Cinema OCD

Vigil in the Night

2011-08-25T14:00:00.000-05:00

A movie has to be pretty damn good to get me past killing a five year old boy in the first five minutes. Vigil in the Night does just that and though I felt like I could hardly forgive it for such monstrousness, I decided to hang in there at least until Brian Aherne showed up. I managed it and I'm glad I did. It's embarrassing to admit just how much I cried during this movie despite the fact that I was wary of the obviously manipulative writers with the whole dying kid thing. To say Vigil in the Night is a melodrama isn't quite fair to it. It would be lumping it in with all those ordinary melodramas that have only half a dozen far-fetched calamities piled on top of one another in two hours. Vigil in the Night has so many more, it's difficult to list them all. It's one of those films that if you step out to make a cup of tea, you better hit the pause button or you won't know where you're at when you return. In fact, skip the tea altogether because that's how the kid dies: his nurse steps out to get a cup of tea and he suffocates.

Carole Lombard plays a nurse who takes the heat when her sister's lapse in professionalism and love for hot caffeinated beverages allows a sick child to die. Brian Aherne plays the doctor she loves. A very determined series of coincidences and calamities keep the lovers apart (just barely) for two hours. It all winds up in quarantined fever ward where doctor and nurse put it all on the line to save a ward full of sweating little tykes. The story is based on the novel by doctor turned novelist, A. J. Cronin, who also wrote The Citadel. Today we take the medical drama as a genre for granted. There's no disease too horrifying that it can't play out for us in prime time. Back in the thirties though, the genre was just finding its feet. Of course, good doctors are glorified to a ridiculous degree (and bad ones vilified in the same extreme), but what I liked about this movie was the focus on the nurses. In one scene, the head of nursing looks at a room full of workmen scrambling to get a quarantine ward ready and comments, "it's the first time I ever saw a man work as hard as a nurse." There's a lot religious imagery in this film, and it's not difficult to see the parallel between nurses and nuns. Well, nuns who get to canoodle on occasion with Brian Aherne, anyway. If you have a nurse in your life, you could do worse than watch this movie thinking of them and then call them up and thank them for working their butts off for humanity.

Gog (1954)

2011-08-22T14:30:00.000-05:00

It was worth watching Gog, which is a fairly tedious, but stylish 50s sci-fi outing, just to see Herbert Marshall with these awesome round, tortoise-shell glasses and undone polka-dot bowtie. If I didn't know better I'd say that Thomas Dolby stole his entire look from this screencap. (Of course, I do know better. He stole it from Harold Lloyd.) I would have felt amply reward for my time, but I was also treated to the image of urbane and elegant Mr. Marshall carrying a flame-thrower later in the film. In that scene, Marshall bears the most priceless look: a mixture of boredom, loathing and back pain that perfectly sums up this late period of his career. At that moment you can see that he is thinking that Ernst Lubitsch or Alfred Hitchcock would never have made him carry a flame-thrower.

I work in an almost 100 year old physics building, which is mainly furnished in cold war Herman Miller and old oscilloscopes. One of the credits in the film thanks Minneapolis Honeywell Controls, a name intimately familiar to Minnesota physicists. I could walk out the door of my office and start filming Gog. Or rather Wes Anderson could. Since all Anderson's films are elaborately set-up homages to art directors of films past, I think he could really do something with Gog. And when he does, brother, do I have the dials and gauges for him.

Speaking of work, watching Gog is a bit like being on the job because it takes so long to get to the actual plot of the film. Each of the labs in the elaborate underground facility has a little cast of characters doing a different futuristic experiment. They range from the plausible (a space mirror that blows stuff up) to the campy (a sexy couple who wear magnetic leotards and dance around trying to simulate zero gravity conditions). Each experiment is explained in detail to the point where even Wes Anderson would be shouting, "get on with it already. Bring on the killer robots."

Since I brought up killer robots you should know a couple of things. First of all everyone in Gog pronounces the word "robot" as if were "row-bit" stressing the first syllable and barely pronouncing the second. This also happens to be the quirky habit of a character on the kid's tv show, Word Girl, that my son watches. I'm not going to say "robot" the right way any more. I'm going to say it the Gog/Word Girl from now on. The second thing you need to know is the robots roll around slowly and swing their arms randomly. They are about as terrifying as the Daleks on Doctor Who, which is to say not terrifying at all.

The very Leslie Nielsenesque Richard Egan, "stars" and forties film noir siren, Constance Dowling plays Marshall's assistant who takes us on the real-time tour of the endless laboratory. Dowling manages to fill out a jumpsuit in an inspiring way, but she is saddled with a horrible haircut that reminds me of Jobriath. Egan's character is sent in to investigate a series of killings in the laboratory, which means when the plot does eventually arrive it feels like an episode of Columbo with good production values. The robots kill everyone remotely by manipulating all the automated controls around the lab. Oh goody! More closeups of dials and gauges! I'm sure there are people out there who have a fetish for vintage scientific equipment, and Gog is to them the most amazing porn ever, but the rest of us will long for the robots to roll slowly up to someone and bludgeon them with random arm movements.

I'm not really all that interested in 1950s science fiction except as a clearing house for some of my favorite actors of earlier eras. You know I watched Forbidden Planet just because Walter Pidgeon was in it. To that end, Netflix Instant has been streaming a lot of rarities in the genre, like this one. Stream it while you can, people.

Colorado Territory

2011-08-10T13:20:00.000-05:00

Film buffs know Colorado Territory primarily as a Westernized re-make of High Sierra. The chief advantage to me of the later film is getting to watch Joel McCrea instead of Humphrey Bogart. McCrea plays Wes McQueen a train robber who breaks out of prison and plans to pull one last big job before going straight. He meets a hard luck rancher who has a pretty daughter (Dorothy Malone). He plans to marry the girl and use the loot from the robbery to stake himself in his new life. His schemes are complicated by his accomplices who want to kill him and take his share. There is also a "bad girl," nick-named Colorado,(Viriginia Mayo) who wants to shack up with him.

Never mind the horses and cowboy hats. This is film noir. In typical noir fashion, the hero is neither as good or as bad as Hollywood film poster copywriters would like. The good girl, is actually a bit of a greedy tramp and the bad girl turns out to practically a saint in disguise. Mayo and McCrea are really delicious together and true to the genre (noir that is) their supposedly illicit relationship is actually full of quaintness and purity-- they try to give the money from the heist to a mission church.

Director Raoul Walsh who also made High Sierra, and Gentleman Jim, keeps the tension ratcheted up till the inevitable shoot-out in a dead -end canyon. The ending made me think that Bob Dylan must have been watching this movie when he wrote Romance in Durango. That's as much of a spoiler as I'll give you, people.

I'm not sure why but Colorado Territory stuck with me for weeks after watching it. I found myself dressing in peasant tops and long skirts and bidding on Navajo jewelery on Ebay. Sometimes a really solid, well-made movie has more staying power than something more ambitious. Colorado Territory is just such a film.

She Married Her Boss (1935)

2011-07-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

Gregory La Cava directed some of the seminal films of the 1930s, My Man Godfrey and Stage Door being the first that usually come to mind. I also enjoy some of this director's lesser known stuff including the pleasing 1935 romp She Married Her Boss. Claudette Colbert plays a driven, highly effective executive secretary who is in love with her boss (Melvyn Douglas). In order to get him to notice her as a woman she agrees to straighten out his chaotic domestic affairs, including a stroppy, bratty child, an overwrought sister and a pack of disagreeable, dishonest servants. After she sorts out his life, he marries her as a reward. You know, just like real life. She expects romance to come eventually but instead her man is even more of a workaholic than before, partly because she's no longer in the office keeping things in order.

What's a girl to do? Well, if it'a 1930s film, in this situation, the best thing to do is to run off with Robert Montgomery, play piano, drink, dance and get caught by the press in a compromising situation. If Robert Montgomery is unavailable, than a Robert Montgomery-type should be enlisted to be the good-time Charlie, friend with benefits. Such is the case in She Married her Boss and a justifiably forgotten Michael Bartlett plays the boyfriend. I found myself longing for Melvyn Douglas to play the good-time Charlie because he does those types of roles so well. (See Angel, Ninotchka, etc.) Here, Douglas is stuck playing the Herbert Marshall type. If we had Herbert Marshall and Melvyn Douglas then we'd really have something. Fantasy football casting aside, this is still a fun, if predictable film. Nothing here to threaten the greatness of Godfrey atop the La Cava canon, but still not a bad way to spend 90 minutes.

My biggest beef with this film is the insipid, oft-repeated idea that a woman's first job is marriage. They were running along nicely with the idea that Colbert's character was indispensable at home AND at work, when they suddenly decided work wasn't important. What? Maybe it was Hollywood's way of pandering to the unemployed to make out that a job wasn't that important. Or maybe it was pandering to the production code which suddenly meant that women couldn't work and be happy any more. At any rate, Colbert is stuck at home, trying to look feminine in a lot of hideous lace collars and I just want the snappy, competent, well-dressed Gal Friday back.

Colbert was at the height of her powers coming off It Happened One Night, the year before. Sexism, bad clothes and anemic scripts can't hold her back. She just shines. And Douglas has the good sense as he always did when acting with magnificent, talented actresses like Garbo and Dietrich, to just get out of the way and let her carry the show.

Private Lives (1931)

2011-03-10T10:26:00.004-06:00

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: Noel Coward inadvertently created the genre of screwball comedy. When his stage play, Private Lives was being made into a film, he advised director, Sidney Franklin, to keep things moving along. In response Franklin turned in a comedy so blisteringly fast that its rapid fire dialog to competes with the infamous His Girl Friday. I had to watch many sections of this film twice to make sure I caught all the quips. I'm sure that, like Friday, it will reward multiple viewings. Not only is Private Lives fast, it's loud, shrill, and full of pratfalls and impossibly mixed-up situations. All it's missing is an escaped fugitive in a roll-top desk.

Until I watched Private Lives, I thought Noel Coward was all about cocktails in the drawing room and biting sarcasm. He is, but, apparently he's also about full body tackles and insulting one's mother-in-law with a viciousness that would make Walter Burns blush. Robert Montgomery and Norma Shearer play Elliot and Amanda, an English couple who have divorced after a series of violent rows. They both remarry and end up honeymooning in the same hotel in the South of France. Their adjacent rooms share a veranda, so it is inevitable that an awkward confrontation and, eventually, a reconciliation will follow. All of the action is compressed into three days, so Coward can be forgiven for packing a decade's worth of arguments into an hour and a half. Elliot and Amanda are loathsome characters, selfish and obnoxious, but they are also a lot of fun. I don't think I could take much more than 90 minutes of their carrying on, though.

Coward's outlook on love is bleak; if Private Lives weren't so dang funny, it would be depressing. In his worldview, passion is a miserable roller coaster of blissful kisses and socks to the jaw. This drunken slugfest can be difficult to watch. Take out the jokes and you'd have a Lifetime movie, or a TMZ expose on Madonna and Guy Ritchie.

The acting is uniformly excellent. The new spouses are played by sadly forgotten Pre-Code bombshell, Una Merkel and stalwart, supporting actor Reginald Denny. And the leads, though miscast as English, are wonderful. Montgomery looks completely at ease as an unchivalrous cad and his role in Private Lives reminds me of my favorite Montgomery performance in Mr. And Mrs. Smith. Speaking of which Norma Shearer seems to have gone to the Carole Lombard School of Meltdowns. Yeah, I had to mute her a few times, but even Lombard, the unquestionable queen of the spoiled rich female temper tantrum, could occasionally cross that line. I'm sure I never let the remote out of my hand while watching Twentieth Century.

Shearer is an able comedian and she brings star quality to the table as well. When Elliot declares that Amanda is the most thrilling, fascinating woman every born, you can't help but think the same applies to the actress playing her. If nothing else there is her habit of forgetting to wear a bra which is in evidence in a couple of scenes in Private Lives. I predict that Shearer will gain a whole new following if her filmography is ever transferred to Blu-Ray.

Thanks to Classic Movie Favorites for the stills.

Crack Up (1946)

2011-02-19T13:00:00.002-06:00

While casting Crack Up, the filmmakers must have made a clerical error. How else to explain Pat O'Brien playing an art critic and Herbert Marshall a cop? Still, it works because Pat O'Brien is pretty bad ass: he makes art criticism seem like a gritty profession. As usual, he drags me, kicking and screaming into liking him. Herbert Marshall is pretty urbane for a cop, but he is supposed to be an undercover agent from Scotland Yard. I guess that makes a difference.

Despite the weird casting, Irving Reis' highly competent direction ended up selling me on this film noir. Reis seamlessly strings together the various set pieces, including, my favorite sequence: O'Brien on the run from the law in a penny arcade. Deft camera movement and clever editing work together to turn a guy standing around pretending to play a video into edge-of-your-seat action.

The script is less good--at times, not even up to the level of a decently written teleplay. An overly enthusiastic writer gives Marshall a rant about how Americans don't appreciate their law enforcement, thus ruining the surprise revelation of Marshall's cop identity. At least the writers do manage to keep track of the plot twists. I like film noir best when it's not so grand at the expense of logic. If I get to the end of the movie and feel that I've learned something about the nature of good and evil but still don't know who dunnit, I get a little peevish. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Big Sleep! No, of course, I'm not saying that Crack Up is better than The Big Sleep--just that it annoyed me less.

O'Brien plays George Steele, whom we first meet in the throes of an alcoholic bender and apparent mental breakdown. In typically circuitous noir style, we soon learn that he began his evening aboard a train that crashed. The problem? The cops have no record of a train wreck. Even in 1946, they kept track of that kind of stuff. So it's not looking good for our hero's sanity. One of his museum colleagues (Claire Trevor) agrees to help him clear his name. He retraces his steps, beginning with another ride on the same train that made him loopy. So far it's a little Lady Vanishes with a some Spellbound tossed in for good measure.

I'm fine with derivative filmmaking, but in those particular Hitchcock films, it’s the romance that keeps me coming back. Here, Claire Trevor manages to play both gal Friday and mysterious dame. Her friendship with O’Brien teeters on the edge of romance and, although it's not a huge surprise when they hook up, it's satisfying. Marshall provides the third side of the triangle, but that plot element doesn't really work. He and Trevor have no chemistry, and in one scene she admits that he makes her miserable. If it weren't for Marshall’s sudden uptick in energy at the end of the movie, I would want to give him B-12 shots. Eventually, however, he solves the crime with panache and starts to seem like an actor who might be worthy of a detective series of his own.

Speaking of detective series, I let out an internal "squee" every time someone in the movie called O'Brien "Mr. Steele." I can't help but wonder if the creators of my all-time favorite TV show, Remington Steele, weren't referencing Crack Up. If you gave Pat O'Brien's wardrobe to a woman, turned the urbane undercover cop into an urbane undercover con man, kept the references to art theft and forgery, squinted and stood back twenty paces, you might have Remington Steele.  

Thanks to the epic series The 100 Greatest Posters of Noir, I will never take movie advertisements at face value again. This poster is terrible. If Where Danger Lives did a 100 Worst, this might well make the list. The title is too small and the tagline is too big. The cracked font is an obvious concept carried out in a half-assed fashion, and, combined with the green, the whole thing reminds me of a turtle. Claire Trevor looks nothing like the poor woman on the poster, who appears to have a painfully broken leg. Pat O'Brien’s portrait does him no favors, either. Herbert Marshall gets third billing, but his portrait dominates the poster. Maybe the artist was a secret Herbert Marshall fan? Nah: no one with such good taste could turn out this little fiasco.

Gentleman Jim (1942)

2011-02-09T09:00:00.000-06:00

Before I saw this movie, my knowledge of Gentleman Jim Corbett had been limited to a particularly audacious Bob Dylan rhyme in the song "Hurricane." (We're gonna put his ass in the stir/we're gonna pin this triple mur/der on him. He ain't no Gentleman Jim.) Nevertheless, I was quickly absorbed in this biopic chronicling the life of the famous 19th Century boxer. For those who need more to entrance them than Errol Flynn's near-constant shirtlessness, this tightly plotted film has plenty of action. Director Raoul Walsh (White Heat, High Sierra) keeps things moving along briskly, with fight scenes peppered liberally throughout the script.

Flynn plays a boxer so cocky and self-absorbed that in the climactic championship bout his main concern is that his hair not get mussed. In addition to fame and fortune, Corbett is also pursuing wealthy boxing patron Victoria Ware (Alexis Smith), who keeps promoting the up-and-coming fighter in hopes that he will get his ass kicked and learn his place already. He keeps winning, and eventually Ware realizes that Corbett differs from his nouveau riche "betters," a bunch of dirt prospectors and miners who got lucky in the Gold Rush, only in being a few decades more nouveau.

The Not So Quiet Man

In the meantime co-stars Alan Hale and Ward Bond steal all their scenes as, respectively, Corbett's scrappy Irish father and larger- than-life Irish rival, John L. Sullivan. Bond is particularly fun to watch; this character stands alongside his hilarious turn as a gambling, boxing-enthusiast priest in The Quiet Man as outstanding examples of his supporting work. Also in the mix is another The Quiet Man alum, Arthur Shields, who plays a gambling, boxing-enthusiast priest. Like The Quiet Man, this movie is funny, sentimental and wildly entertaining. What the later, better-known film has--and Gentleman Jim lacks is the romance. Flynn and Smith have nice-ish chemistry but their constant arguing is shrill and annoying. There's a fine line with these things, and usually it is the script that makes the difference. Give squabbling people amusing things to say, and you've got a Noel Coward play. Give them the script to Gentleman Jim and you're eavesdropping on the dysfunctional couple upstairs. But Smith and Flynn are so gosh-darned pretty that this shortcoming doesn't sink the film. Feel free to use the mute button, is my motto. The movie works as light entertainment and solid proof, if you needed any more, that Raoul Walsh could direct the heck out of an action scene.

The only thing I really learned about 19th Century prize fighting from Gentleman Jim, was that boxers favored sweaters over robes at one point in history. Several scenes show meaty, sweaty boxers with sweaters tied around their necks like 1980s yuppies.

Cinema OCD Valentines

2011-02-07T16:49:00.007-06:00

Once again, I make Valentines out of random photos I've collected this past year. Print these out and give them to your would-be Valentine or anyone else you want to deeply confuse. (Click on the image to see print-ready version. )

Best. Screencap. Ever.

Note: pixelated refers to the movie dialog, not to the fact that my thumbnails look like crap!

Forgive me, but I could see no other way to get this on to my blog.

Valentines + sarcasm= a winning combination.

Nora, this one's for you!

Scotland: Land of Heroes

2011-01-25T09:36:00.011-06:00

On my first trip to Scotland, upon the recommendation of my Scottish mother-in-law, we stopped at a gas station/gift shop called The Canny Scot where you could choose between canned and frozen haggis, sample the delight known as tablet and get a bargain price on smoked fish. For me, the biggest lure of the Canny Scot was their incredible collection of cheesy t-shirts. I settled on one emblazoned with pictures of Mel Gibson as Braveheart and Liam Neeson as Rob Roy and that read "Scotland: Land of Heroes." (The wonderful irony of this is that Mel Gibson is Australian and Liam Neeson is Irish.) As it is Burns Night this evening, I thought I would round up some of my favorites from Scotland: Land of Heroes.

I Know Where I'm Going: Best movie about Scotland, ever. A romantic comedy set in the Scottish Hebrides starring Roger Livesey and Wendy Hiller. Of course, Scotland itself is a character and film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's cinematography is hauntingly beautiful. The tone of the film is quiet and the humor subdued. Best of all no one gets drawn and quartered.

Local Hero: This 1983 film by Scottsih director, Bill Forsyth, was seen by few people, except for the producers of Northern Exposure who completely ripped it off for the series. The story is about an oil man (Peter Reigert) who comes to a remote Scottish village to purchase the town and finds one lone hermit who refuses to sell up. As in I Know Where I'm Going, one of the highlights of the film is a ceilidh, or a Scottish country dance.

The Ghost Goes West/The 39 Steps: I'm always up for a Robert Donat double feature. While the former features Donat in a kilt, sporting a somewhat outrageous accent, the latter has Hitchcock using Scotland as a dramatic background for some of his most intense chase scenes.

My Life So Far: I admit that I stumbled on this movie during my time as a Colin Firth completionist. (As if I'm over my Colin Firth phase!). It's difficult to tease out my feelings for the film's leading actor, but I quite liked the between the wars, coming of age story on its own merit. The Scottish castle and setting are beautifully filmed and the whole thing is quirky and pleasant if not deeply profound.

Rob Roy: Longing to be a rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure movie, this film is ultimately too heavy to really do the genre properly. Liam Neeson and Jessica Lang are really pretty wonderful in the romantic parts of the film, and if you are into broad swords, then the ending of the film is a must see. Tim Roth and John Hurt round out the cast as vile villainous villains. Roth especially stands out as the loathsome Archibald Cunningham an evil and stylish man, the likes of which we haven't seen on screen since the days of Basil Rathbone.

Mary of Scotland: Hollywood knows how to do spectacle and this costume drama from Warner Brothers has plenty of pipers on castle ramparts. Katharine Hepburn and Frederich March play Mary Queen of Scots and James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, lovers enmeshed in court politics. Donald Crisp, John Carradine and Douglas Walton round out the excellent cast.

Brigadoon: Ok, take what I said in my write-up of Mary of Scotland and multiply it by ten. This is what happens when the big studio glamor machine goes bonkers on a meme. In this case, the idea that Scottish people wear as much plaid as possible, tams on their heads and like to dance a reel. Filmed on a sound stage it lacks the authenticity of the other films in this list, but with a blazing, bright technicolor widescreen transfer, it's difficult to say no to Gene Kelly, Sid Charisse and Vincente Minnelli production values.

Highlander: I'm kind of amazed that this movie didn't make the Canny Scot's t-shirt of Scottish heroes played by foreign actors. Perhaps they feared that people would confuse Christopher Lambert with Mel Gibson as they are difficult to tell apart when they are all done up in their highlander garb. (Hint: Mel has the blue face.) The story of an immortal Scottish warrior (Christopher Lambert) and his Spanish fight trainer (Sean Connery with a pearl earring) and their adventure across time to defeat fellow immortal and vile villainous villain, the Kergan (Clancy Brown.) In many ways, this is the movie that Rob Roy wanted to be, but couldn't because it had to stick to some semblance of historical accuracy. It's shamelessly entertaining, surprisingly original and will have you shouting, "there can only be one" in your next outing involving swordplay.

Braveheart: My least favorite of the films on this list, though it does contain a bravura performance from one of my favorite obscure actors, David O'Hara who plays Stephen the Mad Irishman. (O'Hara, ironically was one of the few native Scottish actors with a speaking part in the film). Action film lovers can look to the film's influential battle scenes whose up-close, visceral style became the standard for this sort of thing. It's a bit like watching the Lord of the Rings, actually: a lot of guys with long, dirty hair, giving rousing speeches, head-butting each other. At least there's lots of kilts.

I have not been kidnapped

2011-01-24T14:30:00.002-06:00

To all my faithful friends who have patiently waited for a new blog post, I'm sorry. I really have no excuse other than I needed a little break.

A few things that have ruled my world during hiatus:

1) Tired Old Queen at the Movies. If you haven't seen him, check him out. No one could get me to watch as many 1950s films as he has. Also, you gotta love (and perhaps fear slightly) a guy who collects Barbie doll outfits from classic films.

2) The 100 Greatest Posters of Noir. I'm not even a noir fan and I've been loving this series in an obsessive way. This makes me want to go back to school and take a class from Mr. Fertig. He obviously knows his stuff.

3) Classic Film Scans. Kate from Silents and Talkies lovingly scans pictures of classic film stars and posts them in all their high-res glory. She has wonderfully broad taste and that means that lots of actors like Robert Donat and Herbert Marshall who usually get the short shrift in the world of high res scans get space. I dare you not to spend the rest of the day at this site. I dares ya.

4) Netflix instant. I can't stop watching TV shows this way. Entire seasons of Doctor Who, Slings and Arrows, MI-5 and No Reservations have been gobbled up. A few classic movies might have slipped in as well, like Damn the Defiant and The Girl Rush. Stupid TV. Be less good so I can go back to watching classic movies. Lord help me if they ever get Mad Men.

5) Facebook. Like a massive ven diagram of my life, Facebook allows me to spend untold hours cross pollinating my various obsessions among groups of my friends and family. Most of my online film friends are on here so if you are one of them, get on here already. Together we can and will remain staggeringly unproductive!

An extra big shout-out to all the friends of the blog who continued to e-mail, send goodies by mail and just generally be the most supportive and awesome people ever. You know who you are! Kisses!

Quality Street (1937)

2010-11-23T15:30:00.004-06:00

A few years ago I was up in Duluth, Minnesota looking for someplace quiet, to grab a bite when we suddenly the perfect place: a small restaurant, with a kitschy, pseudo Russian theme that served custom-made burritos named after Rasputin and the like. It was as if the universe had reached into my brain and conjured up exactly what I needed to make me perfectly happy. I've treasured that memory, odd as it may seem, because I felt like it was evidence that of the interconnectedness of all things.

I was content to live my life with just that one instance of planetary alignment, but the other day it happened again. I was home sick, feeling very much in need of a cinematic pick-me-up, something light and frothy with just a touch of screwball. I needed one of those rare tonic films. To complicate matters, I was also feeling very Jane Austen-y since watching The Young Mr. Pitt had reminded me of the early 19th century and, inevitably, of Austen. I picked disconsolately through my Austen DVDs. Sense and Sensibility was too sad. (I always, always cry like a baby when Marianne almost dies). Pride and Prejudice was just too long, Emma was not quite right and Bridget Jones was definitely not on the bill. I scanned my Tivo and alighted randomly on the description of Quality Street: a young woman (Katharine Hepburn) becomes an old maid waiting for a young man (Franchot Tone) to return from the Napoleonic Wars. OK, Kate Hepburn and Franchot Tone--I'm there already. Throw in Napoleonic Wars and you've definitely got me intrigued. And doesn't this outline sound just a little bit like...PERSUASION?! Oh, Universe, you've done it again. You've reached into my brain and provided me with exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it.

What a fun discovery this movie was. It IS a screwball version of Persuasion. Take out Louisa's head injury and add in Anne Elliott posing as her own coquettish, young niece, and you more or less have Quality Street. This film has all the tea-swilling, pelisse-wearing, repressed-sexual-smoldering of a Jane Austen adaptation and all the chaotic misunderstandings and physical gags of 1930s RKO comedies. The story is based a play by Edwardian playwright, James M. Barrie, best known for his novel Peter Pan. The ever-competent George Stevens directs.

Franchot Tone, whom I've liked ever since he took my attention, however briefly, away from Cary Grant in Suzy, is really great here. I've rarely seen him in comedies, and he definitely shines in the part of the cocky young man who is humbled when he actually has to pursue a woman. Even while he chases "niece" Olivia, hoping to reign her in as a favor to spinster aunt Phoebe, he tips his hand in just the right places to show the audience that it's Phoebe he really loves. Hepburn, is excellent as well, belying the old story that she learned everything she knew about comic timing from Walter Catlett in Bringing Up Baby (1938).

If it's so great, why doesn't Quality Street top the list of Hepburn films from this her infamous "box office poison" period---a list that includes such gems as Sylvia Scarlet, Stage Door and Bringing Up Baby? Maybe it's the 19th century setting that puts people off. We think of Hepburn as a modern actress and prefer her comedies edgy and hip. There's nothing particularly edgy about Quality Street,--none of the cross-dressing deviance of Scarlet, or the risque undercurrents to Baby's fast-moving mayhem. (My bone! It's rare! It's precious!) Quality Street has remained quietly buried, dug up once a year when TCM does a Katharine Hepburn tribute; I captured it only through exhaustive Tivo-ing. But if you have any interest in Katharine Hepburn, Franchot Tone, 1930s comedy, or Jane Austen, I'd say you definitely want to make the effort to watch this one.

Young Mr. Pitt (1942)

2010-11-17T08:38:00.000-06:00

Certain Robert Donat films so deserve a DVD release that I feel compelled to do some kind of civil disobedience on their behalf. That's it: I'm going to lie down in the middle of the street until The Young Mr. Pitt comes out on DVD. Not only is it one of Donat's most important performances, it's directed by Carol Reed for Pete's Sake. Carol Reed! You've heard of the The Third Man, right?

I apologize for the poor quality of the screencaps and their limited number. The DVD I obtained was a bootleg made when the movie was shown on TV in England. My computer didn't like this particular DVD very much so I only have captions from the first 40 minutes of the film. Grrrr. But yeah, we really need a DVD of this wonderful film.

Robert Donat plays Pitt the Younger, an obscure, idealist, reform-minded MP in late 18th century England who is suddenly thrust into the premiership as part of a complicated back room deal between the outgoing government and the King. William Pitt was the youngest Prime Minister in British history and his administration was dubbed the "mince pie government" because everyone assumed it would be over by the end of the Christmas season. Of course, if the guy is a subject of a biopic he must have lasted longer than that. He sees Britain through the dark early days of the Napoleonic Wars promoting a then-obscure young seaman named Horatio Nelson to leader of the navy. Nelson's triumph over the French fleet in Egypt suddenly turns the tide of the war and Pitt's popularity skyrockets. All this from a man who promised his father that he'd never seek fame in war.

The ever-fickle public call for peace, though Pitt is sure that Napoleon has no plans to retire anytime soon. He is sure they will be called to defend themselves and their allies again and again. Pitt is in love with the daughter (Phyllis Calvert) of one of his powerful constituents and they become secretly engaged, which was quite the scandalous thing back in the day. His health is wavering as well, so he plans to step down as Prime Minister as soon as he can groom a successor. It looks like the anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce would be the perfect candidate. Fate begs to differ, Pitt is trapped at the helm and money troubles eventually force him to relinquish his dream of marrying.

Donat is very good here, doing his usual schtick of playing a character from late twenties into middle age. Early in the film he plays Pitt the Elder as well. I guess Old Mr. Pitt isn't as good a movie title. It's pretty remarkable that he does manage the young part so well, and I love that he allows his middle-aged face to show through when appropriate. I think that in real life, Donat felt fairly older than his years, so I guess it's not a surprise that he plays a tired, middle-aged man with such delicate poignancy.

My favorite scene in the film involves Donat joining in a pillow fight with a bunch of little kids while Calvert looks on lovingly. His hair gets mussed up. It's all good. Of course, none of this is remotely historically accurate. In real life, Pitt was never romantically linked to any one. The filmmakers did a good job of sneaking the romance in at the edges of Pitt's life and of making the inevitable break-up reasonably believable. Of course in real-life Regency England it would have been perfectly acceptable for a Prime Minister, no matter how beleaguered by bills, to marry a rich young woman. But no matter--it all makes for some lovely angst on Donat's part.

Worth mentioning are the excellent supporting players. Robert Morley is brilliant as Pitt's rival, Charles James Fox and Raymond Lovell makes a hilarious, bumbling King George III. I think it was actually a fairly bold wartime an English monarch as so utterly incompetent. Here, the king is more concerned with his latest turnip crop than with affairs of state. Since the real King George was declared mad only a few years later, it's not such a stretch although it was his grandfather, though who was turnip-obsessed.

Parts of the film are unintentionally funny. As a Big, Important sweeping biopic it keeps reminding us of the march of history in corny ways. As Pitt the Elder watches his son sleep, the screen goes fuzzy at the edges and we cut across the Channel to baby's baptism. "Congratulations Mrs. Bonaparte," an off-screen voice intones. Later we check in on young Napoleon pwning his examination at military school. I guess this is what Robert Donat's biographer, J.C. Trewin meant when he called The Young Mr. Pitt "dated." But what does it really mean to say an old movie is dated? To me, it means that the values it espouses are irrelevant or antithetical to the modern viewer. Gone with the Wind is dated in its portrayal of happy-go-lucky slaves, for example. Still a great film, though, no? The Young Mr. Pitt must have seemed a bit fusty in 1968 when Trewin wrote Donat's biography. Give it another forty years or so and it's just fine: a nice example of British war-time filmmaking that managed to get its message across without beating you over the head with it. There is a whole sub-genre of war films that use past conflicts to make a point about the current political situation. In this case, the Napoleon=Hitler analogy works alright if you don't think about it too much. The point is that having a politician, not a king or a strongman at the wheel is bound to be complicated, but preferable to the alternatives. Some politicians, like the corrupt Fox will be a hawk or a dove depending on the prevailing winds. Actually trying to lead from one's principals is far more difficult. It's Mr. Pitt goes to Whitehall with a downer ending.

Jupiter's Darling (1955)

2010-10-27T09:00:00.001-05:00

This was my first Esther Williams movie. I'm always amazed by the movies I think I know because I've seen lots of clips or satires of them. It's easy to sell a movie like Jupiter's Darling short. Williams plays Amytis, a Greek woman who lives in Rome around the time of Hannibal's invasion. She is trying to squirm out of a protracted engagement with Fabius, Dictator of Rome (George Sanders), when she stumbles onto Hannibal himself (Howard Keel). Amytis and her slave Meta (Marge Champion) are taken prisoner and, of course, find love as a result. Singing, dancing and flimsy excuses for underwater ballet ensue. One of the most enjoyable things about an Esther Williams movie is that almost anything is a pretext for a swimming sequence. She always wears a bathing suit under her clothes, just in case she needs to throw down. In one scene she jumps her horse off a huge cliff, leading a pack of Hannibal's men on an underwater chase that is exciting as it is graceful.

The action begins with Amytis and Meta on a shopping trip that ends with Meta buying a boyfriend, Varius (played by her real-life husband, Gower Champion), in one of several terrific numbers choreographed by Herme's Pan. Meta and Varius take turning owning one another through a plot twist or two which providies a comic foil for the mondo battle of the sexes going on between the leads. A lot of people getting tied up in this movie. I'm just sayin.

The most interesting water scene is "I have a Dream." It begins with a forgettable musical number that Esther sings while feeling up the muscle-bound statues around her pool. Then she dives under water and the statues become dudes in body paint swimming around with her. This is how shallow I am: I think a scene where a woman gets to fondle a bunch of silent guys is feminist. Heck, it's the same principle behind Jane Campion's The Piano except that I was actually entertained by Jupiter's Darling.

I admit that I watched this movie because it starred George Sanders. His character doesn't get much screen time, but he makes the most of it. Fabius has mother issues. He also wears yellow all the time. I'm not sure what this means, but Sanders gets some priceless scenes of being a ruthless dictator completely controlled by his mom. He gets to "simper" in about a dozen different ways. C'est magnifique.

So after Esther hooks up with Hannibal, of course, the first thing she does is get him in the water. He doesn't swim so she drags his whining, baritone ass along with her. I've never been a big Howard Keel fan, but I like him in this movie, because he has nice legs and he doesn't ever wear pants. Not even once. Way to go, Howard. One of my informants tells me that Keel and Sanders got along on set and spent a lot of time giggling during their scenes, which instantly makes me like Keel even more.
I heartily recommend Jupiter's Darling for the sparkling, mindless entertainment that it is. I look forward to more Esther Williams in future.

A Farewell to Arms (1932) picspam

2010-10-15T13:29:00.000-05:00

As usual, I started off making a few caps to illustrate my review and went crazy. Warning: spoilers within.

Director Frank Borzage leaves out star Gary Cooper's face in many scenes, including a fairly long point of view sequence. I like this screen cap because it shows how skinny Coop's legs were.

I watched A Farewell to Arms fairly early in my Gary Cooper fandom. The verdict: young Gary Cooper is brain-meltingly attractive.

This scene introduces the playful relationship between Renaldi (Adolphe Menjou) and Lt. Henry. Renaldi calls him "baby" all the time which has the unintended effect of making him sound like a 1970s record producer.

Menjou is really wonderful in his role. He had been one of the biggest stars on Paramount's lot until Cooper came along, which makes the whole friendship/jealousy theme in the movie a bit more interesting, I think. Also, I love how awkwardly tall Gary Cooper must have been to act with.

Henry and Renaldi enjoy one of the "new girls" at Villa Rosa, the town brothel. Borzage never shows us any more of the girl or the brothel than this framing, which sets up the "meet cute" in the next scene. In the novel, Hemingway also describes the Villa Rosa obliquely. Henry's numerous interactions with prostitutes are summed up in a single long paragraph of verbal pastiche with snippets of dialogue and snatches of description. This book works so well as a film in part because paragraphs like that read almost like a screenplay description of a montage.

An air raid breaks up the fun at the Villa Rosa. Henry goes to a shelter and grabs the nearest naked foot he sees, thinking it must belong to the "new girl." In a wonderful reverse-Cinderella moment, the shoe doesn't fit, and Henry is embarrassed to find himself with English nurse, Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes). None of this beautiful nonsense is in the book, but I like it because it's just so movie-ish, and because it introduces the romance in a way that's less jarring than the way it's presented in the book, where the lovers meet and immediately begin discussing the most intimate details of their lives.

"We seem to be fated to run into one another in the dark," Catherine says, in one of the screenplay's cheesiest attempts to improve on Hemingway's spare and elegant dialogue. Luckily, most of the dialogue in the film is cribbed right from the book. The film deservedly won the Oscar for cinematography. These gorgeous and romantic night scenes are part of the reason. In the novel, the meetings in the garden are awkward, closely supervised, but in the movie the lovers are free to have sex twenty minutes after they've been introduced.

I forgot my review-based excuse for making this screen cap.

This is one of the most romantic scenes in the book, and in the movie it's played in a wonderfully low-key fashion that mirrors the book. Henry is sent to the front, but he turns his ambulance back to town so that he can say good bye to Catherine. "I really wish I could kiss you, right now."

"I got blown up eating cheese," Lt. Henry answers when asked if he did anything heroic to get his war wounds. That's probably my favorite line in all of Hemingway. It's nice that the filmakers left in details like the ambulance drivers eating cold spaghetti with their fingers. In the 1950s version of the film, Lt. Henry is a lot more dashing and heroic in the battle scenes. There's nothing about cheese in the dialogue of that version.

Henry is sent to Milan, where Catherine is working as a nurse in a new hospital. This is the point in the book where Catherine and Henry have sex for the first time, after which they decide they are married, though they are not. I'm not sure why the filmmakers moved the sex scene to the beginning of the story. Although the code was not enforced at the time, A Farewell to Arms nearly failed to get a release because of the frankly sexual nature of the relationship. My guess is that the producers thought sex occuring in a fit of passion would seem more palatable to the censors than rather than a pre-meditated encounter. At any rate, this scene is still pretty hot.

Another invention for the movie: Catherine and Lt. Henry are secretly married by the priest. While they do talk as if they are married, and the priest does visit the lieutenant in the hospital, in the book they never marry.

The couple on their "wedding night." This scene is peppered with bizarre, supposedly sexy dialogue about castor oil. Borzage's camera cuts away to the search lights on the balcony, a detail taken right from the book.

Lt. Henry is sent back to the front but spends his last night in Milan with Catherine, in the classiest hotel they can find. "Darling, I wish we could do something truly sinful," Catherine opines, "but everything we do feel so innocent."
"I hate the rain. Sometimes I see me dead in it." This is one of Hemingway's most difficult lines of dialogue, I think. It's very difficult to make a statement like that and not seem completely overwrought. Hayes does a wonderful job of making Catherine seem a touch neurotic, but not as crazy or annoying as she could easily become in the hands of the wrong actor (e.g. Jennifer Jones in the 1950s remake).

The good-bye in the hotel is one of the most romantic and sad moments in the movie. Gary Cooper's height comes into play again as he picks her up, kisses her and carries her a few feet to the chair.
She looks so small when he puts her down. I think it's the simple, every day details that make this scene so powerful, the way one remembers every bitter sweet second of a parting like this. In a way, for me as a viewer, it's the end of the story because, after this moment, the movie goes off the rails, covering five chapters in five minutes of montage and, most painfully, cutting Catherine and Henry's brief period of happiness in Switzerland.

Some of the expressionistic images from Borzage's montage which collapses a great deal of the book into a five minute silent film, featuring sound effects and music. As much as I'm annoyed by this part of the movie which boils all the heart-ache and complexity of Lt. Henry down to "he deserts because his letters to Catherine come back unopened," I can't help but admire its unique beauty.

The llieutenant hops a freight train to Milan. Meanwhile, Catherine, who is pregnant, has gone to Switzerland. In the book , she goes to a town near the Swiss border, where they are reunited, make a daring escape to Switzerland in a row boat where they live happily ever after, until Catherine dies in childbirth.

Lt. Henry arrives at the hospital to find Catherine moments away from a c-section to save her life and deliver their stillborn child. This image could be Alvin York, Lou Gehrig or Longfellow Deeds-- it is such a classic Gary Cooper moment. Though he's better known for those later roles, this performance could stand alongside the best of his work from the forties.

I swear William Wyler copied this entire death scene for Wuthering Heights. I often wonder if the censors would have released this film at all if Catherine hadn't died at the end, effectively punished for her wanton ways. The studio filmed an alternative ending in which she lived; Hemingway hated it. In fact, it is said that Hemingway really disliked the entire movie with one exception: Gary Cooper. He admired Cooper so much that he insisted he be cast as the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Reader, I shagged him

2010-09-20T11:55:00.001-05:00

There are cinematic obsessions and there are literary obsessions. Sometimes they mingle in our brains. Tainted, we re-read with movies in our heads, yet while watching movies, we are haunted by the ghosts of the books which have been sliced and diced in the production. I've dwelt on some of my literary adaptation obsessions before--Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice-- and I daresay I'll talk about them again in future. That won't prevent me from harping on them today.

There have been 21 adaptations of Jane Eyre, including one currently in production for release next year. As always when a new adaption comes out, one looks back at what has been and wonders why we need another. With Jane Eyre, most the actresses who've played the title part have been great, always laboring to look less pretty than they are in frumpy center-part hair-dos. The Rochesters on the other hand. . . the Rochesters! A Jane Eyre is only as good as its Rochester.

Rochester, we know from the book, is supposed to be plain, as well as shortish, broad-chested, and hairy with an uneven temper and a tendency toward incivility. He is often depicted in illustrations as looking a bit like, well, Wolverine from X-Men. (Invariably Rochester has awesomely big mutton chops, which is one of the things that keeps me coming back to adaptations of Jane Eyre.) Jane, with her artist's sensitivity to shape describes him as a solid square block. I've wracked my brain to think of an actor that fits this description and the best I can come up with is perhaps a young Edward G. Robinson. (Well he has the right first name, at least). That is not to say the a pretty, tall, blond, affable American can't try to play Rochester, but he will probably fail as badly as William Hurt did in 1996.

The first Talkie Rochester was Colin Clive. With a script that pares the story down to a 62 minutes, so little of the original story left here that it's difficult to judge. Clive is surely all wrong: he's congenial and handsome, and when he says he's been living in torment for 15 years his tone of voice seems to say, "it's dashed inconvenient having an insane wife, you know, old sport. Blood curdling screams interrupting house parties and all that." Still, I like Clive because he's obscure and English. He was tormented in his real life, I think. I just wish we got some of it on the screen.

The 1944 adaptation is often credited to its star, Orson Welles, though it was surely mostly directed by the competent Robert Stevenson. Welles did have a large amount of input on casting and possibly even directing some scenes himself. It is the touchstone adaptation, the one that everyone remembers, and it invented quite a lot of business that wasn't in the novel. One of the screenwriters was Aldus Huxley who had created the buoyant but faithless adaptation of Pride and Prejudice a few years earlier. Huxley invents a famous scene in which Helen Burns, (played by a young Elizabeth Taylor), Jane Eyre's doomed school chum, has her hair cut by the vice-hunting Mr. Brocklehurst. Many subsequent adaptations have had a similar scene. The book includes only a passing remark that the students in the school didn't like him because he starves them, gives long sermons and cuts their hair. I think we should take that to mean that it was required to keep one's hair short, not that he took the time to perform a gruesome public shearing with his own hands while sermonizing about vanity. Yet this visceral scene lives on because it works to visually express the cruelty and near-slavery that Jane experienced in her young life.

The 1944 version was my introduction to the story and I was disappointed to learn that my favorite line--Welles' raspy, "Jane, would it be so wicked to love me?" --is actually changed from the book. (It's even better in the book because Jane retorts, "No, but it would be to obey you.") The first time I read the novel I was not only surprised by the substantial trimming of the story, but shocked by the fact that the book really is more about the title character than it is about Rochester. Imagine, reader, nearly a hundred pages go by with barely a mention of his name. Joan Fontaine can hardly begin to capture the essence of the character because she simply isn't allowed to do go there. The best Jane scenes from the book are all cut from the adaptation and even her passion for Rochester is watered down. Jane in the book is sorely tempted not to leave after the wedding is interrupted. This wasn't something the film makers could really get into in 1944.

The novel's Rochester is funny, generous, playful, capricious, silver-tongued and romantic. He is so much more than the brooding bad boy he's too often mistaken for in pop culture. This is a dude who will throw a huge, month-long house party, at risk of exposing a dread secret to the world at large, cross-dress as a gypsy fortune-teller, and propose marriage to another woman just to find out if his governess really likes him or not. He has style. Orson Welles certainly first captured this dashing quality in Rochester. Welles doesn't try to hide his American accent; he just plays the haughty aspects of the character to the hilt. As Rochester himself would, he dares you find fault with him. I love that he doesn't shy away from the character's many complicated and long speeches, but seems to relish Rochester's talkiness. In still pictures, Welles' soft, boyish beauty bleeds through, but on screen his cigar-chomping swagger and bossiness are the main thing, we notice. He is Rochester because he believes he is and so do we. His confidence is everything.

George C. Scott, another confident, cigar-chomping American also played Rochester, not long after Roots had invented the American mini-series television format. This was always my father's favorite adaptation, and I half-suspect that is partly because he could pretend he was watching Patton instead of Gothic romance.

Because Rochester is an anti-hero it is no surprise that the novel has many references to Macbeth (another role played with panache by Welles). While Rochester is not as bad as Macbeth--as far as we know, there are no murders in his past, just hints of more of a sex life than was generally allowed in novels about decent people in the 19th century--he does have a lot in common with Shakespeare's silver-tongued blackguard. He also has a lot in common with another famous Scottish badboy, the womanizing, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. In the novel, Blanche Ingram compares him to "black Bothwell." It is interesting bit of trivia that Bothwell, had several common law wives, one of them, named "Janet," who was thought to be a witch. Rochester refers to Jane frequently as "Janet" and on more than one occasion teasingly accuses her of witchcraft.

The sensual side of Rochester, Rochester the lady killer, was best captured by Toby Stephens in the 2006 adaptation. I confess that I totally ripped off the headline for this post from a newspaper story promoting this mini-series adaptation. The script dwells on all those scenes from the novel where Rochester explains sex to Jane, in deeply unnecessary detail. Meanwhile, he goes about in his shirtsleeves and riding boots, pinning butterflies to cardboard and other acts of obvious innuendo and generally being as hot as a guy who was described by his creator as "an ugly man" dares to be. The screenwriter carefully turns the fact that Jane does not find him handsome into a joke. In one scene, which re-writes classic Victorian literature as PG-13 fan fiction, Rochester tries to prevent Jane from running away from Thornfield by pinning her to bed and making out with her. It almost works, but Jane must inevitably sneak away late at night, while lots of female audience members are thinking-- nay, shouting at the screen--"What's a little attempted bigamy, anyway!?"

Another too handsome Rochester, was Timothy Dalton in 1983. I find this one the weakest of the longer-form adaptations, because it suffers from bad production values and makes substantial changes to the plot. Yet Dalton is fun to watch and at times his brusque manner makes him almost a little unattractive. Almost. I would probably like the whole thing better if they had given him mutton chops.

Spend any time with the Cult of Rochester, whose members are fewer but no less ardent then those in the Cult of Darcy, and you will inevitably be led to Michael Jayston, the star of the 1973 BBC adaptation. Though this serial suffers from 70s BEEB production values (funky hair, make-up and costumes; sets and interior lighting more at home in a cubicle farm than a shadowy old house), it has a devoted fan base. It is one of my favorites because of Jayston who wonderfully captures the teasing tone of so much of Rochester's interaction with Jane and allows you to see that he is quite in love with her. Yes, he's blond, lightly built and more civil in his 19th century incivility than your average "perfect gentleman" is nowadays, but Jayston brings dignity to the role, refusing to ham it up. He inhabits the character rather than putting him on to strut around for a few hours, as many actors do. With a script that is practically a transcription of the novel (down to annoying voice-overs that unnecessarily explain what Jane is thinking), he really gets to bring the character to life.

So after all this do we need another Jane Eyre? I think we do. In the novel, Rochester goes occasionally goes into fugue-like states while describing his romantic past. He seems transported and talking to creatures that aren't in the room. He is very nearly insane, streching arms out to embrace angels and arguing with invisible witches. Of course, Macbeth sees ghosts (and witches), too. Combine these delusions with his obviously depressed state through much of the novel, and you could make a solid case that there is more than one member of the Rochester clan who is nuts. The 1997 adaptation starring Ciaran Hinds suggested a mentally unstable Rochester, but more often than not Hinds' interpretation came out seeming like a series of wildly inappropriate acting choices. I'd love to see a truly batshit Rochester, played like a manic depressive, perhaps. Also Rochester and Jane talk nearly constantly of fairies, sprites and folk tales. Though the 1944 and 2006 adaptations are mysterious and stylized, I'd love to see an adaptation that was even more over the top in this regard. The upcoming adaptation promises to be so which gives me hope, but I worry that its Rochester, Michael Fassbinder, is probably to blond, chisled and Germanic to be quite right.

When Ladies Meet

2010-08-12T15:15:00.002-05:00

When Ladies Meet (1941) is one of MGM's megastar dramas, featuring four brand-name stars, lush production values and a screenplay drawn from a high-profile property. For all that, it's a pretty weak film.

The script is based on a Rachel Crother's play about a popular novelist struggling to finish her latest book whose protagonist is a woman having an affair with a married man. In "real life," the author (Joan Crawford) is having an affair with her married publisher (Herbert Marshall). Her boyfriend (Robert Taylor) hopes to break them up by inviting the publisher's wife (Greer Garson) to country week-end with all the interested parties. It's a cracking great set-up for either melodrama or comedy. The script is intelligently written, the characters are interesting and the dialogue strikes a nice balance between wisecracks and wisdom. I can't remember ever watching a movie with a script this good, that I liked this little. Why don't I love this movie?

The problem is the married man. For certain of my favorite movie stars, I have cut-off years. Laurence Olivier is 1960. Michael Redgrave is 1950. And Herbert Marshall is 1940. I know that these actors probably did some fine work after these dates, but I've just never been interested in it. And, to make matters worse, I've so often been disappointed by by their post-cut-off work, that my prejudice has tended to reinforce itself. When Ladies Meet is a rather drastic example of this. The whole thing hinges on Marshall and Crawford's affair, which must be made convincing--but not too attractive because of the production code. This balancing act is rather tricky. As much as I love Herbert Marshall,I don't find him at all appealing here. He just seems too phony and not in the wonderfully cynical way he is in Trouble in Paradise, where the audience is in on the joke. In When Ladies Meet, he has lied to himself as well, and believes that his love for the author is a grand passion that must not be denied. Had Marshall made this movie a decade earlier, when his character could have been given free reign to willingly lead the author to her doom, we might have had something. We might have had Trouble in Paradise Part II, the Love Quadrangle. Instead, what we find out, of course, is that this isn't his first such grand passion and when confronted by his wife, he instantly gives up on his lover. The affair reminds me of the one between Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy in Woody Allen's Manhattan. "The probably sit around on the floor with wine and cheese and mispronounce 'allegorical' and 'didacticism'."

It's hard to believe that Joan Crawford would ignore Robert Taylor to have an affair with this man or that Greer Garson would stick by him. Not to mention the fact that you find yourself wondering why a man who is married to a woman fifteen years his junior who looks like Greer Garson is philandering to begin with? And that's just the start of this film's casting troubles.

Garson plays the older, wiser, married woman, and Crawford the young, single profession who is dealing with the realities of love for the first time. Robert Taylor refers to Crawford as a "gal," and the whole point of the script is that she's rationalized herself into a big mistake. Garson was only a year older than Crawford, but she seems much younger--perhaps because she'd only been acting in film a few years while Crawford had been a familiar face for well over a decade. In any case, Crawford comes off as far too worldly to fall for Marshall's malarky. If these two actresses had to star, it would have made more sense to reverse their roles. Garson has really good chemistry with Taylor, as well, making it even more puzzling that he doesn't go for her instead.

Taylor is great fun here, getting all the good lines and some physical comedy. In one memorable scene Garson takes him out on her tiny sailboat, and he pretends to know what he's doing while feeling desperately ill and scared. Spring Byington and Rafael Storm nicely round out the cast, playing the third couple at the unhappy country week-end, so wrapped-up in their perpetual redecorating that they scarcely notice the melodrama unfolding around them.

I look forward to watching the pre-code version of this film with Ann Harding as the wife, Myrna Loy as the mistress, Robert Montgomery as the boyfriend and Frank Morgan as the two-timing publisher. Replace Morgan with Marshall would be Fantasy Football casting.

Four Feathers Fail

2010-07-23T11:09:00.005-05:00

The dangers of Cosplay: Haversham disguised as the enemy.

Gosh, I thought I was in the mood for The Four Feathers. I guess not. I'm usually all about obscure British actors cheerio-ing it up in pith helmets in foreign lands. I can't get enough Korda brothers, and, lately, I've even made my peace with splashy Technicolor spectacle films. In this one, the acting is good, the cinematography is wonderful and yet, through most of the movie, I found myself a little restless and bored. Had I been watching on the Big Screen, I have no doubt that, I wouldn't have moved a muscle for fear of missing a second of travelogue glory, but, at home in my basement I had to stand on my head just to give myself something to do. I think I checked all the actor's bios on IMDB. ( Did you know that Ralph Richardson and Laurence Oliver revived the bombed-out Old Vic just after the war? )

Even in my basement, I manage to watch and thoroughly enjoy Lawrence of Arabia. I love that film less for its landscapes and more for its honest and moving portrayal of friendship. I think it is the best movie ever made on the subject. Four Feathers promises a similar vein of Kipling-esque camaraderie in the Victorian-era British army. The problem is that the four friends, after a brief introduction, quickly go their separate ways. The story begins with the engagement of an officer in the army and the daughter of an army General. The officer, Harry Faversham, decides that he doesn't want to participate in a foreign war because he wants to get started on married life as soon as possible. He resigns his commission and his friends and fiance resign their friendship with him, presenting him with a Victorian bitch slap: a box of four feathers. Haversham then takes the crazy step of trying to participate in a foreign war without actually being in the army anymore. If nothing else, this movie serves as an excellent example of what not to do if you are unhappy in the military.

What keeps me coming back to the likes of Gunga Din, The Lives of the Bengal Lancers, and even The Last Outpost is the give and take, the Victorian Army trash-talk if you will. But John Clement's Harry Faversham determinedly pretends to be mute even when he does meet up with Ralph Richardson's blind Captain Durance (OK, that part is pretty awesome. Faversham leads Durance--the faux mute leading the blind?-- across the desert to safety and then gets arrested because he has disguised himself as a Dervish. Talk about no good deed going unpunished.)

Four Feathers is fairly strong in the romance department. June Duprez, one of my favorite obscure British actresses, acquits herself admirably as the beautiful woman who dumps Haversham for his cowardice but continues to love him anyway. In these kinds of movies, the love story is usually tacked on, so it's refreshing to see the romance actually work for the material rather than against it. Four Feathers is a decent movie, but, given all its incredible natural resources, it should be better. More time on character and less on landscapes and battles, would have helped, I think.

The Mindreader (1933) Picspam!

2010-06-30T10:40:00.000-05:00

Warren William plays a sideshow mystic who falls in love, hits the big time and then loses it all. Good lordy, I love this movie. This is probably my favorite Warren William film so far. I could gush about William's powerful combination of roguish charm and villainous behavior, his surprisingly solid acting which leaves me feeling simultaneously attracted and repulsed. But I'll let the pictures do the talking. Just click on the pics to see the larger versions, people.

Five words to make any fan of pre-code movies swoon: Warren William in a turban.

"I've got a headache this big!"

Mick LaSalle finally realizes his dream of being on screen with Warren William.

Who's afraid of the big bad Warren?

When The Great Chandra puts his hand on his heart to show sincerity, run for cover.

Constance Cummings gives in to Chandra's charms.

Married life is the pits.

Chandra goes legit selling backscrubbers.

A fancy address, a nicer turban and our hero is ready to relieve rich patrons of their spare cash.

A blackmail scheme gone wrong ends in gunplay and Chandra flees the country, leaving the missus holding the bag. Here, he is performing in Mexico while drunk-out-of-his-mind. I think I saw this guy on a cruise ship once.

Thanks to this project, I've created a new shortcut filter for Photoshop: Warren William Scruff-- the balance of contrast and gray required to show him at his disheveled best.

Chandra begs forgiveness from his wife before turning himself in to the cops.

Like many of the best movies of this era, The Mindreader walks a thin line between farce and tragedy. Something about the times makes this combination work well.

I love this kiss. She's totally giving him crows feet.

Chandra says goodbye to his old pal Mick before heading off to jail.

Tween Angst: Kathleen (1941)

2010-06-23T14:10:00.007-05:00

I admit it. I really like Shirley Temple movies of the 1940s. They are safe. They are predictable. They are the antithesis of the kinds of movies I normally like (pre-code or screwball with lots of subtext and edge). So sue me. I'm not consistent and I don't bloody care.

I realized a couple of things while thoroughly enjoying this slight little movie. One: Shirley Temple was a really good actress. You just don't notice her acting. Most of the time she's called on to be an adorable, precocious tween which must not have been much of a stretch. In a few scenes she may be required to do dramatic acting, as well, and she handles it like a pro. The trickiest thing she does though is to appear slightly stupider than she really was. Nothing is so difficult as playing dumb in a convincing way.

Two: many of the 1940s reproduction outfits sold to us by Stop Staring and its ilk and often modeled by women with many tattoos, are actually based on outfits that Shirley Temple wore when she was 12. If you find this fact disturbing, then you are not alone.

While Herbert Marshal was the reason I watched this movie in the first place, his performance is fairly forgettable. I did like the fact that the majority of his lines in the first 40 minutes were mostly monosyllabic grunts. "Hmmm. What? Oh hello there. Hmmm. Well. Humpf." He disappears for another 20 minutes or so, and, when he resurfaces, he is wearing a hilariously ugly plaid jacket and bow tie that I was unable to screencap because my computer is acting up. Dang. Well, anyway those are the HM highlights for Kathleen, such as they are.

Lorraine Day gives a solid performance as Temple's only-in-the-movies, live-in psychiatrist. Day is likable, caring, and plucky, and she makes the perfect foil for Gail Patrick's vamping. Since Patrick was born to play the wicked stepmother type, it's great to see her excelling at it here. Herbert Marshall is torn between the two and reacts by grunting. Go, Herbert. You grunted your way into my heart in Riptide. There's no reason you should stop now!

The Story of Esther Costello

2010-06-12T12:58:00.003-05:00

It's wonderfully ironic that a movie whose villains are sleazy publicity hounds had such a ridiculously trashy publicity campaign. Posters and trailers for the film bore the words, "The management of this theater sincerely believes that "The Story of Esther Costello" will not offend any emotionally mature person of either sex. We recommend it for our adult patrons and more-informed teenagers." (Well that rules out the Nipper, surely!) And the geniuses in marketing didn't stop there. About half-way through the trailer, we get this:

I was planning to discuss this film without spoilers but when the trailer pretty much gives the whole story away, I don't feel such discretion is necessary. Please don't reveal what happens in my post. Oh, wait, I want you to so that you'll bring a crowd of more-informed teenagers to my blog.

The its first hour, this film is a pretty standard, well-acted melodrama, but about halfway through, the script jumps into Lake Whatisthiscrazyshit and doesn't come up for air till the last frame. Joan Crawford plays a rich American woman, Margaret Landi, "permanently separated" from her cheating husband, who goes to Ireland to revisit her youth. Her local priest foists a charity project on her--a deaf, blind, mute girl named Esther Costello (Heather Sears). At first, Margaret resists, but she is moved by Esther's plight and takes the girl to London to see specialists. The doctors reveal that there's nothing wrong with Esther's eyes and ears: her condition was caused by an emotional trauma she suffered in an accident. A bit of a stretch, I'd say, but we aren't in Magnificent Obsession territory--yet.

A series of montages show Esther in America making slow progress at a special school. In one scene, Esther throws a tantrum and Margaret smacks her one. (Take care if you play this movie as a drinking game. Chugging every time Joan Crawford smacks someone will likely result in a blackout). After that, Esther decides she really does know her sign language after all. She becomes a superstar on the deaf-mute inspirational lecture circuit of Catholic schools in Boston. Like an indie band out on tour for the first time, she slowly builds up buzz until she draws the attention of a newspaper reporter, Harry Grant (Lee Patterson). After Harry writes an article calling Margaret a saint, Esther starts touring the country, and a foundation is created in her name. One day, 45 minutes into the movie, the foundation gets a check from Margaret's husband, Carlo (Rossano Brazzi), heretofore not seen in the film. Margaret decides to look Carlo up and the pair are reunited.

The next morning, we see Carlo and Margaret in bed together. Actually, it's two twin beds pushed fairly close together, because, after all, there is still a Production Code to be looked after. Emotional maturity was required to view the moment when Carlo, naked to the waist, is introduced to the young lady who will be his adopted daughter. She's blind, of course, but we're not. I confess I didn't make it through this awkward scene without some Beavis-and-Butthead-style giggling.

Carlo brings in a sleazy publicity agent to manage Esther's fundraising tour. They put together creepy, fascistic rallies in sports stadiums around the country, and begin skimming from the foundation. Nice. As if Carlo weren't enough of a dirt bag, he also begins to indulge inappropriate feelings for Esther. Meanwhile, she has a nice, innocent romance with the young reporter. They don't so much kiss as bump their faces together affectionately.

The story descends into familiar Mildred Pierce territory, as Carlo becomes jealous of the face bumping guy and Margaret increasingly jealous of Carlo. Here's where the crazy comes in. Margaret busts him deliberately under-reporting the take at a fundraising rally, and she does nothing. A few days later, she catches him watching Esther undress. Does she dump him immediately? No, she smacks Esther for forgetting to close her curtains, plans to send her away to college and gives Carlo no choice but to end the tour. Wait a sec! This is a guy you've already left once for cheating on you and you don't see these big red flags waving around! Nope.

Meanwhile, Harry the reporter starts to dig into the financial management of the foundation and doesn't like what he sees. His boss plans to print his story to coincide with Esther's big rally in Nuremberg-- I mean London.

While in London, Margaret has to go to Brighton to cancel an upcoming date on the tour. Carlo is supposed to go to Glasgow, but he decides to stay behind, realizing that this might be his last chance to get Esther alone. He walks around London trying to look evil but seems more like a trench coat advertisement. He goes back to the palatial rented digs, finds Esther asleep and rapes her. The scene isn't exactly graphic, but clever cutting away to a storm blowing in Esther's French doors leaves little doubt about what happens.

The next day, Esther wakes up--distraught about the assault but miraculously able to see and hear again. This is the biggest WTF moment in the whole shootin' match. Apparently, movie blind-deaf-muteness is cured much like movie amnesia--one trauma causes the condition, a second can magically fix everything. Hooray!

Harry arrives and confronts Margaret about the financial indiscretions . Having just found one of Carlo's cufflinks in Esther's bed, she gives Harry permission to take Esther away. They both find out that Esther is magically cured. Oh, that's gonna look good in the papers.

Margaret grabs a gun. Finally, I thought, she sees some sense. She's going to shoot her dirtbag husband. But no: she picks him up at the airport, shows him the cufflink, bundles him iton the car and then drives into oncoming traffic, killing them both. I guess that's easier than divorcing an Italian national in the 1950s.

Yo, baby have you heard? Sex with me cures blind-deaf-muteness.

The management of this blog recommends this campy, strange melodrama for those with a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous.

Dangerous (1935)

2010-06-01T17:15:00.000-05:00

At age 27 Bette Davis won an Oscar for playing a burnt-out, drunken, embittered, middle-aged actress, Joyce Heath in this film. She is magnificent as a character so full of nervous energy that even her besotted lover (Franchot Tone) recognizes that she is only bearable if she can work off her neuroses on stage. To her fans, this character is recognizable as Davis' persona, but it's important to note that in 1935 she hadn't done anything like this before. In her must-see performance Davis creates a person who is both self-centered and vulnerable, often within the same sentence.

As glorious as she is, I can't help wishing she'd made this movie in 1948. Young Davis manages to seem world weary enough, but never the frump other characters describe. Shesprings back to youthful perfection too quickly for us to believe she has weather years of hard drinking. Imagine the older Davis in the full flower of her talent inhabiting such a juicy, glorious role. She would have drop-kicked that mofo into eternity. And what if this movie had been made just 18 months earlier, in the pre-code era? Gone would be the insipid, unconvincing ending, in which marital vows are renewed with clockwork precision.

Des,pite these failings, Dangerous is still a great movie. Tone is at his best. I've always liked Franchot Tone. If there were a Tone fan club, I'd probably join it. (And I fully expect to hear of one, as soon as I post this!) Oh, it's true he played all the same sort of wealthy gadabout roles that Roberts Montgomery and Taylor did so well, but Tone brought something unique to them. Perhaps it was that he was a wealthy gadabout in real life. He was, as Mike Connor says of C. K. Dexter Haven, "born to the purple, but still a very nice guy." In Dangerous, he plays an up-and-coming young architect who must choose between his lovely, funny, rich and well-connected fiancee and Davis' washed-up, probably bi-polar, certainly manipulative actress. This seems to be a no-brainer, of course, until Tone glimpses Davis in romantic lighting, wearing his old clothes. She does more for wearing a rope as a belt than even Ellie May Clampit. In this scene Davis has a devilish, nay Satanic, smile that takes half a dozen frames to develop. I've done my best with the screencaps but I fear I've failed. Davis is just one of those stars whom still pictures can never quite capture. Enjoy.

Mixing movies and cocktails

2010-05-19T15:10:00.010-05:00

A friend of mine recently sent me an article from the NY Times about pairing DVDs with drinks I liked the concept and the fact that the author mentioned one of my favorite obscure British films, I Know Where I'm Going!I liked the concept, but I felt, as a classic movie buff and a cocktail maker/drinker, I had something to add. So I'm stealin' his meme, breakin' out my cocktail shaker (they don't call me the "nipper" fo' nothin'), and droppin' my "g"s all over the place.

The Thin Man/martini: How can you talk about movies and booze and not make The Thin Man the first stop in your cinematic bar crawl? This is a movie in which the main characters start drinking when they get out of bed in the morning and don't stop till the case is solved several days later. They get a little tipsy, but no one gets falling-down-drunk. Yes, I realize it's fantasy but it’s a fantasy with enough reality in it to make it a very popular escapist film. Even today, this movie can be relied on to take away all but the deepest, funkiest of blues. Perhaps it’s their old-school alcohol metabolism that keeps them afloat, but I think it’s the fact that the drinks Nick and Nora Charles imbibe are really much smaller than we are used to. It's a case of the dreadful portion-size inflation that has taken over American dining and drinking. The glasses Nick and Nora used were about a third the size of the typical "martini" glass nowadays. In one scene, Myrna Loy orders three martinis and drinks them one after another. If she were to do that with a contemporary martini (which is often not a cocktail at all but just a big, cold glass of neat gin or vodka) she would spend the second half of the film having her stomach pumped. The martini she drank in 1934 would have contained quite a bit of melted ice, vermouth and bitters, as well as a large, alcohol-displacing garnish, like olives or a lemon twist.

Nick and Nora Charles have the Best Christmas ever: booze, toy guns and a new fur coat.

Martini: Fill a shaker half full of cracked ice. I usually crack the ice in the palm of my hand with a large, heavy spoon. Some find this a bit scary, though, so an alternate method is to place ice in a plastic ziploc bag and whack it against the counter top until the ice is broken. If the ice is too small it will melt and make your drink too weak; if it is too big it won’t melt enough. Trust me: it needs to be cracked. Perfecting this technique will not only stand you in good stead not only for martinis but for most other cocktails.For each cocktail, place one room-temperature jigger of gin, a large tablespoon of room-temperature vermouth and a dash of orange bitters into the shaker. Shake or stir, whichever you prefer, Mr. Bond, and strain into small martini glasses. (Ebay is a great source of vintage cocktail glasses.)

The Public Enemy/Salty Dog You have to have at least one movie about bootleggers, and this is probably the most famous. Based on a novel named "Blood and Beer," the film appeared in 1931 and made James Cagney a star. In the movie’s most famous scene, of course, Cagney smashes a grapefruit into Mae Clark's face. That's why the drink that goes best with this movie is the delicious, refreshing "Salty Dog," whose main ingredient is grapefruit juice.

Salty Dog: Fill a tall, Tom Collins glass about half full with ice and add five ounces of grapefruit juice. This drink is mind-blowingly good with fresh-squeezed juice. Add a jigger of gin (bathtub quality is fine, since the juice covers up the flavor anyway) and a pinch of salt. Stir and serve. For a more elegant presentation, you could put the juice and gin in a shaker and use a cocktail glass whose rim has been salted. Technically, a Salty Dog is a mixed drink, as it only contains one kind of alcohol. A drink becomes a cocktail when it contains two or more spirits. Yeah, I know, you wanna smash a grapefruit in my face when I say pedantic stuff like that.

Philadelphia Story/champagne cocktail/Eye-opener: Lots of old movies celebrate champagne, but perhaps none with such devotion as Philadelphia Story. This movie really goes out of its way to make sure that you know just how drunk the main characters get on the stuff. But what really sells it to me as a necessity for a movie/booze post, is its hangover scenes. Everyone who drinks in the film feels the effects the next day, to a comic degree. Was Cary Grant ever more welcome in a movie than when he dashes in fresh as a daisy (he's a recovering alcoholic who doesn't get plastered with the others) and volunteers to make everyone an "Eye-opener that will pop the pennies off the eyelids of dead Irishmen"?

Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) manages to drink Uncle Willie under the table and then sobers up quickly to do some secretarial work for her "wandering parakeet" boyfriend. I've often rooted for Dexter and Liz to hook up, but that's just because I identify with her.

Champagne cocktail: Put a sugar cube at the bottom of a tall champagne flute. Soak the cube in bitters. Angustura is the classic and most available, but any bitters will do. I like orange bitters because the result has the flavor of a mimosa without watering down the champagne with juice. Fill the glass with champagne and enjoy. This works best with a mid-priced sparkling wine, I think. If you get real champagne at $40-plus a bottle, it's sort of a waste to put sugar in it.

Eye opener: If you have too many champagne cocktails while watching Philly Story (as is easy to do), you can enjoy this classic hangover cure. Fill a shaker half full with ice (if you are hung over, you may not want to fuss with cracking the ice). For each cocktail, add a jigger of white rum, a dash of Pernod, a dash of creme de cacao, a teaspoon of finely ground sugar and an egg yolk. Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. This drink was originally made with absinthe, which has recently become available again. If you happen to have it in your bar, use it in place of Pernod. Try not to ride in any carts with Dinah and you should be fine.

Manhattan/Manhattan: A few years ago, my husband and I were in Manhattan and ducked into a fancy hotel for drinks. We ordered,--what else? A Manhattan. The bartender made the drink with rye whiskey and it completely changed my life. Bourbon Manhattans, which are more common, are sweeter and heavier. They will make you feel as if you are sleepwalking until you wake up the next day with a terrible headache. Rye Manhattans have a complex character, like the town after which they are named. I feel that Woody Allen's masterpiece Manhattan best reflects the warmth and unexpected edge of this cocktail. It's one beautiful movie, to boot.

Manhattan: Fill a shaker half full with cracked ice. For each cocktail,add a jigger of rye whiskey, a large tablespoon of sweet vermouth, and a dash of angustura bitters. Stir and strain into a chilled cocktail, garnishing with a cherry.

Platinum Blonde /White Lady: This Frank Capra comedy tells the story of a hard-boiled reporter (Robert Williams) who marries a society dame (Jean Harlow) but falls for his gal Friday (Loretta Young). Toward the end of the movie the reporter’s pals show up at his house, late at night, drunk. He continues to entertain them and winds up on a bender that lasts for days. When he sobers up, Harlow throws him out, and he moves in with Loretta Young. They live happily ever after, thanks to the non-enforcement of the Production Code. Since Platinum Blonde was made toward the end of Prohibition, it seemed appropriate to choose a gin-based cocktail, whose other components could easily hide the taste of bootleg hooch. The White Lady with it sweet and sour flavors fills the bill.

White Lady:

Fill a cocktail shaker half full with cracked ice. For each cocktail, add a jigger of gin, half a jigger of Cointreau or triple sec and a generous tablespoon of fresh-squeezed lemon juice. Serve in a chilled cocktail glass with a sugared rim and garnish with a lemon slice. This is one of my favorite drinks, and I owe my knowledge of it to my mother-in-law, who once visited us in Minnesota in March, bless her soul.

Roman Holiday/Campari shakerato: Roman Holiday isn't really a boozy movie, but, as this piece progresses, I find myself thinking of my favorite cocktails, first, and then trying to come up with movies to match. When I think of Campari shakerato, I think of sunshine and walking around as a tourist, gasping for a drink. Roman Holiday celebrates both those things. Also, Campari shakerato isn't as strong as other drinks on this list, so you can enjoy a couple and still go dancing on that barge in the river later.

The only drinky scene in Roman Holiday. It looks like something stronger than shakerato!

Campari shakerato: For each cocktail, squeeze the juice of one orange (about four ounces) into a shaker with ice (no need to crack it). Add a jigger of Campari, shake and strain into a large, chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange slice.

Cinema OCD Podcast

2010-05-13T11:55:00.001-05:00

Cinema OCD Podcast

Episode two is up and archived. Cliff and I discussed Warren William and his films Upperworld, The Match King, Three on a Match and The Mind Reader. Thirty minutes of Warren William goodness and more of the boy bursting in demanding to tell me stuff about robots. Good times.

Podcast? Well sort of

2010-05-09T14:51:00.003-05:00

Such as it, the first episode of my CinemaOCD Podcast is now available. It's a bit rough, owing to interruptions from my son, and the fact that I had to end early when I lost a page of my script! It ends rather abruptly with no notion that this podcast might continue as regular entity. I do plan to do one next week, with Cliff from Warren William blog as my guest/co-host. Hopefully I'll manage a bit better when I'm not just yammering to myself.

Tune in next week at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time for Episode 2.

OCD for the Big Screen: Notorious

2010-05-07T11:50:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to catch Notorious (1946) at the Riverview Theater. I had a unique experience at that screening: I got there late. Call me an incorrigible optimist, but this was actually a good thing. I walked in during the scene in which Devlin and Alicia are flying down to Rio, their heads pressed together in murmuring conversation against the backs of those gloriously huge 1940s airplane seats. "I was remembering how nice we both were," Alicia says wistfully of her father. Oh, what a thrill to walk into a big movie palace and see those two up there on the screen, carrying on like that. It was a bit like that moment in Radio Days when the boy walks into Radio City Music hall and sees the kiss between Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story? Nevermind that I had to miss all my favorite business with the scarf and "this fog get's me" at the beginning.

With the retrofit sound equipment at the Riverside, I noticed a line I hadn't heard before. When Devlin and Alicia are at the races being watched by Sebastien through the binoculars, Grant says, "Dry your eyes. His nibs is coming." I was so excited because I'd never heard the second half of that before. My husband and I call our son "his nibs." We collect moments in pop culture when the phrase is used. (I noticed another one the other day in When Ladies Meet" when Robert Taylor refers to Joan Crawford as "her nibs.")

It was also great fun to watch Notorious with a really big audience. All around me I heard the gasps of the people who'd never seen the movie before, reacting to the suspense. I'm always so dang jealous of those folks. It's nice to find out which lines get the biggest laughs. My own favorite about the chicken catching fire once garnered a few chuckles, but I was surprised at how much everyone laughed at Louis Calhern's preening when Alicia tells him that Sebastien thought him very handsome. After that, I began to take notice of Calhern's performance and, indeed, he is terrific. I love the scene in which Devlin comes in to tell him that Felicia might be really ill and he's eating cheese and crackers. He's just so into those crackers.

Hitchcock's artistry can't be left out in any discussion of Notorious. During the party scene, Felicia and Devlin must complete their investigation in the wine cellar before the champagn runs out. Hitchcock empahsiszes the champagne in every shot and the effect is like a ticking clock. A while back, I coined the term "champagne clock" to describe this sequence. This time through, I noticed that time and champagne are linked in other scenes as well. Devlin buys a bottle of champagne before he goes to meet with Prescott, and though he refers to it in the script as a "bottle of wine," it is specifically champagne. Hitchcock places the bottle prominently in the scene in which Devlin is presented with the nature of Felicia's work. Unwilling to stand up for Felicia's new found sobriety and faithfulness, which is only a few hours old, Devlin allows the begging of their love affair to sleep away. The champagne clock begins to tick out what Devlin believes to be their final moments. Tellingly, Devlin leaves the bottle behind and doesn't remember it until after he an Felicia have fight later that evening.

The big screen always affords the opportunity to notice new things about Grant's performance. I think the moment when he starts up the stairs to Felicia's room might be the most beautiful moment in the whole movie. Archie Leach the acrobat takes over as he silently bounds the stairs two or three at a time.

I can name movies such as Cary Grant's Pride and the Passion, that I did like at all until I saw them on the big screen. I would encourage those of you who have the opportunity to watch any classic films that you can on the big screen. It is always worth while.

Eye Candy of the Day: Carole's leg

2010-05-03T09:03:00.004-05:00

I just watched this amazing movie for the first time yesterday. I haven't had time to put together a coherent post yet, but I just had to gush. The picture says it all: this movie kicks ass. Twentieth Century is up there with Design for Living as my favorite pre-code comedy. One of the things that definitely makes this movie pre-code (besides the living in sin subtext and the religious lunatic) is the amount of Carole Lombard lounging around dishabille. Typical pre-code cheesecake gambits abound including changing in front of the camera, losing the belt for that robe, etc. Walter Connoly and Roscoe Kerns are brilliant. Also: I'm now a total Barrymore fanatic.

Magnificent Obsession (1935)

2010-04-29T08:53:00.001-05:00

As I was watching Magnificent Obsession, I found myself thinking quite a bit about Random Harvest and comparing the two. Improbable situations? Check. Impossible coincidences? Check. Relentless over-long melodrama? Check, check, checkity, check! And like Random Harvest, a movie I liked despite its rather glaring flaws, I found myself totally getting into Magnificent Obsession. Once again the leads, Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor save the day. What would we do if corny novels were made into films with weak actors? Well, we wouldn't watch them, I guess. Dunne and Taylor are supported by Charles Butterworth and Arthur Treacher who provide the much-needed comic relief.

The story begins with the accidental drowning of a famous and beloved doctor. The doctor's life wasn't saved because some lung contraption was being used over at Bobby Merrick's (Robert Taylor) house after he fell in the lake, drunk. A few days later, Bobby and the doctor's widow have a meet cute moment right out of a Powell and Loy movie. Naturally she loathes him because he "killed her husband," (Wha???) and naturally he dedicates himself to making her love him (double wha???). He tries more screwball nonsense ala Love Crazy and she winds up getting hit by a car and going blind. Ha. ha.

You would think with my love of screwball comedy that I would have just shut the movie off right then, wouldn't you? After all this movie seems to be on some kind of mission to preach responsibility and show lightheartedness as akin to homicidal tendencies. Perhaps because the script was just so completely inflexible on the topic, I hung in there. I just had to see what they came up with next. And boy, oh boy was it worth it. Bobby befriends the widow Hudson and pays for her to see the best specialists in the world. When they can do nothing he goes to medical school and becomes a Nobel Prize winning brain surgeon so that he can perform the surgery himself. Of course this is handled in 90 second montage just to make it all the more hilariously unbelievable. I don't want to see Taylor as a brain surgeon any more than I want to see him as an off the hook drunken playboy going through a religious conversion, which he also does in this film. There is something so wonderfully controlled about Taylor, so smooth and perfect. He really could act and he proves that here, but like Cary Grant, I enjoy watching him embodying his own persona most of all. My favorite scenes with him are those when he is the unrepentant playboy, climbing out of windows and making nurses laugh.

Irene Dunne is terrific of course. She always is. I could watch her read the phone book and in Magnificent Obsession she practically does. Well, she reads books in braille which is almost as exciting.

Magnicent Harvest, I mean Random Obsession, no.... Magnificent Obsession was remade in the 1950s with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. It was the go-to script for proving that pretty boy actors had "unsuspected depth," I guess. But I'm left wondering what's wrong with Robert Taylor being really good at being Robert Taylor? It's a gift from God to be so beautiful and charming that people fall in love with you in two seconds. I'd say it's more important than being a Nobel Prize winning surgeon. Brother, those are a dime a dozen, but the Robert Taylors only come along every fifty years or so.

Cash (1933)

2010-04-27T15:37:00.000-05:00

Cash is an Alexander Korda-produced short film (62 minutes) packed with Robert Donat-y goodness. It follows the story of a wealthy man and his daughter (Edmund Gwen and Wendy Barrie) who are hurt by the financial crash. Robert Donat plays the technician sent to turn off their lights. He ends up going into business with them selling shares in dodgy real estate deal to build a swimming complex called "Eternal Spring" in London. At the time, the idea was meant as a joke, a clear sign that Gwen's character was a con man, and yet, there are places like this all over the United States now. I fully expect to see an "Eternal Spring" in the Wisconsin Dells. (And wouldn't it be awesome to have a water park with a 1930s London theme? I know I'd pony up the dough for a few shares!)

Zoltan Korda's direction is a bit off at times, especially when it comes to adding in music to the soundtrack, which is jarring in every instance, but he does seem to have a deft hand with comedy. The script is fast-paced (with such a short run-time, it would have to be) and funny. The sets are memorable, a sure sign that the other Korda brother, Vincent was probably involved. Gwen and Barrie live in an elaborate streamline art deco masterpiece of a house. This is probably the prettiest set I can think of, equal to Kay Francis' swank digs in Trouble in Paradise.

This film was made shortly after Donat completed work on The Private Life of Henry VIIIth. It was the first starring role for both Donat and Barrie, who had played Jane Seymour in Hank 8. As a Donat fan, it's a thrill to see one of his earliest films even if it's not a terribly impressive effort. It floats by pleasantly enough. Barrie and Donat are quite nice together and they alternate between arguing and making out in a way that is amusing and almost believable.

Cash was a low-budget "quota" movie. In the 1930s Britain was required to produce and exhibit a certain number of British-made films. Quota pictures were frequently greeted with groans by impatient audiences waiting for the American-made part of the program to begin. Yet the Kordas were a force to be reckoned with and I find their cast-off fluff just as interesting if not more so, than similar level films made by American studios.

Show us your Geek Sphere winner

2010-04-25T11:54:00.009-05:00

CinemaOCD follower, Rudyfan was the one and only entrant in my Show Me Your Geeksphere Contest. It's just as well, since Rudyfan's Rudoph Valentino collection would have been stiff competition, anyway. Just feast your peepers on it, peeps. It's inspiring.

An original Mineral Lava Beauty Contest trophy, from the Baltimore Contest. The Baltimore contestant came in third overall in the national contest. Read more about the contest at Rudyfan's blog.
Rudyfan's desk. Nice computer screen.

Rudyfan's posters are all originals. I think the flowers are a nice touch.

Rudyfan's DVD collection and the Maltese Falcon. She titled this one "The stuff that dreams are made of." Word.

An original painting and plaque.

An insert from The Young Rajah.

Rudyfan's Blood and Sand Window Card.

Rudyfan will receive a CinemaOCD t-shirt for her troubles. Hooray!

George in the Jungle: Green Hell (1940)

2010-04-12T16:00:00.000-05:00

What would happen if you crossed Red Dust with a version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in which five of the dwarfs were called Sweaty, one was dead and the other was George Sanders? Or to put it another way, what if you spun out the first fifteen minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark to an hour and a half, and replaced the archeology and booby traps with a half a dozen emo Indiana Joneses who sit around being mooning over a chick? (Eventually the natives attack because they are sick of listening to the whining.) Well if you took either of this filmic perversions to their Nth degree and then some you'd have James Whale's Green Hell (1940).

A Friend of Cinema OCD pointed me in the direction of Green Hell, selling me on it with the information that Vincent Price considered it his worst film. Really? Worse than Theater of Blood (1973)? I'm so there! Well it turns out Green Hell is no where near as bad as Theater of Blood. It's not George Sander's worst film by a long shot either. And I'd even go so far as to say it's not even James Whale's worst film, (that honor could well belong to Wives Under Suspicion).

Warning: Spoilers will follow!

George Sanders and Vincent Price. Price dies so early in the film, I kept expecting him to come back as a zombie later on, else why would they bother to hire him?

The story follows a team of archeologist/adventurers lead by Dr. Loren (Alan Hale with a dubious European accent) and Keith "Brandy" Brandon (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Along for the ride are bigamist David "dies twenty minutes into the Film" Richardson (Vincent Price), Tex (George Bancroft), totally emo Graham (Gene Garrick), beyond emo youngster Hal Scott (John Howard) and emo for a George Sander's character, Forrester (George Sanders).

Tex and Forrester sing Home on the Range, "where the dee-ahs and the aunt-a-lope pah-lay."

After arriving at Incan ruins, they use their team of native guides to build a big house where they settle in for the long haul, excavating the ruins with dynamite and kicking over mummified remains while looking for the treasure hall. Perhaps annoyed by the mistreatment of their sacred burial sites, unfriendly natives show up and shoot Richardson with poison arrows.

"It's just a coma."

Richardson dies and not long after his wife turns up, (Joan Bennett) being carried unconscious in sedan chair and looking, to quote Forrester, "a bit of alright." When she wakes up she's mildly distressed to learn her husband is dead, but she has dreamy Fairbanks and Sanders tripping over themselves to impress her with exotic orchids and trips to the ruins. Excursions she takes in white linen dresses and three inch high white high heels, I must add. Fairbanks attempts to channel Gable from Red Dust as he attempts to remain steadfastly grumpy about this doll face turning up on his expedition and ruining everything. It's a given that he's head over heels in love with her.

Hair by George!

Forrester on the other hand, resigns whatever work he may have been doing in favor of the task of grooming himself, the other dwarfs, and fawning over the newly minted widow. He plays guitar behind his head, washes her hair and refuses to notice that she's completely in love with Brandy. That George! Perhaps it's just that I recently finished A Dreadful Man, but I can't help but see a bit of George and Benita here watching him going all out to amuse and cheer up the widow.

Enjoy the shampoo porn.

George sneaks in a Gomez Adams when Joan Bennett isn't looking.

10 out of 10 for this maneuver: a reverse guitar, straight into a dance floor cut-in, finishing with a "hold this for me will ya jack?"

A year passes and the dwarfs decide perhaps its time Snow White went back to civilization because she might not be safe in the jungle or something. Mrs. Richardson discovers that her husband was married to someone else as well, named "Helen" which gives her an excuse to admit her feelings for Brandy. She promptly represses these feelings for the good of the expedition. Then she pretends to like Forrester more than she does even though she looks like she's holding back vomit when he proposes to her.

In a painful scene, Forrester attempts to buck Brandy up a bit by asking him, "is there enough left of us to drink to 'us'." Some viewers speculate that this and several other scenes were part of Whale's diabolical plot to work gay subtext into the film. Whatever. Can't a brother make another brother really uncomfortable any more without it being a whole thing?

The Society for American Archeology called. You guys are all officially on suspension.

While the boys fight about who gets to escort Mrs. Richardson back to town the native guides suddenly disappear, a storm destroys most of the camp and the archeologists, sheltering from the weather in the ruins, finally stumble over the treasure. The hostile natives take advantage of the chaos to attack and the whole cast appear doomed.

"Well, cheerio everyone."

Eventually realizing that this film leaves him no further chances to be ten times as interesting or charming as anyone else, Forrester shoots himself. Twenty seconds later, the native guides' relatives show up as history's most ironic "cavalry" and save what's left of the expedition.

I apologize for the crummy caps made from Youtube. I just got carried away. It's a fun movie, with a great cast. Steve will yell at me if I don't mention that Karl Freund of Universal Horror fame was the DP on the film. There's at least a minute or two of horror sneaked in between the emofests. In one memorable scene the native guides get roasted alive by the unfriendly pro-Incan natives. If you look up reviews for the film you find quite a few people who saw it in the theater who remember this scene very vividly. They must have been a bit traumatized, poor souls.

And here's a weird tidbit for you: in looking for stills of this movie online, I found that it was listed in a web directory called the Shampoo Forum for people who fetishize hair washing. If only there was a forum for people who fetishize George Sanders playing the guitar behind his head. Oh wait, there is. It's called the comments section of CinemaOCD.

A Tale of Two Cities (1935)

2010-04-07T13:30:00.002-05:00

I really thought nothing could top Dirk Bogarde's performance in Tale of Two Cities, (1958) but I think Ronald Colman''s Sydney Carton is at least as good. I was just reading about Colman being given the part after it was conditionally offered to Brian Aherne in the latter's A Dreadful Man. Though Aherne was crushed, he was happy for his friend. The part went on to be Colman's favorite of his entire career and I can see why. He really gets to do it all: brood, act drunk, woo women, be witty, save the day, cry on camera...It's just a big box of delicious acting treats. No wonder Aherne was still licking his wounds decades later.

Colman is supported by an awesome cast that includes the always delightful Edna May Oliver as Pross, Reginald Owen as Carton's s loud-mouthed boss Stryver, Basil Rathbone as the villainous Marquis, Blanche Yurka as Madame DeFarge and Elizabeth Allan as Lucy Mannette. Director Jack Conway manages the big crowd scenes and the epic sweep of history, of course, but is equally at home in the claustrophobic world of Georgian interiors, some shabby, some baroque. Little touches like Colman's face framed in Jack Crusher's dilapidated doorway made me continuously happy. My favorite scene is one that could be completely unbearable in the hands of any other director. On Christmas eve Carton runs into Lucy and Pross on their way to church. He tags along, partly because he's drunk and indulging his desire to be with Lucy and partly because he's too polite, even when blotto, to disappoint her. Lucy lights a candle for him while "Oh Come All Ye Faithful (ever notice how so many Christmas hymns are downbeat and in the minor key? ) moves Carton to tears. Colman plays the scene with the absolute minimum of acting flourish which makes it work and keeps it from falling over the cliff into cliche. It almost makes up for the awful and scene in which Carton states the obvious about his attraction to Lucy while talking to himself in a mirror. The mirror scene is awful simply because it's unnecessary. We've already seen Sydney's motivations. We don't need it spelled out. Still Colman manages to make it bearable by giving it a wry dignity that it doesn't deserve.

Conway manages a level of realism that's unprecedented for big budget historical films of this era. The peasants look truly shabby (though not as terrifically famished as they do in the '58 version) and the director's eye for historical detail is razor sharp. In the trial scene the judge continually clouds the air with perfumed powder whenever those of the lower ranks get within ten feet of him. In another scene Carton and Stryver warm their punch in a big bowl with a hot poker from the fire. This latter image is straight out of Hogarth engravings of the period and it made the history dork in me squee with delight.

The Defarge's are grungy "characters" but I preferred them in the 1958 version where they are a touch less grotesque and more earthy. Yet, this version is probably closer to Dicken's vision since Dicken's was never afraid of making his minor characters into caricatures. And I thought again of another 18th century satirist Gilray as nasty Madame LeFarge and her toothless, warty cohorts cackle with delight while they imagine torturing their aristocratic overlords and rub their hands with glee in expectation of introducing little Lucy to the guillotine. The best scene that doesn't involve Colman is the awesome catfight between Pross and Defarge. This has to be one of classic cinema's greatest girl fights--these two should have had a cameo in The Women.

It's rare that a classic novel gets even one great cinematic adaptation, but this one is lucky enough to have two. You can't go wrong with either film and if you figure out who is the more awesome Sydney Carton, Dirk or Ronny, then you'll have to let me know.

A Dreadful Man

2010-04-05T13:27:00.005-05:00

I have officially joined the cult of Sanders. I put it off as along as I could, but midway through Brian Aherne's breezy book "A Dreadful Man" I realized I was completely mesmerized by this eccentric, misanthropic actor and nothing less than full-on obsession would do for it. While the book is mostly about Sanders surpisingly few of the letters in this epistolary biography were written by him. Sanders married actress Benita Hume, in a scandalously short time after the death of her first husband Ronald Colman. Benita actually turns out to be the main correspondent and her letters make up the bulk of "A Dreadful Man." What letters of Sanders' do appear are treasures as they capture the full force of his curmudgeonly style. Benita's correspondence is light and chatty and occasionally catty. She describes Grace Kelly's acting as "an atomic age thundering bore," an assessment which made me laugh out loud even as I disagreed with it.

What I enjoyed most from her correspondence was the emergence of a snapshot of her relationship with George Sanders. Though most suspected he married her for the fortune he imagined she'd inherited from her first husband, he seems to have been completely devoted to her all along, despite the fact that he found out rather quickly that most of her money was hopelessly locked into trust funds for her children. Even his best friends found him to be eccentric to an extreme degree, thoughtless and probably unmarriagable. And yet, this odd pair worked somehow. She made him a better husband by dragging him out more into the social sphere and he helped her move on from the crippling grief she felt when Colman died. Colman had been ill for some time, and if you compare her letters during that time to the letters after her marriage you can see that she was operating under a huge strain and hadn't really realized it. Sanders it turned out, made her laugh which is a power not to be underestimated in such a situation, and she describes him as nothing but thoughtful and caring. It's difficult to imagine to those with much familiarity with Sander's as an actor, but he seems to have made Benita an exception to his caddish ways for the 18 years of their marriage.

I'm about five minutes away from starting a Tumblr blog called "FuckyeahGeorgeandBenita" based on this picture alone. The caption was written by one or the other of them, probably Benita.

One of the more intriguing aspects of "A Dreadful Man" is its depiction of Sanders strange business dealings. Robbed of his birthright title and fortune by the Bolshevik Revolution, Rossian-born Sanders chased the dream of being a tycoon for most of his life. He created a number of dodgy companies to hide his wealth around the globe. In several cases he encouraged friends to invest in these hopelessly corrupt organizations with disastrous results. While Sanders and Hume were usually the main losers in these dealings, Aherne is quick to point out that Sanders never expressed an iota of regret for the other people who lost money in these swindles. It's hard to believe but Sanders even managed to con the British government into subsidizing his "Cadco" (named after his autobiography "Memoirs of a Professional Cad.") When a company has the word "cad" in its name, should you really be surprised when it rips you off? Besides fodder for Aherne's sometimes bitter writing (he lost quite a lot of money in one of Sander's earliest schemes), these companies' main product was the prestige that Sanders desired. Though he never spent a minute actually working or managing one of them, he spent untold hours planning and decorating elaborate executive office suites for himself. He liked nothing more than a big desk with lots of buttons apparently. All of this is endearing to me as I always love a good eccentric, especially if I don't have to actually live with him or haven't given him any of my money to "invest." Sanders narrowly avoided prosecution for some his more egregious failings while the rest of Cadco's management actually went to jail.

Sanders was completely disdainful of his career as an actor. You can see a bit of Aherne's own complicated relationship with his profession coming though, here. You can tell he's driven a bit mad by Sanders who never put much effort into his work, always turned up never having even glanced at a script. Aherne who was conscientious to a fault struggled to find work as he aged, while Sanders was seemingly always had more work than he could use. Surely some of this was the lingering prestige of his Oscar for All About Eve, but some of it was what Aherne describes as "his personality." Sanders just brought class to whatever it was he was about, even if it was trash like Psychomania.

After Hume's death in the late 1960s, Sander's life went downhill in a big way. He married a second Gabor sister, Magda (he'd had a comically disastrous marriage to Zsa Zsa before Benita). The second Gabor marriage was actually Zsa Zsa's scheme to provide for her older sister and to try to help Sander's whose drinking was becoming alarming. How this loveless, nay, like-less, match was supposed to work, Zsa Zsa never explained but it was annulled six weeks after it began. After, Magda, his film choices went from bad to worse, his health was poor and made worse by drinking. He ended in suicide in 1972 with a note famous for its brevity and wit among suicide notes, "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

I think part of Aherne's motivations for writing the book was to come to terms with the loss of his friend and of course the suicide. Though Sander's claimed "boredom" I don't think Aherne was convinced by that. I certainly wasn't. The picture of a man with many talents, hobbies and interests is not one of boredom, but of destabilization and frustration with many bad choices. Sanders had an almost compulsive house buying habit. He would drive through a neighborhood, see a house for sale and buy it on the spot. He moved continuously to avoid taxes, often winding up in far flung locales far from friends and family, which was more than usual the case when he found himself at a small coastal town in Spain with too many sleeping pills. Benita seemed to bring out the best in George and provided some stability. Without her, he might have gone off the rails more completely than anyone, even he, could guess.

Shirtless and apparently underpantless as well . You'll thank me for the "archive" setting on my scanner or you'll curse me for it. Click in at your own risk, people.

There are many great Sander's anecdotes in the book but my favorite is the one Aherne tells about golfing with George. Sanders was a great lover of croquet but famously hated golf. Aherne played golf a lot in Switzerland since there wasn't much else to do. His entire social life revolved around the game and he continually pestered George to play just to get him out and about. Sanders finally relented and arrived at the country club in his favorite ensemble, a pair of ratty old shorts and bedroom slippers. No shirt and eventually the slippers were discarded as well. Sanders had no clubs so he borrowed a five iron from Aherne. He proceeded to win by several strokes all with with just the five iron and all while protesting that he hated golf and never played.

The ease with which Sanders could pick up just about anything was legendary and perhaps the key to his desperate end. A stroke had made life difficult. He hacked his beloved piano to pieces with an axe because he couldn't play it any more. For someone to whom everything came easily, it was perhaps simply too humbling to learn after all that life requires some effort.

Dark Purpose (L'Intrigo) 1964

2010-04-02T16:36:00.004-05:00

Click on the photo to see the enlarge picture. If you look closely you can actually see the despair in these two actor's eyes.

Man this movie was bad. It stunk. The script was bad. The direction was confused. The music was overpowering and annoying. The cinematography went back and forth between cliched and blurry. The copy TCM showed was cruddy. The actors: George Sanders, Rossano Brazzi and Shirley Jones all had an air of hopelessness about them as they spoke their lines. That is when you could understand the lines, because the dubbing is downright awful.

This is the point where you expect me to say, "But I loved it anyway!" or "George and Rossano can save any dog turd of a film." No, I'm not going to say that. The only genuine entertainment in this movie was seeing George Sanders crammed into a tiny Italian car in the first three minutes. Even that sequence was poorly edited, backed by annoying music, squinched into a horrible pan and scan frame and the film stock looked washed out and a hundred years old. At one point in the film Shirley Jones and Rossano Brazzi come into the room and find Sanders lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling. I was really hoping he'd address the fourth wall and say, "I've just given up on this movie, people. Can you blame me?" But wouldn't you know, it was actually part of the "plot."

Sometimes bad movies are good for their mockability quotient. Dark Purpose isn't even bad enough for that. It's just good enough. It has a 1970s made for TV movie vibe about it. The plot smells of warmed over television. Two professional art appraisers (Shirley Jones and George Sanders) spend a week in an Italian villa owned by a mysterious Count (Rossano Brazzi) and his troubled daughter (Giorgia Moll). There's a little bit of Jane Eyre here, or at least the Wide Sargasso Sea, but tension never builds enough for it to pay off.

Brazzi and Jones seem to have little chemistry together. "Oh Paolo I love you. I love you!" She says and he looks like he might be mentally chastising his agent for getting him involved in this debacle. She has more luck with George Sanders and I wish things would have been written more of a love triangle. Though Sanders is ten years older than Brazzi he somehow seems more comfortable in his skin, probably because Brazzi was, at this point really tired of playing the continental lover. Sanders had long since ceased to care about acting other than what it paid him. Shirley Jones was great as Mrs. Partridge, but as the supposed daughter of a museum curator and art historian, she seems way out of her depth. Giorgia Moll gives a decent performance, if a bit silly and over dramatic at times, but the whole plot is hard to swallow, especially her part of it.

The most compelling thing about the movie is the Count's over-worked German Shepard named Diablo. It wasn't just the presence of a satanic German Shepard that reminded me of the made for television horror schlock master piece Devil Dog (1978). Everything about Dark Purpose seemed crying out for it to be endlessly recycled in the CBS late Night Movie, sandwiched between old episodes of Magnum PI and Columbo. It's too bad because Sanders is hilarious--I laugh at his smallest gesture or expression, and had he been given anything at all to do he might have saved this movie from junk heap.

Woman Wanted (1935)

2010-03-31T16:56:00.006-05:00

I've been a little Joel McCrea crazy (Joel McCrazy?) lately so I really dug this 1935 outing with too oft-over-looked Maureen O'Sullivan. O'Sullivan plays a woman on the run for a crime she didn't commit and Joel McCrea plays a lawyer who helps her out. It's no surprise thathe falls for her and even less surprise that he manages to get her out of the mess.

The film is quite romantic and funny. There is a deliberate It Happened One Night vibe here as the couple bum around the countryside hiding from the cops. There is also a fair amount of suspense as they lurk around the waterfront and other foggy locations. One of the great "only in the movies" touches is that McCrea's character lives on a houseboat, and drives around in a speedboat most of the time. He also has a funny butler (Robert Grieg), which is another one of those things that usually only happens in the movies. To add to the drama, McCrea has a fiancee (Adrienne Ames) from whom he must hide his beautiful fugitive. Woman Wanted is really a romantic drama, crying out to be screwball. Make that fiancee a bit more of a dragon lady, steal a few more cars, throw in an animal, and you'd have it!

O'Sullivan is an actress who I've probably seen in a dozen films, but haven't noticed her acting until recently. To confess the truth, she is part of a cabal of actresses whom I get confused with one another: Maureen O'Sullivan, Maureen O'Hara, Margaret Sullavan and Margaret Lockwood. I actually like ALL of these actresses and am well aware which one I'm watching at the time that I'm doing so. But get me away from one of their movies or the IMDB and I'm at a loss. They are all from the British Isles, their names all start with "M" and most sound Irish. I've had to develop a memory device O' Sullivan is Tarzan's girl. She has the extra "O" in her name, that sounds like Tarzan's call. O'Hara is the Quiet man's Woman. He's so quiet you don't "O'HEAR-a him. (Hey, I didn't say these were clever, just that they work!) Margaret Sullavan is spelled with an "a" as in "The shop around the Corner tried to sell a van to me today." Margaret Lockwood was in the Lady Vanishes. "Michael Redgrave had to knock wood to get lucky with Lockwood." Memorize these idiotic sayings and you'll never get them confused again, I promise.

As for Woman Wanted, despite my efforts to re-write it mentally, it is probably hopelessly mediocre. It's predictable, derivative and forgettable, all that, I give you, and yet... Joel McCrea and speedboats! What's not to love?

I be ILLin, more treasures from Inter-library Loan

2010-03-30T08:57:00.004-05:00

Here are more treasures from two long out of print biographies, Robert Donat by J.C. Trewin and Mr. Chips: The Life of Robert Donat by Keith Barrow. Trewin's book is as close to an official biography as we have. He was selected by the family, given access to Donat's personal papers and John Donat wrote the prologue to the volume. It ranks as one of the finest celebrity bios I've ever read, (and trust me, I've read a lot of these things) in its balance between research and writing. It captures the all-too human flaws and foibles without being excessively negative or gossipy. The only criticism I have is that Trewin is a little bit in love with himself as a writer. He indulges in frequent stream of conscience riffs that are really difficult to follow unless you're completely immersed in the period about which he's talking. Barrow's book on the other hand, is a delicious read, and a bit more gossipy, but without the tendency to confabulation from which so many Hollywood hacks suffer. I would highly recommend both for anyone with an interest in Robert Donat.

Donat's first starring stage role in the Unknown Soldier in 1929 at age 24. Especially prominent in this photo is Donat's heavy lower lid liner. The man must have gone through a lot of kohl pencils. He didn't stop wearing this in his films until the latter half of the thirties, long after most actors had given it up. I've always found it to be a charming, kind of Johnny Deppish tendency.

Studying his lines in the Count of Monte Cristo. This was Donat's only Hollywood film. It was very successful and Donat was offered several juicy adventure roles like Captain Blood. Donat was afraid of the long-term Hollywood contract and preferred to make films in England where he could work on the stage as well.

Love the bling: The Ghost Goes West

Donat on vacation with Joan Lynam. She had worked as Alfred Hitchock's secretary during the time that he was making The 39 Steps. He was still married to his wife, Ella at the time of their affair.

Robert with his two eldest children John and Joanne. His son described Donat in this period as an absentee father who was returned to his children for holiday photo opportunities. It wasn't until his children were adults that he developed a real relationship with them.

Donat and Bette Davis never met in real life, but they were photoshopped together onto the cover of Picturegoer. The two stars were the winners of a reader's poll.

With Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armor. Dietrich went to bat for Donat when illness delayed the production. She used her leverage to prevent him from being replaced in the film. Donat always was a bit awestruck around her. His son describes his buying a large, fancy Sunbeam roadster to impress and then she refused to ride in it saying she preferred little cars.

I really can never get enough stills from Knight without Armor. The fur hats. The five O Clock shadow. Yum!

As the Old Croaker in The Good-Natured Man with Stewart Granger and Constance Cummings at the Old Vic. This was the first of Robert Donat's "old man make-up" parts. It shocked the London theater scene, since Donat was mainly seen as a leading man, but the great theatrical genius Tyrone Gutherie who staged the play wanted Donat to stretch out into character parts. He discouraged Donat from pursuing his wish to play Romeo on stage, feeling him too old for the part. Though Donat could certainly play younger than his age, it was often dependent on his health and Donat had just recovered from months of battling asthma which left him so reduced in size that his costumes had to be frequently padded out.

With Constance Cummings in Romeo and Juliet on stage. Donat's Romeo wasn't terribly successful. Donat was quite ill during rehearsals and he was perhaps thinking that Guthrie had been right after all. He had turned down the chance to play the part on screen opposite Norma Shearer. This was the only one of Shakespeare's "great roles" that Donat ever had the chance to play on stage or on screen. He was suggested as a possible Hamlet in the 1930s when Alexander Korda attempted to mount a screen production, but it would not be until Olivier in the 1940s, that the Young Prince of Denmark would be seen as a viable draw for movie audiences.

With Ralph Richardson in 1938 in the Citadel.

My favorite scene from Good-bye Mr. Chips.

On stage at the Old Picadilly in The Devil's Desciple in 1940.

With real-life lover Rosamund John in The Devil's Disciple.

Robert Donat as the "elder" Mr. Pitt in The Young Mr. Pitt in 1942. (Donat played both parts). Donat donated his proceeds to the war effort and had his first of two opportunities of working with the great British director, Carol Reed.

Donat heavily made up in your dad's eyebrows for a screen test for the part of Sikes in Oliver Twist. Donat lost the part to character actor Robert Newton.

With future wife Renee Asherson in a 1946 stage production of Much Ado About Nothing. Asherson turned down a season at the Old Vic co-starring with Laurence Olivier because of growing relationship with Donat. The production was Donat's West End Shakespeare debut and received mixed reviews. Reviewers at the time complained that his touch was too heavy for comedy. (I find this baffling. He must have had an off night or something!) As a result of mediocre reviews, Donat never realized his dream of playing Hamlet or Lear on stage.

With Dorice Fordred in The Sleeping Clergyman.

Another scene in the Sleeping Clergyman. Though his Shakespeare the previous year had been a bit of a failure, the Sleeping Clergyman was his biggest stage hit. It played first in Manchester, then in Scotland (where the native's griped about Donat's adopted Scot's accent) and finally for 250 performances at the Picadilly in London. Donat played a man dying of tuberculosis and found dying on a nightly basis more fatiguing than actually being sick.

With Margaret Leighton in The Winslow Boy. Donat plays Sir Robert Morton. The role was a tricky one that could have easily been seen as unsympathetic. Donat managed to make Sir Robert likable without betraying the original play. Donat's contemporary doppleganger, Jeremy Northam also played Sir Robert Morton and seemed to allow Donat's characterization to influence him.

Donat makes his directorial debut with The Cure for Love (1950). Donat admired directors such as Fritz Lang and Orson Welles and hoped to make the leap into a second career. Biographers characterize him as quite exacting and demanding of all whom he worked with, though leading lady Renee Asherson must not have thought he was too bad--she married him three years later.

Donat and Asherson remained married till his death in 1958. Donat ended his career on a high note on both stage and screen. His performance as Becket in Murder in the Cathedral is legendary and resulted in the longest ovation in the history of the Old Vic. His performance as the Mandarin opposite Ingrid Bergman in the Inn of the Sixth Happiness was critically well-received and surely would have resulted in the longed for "second" career as a character actor, had Donat not died of a brain tumor weeks after the film's completion.

Show Me Your Geek Sphere

2010-03-26T15:01:00.001-05:00

Announcing the Cinema OCD Show Me Your Geek Sphere Contest. All you need to do to participate is to email me a photo of you and your movie geek sphere. Show me the piles of memorabilia, lovingly framed photos, shrines and filing cabinets stuffed with research. Extra special bonus points will go to those finding a way to pay tribute to Cinema OCD in their geeksphere, such as a print out of my macro, valentines or fake magazine cover.

I know lots of you are serious memorabilia collectors. I look forward to drooling over your collections!

All photos received by April 10th will be eligible for the contest. The winner will be determined by poll from a pool of finalists selected by me. By sending me your photo you are giving me permission to post it, so don't send it if you don't wanna be on the internets. The winner will receive the Cinema OCD t-shirt of their choice.

Spring Cleaning!

2010-03-17T13:58:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the new improved Cinema OCD. The first thing you'll notice is the new look. Thanks to Kate Gabrielle from Silents and Talkies for designing my new logo. I highly recommend Kate's services as a graphic designer and artist. She was so fast, professional and fun to "work" with that the process was completely painless for me.

The new look is inspired by covers for the great magazine Photoplay from the early 1930s and by film poster art in general. I've always admired the somewhat-trashy, totally-pithy and beautifully-illustrated film magazines of the classic era and I've always hoped to bring that vibe to my blog.

Cinema OCD has been improved content wise as well. I'm going to be phasing out the Media Room, and in doing so, I'll be incorporating all my media room posts into this blog. The media room was originally meant as a place to post overflow (if I'd already posted five times in a month on Barbara Stanwyck and wanted to post some more) or as a place to put book reviews. The overflow has become unnecessary because I've been trying to vary the movies I watch more and book reviews never really materialized. All the old posts are marked with the tag "media room" so if you missed them you can go back and find them here. Spare media will now be posted on my tumblr page.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)

2010-03-15T11:30:00.004-05:00

I was first drawn to The Barretts of Wimpole Street because the stage version starring Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne (pictured at left) is on my ever-growing list of time machine plays, that if I ever get access to a TARDIS, I'll be sure to go back and watch. Written in 1930 by Rudolpf Besier, the original Broadway production ran for more than 300 performances at the Empire theater. That run was followed by a highly successful cross-country tour and then a world tour that took Aherne to far-flung places like the Australian outback about which he writes charmingly in his autobiography A Proper Job. I was intrigued by the story although, the film version stars Norma Shearer and Fredric March, (as if they were a pair to sneeze at!)

It's not often that a movie is made about one writer let alone two. Writing usually just isn't exciting enough as an activity to be the subject of a movie. And writer's lives, while they have their moments of drama, tend to be about observation more than experience. Fictional writers of the ilk of Carrie Bradshaw abound, but it's really pretty rare that a real life author is the subject of a film. The most we usually get on film is an actor portraying Sommerset Maughm appearing as a rye character in an adaptation of one his books. Occasionally a biopic about a writer, like say Becoming Jane about Jane Austen, will make it into the mainstream, but it is unusual if it is faithful to reality in any way. But Barretts is truly rare in that it focuses on the lives of two writers and it is not wildly off the mark. The story revolves around Barrett's father who was steadfastly opposed to any marriage by any of his children and the hiding in plain site courtship that she carried on with admirer and fellow-poet Robert Browning. It is based loosely on the mass of correspondence between the two famous poets from 1945 until their elopement in 1946. Much of the dialog in the film is quoted from or paraphrased from the letters. This makes for a slightly artificial and odd way of communicating, since in real life, people don't speak as they would write. The work succeeded despite this stagey quality and despite the fact that the problems of two rich neurotic thirty year old virgins couldn't have had much appeal to people facing life in America in the early 1930s.

Or could it?

I've been trying to work out what it was in the play that resonated with audiences in the grip of the Depression. At first I thought that it was just escapist fantasy, yearning for a time and place where money problems seems simply to not exist. In reality of course, money was an issue. Robert Browning was a poor poet who managed on a very small income from his father. If Elizabeth Barrett Browning had not had her own small income, free from the machinations of her father, there would be no possible elopement and no drama. The couple had a mutual friend the painter, Robert Haydon, who committed suicide as a result of a huge financial loss. But the movie simplifies even further what the play barely mentions.

Escapism alone can not explain the popularity of the play and film. The play focuses instead on the father's opposition to marriage, implying rather strongly that he was a rapist, molester and that incestous feelings were behind his strange and vehement opposition to his daughters marrying. In real life Edward Mouton Barrett was opposed to all of his 12 children marrying and disinherited the boys and girls who disobeyed him. In some of Elizabeth's letters there are hints of physical abuse, but no explicit examples are ever named. The application of modern psychology to Mr. Barrett's strange attitudes (Elizabeth describes them as "eccentricity and something more") was probably appealing to 1930s audiences as well as the lurid subject matter. Most appealing of all, was probably the theme of breaking away from one's extended family and focusing on creating a new, separate "nuclear" family. Demographically many Americans were in this boat. The Depression caused many families to stay together perhaps longer than the young people could wish as marriages were happening later, etc. My own grandparents were forced to move back in with my great-grand parents, with not always harmonious results.

As for the production of the film, it was first promised to Marion Davies. After a battle royale with Norma Shearer, the role was reassigned and the kerflufle that followed led to Davies, and the substantial bank roll behind William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan pictures, leaving MGM. As a result Hearst papers refused to review the film, which probably hurt its box office a bit. Not wanting anything to do with this hornet's nest of studio politics, Brian Aherne ran a mile from the part. The role fell to a somewhat unhappy Fredric March who complained that director, Sydney Franklin was so focused on Shearer that he allowed him to get away with the worst excesses of hamish acting. Not only does this seem like unfair criticism (it's the director's fault that you can't control your hamish instincts?) it is just plain wrong. March is actually quite wonderful and perfectly suited to the part. In real life, Robert Browning was an intense dude. This was a man who had major life crisis in his twenties because he read a poem by Percy B. Shelley. He wildly declared his love for Elizabeth Barrett Browning in his first letter to her and then spent the next 16 months trying to prove his feelings were not mere fanboy gushing. He could be overly enthusiastic (friends described him as loud-mouthed), impetuous and even unreasonably optimistic. Had he not been all these things as well as a cracking great poet he never would have gotten Elizabeth Barrett Browning to marry him.

Norma Shearer is equally well-suited, though it is not what we typically think of as a Shearer material. I think this film is often neglected by Shearer fans, because it was technically post-code. While some of the references to incest were toned down from the play, these changes were actually very minor and the film stands as one of her edgiest and most powerful performances. While Norma is emotionally restrained and subtle, she really sells the idea that is a woman battling for her life and independence, standing up to a tyrannical, even dangerous father. In one of her letters to Robert Browning, Elizabeth declares that her father would rather see her dead on his doorstep than married. I don't know how anyone could watch the last ten minutes of the film and not hum "I am woman here me roar" to themselves while Norma, with the help of her maid, Wilson (Una O'Connor) gains the strength to pick up and leave her oppressive environment for the man she loves. Franklin gives her a gorgeous close-up as she surveys for a final time the room where she's spent most of her adult life. It's powerful stuff and it hasn't been diluted a bit by the intervening seven decades since it was shot.

The unacknowledged star of the show is Charles Laughton who is at his scary best as the bullying, manipulative father. "They can't censor the twinkle in my eye" he famously groused when producers had to tone down some of his more overtly sexual moments. In a scene where his niece sits in his lap and fondles his whiskers, the stage directions for the play insist that he slaps her roughly on the thigh while she squeals in delight. This is really the only purge I can find in his scenes, which survive almost verbatim from the stage version of the script. Laughton is aided by the wonderful Maureen O'Sullivan who plays Elizabeth's lively sister Henrietta. O'Sullivan gets a great scene at the end where she relishes delivering Elizabeth's good-bye letter to their father and one very funny scene early on between she and a tongue-tied suitor whom she continually admonishes not to speak before he can get a word out to her. I'm pretty sure Woody Allen ripped off the whole concept for a similar scene in Bullets over Broadway. This sparkling bit of nonsense was invented by screenwriter Ernest Vajda for the film as comic relief.

I've spent most of the intervening ten days since I first watched the film reading everything I could get my hands on about the two poets who are subject of the film, including a volume of their letters, the script of the play, Barrett-Browning's volume of poetry written during their courtship, Sonnetts from the Portugese, and a feminist biography of her life, which dismisses the film as reducing her to a cheerful invalid who has to be rescued by a man. The problem with this assessment is the same one that haunts Barrets of Wimpole Street. When you add a layer of contemporary expectations to something that happened in the past you are really just twisting it to your own ends. We may never really understand the tortured relationship between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her father. It is probably certain that it was not as dysfunctional as what appeared on stage or screen in the 1930s. I am equally certain that this film was not intended to be a weak-kneed reinforcement of Barrett-Browning as a cheerful invalid. Of all the films in which I've seen Shearer since starting this blog, I liked The Barretts of Wimpole Street the best. I think it deserves a second look from fans as it may be the height of her achievement as a barrier- breaker for the way in which women were depicted in film.

Eye Candy of the Day: I love inter-library loan

2010-03-11T13:28:00.008-06:00

If you've been wondering where I've been the past couple of days you can rest assured I'm not off on a bender inspired by Colin Firth's loss at the Oscars. No, I'd pretty well resigned myself to that a few weeks ago when a good friend of mine who is very good at Oscar predictions informed me that Jeff Bridges was a lock. I still held out hope, but I knew deep down Colin was like Ralph Nader in 2000 in that he was the latest in a long line of lost causes which I've supported. At least no one is going to blame me for George Bush getting elected this time.

Nope, I've been off in the library digging through old movie star biographies, reading plays and poems that relate to some of the movies I've been watching. I love inter-library loan. It's like Netflix for books. Check out this sa-weeet image from an out of print bio of Robert Donat. This is Robert Donat and Flora Robson in Mary Read, a stage production in 1934 at His Majesty's Theater. How much of a hottie was Flora in her riding pants and over the knee boots? Wow, and I always think of her as Queen Elizabeth!

The 39 Caps

2010-03-04T08:30:00.001-06:00

I've been in screen capping mood lately. I'm screen capping happy. (Scappy?) Not content to let the good folks at 1,000 Frames of Hitchcock do my work for me, I had to go out and make 39 caps from one of my favorite films. Gosh it was fun. So fun, I couldn't really stop at just 39. This is a recap, so spoilers abound.

As with Notorious, Hitchcock chooses to introduce his hero, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) from behind in The 39 Steps. In Notorious, I think it is to keep Devlin's character ambiguous and shadowy, here, I think it's more of a "look out behind you!" kind of thing.

After several minutes of the music hall and Mr. Memory, we finally see Hannay from the front. And even then it's not clear that he is the focus of the film. His question, "How far is Winnepeg from Montreal?" is one of many shouted out. It's amusing to me, given my post on Man Hunt a few weeks ago, that here we have a Brit playing a Canadian in a chase movie. Hey, Robert Donat, you and Walter Pidgeon should switch. Nah. On second thought you are perfect in every way in this film, Mr. Donat.

A scuffle breaks out in the music hall and shots are fired. Hannay helps a mysterious lady with a veil to navigate the press of the crowd.

Anabella "Smith" (Lucie Mannheim) asks him if he will take her back to his place. Thinking it a proposition, Hannay is a bit shocked. "What's the idea?" he asks. Later he repeats the question when he realizes that Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) who has been handcuffed to him all night has broken free of her bonds and NOT done a runner. So what's the idea, Richard Hannay? Are you unaware that you attractive or something? (Thereby making yourself even more attractive...tricky!) After she assures him that he has the right end of the stick, he says, jokingly "It's your funeral." You've really gotta love Sir Alfred's wicked sense of humor.

Ok, I'm pretty gaga about everything about Richard Hannay's Art Deco/Art Noveau apartment (including its occupant) but this bar is just too much. If you only knew how many walnut hideaway bars I've lost in Ebay Auctions you would cry.

This is not only my favorite cap from The 39 Steps, but this may be my single favorite moment in any Robert Donat film. I can't explain why exactly, maybe it's the size of the fish or the way the cigarette is dangling from his lips. I'm a sucker for kitchen scenes in 1930s films, but kitchen scenes in which men cook? There oughta be a blog about it or something. By the way, this is the first of four fish references in the film. In Scotland the Crofter asks him if he can "eat the herring?" Then the Crofter's wife cooks up a huge pan full of whole herrings. At the political rally a woman cries out, "what about the herring fisheries?" Somewhere a screenwriter was winning a bet that they could get four overt fish references into a feature film.

Hannay isn't having any of Anabella's spy nonsense. Come on, man, she's wearing a veil. What more proof could you want? After this he takes the knife, nonchalantly out to inspect the window to confirm that men are indeed following her. They're still in the kitchen eating fish and he's still in his overcoat. The whole idea of their initial impulsive hook-up is wordlessly forgotten.

Annabella gets it in the back with that same knife. In offering to take the couch, he probably saved his own life. Who says chivalry is dead?

A clue! Hannay finds a map of Scotland with the village "Alt na Shallach" circled in pen, is found clutched in the dead woman's hand. My friends at CGMTV once made a video of every instance in which Cary Grant's hair gets mussed up. If I ever do such a thing for Robert Donat, you can bet this scene will be in there.

The next morning Hannay trades coats with the milk men, in order to evade the murderers. This is the first of four times that he borrows a coat.

There is something a tad unsavory and even menacing about the two men on the train to Scotland. I think they must be related to the really unpleasant passengers in The Lady Vanishes. Even so, you gotta love 1930s lingerie.

With the police chasing him around a moving train, Hannay throws them off by bursting into Pamela's compartment and kissing her. The "throw them off" kiss is a move later perfected by Cary Grant in Notorious (and at least half a dozen episodes of Remington Steeele.) I love Madelaine' Carroll's expression here. She really does a lot with that one eye ball.

One of about 1,000 instances in this movie where Hitchcock blurs the line between sex and violence. No matter how much she protests afterward, the truth remains that she did drop her glasses.

After Pamela turns him in, he makes a daring escape by jumping out of the door as the train crosses the Forth of Firth Bridge. If the cops were smart they'd get him in one of those Hannibal Lector suits right away. This dude is slippery.

After the exciting escape from the bridge (which happens off screen) Hannay finds himself miles from Alt na Shellach. He arranges some accommodation for the night with a Crofter and his wife, Margaret. "Could ye sleep in there, do ye think?" she asks. "Try and stop me." The little bittersweet romantic interlude between Hannay and Margaret is my favorite part of the film.

Over dinner Margaret reads about Hannay in the newspaper. He must convince her that's he not a murderer without saying a word while her suspicious husband sits inches a way. This is a really tense scene. Hitchcock is completely economical conveying exactly what the audience needs to know in a few close-ups and this medium shot.
The Crofter excuses himself to go shut the barn door (likely story, Crofter!) and spies on his wife through the window. We can't hear their conversation but he gets the wrong idea about what is happening here. He isn't completely wrong though, he correctly surmises that there is a spark between his wife and the handsome stranger.

I guess she didn't try to stop him from sleeping in the box bed.

Margaret tries to warn Hannay that the police are coming to search the house, but the Crofter thinks they are "Makin' love." Hannay, to save Margaret's honor, confesses that the police are after him and offers the Crofter five pounds to keep his mouth shut. The Crofter accepts his money but is planning on turning him over, anyway.

Margaret gives Hannay her husband's overcoat and tells him to scoot before he's "catched." I love the way Hannay says, "I'll never forget you for this. What's yer name?" Hannay realizes that Margaret is attracted to him and he uses it a bit. At first he flirts to keep her from reading the dreaded newspaper, but later he feels grateful that she's willing to go out on a limb for him. Throughout the film, women come to his rescue, repeatedly, except for Pamela, whom he imposed upon. So the moral of the story is, Richard Hannay wannabees, never assume!

He steals a quick good-bye kiss and then he's gone. Margaret is left to deal with her husband which isn't pretty. The whole breathlessness of this scene is really quite great. It leaves the viewer feeling like Margaret, not wanting it to end.

Annabella explained, while they were eating their Haddock that the chief spy out to get her was missing the top joint of his little finger. After escaping from the Crofter's he heads for Alt na Shellach. The Professor, who Hannay believes is an ally, turns out to be the last man in Britain that he'd want to see. This is probably the most famous scene in the film.

Like the best of Hitchcock's civilized villains, The Professor offers him a drink, and a gun with which to shoot himself. When Hannay refuses he shoots him anyway. I love that Hannay is still clutching his cigarette. In real life, Robert Donat had asthma. I'm sure all the smoking he did in his movies didn't do him any favors.

Hannay finds himself again in Margaret's debt as the hymnal in her husband's coat stopped the bullet. Hannay turns himself in to the local sheriff. That doesn't go so well so he escapes by jumping through a window.

Hannay finds himself in a political hall, mistaken for the next speaker. He extemporizes a great speech. I love the top hat on the daius, as Hannay has almost a magical ability to think on his feet.

His speech is a rousing success and he backs away from the crowd slowly, unaware that the police are behind him, waiting for him. I warned you that Hitchcock filmed him from behind a lot but you didn't believe me.

Pamela, that same girl from the train, recognizes him and turns him over to the police. He gives her an earful about the 39 Steps and the secret that the Professor is about to take out of the country. The police decide she'd better come along down town to identify him.

As he's being led away in handcuffs he waves to the crowd who are still pumped up about his speech.

The police act strangely and decide to take them to Inverary. Suspecting that they aren't the police at all Hannay confronts them. When a "whole flock of detectives" (sheep) block the road, the bad guys handcuff Pamela to Hannay. He doesn't seem to cut up about it, does he?

Hannay escapes with Pamela in tow. It's not easy considering he has to drag her and keep his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming.

There's a whole thing with them getting tangled up in this fence. I made five caps of it and then I decided that they were all too dark to really appreciate how funny this scene is. Like a screwball comedy, this section of The 39 Steps has the war between the sexes, contention over sleeping arrangements, confusion, misunderstanding and an undercurrent of romance.

Pamela and Hannay hide beneath a waterfall. OK, messy hair again, I admit it!

Hannay whistles a tune that he heard at the Music Hall, except that he can't remember where he heard it. This little throw away detail becomes crucial at the end of the film.

I love this little bit of stage business as he starts cleaning leaves out of her hair. Pamela's not really afraid of him and stuff like this is why. He's just too nice and considerate to have murdered that woman at Portland Place.

Since Pamela still doesn't believe that he's innocent, Hannay decides to make the best of his reputation as killer and bully Pamela into cooperating. "For all you know, I might murder a girl a week," he says. She's not really buying it though and she pushes him off her. "I like your pluck," he says.

Hannay orders Pamela to keep quiet as they are about to get a room at the Argyll Arms. If she makes a peep he'll shoot her with the gun that the audience knows he doesn't have. "Does that penitrate the ivory dome?" he asks. If he isn't a murderer, he's being a bit condescending here. Still, Pamela seems to be warming up to him a bit.

Hannay and Pamela don't fool anyone that they're married, but Innkeeper Alice thinks they are a runaway couple and so rents them a room anyway. She cheekily asks the lady if she'd like to borrow a nightgown.

With the pipe that Pamela is meant to think is a gun pressed firmly against her, Hannay convinces Alice not to let anyone know they're here. Alice, mistaking their panting and pawing of one another as true love (they are chained together, afterall) agrees not give them away.

After Alice leaves, Pamela decides to take off her wet stockings. This proves to be problematic.

This may be the only time Hannay paws Pamela that's not in the service of keeping her quiet. He is genuinely enjoying himself. Amazingly, she lets it slide.

He does eventually agree to hold her sandwich.

Reluctantly, Pamela agrees to share a bed with Hannay. He begins telling her a wacky, made-up story about his life in crime and his criminal ancestor the Cornish Blue Beard.

The camera catches Pamela enjoying herself a little.

His little bedtime story puts her to sleep.

She no sooner manages to wriggle out of the handcuffs, than he wants to snuggle. She manages to get away without waking him. She overhears the two men whom she thought were policemen describing how since Hannay is on the loose "The whole 39 steps have been alerted." She also overhears the crucial clue that the secrets will be taken in hand at the London Palladium. She returns to the room, finally convinced of Hannay's innocence.

Hannay wakes finding himself alone in bed.

He's happily surprised that Pamela hasn't left. That is until he hears that she let the bad guys get away without waking him.

At the Palladium, Hannay figures out that the Professor is using Mr. Memory to take the secrets out of the country. He tries to tell the police who are there to arrest him. He creates a diversion by shouting to Mr. Memory, "What are the 39 Steps." To everyone's suprise Mr. Memory answers and gets shot for his trouble.

Poor memory pours out his secrets to Hannay before dying and gets his catch phrase, "Am I right, sir?" in one last time. I love that you can see the chorus girls lined up in the back ground. The show must go on.

As Hannay backs toward the camera a final time, he's joined by Pamela. This time she willingly holds his hand. The end(s).

Luminous beings are we

2010-03-02T10:00:00.000-06:00

My kid has been on a real Star Wars kick lately. His favorite movie is The Empire Strikes Back, or as he calls it, "The One Where Vader Puts the Gentlemen in the Lights and Turns Him to Stone." I've watched the movie three times in as many days and I find that it wears really well, especially in comparison to other installments of the story. For one thing, it's just a beautifully shot movie. Director, Irvin Kirschner, used light and shadow to truly memorable effect. For another, it has the least sucky dialog of all six episodes. So here, without further ado, is the pretty:

"You didn't see us alone together in South Passage. She expressed her true feelings for me." I was ten in 1980 and I read the novelization of Empire till the covers fell off. I thought it was the most romantic thing ever, in large part, because it took place in a snow fort.

"Whaddya mean, Luke's missing? Tech officer! Tech Officer!"

I love this shot. Luke looks like just another stalactite. Also you can see the bones of the dead animals in Wampa's cave to the left. Years ago, I kept a Wampa and Luke in Hoth gear action figure in my freezer.

Han flags down help after spending the night in the shelter with Luke. I've always thought that must have been a long night for Han, what with Luke raving about Ben and reeking of Tauntaun guts. This screen cap shows one of my favorite things about the Frozen Planet of Hoth: Mukluks.

Who needs CGI when there is stop motion, like this? Is there a fanboy or fangirl who doesn't squeal in delight when the walker shifts its weight to take out that snow speeder.

The Millenium Falcon causes a near miss between some star destroyers. I could probably fill a whole post with just screencaps of the Falcon.

"Horizontal boosters! Alluvial Dampeners!!" Holy hydrospaners, I love this scene.

One of Vader's minions catches an unwanted eyeful of what he looks like underneath the helmet. This shot is accompanied by one of the most disturbing sound effects ever as the air gets sucked out of Vader's head can.

Luke camping on Dagoba with R2. The power generator always reminds me of a spacey Coleman lantern.

Meanwhile back on the Falcon, 3PO interrupts the Gentleman and the Lady.

This is the most difficult scene in the film to explain to a four-year-old. I have a delightfully literal action figure of Darth on which the face mask pulls off to reveal Luke's face. Really, George Lucas will make just about anything into a toy.

This is the counterpoint the stalactite shot. Mark Hamil did a lot of upside-down work in this movie.

Puppet Yoda is prettier than CGI yoda.

Oh, Cloud City set. You are so obviously an Art Deco painting. I heart that about you.

Thematically Empire is the darkest installment of the Original Trilogy, but tonally it's the lightest. Even Darth Vader is bathed in sunshine and fireworks. With the snow on Hoth, the clouds on Bespin, and the mist on Dagoba, there's very little literal darkness in this film.

Just to contradict that last caption...

"He's alive and in perfect hibernation."

I had a Burger King cup with this image on it. And a beach towel. Nothing says a day at the seaside like father and son squaring off with deadly weapons.

An absurdly beautiful piece of set that exists for no real reason. I love it.

This scene reminds me so much of the Krell interiors in Forbidden Planet, from the color scheme, to the 1950s streamline art deco architecture to the massive sense of scale with the diminutive humans walking around. I had to double check that conceptual artist, Ralph McQuarrie didn't work on Forbidden Planet.

In order of production, this is the third limb lost in the Star Wars saga. In the time line of the story it is the eleventh out of a total of twelve.

Vader is so bummed out about the fight with his son that when his minions loose the Falcon yet again, he doesn't even bother to kill any of them.

Lucas had only a guiding hand in the writing of Empire. Leigh Brackett, whoever you are, thank you.

Twelve O'Clock High (1949)

2010-02-28T10:30:00.000-06:00

I'm not such a huge fan of war movies, but I tend to endure them if actors that I like are in them. Nothing but pure unadulterated adoration for Michael Redgrave could get me to watch the likes of The Dam Busters. And so it is with Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High as well, except that Twelve O'Clock High is actually a good movie! Made in the late 1940s its a much more frank look at combat than something that could have been made in World War II. The movie begins, after a leisurely opening in modern day England, with the results of a failed bombing mission. After the plane lands, one man has had the back of his skull blown off ("You can see his brain" the doctor observes), another a broken leg and there is a stray arm inside the plane cabin. The fourth member of the crew is obviously traumatized by the two hours he spent keeping what was left of the team alive and flying the plane. The ill-fated mission is just the latest in a series of "hard luck" incidents to face this daylight bombing unit.

The unit's commanding officer Col. Davenport (Gary Merrill) is distressed to learn that not only has he lost five planes, he will only be receiving three replacements and he has another mission to fly the next day. To further add to his troubles, the mission is directed to be at a much lower altitude than previously. Thinking the whole thing a mistake, he goes to his friend at headquarters, General Frank Savage (Peck). Savage tells him that mission is possible and in the interview he decides that the strain of command is getting to his buddy. He arranges to have him relieved and he takes over command of the unit. Of course this is a hugely unpopular move and he doesn't gain any friends by being extremely strict about regulations on the base. Half the base is put on report of one kind or another and there are demotions as Savage puts his tough love plan into action. His one ally turns out to be his clerk, Harvey (Dean Jagger) an older man who is a self-described retread from the last war. In civilian life, he's a lawyer and he helps his boss navigate base politics. Their friendship is the most interesting part of the film I think because it humanizes Frank and because it gives the an audience a character in Harvey with whom they can identify. Harvey has a really great scene where he gets drunk because he can't remember the faces of the pilots who've died recently. It's such a great speech they ripped it off for Battlestar Galactica. (The more I watch war movies the more I realize that all the best bits of that show were ripped off from films from the 40s and 50s.)

Of course Frank whips the unit into shape and of course he has lots of great scenes of chewing people out. Seriously, Gregory Peck yelling at me would probably motivate me to do just about anything. These are usually followed by a scene in private where he proves that the command is getting to him. There are a few scenes where he shows his enthusiasm and pride in the men and those are just too adorable. You can see why he has to keep all that under wraps.

For a war movie about bombers there is refreshingly little time spent inside the actual planes. What is there is well-done, easy to follow and director Henry King wrings as much tension as possible from these scenes. When Frank has his inevitable meltdown at the worst possible time, all the men whose he pushed so hard are there to cover for him. I guess his tough love plan really worked then, but the viewer is left with a sense of fragility in the hero that is pretty atypical in war movies. Well, actually if you look at the war movies of the pre-code era, usually set during WWI, that is a very common theme. It took Hollywood almost twenty years and another war to be able to be even marginally realistic when it comes to war.

Merrily We Live (1938) and If You Only Could Cook (1935)

2010-02-25T10:00:00.001-06:00

Merrily We Live has been on my Wish List for years. TCM has started showing it recently to my delight. It's difficult to describe the movie, without using the words "My Man Godfrey" and "derivative," and yet this is a wonderfully enjoyable film. I will go so far as to say I enjoyed it at least as much as the earlier far more famous flick. Billie Burke plays the ditsy mother whose habit of hiring tramps as chauffeurs has left the family destitute of silver. An early scene has the family eating breakfast using kitchen utensils. She received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for the role. Despite the "forgotten men" as servants/love interests plot device, this movie is derived from different source material, a 1926 play, "They All Want Something" and the first film incarnation of it, What a Man (1930).

Brian Aherne plays Wade Rawlins a novelist who has a car accident on a fishing trip and stops at the Kilbourne mansion to use the telephone. Assuming he's a tramp looking for work, he is whisked away, protesting loudly, to be be suited up as the family's new chauffeur. One look at him in his work duds and heiress Jerry (Constance Bennett) is a goner. This is one of those moments where 1930s sensibilities are lost on me. While I think Aherne looks pretty tasty in his scruffy fishing outfit, shown above, chauffeur's uniforms always remind me a little too much of Berlin in 1939. It hardly signifies what he wears because when a tramp who isn't really a tramp and an heiress are in the same movie together, it's a sure bet they're gonna wind up getting married.

All the supporting cast are excellent including Bonita Granville as aspiring thespian/rich brat (territory that Virginia Wiedler had pretty well sown up in my book), Ann Dvorak as the chief rival for Rawlins' attention, Patsy Kelly as the sassy kitchen main and Alan Mowbray, as the family butler who quits at least once a day. This family is so screwball, even the dogs are funny, with names like "Down Boy" and "Off the Carpet" though sadly there are no wire-haired terriers present.

To add to the Dreamboat in Disguise as Servant sub-genre, If You Only Could Cook (1935) features Jim Buchanon (Herbert Marshall) as an automotive mogul who, after a rough day at the office, meets Joan Hawthorn (Jean Arthur) on a park bench while she's looking through the want ads. Mistaking him for a fellow job-seeker, she invites him to pose as a married couple in order to get jobs as a cook and a butler. Marshall of course, has his own butler, who he hits up for tips, before heading off for a few weeks vacation as a servant. Only in the movies!

Lionel Sander, best known as Max from the TV series Hart to Hart has a supporting role as one of the gangsters in the employ of Mike Rossini (Leo Carillo). The mob boss hires the couple, and then falls for Joan, which presents complications for Jim who is also in love with her. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Jim is supposed to be getting married to a woman he doesn't love in a few days. As is the way in screwball comedy, it all works out right in the end after much confusion over sleeping arrangements in the couple's cramped servant's quarters. One of Sander's lines, "If you were married to her, would you sleep on the sofa!?" sums up the tensions that drove the entire screwball genre.

Marshall doesn't quite go through the mistaken for a "forgotten man," routine. It's enough for him merely to sit on a park bench and to be branded as unemployed. Arthur is plucky and funny as usual. She always plays well as the wiser and more worldly member of a couple, and it's a nice twist to see reserved Marshall cast as her love interest. Mr. Smith and Mr. Deeds were hicks, but they were also dreamers, as is our Mr. Buchanon. He's just a bit more sophisticated.

Familiar tropes are sometimes the best because their variations delight and amuse almost more than those films which are entirely novel. During the Depression there was no greater fantasy than being a rich person with servants, unless of course it was that you were rich, your servant happened to look like a movie star and be a millionaire in disguise.

Forbidden? Plan It!

2010-02-24T11:25:00.004-06:00

Click on image to see the full size file. Also available as a printable pdf if you like. I will e-mail it to you.
More Forbidden Planet Nonsense. I just thought that Dr. M's pad deserved to the modern house porn treatment.

Forbidden Fashions of 1956

2010-02-23T10:08:00.008-06:00

You can learn a lot about a movie from it's costumes. This is especially true with science fiction, I think. The notion of what people will wear in space or in the future tells a lot about the culture that spawned a film. Here's a look at some of my favorite costumes from Forbidden Planet (1956). Keep in mind that Robby the Robot is supposed to have made all of the clothes worn by Dr. Morbius and his daughter, Alta.

The Fleet is in

One of the best things about this movie are the Space Navy costumes worn by the men. They look a little bit space, a little bit navy and they give everyone nice big shoulders. As Betty Davis and Joan Crawford might attest, everyone could use a little help in the shoulder department.

Well hello, Ruby Tuesday

No sooner is Alta introduced, than her costume causes problems for the space men who've come to investigate her father. Dopey looks quickly progress to kissing lessons. Though Dr. Mobious is jealous of any attention given to Alta by the starry sailors, he has yet to have the "you're not leaving the house dressed like that, young lady," talk with her. Her "statement necklace" is genuine ruby, synthesized by Robby.

That dress is so money

Since Dr. Morbius has failed teach Alta the facts about sailors, Commander Adams tries explaining that men who've been "locked up in hyperspace" for more than a year can't necessarily remain gentleman with her short skirts and free lip locks. He gets all bitchy and it's pretty clear he's feeling the pressure too. I love this dress with it's boat neck, funnel collar and texture reminiscent of coins welded to fabric.

Greece is the word

Taking his lecture to heart, Alta tones down her look for her next meeting with the Commander. Some of her good intentions are lost when she precedes the big reveal with a naked swim. It's so hard to explain cultural mores to space girls. Another of Robby's amazing necklaces accessorizes this Grecian inspired gown.

Nights in black satin

Alta wears this black satin number with off center silver sequins for a few minutes while she stands around in the background. As near as I can tell the movie takes place over three days, which gives Alta a number of costume changes approaching the Kay Francis level.

Kim-OH-NO you didn't!

Not to be left out, Dr. Morbius relaxes in this black kimono or Man Dress. The sumptuous black on black ensemble is just the thing to wear to meet your Id monster.

Nautical or nice?

This is my favorite of Alta's many ensembles. It's a travel dress, but you have to think she had Robby whip it up, taking style cues from the Space Navy uniforms. I love the collar and hood, the structured box sleeves and the button details on the waist.

Thanks Robby!

Don't forget to hug your robot!

Not seeing Avatar?

2010-02-22T16:47:00.000-06:00

Forbidden Planet: Just one of the many movies I'd rather be watching than Avatar.

I don't really have anything against James Cameron or mega blockbusters. I don't hate Avatar. (How could, I haven't seen it.) I just don't have any interest in seeing this movie. I felt the same way about Titanic, and I managed to avoid seeing that. When Titanic took over the world, I made a little web page, "The last people on Earth who haven't seen Titanic." So I thought I'd do it again.

Maybe it's just that I don't like being bossed around. So many people have said, "oh you have to see Avatar." That kind of word of mouth praise, just works in reverse for me. Please don't flood this page with comments about how great Avatar is, ok. I just don't care. If you do want to comment about some other sci fi movies, classic film or even movies in general, then please, by all means, go for it.

I'm also starting a Facebook group as a place for people to hang out who are not seeing Avatar. It's gonna be a whole thing, I promise.

King Solomon's Mines (1950)

2010-02-22T11:00:00.005-06:00

A while back I did a couple of posts, Swoon-worthy Actors and Phonebook Actresses. Two stars that I neglected to put on either list out of sheer stupidity were Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. I've always loved Granger ever since I saw Young Bess, years ago. I even did a tribute to his legs a while back. How could I forget him? And Kerr is such a solid actress. I love her in comedy (the two she made with Cary Grant are slight , but entertaining) and drama (From Here to Eternity, Night of the Iguana) which is a rarity. I adore her in Vacation from Marriage and Affair to Remember where she gets to do a bit of both. So to make up for this oversight, I'm posting on yet another fifties movie, King Solomon's Mines, which stars Granger and Kerr.

This is a straight-forward action picture with a bit of romance. The story follows an English woman (Kerr) who hires hunter, Alan Quartermain(Granger) to find her treasure hunting husband who has gone AWOL in Africa. I watched this with my husband and the boy and they both loved it, too. At one point my husband went upstairs to check on the roast and came back ten minutes later. It took me a couple of minutes to summarize all the plot points he'd missed. With such a busy script this could have easily been a confused, over-blown mess. Yet, the basic journey motif keeps it all hanging together. Do characters drop in and out? Why, yes. Character development? Hardly any, unless you count Deborah Kerr cutting her hair. There are countless scenes of Granger rescuing Kerr from danger to be followed by an awkward moment when they seem like they might kiss. It's not so much a romance as a series of awkward moments.

I don't really mind these flaws though. This is a piece of spectacle and it excels at that. It is a big budget, highly proficient film made about an Africa that simply doesn't exist anymore, and probably never did anyway. The movie opens with Quatermain hunting elephants with a bunch of spoiled rich people. If there were any pro-Elephant hunting people left in the world, this movie would change their minds. The access to animals on the scale shown in this movie is pretty much never going to happen again. There is a long sequence of a stampede that had the intended effect of bowling me over. The native people in the film are presented in a way which was fairly unoffensive even today. Native actors Kimursi and Siriaque are especially memorable. Their tribes are shown with at least a minimal attempt at accuracy. I'm not going to go so far as to say they weren't exploited for the film , because I don't know but none of the usual savage stereotypes that plagued 1930s films of this genre are present. The worst you can say is that the film focuses too much on the white people. It plays like a technicolor, live action National Geographic photo essay. It's not exactly anthropology and it's not exactly high art, but it has an edutainment value.

I've often seen this film listed as among the inspirations for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The emphasis is on travelogue, not treasure hunting. When they are in the mines and there is a booby trap with at least one big, round obviously fake bolder. I could also see Quartermaine as a forerunner to Indiana Jones. He has a trademark hat and he wears khaki pants. He hates dragging women along but that is Victorian chauvenism. Indy doesn't like to bring women along because he such a commitment-phobe that it might seem like going steady with a gal if he talks to her more than twice. On second thought, maybe those are both the exact same reason!

One final note, for those playing along at home, Stewart Granger's legs do make an appearance in the film, but just barely. Thanks to all those jungle thorns his pants eventually get completely torn to shreds leaving just strips that occasionally offer a peek at those Granger Gams. Hooray! Sorry I couldn't make screen caps. You'll just have to trust me on this one, people. Speaking of legs, Deborah Kerr gets to wear gauchos in this movie. Kerr's gauchos are not quite in the same class as Susan Hayward's in Garden of Evil, but they'll do.

Bootleggers or preservationists?

2010-02-19T09:53:00.001-06:00

I've been watching classic movies since the mid 1980s and I've been interested in film preservation since the mid-1990s. I must say though that my interest in film preservation, was at first entirely selfish. Being big into Cary Grant, there were a small group of us who simply wanted copies of all of his films. Cary Grant belonged to Paramount for the first seven years of his film career. Around a third of his total filmography belonged to Paramount and with all the corporate mergers in the 80s, these archives changed hands pretty frequently.

In the seventies and early eighties, before home video took over the world, classic films were primarily shown in the afternoons on local televisions stations as filler programming. Paramount sold the rights to many of their early films to be shown on television. At that time, satellite television was just coming onto the consumer market. They were expensive but they appealed to people who lived in remote places or who were gadget heads. There were also quite a few film fanatics and collectors who owned dishes. They could sit in their living room in Wyoming and tape movies off the dish being shown anywhere in the world. These unsung heroes were the renegade saints of the classic film world for they had in their vast archives of video tapes a great many films which were simply unavailable anywhere else. And luckily they were happy to sell them to us for little more than the cost of their efforts. This truly was a labor of love.

Though Turner Classic Movies existed in the late 90s their access to the Paramount archives was (and still is) limited. To this day, many early Paramount films are tied up in this limbo. There is very little hope that most of these films see the light of day as a DVD release. Paramount not only owned Cary Grant, but Gary Cooper. Cary Grant fans are lucky, all his work survives and many of those titles which we lovingly bootlegged and passed around amongst ourselves 15 years ago, have since been officially released. Gary Cooper fans are not so lucky. A great deal of Cooper's silent work is considered lost and many of his early Paramount efforts are only available through back channels on the internet. Of course, Paramount is just one studio and Gary Cooper is just one star. What of the fate of the work of lesser known, but equally great actors? What of the smaller studios? The foreign studios? Those films have even less of a chance of ever being rescued from the dustbin.

It is these back channels that I want to talk to today. There are numerous sellers on Ebay, Bonanzle and on small e-commerce sights who collect rare and out of print films and distribute them at a low price, usually enough to recoup their cost in time and materials. Some collectors keep lists of missing or lost titles. Occasionally collectors turn up with a copy of these lost titles and the film can be momentarily preserved because it can be seen. The quality of these copies varies so widely, it's hardly worth talking about, but suffice to say that it's not uncommon to buy two or three copies of a film over time, to try to improve one's luck. I have four copies of the Lawrence Olivier/Merle Oberon film, the Divorce of Lady X. The first two were old VHS tapes that were unplayable by the time I got a hold of them. Eventually, I was able to track down a decent fan made DVD rip of the movie just before an official DVD came out.

In recent years there are a die-hard group of film fans who upload classic movies to Youtube in 10 minute chunks. There are many films that I would not have been able to track down if it weren't for these new rogue bootleggers. Their films are constantly being removed by Youtube which doesn't allow complete films on its site, but they continue to operate, changing titles, keywords and accounts frequently. Again, this is a labor of love. The people uploading the movies receive no compensation for their time and efforts.

What does all this have to do with film preservation? As much as this internet back alley trading keeps collectors going, and in some cases is the only way we can preserve a film if its original has been lost, it is simply not enough. Google Books is in court battling an anti-trust suit and its outcome could potentially effect classic film fans. If the court allows Google to electronically publish books whose copyright holders can no longer be tracked down, there is a possibility that films whose copyrights are in similar limbo could be electronically cataloged in the same way. Five years from now we could sit down at our computers and stream these classic films to our computers.

Of course films aren't exactly analagous to books. To begin with, books are a lot tougher than movies. If you don't believe me just pick up an old Photoplay magazine from the 1930s and count the number of "lost" titles within. The cheapest pulp paper is more durable than the most expensive film stock from a given year. Even handling archived collections is risky, let alone figuring out how to digitize them. For those films that are in stable condition sitting in archives, unseen there should be a massive digitization effort. For film fans and for future generations these things should be made digital and they should be made available.

For films that are in the hands of private collectors, digital technology should make sharing them easier than ever. Sadly this has not been the case. Peer to peer (P2P) sharing, which has been the bane of music and movie industries has not had much effect on the classic film market. In order for P2P to be effective you need to have a large number of people interested in a title and willing to allow people to download it from their computer. If any of you are old enough to remember the final days of the original Naptster you may recall that it went from being a place where you could slowly download the latest top 40 junk to a music-lovers paradise where you get any obscure thing you could want at high speeds. The reason for this improvement was that the rumors of the demise of the site pushed a huge number of users there at once. Compared to the latest blockbuster still in the theater, there is almost no interest in sharing a 70-year old film.

It's conceivable that a safe harbor for out of print films could be created, where fans could peer to peer share their collections using the internet instead of the mail. It's possible that VEOH, which Time Warner and other corporations have invested in, which runs on P2P, might be the perfect place. They allow high quality dowloads, support flash streaming and most importantly, whole movies. My experiences with streaming classic movies there have been maddeningly frustrating, but if the site were to catch on with more classic movie fans, maybe the ease of delivery would be improved. I should start a rumor that VEOH is going away!

Another viable model for getting films out of the vaults and into DVD players, is being used by Warner Brother's for their Vault Collection. They burn a DVD after its paid for and send it out. It's rather like those Bonanzle sellers who make a DVDR for you after your Paypal has cleared. You can support this model by buying those DVDs. If it proves profitable, I think other film collections could be distributed in this way. Not only will it increase the number of titles on offer, it would greatly improve things for the average film collector subject to the whims of the market where titles constantly go in and out of print.

What of those films in archives that are not stable, that are damaged and deteriorated to the point that digitizing is out of the question? This is where the painstaking and expensive work of restoration comes in. I once looked in to the possibility of purchasing restoration software. I was told that a single license cost $30,000. This is before you take into account the user skill and expensive hardware set-ups required for such an undertaking. Many organizations public and private do film restoration. This blogathon is in support of the National Film Preservation Foundation, which is part of the Library of Congress. I can personally attest to the quality work that this organization does. In 2001, as part of a Cary Grant convention we were allowed to view the recently restored Notorious. I'd seen the film many times on television and at least once in a theater, but seeing a newly restored print in a theater is almost like watching a different movie. You notice new details in the background and on the soundtrack. Seeing the original contrast in a black and white film makes the images leap off the screen, where before they might have been very gray or washed out.

Please check out the NFPF, support the blogathon and consider giving a contribution. In a somewhat similar vein to my post, John McElwee of Greenbriar Picture Show recounts his own efforts at film collecting and preservation in the 1970s.

Valentine redux

2010-02-17T10:23:00.008-06:00

As 30 Rock pointed out to me this week, Valentine's Day is really a stalker's holiday. So I made an over long, totally stalkerish Valentine to one of my favorite classic films, David Lean's Summertime (1955).

I discovered this movie as part of a series I did about summer romance/travel movies that ripped off Roman Holiday. As much as I love Roman Holiday, I think Summertime might be a little better. While Roman Holiday definitely has youth on its side, Summertime is unabashedly mature. "If age is an asset than I'm loaded," Jane Hudson (Katharine Hepburn) says. While Roman Holiday shows postwar Rome to great advantage, Summertime shows Venice in a more realistic, although still highly romantic, light. People dump trash in the canal and Hudson's guide throughout most of the film is a barefoot homeless child who smokes and procures gondolas for adulterous couples to use as trysting places. To its credit, the film doesn't try to squirm out of these unpleasantries. Nor does it try to squirm out of the bleak dilemma that traps its central characters. While the lovers in Roman Holiday are doomed to part, Audrey Hepburn goes back to being a princess, and Katharine Hepburn goes back to being a secretary in Akron, Ohio.

Yet, Summertime is much more than a Geezer Roman Holiday. For one, it is also a David Lean film. It moves at a casual pace. Rossano Brazzi doesn't even appear in the film until 15 minutes in and then disappears for another fifteen minutes or so. Though the images are tightly controlled and composed, you don't necessarily feel like they are. You feel like you might be watching one of Jane Hudson's home movies. In that spirit, I'm taking my sweet old time, getting to the re-cap, so here goes...

The train bearing Jane Hudson arrives in Venice, seemingly floating on the water. We're introduced to her character, a single woman traveling alone. Her tail-wagging enthusiasm is endearing. Having been a solo female American on many travels I can attest that this is the best way to travel if you really want to see a place and meet its natives.

Jane meets the McIlhenny's on the "bus." They are the stereotypical ugly Americans giving offense and making fools of themselves wherever they go. Mrs. McIlhenny speaks Italian and it embarrasses her husband. Even though they are supposed to be awful, I kind of like them.

Jane arrives at Pensione Fiorini, and meets its proprietress, a widow Jane's age. Mrs. Fiorini is sophisticated and smart and she instantly takes to Jane's open heart. She thinks a lot less of Mr. McIlhenny who complains that "this WOP food is ruining my digestion." OK, when I said I liked the McIlhenny's, I meant, "outside their appalling racism." Jane refuses Mrs. Fiorini's offer of dinner with real Italians and instead decides to check out the famed Piazza San Marco.

People watching in the Piazza.

This is one of Lean's most brilliant and brilliantly simple set ups.

As Jane watches a couple of pretty girls being chased by two wolfish young men, she is shocked by the openness of the young men's approach.

In her reaction shot, we first glimpse Renato de Rossi (Rossano Brazzi) who is about to make the same completely straightforward move on her.

The noise of Janes' movie camera catches his eye and and Lean's camera follows their gaze up to the rooftops. One of the nice things is that although he lives in Venice, De Rossi always seems to be seeing the place through Jane's newcomber's eyes.

As he is about to turn away, he notices her legs.

I like these shoes, but I imagine, that's not what he's thinking about.

Jane senses she's being watched and is startled to find the wolf so close by.

She attempts to throw him off by putting on her sunglasses, which is hilariously ineffective.

Then she tries to pay the bill quickly and leave, but apparently the universal "check please" gesture doesn't work in Italy. Senior de Rossi steps in to gain the waiter's attention on her behalf to her mortification. Later when discussing their first meeting she says, merely, "you were wearing a yellow tie."

Jane flees to the quiet of the canal, where she broods a bit.

The next day Jane meets Mauro (Gaetano Autiero), a homeless boy who acts as her guide and sells her dirty postcards.

Jane is drawn to a red goblet in the window of an antiques store and goes in to inquire about buying it.

Jane is so focused on the goblet she does not notice that the attentive shopkeeper who is trying to sell it to her is the very same man from the Piazza San Marco.

"Maybe you could see it's color better if you took off your glasses," he says and she does.

There is a long beat before she finally recognizes him and then this hilarious reaction shot.

He smoothly inquires about her hotel, "in case a matching goblet ever turns up" and she responds "I'm staying in Venice" before she tells him the name of her pensione. It's hard to tell whether she is just awkward because she's nervous or used to repelling men out of habit, or both. He watches her walking away across the footbridge outside his shop and she tries to look back at him and trips, almost falling over.

That afternoon, Jane is writing a letter to her friends back home and already describing the handsome stranger as "me amico" and imagining that if her friends were there they could double date. This is so sweet and so real.

After a painful scene in which she attempts to wheedle an invitation to drinks with the Yaegers, an American couple at the hotel, Jane is left on her own again. She heads for the Piazza. She is waiting for her "amico" but sees the Yaegers walking past and doesn't want them to think that they should come join her. She puts the chair next to her up against her table as a sign that she wants to be alone. The Yaegers don't see her and Jane is relieved. Then Mr. de Rossi enters the frame from behind.

He approaches, says "good evening" and pauses.

Jane realizes too late that the chair against the table has warded him off and she makes this total "I love Lucy" face as he walks away again.

The next day, Jane gets lost exploring the back alleys of Venice. Mauro finds her and brings her back to the antique shop, where she inquires for her friend, who is out of the shop.

Then she tries to film the front of the shop and falls in the canal.

Jane's fall into the canal makes everyone's days and Mr. De Rossi turns up at the pensione to inquire after her health.

She is wearing a dish towel and keeps asking him why he's there. He tries to explain sexual attraction to her without using any words. I love how he just keeps getting closer and closer to her in this scene and we don't see him move. It's like he's on casters or something.

The McIlhenny's come in and ruin everything. They have half a dozen goblets to match the supposedly rare one Jane bought at Mr. De's store. Awkward. Mr. McIlhenny says "Arrivaderci" and that makes Mrs. McIlhenny all excited in a way that I really don't want to think about.

He tries to explain that hers is an antique but she is mad and knocks over one of Mrs. Fiorini's really old chairs. For someone who runs an antique store, Mr. De Rossi doesn't seem at all bothered by his new girl's furniture abuse, but we'll let this slide. He's in love.

Mr. De gets overly-familiar with her dishtowel and eventually asks her out on date. Jane finally accepts.

They go to a concert at the Piazza and then she surprises him by picking a white gardenia from the flower vendor. Why this is surprise, I have no idea. I guess I just don't have enough Fifties Italian flower savvy.

Jane looses her flower in the canal and he's unable to retrieve it.

Undeterred by the obvious symbolic foreshadowing, they kiss. Things get a little passionate, and she asks him why he kissed her like that, which is the kind of thing only people in old movies would say. I mean I get that she's a rookie to this whole romance thing, obviously, but it would serve her right if he would just say, "Because I'm Italian and I'll get busted down to being Belgian if I don't get to first base.." Jane first tells him she doesn't want to see him again and after another kiss, she says, "I love you" and runs away. Newbs.

The next day Jane has an old movie makeover, which is awesome. She gets her hair done, her nails painted, buys a strapless gown (which she still wears with a dishtowel-like scarf attached with a weird necklace thingy) and red high heel shoes.

The red shoe becomes a big symbol of her newly found sexy side so keep an eye on them.

Jane waits for Mr. De Rossi and his "nephew" turns up to tell her he's going to be late. Though the kid is 12, she offers him a cigarette. It's funny how the things that were shocking about this movie when it came out are kind of humdrum now, and things like this little cigarette business with the kid are scandalous.

Jane finds out that the kid is not really Mr. De Rossi's nephew but his son. What is worse, the boy's mother is still in the picture.She heads straight to Harry's bar to get shit-faced. At Harry's she meets Phyl Jaeger who has a head start on her in the whole drinking and crying department. Jane must hold it together in front of Phyl who thinks she is tough. Phyl and Jane bond--not over what pigs men are, as they would in a contemporary movie--but over how much it hurts to not be everything to the person you love.

Back at the pensione, Jane overhears Mr. Jaeger and Mrs. Fiorini arranging a late-night gondola excursion, which explains why Phyl was crying at Harry's bar.

Mauro helps the lovers get a gondola. Jane catches Mauro and freaks out at him. Just then Mr. De Rossi arrives and her anger switches to a more appropriate target.

Mr. De tries to explain that he and his wife are separated and then Jane pisses him off by asking him if Mrs. De Rossi has "gondola friends." I think that's the best euphemism ever, by the way. Jane asks him why he didn't tell her he was married and why he pretended that his son was his nephew. He answers lamely that he was afraid of scaring her away. She doesn't ask if he ever planned on telling her the truth, and I think it's because she's afraid he'll either lie again or she won't want to hear the truth.

He gives her a speech. "You wanted someone young, rich, handsome witty and of course, not married. I am not young. I am a shopkeeper. I'm not handsome or witty (I'd beg to differ on both accounts) and of course, I'm married. But I am a man. And you are a woman." Then he kisses her and at least this time she doesn't ask him why he did it. Then he gives her this beefsteak and ravioli analogy, which doesn't really work logically but has the effect of making her hungry which was all part of a clever plan to get her to go to dinner with him. Boy, is he smooth.

She decides to go for a walk and he follows, chasing her into some symbolic dead ends.

A gondola driver asks if they need a ride and Mr. De Rossi totally jumps down his throat, which would be funny if it weren't so painful.

At dinner a toy peddler comes by and Jane cheers up a bit. I mean who doesn't love wind-up monkeys? So cute!

Oh yeah, back to the adultery, which 80 minutes into the movie is finally starting to happen. After dining and dancing and lots more walking around Jane finally just decides to go for it.

Kiss with the red shoe.

It's a well-known fact that in the 1950s when people had sex, there were always fireworks.

The red shoes spend the night on Mr. De's balcony.

Sun coming up on the shoe.

We see the sun coming up on Venice, which is beautiful. Mr. De walks Jane to the dock and puts her in a gondola.

She waves goodbye with her shoe, which is genius.

Jane's walk of shame back to her room at the Pensione is adorable and the shoe makes it's final stand at symbolism. Is that a men's bathrobe she's rocking as outerwear? Also, I love how the dishtowel is now a sporty ascot.

Riding in speedboats is classic film short hand for adultery.

They rent an apartment on a little island and spend the next few days making sweet, sweet innuendo. Here's a sampling of dialog, "You sleep all day and then you don't want to sleep at night." Renato's "hungry like the wolf" look and his sleepy look are almost exactly the same. Ah, Men!

This scene is beautiful, but what distracts me is the building in the background. Is that a grain elevator or a nuclear power plant? Well anyway, it's phallic, so it works.

Jane is way more relaxed and laid back in these scenes which is hilarious when you think about it.

Jane suddenly remembers this relationship can never really go anywhere and decides that she can't wait until divorce becomes legal in Italy in 1974. Preferring to rip the bandage off quickly, she tells Mr. De that she's packed and her train leaves in two hours.

They have a fight which consists of him kissing her and her saying "Oh, Renato!!" I guess in times of distress you stick to what you know works for you.

Gut punched by love.

Jane jumps on a gondola and waves good-bye with her white shoe. It's here that I wonder about Katharine Hepburn and her real life paramour, Spencer Tracy. How much of this is just wish fulfillment for Hepburn? If she could have walked or floated away like this, I think she would have.

Even though she just totally dumped his ass, Jane seems to expect Renato to turn up at the train station. This is another one of those sweet and true to life character details that I love in this film. She says good-bye to Mauro who somehow knows she's there. There must be a Jane Hudson channel on the police scanner. Everyone always knows where she is.

As the train is pulling away, with Jane on it, Renato finally turns up with a little box. We never find out what's in it. It's too small to be a goblet. Also we hope it's not breakable because at one point it goes skittering across the platform.

Renato runs after the train, holding up a white gardenia. She is too far away to take it. This is Jane's final glimpse of him.

The movie ends with lavish hand waving and a blatant disregard for train platform safety protocols.

Yes, Summertime is an effective example of a tear-jerker romance, but what I really like are the characters. Renato di Rossi is very slick and polished and yet we get the feeling that this more a result of his being Italian than his being such a well-practiced player. Part of this is Brazzi's performance since he cleverly manages to be at once super smooth Euro dude and tired middle-aged guy. He has to realize that Jane is way more high maintenance the casual fling he'd probably originally envisioned, but he pursues her because, they are both lonely people who are practiced at putting on a brave face. When he turns up at the pensione and she pretends not to understand why he's there, he rightly points out that she's been stalking him all over the city. He cuts through all her romantic notions and dares her to take his love even though it doesn't live up to her ideals.

I can't decide whether it's because she's a "spinster" (God what a terrible word, I hate to even type it), because she's a free spirit, or because it's vacation and she just wants to enjoy herself that Jane allows him to seduce her. It is chauvinistic to conclude that if you are a woman of a certain age who has waited to fall in love because you were unwilling to "settle," you might actually end up alone. It is feminist to say that if you a woman alone you can be perfectly happy even though you do still sometimes feel like you are missing out on certain things. Miraculously, Summertime makes both conclusions without making your head explode. Then again it might have nothing to do with ones age or gender. With love , things might be more complicated than you are prepared to accept. (Try fitting that on a Valentine's Day card.) That truth hits everyone, even young people. If you don't believe me, watch Roman Holiday!

CinemaOCD Valentines

2010-02-13T10:00:00.001-06:00

Here are some valentines for you download and give to your sweetheart tomorrow. It's classic film related and it will get you out of actually buying something. Enjoy!

Bird of Paradise, Starring Joel McCrea and Delores Del Rio. Click on the image to be taken to a larger version for printing.

Condemned, Featuring Ronald Colman.

Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat and Elissa Landi

Foreign Correspondent with Alfred Hitchock and George Sanders.

Summertime starring Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi.

Kate Bush, Classic Movie fan?

2010-02-12T10:34:00.005-06:00

I have a soft spot for any contemporary celebrity who is a classic film nerd. I've started watching 30 Rock just because I like Alec Baldwin's geeky contributions to The Essentials. I like the host segments of the latter show so much that I've been taping them, even when I've seen the movie just because I enjoy the brief discussions. I wish TCM would put them on their website.

I read on the Smoking Gun that when Cher gives a concert she insists on having a TV with Turner Classic Movies in her dressing room. Now that's my kind of demanding diva. I've always liked her acting but that makes me like her even more.

And I'm starting to suspect that one of my favorite singers is secretly a film dork. I always thought that Kate Bush's song "Wuthering Heights" was more about the classic 1939 movie than about the book. And I just found out today that her video for the 1985 song "Hounds of Love" is (loosely) based on The 39 Steps. I quite enjoy this incredibly low budget homage to Hitchcock, but like even more this recent Youtube version which combines footage from The 39 Steps with the song.