Jupiter's Darling (1955)

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

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

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

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.