's brother Lionel Barrymore. You couldn't find two more unlikely looking brothers if you searched through a hundred years of film. John the baron thief honest guy is so freaking suave and classy that you realize instantly that people such as Bogart and Cary Grant and yes even Marlon Brando would have been unthinkable had Barrymore not been there to show them the way. As the sad and touching man who believes himself to be terminally ill, Lionel gives new meaning to the idea of humility and courage, so much so that various cinematic nebbishes as Woody Allen, or the fictional George Costanza or George McFly could not have existed without Lionel happening first.
We're obviously off to a great start. We have Garbo uttering her famous line, "I want to be alone!" We have the Barrymore Boys supporting one another. You'll never guess what else! Joan Crawford is here and sonofagun if she ain't a real breathtaking beauty. Now anyone who ever sat through all two hours of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane will be delighted to proclaim that Joanie was a lot of things and that beautiful ain't quite the first thing to come to mind and who tells you that is right. But dammit all back and forth if I could even believe it was Crawford playing the gorgeous stenographer until the roomie looked it up for me halfway through the feature. She hadn't learned all that hyperbolic screeching and hideous over acting that would later plague all those who got within spitting distance. Here she's a really gem and we don't go far or long before we hope she and the Baron will hook up big time. Early on John and Joan trade barbs and innuendos so hot and fast it'll get you psychologically aroused before your body even knows what's happening. Just as true, when she gives in a little bit to the evil General Director Preysing, also known as Wallace Beery, you just want to die inside and for real because these people are so excitingly exact that there is no question they really do come and go and one hell of a lot happens. When Lionel stands up to Beery, saying in effect, "You can't fire me you fat fuck because I'm already dead!' around my house we all stood up and cheered Lionel and dropped our pants to moon Beery.
Believe it or not, we're just getting started. The Baron falls for Garbo, saving her from a life of suicide. She falls back for him, which makes his attempted tryst with Crawford a mite sticky, but he's able to pawn Joan off on Lionel while Beery stomps and snorts. Garbo's character, Grusinskaya the dancer, suffers from what used to be called manic depression and the Baron is just the mania she needs. If I tell you much more it would ruin the experience and what's more mere words don't do any good at this point because when Vicky Baum's rewrite of William A. Drake's play doesn't dazzle you, director Edmund Goulding's amazing beautification of the hotel will spin your head around just as fast as the characters come and go. With great subtlety Goulding even manages to give each character his or her own theme music accompanied by the sense that the music is being played by an orchestra somewhere down near the ballroom. Gouldin would continue to direct movies for decades but the closest he ever came to capturing the glory of Grand Hotel was in 1939 with Dark Victory.
Earlier this year Warner Bros released a restored version of Grand Hotel on Blu-Ray (eeks, ooh!) and it's readily available on standard DVD as well as showing up occasionally on TCM. The main thing you need to know is that this does not look like an old movie despite it being eighty-one years old. A lot of that is due to the timelessness of the acting. A good bit of it can be attributed to the decent if not spectacular restoration job. But the main reason this movie still packs them in is because that ironically nonexistent storyline grabs you be the belt and collar and just keeps swinging you back and forth until you learn to love the ride.
You want to know what's really old about this movie? The fact that it's so good. At the risk of sounding like an oldster my own damned self, I have to stand on a box and declare that today we do not have anyone appearing in pictures who can hold the jock strap of John Barrymore. That's mostly because we don't have an impressive gaggle of actors, although we sho nuff do have our share of movie stars. You know what movie stars are? Movie stars are the cretins that Rod Stewart used to fuck when he could still get it up. Movie stars are Tom Cruise and Megan Fox, Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl, Seth Rogan and Lindsay Lohan. Actual great actors alive today (unless somebody passed away while I was trying to figure out this list) would be Meryl Streep Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Emma Thompson, Patricia Arquette, Annette Bening, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Connelly, Joan Allen, Charlize Theron, Christian Bale, Johnny Depp, Bob Hoskins, Ned Beatty, Warren Beatty, Alan Arkin, Javier Bardem, Bill Murray, Jodie Foster (even though she's retired), Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Sissy Spacek, Julie Christie, Chris Cooper, Ed Harris, Max von Sydow, Edward Norton, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro, at least half of whom are over fifty years of age. There's lots and lots of great real actors around and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Lots of great scripts are written all the time and once in a while those scripts actually make it to the screen. There's all kinds of great young directors out there as well as a few of the old masters. So why can't we get another movie made that's maybe even half as enjoyable as Grand Hotel? After all, they say anyone can make a movie these days.
THE BICYCLE THIEF
Perhaps you remember the scene in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Paul Newman peddles Katharine Ross around on a bicycle while B.J. Thomas sings "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head." The scene was good for more than merely cheap sentiment because the two-wheeler, which might have been stolen from Wilbur and Orville's famous bicycle shop, signified the very pre-flight moment in human evolution when robbing trains was no longer a viable means of making an honest living.
As Randy Newman so simply put it:
Sing a song of long ago
When things were green and movin' slow
and people'd stop to say hello,
or they'd say "hi" to you.
Would you like to come over for tea
with the missus and me?
It's a real nice way
to spend the day
in Dayton, Ohio
on a lazy Sunday afternoon in 1903.
But in post-war Rome, Antonio Ricci needed his bicycle for commercial reasons. It was the primary reason he was selected from dozens of men for a job hanging Rita Hayworth posters on city walls. So he goes to the pawn shop and pays sixty-five hundred lire to get his two-wheeler out of hock. Now he can make money for his wife and son. On the first day of work, an Italian wearing a German cap steals the bicycle. Antonio spends the rest of the movie attempting to get it back. His efforts change him, or reveal him to himself.
That is the entire movie.
The movie is, of course, The Bicycle Thief (1949).
And yet it is so much more than what I have said.
In part it is the staggering brilliance of director Vittorio de Sica placing millions of bicycles in the path of Ricci and his son Bruno. In part it is the carelessness of the way Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani, looking very much like a young Robert Duvall) treats the machine when he first gets it back, only to have its value scream at him as it is taken away. In part it is the depths to which he sinks trying to get it back. But mostly it is Bruno watching his father deteriorate in front of him. This kid is no Mickey Rooney, with eyes full of innocent deviltry. This is a kid who talks back freely, a kid who disobeys on a regular basis, a kid who sees his own future and nearly suffocates beneath it.
De Sica knew poverty, he knew desperation, and he knew about the ways that men turn against men. He understood the way that people rationalize within their own economic class. Everyone in the movie is dirt poor and yet each person imagines himself to be in a different economic class from everyone else. Ricci finds an old man who is somehow involved in the theft of the bike. The old man is surviving out of a Catholic soup kitchen. The old man is in far worse shape than Ricci, even though if things do not improve, Ricci will find himself in similar digs, and Ricci knows this. Nevertheless he hounds the old man relentlessly. Antonio encounters an old fortune-teller woman who exploits the misery of those who come to her. He holds the woman in contempt and yet finds himself reaching out to her when he has nowhere else to seek help. He encounters a city block owned and operated by thieving grease-balls who are doing well to have two lire to rub together, yet he takes on the whole lot of them in an effort to retrieve his trusty bicycle. In the end, he must make a moral decision about whether to steal someone else's bicycle.
So there is actually very little simplicity to this seemingly uncomplicated work of Italian cinema.
As Randy Newman so simply put it:
Sing a song of long ago
When things were green and movin' slow
and people'd stop to say hello,
or they'd say "hi" to you.
Would you like to come over for tea
with the missus and me?
It's a real nice way
to spend the day
in Dayton, Ohio
on a lazy Sunday afternoon in 1903.
But in post-war Rome, Antonio Ricci needed his bicycle for commercial reasons. It was the primary reason he was selected from dozens of men for a job hanging Rita Hayworth posters on city walls. So he goes to the pawn shop and pays sixty-five hundred lire to get his two-wheeler out of hock. Now he can make money for his wife and son. On the first day of work, an Italian wearing a German cap steals the bicycle. Antonio spends the rest of the movie attempting to get it back. His efforts change him, or reveal him to himself.
That is the entire movie.
The movie is, of course, The Bicycle Thief (1949).
And yet it is so much more than what I have said.
In part it is the staggering brilliance of director Vittorio de Sica placing millions of bicycles in the path of Ricci and his son Bruno. In part it is the carelessness of the way Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani, looking very much like a young Robert Duvall) treats the machine when he first gets it back, only to have its value scream at him as it is taken away. In part it is the depths to which he sinks trying to get it back. But mostly it is Bruno watching his father deteriorate in front of him. This kid is no Mickey Rooney, with eyes full of innocent deviltry. This is a kid who talks back freely, a kid who disobeys on a regular basis, a kid who sees his own future and nearly suffocates beneath it.
De Sica knew poverty, he knew desperation, and he knew about the ways that men turn against men. He understood the way that people rationalize within their own economic class. Everyone in the movie is dirt poor and yet each person imagines himself to be in a different economic class from everyone else. Ricci finds an old man who is somehow involved in the theft of the bike. The old man is surviving out of a Catholic soup kitchen. The old man is in far worse shape than Ricci, even though if things do not improve, Ricci will find himself in similar digs, and Ricci knows this. Nevertheless he hounds the old man relentlessly. Antonio encounters an old fortune-teller woman who exploits the misery of those who come to her. He holds the woman in contempt and yet finds himself reaching out to her when he has nowhere else to seek help. He encounters a city block owned and operated by thieving grease-balls who are doing well to have two lire to rub together, yet he takes on the whole lot of them in an effort to retrieve his trusty bicycle. In the end, he must make a moral decision about whether to steal someone else's bicycle.
So there is actually very little simplicity to this seemingly uncomplicated work of Italian cinema.
MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
DARK VICTORY
OF MICE AND MEN
THE GREAT DICTATOR
CITIZEN KANE
HIGH SIERRA
THE MALTESE FALCON
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
PRIDE OF THE YANKEES
JOURNEY INTO FEAR
A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN
THE BIG SLEEP
GILDA
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE
DARK VICTORY
OF MICE AND MEN
THE GREAT DICTATOR
CITIZEN KANE
HIGH SIERRA
THE MALTESE FALCON
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
PRIDE OF THE YANKEES
JOURNEY INTO FEAR
A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN
THE BIG SLEEP
GILDA
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE
