by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ended up running a movie I’ve been curious about for years and had never had the chance to see; The Big Parade, the 1925 MGM blockbuster hit about World War I that was the second-highest grossing movie of the entire silent era (after The Birth of a Nation). The Big Parade started when MGM production chief Irving Thalberg decided to buy the movie rights to Laurence Stallings’ hit play What Price Glory?, a comedy set against a backdrop of World War I. When William Fox outbid him for What Price Glory?, Thalberg decided that if he couldn’t have the hit play he could have something similar by the same author about the same subject, so he hired Stallings to write him an original World War I story (just as, six years later, he responded to the success of Warners’ gangster film Little Caesar by hiring W. R. Burnett, author of the novel on which Little Caesar was based, to write an original gangster story for MGM, The Beast of the City).
Originally The Big Parade was planned as a modestly budgeted star vehicle for John Gilbert, but when director King Vidor turned in his rough cut, Thalberg screened it and said, “Make it bigger.” So Vidor was sent back to his locations (Legion Park, near Griffith Park, in Los Angeles and Clover Field in San Diego) along with hundreds of troop transports and other military equipment, to shoot the two great scenes that give the movie the inspiration for its title: the U.S. army going forth to battle in France with hope and high spirits — and returning from a rout at the hands of the more experienced, battle-hardened German troops in a low-energy state of despair. Vidor told interviewers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg that his inspiration for The Big Parade was a desire to make films that would have long theatrical releases (“In those days we’d put a lot of effort into films that would come to town and play for only a few days and then be forgotten”), and also to make the first truly honest movie about war. “Until then they’d all been very phony, glorifying officers and warfare,” Vidor said. “There hadn’t been a single picture showing the war from the view of ordinary soldiers and privates, not one with some feeling of anti-war, of realistic war.” The Big Parade is probably the first, and still one of only a handful of war movies in which almost no commissioned officers are shown as characters; when Vidor said he wanted to focus on “ordinary soldiers and privates,” he wasn’t kidding.
The central characters are Jimmy Apperson (John Gilbert), wastrel son of a steel mill owner (Hobart Bosworth) whose nerdy brother Harry (Robert Ober) is being trained to take over the mill; local bartender Bull (Tom O’Brien) — the titles are a bit coy about what he does for a living and remind one that Prohibition hadn’t yet been passed in 1917, when the film takes place, but was in full force when it was made in 1925; and the comic-relief character Slim (Karl Dane), who works as a riveter on skyscrapers. Suddenly the U.S. declares war on Germany and a title mentions that people who before didn’t know what patriotism was immediately get swept up in it; the proletarian principals enlist immediately, and a chance run-in with them convinces Jimmy to sign up too. Jimmy leaves his sports car in the middle of the street (the car has right-hand drive, a neat symbol of Jimmy’s lack of touch with American life and his upper-class pretensions) and dashes off to the recruiting office, then is scared to tell his parents that he’s signed up. (The living room of the Apperson mansion is one of those incredibly exotic sets MGM hauled out of their warehouse regularly, usually as a Third World palace; it seems decidedly over-the-top representing the residence of an American businessman.)
When Jimmy’s girlfriend Justyn Reed (Claire Adams) “outs” him as an enlistee, predictably dad is happy about it and mom is miserable. The soldiers go through training and then to France — they’re kept together in the same unit but Bull becomes a sergeant and thus has command responsibility over the other two — and for most of its first half The Big Parade is more a comedy than anything else, featuring scenes in which Our Heroes have to shovel shit to clean out the French barn they’ve been billeted in and try to eat a rock-hard cake Justyn has sent Jimmy which has grown ultra-stale in transit. Eventually Jimmy meets Melisande (Renée Adorée, one of the great phony star names in Hollywood history — she was genuinely French but the name she was born with was either Jeanne de la Fonte or Jeanne de la Fontein, sources differ), teaches her to chew gum and falls in love with her.
The mood of The Big Parade changes abruptly when the American soldiers are actually ordered to the battlefield — and there’s a big, intensely moving scene in which Melisande chases after the troop transport that is taking Jimmy away (a scene Vidor reproduced in the 1929 film Show People, which starred Marion Davies as an actress on her way to Hollywood stardom; in Show People Davies and William Haines re-enact the scene, supposedly as part of a movie they are making together, and though I haven’t seen Show People in years it’s my recollection that, as good as Adorée is in the scene, Davies played it even better). The company marches off to war (by this time Bull has inadvertently kicked an officer and been busted from sergeant down to private) and in a scene that goes far to explain why World War I was such a carnage, facing a German army with machine guns they charge into battle standing straight up, practically inviting themselves to be easy targets — the infantry charges we’re used to seeing in World War II movies, with the advancing men hugging the ground and crawling the last 200 feet or so towards the enemy to avoid being picked off by machine-gun and long-range rifle fire, apparently hadn’t been invented yet.
Much of the battle footage was directed not by Vidor, but by another MGM director, George Hill — and it’s among the best material in the film; whereas Vidor seems to have been going for an ironic contrast between the natural beauty of the battlefields and the carnage taking place on them (the dappled sunlight effects give the battle scenes an oddly pastoral look), Hill pulls out all the stops and shoots his battle scenes in what was then (ironically) called the “German” look, with deep shadows and a chiaroscuro, high-contrast visual style that later became identified with film noir. Slim gets picked to go on a mission to take out the German machine-gunner that is decimating their unit, and he’s severely wounded (at first we think he’s dead, though he turns up alive but in a military hospital later), and Jimmy is shot in the leg going after him — he escapes from the hospital with one leg in a cast, and later he loses the leg (as writer Laurence Stallings had in real life).
The scene of his homecoming is still one of the subtlest and bitterest anti-war commentaries in film: Vidor keeps his camera waist-high as the domestic drama plays out — including the revelation that in the meantime Justyn has fallen in love with Jimmy’s stay-at-home brother Harry — and only when his parents have expressed their gratitude that he’s home and he’s alive does Vidor cut to a full-frame shot of Jimmy with one leg missing. (The effect is absolutely convincing and I found myself wondering how they did it in 1925; long before the invention of digital imaging that allows modern filmmakers to paint out electronically the limbs of actors playing amputees, the usual way of staging something like this was to use a straitjacket-like device to tie the actor’s leg behind him — but Vidor’s camera shoots the one-legged Gilbert both front and back, so it’s highly unlikely they did it that way.) On learning that Justyn doesn’t want him anymore, Jimmy determines to return to France and find Melisande — which he does (he comes upon her chewing gum, natch) for what Irving Kolodin called a mezzo-lieto fine: a sort-of happy ending (the good news is he’s found his girlfriend, the bad news is he only has one leg — though between the two climactic scenes he’s been fitted with an uncomfortable-looking and not entirely convincing prosthesis).
The Big Parade holds up surprisingly well for the period and manages to be intense entertainment even today — though the juncture between the relatively light-hearted first half and the grimness of the war footage jars. Though one of the companies that later merged into MGM, Metro, had made an even better epic involving World War I, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Big Parade is a great film, well balanced between sweeping imagery and an intimate story — and if it sometimes seems clichéd, it’s important to remember that this is one of the movies whose makers invented those clichés.
The acting is effective even though there’s no performance here with the kind of charisma Valentino brought to The Four Horsemen; John Gilbert seems to be overdoing the character’s naïveté early on, unable to strike the required balance between playing superficial and being superficial, but once he gets into combat and the war takes the sheen off his character, he’s quite good, with some heart-stopping close-ups that make it clear what 1920’s audiences saw in this since-maligned star. (Gilbert made his best films — The Big Parade and Stroheim’s The Merry Widow — in 1925; afterwards MGM pretty much cast him in relatively superficial romantic leads until he ran into problems in the sound era, less — I think — due to the timbre of his voice than his inability to act with it; by the time he learned to modulate his voice and change its tone and timbre to reflect the emotions his character was supposed to be feeling, he had already tumbled down from the heights of stardom and MGM didn’t quite know what to do with him, though some of his later talkies as a contract player at MGM — The Phantom of Paris, West of Broadway and Fast Workers — are genuinely interesting and entertaining films.)
Renée Adorée was your typical silent heroine; Vidor was effusive about her (“I was mad about her,” he told Higham and Greenberg; “She was actually French …and because of her background there was never any argument against using her”), and he did get her to cool it on the simpering coyness she showed in some of her other movies (but then simpering coyness was an occupational hazard of silent-era ingénues), but she’s nothing special. Karl Dane’s comic relief gets oppressive after a while — though his near-death scene is surprisingly moving — and Tom O’Brien is quite good but he’s the least important of the three principals and we don’t get to see enough of him. What you get out of The Big Parade is the spectacle and the way Vidor and his writers (Stallings, scenarist Harry Behn and title writer Joe Farnham) manage to work in an anti-war message without getting preachy about it the way the makers of All Quiet on the Western Front (same war, different side!) did five years later; at one point Jimmy Apperson lets loose a tirade against the whole idea of war and his role in it (the one sequence in The Big Parade that would actually have worked better in a sound film), but for the most part the film is content to understate its condemnation of war, which is welcome. Both the romantic leads in this film had quite unfortunate subsequent lives; Gilbert’s failure and early death are well known, and Adorée caught tuberculosis and was forced to retire in 1930, three years before the disease took her life at age 35.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
New Muslim Cool (Specific Pictures/PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
New Muslim Cool, directed by Jennifer Maytorena Taylor — who seems to have made a career out of documentaries about American Muslims, judging from her list of previous credits (Ramadan Primetime, Special Circumstances, Paulina, Home Front and Immigration Calculations) — deals with the story of Hamza (née Jason) Pérez, a former drug dealer and gang member in Boston who at age 21 converted to Islam, gave up dealing and ganging, and moved to Pittsburgh to pursue a career as a drug and alcohol counselor to inmates at the Allegheny County Jail and rap performer with his brother, Sulieman (also a convert to Islam) as part of a duo called M-Team (“M” being short for moujahedin, the literal name of people who engage in jihad — the term “jihadi” is a Western neologism that isn’t recognized by Muslims).
It was a fascinating movie but also a disappointment in one major respect: Hamza’s history was presented merely as backstory — we didn’t get any sense of his past beyond the mere recitation of his former drug and gang involvements, nor did we hear why the street missionary who started him on the path to Islam made such an impression on him that he literally turned his life around and became a very different sort of person, not just a believer in a religion far different from the Roman Catholicism of his family but an activist in Pittsburgh’s Muslim community. I had hoped that the film would include something along the lines of Malcolm X’s account of his soul-searching in his autobiography — as well as a greater sense of what Hamza had been in his pre-Muslim days and how great the change in his character had been.
What the film did do is present Hamza and his family (he’s just broken up with his first wife when the film begins, and during it he meets an African-American Muslim woman through the Internet, they date and eventually marry, and at the end he’s doing a Muslim version of Yours, Mine and Ours: raising his children by his previous wife, hers by her previous husband, and a newborn who’s the first of their children) in a disarmingly normal context. They live simply, modestly, worry about the bills; they respond to each other much the way anyone else does (there’s a marvelous scene filmed shortly before Hamza’s wedding in which his wife-to-be says how much she’s looking forward to the ceremony — and he says the part he’s looking forward to is the wedding night, which provokes a grin from her that suggests she’s going to enjoy that part of the relationship as much as he will: so much for the ridiculous stereotype that Muslim women hate sex!), and they behave so much like anyone else that if Taylor’s intent was to tell her audience, “You see, Muslims aren’t any different from anyone else,” she has succeeded quite well.
The other thing the film does is show that, for all the normality of these nice young people living simple, decent lives, there’s still so much hatred of Muslims in the U.S. and so much anti-Muslim profiling that every American Muslim, whether born into the religion or a convert; whether Black, Latino, Asian or White; is all too aware almost every day that they live here on the margins, at best grudgingly accepted and at worst demonized by a vicious stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists. In one sequence from the film, a green box appears on a telephone pole across the street from the mosque (a converted row house) at which Hamza worships and in which he’s active (much like a volunteer with any other church). Hamza and the imam of his mosque (the term “imam,” like so much else in Islam, has acquired a sinister reputation even though it simply means a religious leader, the equivalent of “priest” or “pastor” in Christianity and “rabbi” in Judaism) figure out that the mysterious box is a camera, installed by the FBI to keep an eye on their mosque — and Hamza grimly points out that the camera isn’t pointing to a well-known corner at which drug dealers ply their trade just a block away, but is aimed dead on at their mosque.
Shortly after the camera is installed, the mosque is raided by gun-toting FBI agents who break down doors, smash things, terrorize the worshipers (they picked Friday afternoon, the time of worship in Islam, to stage their raid — the equivalent of raiding a Christian church on Sunday morning) and then leave without having arrested anybody, and without ever telling anybody what they were looking for, whether they found it or anything else on the case. (Hamza later learns that under the USA PATRIOT Act the feds have the right to raid anybody, at any time, and never have to let the victims know why they raided or whether they’re in any legal jeopardy from whatever it was they found.) Later Hamza’s clearance to go into the Allegheny County Jail to lead groups with prisoners is suddenly withdrawn — as are the clearances of the four other Muslims who were doing that work — and he visits the local ACLU office; he eventually learns that this had no connection to the FBI raid on his mosque a year earlier but instead was a red-flag based on some inflammatory statements he made in an interview years earlier to a music magazine about his work as a rapper.
New Muslim Cool is less than the movie it could have been, but it’s still a fascinating film, well worth seeing for what it is — and Hamza himself is an engaging figure, determined to be optimistic and upbeat about his life despite the curveballs the authorities keep throwing at him. Indeed, he seems to have got mellower as the events of the film took place, as evidenced by the two extended samples of his music we get; the earlier one is incendiary, angry words shouted over the staccato beat familiar from the Black gangsta rappers; while the piece he’s shown recording towards the end is far mellower, more introspective and accompanied by a much softer, more gentle music track (and Hamza and Sulieman even do a bit of singing, as well as rapping, on this one!).
New Muslim Cool, directed by Jennifer Maytorena Taylor — who seems to have made a career out of documentaries about American Muslims, judging from her list of previous credits (Ramadan Primetime, Special Circumstances, Paulina, Home Front and Immigration Calculations) — deals with the story of Hamza (née Jason) Pérez, a former drug dealer and gang member in Boston who at age 21 converted to Islam, gave up dealing and ganging, and moved to Pittsburgh to pursue a career as a drug and alcohol counselor to inmates at the Allegheny County Jail and rap performer with his brother, Sulieman (also a convert to Islam) as part of a duo called M-Team (“M” being short for moujahedin, the literal name of people who engage in jihad — the term “jihadi” is a Western neologism that isn’t recognized by Muslims).
It was a fascinating movie but also a disappointment in one major respect: Hamza’s history was presented merely as backstory — we didn’t get any sense of his past beyond the mere recitation of his former drug and gang involvements, nor did we hear why the street missionary who started him on the path to Islam made such an impression on him that he literally turned his life around and became a very different sort of person, not just a believer in a religion far different from the Roman Catholicism of his family but an activist in Pittsburgh’s Muslim community. I had hoped that the film would include something along the lines of Malcolm X’s account of his soul-searching in his autobiography — as well as a greater sense of what Hamza had been in his pre-Muslim days and how great the change in his character had been.
What the film did do is present Hamza and his family (he’s just broken up with his first wife when the film begins, and during it he meets an African-American Muslim woman through the Internet, they date and eventually marry, and at the end he’s doing a Muslim version of Yours, Mine and Ours: raising his children by his previous wife, hers by her previous husband, and a newborn who’s the first of their children) in a disarmingly normal context. They live simply, modestly, worry about the bills; they respond to each other much the way anyone else does (there’s a marvelous scene filmed shortly before Hamza’s wedding in which his wife-to-be says how much she’s looking forward to the ceremony — and he says the part he’s looking forward to is the wedding night, which provokes a grin from her that suggests she’s going to enjoy that part of the relationship as much as he will: so much for the ridiculous stereotype that Muslim women hate sex!), and they behave so much like anyone else that if Taylor’s intent was to tell her audience, “You see, Muslims aren’t any different from anyone else,” she has succeeded quite well.
The other thing the film does is show that, for all the normality of these nice young people living simple, decent lives, there’s still so much hatred of Muslims in the U.S. and so much anti-Muslim profiling that every American Muslim, whether born into the religion or a convert; whether Black, Latino, Asian or White; is all too aware almost every day that they live here on the margins, at best grudgingly accepted and at worst demonized by a vicious stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists. In one sequence from the film, a green box appears on a telephone pole across the street from the mosque (a converted row house) at which Hamza worships and in which he’s active (much like a volunteer with any other church). Hamza and the imam of his mosque (the term “imam,” like so much else in Islam, has acquired a sinister reputation even though it simply means a religious leader, the equivalent of “priest” or “pastor” in Christianity and “rabbi” in Judaism) figure out that the mysterious box is a camera, installed by the FBI to keep an eye on their mosque — and Hamza grimly points out that the camera isn’t pointing to a well-known corner at which drug dealers ply their trade just a block away, but is aimed dead on at their mosque.
Shortly after the camera is installed, the mosque is raided by gun-toting FBI agents who break down doors, smash things, terrorize the worshipers (they picked Friday afternoon, the time of worship in Islam, to stage their raid — the equivalent of raiding a Christian church on Sunday morning) and then leave without having arrested anybody, and without ever telling anybody what they were looking for, whether they found it or anything else on the case. (Hamza later learns that under the USA PATRIOT Act the feds have the right to raid anybody, at any time, and never have to let the victims know why they raided or whether they’re in any legal jeopardy from whatever it was they found.) Later Hamza’s clearance to go into the Allegheny County Jail to lead groups with prisoners is suddenly withdrawn — as are the clearances of the four other Muslims who were doing that work — and he visits the local ACLU office; he eventually learns that this had no connection to the FBI raid on his mosque a year earlier but instead was a red-flag based on some inflammatory statements he made in an interview years earlier to a music magazine about his work as a rapper.
New Muslim Cool is less than the movie it could have been, but it’s still a fascinating film, well worth seeing for what it is — and Hamza himself is an engaging figure, determined to be optimistic and upbeat about his life despite the curveballs the authorities keep throwing at him. Indeed, he seems to have got mellower as the events of the film took place, as evidenced by the two extended samples of his music we get; the earlier one is incendiary, angry words shouted over the staccato beat familiar from the Black gangsta rappers; while the piece he’s shown recording towards the end is far mellower, more introspective and accompanied by a much softer, more gentle music track (and Hamza and Sulieman even do a bit of singing, as well as rapping, on this one!).
The Tales of Hoffmann (The Archers/London Films, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1951 film The Tales of Hoffmann, yet another experimental movie by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. This time, as a follow-up to their 1948 ballet extravaganza The Red Shoes, they took Offenbach’s opera (sung in an English translation by Dennis Arundell of the original French libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré — though for some reason Barbier is credited but Carré is not) from a soundtrack recording conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham (and released on Decca in Britain and London in the U.S., the only time Beecham recorded for that company), and used it as the basis for a fantastic story shot in highly stylized color on extravagant and flagrantly unreal sets, and with most of the cast members doubled by ballet dancers — including Red Shoes star Moira Shearer, who dances both Olympia (sung by Dorothy Bond) and Stella, the ballerina Hoffmann is lusting after in the opening scene. The opera is based on three short stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, an early 19th century German Romantic writer (he also wrote the tale on which Tchaikovsky’s warhorse ballet The Nutcracker is based) with a flair for fantasies about doomed loves. Barbier and Carré took three of these stories and linked them with a framing plot that made Hoffmann (played in the movie by Richard Rounseville, one of only two cast members who appears both on the screen and on the soundtrack) an on-stage character, hanging out in Luther’s Tavern between the acts of the ballet Stella is dancing and narrating his unfortunate experiences with previous would-be lovers.
These include Olympia, a woman who turns out to be a mechanical doll run by clockwork (these sorts of things were actually quite popular in Hoffmann’s time, though none were life-size; there was a chess-playing robot that was exhibited as supposedly having belonged to Napoleon, but most modern authorities believe the thing was actually a fake with a live person inside operating it); Antonia (Anne Ayars, the only cast member besides Rounseville who both appeared in the movie and sang on the soundtrack), daughter of a famous opera singer who died young and apparently headed for the same fate, with her father and doctor alternating between insisting that she sing and insisting that she not sing, for fear that the act of singing would be fatal; and Giulietta (played by Ludmilla Tchérina, sung by Margherita Grandi — who was also Lady Macbeth in Beecham’s production of Verdi’s opera), a femme fatale in Venice who gets her lovers to give up their shadows or their reflections as the price of her affections. (Offenbach, who died before he had quite finished the opera — Ernest Guiraud, who had composed the recitatives for the grand-opera version of Bizet’s Carmen after Bizet’s death, was likewise employed here to finish the piece — intended the acts to be played in the order Olympia-Antonia-Giulietta, but for some reason it’s become traditional to play the Antonia act last and so it’s done here.)
I enjoyed watching this movie but I’m not quite sure what I think of it long-term; it’s certainly not your standard-issue stand-and-sing opera movie, and in The Tales of Hoffmann Powell and Pressburger certainly picked an opera that lent itself to their no-holds-barred fantasy approach (one couldn’t imagine The Marriage of Figaro, La Traviata or Lohengrin working this way!), but the film doesn’t seem to be about anything. The Red Shoes stuck closely enough to conventional narrative that it had real dramatic issues — the conflict faced by Moira Shearer’s character between fulfilling her art as a dancer and pursuing love and marriage as a woman; the domineering, almost Svengali-like attitude of her ballet coach (Anton Walbrook — indeed when I saw The Red Shoes the films it reminded me of, Svengali, The Mad Genius and Maytime, all had John Barrymore in similar roles, so in effect Walbrook was “channeling” Barrymore in that film!); the relative innocence of the composer the ballerina character falls in love with — and packs a wallop even though the ending seems totally over-the-top and frankly unbelievable (but then so does the sexist cop-out ending of Maytime; perhaps the reason both these films have their hallucinatory power is that the conflict between love and art, at least as both sets of filmmakers present it, is ultimately unresolvable) — whereas The Tales of Hoffmann seems to be about only itself and the ability of Powell, Pressburger and their cinematographer, Christopher Challis, and art director, Hein Heckroth, to create absolutely stunning, over-the-top images.
Powell and Pressburger (who tends to get lost in the modern literature on these films; most of today’s critics credit these films to Powell alone even though Pressburger is listed as co-director on the original credits) had a flair for visual stylistics that ran through their films, but sometimes they hitched those dazzling images to a coherent and emotionally gripping plot (as in A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes) and sometimes they didn’t (as in Black Narcissus and The Tales of Hoffmann). The Tales of Hoffmann is a marvelous movie — and certainly one doesn’t want to criticize a film that dares so much more than the average movie — but it’s also one of those curious meals that seems to be all desserts. The imdb.com Web site had a “Trivia” item that said that George A. Romero, director of The Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, regards The Tales of Hoffmann as his all-time favorite film and said that seeing it in his childhood was what made him want to be a director — had Guillermo del Toro said that I could believe it (certainly the extravagant imagery of Pan’s Labyrinth has commonalities with Powell’s and Pressburger’s work), but it seems odd that Romero claims The Tales of Hoffmann as his inspiration for a bunch of cheap, tacky, sloppily photographed and badly acted horror films.
I ran the 1951 film The Tales of Hoffmann, yet another experimental movie by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. This time, as a follow-up to their 1948 ballet extravaganza The Red Shoes, they took Offenbach’s opera (sung in an English translation by Dennis Arundell of the original French libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré — though for some reason Barbier is credited but Carré is not) from a soundtrack recording conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham (and released on Decca in Britain and London in the U.S., the only time Beecham recorded for that company), and used it as the basis for a fantastic story shot in highly stylized color on extravagant and flagrantly unreal sets, and with most of the cast members doubled by ballet dancers — including Red Shoes star Moira Shearer, who dances both Olympia (sung by Dorothy Bond) and Stella, the ballerina Hoffmann is lusting after in the opening scene. The opera is based on three short stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, an early 19th century German Romantic writer (he also wrote the tale on which Tchaikovsky’s warhorse ballet The Nutcracker is based) with a flair for fantasies about doomed loves. Barbier and Carré took three of these stories and linked them with a framing plot that made Hoffmann (played in the movie by Richard Rounseville, one of only two cast members who appears both on the screen and on the soundtrack) an on-stage character, hanging out in Luther’s Tavern between the acts of the ballet Stella is dancing and narrating his unfortunate experiences with previous would-be lovers.
These include Olympia, a woman who turns out to be a mechanical doll run by clockwork (these sorts of things were actually quite popular in Hoffmann’s time, though none were life-size; there was a chess-playing robot that was exhibited as supposedly having belonged to Napoleon, but most modern authorities believe the thing was actually a fake with a live person inside operating it); Antonia (Anne Ayars, the only cast member besides Rounseville who both appeared in the movie and sang on the soundtrack), daughter of a famous opera singer who died young and apparently headed for the same fate, with her father and doctor alternating between insisting that she sing and insisting that she not sing, for fear that the act of singing would be fatal; and Giulietta (played by Ludmilla Tchérina, sung by Margherita Grandi — who was also Lady Macbeth in Beecham’s production of Verdi’s opera), a femme fatale in Venice who gets her lovers to give up their shadows or their reflections as the price of her affections. (Offenbach, who died before he had quite finished the opera — Ernest Guiraud, who had composed the recitatives for the grand-opera version of Bizet’s Carmen after Bizet’s death, was likewise employed here to finish the piece — intended the acts to be played in the order Olympia-Antonia-Giulietta, but for some reason it’s become traditional to play the Antonia act last and so it’s done here.)
I enjoyed watching this movie but I’m not quite sure what I think of it long-term; it’s certainly not your standard-issue stand-and-sing opera movie, and in The Tales of Hoffmann Powell and Pressburger certainly picked an opera that lent itself to their no-holds-barred fantasy approach (one couldn’t imagine The Marriage of Figaro, La Traviata or Lohengrin working this way!), but the film doesn’t seem to be about anything. The Red Shoes stuck closely enough to conventional narrative that it had real dramatic issues — the conflict faced by Moira Shearer’s character between fulfilling her art as a dancer and pursuing love and marriage as a woman; the domineering, almost Svengali-like attitude of her ballet coach (Anton Walbrook — indeed when I saw The Red Shoes the films it reminded me of, Svengali, The Mad Genius and Maytime, all had John Barrymore in similar roles, so in effect Walbrook was “channeling” Barrymore in that film!); the relative innocence of the composer the ballerina character falls in love with — and packs a wallop even though the ending seems totally over-the-top and frankly unbelievable (but then so does the sexist cop-out ending of Maytime; perhaps the reason both these films have their hallucinatory power is that the conflict between love and art, at least as both sets of filmmakers present it, is ultimately unresolvable) — whereas The Tales of Hoffmann seems to be about only itself and the ability of Powell, Pressburger and their cinematographer, Christopher Challis, and art director, Hein Heckroth, to create absolutely stunning, over-the-top images.
Powell and Pressburger (who tends to get lost in the modern literature on these films; most of today’s critics credit these films to Powell alone even though Pressburger is listed as co-director on the original credits) had a flair for visual stylistics that ran through their films, but sometimes they hitched those dazzling images to a coherent and emotionally gripping plot (as in A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes) and sometimes they didn’t (as in Black Narcissus and The Tales of Hoffmann). The Tales of Hoffmann is a marvelous movie — and certainly one doesn’t want to criticize a film that dares so much more than the average movie — but it’s also one of those curious meals that seems to be all desserts. The imdb.com Web site had a “Trivia” item that said that George A. Romero, director of The Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, regards The Tales of Hoffmann as his all-time favorite film and said that seeing it in his childhood was what made him want to be a director — had Guillermo del Toro said that I could believe it (certainly the extravagant imagery of Pan’s Labyrinth has commonalities with Powell’s and Pressburger’s work), but it seems odd that Romero claims The Tales of Hoffmann as his inspiration for a bunch of cheap, tacky, sloppily photographed and badly acted horror films.
The Million Eyes of Sumuru (Shaw Brothers, 1967)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation from its early days as a local program in Minneapolis: the ridiculously titled movie The Million Eyes of Sumuru, a 1967 production ostensibly based on stories by Sax Rohmer — the guy who created Fu Manchu and seemed in this instance to be following that up with a female version of the same character, though in this movie Sumuru is played by Shirley Eaton and not depicted as Asian at all even though most of the story is set in China. The film is one of those stories that makes absolutely no sense — it seems to have something to do with Sumuru’s desire to have her minions become the mistresses and, sometimes, wives of prominent men in political and corporate power as part of a long-term plan to destroy the male half of the human race, which she hates with a venom that sounds a good deal like a lot of the Lesbian feminism I remember from the late 1970’s — though she doesn’t allow her “slaves” (that’s how they’re referred to in the cast list) to have pleasure sex with each other any more than she does with men (when one of the “slaves” does get involved with a man, the penalty is instant execution), and frankly if they’d been able to get it on with each other this movie might have been considerably more fun than it is.
As it is, the two “heroes” — quotes definitely intended — are secret agents Tommy Carter (Frankie Avalon) and Nick West (George Nader), who are whirled out of China to Italy (where West is framed for the murder of a woman he’s never seen before but whose corpse is dumped in his hotel room by Sumuru’s minions as a way of getting him to participate in one of his diabolical “experiments”) and then back to Hong Kong, where the bulk of this movie was filmed at the Shaw Brothers’ studio. (The lead Shaw brother, Run Run Shaw, later became famous when his name turned up as the producer of Bruce Lee’s major films — and his name got even sillier when the British government, which then still ruled Hong Kong, knighted him and he became Sir Run Run Shaw.) The writers, Kevin Kavanagh and “Peter Welbeck” (the latter a pseudonym for producer Harry Alan Towers), seem to have been aiming for a James Bond spoof of sorts — and I’ll say one thing for this movie: George Nader is genuinely hot, flashing a nice basket in one scene (in fact there’s one sequence in which he and Frankie Avalon look like they’re about to go have sex with each other — at least it follows the conventions of “setup” scenes in Gay porn — though what actually happens thereafter is considerably less interesting), though he’s less interesting as an actor than as a body and he’s saddled with a lot of lame wisecracks that are considerably less funny than Kavanagh and Towers clearly thought they were.
There are at least two actors with major reputations in this film, both trying to do their best to maintain some sense of dignity; one is Wilfred Hyde-White, who seems to be the immediate supervisor of Carter and West in whatever sorts of secret-agentry these guys are doing; and the other is Klaus Kinski (Frankie Avalon and Werner Herzog: one degree of separation!), who’s playing “President Boong” (the writers never quite get around to explaining what he’s president of) and whom Carter and West are supposed to be keeping alive while Sumuru and his minions are trying to kill him (again, we’re not told why, though in a movie this cheap and stupid we probably wouldn’t believe the explanation even if the writers had bothered to come up with one). Klaus Kinski actually gets killed, but then it turns out that he was really only posing as Boong at the behest of Boong’s secret service and the real Boong is still alive — at least I think that’s what happened; this movie is so sleep-inducing I was having trouble keeping awake through much of it and, thanks to the suspense genius of director Lindsay Shonteff, the big final shoot-out is even more boring than the rest of the film.
Kinski offers a certain degree of kinky appeal in a role that could have been even kinkier — director Shonteff recalled in a 1994 interview that Kinski wanted his character to be seen emerging from a pile of cushions every time he made an appearance and he wanted to be equipped with a giant prop tongue that would lick the face of a girl whenever he talked to one. Alas (unlike Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard, who accepted Erich von Stroheim’s suggestion that his character write fake fan letters to Gloria Swanson’s character to bolster her illusion that she was still famous), almost none of Kinski’s ideas were accepted — though I can see Harry Alan Towers blanching at the probable cost of constructing and operating that fake tongue. Another nice bit is one scene in which Frankie Avalon actually makes an on-screen joke about not being allowed to sing in this film (which provoked a response from the MST3K crew to the effect that it was their job, not that of the people actually in it, to make fun of the film!).
It’s hard to imagine just who might have found The Million Eyes of Sumuru entertaining — maybe a bunch of straight guys who had just spent 20 years in a monastery and wanted to be reminded of what women looked like — but as it stands it’s a bore and isn’t helped by the fact that the extant print is faded and the color has leached down to a dirty brown and tan. The MST3K people even incorporated that into their mockery, which otherwise was amusing but nothing special — their own writing got a lot better as the show progressed — and this was still in the show’s local Minneapolis days, with the robots looking like they’d been made out of an Erector set (they probably had been!) and the charming inserts giving the original time and temperature — which by the time this show aired was 65°. In some of the earlier ones it was 32° — an odd sight for me who, as a lifelong Californian, has never lived in a place that ever got that cold!
I ran a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation from its early days as a local program in Minneapolis: the ridiculously titled movie The Million Eyes of Sumuru, a 1967 production ostensibly based on stories by Sax Rohmer — the guy who created Fu Manchu and seemed in this instance to be following that up with a female version of the same character, though in this movie Sumuru is played by Shirley Eaton and not depicted as Asian at all even though most of the story is set in China. The film is one of those stories that makes absolutely no sense — it seems to have something to do with Sumuru’s desire to have her minions become the mistresses and, sometimes, wives of prominent men in political and corporate power as part of a long-term plan to destroy the male half of the human race, which she hates with a venom that sounds a good deal like a lot of the Lesbian feminism I remember from the late 1970’s — though she doesn’t allow her “slaves” (that’s how they’re referred to in the cast list) to have pleasure sex with each other any more than she does with men (when one of the “slaves” does get involved with a man, the penalty is instant execution), and frankly if they’d been able to get it on with each other this movie might have been considerably more fun than it is.
As it is, the two “heroes” — quotes definitely intended — are secret agents Tommy Carter (Frankie Avalon) and Nick West (George Nader), who are whirled out of China to Italy (where West is framed for the murder of a woman he’s never seen before but whose corpse is dumped in his hotel room by Sumuru’s minions as a way of getting him to participate in one of his diabolical “experiments”) and then back to Hong Kong, where the bulk of this movie was filmed at the Shaw Brothers’ studio. (The lead Shaw brother, Run Run Shaw, later became famous when his name turned up as the producer of Bruce Lee’s major films — and his name got even sillier when the British government, which then still ruled Hong Kong, knighted him and he became Sir Run Run Shaw.) The writers, Kevin Kavanagh and “Peter Welbeck” (the latter a pseudonym for producer Harry Alan Towers), seem to have been aiming for a James Bond spoof of sorts — and I’ll say one thing for this movie: George Nader is genuinely hot, flashing a nice basket in one scene (in fact there’s one sequence in which he and Frankie Avalon look like they’re about to go have sex with each other — at least it follows the conventions of “setup” scenes in Gay porn — though what actually happens thereafter is considerably less interesting), though he’s less interesting as an actor than as a body and he’s saddled with a lot of lame wisecracks that are considerably less funny than Kavanagh and Towers clearly thought they were.
There are at least two actors with major reputations in this film, both trying to do their best to maintain some sense of dignity; one is Wilfred Hyde-White, who seems to be the immediate supervisor of Carter and West in whatever sorts of secret-agentry these guys are doing; and the other is Klaus Kinski (Frankie Avalon and Werner Herzog: one degree of separation!), who’s playing “President Boong” (the writers never quite get around to explaining what he’s president of) and whom Carter and West are supposed to be keeping alive while Sumuru and his minions are trying to kill him (again, we’re not told why, though in a movie this cheap and stupid we probably wouldn’t believe the explanation even if the writers had bothered to come up with one). Klaus Kinski actually gets killed, but then it turns out that he was really only posing as Boong at the behest of Boong’s secret service and the real Boong is still alive — at least I think that’s what happened; this movie is so sleep-inducing I was having trouble keeping awake through much of it and, thanks to the suspense genius of director Lindsay Shonteff, the big final shoot-out is even more boring than the rest of the film.
Kinski offers a certain degree of kinky appeal in a role that could have been even kinkier — director Shonteff recalled in a 1994 interview that Kinski wanted his character to be seen emerging from a pile of cushions every time he made an appearance and he wanted to be equipped with a giant prop tongue that would lick the face of a girl whenever he talked to one. Alas (unlike Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard, who accepted Erich von Stroheim’s suggestion that his character write fake fan letters to Gloria Swanson’s character to bolster her illusion that she was still famous), almost none of Kinski’s ideas were accepted — though I can see Harry Alan Towers blanching at the probable cost of constructing and operating that fake tongue. Another nice bit is one scene in which Frankie Avalon actually makes an on-screen joke about not being allowed to sing in this film (which provoked a response from the MST3K crew to the effect that it was their job, not that of the people actually in it, to make fun of the film!).
It’s hard to imagine just who might have found The Million Eyes of Sumuru entertaining — maybe a bunch of straight guys who had just spent 20 years in a monastery and wanted to be reminded of what women looked like — but as it stands it’s a bore and isn’t helped by the fact that the extant print is faded and the color has leached down to a dirty brown and tan. The MST3K people even incorporated that into their mockery, which otherwise was amusing but nothing special — their own writing got a lot better as the show progressed — and this was still in the show’s local Minneapolis days, with the robots looking like they’d been made out of an Erector set (they probably had been!) and the charming inserts giving the original time and temperature — which by the time this show aired was 65°. In some of the earlier ones it was 32° — an odd sight for me who, as a lifelong Californian, has never lived in a place that ever got that cold!
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles the DVD he’d just got (from a used pile at Vons) of the 2008 film Speed Racer, an elaborate riff by Larry and Andy Wachowski based on the 1960’s Japanese animated series. Charles remembered the show well from its reruns in his own childhood days, and especially committed to memory the infectious musical theme: “Go, go, go, go, go, Speed Racer.” (Virtually all of Michael Giacchino’s original music score is variations on this song.) The movie is really odd because it’s enjoyable but ultimately unsatisfying; it’s a pretty standard revenge drama in which the young Speed Racer (that’s really his name!) — played as a boy by Nicholas Elia and as a young man by Emile Hirsch — seeks to avenge the mysterious death of his brother Rex Racer (Scott Porter), who quit the family car company to drive for a big-business syndicate and whose career was ultimately finished first in a scandal and then in a crash.
As soon as Speed Racer starts to win races in his family’s custom-built car, the Mach 5 (a long, low-slung sports car with what appears to be a turbine engine and a capability to allow it to jump over cars and pass them), he and his family — including his father (John Goodman), mother (Susan Sarandon), younger brother Spritle (Paulie Litt) — pronounced to rhyme with “brittle” — and pet chimp Chim Chim (doubled by two real chimps, “Willy” and “Kenzie”) — get an offer from the sinister multibillionaire E. P. Arnold Royalton (Roger Allam) for Speed Racer to drive on his team. (I suspect the character of Royalton is based on the real-life auto-racing magnate Bernie Ecclestone, a British multi-billionaire who owns the entire sport of Formula One auto racing outright, and among his business partners is Max Mosley, relative of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; Ecclestone remains a highly controversial figure in international sport and there’s a lot of debate in auto racing circles as to whether his control has been good or bad.)
When the Racers politely turn Royalton down, he determines to do everything he can to stop them — from suing them on the ground that their car infringes one of his patents to ordering his drivers to run Speed off the road in the next race. A desperate Speed, pushed off all legitimate tracks by Royalton and his goons, enters the Casa Christo road rally despite that being the race which killed his brother. He does so in partnership with a Japanese company, Togokahn, which Royalton is attempting to buy out, mainly because the young driver Taejo Togokahn (played by the appealingly androgynous Korean vocal star Rain — though he doesn’t get to sing here), has promised Speed and the mysterious “Racer X,” agent for an international regulatory agency seeking to get the goods on Royalton for fixing virtually every race on the circuit, a full file on Royalton. Speed, his girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) and Taejo Togokahn drive the three Togokahn team cars to victory in the Casa Christo rally — against various hazards; the cars in this race are essentially weapons, with each driver seeking to knock the others out of the race by foul methods (one car even has spiked hubs — the high-tech equivalent of the “Grecian wheels” on the bad guy’s chariot in Ben-Hur — only Speed’s car has been equipped with shields that pop out from his hubcaps and fight back against the sword-like spikes; he also has molded plastic that fastens itself to his wheel rims when someone tries to shoot out his tires, and a bullet-proof plastic bubble canopy that covers his cockpit when someone tries to shoot him!) — only to find out he was being set up; Taejo’s father only wanted a victory in Casa Christo to boost the stock price of his company so Royalton would pay more for it. Taejo gives Speed his invitation to enter the Grand Prix — and Speed’s family’s shop cranks out a car for him to do so — and of course he wins the big race despite the attempts by Royalton’s forces to sabotage it, good triumphs over evil and there’s a happy ending.
Speed Racer is one of those movies where there’s an enormous gulf between the imagination with which the piece is staged and the tiresome clichés of the plot. There’s an anti-corporate streak to the whole story, and for some reason this was the movie on which the critics decided to let loose their pent-up frustration at seeing all these vaguely anti-capitalist stories come from multinational media conglomerates whose managements behave far more like Royalton than they do like the Racers. Certainly there’s an air of hypocrisy involved in taking a multi-million dollar production budget from a major studio and using it to make a movie blasting the whole idea of multinational corporations — Ayn Rand had a point in the 1940’s when she called on the film industry to abandon the pseudo-populism of so many movies then and now, and instead make films about heroic capitalists and the efforts of mediocre social leeches and proletarian drones to get in their way (in other words, she wanted them to make the sorts of movies she wanted to write!) — but by now the anti-corporate politics many movies profess is little more than a nervous tic, a vestigial leftover from the days of Frank Capra, and quite meaningless and unthreatening in an era in which virtually everyone in the moviegoing audience accepts the idea that capitalism is the only possible economic system and all others, including socialism, are proven failures not even worth considering.
The most appealing part of the film is its visual look; instead of the dirty greens and browns of all too many modern films or the dank, murky darkness of others (including the Wachowskis’ star-making movies, the Matrices), the screen is alive with hot, vibrant colors, probably in homage to the fact that this one started out as a TV cartoon. The racing sequences are especially well staged; while the film’s plot portions are more or less in a standard conception of reality, the races are gravity-defying spectacles in which the line between live-action and animation almost completely disappears. The race tracks in the movie include long jumps that defy physical possibility, and the laws of physics are so totally ignored in the staging of this film it’s not at all surprising to read on imdb.com that virtually every scene was shot in front of a green screen and the actors playing drivers actually sat in “gimbles,” prop cockpits hooked up to hydraulic systems that moved them up, down or sideways in a pre-programmed pattern based on what that car was supposed to be doing in the script.
That’s the good stuff; the not-so-good stuff is that there’s virtually no emotional power in this film — the characters are deliberate caricatures and there’s nothing like the pathos that occasionally intruded into the dank fantasy world of The Matrices and emerged front-and-center in V for Vendetta, the Wachowskis’ most openly emotional and genuinely moving film. Indeed, the most disappointing thing about Speed Racer is that after making a near-masterpiece like V for Vendetta — in which they proved that their intensely melodramatic action sequences and highly theatrical characterizations could be harnessed into the service of genuinely moving drama — they went back to a cartoon, literally and figuratively, for their inspiration.
I had assumed that doing a big-budget, big-screen, (more or less) live-action version of Speed Racer was the Wachowskis’ own idea and this was sort of a pet project for them, but according to imdb.com that wasn’t the case — there was a previous version under development with Alfonso Cuarón as director and Johnny Depp as star, which would have been even weirder than the one we got — and what’s the real mystery behind the film is who they thought the audience would be. About the only people who would turn out for a movie based on Speed Racer were those of the right age to remember the TV series — and that doesn’t include most of the movie audience of today; all those teenagers who know very well who Spider-Man and Batman are couldn’t care less about a tacky old Japanese TV show whose heyday occurred well before they were born and which hasn’t remained part of the cultural Zeitgeist the way the DC and Marvel super-heroes have.
Not surprisingly, Speed Racer was a near-total flop and probably took the Wachowskis’ career down (if not out) with it (Larry and Andy Wachowski are currently listed on imdb.com as producers of an upcoming movie called Ninja Assassin, but they’re neither the directors nor the writers; and also Larry is listed as attached to an in-development project called Cloud Atlas scheduled for release in 2011 … yeah, right; I’ll believe it when I see it!), and as it is it’s a fun movie, about a third too long at 127 minutes (but then the Wachowskis’ movies have always tended to be too long; it’s still amazing that John Carpenter was able to get more out of the central premise of The Matrix in one 105-minute film, They Live, than the Wachowskis were able to in three 135-minute films!), entertaining but also way too proud of its own cleverness, the cinematic equivalent of gorging yourself on gourmet chocolate and cotton candy and then wondering why you feel bloated and still not nourished afterwards …
I ran Charles the DVD he’d just got (from a used pile at Vons) of the 2008 film Speed Racer, an elaborate riff by Larry and Andy Wachowski based on the 1960’s Japanese animated series. Charles remembered the show well from its reruns in his own childhood days, and especially committed to memory the infectious musical theme: “Go, go, go, go, go, Speed Racer.” (Virtually all of Michael Giacchino’s original music score is variations on this song.) The movie is really odd because it’s enjoyable but ultimately unsatisfying; it’s a pretty standard revenge drama in which the young Speed Racer (that’s really his name!) — played as a boy by Nicholas Elia and as a young man by Emile Hirsch — seeks to avenge the mysterious death of his brother Rex Racer (Scott Porter), who quit the family car company to drive for a big-business syndicate and whose career was ultimately finished first in a scandal and then in a crash.
As soon as Speed Racer starts to win races in his family’s custom-built car, the Mach 5 (a long, low-slung sports car with what appears to be a turbine engine and a capability to allow it to jump over cars and pass them), he and his family — including his father (John Goodman), mother (Susan Sarandon), younger brother Spritle (Paulie Litt) — pronounced to rhyme with “brittle” — and pet chimp Chim Chim (doubled by two real chimps, “Willy” and “Kenzie”) — get an offer from the sinister multibillionaire E. P. Arnold Royalton (Roger Allam) for Speed Racer to drive on his team. (I suspect the character of Royalton is based on the real-life auto-racing magnate Bernie Ecclestone, a British multi-billionaire who owns the entire sport of Formula One auto racing outright, and among his business partners is Max Mosley, relative of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; Ecclestone remains a highly controversial figure in international sport and there’s a lot of debate in auto racing circles as to whether his control has been good or bad.)
When the Racers politely turn Royalton down, he determines to do everything he can to stop them — from suing them on the ground that their car infringes one of his patents to ordering his drivers to run Speed off the road in the next race. A desperate Speed, pushed off all legitimate tracks by Royalton and his goons, enters the Casa Christo road rally despite that being the race which killed his brother. He does so in partnership with a Japanese company, Togokahn, which Royalton is attempting to buy out, mainly because the young driver Taejo Togokahn (played by the appealingly androgynous Korean vocal star Rain — though he doesn’t get to sing here), has promised Speed and the mysterious “Racer X,” agent for an international regulatory agency seeking to get the goods on Royalton for fixing virtually every race on the circuit, a full file on Royalton. Speed, his girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) and Taejo Togokahn drive the three Togokahn team cars to victory in the Casa Christo rally — against various hazards; the cars in this race are essentially weapons, with each driver seeking to knock the others out of the race by foul methods (one car even has spiked hubs — the high-tech equivalent of the “Grecian wheels” on the bad guy’s chariot in Ben-Hur — only Speed’s car has been equipped with shields that pop out from his hubcaps and fight back against the sword-like spikes; he also has molded plastic that fastens itself to his wheel rims when someone tries to shoot out his tires, and a bullet-proof plastic bubble canopy that covers his cockpit when someone tries to shoot him!) — only to find out he was being set up; Taejo’s father only wanted a victory in Casa Christo to boost the stock price of his company so Royalton would pay more for it. Taejo gives Speed his invitation to enter the Grand Prix — and Speed’s family’s shop cranks out a car for him to do so — and of course he wins the big race despite the attempts by Royalton’s forces to sabotage it, good triumphs over evil and there’s a happy ending.
Speed Racer is one of those movies where there’s an enormous gulf between the imagination with which the piece is staged and the tiresome clichés of the plot. There’s an anti-corporate streak to the whole story, and for some reason this was the movie on which the critics decided to let loose their pent-up frustration at seeing all these vaguely anti-capitalist stories come from multinational media conglomerates whose managements behave far more like Royalton than they do like the Racers. Certainly there’s an air of hypocrisy involved in taking a multi-million dollar production budget from a major studio and using it to make a movie blasting the whole idea of multinational corporations — Ayn Rand had a point in the 1940’s when she called on the film industry to abandon the pseudo-populism of so many movies then and now, and instead make films about heroic capitalists and the efforts of mediocre social leeches and proletarian drones to get in their way (in other words, she wanted them to make the sorts of movies she wanted to write!) — but by now the anti-corporate politics many movies profess is little more than a nervous tic, a vestigial leftover from the days of Frank Capra, and quite meaningless and unthreatening in an era in which virtually everyone in the moviegoing audience accepts the idea that capitalism is the only possible economic system and all others, including socialism, are proven failures not even worth considering.
The most appealing part of the film is its visual look; instead of the dirty greens and browns of all too many modern films or the dank, murky darkness of others (including the Wachowskis’ star-making movies, the Matrices), the screen is alive with hot, vibrant colors, probably in homage to the fact that this one started out as a TV cartoon. The racing sequences are especially well staged; while the film’s plot portions are more or less in a standard conception of reality, the races are gravity-defying spectacles in which the line between live-action and animation almost completely disappears. The race tracks in the movie include long jumps that defy physical possibility, and the laws of physics are so totally ignored in the staging of this film it’s not at all surprising to read on imdb.com that virtually every scene was shot in front of a green screen and the actors playing drivers actually sat in “gimbles,” prop cockpits hooked up to hydraulic systems that moved them up, down or sideways in a pre-programmed pattern based on what that car was supposed to be doing in the script.
That’s the good stuff; the not-so-good stuff is that there’s virtually no emotional power in this film — the characters are deliberate caricatures and there’s nothing like the pathos that occasionally intruded into the dank fantasy world of The Matrices and emerged front-and-center in V for Vendetta, the Wachowskis’ most openly emotional and genuinely moving film. Indeed, the most disappointing thing about Speed Racer is that after making a near-masterpiece like V for Vendetta — in which they proved that their intensely melodramatic action sequences and highly theatrical characterizations could be harnessed into the service of genuinely moving drama — they went back to a cartoon, literally and figuratively, for their inspiration.
I had assumed that doing a big-budget, big-screen, (more or less) live-action version of Speed Racer was the Wachowskis’ own idea and this was sort of a pet project for them, but according to imdb.com that wasn’t the case — there was a previous version under development with Alfonso Cuarón as director and Johnny Depp as star, which would have been even weirder than the one we got — and what’s the real mystery behind the film is who they thought the audience would be. About the only people who would turn out for a movie based on Speed Racer were those of the right age to remember the TV series — and that doesn’t include most of the movie audience of today; all those teenagers who know very well who Spider-Man and Batman are couldn’t care less about a tacky old Japanese TV show whose heyday occurred well before they were born and which hasn’t remained part of the cultural Zeitgeist the way the DC and Marvel super-heroes have.
Not surprisingly, Speed Racer was a near-total flop and probably took the Wachowskis’ career down (if not out) with it (Larry and Andy Wachowski are currently listed on imdb.com as producers of an upcoming movie called Ninja Assassin, but they’re neither the directors nor the writers; and also Larry is listed as attached to an in-development project called Cloud Atlas scheduled for release in 2011 … yeah, right; I’ll believe it when I see it!), and as it is it’s a fun movie, about a third too long at 127 minutes (but then the Wachowskis’ movies have always tended to be too long; it’s still amazing that John Carpenter was able to get more out of the central premise of The Matrix in one 105-minute film, They Live, than the Wachowskis were able to in three 135-minute films!), entertaining but also way too proud of its own cleverness, the cinematic equivalent of gorging yourself on gourmet chocolate and cotton candy and then wondering why you feel bloated and still not nourished afterwards …
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Before There Was Bond, There Was Drummond
The Bulldog Drummond Series at Paramount — and One Earlier, One Later
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Bulldog Drummond (Goldwyn/United Artists, 1929)
I ran the 1929 Bulldog Drummond, produced by Sam Goldwyn, directed by F. Richard “Dick” Jones (who’d worked in the silent era for Sennett and Roach, directed Mabel Normand’s hits Mickey and Molly O — in the process of the troubled production of Mickey, which ran through four directors, Jones actually stole the negative from the studio and essentially held it hostage in a pay dispute between him and Sennett — and ultimately rose to direct prestige features like Douglas Fairbanks’ The Gaucho, only to die a year after Bulldog Drummond without ever making another film) and starring Ronald Colman in the title role in his first talking film.
Alexander Walker cites this film as an example of a producer who did something right in breaking his big star into sound films — by contrast to the shabby treatment John Gilbert got from MGM in selecting his talkie debut, His Glorious Night, two months later. As a silent star Colman had been a heavy-breathing lover of the Valentino type, cast in intense romances (mostly with costar Vilma Banky, whose fractured Hungarian-accented English killed her chances for a successful transition in the U.S.); as a talkie star Colman’s ringing high tenor voice and British inflections made it hard to cast him as anything but the Englishman he in fact was, and made him better suited for a film like this: a comedy-thriller in which Drummond, a former captain in the British army in World War I, advertises in the London Times for a damsel in distress he can rescue and finds her in the person of Phyllis Benton (Joan Bennett), whose uncle, fabulously wealthy American financier John Travers (Charles Sellon), is being held prisoner in the mental asylum of Dr. Lakington (Lawrence Grant, in a marvelously florid villain performance on the order of Gustav von Seyffertitz or Ernest Torrence) and a husband-and-wife criminal team, Carl and Irma Peterson (Montagu Love and Lilyan Tashman), posing (like the Stapletons in The Hound of the Baskervilles) as brother and sister.
Based on a play by the original creator of the Drummond character, H. C. McNeile — billed on the credits only as “Sapper” (the pseudonym, and the use of initials, both seem to have been conditioned by his parents having given him the decidedly un-butch first name “Herman”) — and adapted by Wallace Smith (continuity) and Sidney Howard (dialogue), Bulldog Drummond opens magnificently with a sequence later recycled for two even better films, Love Me Tonight and Top Hat: Drummond and his upper-class twit friend Algy Longworth (Claud Allister in a superb comic-relief performance) are sitting in a London club that strictly forbids speech on the premises (like so much of the Drummond mythos, this too is a direct ripoff of one of the Conan Doyle Holmes stories, though doubtless such clubs actually did exist!). When one of the waiters drops a teaspoon — the first synchronous sound we hear in a film that began with a door being closed in our face to reveal a sign reading, “SILENCE” (itself a quite amusing in-joke just two years after The Jazz Singer) — a club member stands up and protests “this infernal din.” Drummond and Algy walk out whistling “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and — inspired by a joke from Algy — Drummond puts in his Times ad and the plot per se gets under way.
The film creaks all over the place; Jones was (not surprisingly, given his background) considerably more comfortable with the comedy than with the thrills, and much of the action is slow and stagy even though the cinematographers, George Barnes and Gregg Toland, cop some of the more spectacular effects from the German thrillers, Lang’s films in particular — including some shots of rooms with ceilings 12 years before Citizen Kane (also shot by Toland!) supposedly pioneered them. The entertainment value of Drummond lies mostly in the finely honed acting of Colman, Allister (for once a comic-relief character is genuinely funny!) and Tashman, whose over-the-top vampy villainy leaves nominal heroine Bennett in the dust by comparison; and in the overall “look” created not only by Barnes and Toland but also by set designer William Cameron Menzies, many of whose backdrops are so obviously stylized that at times the film looks like The Cabinet of Bulldog Drummond.— 6/30/05
Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1/22/37)
When Charles finally did get back and joined me in the room for a movie, my choice was Bulldog Drummond Escapes, the first in the eight-film Drummond series for Paramount from 1937 to 1939, though separate from the others in that it used a different cast: Ray Milland (back when he was still the male equivalent of a starlet, before Paramount started giving him better roles in films like Arise, My Love and The Major and the Minor and elevated him to major stardom) as Drummond, Sir Guy Standing (in his last film; he died of a heart attack shortly after it was finished) as Inspector — excuse me, Captain (he makes a big fetish of the distinction in the film!) Nielsen of Scotland Yard (who was essentially to Drummond what Inspector Lestrade was to Sherlock Holmes), Heather Angel as damsel-in-distress Phyllis Clavering (her character would continue throughout the series and there was a running gag that her planned marriage to Drummond was always getting interrupted by one crisis or another that he would have to run off and investigate), and Reginald Denny as Drummond’s Dr. Watson, upper-class twit Algy Longworth. (In the later films in the series American actor John Howard would take over as Drummond — likely because he’d played Ronald Colman’s brother credibly if unspectacularly in Lost Horizon and therefore could conceivably be accepted in a role most moviegoers still associated with Colman — with Louise Campbell as Phyllis, though Angel later re-assumed the role; John Barrymore and H. B. Warner as Nielsen; and Denny the only cast member from this film who carried over into the later ones.)
Based on a play called Bulldog Drummond Again by the character’s creator, Herman Cyril “Sapper” McNeile, with Gerard Fairlie, and variously called Bulldog Drummond Saves a Lady, Bulldog Drummond’s Holiday, Bulldog Drummond’s Romance and Bulldog Drummond’s Escape, Bulldog Drummond Escapes was a decent enough movie with an O.K. script by Edward T. Lowe (later associated with the dregs of the original Frankenstein cycle at Universal), competent direction by James Hogan, brilliant cinematography by Victor Milner (oddly uncredited on the extant prints, which were released not by Paramount but by a TV reissue label called “Congress Films”) — though the movie is a lighthearted thriller with no “class” ambitions there are some heavily Germanic shots here that anticipate noir — and a decent cast but a surprising dearth of real excitement.
The plot seems heavily recycled from the 1929 Bulldog Drummond film with Ronald Colman: Phyllis Clavering is being held in a sinister old dark house by two men, Norman Merridew (Porter Hall) and Stanton (Walter Kingsford) and one woman, Merridew’s sister (she really is his sister this time, not his wife posing as his sister à la The Hound of the Baskervilles and the 1929 Colman film) Natalie (Fay Holden), who are trying to convince her that she killed her brother Ted (actually murdered by Merridew) and then went insane. Though it’s a bit surprising he didn’t wear the Colman-style moustache John Howard donned for his entries in the series, Milland is an excellent Drummond, able to bring to the role the same insouciant charm Colman did; and the rest of the casting works well enough, though one misses the sheer outrageousness of Claud Allister’s Algy from the first Colman film.
Oddly, Charles noted that though the accents were suitable for British people (the fact that the four top-billed actors were British undoubtedly helped in that department), the script itself was full of American idioms that wouldn’t have come from these people’s mouths in real life — but the real problem with this film is that, for all the excellent atmospherics of Milner’s cinematography and the strong performances, it’s surprisingly dull. One of the quirkier aspects of 1930’s cinema is that the gangster films of the era were tight, fast-paced and genuinely exciting and intense, but when the studios tried any other sort of crime film the results were frequently anemic, slow-paced and uninteresting. There are some genuinely clever scenes — including the early one, in which Heather Angel coaxes Milland out of his car, he appropriately “rescues” her and she responds by stealing his car in her attempt to escape that old, dark house — but for the most part this is just a 67-minute time-filler that largely wastes a good cast. — 7/4/05
Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (9/24/37)
I ran Charles Bulldog Drummond Comes Back, the second in the sequence of eight Bulldog Drummond films made by Paramount between 1937 and 1939, and a good deal better than the earlier Bulldog Drummond Escapes. (I couldn’t help but consider the odd confluence of the titles of the two films on this Critics’ Choice disc: Bulldog Drummond Escapes and Bulldog Drummond Comes Back. It’s reminiscent of Desi Arnaz’s joke about Lucille Ball’s titles for the TV series she did after they broke up: when she came out with one called Here’s Lucy, he said her next two would be called There Goes Lucy and Here Comes Lucy Back.)
Bulldog Drummond Comes Back benefits from a better director (Louis King) than the one who helmed Bulldog Drummond Escapes (James Hogan); a stronger plot line — though both of them are based on writings by Drummond’s creator, H. C. “Sapper” McNeile, Comes Back is based on a novel (The Female of the Species, 1928) rather than a play, allowing the writer (Edward T. Lowe again) to get some action into it; and two genuinely interesting villains, Mikhail Valdin (J. Carrol Naish) and his sister Erena Soldanis (Helen Freeman), who though their nationalities remain uncertain (their names say Russian, or at least Slavic, but Naish’s makeup makes him look Chinese and their accents are unlike those of any real people from anywhere on earth!) are at least powerfully motivated: they seek revenge on Drummond (John Howard, in his first of seven appearances in the role) for having sent Erena’s brother to the gallows exactly one year earlier.
They do so by kidnapping Drummond’s fiancée, Phyllis Clavering (Louise Campbell, replacing Heather Angel — though Ms. Angel would take the role back in subsequent episodes of the series) and running Drummond, his butler Tenny (E. E. Clive) and his friend Algy Longworth (Reginald Denny again) on a wild-goose chase around London and its environs through a series of cryptic clues — some delivered as gnomic rhymes on paper, some as phonograph records, one delivered by Phyllis herself as the villains are holding both her and Drummond hostage in a moving car. One caution the villains give Drummond is specifically not to involve his friend, Col. Nielson (that’s how it’s spelled in the credits) of Scotland Yard, in the investigation — they’ll kill Phyllis instantly if they spot Nielson on their trail — but Nielson disguises himself in a series of increasingly ugly lumpenproletariat outfits in order to hang out in the lower-class environments (including several pubs, one run by the great character actress Zeffie Tilbury, listed in the credits as playing a character called “Zeffie”!) to which the villains’ clues are sending Drummond.
Though this is just a “B” with a 64-minute running time (the film’s brevity actually helped it, forcing King and Lowe to speed the action along at a rapid clip and avoiding the longueurs of Bulldog Drummond Escapes), it has a quite handsome physical production — producer Stuart Walker and director King did a good job raiding the Paramount warehouses for old sets they could use to stage elaborate action scenes, including a dungeon with a trap door over the Thames and another in which gas is piped in while Drummond, Phyllis and Algy are trapped at the end (there’s also a time bomb that will explode, then combine with the gas to produce a truly horrific conflagration and incinerate Our Heroes).
Nielson is played by John Barrymore, whom the Paramount brasses actually gave top billing — “Youngsters of the period, who had never heard of Barrymore, could never understand why his name was billed above that of Howard, who carried all the action, and they resented it,” William K. Everson wrote of this film and its two immediate successors in The Detective in Film — and who gets surprisingly little screen time but thoroughly makes the most of what he had. His disguises (especially the second, uglier one) bear more than a faint resemblance to his look as Mr. Hyde in the 1920 Paramount version of the Stevenson novel, and though he was portlier than he’d been in his glory days his posture, profile and magnificent voice dominate the screen in all his appearances. Barrymore’s presence adds a touch of class to a film that’s otherwise all Boy’s Own Adventure action with only brief (though charming) bits of exposition between the big scenes; but Howard, though laboring under the handicap of American nationality (unlike Ronald Colman and Ray Milland, who like the Drummond character were card-carrying Brits), is quite a good Drummond. His British accent is serviceable and good enough to be credible, and his rather arrogant manner (off-putting when he was playing Ronald Colman’s brother in Lost Horizon and Katharine Hepburn’s fiancé in The Philadelphia Story, his two best-known films) actually suits the character. — 7/7/05
Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge (1/7/38)
I spent the morning running a videotape I got recently at Blockbuster, a double bill of Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge and Bulldog Drummond’s Peril. These were two of the Bulldog Drummond “B” movies made at Paramount in the late 1930’s, starring John Howard as Drummond (probably cast because he’d been so convincing as Ronald Colman’s brother in Lost Horizon, and Colman, of course, was the most famous movie Drummond of all) and John Barrymore as Inspector Nielson of Scotland Yard. Revenge had the interesting novelty of having its villain (Frank Puglia) spend most of the movie in drag as a disguise, though the film was surprisingly un-atmospherically directed by Louis King (especially three years after his good work in Charlie Chan in Egypt) and Peril had a better, if sometimes confusing, plot (and a novel casting of Porter Hall as the villain); together these brief films (Revenge was 54 minutes, Peril 66 minutes) made a nice little entertainment package, full of the economy in storytelling that makes even the least interesting 1930’s movies watchable today (when Drummond lands his plane in the middle of nowhere in Peril, the next scene shows him driving into London — without bothering to waste valuable screen time explaining how he obtained the car). — 7/23/93
•••••
I ran him the second of the John Howard Bulldog Drummonds — still with John Barrymore top-billed for the relatively minor role of Col. Nielson [sic] of Scotland Yard — called Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge, though in fact there was very little content in these titles: all you had to do to name one of these films was to give the character name and add to it some noun or verb-object phrase that would connote “thriller-icity.” William K. Everson is particularly hard on this film, calling it “unquestionably the weakest” of the Howard Drummonds and adding, “Nothing whatsoever happened in the film — certainly no kind of action that could be constituted as ‘revenge’ — and Frank Puglia was a mild and ineffective villain.”
Actually, quite a lot happens in this film — reclusive but not quite mad scientist Sir John Haxton (Matthew Boulton) invents the world’s most powerful explosive, “haxtonite,” but his long-suffering secretary Draven Nogais (Frank Puglia) hatches a plot to steal it; as Haxton is flying his own plane to meet with international representatives for a demonstration of haxtonite, Nogais, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, shoots him, dumps the attaché case containing the haxtonite out of the plane — a parachute is attached and two of Nogais’s confederates are on the ground in a car waiting for it — then bails out himself, after putting his ring on a severed hand so anyone finding the wreckage will think both Haxton and Nogais were killed in the crash. Only Drummond (John Howard), his fiancée Phyllis Clavering (Louise Campbell) and his upper-class twit friend Algy Longworth (Reginald Denny) happen upon the haxtonite first and take it back to their country home — whereupon Nogais sneaks in and steals it back, then hides out on the Channel boat-train to Paris, which means Our Heroes have to get on the train themselves and give chase. About the only interesting part of the film is that, to avoid detection on the train, Nogais dresses as a woman — it’s actually one of the worst drag attempts in movie history, thought it might have fooled audiences in 1937 — though of course the villain is finally foiled.
The film’s biggest weakness (the script is by Edward T. Lowe again — the credited source is H. C. “Sapper” McNeile’s book The Return of Bulldog Drummond but the most-powerful-explosive-in-the-world bit was hardly fresh writing even then! — and the direction by Louis King hardly lives up to the atmospherics of Charlie Chan in Egypt and Bulldog Drummond Comes Back) is its sheer preposterousness: even by the usual standards of a thriller, the plot depends on one unbelievable gimmick after another, and one can’t help but recall how much better Alfred Hitchcock had done with a similar plot in The 39 Steps two years earlier (albeit with Robert Donat, a much more charismatic star than John Howard and an actor who would have been quite good casting as Drummond).
John Barrymore is barely in the film at all, and when he is he’s playing Nielson as a crotchety old man, resenting Drummond for butting into Scotland Yard’s business (now where have we heard that old cliché before?) and possibly — at least this is what William Everson thought — expressing his own resentment for having to make his living making silly films like this and playing a part that, for all the pretension and conceit of Paramount’s billing (below the title, but still first and in larger letters than Howard’s, and with his name in all caps on the closing card), is still a pretty unimportant supporting role. At 56 minutes this is short even for a late-1930’s “B” and it seems to drag in a way Bulldog Drummond Comes Back — with its comparative wealth of genuinely exciting action scenes — hadn’t; and Howard, appropriately debonair in his earlier Drummond film, just seems morose and petulant in this one. This time Lowe made the mistake of including Algy’s wife Gwen (Nydia Westman) as an on-screen character — in the two previous films she’d merely been talked about — and the so-called “comic relief” of Mr. and Mrs. Longworth just makes one long for the comparative subtlety and genuine amusement provided by Claud Allister as Algy in the 1929 Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman. — 7/15/05
Bulldog Drummond’s Peril (3/18/38)
Afterwards we settled in for the evening and watched the second film on the first of two Embassy Entertainment tapes featuring Bulldog Drummond movies I bought in the mid-1990’s and recently dug out of the back files to “mate” them with the Critics’ Choice DVD’s of some of these movies — alas there’s one title, Arrest Bulldog Drummond, that I’m still missing (a real pity because the villain is George Zucco and there’s a marvelously tacky still from it in William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film that shows Zucco and his henchpeople, Jean Fenwick and Georges Regas, posed in front of a so-called “Death Ray” obviously cobbled together from two old movie projectors).
Bulldog Drummond’s Peril was the fourth in the series — the third with John Howard as Drummond and the last to use Louise Campbell as his fiancée Phyllis Clavering and John Barrymore as Col. Nielson (probably just as well, for while he’d been a marvelously campy Nielson in Bulldog Drummond Comes Back he played the part in Revenge and Peril as a crotchety old man with little to offer but a generalized disinclination to deal with Drummond’s help on his cases; as Everson put it, “Either the novelty had worn off for Barrymore and he was proving hard to handle, so that the scenarists literally wrote him out of the films except for token appearances, or his roles were initially so small that Barrymore resented it and showed it by his performances. Either way, his Nielson became morose and bad-tempered, shouting his lines, glowering, mugging, and showing no signs of wanting to give either a serious performance or a gaily lighthearted one” — though even here, in Barrymore’s last appearance in the series, he was still getting top billing!).
While not at the level of Escapes or Comes Back it was certainly a major improvement over Revenge. Its only real flaw as a thriller is that there are just too many villains: American (though oddly accented) scientist Dr. Max Botulian (Porter Hall), diamond syndicate owner Sir Raymond Blantyre (Matthew Boulton — the character’s last name is pronounced “Blan-tree”), and his secretary Roberts (Austin Fairman). They’re all after a new process for making artificial diamonds of gem size, perfected by yet another dotty but not really mad scientist (much like Boulton’s role in Revenge), Professor Bernard Goodman (Halliwell Hobbes), which Blantyre wants suppressed because it will make his natural diamonds worthless, and Botulian wants suppressed because Goodman has beaten him in the race to perfect a diamond-making process, while Roberts secretly wants to steal the formula and use it to make money (at least that’s what I think is going on; the script by thriller writer Stuart Palmer isn’t all that coherent as to the characters’ clashing motivations) — and the plot thickens when Roberts disguises himself as Botulian to get his hands on Botulian’s diamond-making equipment and the real Botulian disguises himself as Roberts disguised as Botulian to kill Goodman (though Goodman actually survives to the fadeout) and blow up his lab under the cover story of offering Goodman his own diamond-making equipment (which Goodman wanted to retrofit with his own process so he could create an artificial diamond bigger than any natural one).
Despite the confusing plot, Bulldog Drummond’s Peril is actually quite an entertaining movie, largely due to two really elaborate and genuinely exciting action sequences. In one, Drummond’s butler Tenny chases the bad guys (some of them, anyway) in a motorcycle, catching up to the villains’ van, leaping on top of it and forcing his way in with a gun. (E. E. Clive’s stunt double must have had a field day with this one!) The other is a quite spectacular fight scene between Drummond and Botulian at the end, in which Botulian, armed with a bullwhip, uses it to snap Drummond’s gun out of his hand; Drummond reaches for some conveniently placed swords hanging on the wall and slices off the business end of Botulian’s whip — which comes off weirdly as a sort of symbolic castration — then throws it like a javelin and impales Botulian in the arm, wounding him to the point of offering no resistance while Drummond waits for Nielson and the police to take Botulian into custody.
One could tell the roles were starting to wear on some of the actors — Louise Campbell was clearly getting tired of the damsel-in-distress bit (though she gets some delightful scenes at a château in Switzerland — where Drummond and Phyllis have gone to get married, interrupted by all the diamond business — with her aunt, played by the delightful Elizabeth Patterson) and John Howard was both stuffier and nastier than he’d been in previous series episodes — and James Hogan, returning as director, didn’t have the flair for atmospherics Louis King did and paced the film (except for the two big action scenes) rather sluggishly, but still Bulldog Drummond’s Peril (whose working title was Bulldog Drummond Interferes — which shows once again how these films could have been called just about anything as long as the Bulldog Drummond name appeared alongside some words suggesting a thriller) was a nice little bit of 1930’s “B”-thriller fun. — 7/16/05
Bulldog Drummond in Africa (8/5/38)
I ran him the next Bulldog Drummond series film in sequence: Bulldog Drummond in Africa, which I’d been somewhat dreading because I didn’t think even a major studio like Paramount would have been able to mount an effective physical reproduction of Africa (and where in Africa? I’d assumed it would be sub-Saharan but it turned out to be Morocco, and Spanish rather than French Morocco at that!) on a “B” budget. As things turned out, though, this was actually one of the better ones in the series: J. Carrol Naish returned as the principal villain, a former British spy named Richard Lane who during the Great War had turned traitor and then fled the country to avoid execution, settling in Spanish Morocco and thumbing his nose at British law — until the action of this film starts with Lane secretly returning to England to kidnap Col. Nielson (H. B. Warner, taking over the role from John Barrymore — one of the screen’s most famous alcoholics replaced by Jesus Christ!) to worm out of him the secret of a radio-wave dematerializer that would permit the British to scramble their own radio signals and thereby encrypt their secret communications. (Remember what Alfred Hitchcock said: it doesn’t matter what the spies are after! It matters to the people in the movie but we in the audience couldn’t care less!)
As things turned out, the reproduction of Africa was just fine — aided by decent if unspectacular process work and quite a lot of stock footage (including what looked like a clip from the Valentino Sheik!) as well as a Moroccan villa for the bad guy that looked recycled from Charles Laughton’s redoubt in Island of Lost Souls. The plot features Lane flying the kidnapped Nielson out of Britain to his Moroccan home and Drummond following them in his own plane despite the efforts of British authorities on both ends of his trip to keep him from doing so, which Drummond evades on the British side by locking a Scotland Yard inspector in a trunk and on the Moroccan side by dealing with the lazy British consul Major Gray (series regular Matthew Boulton) and his assistant, Deane Fordine (played by a very young Anthony Quinn in his days as a low-level contract player at Paramount).
There’s one good suspense scene in which the baddies have planted a bomb on Drummond’s plane and timed it to go off over the ocean — only Drummond disobeys instructions and secretly flies back into Morocco and he and his passengers, Phyllis (Heather Angel), Algy (Reginald Denny, blessedly less arch than usual) and his butler Tenny (E. E. Clive), get out of the plane with seconds to spare before it blows up. The finale isn’t as much fun, and there’s no real surprise about it — it’s just a shootout on the balcony of Lane’s villa followed by the scene we’ve been expecting for at least half the movie, in which Lane’s pet lion turns on him and devours him for the finish — but this is still one of the better Paramount Drummonds, at least in part (as Charles put it) because it has less of the Wooster-and-Jeeves aspects of the Drummond-Algy and Drummond-Tenny relationships about it.. (Incidentally, the extant print has two “The End” titles — one in Paramount’s typeface superimposed over the plane that takes Drummond and company out of Africa, then quickly replaced by a Congress Films end title and then back to Paramount for the closing cast list.) — 7/18/05
Arrest Bulldog Drummond (11/25/38)
I ran Arrest Bulldog Drummond, which Charles had recently downloaded from archive.org and which was the only one of the late-1930’s Paramount Bulldog Drummond films I didn’t have in my collection. The Paramount Drummonds began with a separate film called Bulldog Drummond Escapes, released in January 1937 and featuring Ray Milland as Drummond, but when Paramount launched it as a “B” series later in 1937 Drummond was played throughout by John Howard. Howard seems to have got the part because in the film Lost Horizon he’d played the brother of Ronald Colman, who though he only played the role of Drummond twice (Bulldog Drummond for Sam Goldwyn in 1929 and Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back for 20th Century-United Artists in 1934), became as identified with the part as Sean Connery later would in the role of James Bond, and for the same reason: he was simply that much better than anyone else who ever played it.
The Drummond-Bond parallel is actually quite strong — the Drummond films come closer than any other 1930’s productions to the Bond movies, presenting a British action hero (created by author H. C. “Sapper” McNeile, whose military experience in World War I gave him the idea for the character much the way Ian Fleming’s real involvement with the British secret service during World War II gave him the idea for Bond) with plenty of derring-do and dash in gimmicky melodramas against various super-villains — though, this being the Production Code era, instead of seducing one woman after another like Bond did, Drummond (at least in this phase of his on-screen existence) has a fiancée, Phyllis Clavering (Heather Angel), and he’s trying to marry her but ends up leaving her at the altar again and again and again when called on to solve some case of immediate pressing importance.
Arrest Bulldog Drummond — the title is a bit of a misnomer since Drummond hardly spends any time in police custody even though he is at one point a prime suspect in the murder of his long-time friend, inventor Richard Gannett (Leonard Mudie) — deals with Rolf Alferson (George Zucco), the real killer of Gannett, who was out to steal Gannett’s invention, a ray that will detonate explosives from a distance. (The ray is a quite crude construction, transparently lashed together from two old movie projectors; Paramount’s prop department obviously wasn’t going to spend much time or money building something genuinely credible for a 57-minute “B”!)
Alferson and his girlfriend, Lady Beryl Ledyard (Jane Fenwick) — it’s something of a novelty that this movie (scripted by Stuart Palmer from McNeile’s novel The Final Count) features a villain who has a girlfriend, and what’s more seems genuinely to care for her — steal Gannett’s ray, killing him in the process, and set up shop on the island of St. Anthony (which according to Wikipedia’s geographic subsidiary, Wikimapia, is actually off the coast of India, though the scenery we see looks Caribbean), where they plan to meet with agents of the usual sinister (and unnamed) foreign power to sell the Gannett invention for cash.
I’d had hopes for Arrest Bulldog Drummond mainly because Zucco played the villain — but for some reason he underplayed it, offering very little of the eye-rolling hamming that made so many of Zucco’s bad guys fun to watch — did director James Hogan tell Zucco to cool it? If so, it was a mistake. There’s only one scene in which Hogan let Zucco be Zucco: he’s captured Drummond’s assistant Algernon Longworth (Reginald Denny) and his butler Tenny (E. E. Clive) and has them in a rope basket, suspended over a bit of ocean in which they’ll either drown or get eaten by sharks, and though they’ve already escaped by then (we know that, but Zucco’s character doesn’t), Zucco gets ready to sever the cord suspending them and tells Phyllis (whom he’s lured there) that he’s about to eliminate the last two living witnesses to his misdeeds: “Care to see the splash?”
Aside from that, Arrest Bulldog Drummond is 57 minutes of relatively amusing fun, suffering (as most of the films in this series did) from John Howard’s stuffiness and stiffness (we don’t want Heather Angel to have to marry him any more than we wanted Katharine Hepburn to in The Philadelphia Story) but getting most of its entertainment value from the various traps McNeile and Palmer set for the hero and his imagination and daring in getting out of them. — 5/23/09
Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police (4/14/39)
I ran another one of the John Howard Bulldog Drummond series, Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police — a surprisingly good little “B,” given a beautiful subterranean tunnel set (apparently, according to William Everson, the set was “constructed specifically for this film and was not a borrowed castoff from another”) and atmospheric direction from James Hogan that made good, suspenseful use of it. — 7/28/93
•••••
The two Bulldog Drummond movies, Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police and Bulldog Drummond’s Bride, were both very pleasant surprises indeed. By 1939 the writers, Garnett Weston (on both films) and Stuart Palmer (on Secret Police), had finally got the mix of action and camp right; they had stopped trying for proto-James Bond melodrama and instead kept the tone light, the intrigues believable (more or less — the McGuffin in Secret Police is the royal jewels and treasury of King Charles I, supposedly buried in Drummond’s ancestral manse by Charles’ faithful secretary after the battle of Nasby sealed the king’s fate).
Secret Police was based on H. C. “Sapper” McNeile’s novel Temple Tower (previously filmed by Fox in 1930 in what William K. Everson rather baldly proclaimed the worst Drummond film of all time) and, according to Everson, used an elaborate set of underground tunnels, passages and streams that was actually built especially for this film and not recycled from an earlier, bigger-budgeted one. The story features a genuinely charming performance by Forrester Harvey as a dotty professor named Downie — a far cry from the rustic peasants he usually played (most notably in Frankenstein, in which he’s the father of the murdered girl) who brings Drummond the news that his castle contains a fortune in jewels, only to be killed by the vicious criminal Henry Seaton (Leo G. Carroll, not yet using his middle initial professionally), The first half of the film features a dream sequence in which Drummond recalls all the previous adventures that have kept him from marrying fiancée Phyllis Clavering (a welcome return to the role by British actress Heather Angel after the rather shrill Louise Campbell did some of the early episodes) and the second half is almost all chase through that great set — but the whole thing is a lot of fun and even Reginald Denny’s comic relief, oppressive in some of the earlier films, is genuinely funny. — 10/7/05
Bulldog Drummond’s Bride (6/30/39)
Earlier in the evening I’d watched Bulldog Drummond’s Bride — James Hogan’s direction had exactly the fast-paced quality Chester Erskine’s direction of the 1934 film Midnight needed and lacked, and in this, as in his other entries in the series, Hogan basically handled the absurdities of the plot and its “comic” relief by slamming through the story so fast they didn’t matter much. It’s surprising how strong the cast was, given that this was just a “B” movie: not only John Howard as Drummond, but H. B. Warner, Reginald Denny, E. E. Clive, Heather Angel, Eduardo Ciannelli (as the villain, naturally) and John Sutton, an interesting actor, as Warner’s assistant at Scotland Yard. Needless to say, it was the actors who made this film and gave it its appeal (and John Howard is so credible as a dashing hero, here and in the other three series entries I’ve seen, it seems odd he got relegated after this to Ralph Bellamy-type roles as in The Philadelphia Story). — 7/30/93
•••••
So it is with Bulldog Drummond’s Bride, an even funnier and better balanced film whose action ranges from the London flat where Drummond and Phyllis are planning to live after their oft-delayed wedding (thanks to a homemade bomb that blew up a good chunk of their castle at the end of Secret Police) to a village in France variously called Tagemont and Targemont (it’s spelled one way on the destination sign at its train station, another way in Paramount’s intertitle) where Phyllis has fled with her Aunt Blanche (Elizabeth Patterson in a comic-relief role that adds a lot to these films’ appeal) after the latest delay in her marriage plans and has served notice on Drummond that unless he marries her by September 10 she’ll marry another man on September 11. (At the end she ruefully confesses that this “other man” did not exist.)
Though the basis of this film is an H. C. McNeile novel called Bulldog Drummond and the Oriental Mind, no Orientals figure in the dramatis personae: instead the principal villain is Henri Armides (Eduardo Ciannelli), who in the opening reel stages a daring bank robber, then flees by disguising himself as one of the painters working on Drummond’s flat (which conveniently lies just across the street from the robbed bank) and hiding the 10,000-pound loot inside Drummond’s radio-phonograph — which Phyllis asks him to send to her in Ta(r)gemont.
The script by Garnett Weston is full of felicitous touches — notably Armides’ inventive escape from the police cordon around Drummond’s apartment building by pretending to go insane, splashing paint over the walls of Drummond’s flat (and inundating Algy Longworth, Drummond’s comic-relief friend, with paint), getting hauled out of the area in the asylum van and then relatively easily escaping from the mental hospital to which he’d been taken — and in the end Drummond and Phyllis are finally married by the town magistrate of Ta(r)gemont before Drummond’s final climactic fight with the bad guy, staged on the rooftops of the French village in a style that harkens back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue as well as looking forward to the opening scenes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
This was a very neat ending to a series that was better than its reputation (Everson recalls that critics hadn’t liked these films — being particularly hostile to the delayed-marriage gimmick used to unify them — and greeted the end of the series gladly) and actually got better as it progressed — and it’s an indication that John Howard, while hardly in the same league as Ronald Colman or Ray Milland when it came to playing a dashing hero, could credibly play a good guy and a lover, something one would never know about him from his two most famous roles (Colman’s obnoxious brother in Lost Horizon and the stuffy piece of cardboard who loses Katharine Hepburn to her ex, Cary Grant, in The Philadelphia Story). — 10/7/05
Calling Bulldog Drummond (MGM, 1951)
The film was Calling Bulldog Drummond, a 1951 frozen-funds movie from MGM starring Walter Pidgeon as a rather over-the-hill Drummond (supposedly he retired from crime-fighting to re-enlist in the armed forces, served in North Africa during World War II, then retired to a farm and raised, not bees like Sherlock Holmes, but pigs) and the talented Margaret Leighton as Sgt. Helen Smith of Scotland Yard. I remembered seeing this film in the 1970’s and not liking it particularly — though ostensibly a thriller, it was plodding and dull and I had a hard time staying awake — but this time around it seemed better than that, though still hardly a great film. (William K. Everson, in his chapter on the Drummond movies in The Detective in Film, called it “the best in many years, though its merits are only relative.” That about sums it up.)
It begins with a marvelous opening sequence: a group of 12 crooks in face masks that gives them a simultaneously sinister and clown-like appearance deploy from a truck and commit an armed robbery of a department store with military-style precision, then get away in a thick London fog thanks to a radar device they’ve stolen from the British military that allows them to navigate while the cops can’t pursue them. Drummond is called out of retirement by Inspector McIver of Scotland Yard and asked to go after this band of commando bandits, who’d committed two previous crimes with the same M.O., and to help him he’s given the undercover services of Sgt. Smith despite his rather sexist objections (which he soon modifies) to women as crimefighters.
Of the usual supporting cast of the Drummond adventures only his sidekick Algy Longworth (a doofus Watson to his Holmes) appears — and he’s played here by David Tomlinson, who surfaced in the U.S. 18 years later as the villain in the Disney comedy The Love Bug. Anyway, Drummond and Smith go undercover, posing as a criminal couple recently forced to flee Italy when their smuggling ring was uncovered, to attempt to infiltrate the gang; and gang member Arthur Gunns (Robert Beatty, who alone among all the actors here speaks with no trace of a British accent — was the character supposed to be American?) falls for her, much to the disgust of his previous girlfriend, Molly (a nicely edgy noir-ish performance by Peggy Evans), who in turn finds out who Drummond really is and blows his cover. In the end Drummond and Smith are able to keep the gang members from killing them long enough to allow the police to arrive, and the mastermind of the gang is revealed to be Drummond’s old club-mate, Col. Webson (Bernard Lee), who took up crime to relieve his boredom and lack of action after the war.
Calling Bulldog Drummond benefits from a decent script (story by Gerard Fairlie, who also co-wrote the script with Howard Emmett Rogers and Arthur Wimperis) and workmanlike direction by Victor Saville (whom, based on his later work, I’d always regarded as an amiable hack — seeing his spectacular and incredibly creative 1930’s musicals, Evergreen, First a Girl an earlier version of Victor/Victoria — and It’s Love Again with Jessie Matthews and Evensong with Evelyn Laye, was a revelation). Indeed, “workmanlike” is a good description of the entire film; there’s nothing especially bad about it but there’s nothing especially good about it either (aside from Saville’s commendable restraint in using Rudolph G. Kopp’s original score — many of the big action scenes are not underscored and actually benefit from the absence of music)
Much of the film takes place at a low-life cabaret with a creditable Black jazz group playing songs from the MGM catalogue — I had a fun time trying to identify them. Some sounded like they might have been British songs that didn’t cross the pond but I recognized at least two important songs from MGM musicals, “Our Love Affair” from one of the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland films, Strike Up the Band (1940), and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” introduced by Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh (1945). There were at least two interesting credits on the technical end — both men with the same last name, albeit in different languages — art director Alfred Junge, who’d worked with Saville before on The Good Companions (1932) and with Hitchcock on The Man Who Knew Too Much (first version, 1934); and cinematographer Freddie Young, who would later shoot Lust for Life for Vincente Minnelli and Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter for David Lean.
About the only thing against Calling Bulldog Drummond is that, for a thriller, it isn’t particularly thrilling — it introduces a particularly creative set of bad guys but then settles down into all too normal intrigues, and the sexual tension between Drummond and Smith (as well as the interesting script conceit that in order to establish their bona fides as crooks he has to make himself look like he abuses her) actually has more entertainment value than the overall plot! — 2/5/05
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Bulldog Drummond (Goldwyn/United Artists, 1929)
I ran the 1929 Bulldog Drummond, produced by Sam Goldwyn, directed by F. Richard “Dick” Jones (who’d worked in the silent era for Sennett and Roach, directed Mabel Normand’s hits Mickey and Molly O — in the process of the troubled production of Mickey, which ran through four directors, Jones actually stole the negative from the studio and essentially held it hostage in a pay dispute between him and Sennett — and ultimately rose to direct prestige features like Douglas Fairbanks’ The Gaucho, only to die a year after Bulldog Drummond without ever making another film) and starring Ronald Colman in the title role in his first talking film.
Alexander Walker cites this film as an example of a producer who did something right in breaking his big star into sound films — by contrast to the shabby treatment John Gilbert got from MGM in selecting his talkie debut, His Glorious Night, two months later. As a silent star Colman had been a heavy-breathing lover of the Valentino type, cast in intense romances (mostly with costar Vilma Banky, whose fractured Hungarian-accented English killed her chances for a successful transition in the U.S.); as a talkie star Colman’s ringing high tenor voice and British inflections made it hard to cast him as anything but the Englishman he in fact was, and made him better suited for a film like this: a comedy-thriller in which Drummond, a former captain in the British army in World War I, advertises in the London Times for a damsel in distress he can rescue and finds her in the person of Phyllis Benton (Joan Bennett), whose uncle, fabulously wealthy American financier John Travers (Charles Sellon), is being held prisoner in the mental asylum of Dr. Lakington (Lawrence Grant, in a marvelously florid villain performance on the order of Gustav von Seyffertitz or Ernest Torrence) and a husband-and-wife criminal team, Carl and Irma Peterson (Montagu Love and Lilyan Tashman), posing (like the Stapletons in The Hound of the Baskervilles) as brother and sister.
Based on a play by the original creator of the Drummond character, H. C. McNeile — billed on the credits only as “Sapper” (the pseudonym, and the use of initials, both seem to have been conditioned by his parents having given him the decidedly un-butch first name “Herman”) — and adapted by Wallace Smith (continuity) and Sidney Howard (dialogue), Bulldog Drummond opens magnificently with a sequence later recycled for two even better films, Love Me Tonight and Top Hat: Drummond and his upper-class twit friend Algy Longworth (Claud Allister in a superb comic-relief performance) are sitting in a London club that strictly forbids speech on the premises (like so much of the Drummond mythos, this too is a direct ripoff of one of the Conan Doyle Holmes stories, though doubtless such clubs actually did exist!). When one of the waiters drops a teaspoon — the first synchronous sound we hear in a film that began with a door being closed in our face to reveal a sign reading, “SILENCE” (itself a quite amusing in-joke just two years after The Jazz Singer) — a club member stands up and protests “this infernal din.” Drummond and Algy walk out whistling “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and — inspired by a joke from Algy — Drummond puts in his Times ad and the plot per se gets under way.
The film creaks all over the place; Jones was (not surprisingly, given his background) considerably more comfortable with the comedy than with the thrills, and much of the action is slow and stagy even though the cinematographers, George Barnes and Gregg Toland, cop some of the more spectacular effects from the German thrillers, Lang’s films in particular — including some shots of rooms with ceilings 12 years before Citizen Kane (also shot by Toland!) supposedly pioneered them. The entertainment value of Drummond lies mostly in the finely honed acting of Colman, Allister (for once a comic-relief character is genuinely funny!) and Tashman, whose over-the-top vampy villainy leaves nominal heroine Bennett in the dust by comparison; and in the overall “look” created not only by Barnes and Toland but also by set designer William Cameron Menzies, many of whose backdrops are so obviously stylized that at times the film looks like The Cabinet of Bulldog Drummond.— 6/30/05
Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1/22/37)
When Charles finally did get back and joined me in the room for a movie, my choice was Bulldog Drummond Escapes, the first in the eight-film Drummond series for Paramount from 1937 to 1939, though separate from the others in that it used a different cast: Ray Milland (back when he was still the male equivalent of a starlet, before Paramount started giving him better roles in films like Arise, My Love and The Major and the Minor and elevated him to major stardom) as Drummond, Sir Guy Standing (in his last film; he died of a heart attack shortly after it was finished) as Inspector — excuse me, Captain (he makes a big fetish of the distinction in the film!) Nielsen of Scotland Yard (who was essentially to Drummond what Inspector Lestrade was to Sherlock Holmes), Heather Angel as damsel-in-distress Phyllis Clavering (her character would continue throughout the series and there was a running gag that her planned marriage to Drummond was always getting interrupted by one crisis or another that he would have to run off and investigate), and Reginald Denny as Drummond’s Dr. Watson, upper-class twit Algy Longworth. (In the later films in the series American actor John Howard would take over as Drummond — likely because he’d played Ronald Colman’s brother credibly if unspectacularly in Lost Horizon and therefore could conceivably be accepted in a role most moviegoers still associated with Colman — with Louise Campbell as Phyllis, though Angel later re-assumed the role; John Barrymore and H. B. Warner as Nielsen; and Denny the only cast member from this film who carried over into the later ones.)
Based on a play called Bulldog Drummond Again by the character’s creator, Herman Cyril “Sapper” McNeile, with Gerard Fairlie, and variously called Bulldog Drummond Saves a Lady, Bulldog Drummond’s Holiday, Bulldog Drummond’s Romance and Bulldog Drummond’s Escape, Bulldog Drummond Escapes was a decent enough movie with an O.K. script by Edward T. Lowe (later associated with the dregs of the original Frankenstein cycle at Universal), competent direction by James Hogan, brilliant cinematography by Victor Milner (oddly uncredited on the extant prints, which were released not by Paramount but by a TV reissue label called “Congress Films”) — though the movie is a lighthearted thriller with no “class” ambitions there are some heavily Germanic shots here that anticipate noir — and a decent cast but a surprising dearth of real excitement.
The plot seems heavily recycled from the 1929 Bulldog Drummond film with Ronald Colman: Phyllis Clavering is being held in a sinister old dark house by two men, Norman Merridew (Porter Hall) and Stanton (Walter Kingsford) and one woman, Merridew’s sister (she really is his sister this time, not his wife posing as his sister à la The Hound of the Baskervilles and the 1929 Colman film) Natalie (Fay Holden), who are trying to convince her that she killed her brother Ted (actually murdered by Merridew) and then went insane. Though it’s a bit surprising he didn’t wear the Colman-style moustache John Howard donned for his entries in the series, Milland is an excellent Drummond, able to bring to the role the same insouciant charm Colman did; and the rest of the casting works well enough, though one misses the sheer outrageousness of Claud Allister’s Algy from the first Colman film.
Oddly, Charles noted that though the accents were suitable for British people (the fact that the four top-billed actors were British undoubtedly helped in that department), the script itself was full of American idioms that wouldn’t have come from these people’s mouths in real life — but the real problem with this film is that, for all the excellent atmospherics of Milner’s cinematography and the strong performances, it’s surprisingly dull. One of the quirkier aspects of 1930’s cinema is that the gangster films of the era were tight, fast-paced and genuinely exciting and intense, but when the studios tried any other sort of crime film the results were frequently anemic, slow-paced and uninteresting. There are some genuinely clever scenes — including the early one, in which Heather Angel coaxes Milland out of his car, he appropriately “rescues” her and she responds by stealing his car in her attempt to escape that old, dark house — but for the most part this is just a 67-minute time-filler that largely wastes a good cast. — 7/4/05
Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (9/24/37)
I ran Charles Bulldog Drummond Comes Back, the second in the sequence of eight Bulldog Drummond films made by Paramount between 1937 and 1939, and a good deal better than the earlier Bulldog Drummond Escapes. (I couldn’t help but consider the odd confluence of the titles of the two films on this Critics’ Choice disc: Bulldog Drummond Escapes and Bulldog Drummond Comes Back. It’s reminiscent of Desi Arnaz’s joke about Lucille Ball’s titles for the TV series she did after they broke up: when she came out with one called Here’s Lucy, he said her next two would be called There Goes Lucy and Here Comes Lucy Back.)
Bulldog Drummond Comes Back benefits from a better director (Louis King) than the one who helmed Bulldog Drummond Escapes (James Hogan); a stronger plot line — though both of them are based on writings by Drummond’s creator, H. C. “Sapper” McNeile, Comes Back is based on a novel (The Female of the Species, 1928) rather than a play, allowing the writer (Edward T. Lowe again) to get some action into it; and two genuinely interesting villains, Mikhail Valdin (J. Carrol Naish) and his sister Erena Soldanis (Helen Freeman), who though their nationalities remain uncertain (their names say Russian, or at least Slavic, but Naish’s makeup makes him look Chinese and their accents are unlike those of any real people from anywhere on earth!) are at least powerfully motivated: they seek revenge on Drummond (John Howard, in his first of seven appearances in the role) for having sent Erena’s brother to the gallows exactly one year earlier.
They do so by kidnapping Drummond’s fiancée, Phyllis Clavering (Louise Campbell, replacing Heather Angel — though Ms. Angel would take the role back in subsequent episodes of the series) and running Drummond, his butler Tenny (E. E. Clive) and his friend Algy Longworth (Reginald Denny again) on a wild-goose chase around London and its environs through a series of cryptic clues — some delivered as gnomic rhymes on paper, some as phonograph records, one delivered by Phyllis herself as the villains are holding both her and Drummond hostage in a moving car. One caution the villains give Drummond is specifically not to involve his friend, Col. Nielson (that’s how it’s spelled in the credits) of Scotland Yard, in the investigation — they’ll kill Phyllis instantly if they spot Nielson on their trail — but Nielson disguises himself in a series of increasingly ugly lumpenproletariat outfits in order to hang out in the lower-class environments (including several pubs, one run by the great character actress Zeffie Tilbury, listed in the credits as playing a character called “Zeffie”!) to which the villains’ clues are sending Drummond.
Though this is just a “B” with a 64-minute running time (the film’s brevity actually helped it, forcing King and Lowe to speed the action along at a rapid clip and avoiding the longueurs of Bulldog Drummond Escapes), it has a quite handsome physical production — producer Stuart Walker and director King did a good job raiding the Paramount warehouses for old sets they could use to stage elaborate action scenes, including a dungeon with a trap door over the Thames and another in which gas is piped in while Drummond, Phyllis and Algy are trapped at the end (there’s also a time bomb that will explode, then combine with the gas to produce a truly horrific conflagration and incinerate Our Heroes).
Nielson is played by John Barrymore, whom the Paramount brasses actually gave top billing — “Youngsters of the period, who had never heard of Barrymore, could never understand why his name was billed above that of Howard, who carried all the action, and they resented it,” William K. Everson wrote of this film and its two immediate successors in The Detective in Film — and who gets surprisingly little screen time but thoroughly makes the most of what he had. His disguises (especially the second, uglier one) bear more than a faint resemblance to his look as Mr. Hyde in the 1920 Paramount version of the Stevenson novel, and though he was portlier than he’d been in his glory days his posture, profile and magnificent voice dominate the screen in all his appearances. Barrymore’s presence adds a touch of class to a film that’s otherwise all Boy’s Own Adventure action with only brief (though charming) bits of exposition between the big scenes; but Howard, though laboring under the handicap of American nationality (unlike Ronald Colman and Ray Milland, who like the Drummond character were card-carrying Brits), is quite a good Drummond. His British accent is serviceable and good enough to be credible, and his rather arrogant manner (off-putting when he was playing Ronald Colman’s brother in Lost Horizon and Katharine Hepburn’s fiancé in The Philadelphia Story, his two best-known films) actually suits the character. — 7/7/05
Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge (1/7/38)
I spent the morning running a videotape I got recently at Blockbuster, a double bill of Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge and Bulldog Drummond’s Peril. These were two of the Bulldog Drummond “B” movies made at Paramount in the late 1930’s, starring John Howard as Drummond (probably cast because he’d been so convincing as Ronald Colman’s brother in Lost Horizon, and Colman, of course, was the most famous movie Drummond of all) and John Barrymore as Inspector Nielson of Scotland Yard. Revenge had the interesting novelty of having its villain (Frank Puglia) spend most of the movie in drag as a disguise, though the film was surprisingly un-atmospherically directed by Louis King (especially three years after his good work in Charlie Chan in Egypt) and Peril had a better, if sometimes confusing, plot (and a novel casting of Porter Hall as the villain); together these brief films (Revenge was 54 minutes, Peril 66 minutes) made a nice little entertainment package, full of the economy in storytelling that makes even the least interesting 1930’s movies watchable today (when Drummond lands his plane in the middle of nowhere in Peril, the next scene shows him driving into London — without bothering to waste valuable screen time explaining how he obtained the car). — 7/23/93
•••••
I ran him the second of the John Howard Bulldog Drummonds — still with John Barrymore top-billed for the relatively minor role of Col. Nielson [sic] of Scotland Yard — called Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge, though in fact there was very little content in these titles: all you had to do to name one of these films was to give the character name and add to it some noun or verb-object phrase that would connote “thriller-icity.” William K. Everson is particularly hard on this film, calling it “unquestionably the weakest” of the Howard Drummonds and adding, “Nothing whatsoever happened in the film — certainly no kind of action that could be constituted as ‘revenge’ — and Frank Puglia was a mild and ineffective villain.”
Actually, quite a lot happens in this film — reclusive but not quite mad scientist Sir John Haxton (Matthew Boulton) invents the world’s most powerful explosive, “haxtonite,” but his long-suffering secretary Draven Nogais (Frank Puglia) hatches a plot to steal it; as Haxton is flying his own plane to meet with international representatives for a demonstration of haxtonite, Nogais, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, shoots him, dumps the attaché case containing the haxtonite out of the plane — a parachute is attached and two of Nogais’s confederates are on the ground in a car waiting for it — then bails out himself, after putting his ring on a severed hand so anyone finding the wreckage will think both Haxton and Nogais were killed in the crash. Only Drummond (John Howard), his fiancée Phyllis Clavering (Louise Campbell) and his upper-class twit friend Algy Longworth (Reginald Denny) happen upon the haxtonite first and take it back to their country home — whereupon Nogais sneaks in and steals it back, then hides out on the Channel boat-train to Paris, which means Our Heroes have to get on the train themselves and give chase. About the only interesting part of the film is that, to avoid detection on the train, Nogais dresses as a woman — it’s actually one of the worst drag attempts in movie history, thought it might have fooled audiences in 1937 — though of course the villain is finally foiled.
The film’s biggest weakness (the script is by Edward T. Lowe again — the credited source is H. C. “Sapper” McNeile’s book The Return of Bulldog Drummond but the most-powerful-explosive-in-the-world bit was hardly fresh writing even then! — and the direction by Louis King hardly lives up to the atmospherics of Charlie Chan in Egypt and Bulldog Drummond Comes Back) is its sheer preposterousness: even by the usual standards of a thriller, the plot depends on one unbelievable gimmick after another, and one can’t help but recall how much better Alfred Hitchcock had done with a similar plot in The 39 Steps two years earlier (albeit with Robert Donat, a much more charismatic star than John Howard and an actor who would have been quite good casting as Drummond).
John Barrymore is barely in the film at all, and when he is he’s playing Nielson as a crotchety old man, resenting Drummond for butting into Scotland Yard’s business (now where have we heard that old cliché before?) and possibly — at least this is what William Everson thought — expressing his own resentment for having to make his living making silly films like this and playing a part that, for all the pretension and conceit of Paramount’s billing (below the title, but still first and in larger letters than Howard’s, and with his name in all caps on the closing card), is still a pretty unimportant supporting role. At 56 minutes this is short even for a late-1930’s “B” and it seems to drag in a way Bulldog Drummond Comes Back — with its comparative wealth of genuinely exciting action scenes — hadn’t; and Howard, appropriately debonair in his earlier Drummond film, just seems morose and petulant in this one. This time Lowe made the mistake of including Algy’s wife Gwen (Nydia Westman) as an on-screen character — in the two previous films she’d merely been talked about — and the so-called “comic relief” of Mr. and Mrs. Longworth just makes one long for the comparative subtlety and genuine amusement provided by Claud Allister as Algy in the 1929 Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman. — 7/15/05
Bulldog Drummond’s Peril (3/18/38)
Afterwards we settled in for the evening and watched the second film on the first of two Embassy Entertainment tapes featuring Bulldog Drummond movies I bought in the mid-1990’s and recently dug out of the back files to “mate” them with the Critics’ Choice DVD’s of some of these movies — alas there’s one title, Arrest Bulldog Drummond, that I’m still missing (a real pity because the villain is George Zucco and there’s a marvelously tacky still from it in William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film that shows Zucco and his henchpeople, Jean Fenwick and Georges Regas, posed in front of a so-called “Death Ray” obviously cobbled together from two old movie projectors).
Bulldog Drummond’s Peril was the fourth in the series — the third with John Howard as Drummond and the last to use Louise Campbell as his fiancée Phyllis Clavering and John Barrymore as Col. Nielson (probably just as well, for while he’d been a marvelously campy Nielson in Bulldog Drummond Comes Back he played the part in Revenge and Peril as a crotchety old man with little to offer but a generalized disinclination to deal with Drummond’s help on his cases; as Everson put it, “Either the novelty had worn off for Barrymore and he was proving hard to handle, so that the scenarists literally wrote him out of the films except for token appearances, or his roles were initially so small that Barrymore resented it and showed it by his performances. Either way, his Nielson became morose and bad-tempered, shouting his lines, glowering, mugging, and showing no signs of wanting to give either a serious performance or a gaily lighthearted one” — though even here, in Barrymore’s last appearance in the series, he was still getting top billing!).
While not at the level of Escapes or Comes Back it was certainly a major improvement over Revenge. Its only real flaw as a thriller is that there are just too many villains: American (though oddly accented) scientist Dr. Max Botulian (Porter Hall), diamond syndicate owner Sir Raymond Blantyre (Matthew Boulton — the character’s last name is pronounced “Blan-tree”), and his secretary Roberts (Austin Fairman). They’re all after a new process for making artificial diamonds of gem size, perfected by yet another dotty but not really mad scientist (much like Boulton’s role in Revenge), Professor Bernard Goodman (Halliwell Hobbes), which Blantyre wants suppressed because it will make his natural diamonds worthless, and Botulian wants suppressed because Goodman has beaten him in the race to perfect a diamond-making process, while Roberts secretly wants to steal the formula and use it to make money (at least that’s what I think is going on; the script by thriller writer Stuart Palmer isn’t all that coherent as to the characters’ clashing motivations) — and the plot thickens when Roberts disguises himself as Botulian to get his hands on Botulian’s diamond-making equipment and the real Botulian disguises himself as Roberts disguised as Botulian to kill Goodman (though Goodman actually survives to the fadeout) and blow up his lab under the cover story of offering Goodman his own diamond-making equipment (which Goodman wanted to retrofit with his own process so he could create an artificial diamond bigger than any natural one).
Despite the confusing plot, Bulldog Drummond’s Peril is actually quite an entertaining movie, largely due to two really elaborate and genuinely exciting action sequences. In one, Drummond’s butler Tenny chases the bad guys (some of them, anyway) in a motorcycle, catching up to the villains’ van, leaping on top of it and forcing his way in with a gun. (E. E. Clive’s stunt double must have had a field day with this one!) The other is a quite spectacular fight scene between Drummond and Botulian at the end, in which Botulian, armed with a bullwhip, uses it to snap Drummond’s gun out of his hand; Drummond reaches for some conveniently placed swords hanging on the wall and slices off the business end of Botulian’s whip — which comes off weirdly as a sort of symbolic castration — then throws it like a javelin and impales Botulian in the arm, wounding him to the point of offering no resistance while Drummond waits for Nielson and the police to take Botulian into custody.
One could tell the roles were starting to wear on some of the actors — Louise Campbell was clearly getting tired of the damsel-in-distress bit (though she gets some delightful scenes at a château in Switzerland — where Drummond and Phyllis have gone to get married, interrupted by all the diamond business — with her aunt, played by the delightful Elizabeth Patterson) and John Howard was both stuffier and nastier than he’d been in previous series episodes — and James Hogan, returning as director, didn’t have the flair for atmospherics Louis King did and paced the film (except for the two big action scenes) rather sluggishly, but still Bulldog Drummond’s Peril (whose working title was Bulldog Drummond Interferes — which shows once again how these films could have been called just about anything as long as the Bulldog Drummond name appeared alongside some words suggesting a thriller) was a nice little bit of 1930’s “B”-thriller fun. — 7/16/05
Bulldog Drummond in Africa (8/5/38)
I ran him the next Bulldog Drummond series film in sequence: Bulldog Drummond in Africa, which I’d been somewhat dreading because I didn’t think even a major studio like Paramount would have been able to mount an effective physical reproduction of Africa (and where in Africa? I’d assumed it would be sub-Saharan but it turned out to be Morocco, and Spanish rather than French Morocco at that!) on a “B” budget. As things turned out, though, this was actually one of the better ones in the series: J. Carrol Naish returned as the principal villain, a former British spy named Richard Lane who during the Great War had turned traitor and then fled the country to avoid execution, settling in Spanish Morocco and thumbing his nose at British law — until the action of this film starts with Lane secretly returning to England to kidnap Col. Nielson (H. B. Warner, taking over the role from John Barrymore — one of the screen’s most famous alcoholics replaced by Jesus Christ!) to worm out of him the secret of a radio-wave dematerializer that would permit the British to scramble their own radio signals and thereby encrypt their secret communications. (Remember what Alfred Hitchcock said: it doesn’t matter what the spies are after! It matters to the people in the movie but we in the audience couldn’t care less!)
As things turned out, the reproduction of Africa was just fine — aided by decent if unspectacular process work and quite a lot of stock footage (including what looked like a clip from the Valentino Sheik!) as well as a Moroccan villa for the bad guy that looked recycled from Charles Laughton’s redoubt in Island of Lost Souls. The plot features Lane flying the kidnapped Nielson out of Britain to his Moroccan home and Drummond following them in his own plane despite the efforts of British authorities on both ends of his trip to keep him from doing so, which Drummond evades on the British side by locking a Scotland Yard inspector in a trunk and on the Moroccan side by dealing with the lazy British consul Major Gray (series regular Matthew Boulton) and his assistant, Deane Fordine (played by a very young Anthony Quinn in his days as a low-level contract player at Paramount).
There’s one good suspense scene in which the baddies have planted a bomb on Drummond’s plane and timed it to go off over the ocean — only Drummond disobeys instructions and secretly flies back into Morocco and he and his passengers, Phyllis (Heather Angel), Algy (Reginald Denny, blessedly less arch than usual) and his butler Tenny (E. E. Clive), get out of the plane with seconds to spare before it blows up. The finale isn’t as much fun, and there’s no real surprise about it — it’s just a shootout on the balcony of Lane’s villa followed by the scene we’ve been expecting for at least half the movie, in which Lane’s pet lion turns on him and devours him for the finish — but this is still one of the better Paramount Drummonds, at least in part (as Charles put it) because it has less of the Wooster-and-Jeeves aspects of the Drummond-Algy and Drummond-Tenny relationships about it.. (Incidentally, the extant print has two “The End” titles — one in Paramount’s typeface superimposed over the plane that takes Drummond and company out of Africa, then quickly replaced by a Congress Films end title and then back to Paramount for the closing cast list.) — 7/18/05
Arrest Bulldog Drummond (11/25/38)
I ran Arrest Bulldog Drummond, which Charles had recently downloaded from archive.org and which was the only one of the late-1930’s Paramount Bulldog Drummond films I didn’t have in my collection. The Paramount Drummonds began with a separate film called Bulldog Drummond Escapes, released in January 1937 and featuring Ray Milland as Drummond, but when Paramount launched it as a “B” series later in 1937 Drummond was played throughout by John Howard. Howard seems to have got the part because in the film Lost Horizon he’d played the brother of Ronald Colman, who though he only played the role of Drummond twice (Bulldog Drummond for Sam Goldwyn in 1929 and Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back for 20th Century-United Artists in 1934), became as identified with the part as Sean Connery later would in the role of James Bond, and for the same reason: he was simply that much better than anyone else who ever played it.
The Drummond-Bond parallel is actually quite strong — the Drummond films come closer than any other 1930’s productions to the Bond movies, presenting a British action hero (created by author H. C. “Sapper” McNeile, whose military experience in World War I gave him the idea for the character much the way Ian Fleming’s real involvement with the British secret service during World War II gave him the idea for Bond) with plenty of derring-do and dash in gimmicky melodramas against various super-villains — though, this being the Production Code era, instead of seducing one woman after another like Bond did, Drummond (at least in this phase of his on-screen existence) has a fiancée, Phyllis Clavering (Heather Angel), and he’s trying to marry her but ends up leaving her at the altar again and again and again when called on to solve some case of immediate pressing importance.
Arrest Bulldog Drummond — the title is a bit of a misnomer since Drummond hardly spends any time in police custody even though he is at one point a prime suspect in the murder of his long-time friend, inventor Richard Gannett (Leonard Mudie) — deals with Rolf Alferson (George Zucco), the real killer of Gannett, who was out to steal Gannett’s invention, a ray that will detonate explosives from a distance. (The ray is a quite crude construction, transparently lashed together from two old movie projectors; Paramount’s prop department obviously wasn’t going to spend much time or money building something genuinely credible for a 57-minute “B”!)
Alferson and his girlfriend, Lady Beryl Ledyard (Jane Fenwick) — it’s something of a novelty that this movie (scripted by Stuart Palmer from McNeile’s novel The Final Count) features a villain who has a girlfriend, and what’s more seems genuinely to care for her — steal Gannett’s ray, killing him in the process, and set up shop on the island of St. Anthony (which according to Wikipedia’s geographic subsidiary, Wikimapia, is actually off the coast of India, though the scenery we see looks Caribbean), where they plan to meet with agents of the usual sinister (and unnamed) foreign power to sell the Gannett invention for cash.
I’d had hopes for Arrest Bulldog Drummond mainly because Zucco played the villain — but for some reason he underplayed it, offering very little of the eye-rolling hamming that made so many of Zucco’s bad guys fun to watch — did director James Hogan tell Zucco to cool it? If so, it was a mistake. There’s only one scene in which Hogan let Zucco be Zucco: he’s captured Drummond’s assistant Algernon Longworth (Reginald Denny) and his butler Tenny (E. E. Clive) and has them in a rope basket, suspended over a bit of ocean in which they’ll either drown or get eaten by sharks, and though they’ve already escaped by then (we know that, but Zucco’s character doesn’t), Zucco gets ready to sever the cord suspending them and tells Phyllis (whom he’s lured there) that he’s about to eliminate the last two living witnesses to his misdeeds: “Care to see the splash?”
Aside from that, Arrest Bulldog Drummond is 57 minutes of relatively amusing fun, suffering (as most of the films in this series did) from John Howard’s stuffiness and stiffness (we don’t want Heather Angel to have to marry him any more than we wanted Katharine Hepburn to in The Philadelphia Story) but getting most of its entertainment value from the various traps McNeile and Palmer set for the hero and his imagination and daring in getting out of them. — 5/23/09
Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police (4/14/39)
I ran another one of the John Howard Bulldog Drummond series, Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police — a surprisingly good little “B,” given a beautiful subterranean tunnel set (apparently, according to William Everson, the set was “constructed specifically for this film and was not a borrowed castoff from another”) and atmospheric direction from James Hogan that made good, suspenseful use of it. — 7/28/93
•••••
The two Bulldog Drummond movies, Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police and Bulldog Drummond’s Bride, were both very pleasant surprises indeed. By 1939 the writers, Garnett Weston (on both films) and Stuart Palmer (on Secret Police), had finally got the mix of action and camp right; they had stopped trying for proto-James Bond melodrama and instead kept the tone light, the intrigues believable (more or less — the McGuffin in Secret Police is the royal jewels and treasury of King Charles I, supposedly buried in Drummond’s ancestral manse by Charles’ faithful secretary after the battle of Nasby sealed the king’s fate).
Secret Police was based on H. C. “Sapper” McNeile’s novel Temple Tower (previously filmed by Fox in 1930 in what William K. Everson rather baldly proclaimed the worst Drummond film of all time) and, according to Everson, used an elaborate set of underground tunnels, passages and streams that was actually built especially for this film and not recycled from an earlier, bigger-budgeted one. The story features a genuinely charming performance by Forrester Harvey as a dotty professor named Downie — a far cry from the rustic peasants he usually played (most notably in Frankenstein, in which he’s the father of the murdered girl) who brings Drummond the news that his castle contains a fortune in jewels, only to be killed by the vicious criminal Henry Seaton (Leo G. Carroll, not yet using his middle initial professionally), The first half of the film features a dream sequence in which Drummond recalls all the previous adventures that have kept him from marrying fiancée Phyllis Clavering (a welcome return to the role by British actress Heather Angel after the rather shrill Louise Campbell did some of the early episodes) and the second half is almost all chase through that great set — but the whole thing is a lot of fun and even Reginald Denny’s comic relief, oppressive in some of the earlier films, is genuinely funny. — 10/7/05
Bulldog Drummond’s Bride (6/30/39)
Earlier in the evening I’d watched Bulldog Drummond’s Bride — James Hogan’s direction had exactly the fast-paced quality Chester Erskine’s direction of the 1934 film Midnight needed and lacked, and in this, as in his other entries in the series, Hogan basically handled the absurdities of the plot and its “comic” relief by slamming through the story so fast they didn’t matter much. It’s surprising how strong the cast was, given that this was just a “B” movie: not only John Howard as Drummond, but H. B. Warner, Reginald Denny, E. E. Clive, Heather Angel, Eduardo Ciannelli (as the villain, naturally) and John Sutton, an interesting actor, as Warner’s assistant at Scotland Yard. Needless to say, it was the actors who made this film and gave it its appeal (and John Howard is so credible as a dashing hero, here and in the other three series entries I’ve seen, it seems odd he got relegated after this to Ralph Bellamy-type roles as in The Philadelphia Story). — 7/30/93
•••••
So it is with Bulldog Drummond’s Bride, an even funnier and better balanced film whose action ranges from the London flat where Drummond and Phyllis are planning to live after their oft-delayed wedding (thanks to a homemade bomb that blew up a good chunk of their castle at the end of Secret Police) to a village in France variously called Tagemont and Targemont (it’s spelled one way on the destination sign at its train station, another way in Paramount’s intertitle) where Phyllis has fled with her Aunt Blanche (Elizabeth Patterson in a comic-relief role that adds a lot to these films’ appeal) after the latest delay in her marriage plans and has served notice on Drummond that unless he marries her by September 10 she’ll marry another man on September 11. (At the end she ruefully confesses that this “other man” did not exist.)
Though the basis of this film is an H. C. McNeile novel called Bulldog Drummond and the Oriental Mind, no Orientals figure in the dramatis personae: instead the principal villain is Henri Armides (Eduardo Ciannelli), who in the opening reel stages a daring bank robber, then flees by disguising himself as one of the painters working on Drummond’s flat (which conveniently lies just across the street from the robbed bank) and hiding the 10,000-pound loot inside Drummond’s radio-phonograph — which Phyllis asks him to send to her in Ta(r)gemont.
The script by Garnett Weston is full of felicitous touches — notably Armides’ inventive escape from the police cordon around Drummond’s apartment building by pretending to go insane, splashing paint over the walls of Drummond’s flat (and inundating Algy Longworth, Drummond’s comic-relief friend, with paint), getting hauled out of the area in the asylum van and then relatively easily escaping from the mental hospital to which he’d been taken — and in the end Drummond and Phyllis are finally married by the town magistrate of Ta(r)gemont before Drummond’s final climactic fight with the bad guy, staged on the rooftops of the French village in a style that harkens back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue as well as looking forward to the opening scenes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
This was a very neat ending to a series that was better than its reputation (Everson recalls that critics hadn’t liked these films — being particularly hostile to the delayed-marriage gimmick used to unify them — and greeted the end of the series gladly) and actually got better as it progressed — and it’s an indication that John Howard, while hardly in the same league as Ronald Colman or Ray Milland when it came to playing a dashing hero, could credibly play a good guy and a lover, something one would never know about him from his two most famous roles (Colman’s obnoxious brother in Lost Horizon and the stuffy piece of cardboard who loses Katharine Hepburn to her ex, Cary Grant, in The Philadelphia Story). — 10/7/05
Calling Bulldog Drummond (MGM, 1951)
The film was Calling Bulldog Drummond, a 1951 frozen-funds movie from MGM starring Walter Pidgeon as a rather over-the-hill Drummond (supposedly he retired from crime-fighting to re-enlist in the armed forces, served in North Africa during World War II, then retired to a farm and raised, not bees like Sherlock Holmes, but pigs) and the talented Margaret Leighton as Sgt. Helen Smith of Scotland Yard. I remembered seeing this film in the 1970’s and not liking it particularly — though ostensibly a thriller, it was plodding and dull and I had a hard time staying awake — but this time around it seemed better than that, though still hardly a great film. (William K. Everson, in his chapter on the Drummond movies in The Detective in Film, called it “the best in many years, though its merits are only relative.” That about sums it up.)
It begins with a marvelous opening sequence: a group of 12 crooks in face masks that gives them a simultaneously sinister and clown-like appearance deploy from a truck and commit an armed robbery of a department store with military-style precision, then get away in a thick London fog thanks to a radar device they’ve stolen from the British military that allows them to navigate while the cops can’t pursue them. Drummond is called out of retirement by Inspector McIver of Scotland Yard and asked to go after this band of commando bandits, who’d committed two previous crimes with the same M.O., and to help him he’s given the undercover services of Sgt. Smith despite his rather sexist objections (which he soon modifies) to women as crimefighters.
Of the usual supporting cast of the Drummond adventures only his sidekick Algy Longworth (a doofus Watson to his Holmes) appears — and he’s played here by David Tomlinson, who surfaced in the U.S. 18 years later as the villain in the Disney comedy The Love Bug. Anyway, Drummond and Smith go undercover, posing as a criminal couple recently forced to flee Italy when their smuggling ring was uncovered, to attempt to infiltrate the gang; and gang member Arthur Gunns (Robert Beatty, who alone among all the actors here speaks with no trace of a British accent — was the character supposed to be American?) falls for her, much to the disgust of his previous girlfriend, Molly (a nicely edgy noir-ish performance by Peggy Evans), who in turn finds out who Drummond really is and blows his cover. In the end Drummond and Smith are able to keep the gang members from killing them long enough to allow the police to arrive, and the mastermind of the gang is revealed to be Drummond’s old club-mate, Col. Webson (Bernard Lee), who took up crime to relieve his boredom and lack of action after the war.
Calling Bulldog Drummond benefits from a decent script (story by Gerard Fairlie, who also co-wrote the script with Howard Emmett Rogers and Arthur Wimperis) and workmanlike direction by Victor Saville (whom, based on his later work, I’d always regarded as an amiable hack — seeing his spectacular and incredibly creative 1930’s musicals, Evergreen, First a Girl an earlier version of Victor/Victoria — and It’s Love Again with Jessie Matthews and Evensong with Evelyn Laye, was a revelation). Indeed, “workmanlike” is a good description of the entire film; there’s nothing especially bad about it but there’s nothing especially good about it either (aside from Saville’s commendable restraint in using Rudolph G. Kopp’s original score — many of the big action scenes are not underscored and actually benefit from the absence of music)
Much of the film takes place at a low-life cabaret with a creditable Black jazz group playing songs from the MGM catalogue — I had a fun time trying to identify them. Some sounded like they might have been British songs that didn’t cross the pond but I recognized at least two important songs from MGM musicals, “Our Love Affair” from one of the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland films, Strike Up the Band (1940), and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” introduced by Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh (1945). There were at least two interesting credits on the technical end — both men with the same last name, albeit in different languages — art director Alfred Junge, who’d worked with Saville before on The Good Companions (1932) and with Hitchcock on The Man Who Knew Too Much (first version, 1934); and cinematographer Freddie Young, who would later shoot Lust for Life for Vincente Minnelli and Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter for David Lean.
About the only thing against Calling Bulldog Drummond is that, for a thriller, it isn’t particularly thrilling — it introduces a particularly creative set of bad guys but then settles down into all too normal intrigues, and the sexual tension between Drummond and Smith (as well as the interesting script conceit that in order to establish their bona fides as crooks he has to make himself look like he abuses her) actually has more entertainment value than the overall plot! — 2/5/05
The First Hundred Years (MGM, 1938)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we picked was from a recent TCM tribute to Robert Montgomery: The First Hundred Years, made at MGM (his home studio) in 1938 — five years after When Ladies Meet, which I’d actually recorded from a different TCM “tribute” night, to Myrna Loy — and though not as daring in its plotting as When Ladies Meet it was actually a much nicer and more good-natured movie. It began as a story by screenwriter Norman Krasna, who also produced, though another writer, Melville Baker, worked up Krasna’s story into an actual screenplay.
The premise is an oldie but goodie: Lynn Conway (Virginia Bruce, a woefully underused actress whose talents entitled her to far bigger roles and better breaks than she got) insists on continuing to work for theatrical agent Harry Borden (Warren William) — on her job she uses her original last name, Claymore — even though her husband, yacht designer David Conway (Robert Montgomery), has just been offered a job supervising a shipyard. The problem is that the job is in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and being a married man in a 1930’s movie he naturally assumes that she’s going to quit her job, move there with him and become a stay-at-home housewife. She assumes no such thing; she wants to continue working as an agent and says that if he insists on taking the New Bedford job, they can always live apart during the week but spend the weekends together. “I want a wife, not a guest!” he snarls back (or at least as close to a snarl as Robert Montgomery ever got).
The rest of the movie consists of their attempts to resolve this impossible dilemma, which gets them as far as a legal separation (under which she is required to pay him alimony since she’s always made more than he has) and several misunderstandings before the inevitable (for a 1930’s movie) happens: undergoing a routine exam for an insurance policy, she discovers that she’s pregnant and the fetus ex machina finally brings them back together and leads her to abandon her career and move to New Bedford with him — though there’s a charming Krasna-esque tag scene in which, not knowing his wife is already pregnant, while they’re driving to New Bedford David muses that maybe they should have a child. “I’ll think about it,” says Lynn before she nods off in the passenger seat and the end title comes up. (Just when the two of them stopped their mad rush of work, parties and misunderstandings long enough to have sex is a minor mystery this film leaves unanswered.)
What’s most likable about this movie is what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t moralize against its proto-feminist heroine (the way the somewhat similarly plotted Kept Husbands did); it doesn’t show the couple getting involved with other partners on their way to a reconciliation (a subsidiary character played by Binnie Barnes does sort-of try to vamp David, but she doesn’t seem too serious about it and the writers don’t, either); and it treats the incidents it depicts in a nicely matter-of-fact fashion that makes even the sexist ending easy to take — though given how many two-career, two-income couples there are these days, the central dilemma of the film “reads” very differently today than it did in 1938 (and a modern filmmaker doing the same central premise would approach it very differently, too).
The film we picked was from a recent TCM tribute to Robert Montgomery: The First Hundred Years, made at MGM (his home studio) in 1938 — five years after When Ladies Meet, which I’d actually recorded from a different TCM “tribute” night, to Myrna Loy — and though not as daring in its plotting as When Ladies Meet it was actually a much nicer and more good-natured movie. It began as a story by screenwriter Norman Krasna, who also produced, though another writer, Melville Baker, worked up Krasna’s story into an actual screenplay.
The premise is an oldie but goodie: Lynn Conway (Virginia Bruce, a woefully underused actress whose talents entitled her to far bigger roles and better breaks than she got) insists on continuing to work for theatrical agent Harry Borden (Warren William) — on her job she uses her original last name, Claymore — even though her husband, yacht designer David Conway (Robert Montgomery), has just been offered a job supervising a shipyard. The problem is that the job is in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and being a married man in a 1930’s movie he naturally assumes that she’s going to quit her job, move there with him and become a stay-at-home housewife. She assumes no such thing; she wants to continue working as an agent and says that if he insists on taking the New Bedford job, they can always live apart during the week but spend the weekends together. “I want a wife, not a guest!” he snarls back (or at least as close to a snarl as Robert Montgomery ever got).
The rest of the movie consists of their attempts to resolve this impossible dilemma, which gets them as far as a legal separation (under which she is required to pay him alimony since she’s always made more than he has) and several misunderstandings before the inevitable (for a 1930’s movie) happens: undergoing a routine exam for an insurance policy, she discovers that she’s pregnant and the fetus ex machina finally brings them back together and leads her to abandon her career and move to New Bedford with him — though there’s a charming Krasna-esque tag scene in which, not knowing his wife is already pregnant, while they’re driving to New Bedford David muses that maybe they should have a child. “I’ll think about it,” says Lynn before she nods off in the passenger seat and the end title comes up. (Just when the two of them stopped their mad rush of work, parties and misunderstandings long enough to have sex is a minor mystery this film leaves unanswered.)
What’s most likable about this movie is what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t moralize against its proto-feminist heroine (the way the somewhat similarly plotted Kept Husbands did); it doesn’t show the couple getting involved with other partners on their way to a reconciliation (a subsidiary character played by Binnie Barnes does sort-of try to vamp David, but she doesn’t seem too serious about it and the writers don’t, either); and it treats the incidents it depicts in a nicely matter-of-fact fashion that makes even the sexist ending easy to take — though given how many two-career, two-income couples there are these days, the central dilemma of the film “reads” very differently today than it did in 1938 (and a modern filmmaker doing the same central premise would approach it very differently, too).
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Star Trek (Bad Robot/Spyglass Entertainment/Paramount, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 2009 Star Trek movie is actually quite a good action film in the modern manner. The credit goes mainly to director J. J. Abrams and his writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who have come up with a story that mostly stays faithful to the Star Trek mythos while legitimately extending it — much like the better Sherlock Holmes pastiches. It’s essentially a prequel to the 1960’s TV show, opening with the birth of James Tiberius Kirk inside a shuttlecraft that is evacuating his mother Winona (Jennifer Morrison) from the starship U.S.S. Kelvin while it’s under attack from a renegade Romulan vessel commanded by Nero (Eric Bana), seeking to avenge the destruction of Romulus by a supernova and the failure of the Federation to save his planet by destroying the Federation and in particular incinerating its two most important planets, Earth and Vulcan.
Nero demands that the Kelvin’s captain, Robau (Faran Tahir), come aboard his vessel, leaving George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) in charge of the Kelvin for about 10 minutes — he attempts to incinerate the ship inside the Romulan vessel and thereby blow it up, first evacuating all the crew members in a series of shuttlecraft (just what the point of the shuttlecraft was was a part of the Star Trek mythos I never quite figured out, since their transporter system would seem to be capable of moving just about any people or equipment anywhere they wanted them, but in this film there are several scenes in which the Romulan ship puts out a force field of some sort that renders the transporters inoperable) — though the gesture fails because we see Nero and his ship (an appealingly abstract concept that looks like the Watts Towers in space) in a sequence taking place 25 years later.
In the meantime the film cuts back and forth between Vulcan and Iowa — where James T. Kirk steals his stepfather’s antique Corvette (the idea that a 20th century car would still be operable four centuries later is one of the weirdest parts of the movie, and Duncan Shepherd wondered in his review where they would get the fossil fuel to power it) and drives it off a cliff, barely reaching safety himself when he’s apprehended by a police officer in a sort of hovercraft motorcycle that’s one of the coolest conveyances in the film. Eventually Kirk grows up to adulthood (and to be played by Chris Pine, who looks surprisingly credible as someone we can imagine as a younger version of William Shatner), at least chronologically — psychologically he’s a big, spoiled boy who’s drawn so much like the Tom Cruise character in Top Gun I joked that this movie could have been called Top Phaser — and on a dare from Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), he enters Starfleet Academy and nearly washes out when he hacks into the computerized training program and screws up a test situation Spock (Zachary Quinto) had written to be unsolvable.
Spock has his own interesting backstory; as all Star Trek devotees know, he’s the product of a Vulcan father, Sarek (Ben Cross) — though his name is never used in the actual script — and a human mother, Amanda Grayson (Winona Ryder, of all people). Though he’s grown up as a Vulcan he’s remained torn between both worlds, teased by his all-Vulcan peers as a half-breed and finally admitted into the Vulcan Academy of Sciences — only to resign his commission there when the head of the admitting board makes a hatefully patronizing comment about how far he’d risen “despite your handicap” — a bit of interplanetary racism which decides Spock to tell the Vulcan Academy of Sciences to go hang and enlist in Starfleet instead.
Kirk is about to be washed out of the service on Spock’s recommendation when Starfleet (whose headquarters are in San Francisco — and, interestingly, the Golden Gate Bridge still exists in this vision of the future) receives word of a natural disaster threatening Vulcan and orders seven starships to travel there. Only it’s not a natural disaster; it’s Nero, destroying Vulcan by sending a probe into the planet’s core containing “red matter,” which creates an artificial black hole and sucks the planet into it. On board the Enterprise, Spock is able to rescue a handful of Vulcans — including his dad — but his mom doesn’t make it to the transporter coordinate in time and gets killed along with the rest of the six billion Vulcans. Kirk, who sneaked aboard the Enterprise without authorization but then redeemed himself by correctly assessing the situation and the danger Vulcan was up against, is nonetheless ordered off the ship by Spock and ends up on the planet Delta Vega 4, an icebound world in which he’s menaced by various picturesque monsters that look like higher-tech versions of the one on the Japanese Ultra-Man kids’ TV show; fleeing from them, he dashes into a convenient cave and there meets … Leonard Nimoy, ending his career as a science-fiction star where he began it 57 years ago in Zombies of the Stratosphere.
Nimoy is playing an older, leather-skinned version of Spock — called “Spock Prime” in the credits — as a visitor from the future who explains that he was supposed to destroy the supernova that annihilated the planet Romulus 129 years in the future, only he failed in the mission and therefore the recent destruction of Vulcan is all his fault even though Nero is exacting revenge for something that hasn’t happened yet (are you getting all this?). Though Zachary Quinto isn’t at all a bad Spock, Nimoy’s appearance has an inevitable air of “step aside, kid, and let the old pro show you how it’s done” about it. Anyway, the old time-traveling Spock explains to Kirk that his destiny is to command the Enterprise with the young Spock as his second-in-command — and, realizing that now that Nero has annihilated Vulcan his next target is Earth, Kirk gets back on board the Enterprise and the crew finally makes it there, with Kirk eventually assuming command after he tricks Spock into showing too much of an emotional investment in the goings-on surrounding the death of his home world, and the good guys finally destroying the bad guys so the movie can end.
Star Trek is actually a quite well constructed modern-day action movie — it runs 127 minutes, enough so that you feel you got your money’s worth but not so long that it starts to drag — and the plot portions are obviously there just to set up the action but don’t have that almost porn-movie uselessness you sense in so many other modern-day blockbusters. For the most part, the film is faithful to the old Star Trek mythos, except in two particulars that really jarred me: the bizarre flirtation between Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldana), much to the displeasure of Kirk, who’s after her himself — why she would throw herself at Spock is a mystery and why he would reciprocate is an even bigger one (it actually reminded me of Sean Ono Lennon, who like his father fell in love with a Japanese woman and co-founded a band with her) — and the total destruction of the planet Vulcan, which was alive and well in the TV episode “Amok Time.” Much is made — more than in the TV series — of Spock’s mixed-race heritage, half-human and half-Vulcan (perhaps inevitably in the age of Obama!) — though somehow more got said about Spock’s mixed heritage in the simple exchange in “Amok Time,” when Celia Lovsky (the widow of Peter Lorre) as the high priestess of Vulcan asked Spock, “Are ye Terran or Vulcan?,” and he answered, “Vulcan,” than in all 127 minutes of this movie.
Indeed, what’s really missing from this movie is the social commentary of the original Star Trek, the ways Gene Roddenberry and his writers were able to make oblique political statements without actually offending either side in a time (the late 1960’s) that was, if anything, even more highly charged ideologically than our own. Without that aspect, the new Star Trek is great entertainment but little more, with the obligatory nods to other movies — Top Gun in the cocksure aspects of the young Kirk’s character and the way he’s redeemed in action; 2001: A Space Odyssey in a quite remarkable scene of Kirk, Sulu (John Cho) and Olsen (one of the so-called “redshirt” characters brought on only to be killed almost immediately) doing a space jump to land on the Romulan drill mechanism and disable it so the Enterprise’s communicators and transporters will work again (the drill emits some sort of wave which jams them) — and as they fall through the air you hear some Kubrickian heavy breathing from inside their spacesuits; and Star Wars all over the place, from the Starfleet bar in San Francisco in which Kirk starts a fight to the scene towards the end in which Kirk and Spock are piloting a shuttlecraft into the bowels of the Romulan ship and they’re so unsure of where they’re going one’s tempted to yell at them, “Use the Force, Jim!”
Much is made of the history of Vulcan and in particular of the device that Vulcan was once nearly torn apart by wars, and its inhabitants learned to suppress their emotions and accept the discipline of logic to learn to survive and live each other in peace — actually a contribution of Leonard Nimoy; the original conception of Vulcanis (to use the first name it had) was as a planet where the people simply lacked emotions naturally, and when Nimoy wrote an analysis of the character of Spock he invented the backstory of Vulcan’s history of destructive wars and their people’s adoption of logic as a way to avoid them — and ever since then the Star Trek writers have run with that and made Vulcan’s emotional past a key element in story after story. Also somewhat disappointing is Eric Bana’s casting as Nero; like the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, he’s overqualified for a villain role; an actor whose stock in trade is wrenching conflicts within his own conscience can’t really be effective as an unmotivated (or undermotivated) psychopath. The 2009 Star Trek is a first-rate movie for what it is, and quite better than most of the big-budget blockbusters getting fired at the popcorn audience these days, and I don’t suppose it’s fair to expect it to have more of the quality of a TV series made in a very different era and for a very different set of audience expectations.
The 2009 Star Trek movie is actually quite a good action film in the modern manner. The credit goes mainly to director J. J. Abrams and his writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who have come up with a story that mostly stays faithful to the Star Trek mythos while legitimately extending it — much like the better Sherlock Holmes pastiches. It’s essentially a prequel to the 1960’s TV show, opening with the birth of James Tiberius Kirk inside a shuttlecraft that is evacuating his mother Winona (Jennifer Morrison) from the starship U.S.S. Kelvin while it’s under attack from a renegade Romulan vessel commanded by Nero (Eric Bana), seeking to avenge the destruction of Romulus by a supernova and the failure of the Federation to save his planet by destroying the Federation and in particular incinerating its two most important planets, Earth and Vulcan.
Nero demands that the Kelvin’s captain, Robau (Faran Tahir), come aboard his vessel, leaving George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) in charge of the Kelvin for about 10 minutes — he attempts to incinerate the ship inside the Romulan vessel and thereby blow it up, first evacuating all the crew members in a series of shuttlecraft (just what the point of the shuttlecraft was was a part of the Star Trek mythos I never quite figured out, since their transporter system would seem to be capable of moving just about any people or equipment anywhere they wanted them, but in this film there are several scenes in which the Romulan ship puts out a force field of some sort that renders the transporters inoperable) — though the gesture fails because we see Nero and his ship (an appealingly abstract concept that looks like the Watts Towers in space) in a sequence taking place 25 years later.
In the meantime the film cuts back and forth between Vulcan and Iowa — where James T. Kirk steals his stepfather’s antique Corvette (the idea that a 20th century car would still be operable four centuries later is one of the weirdest parts of the movie, and Duncan Shepherd wondered in his review where they would get the fossil fuel to power it) and drives it off a cliff, barely reaching safety himself when he’s apprehended by a police officer in a sort of hovercraft motorcycle that’s one of the coolest conveyances in the film. Eventually Kirk grows up to adulthood (and to be played by Chris Pine, who looks surprisingly credible as someone we can imagine as a younger version of William Shatner), at least chronologically — psychologically he’s a big, spoiled boy who’s drawn so much like the Tom Cruise character in Top Gun I joked that this movie could have been called Top Phaser — and on a dare from Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), he enters Starfleet Academy and nearly washes out when he hacks into the computerized training program and screws up a test situation Spock (Zachary Quinto) had written to be unsolvable.
Spock has his own interesting backstory; as all Star Trek devotees know, he’s the product of a Vulcan father, Sarek (Ben Cross) — though his name is never used in the actual script — and a human mother, Amanda Grayson (Winona Ryder, of all people). Though he’s grown up as a Vulcan he’s remained torn between both worlds, teased by his all-Vulcan peers as a half-breed and finally admitted into the Vulcan Academy of Sciences — only to resign his commission there when the head of the admitting board makes a hatefully patronizing comment about how far he’d risen “despite your handicap” — a bit of interplanetary racism which decides Spock to tell the Vulcan Academy of Sciences to go hang and enlist in Starfleet instead.
Kirk is about to be washed out of the service on Spock’s recommendation when Starfleet (whose headquarters are in San Francisco — and, interestingly, the Golden Gate Bridge still exists in this vision of the future) receives word of a natural disaster threatening Vulcan and orders seven starships to travel there. Only it’s not a natural disaster; it’s Nero, destroying Vulcan by sending a probe into the planet’s core containing “red matter,” which creates an artificial black hole and sucks the planet into it. On board the Enterprise, Spock is able to rescue a handful of Vulcans — including his dad — but his mom doesn’t make it to the transporter coordinate in time and gets killed along with the rest of the six billion Vulcans. Kirk, who sneaked aboard the Enterprise without authorization but then redeemed himself by correctly assessing the situation and the danger Vulcan was up against, is nonetheless ordered off the ship by Spock and ends up on the planet Delta Vega 4, an icebound world in which he’s menaced by various picturesque monsters that look like higher-tech versions of the one on the Japanese Ultra-Man kids’ TV show; fleeing from them, he dashes into a convenient cave and there meets … Leonard Nimoy, ending his career as a science-fiction star where he began it 57 years ago in Zombies of the Stratosphere.
Nimoy is playing an older, leather-skinned version of Spock — called “Spock Prime” in the credits — as a visitor from the future who explains that he was supposed to destroy the supernova that annihilated the planet Romulus 129 years in the future, only he failed in the mission and therefore the recent destruction of Vulcan is all his fault even though Nero is exacting revenge for something that hasn’t happened yet (are you getting all this?). Though Zachary Quinto isn’t at all a bad Spock, Nimoy’s appearance has an inevitable air of “step aside, kid, and let the old pro show you how it’s done” about it. Anyway, the old time-traveling Spock explains to Kirk that his destiny is to command the Enterprise with the young Spock as his second-in-command — and, realizing that now that Nero has annihilated Vulcan his next target is Earth, Kirk gets back on board the Enterprise and the crew finally makes it there, with Kirk eventually assuming command after he tricks Spock into showing too much of an emotional investment in the goings-on surrounding the death of his home world, and the good guys finally destroying the bad guys so the movie can end.
Star Trek is actually a quite well constructed modern-day action movie — it runs 127 minutes, enough so that you feel you got your money’s worth but not so long that it starts to drag — and the plot portions are obviously there just to set up the action but don’t have that almost porn-movie uselessness you sense in so many other modern-day blockbusters. For the most part, the film is faithful to the old Star Trek mythos, except in two particulars that really jarred me: the bizarre flirtation between Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldana), much to the displeasure of Kirk, who’s after her himself — why she would throw herself at Spock is a mystery and why he would reciprocate is an even bigger one (it actually reminded me of Sean Ono Lennon, who like his father fell in love with a Japanese woman and co-founded a band with her) — and the total destruction of the planet Vulcan, which was alive and well in the TV episode “Amok Time.” Much is made — more than in the TV series — of Spock’s mixed-race heritage, half-human and half-Vulcan (perhaps inevitably in the age of Obama!) — though somehow more got said about Spock’s mixed heritage in the simple exchange in “Amok Time,” when Celia Lovsky (the widow of Peter Lorre) as the high priestess of Vulcan asked Spock, “Are ye Terran or Vulcan?,” and he answered, “Vulcan,” than in all 127 minutes of this movie.
Indeed, what’s really missing from this movie is the social commentary of the original Star Trek, the ways Gene Roddenberry and his writers were able to make oblique political statements without actually offending either side in a time (the late 1960’s) that was, if anything, even more highly charged ideologically than our own. Without that aspect, the new Star Trek is great entertainment but little more, with the obligatory nods to other movies — Top Gun in the cocksure aspects of the young Kirk’s character and the way he’s redeemed in action; 2001: A Space Odyssey in a quite remarkable scene of Kirk, Sulu (John Cho) and Olsen (one of the so-called “redshirt” characters brought on only to be killed almost immediately) doing a space jump to land on the Romulan drill mechanism and disable it so the Enterprise’s communicators and transporters will work again (the drill emits some sort of wave which jams them) — and as they fall through the air you hear some Kubrickian heavy breathing from inside their spacesuits; and Star Wars all over the place, from the Starfleet bar in San Francisco in which Kirk starts a fight to the scene towards the end in which Kirk and Spock are piloting a shuttlecraft into the bowels of the Romulan ship and they’re so unsure of where they’re going one’s tempted to yell at them, “Use the Force, Jim!”
Much is made of the history of Vulcan and in particular of the device that Vulcan was once nearly torn apart by wars, and its inhabitants learned to suppress their emotions and accept the discipline of logic to learn to survive and live each other in peace — actually a contribution of Leonard Nimoy; the original conception of Vulcanis (to use the first name it had) was as a planet where the people simply lacked emotions naturally, and when Nimoy wrote an analysis of the character of Spock he invented the backstory of Vulcan’s history of destructive wars and their people’s adoption of logic as a way to avoid them — and ever since then the Star Trek writers have run with that and made Vulcan’s emotional past a key element in story after story. Also somewhat disappointing is Eric Bana’s casting as Nero; like the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, he’s overqualified for a villain role; an actor whose stock in trade is wrenching conflicts within his own conscience can’t really be effective as an unmotivated (or undermotivated) psychopath. The 2009 Star Trek is a first-rate movie for what it is, and quite better than most of the big-budget blockbusters getting fired at the popcorn audience these days, and I don’t suppose it’s fair to expect it to have more of the quality of a TV series made in a very different era and for a very different set of audience expectations.
When Ladies Meet (MGM, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles finally returned home I ran him a movie, the 1933 version of When Ladies Meet, an MGM film based on a play by Rachel Crothers with a provocative premise: novelist Mary Howard (Myrna Loy) meets and befriends Clare Woodruf (Ann Harding, on loan from RKO and top-billed), not knowing that Clare is the wife of her publisher, Rogers Woodruf (Frank Morgan) — the woman Mary is trying to seduce Rogers away from, much to the disgust of her former boyfriend, Jimmie Lee (Robert Montgomery). It was a movie that more or less took advantage of the freedom of so-called “pre-Code” Hollywood (a misnomer because the Production Code was already in effect and it was being enforced, though far more loosely than it was after 1934) to deal with relationship and sexual issues in a way that at least approached reality; indeed, some of the better films of the era, like Erich von Stroheim’s Hello, Sister! and John Ford’s Pilgrimage, have a sexual frankness about them that seems startling today.
Unfortunately, When Ladies Meet isn’t anywhere near that league; hamstrung by what sounds like an unbearably preachy script (since I haven’t read or seen the play I can’t be sure whether to blame Crothers or the screenwriters who adapted her work, John Meehan and Leon Gordon, but my guess is the preachiness was inherent in Crothers’ play) that makes its love vs. marriage and freedom vs. commitment points in a depressingly obvious fashion, it emerges as one of those early 1930’s movies (like the better but still flawed 1932 RKO production Westward Passage, also an Ann Harding vehicle) uncertainly perched between screwball comedy and soap opera. It doesn’t help that, even though she’s top-billed, Ann Harding doesn’t appear in this movie until about a third of the way through its 85-minute running time — or that Myrna Loy is such a better actress than Harding that we spend the first third of the film getting to know and like her, thereby seeing her as a sympathetic character instead of the unscrupulous home-wrecker Crothers seems to have intended.
It also doesn’t help that the actor playing the man these two women are fighting over is best known today as the foofy Wizard of Oz — or that the same year Frank Morgan made a far better adultery drama at Universal, The Kiss Before the Mirror (though in that he’s the cuckoldee instead of the cuckolder), with a far more creative director, James Whale, than the one he got here, Harry Beaumont. I’ve actually liked most of the Beaumont films I’ve seen — including the 1935 version of Enchanted April, which re-teamed him with Ann Harding, this time at her home studio — but this time he seemed to be directing under water, taking the story all too seriously and moving it along at a leaden pace instead of the rapid-fire one that might have emphasized the comedy over the soap and made the film more entertaining.
Maybe that wouldn’t have helped much, though, because the “comedy” elements in the film we have aren’t all that funny. Robert Montgomery’s prank-loving character gets so exasperating that we wonder why we’re being told this is the man Myrna Loy is supposed to end up with; and Alice Brady as Bridget Drake, the comic-relief character whose home hosts the second act of the film, including the fateful meeting between Mary and Clare, is a bird-brained ditz whose comic musings and overall confused consciousness jar. It’s basically the same character Brady played delightfully in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film The Gay Divorcée a year later, but in the fluffier context of an Astaire-Rogers musical Brady’s characterization seems right at home, whereas here you just end up wanting to strangle her.
Ann Harding doesn’t help, either; for all the big movies she got to make in the early 1930’s she never seemed to be that good an actress — her emotions seem limited to soulful suffering and annoyance — and through much of When Ladies Meet I couldn’t help thinking MGM had borrowed the wrong RKO star and should have got Katharine Hepburn instead; though tenaciously fighting to hold on to a straying husband isn’t the sort of part we usually think of as a Hepburn role, her ferocity and indomitable drive would have played far better than Harding’s bovine inertness and made a better on-screen antagonist to Loy — who takes the acting honors more by default than anything else; playing a writer who (like Gary Cooper’s character in the Sam Goldwyn/Anna Sten vehicle The Wedding Night) has arranged her latest book to reflect her real-life situation and end the way she hopes the real events will turn out, too, she approaches the part with quiet grace and dignity, in the process (as I noted above) making us root for her and thereby throwing the intended moral balance of the story totally off-kilter.
It also doesn’t help that there’s virtually no chemistry between her and Montgomery (William Powell would have made a far better vis-à-vis for her, but he was still at Warners when this film was made), or that given the creepiness of Montgomery’s “joke” antics throughout the film, when the two of them finally get together at the end we’re more likely to groan than to accept this as a happy ending! When Ladies Meet was remade in 1941 with Joan Crawford (almost inevitably, after her role in The Women) in the Myrna Loy role and Greer Garson (almost inevitably, also, given the way MGM was pushing her towards wife-and-mother roles — the character has two children, though at least in the 1933 version we never actually see them) as the wife she’s trying to displace.
When Charles finally returned home I ran him a movie, the 1933 version of When Ladies Meet, an MGM film based on a play by Rachel Crothers with a provocative premise: novelist Mary Howard (Myrna Loy) meets and befriends Clare Woodruf (Ann Harding, on loan from RKO and top-billed), not knowing that Clare is the wife of her publisher, Rogers Woodruf (Frank Morgan) — the woman Mary is trying to seduce Rogers away from, much to the disgust of her former boyfriend, Jimmie Lee (Robert Montgomery). It was a movie that more or less took advantage of the freedom of so-called “pre-Code” Hollywood (a misnomer because the Production Code was already in effect and it was being enforced, though far more loosely than it was after 1934) to deal with relationship and sexual issues in a way that at least approached reality; indeed, some of the better films of the era, like Erich von Stroheim’s Hello, Sister! and John Ford’s Pilgrimage, have a sexual frankness about them that seems startling today.
Unfortunately, When Ladies Meet isn’t anywhere near that league; hamstrung by what sounds like an unbearably preachy script (since I haven’t read or seen the play I can’t be sure whether to blame Crothers or the screenwriters who adapted her work, John Meehan and Leon Gordon, but my guess is the preachiness was inherent in Crothers’ play) that makes its love vs. marriage and freedom vs. commitment points in a depressingly obvious fashion, it emerges as one of those early 1930’s movies (like the better but still flawed 1932 RKO production Westward Passage, also an Ann Harding vehicle) uncertainly perched between screwball comedy and soap opera. It doesn’t help that, even though she’s top-billed, Ann Harding doesn’t appear in this movie until about a third of the way through its 85-minute running time — or that Myrna Loy is such a better actress than Harding that we spend the first third of the film getting to know and like her, thereby seeing her as a sympathetic character instead of the unscrupulous home-wrecker Crothers seems to have intended.
It also doesn’t help that the actor playing the man these two women are fighting over is best known today as the foofy Wizard of Oz — or that the same year Frank Morgan made a far better adultery drama at Universal, The Kiss Before the Mirror (though in that he’s the cuckoldee instead of the cuckolder), with a far more creative director, James Whale, than the one he got here, Harry Beaumont. I’ve actually liked most of the Beaumont films I’ve seen — including the 1935 version of Enchanted April, which re-teamed him with Ann Harding, this time at her home studio — but this time he seemed to be directing under water, taking the story all too seriously and moving it along at a leaden pace instead of the rapid-fire one that might have emphasized the comedy over the soap and made the film more entertaining.
Maybe that wouldn’t have helped much, though, because the “comedy” elements in the film we have aren’t all that funny. Robert Montgomery’s prank-loving character gets so exasperating that we wonder why we’re being told this is the man Myrna Loy is supposed to end up with; and Alice Brady as Bridget Drake, the comic-relief character whose home hosts the second act of the film, including the fateful meeting between Mary and Clare, is a bird-brained ditz whose comic musings and overall confused consciousness jar. It’s basically the same character Brady played delightfully in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film The Gay Divorcée a year later, but in the fluffier context of an Astaire-Rogers musical Brady’s characterization seems right at home, whereas here you just end up wanting to strangle her.
Ann Harding doesn’t help, either; for all the big movies she got to make in the early 1930’s she never seemed to be that good an actress — her emotions seem limited to soulful suffering and annoyance — and through much of When Ladies Meet I couldn’t help thinking MGM had borrowed the wrong RKO star and should have got Katharine Hepburn instead; though tenaciously fighting to hold on to a straying husband isn’t the sort of part we usually think of as a Hepburn role, her ferocity and indomitable drive would have played far better than Harding’s bovine inertness and made a better on-screen antagonist to Loy — who takes the acting honors more by default than anything else; playing a writer who (like Gary Cooper’s character in the Sam Goldwyn/Anna Sten vehicle The Wedding Night) has arranged her latest book to reflect her real-life situation and end the way she hopes the real events will turn out, too, she approaches the part with quiet grace and dignity, in the process (as I noted above) making us root for her and thereby throwing the intended moral balance of the story totally off-kilter.
It also doesn’t help that there’s virtually no chemistry between her and Montgomery (William Powell would have made a far better vis-à-vis for her, but he was still at Warners when this film was made), or that given the creepiness of Montgomery’s “joke” antics throughout the film, when the two of them finally get together at the end we’re more likely to groan than to accept this as a happy ending! When Ladies Meet was remade in 1941 with Joan Crawford (almost inevitably, after her role in The Women) in the Myrna Loy role and Greer Garson (almost inevitably, also, given the way MGM was pushing her towards wife-and-mother roles — the character has two children, though at least in the 1933 version we never actually see them) as the wife she’s trying to displace.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Outrage (Magnolia Pictures, 2009)
Exposing Hypocrisy or Perpetrating It?
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
PHOTOS, top to bottom: Congressmember Barney Frank, former Senator Larry Craig (mug shot), former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, former Human Rights Campaign executive director Elizabeth Birch, author/activist Larry Kramer. Courtesy Magnolia Pictures.
One wonders if director Kirby Dick — 50-something and straight, at least by his own account — picks such sexually provocative subjects for his documentaries because of his last name. So far he’s made Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, in which the title character was a man with cystic fibrosis who responded to being in constant pain by ramping up his discomfort level through having his wife subject him to extreme S/M; Twist of Faith, which showed a man dealing with the long-term trauma of having been sexually abused in his boyhood by a Roman Catholic priest; and This Film Is Not Yet Rated, about the motion-picture rating system and how it reflects America’s hypocrisy on matters sexual. His latest, Outrage, is an old-fashioned morality play in which you know from the get-go who the good guys are and who the bad guys are: the good guys are the independent reporters and activists who “out” closeted Queer politicians and the bad guys are the politicians themselves and most of the mainstream media, who actively and passively collude with them to maintain their secrets.
If this sounds like a movie based on a conspiracy theory, it’s because it is; in his written prologue — after a dizzying series of credits that makes it look like the projectionist is still fiddling with his lens to get the film in focus — Dick actually uses the C-word to describe the tacit (and, he alleges, sometimes not so tacit) alliance between homosexually active but heterosexually identified politicians and the media who cover them. He makes the point that hetero sex scandals involving politicians get debated endlessly and become fodder for tabloids and ostensibly “serious” news outlets alike (does the name “Bill Clinton” mean anything to you?), while homo ones mostly get swept under the carpet unless the homoactive politician gets caught in a police sting in a cruisy restroom like former Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) or soliciting teenage staffers for sex like Congressmember Mark Foley (R-Florida).
Outrage is a film carefully constructed to give the illusion that it’s more fearless than it is. It’s done in a dead-serious fashion; anyone who enjoyed the Michael Mooreisms of This Film Is Not Yet Rated — particularly the whole plotline of Dick and the two women private eyes (a Lesbian couple) he hired to break the omertà of the movie ratings board and find out its members’ secret identities — and was hoping for more of the same this time will be sorely disappointed. What’s more, Dick himself doesn’t “out” anyone, nor are there any new revelations in the film. Everyone named as a closeted Gay in the film — including Craig, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, California Congressmember Dave Dreier, former Louisiana Congressmember Jim McCrery and former New York Mayor Ed Koch (all men, and all Republicans except Koch) — has been publicized as such either by reporters for alternative newspapers or by Michael Rogers, the film’s principal “hero,” on his blog, blogactive.com.
The most blatant aspect of the morality-play nature of Outrage is that Dick adopts as his own the self-proclaimed agenda of “outers” Rogers, Michaelangelo Signorile (who along with Gabriel Rotello, his editor at the short-lived Queer publication OutWeek in New York from 1989 to 1991, invented “outing” in the first place) and Larry Kramer (founder of ACT UP and a close associate of Signorile and Rotello “in the day”). They insist that in seeking to expose certain politicians as Queer, they’re not punishing them for their homosexuality, but rather for their hypocrisy: for working, speaking and voting against the interests of the Queer community. The advertising copy for Outrage calls the film “a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted politicians with appalling Gay rights voting records who actively campaign against the LGBT [Queer] community they secretly belong to.”
But what’s presented in the film as holding closeted Queer politicians to a standard of supporting Queer issues and rights can also be read as an ideological enforcement action, insisting that all Queers in public life adopt a liberal-Left policy agenda not only on Queer issues but everything else as well. The litmus-test issues on which the film bases its definition of who’s pro-Queer and who’s anti-Queer in public life are anti-discrimination legislation, anti-hate crimes legislation, “HIV/AIDS” funding and marriage equality for same-sex couples. The message of both Dick’s “outer” heroes and Dick himself is that unless you support that entire agenda — one associated far more with the Democratic than the Republican party — you’re “anti-Gay” and therefore your private sexual orientation is fair game for public scrutiny, whereas if you do support it your right to sexual privacy should be, and will be, respected.
All those items can be subject to legitimate question. You could be staunchly in favor of people’s right to be Queer and express their sexuality with members of their own gender and still oppose private-sector anti-discrimination laws as a violation of the rights of employers and employees to associate freely. You could oppose hate-crimes legislation on the ground that if you add years to the sentence of a person convicted of murder, robbery or some other felony on the ground that it was motivated by the victim’s homosexuality, the additional punishment is essentially one for anti-Queer thoughtcrime. You could oppose “HIV/AIDS” funding if you believe (as I do) that there are serious problems both with the mainstream explanation for AIDS and the drug-centered “therapy” approach that has become the standard of care, especially since most so-called “AIDS funding” goes to pay inflated prices for AIDS medications and therefore is really corporate welfare for Big Pharma. And you could even question whether same-sex relationships really ought to be called “marriages” and be put on the same legal basis as the opposite-sex relationships which actually produce children and propagate the species.
Now, most of those putative positions bear no relationship to my politics at all. I think it’s outrageous that in 31 states you can legally be denied employment for being Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual and in 39 states you can legally be denied employment for being Transgender. It’s also outrageous that the rights of committed Gay and Lesbian partners to marry each other is still a live-wire controversy in this country, and that the opponents of same-sex marriage openly and proudly boast that their aim is to write their understanding of the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition into this country’s secular law — and that they keep sounding off on the “marriage is for procreation” line when plenty of heterosexual couples don’t reproduce and many Queer couples are raising kids — either ones they’ve adopted (except in Florida, where there’s an outright ban on adoptions by same-sex couples which the putatively Gay Governor Crist fully supports), ones they’ve conceived with third-party help or ones they had normally in previous heterosexual relationships.
I’m a lot more conflicted about “HIV/AIDS” funding and a bit uneasy about hate-crimes legislation as well. Overall, it’s a good thing to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of characteristics like race, religion and gender that qualify for hate-crimes enhancements — but the mainstream Queer community’s defense of hate-crime legislation is uncomfortably close to the one Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia offered for sodomy laws in his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas: that even if we can’t enforce a law targeting certain people’s behavior, we ought to be able to have it on the books anyway just to express social disapproval of what they do. But the point isn’t to take one side or another on the debate over these issues; rather, it’s to say that reasonable people — including reasonable Queer people — can debate them and take different sides, and it’s troublesome to declare one side the “enemy” because they adopt a view on marriage or discrimination legislation or hate crime law or AIDS funding different from the liberal-Left consensus of the mainstream Queer establishment.
What’s more, the idea of declaring certain people “enemies” of the Queer community for opposing anti-discrimination, hate-crimes or marriage-equality legislation runs into another profoundly disturbing possibility: what do we do with Queer people who believe in a strong national defense, aggressive pursuit of the “war on terror,” a lassiez-faire economy with little or no government interference with the market and the private sector, and an approach to civil rights that involves protecting individuals rather than groups? All those beliefs would lead them to be far more comfortable with the Republican than the Democratic party — yet the Republicans, over the last 30 years (ever since the rise of the evangelical Christian Right and its emergence as a key part of the Republican voter base), have also embraced an aggressive challenge to the policy agenda of the Queer community and the very existence of what they refer to as “so-called ‘Gay rights.’”
Should a person with that mix of issue positions — actively Queer and concerned with the equal rights of his or her peers, but also conservative or Right-wing on most non-Queer issues — be expected to compromise everything else he or she believes in for the sake of his or her sexual orientation? Kirby Dick and his “heroes” obviously believe that. Yet in some ways there’s a certain poignancy to the lives of some of the people Dick and company place on the “villain” side of their ledger, a sad reality that they can’t work for the conservative causes they believe in without having to fear exposure and disgrace if their homosexual activities are revealed, either accidentally by circumstances or deliberately by “outers.” In that sense, it’s ironic that the promotional campaign for Outrage is using the slogan, “Do ask, do tell,” because Queer conservatives frequently find themselves in the same position as Queer servicemembers under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy: able to serve their country in the way they choose but only if they continually lie about themselves, and constantly fearful that their real orientation will come out anyway, ruin their careers and deprive them of that ability to serve.
What’s more, Outrage takes an uncomfortably essentialist view of sexual orientation that divides the human race into two groups: “straight” and “Gay.” The word “Bisexual” appears in the film exactly twice: once when former Human Rights Campaign executive director Elizabeth Birch is rattling off the litany by which the Queer community defines itself these days — “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender” — and once when Senator Craig, shown in a film clip from a TV interview, says, “I’m not homosexual” and in the same breath quickly adds, “I’m not Bisexual.” Just as Barack Obama is almost universally referred to as “America’s first African-American president” when he is in fact mixed-race and his white parent had far more of a role in his upbringing than his Black one, so the people the movie purports to “out” are described throughout as “Gay” even though many of them are (or have been) married to women and have fathered children. Why should one assume that the feelings of a so-called “Gay politician” for his wife and children are automatically less important to him emotionally — or even physically — than whatever he’s getting out of his clandestine male-on-male trysts? And why do so many Queer people automatically call such people “Gay” when, at least by their behavior, they’re clearly Bisexual?
Not only does Outrage avoid these issues, it stacks the deck against any consideration of them. Dick goes out of his way to tell us that not only does Larry Craig deny being Bisexual, but the three children Craig was raising weren’t his — they were his wife’s by a previous marriage. Dick also brings on a former college classmate of Louisiana Congressmember McCrery who claims that McCrery was a liberal Democrat when in school, and it was only when he decided to run for Congress in a conservative district that he did a political 180°, re-registering as Republican, joining a Right-wing evangelical church and adopting a hard-Right stance against Queer rights and on other issues as well. Dick’s agenda is not to present the dilemma faced by his subjects in its real complexity; rather, under the guise of exposing “hypocrisy,” it’s to demonize them and get his audience not to understand them, but to hate them as much as he does.
That’s why the film contains some extraordinary scenes, including one in which a Queer interviewee asks how the wives of the homosexually active politicians handle being married to them and why they stay with them. (Probably for many of the same reasons Hillary Clinton has stayed with her husband despite his multiple adulteries with women.) This person then goes on to suggest that the wives should be getting regular STD screenings — a surprising endorsement of the homophobic idea that male-to-male sex is somehow dirtier than male-to-female sex and more likely to lead to infection. Actually it’s not that surprising when you realize that two of the people Dick presents as “heroes,” Signorile and Kramer, were strong supporters of an anti-sex movement in the New York Queer community in the mid-1990’s that, ostensibly to prevent the spread of AIDS, sought to close all public sex locations and actively lobbied the police department to shut down bathhouses and public cruising areas, either by undercover entrapments or open raids.
Dick’s choices of “good guys” among Queer politicians and activists are equally troublesome. He presents former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, Massachusetts Congressmember Barney Frank and former Arizona Congressmember Jim Kolbe on the “good” side of his moral ledger and totally ignores the fact that both Frank and McGreevey were dragged out of the closet by scandals. Frank was forced out after one of his boyfriends was caught running a rent-boy business out of the Congressmember’s office and using a taxpayer-funded phone line to do so. McGreevey was driven both out of the closet and out of office after a young man he was trying to seduce revealed that the governor had bribed him with a government job to have sex with him. In forgiving his “good guys” like Frank and McGreevey despite their clearly improper, and likely illegal, behavior, while lambasting his “bad guys” (though, of all his “outing” victims, Craig is the only one who openly broke the law), Dick, under the guise of exposing hypocrisy, is really perpetrating hypocrisy.
Another one of the film’s “good guys” is Dan Gurley, former North Carolina field director for the Republican National Committee (in which capacity he once mailed a postcard to churchgoers in Southern states saying that Democrats would take away their Bibles and turn their states over to homosexuals) and now active with Equality California. One person that’s missing from the movie is former Congressmember Mark Foley (R-Florida), despite the national scandal surrounding his exposure in 2006 for sexually harassing male Congressional pages and sending them disgustingly lubricious e-mails. Dick told an interviewer for the Evening Spot blog that the reason he left out Foley was, “Mark Foley initially had some anti-Gay votes he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, like three quarters of the Congress, but very soon after that, even though he was quasi-closeted, he had a very good pro-Gay voting record.” Dick’s attitude towards Gurley and Foley is a grim indication of the film’s (and the filmmaker’s) ideological agenda. He wants closeted Gay Republicans not only to stop being closeted but to stop being Republicans — or at least stop being conservatives.
He may not get his wish. One person he briefly interviewed is self-proclaimed Gay conservative and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, who’s become a role model for a new generation of Queer Rightists, some of whom have gone farther towards Right-wing orthodoxy than he has. San Diego is the home of City Councilmember Carl DeMaio, who instead of hiding in the closet has said, basically, “I’m Gay. So what? I really want to talk about the city budget and all the cuts I want to make to balance it.” It’s also the base of openly Gay Right-wing talk-show host Steve Yuhas, who was driven from the local Queer press for his inconvenient politics and now holds forth every Sunday night with a show expressing why he doesn’t think he should be expected to toe a liberal-Left line on both Queer and non-Queer issues just because his romantic and sexual interests lie with men. The American Right has long fought charges of racism and sexism by actively recruiting women and people of color to join its ranks — Phyllis Schlafly, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Armstrong Williams, Alan Keyes — and now it’s fighting back against accusations of homophobia by recruiting Right-wing Queers and giving them political and media exposure.
Whatever can be said against Outrage, the fact is that Kirby Dick is a master documentarian who has made a compelling movie. He’s done a good enough job of making his case that most of the reviewers have accepted his film at face value and not raised the questions I have above — namely, to what extent is “outing” carefully selected Right-wing Queer politicians driven by an ideological agenda that says Queers in public life have to believe, and work for, a strong set of liberal-Left values, including ideas with which they may not be comfortable? Also, to what extent does “outing” buy into the negative image of homosexuality its advocates say they’re trying to fight? As much as they say (in the film and elsewhere) that they’re not seeking to punish the “outed” for their homosexuality — only their “hypocrisy”— it’s a distinction that will be lost on many straight viewers of this movie who will see the “outers” as a group of unsmiling fanatics imposing ideological conformity on Queer politicians by threatening to embarrass them publicly over their sexual orientation if they don’t comply.
As much as I ordinarily can’t stand Andrew Sullivan, he really spoke for me when he said in this film that above all the Queer community should be a place where its members can feel protected and where their privacy can be respected. The film includes an archival clip of the late Harvey Milk urging Queer people to come out — but I really doubt that Milk meant that they should be dragged out forcibly; rather, he wanted to make people aware that both their community and they as individuals would be better off if they did so voluntarily. “Outing” strikes at the heart of our community; instead of watching each other’s backs and protecting each other against law-enforcement abuses and both Queer and straight predators, the vision of “outing” is one of a self-appointed group of ideological commissars imposing intellectual discipline on Queer public figures and saying, “Do what we want — or else.” You should definitely go see Dick’s film — but you should watch it with a critical eye and debate these issues on your way out of the theatre instead of uncritically accepting his black-and-white vision of them.
Outrage is tentatively scheduled to open Friday, June 5 at the Landmark Cinemas Hillcrest, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
The Keyhole (Warners, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards we watched The Keyhole, a 1933 Warners melodrama that began powerfully — with a middle-aged roué type named Maurice Le Brun (Monroe Owsley) in a little room, reviewing his scrapbook of press clippings about his former days as a professional dancer with a partner named Valentine, whom he’d married. The camera dollies to a bottle of poison that Maurice is about to drink, and then the film cuts to his suicide note, which is in the hands of Valentine, who left show business and is now known as Ann Vallée Brooks (Kay Francis), wife of multi-millionaire tycoon Schuyler Brooks (Henry Kolker).
Valentine meets Maurice in the room and learns that he hasn’t killed himself yet — he just drank milk instead of the poison and awaited her arrival — and though she had previously given him $10,000 as a settlement if he agreed to arrange for their divorce, she now learns that he never divorced her (which means they’re still legally married and her golddigger marriage to Schuyler Brooks is invalid on grounds of bigamy) and is demanding $50,000. She’s unable to raise that much money without help and she’s afraid to go to her husband for it, so she connects with Schuyler’s sister Portia (Helen Ware), and the two agree that Portia will put up the money and Ann will go to Havana to meet Maurice, pay him off and get the divorce at last.
Meanwhile, Schuyler has got suspicious of his wife’s absences — when she sneaked out to visit Maurice, Schuyler understandably suspected her of having an affair — so he hires a private-detective agency headed by J. Weems (Clarence Wilson, the marvelous villain from the W. C. Fields/Alison Skipworth movie Tillie and Gus), and Weems hires his top operative, Neil Davis (George Brent), to shadow Ann on her Havana trip — and in order to keep track of her he starts dating her, and sure enough love blossoms and by the end of the film they’re in love, Maurice is conveniently dead, Schuyler Brooks is a faraway memory and Neil and Ann are together as the camera zooms out through a keyhole — mirroring the opening shot that went through a keyhole to reveal Maurice in his room about to entrap the heroine into his blackmail scheme by luring her with the threat of suicide. (In a nicely mordant line by screenwriter Robert Presnell, co-author of Meet John Doe — adapting a story called “Adventuress” by Alice Duer Miller, author of Roberta! — Ann leaves Maurice with the words, “And the next time you try to kill yourself, let me know; I’d love to help you.”)
Directed stylishly by Michael Curtiz, The Keyhole is a perfectly nice soap opera that would have benefited from a stronger leading man than Brent (like William Powell, maybe?) but nonetheless manages to make an effect despite an almost unbearably predictable and clichéd plot; once you realize that hot, sexy George Brent (at least we’re supposed to believe he was hot and sexy, and apparently more than one of his leading ladies, including Bette Davis, thought that way about him in real life even though he’s never done much for me) is being assigned to tail Kay Francis you could practically write the rest of it yourself, and the subplot involving yet another golddigger, Dot (Glenda Farrell, marvelous as usual), vamping Davis’s comic-relief sidekick Hank Wales (Allen Jenkins in a role that expresses him in all his total Allen Jenkins-ness) only to dump him in the proverbial heartbeat once she realizes he’s a detective, is more interesting than the main intrigue.
Afterwards we watched The Keyhole, a 1933 Warners melodrama that began powerfully — with a middle-aged roué type named Maurice Le Brun (Monroe Owsley) in a little room, reviewing his scrapbook of press clippings about his former days as a professional dancer with a partner named Valentine, whom he’d married. The camera dollies to a bottle of poison that Maurice is about to drink, and then the film cuts to his suicide note, which is in the hands of Valentine, who left show business and is now known as Ann Vallée Brooks (Kay Francis), wife of multi-millionaire tycoon Schuyler Brooks (Henry Kolker).
Valentine meets Maurice in the room and learns that he hasn’t killed himself yet — he just drank milk instead of the poison and awaited her arrival — and though she had previously given him $10,000 as a settlement if he agreed to arrange for their divorce, she now learns that he never divorced her (which means they’re still legally married and her golddigger marriage to Schuyler Brooks is invalid on grounds of bigamy) and is demanding $50,000. She’s unable to raise that much money without help and she’s afraid to go to her husband for it, so she connects with Schuyler’s sister Portia (Helen Ware), and the two agree that Portia will put up the money and Ann will go to Havana to meet Maurice, pay him off and get the divorce at last.
Meanwhile, Schuyler has got suspicious of his wife’s absences — when she sneaked out to visit Maurice, Schuyler understandably suspected her of having an affair — so he hires a private-detective agency headed by J. Weems (Clarence Wilson, the marvelous villain from the W. C. Fields/Alison Skipworth movie Tillie and Gus), and Weems hires his top operative, Neil Davis (George Brent), to shadow Ann on her Havana trip — and in order to keep track of her he starts dating her, and sure enough love blossoms and by the end of the film they’re in love, Maurice is conveniently dead, Schuyler Brooks is a faraway memory and Neil and Ann are together as the camera zooms out through a keyhole — mirroring the opening shot that went through a keyhole to reveal Maurice in his room about to entrap the heroine into his blackmail scheme by luring her with the threat of suicide. (In a nicely mordant line by screenwriter Robert Presnell, co-author of Meet John Doe — adapting a story called “Adventuress” by Alice Duer Miller, author of Roberta! — Ann leaves Maurice with the words, “And the next time you try to kill yourself, let me know; I’d love to help you.”)
Directed stylishly by Michael Curtiz, The Keyhole is a perfectly nice soap opera that would have benefited from a stronger leading man than Brent (like William Powell, maybe?) but nonetheless manages to make an effect despite an almost unbearably predictable and clichéd plot; once you realize that hot, sexy George Brent (at least we’re supposed to believe he was hot and sexy, and apparently more than one of his leading ladies, including Bette Davis, thought that way about him in real life even though he’s never done much for me) is being assigned to tail Kay Francis you could practically write the rest of it yourself, and the subplot involving yet another golddigger, Dot (Glenda Farrell, marvelous as usual), vamping Davis’s comic-relief sidekick Hank Wales (Allen Jenkins in a role that expresses him in all his total Allen Jenkins-ness) only to dump him in the proverbial heartbeat once she realizes he’s a detective, is more interesting than the main intrigue.
Time of the Apes (Tsuburaya Productions/Sandy Frank Productions
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ran the rest of the movie we’d started to watch the night before and burned out on: Time of the Apes, a Japanese production from 1987 that shamelessly ripped off Planet of the Apes — a woman and two children stumble into a cryogenic chamber just when an earthquake hits Japan and when they awaken, they’re in the future and apes rule the world while humans have become an oppressed minority. (It’s not clear how many years have elapsed, but the apes drive the same sorts of cars the human rulers of the world were driving in our own time.) We were watching the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of this, but that wasn’t as much help as you’d think; the film’s actual dialogue (dubbed into English, atrociously as usual) sounded every bit as silly as the MST3K crew’s snarky riffs on it; the costumes of the actors playing apes looked like the producers had raided a Hallowe’en store for Planet of the Apes-themed trick-or-treat costumes; and about the only appealing element this film had to offer was a surprisingly hot-looking guy, Tetsuya Ushio, as Gôdo, leader of the human resistance movement to the apes’ control.
Charles and I ran the rest of the movie we’d started to watch the night before and burned out on: Time of the Apes, a Japanese production from 1987 that shamelessly ripped off Planet of the Apes — a woman and two children stumble into a cryogenic chamber just when an earthquake hits Japan and when they awaken, they’re in the future and apes rule the world while humans have become an oppressed minority. (It’s not clear how many years have elapsed, but the apes drive the same sorts of cars the human rulers of the world were driving in our own time.) We were watching the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of this, but that wasn’t as much help as you’d think; the film’s actual dialogue (dubbed into English, atrociously as usual) sounded every bit as silly as the MST3K crew’s snarky riffs on it; the costumes of the actors playing apes looked like the producers had raided a Hallowe’en store for Planet of the Apes-themed trick-or-treat costumes; and about the only appealing element this film had to offer was a surprisingly hot-looking guy, Tetsuya Ushio, as Gôdo, leader of the human resistance movement to the apes’ control.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Mystery Liner (Monogram, 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a 1934 movie called Mystery Liner that had looked interesting on the TCM schedule (“An Army major tries to catch enemy agents on an ocean liner”) but turned out to be pretty much a misfire and a sad waste of a provocative story premise. The story originated from British writer Edgar Wallace and was originally published as “The Ghost of John Holling” in the March 8, 1924 Saturday Evening Post. The film was made towards the end of the first incarnation of Monogram Pictures, which had been a minor independent called Rayart (after its founder and owner, W. Ray Johnston) in the silent era and had reorganized as Monogram in the early sound era. It made some quite estimable films, including the 1933 proto-noirs Sensation Hunters and The Phantom Broadcast and the first sound version of Jane Eyre in 1934 (with Colin Clive as Rochester and Virginia Bruce as Jane — and Bruce far out-acted Joan Fontaine in the 1943 remake for 20th-Century Fox), but in 1935 Johnston agreed to merge his company with Mascot Pictures owner Herbert Yates to form Republic.
Within two years Johnston was tired of working with Yates, and he pulled out of Republic and reorganized Monogram — only instead of at least occasionally going for quality on a low budget, the new Monogram made mostly tacky, dreary movies and spent so little on them that frequently one fears for the actors’ safety, expecting the sets to fall on them at any moment. Mystery Liner was a product of Monogram 1.0 but has quite a lot of the tackier aspects of Monogram 2.0, starting with the director, William Nigh, who had made some semi-major films in the silent era and had worked with at least two of the A-listers of the day — Mary Pickford and Lon Chaney — but because he plunged into the stock market during the boom and lost it all in the crash, he was forced to take whatever assignments he could grab for most of the rest of his life.
The plot is intriguing: Professor Grimson (Ralph Lewis) has invented an elaborate computer that can be used to drive a ship by remote control (an interesting parallel to the drone aircraft being used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Pakistan today). To make it work, it needs a vacuum tube called S-505 that plugs into the unit on board the ship and establishes a wireless connection with the computer back in the ship’s home port. The ship chosen to test S-505 on is the ocean liner Guthrie, whose captain, John Holling (Noah Beery, Wallace Beery’s brother and a major silent-era star in his own right, most famous for Paramount’s 1926 epic Old Ironsides), has just gone through a nervous breakdown. One minute he’s perfectly lucid, the next he’s going crazy and denouncing Professor Grimson and his assistants for trying to take his ship away from him — and when Grimson is found incapacitated and almost killed on the morning the ship is scheduled to sail (he’s been strangled with a rope tied with a knot only a sailor would know), Holling is the prime suspect. (Peculiarly, Noah Beery is top-billed even though his character appears in only two scenes.)
Downey, the chief mate, assumes command of the ship — though presumably S-505 and the home-port computer it’s attached to (which looks like Monogram’s plot department made it out of an immense amount of radio gear and powered it with some of Kenneth Strickfaden’s cool lab equipment from the Frankenstein films), with Watson (John Maurice Sullivan), the late Professor Grimson’s assistant, assuming control of the computer on shore. Watson hires Major Pope (Edwin Maxwell, who seems to be channeling Edward Arnold) to serve as a private detective on board ship and investigate the murder, and there are also two other characters: a dotty old society woman, Mrs. Plimpton (Zeffie Tilbury) and an equally dotty German, Count Von Kessling (Gustav von Seyffertitz, who in 1922 had played Moriarty to John Barrymore’s Sherlock Holmes), who seem at first to be just a comic-relief couple — and Tilbury, though she’s a bit overbearing at first, eventually pretty much steals the movie. Also worthy is Astrid Allyn playing a woman whose connection to the enterprise is pretty sketchy for most of the movie but who at least for once gets to play an ingénue instead of the villainess she usually had to portray — and does so quite well, with a cool efficiency but still evoking the sympathy and likeability her character is supposed to engender in us.
That’s about all the good news, though; any genuine excitement, suspense or thrills in Wallace’s loopy story (scripted by someone named Wellyn Totman) is vitiated by the slow, stately pace of Nigh’s direction. Nigh ruined a lot of potentially good films in Monogram’s second iteration, too, and while this one isn’t quite as bad as those (at least the sets look reassuringly solid and Archie Stout’s cinematography, though straightforward, is luminous, well-polished and decently lit), it’s just dull, dull, dull. Nigh has the actors speaking so slowly, and pausing so carefully between hearing their cue and speaking their own line, that much of Mystery Liner seems like a film from 1929 instead of 1934. Also there’s virtually no background music — though given the lousy stock scores available to Monogram, that may not be altogether a bad thing — and whatever entertainment potential this story may have had is grimly sucked out of it by the stately pacing and the almost total lack of action, while the final resolution (Major Pope, supposedly the detective, is really the murderer; and Count Von Kessling, supposedly a dotty comic-relief character, is really the detective — a denouement that seems ripped off from Mary Roberts Reinhart’s The Bat) seems tacked on and by the time we get there this boring little 62-minute movie has worn us down so much we hardly care.
Charles and I watched a 1934 movie called Mystery Liner that had looked interesting on the TCM schedule (“An Army major tries to catch enemy agents on an ocean liner”) but turned out to be pretty much a misfire and a sad waste of a provocative story premise. The story originated from British writer Edgar Wallace and was originally published as “The Ghost of John Holling” in the March 8, 1924 Saturday Evening Post. The film was made towards the end of the first incarnation of Monogram Pictures, which had been a minor independent called Rayart (after its founder and owner, W. Ray Johnston) in the silent era and had reorganized as Monogram in the early sound era. It made some quite estimable films, including the 1933 proto-noirs Sensation Hunters and The Phantom Broadcast and the first sound version of Jane Eyre in 1934 (with Colin Clive as Rochester and Virginia Bruce as Jane — and Bruce far out-acted Joan Fontaine in the 1943 remake for 20th-Century Fox), but in 1935 Johnston agreed to merge his company with Mascot Pictures owner Herbert Yates to form Republic.
Within two years Johnston was tired of working with Yates, and he pulled out of Republic and reorganized Monogram — only instead of at least occasionally going for quality on a low budget, the new Monogram made mostly tacky, dreary movies and spent so little on them that frequently one fears for the actors’ safety, expecting the sets to fall on them at any moment. Mystery Liner was a product of Monogram 1.0 but has quite a lot of the tackier aspects of Monogram 2.0, starting with the director, William Nigh, who had made some semi-major films in the silent era and had worked with at least two of the A-listers of the day — Mary Pickford and Lon Chaney — but because he plunged into the stock market during the boom and lost it all in the crash, he was forced to take whatever assignments he could grab for most of the rest of his life.
The plot is intriguing: Professor Grimson (Ralph Lewis) has invented an elaborate computer that can be used to drive a ship by remote control (an interesting parallel to the drone aircraft being used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Pakistan today). To make it work, it needs a vacuum tube called S-505 that plugs into the unit on board the ship and establishes a wireless connection with the computer back in the ship’s home port. The ship chosen to test S-505 on is the ocean liner Guthrie, whose captain, John Holling (Noah Beery, Wallace Beery’s brother and a major silent-era star in his own right, most famous for Paramount’s 1926 epic Old Ironsides), has just gone through a nervous breakdown. One minute he’s perfectly lucid, the next he’s going crazy and denouncing Professor Grimson and his assistants for trying to take his ship away from him — and when Grimson is found incapacitated and almost killed on the morning the ship is scheduled to sail (he’s been strangled with a rope tied with a knot only a sailor would know), Holling is the prime suspect. (Peculiarly, Noah Beery is top-billed even though his character appears in only two scenes.)
Downey, the chief mate, assumes command of the ship — though presumably S-505 and the home-port computer it’s attached to (which looks like Monogram’s plot department made it out of an immense amount of radio gear and powered it with some of Kenneth Strickfaden’s cool lab equipment from the Frankenstein films), with Watson (John Maurice Sullivan), the late Professor Grimson’s assistant, assuming control of the computer on shore. Watson hires Major Pope (Edwin Maxwell, who seems to be channeling Edward Arnold) to serve as a private detective on board ship and investigate the murder, and there are also two other characters: a dotty old society woman, Mrs. Plimpton (Zeffie Tilbury) and an equally dotty German, Count Von Kessling (Gustav von Seyffertitz, who in 1922 had played Moriarty to John Barrymore’s Sherlock Holmes), who seem at first to be just a comic-relief couple — and Tilbury, though she’s a bit overbearing at first, eventually pretty much steals the movie. Also worthy is Astrid Allyn playing a woman whose connection to the enterprise is pretty sketchy for most of the movie but who at least for once gets to play an ingénue instead of the villainess she usually had to portray — and does so quite well, with a cool efficiency but still evoking the sympathy and likeability her character is supposed to engender in us.
That’s about all the good news, though; any genuine excitement, suspense or thrills in Wallace’s loopy story (scripted by someone named Wellyn Totman) is vitiated by the slow, stately pace of Nigh’s direction. Nigh ruined a lot of potentially good films in Monogram’s second iteration, too, and while this one isn’t quite as bad as those (at least the sets look reassuringly solid and Archie Stout’s cinematography, though straightforward, is luminous, well-polished and decently lit), it’s just dull, dull, dull. Nigh has the actors speaking so slowly, and pausing so carefully between hearing their cue and speaking their own line, that much of Mystery Liner seems like a film from 1929 instead of 1934. Also there’s virtually no background music — though given the lousy stock scores available to Monogram, that may not be altogether a bad thing — and whatever entertainment potential this story may have had is grimly sucked out of it by the stately pacing and the almost total lack of action, while the final resolution (Major Pope, supposedly the detective, is really the murderer; and Count Von Kessling, supposedly a dotty comic-relief character, is really the detective — a denouement that seems ripped off from Mary Roberts Reinhart’s The Bat) seems tacked on and by the time we get there this boring little 62-minute movie has worn us down so much we hardly care.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Benny Goodman: The Centennial Collection (RCA Bluebird, 2001)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran him the bonus DVD included with the Benny Goodman Centennial Collection CD, an odd mixture of film clips from 1937 to 1966. The first one was a clip of both the Goodman full band and his quartet — himself on clarinet, Lionel Hampton on vibes, Teddy Wilson on piano and Gene Krupa on drums — miming to the soundtrack recordings they’d made for the 1937 film Hollywood Hotel, though the footage was not from the movie but a much more plainly staged film introduced by Rudy Vallée from a short called Auld Lang Syne — A Tribute to Will Rogers. The appearance of Goodman’s interracial band in Hollywood Hotel, performing a medley of “I Got Rhythm” and a song especially written for the film called “I’ve Got a Heartful of Music,” was the first time white and Black musicians were shown playing together on screen — though Mae West had appeared with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in Belle of the Nineties three years earlier (and, much to the horror of the “suits” at Paramount, had insisted on being shown with Ellington’s African-American crew on camera — she didn’t have them hide behind a curtain or have white musicians mime to their recordings) — and, not surprisingly, the sequence was excised from prints shown in the South. The cover of the Goodman CD dates this clip from 1939, but it can’t be; Harry James is clearly visible playing a trumpet solo on one of the full-band songs (“Avalon” and “House Hop”), and he left in January 1939 to start his own band.
The next three clips are from what looks like a surprisingly interesting movie, The Powers Girl, made by Charles Rogers’ independent production company in 1942 and featuring three songs, “I Know That You Know” by a new Benny Goodman Quintet (Goodman, clarinet; Dave Barbour, electric guitar; Mel Powell, piano; probably Cliff Hill, bass; and Howard “Hud” Davies, drums) and “Roll ’Em” and “One O’Clock Jump” by the full band, in arrangements quite different from the RCA Victor recordings from 1937 and 1938. The most fascinating clip from this movie is “Roll ’Em,” which is supposedly being played by the Goodman band in an outdoor dance pavilion in a driving rainstorm — the band members are sheltered by a canopy but the audience, including some quite spectacular jitterbug dancers, are getting quite wet!
Afterwards the disc includes the trailer for the 1943 film The Gang’s All Here, which reunited Goodman and director Busby Berkeley from Hollywood Hotel and is probably the best film Goodman ever made — though the color, one of the film’s major selling points, is very badly faded on this trailer. Then there are two clips from the 1942 film Stage Door Canteen, including the great one of Peggy Lee singing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” as well as an instrumental version of “Bugle Call Rag” — the camerawork is pretty plain and the instrumental gets talked over by some of the actors, but it’s great to have these scenes, especially the young Peggy Lee in full vocal cry on the song that made her a star.
The next clip is a brief newsreel of the premiere of the 1955 biopic The Benny Goodman Story — and its principal interest is getting to see Goodman posing with Steve Allen, who played him in the film; Allen is visibly taller but otherwise they look uncannily alike. Then there’s a 1960 TV clip of “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” by a Goodman small group (by then virtually all of Goodman’s live performances were with small groups — he only put together big bands for special occasions like the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 or his tour of the Soviet Union in 1962) featuring the great Kenneth “Red” Norvo on vibes, and the show closes with clips from a documentary on the 1966 Belgian Jazz Festival that show Goodman rehearsing with an interracial band (though the footage is so badly faded color-wise that it’s all the color of café au lait and it’s virtually impossible to tell from what we see that Goodman is white and his trumpeter, Doc Cheatham, is Black — the way Cheatham has his hair processed to the point where it looks virtually lacquered onto his scalp doesn’t help either!), playing a blues to warm up and then rehearsing, and finally performing, a new original called “The Monk Swings” that — despite its Christian (or Buddhist) title — actually brings Gershwin back to his klezmer roots. (When klezmer had its brief burst of renewed popularity in the early 1980’s, I remember thinking the first time I heard any, “So that’s where Benny Goodman came from! All the parts of his style he didn’t rip off from the Black New Orleans clarinetists who’d come to Chicago, he got from the folk music of his own people — duh!”)
The last bit on the disc is a so-called “audio interview with Benny Goodman” which I had high hopes for because the Duke Ellington package in this same series had included a fascinating interview from 1941 in which Ellington talked about his rehearsal practices (he said he only rehearsed the band when there was a piece of new material they needed to learn; otherwise, they practiced on the job) and paid tribute to his newly hired arranger, Billy Strayhorn. Alas, the Goodman “interview” is merely about a minute of him from a radio show on which he’d served as a guest D.J. The whole package of clips is fascinating in its way, and some of the music shows Goodman at his very best (alas, a narrator talks over a chunk of “The Monk Swings,” which otherwise sounds like quite a good composition and a real departure from what people expected of Benny Goodman in 1966), but visually these clips simply aren’t as interesting as the ones from the Ellington disc — quite possibly reflecting Ellington’s lifelong interest in the visual arts; though he wasn’t credited as director or designer of any of his short films, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Ellington had been involved in the visual aspect, since the Ellington band shorts are generally quite interesting visually and “push the envelope” of how the big bands were shown on film just as Ellington’s music pushed the envelope of how big-band music was supposed to sound. (I’ve joked before about how the origin of the swing era was the great Black bandleader/arranger Fletcher Henderson, whose charts formed the foundation of the book of the band that made Goodman a star, evolving the rules by which swing music would be played — and Ellington following right behind him and figuring out creative ways to break them all.)
The Centennial Collection celebrated the centennial of Victor Records, not of any of the musicians involved, and the other entries in the series included Coleman Hawkins, Glenn Miller, Fats Waller and Artie Shaw — and the Shaw one would be especially nice to have because, while Goodman looked like a Jewish accountant all his life, Shaw was a hunk, and it’s easy to see from his film appearances how he got movie stars like Lana Turner and Ava Gardner to marry him.
I ran him the bonus DVD included with the Benny Goodman Centennial Collection CD, an odd mixture of film clips from 1937 to 1966. The first one was a clip of both the Goodman full band and his quartet — himself on clarinet, Lionel Hampton on vibes, Teddy Wilson on piano and Gene Krupa on drums — miming to the soundtrack recordings they’d made for the 1937 film Hollywood Hotel, though the footage was not from the movie but a much more plainly staged film introduced by Rudy Vallée from a short called Auld Lang Syne — A Tribute to Will Rogers. The appearance of Goodman’s interracial band in Hollywood Hotel, performing a medley of “I Got Rhythm” and a song especially written for the film called “I’ve Got a Heartful of Music,” was the first time white and Black musicians were shown playing together on screen — though Mae West had appeared with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in Belle of the Nineties three years earlier (and, much to the horror of the “suits” at Paramount, had insisted on being shown with Ellington’s African-American crew on camera — she didn’t have them hide behind a curtain or have white musicians mime to their recordings) — and, not surprisingly, the sequence was excised from prints shown in the South. The cover of the Goodman CD dates this clip from 1939, but it can’t be; Harry James is clearly visible playing a trumpet solo on one of the full-band songs (“Avalon” and “House Hop”), and he left in January 1939 to start his own band.
The next three clips are from what looks like a surprisingly interesting movie, The Powers Girl, made by Charles Rogers’ independent production company in 1942 and featuring three songs, “I Know That You Know” by a new Benny Goodman Quintet (Goodman, clarinet; Dave Barbour, electric guitar; Mel Powell, piano; probably Cliff Hill, bass; and Howard “Hud” Davies, drums) and “Roll ’Em” and “One O’Clock Jump” by the full band, in arrangements quite different from the RCA Victor recordings from 1937 and 1938. The most fascinating clip from this movie is “Roll ’Em,” which is supposedly being played by the Goodman band in an outdoor dance pavilion in a driving rainstorm — the band members are sheltered by a canopy but the audience, including some quite spectacular jitterbug dancers, are getting quite wet!
Afterwards the disc includes the trailer for the 1943 film The Gang’s All Here, which reunited Goodman and director Busby Berkeley from Hollywood Hotel and is probably the best film Goodman ever made — though the color, one of the film’s major selling points, is very badly faded on this trailer. Then there are two clips from the 1942 film Stage Door Canteen, including the great one of Peggy Lee singing “Why Don’t You Do Right?” as well as an instrumental version of “Bugle Call Rag” — the camerawork is pretty plain and the instrumental gets talked over by some of the actors, but it’s great to have these scenes, especially the young Peggy Lee in full vocal cry on the song that made her a star.
The next clip is a brief newsreel of the premiere of the 1955 biopic The Benny Goodman Story — and its principal interest is getting to see Goodman posing with Steve Allen, who played him in the film; Allen is visibly taller but otherwise they look uncannily alike. Then there’s a 1960 TV clip of “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” by a Goodman small group (by then virtually all of Goodman’s live performances were with small groups — he only put together big bands for special occasions like the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 or his tour of the Soviet Union in 1962) featuring the great Kenneth “Red” Norvo on vibes, and the show closes with clips from a documentary on the 1966 Belgian Jazz Festival that show Goodman rehearsing with an interracial band (though the footage is so badly faded color-wise that it’s all the color of café au lait and it’s virtually impossible to tell from what we see that Goodman is white and his trumpeter, Doc Cheatham, is Black — the way Cheatham has his hair processed to the point where it looks virtually lacquered onto his scalp doesn’t help either!), playing a blues to warm up and then rehearsing, and finally performing, a new original called “The Monk Swings” that — despite its Christian (or Buddhist) title — actually brings Gershwin back to his klezmer roots. (When klezmer had its brief burst of renewed popularity in the early 1980’s, I remember thinking the first time I heard any, “So that’s where Benny Goodman came from! All the parts of his style he didn’t rip off from the Black New Orleans clarinetists who’d come to Chicago, he got from the folk music of his own people — duh!”)
The last bit on the disc is a so-called “audio interview with Benny Goodman” which I had high hopes for because the Duke Ellington package in this same series had included a fascinating interview from 1941 in which Ellington talked about his rehearsal practices (he said he only rehearsed the band when there was a piece of new material they needed to learn; otherwise, they practiced on the job) and paid tribute to his newly hired arranger, Billy Strayhorn. Alas, the Goodman “interview” is merely about a minute of him from a radio show on which he’d served as a guest D.J. The whole package of clips is fascinating in its way, and some of the music shows Goodman at his very best (alas, a narrator talks over a chunk of “The Monk Swings,” which otherwise sounds like quite a good composition and a real departure from what people expected of Benny Goodman in 1966), but visually these clips simply aren’t as interesting as the ones from the Ellington disc — quite possibly reflecting Ellington’s lifelong interest in the visual arts; though he wasn’t credited as director or designer of any of his short films, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Ellington had been involved in the visual aspect, since the Ellington band shorts are generally quite interesting visually and “push the envelope” of how the big bands were shown on film just as Ellington’s music pushed the envelope of how big-band music was supposed to sound. (I’ve joked before about how the origin of the swing era was the great Black bandleader/arranger Fletcher Henderson, whose charts formed the foundation of the book of the band that made Goodman a star, evolving the rules by which swing music would be played — and Ellington following right behind him and figuring out creative ways to break them all.)
The Centennial Collection celebrated the centennial of Victor Records, not of any of the musicians involved, and the other entries in the series included Coleman Hawkins, Glenn Miller, Fats Waller and Artie Shaw — and the Shaw one would be especially nice to have because, while Goodman looked like a Jewish accountant all his life, Shaw was a hunk, and it’s easy to see from his film appearances how he got movie stars like Lana Turner and Ava Gardner to marry him.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Cheat (Paramount, 1915/1918)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we saw “live” on TCM last night was The Cheat, one of Cecil B. DeMille’s earliest films — though he’s credited as producer rather than director, it’s clear he directed it — a wild 1915 melodrama from the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, which was later absorbed into Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players studio and eventually assumed the name of the company that distributed both studios’ films, Paramount. (The titles for this version, a 1918 reissue, show both the Famous Players-Lasky and Paramount logos.) The star is Fannie Ward, a well-known stage actress of the day, and TCM was showing it mainly because of the villain, Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, whose only well-known credit today was as the Japanese prison camp commander in The Bridge on the River Kwai 42 years later.
A good deal of the interest in this film is being able to see what this very interesting actor looked like young, and also in terms of DeMille’s overall directorial style. He was the first director consciously to use half-shadow lighting in scenes — when his company’s sales manager, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), said exhibitors were complaining about how DeMille kept great chunks of the screen in darkness, DeMille told him, “If they’re too dumb to recognize Rembrandt lighting when they see it, to hell with them!” Accordingly, Goldwyn — who was nothing if not a born salesman — made “Rembrandt lighting” a selling point for DeMille’s pictures. One of the peculiar perplexes of DeMille’s career is how his technical skills as a director actually declined over his career — explained in the TCM documentary on him by the fact that his most personal, most “artistic” films were his only box-office flops, and he realized that if he was going to make it as a commercially successful filmmaker he shouldn’t bother with quality and should go all-out for sheer spectacle instead.
Fortunately, The Cheat was early enough in DeMille’s career that he felt he could go for broke with artistic visuals — including the marvelous use of silhouettes on the rice-paper walls of Hayakawa’s home — making this a dazzling-looking film that seems more like something from the film noir era than from 1915. Still, it’s dated not only by the fact that it’s a silent film, but also by the sheer loopy melodramatics of the plot — indeed, this film is so off-the-wall I had assumed it was a stage play that DeMille and his writers, Jeanie Macpherson (whom he worked with virtually his whole career) and Hector Turnbull, had adapted, and I was startled to find that (at least according to its imdb.com listing) it was actually an original.
Edith Hardy (Fannie Ward) is the wife of wealthy stockbroker Richard Hardy (played by Jack Dean, her real-life husband at the time — though he’s so doughy-looking, tall but ill-defined and with a really silly movie moustache, that heaven only knows what she saw in him off-screen). Jones (James Neill), a friend of theirs who’s really a con-artist, tries to get the Hardys to abandon their investment in the D & O company and buy United Copper. Richard has the good sense to ignore him, but Edith takes the plunge, stealing $10,000 she has collected as a fundraiser for the Red Cross and giving it to Jones to invest in United Copper. The very next day, she learns that United Copper has gone belly-up and she’s lost her entire investment overnight (maybe the plot of this movie isn’t so dated after all!) — and what’s worse, the Red Cross official she was working for as a fundraiser tells her that he’ll be presenting the $10,000 to representatives of the Belgian government for war relief the next day.
Unable to raise the money from her husband or anyone else (she’s overheard him tell someone that he couldn’t raise a dime at the moment), she turns to Haka Arakau (Sessue Hayakawa), a Burmese ivory merchant who’s been living in New York with an Asian houseboy (Yutaka Abe, who interestingly looks more visibly “Asian” than Hayakawa does!) and trying to crash white American society. (In the original 1915 release, Hayakawa’s character was called Hishuru Tori and was Japanese, as Hayakawa was himself, but the Japanese Association of Southern California complained to Paramount and so he was changed to a Burmese when the film was reissued in 1918.) We first see Arakau in his study with a pencil-length branding iron with which he is inscribing the bases of antique statuettes to show, as he explains to his houseboy, that “they belong to me.” After the writers have planted that clue for us big-time, we pick up the thread involving the white characters as Edith, having nowhere else to turn, comes to Arakau for the money — and he makes it clear (as clear as he could under the early days of movie censorship, anyway) that, like Baron Scarpia in Tosca, his price for helping out the heroine is her body.
She takes Arakau’s check, the Red Cross and the Belgians get their money, and the next day her husband’s investment in D & O comes in and she asks him for $10,000 so she can pay off Arakau and won’t have to Give Herself to Him. He’s not interested in money as a substitute, and in the scene from this film everyone who’s seen it remembers, he takes his little branding iron and inscribes his brand on her shoulder to show the world that … and when he advances on her to claim his “property,” she pulls out a gun and shoots him. Meanwhile, her husband, who’s traced her there, comes on the scene and goes to the bloody body of Arakau, gets his blood on his hands, then picks up the gun — and just then the police come in and arrest the husband for Arakau’s (almost) murder. “Almost” applies because it turns out Arakau, who spends most of the scene after he’s been shot flapping around like a fish literally out of water, survives his wound and lives to testify at Richard Hardy’s trial. Mr. Hardy is found guilty of attempted murder after both he and Arakau insist that he was the shooter, but the sight of her husband’s conviction and imminent prison sentence unhinges Edith, who announces in court that she is the killer and, to show off her motive, pulls her dress down off her shoulder and reveals Arakau’s brand. The court sets aside the verdict and rules that Edith shot Arakau in self-defense, the rather stupid white couple get back together and Arakau presumably slinks back to Burma to make more money off ivory.
The open racism of this plot, while not quite as bothersome as that of The Birth of a Nation, is still pretty raw — especially since for much of the film Arakau comes off as the most sympathetic character, a man of genuine refinement and culture amidst a bunch of white people seemingly motivated only by greed. For most of the movie Hayakawa wears Western dress and doesn't look particularly “Asian” — it’s only in his attempted seduction of the heroine that he’s shown wearing classic Asian garb, an obvious symbol of his primitive, creepy “Yellow Peril” nature coming out under the guise of refinement and culture, and for this scene they might have accentuated the makeup around his eyes to make them even more slanted than nature did.
The acting in The Cheat is generally surprisingly good for a film made in 1915 and featuring a stage actress as star; most of Ward’s gestures are restrained, though in her two big scenes (when she realizes she's lost all her money and when she shoots Arakau rather than have sex with him) she suddenly lapses into the stagy, obvious gestures that were the stock-in-trade of most actors on stage as well as in films at the time. Hayakawa’s performance is also chillingly restrained, though in the only other significant part Jack Dean flops around and does some of the phony gestures most people who haven’t seen a silent film start-to-finish think all silent-era actors used — still, it’s clear that DeMille at this stage in his career still gave a damn how his actors performed and used his power as director to tone them down. The Cheat was remade in the early 1930’s (that version is in a boxed set of pre-Code Paramounts recently released by Universal Home Video that is definitely on my want list) and, if someone could find a way to work around the racist elements of the plot, it could probably be updated for a modern remake as well — certainly the desperation of people in the investment business suddenly losing all their money and susceptible to all manner of schemes to get it back is a quite credible motivator for fiction in today’s economy!
The film we saw “live” on TCM last night was The Cheat, one of Cecil B. DeMille’s earliest films — though he’s credited as producer rather than director, it’s clear he directed it — a wild 1915 melodrama from the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, which was later absorbed into Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players studio and eventually assumed the name of the company that distributed both studios’ films, Paramount. (The titles for this version, a 1918 reissue, show both the Famous Players-Lasky and Paramount logos.) The star is Fannie Ward, a well-known stage actress of the day, and TCM was showing it mainly because of the villain, Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, whose only well-known credit today was as the Japanese prison camp commander in The Bridge on the River Kwai 42 years later.
A good deal of the interest in this film is being able to see what this very interesting actor looked like young, and also in terms of DeMille’s overall directorial style. He was the first director consciously to use half-shadow lighting in scenes — when his company’s sales manager, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), said exhibitors were complaining about how DeMille kept great chunks of the screen in darkness, DeMille told him, “If they’re too dumb to recognize Rembrandt lighting when they see it, to hell with them!” Accordingly, Goldwyn — who was nothing if not a born salesman — made “Rembrandt lighting” a selling point for DeMille’s pictures. One of the peculiar perplexes of DeMille’s career is how his technical skills as a director actually declined over his career — explained in the TCM documentary on him by the fact that his most personal, most “artistic” films were his only box-office flops, and he realized that if he was going to make it as a commercially successful filmmaker he shouldn’t bother with quality and should go all-out for sheer spectacle instead.
Fortunately, The Cheat was early enough in DeMille’s career that he felt he could go for broke with artistic visuals — including the marvelous use of silhouettes on the rice-paper walls of Hayakawa’s home — making this a dazzling-looking film that seems more like something from the film noir era than from 1915. Still, it’s dated not only by the fact that it’s a silent film, but also by the sheer loopy melodramatics of the plot — indeed, this film is so off-the-wall I had assumed it was a stage play that DeMille and his writers, Jeanie Macpherson (whom he worked with virtually his whole career) and Hector Turnbull, had adapted, and I was startled to find that (at least according to its imdb.com listing) it was actually an original.
Edith Hardy (Fannie Ward) is the wife of wealthy stockbroker Richard Hardy (played by Jack Dean, her real-life husband at the time — though he’s so doughy-looking, tall but ill-defined and with a really silly movie moustache, that heaven only knows what she saw in him off-screen). Jones (James Neill), a friend of theirs who’s really a con-artist, tries to get the Hardys to abandon their investment in the D & O company and buy United Copper. Richard has the good sense to ignore him, but Edith takes the plunge, stealing $10,000 she has collected as a fundraiser for the Red Cross and giving it to Jones to invest in United Copper. The very next day, she learns that United Copper has gone belly-up and she’s lost her entire investment overnight (maybe the plot of this movie isn’t so dated after all!) — and what’s worse, the Red Cross official she was working for as a fundraiser tells her that he’ll be presenting the $10,000 to representatives of the Belgian government for war relief the next day.
Unable to raise the money from her husband or anyone else (she’s overheard him tell someone that he couldn’t raise a dime at the moment), she turns to Haka Arakau (Sessue Hayakawa), a Burmese ivory merchant who’s been living in New York with an Asian houseboy (Yutaka Abe, who interestingly looks more visibly “Asian” than Hayakawa does!) and trying to crash white American society. (In the original 1915 release, Hayakawa’s character was called Hishuru Tori and was Japanese, as Hayakawa was himself, but the Japanese Association of Southern California complained to Paramount and so he was changed to a Burmese when the film was reissued in 1918.) We first see Arakau in his study with a pencil-length branding iron with which he is inscribing the bases of antique statuettes to show, as he explains to his houseboy, that “they belong to me.” After the writers have planted that clue for us big-time, we pick up the thread involving the white characters as Edith, having nowhere else to turn, comes to Arakau for the money — and he makes it clear (as clear as he could under the early days of movie censorship, anyway) that, like Baron Scarpia in Tosca, his price for helping out the heroine is her body.
She takes Arakau’s check, the Red Cross and the Belgians get their money, and the next day her husband’s investment in D & O comes in and she asks him for $10,000 so she can pay off Arakau and won’t have to Give Herself to Him. He’s not interested in money as a substitute, and in the scene from this film everyone who’s seen it remembers, he takes his little branding iron and inscribes his brand on her shoulder to show the world that … and when he advances on her to claim his “property,” she pulls out a gun and shoots him. Meanwhile, her husband, who’s traced her there, comes on the scene and goes to the bloody body of Arakau, gets his blood on his hands, then picks up the gun — and just then the police come in and arrest the husband for Arakau’s (almost) murder. “Almost” applies because it turns out Arakau, who spends most of the scene after he’s been shot flapping around like a fish literally out of water, survives his wound and lives to testify at Richard Hardy’s trial. Mr. Hardy is found guilty of attempted murder after both he and Arakau insist that he was the shooter, but the sight of her husband’s conviction and imminent prison sentence unhinges Edith, who announces in court that she is the killer and, to show off her motive, pulls her dress down off her shoulder and reveals Arakau’s brand. The court sets aside the verdict and rules that Edith shot Arakau in self-defense, the rather stupid white couple get back together and Arakau presumably slinks back to Burma to make more money off ivory.
The open racism of this plot, while not quite as bothersome as that of The Birth of a Nation, is still pretty raw — especially since for much of the film Arakau comes off as the most sympathetic character, a man of genuine refinement and culture amidst a bunch of white people seemingly motivated only by greed. For most of the movie Hayakawa wears Western dress and doesn't look particularly “Asian” — it’s only in his attempted seduction of the heroine that he’s shown wearing classic Asian garb, an obvious symbol of his primitive, creepy “Yellow Peril” nature coming out under the guise of refinement and culture, and for this scene they might have accentuated the makeup around his eyes to make them even more slanted than nature did.
The acting in The Cheat is generally surprisingly good for a film made in 1915 and featuring a stage actress as star; most of Ward’s gestures are restrained, though in her two big scenes (when she realizes she's lost all her money and when she shoots Arakau rather than have sex with him) she suddenly lapses into the stagy, obvious gestures that were the stock-in-trade of most actors on stage as well as in films at the time. Hayakawa’s performance is also chillingly restrained, though in the only other significant part Jack Dean flops around and does some of the phony gestures most people who haven’t seen a silent film start-to-finish think all silent-era actors used — still, it’s clear that DeMille at this stage in his career still gave a damn how his actors performed and used his power as director to tone them down. The Cheat was remade in the early 1930’s (that version is in a boxed set of pre-Code Paramounts recently released by Universal Home Video that is definitely on my want list) and, if someone could find a way to work around the racist elements of the plot, it could probably be updated for a modern remake as well — certainly the desperation of people in the investment business suddenly losing all their money and susceptible to all manner of schemes to get it back is a quite credible motivator for fiction in today’s economy!
Island of Doomed Men (Columbia, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Island of Doomed Men, a 1940 Columbia “B” I’d recently recorded off TCM as part of a night-long tribute to Peter Lorre that also encompassed two of his big mid-1940’s Warners melodramas, Three Strangers and The Verdict. Lorre’s film career began vividly (and indelibly) with the 1931 Fritz Lang thriller M — which he shot in Berlin while simultaneously appearing on stage in Bertolt Brecht’s satirical farce A Man’s a Man (he made the film by day and acted in the play at night) — and his initial foray into the English-speaking film world produced great movies like Hitchcock’s first The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The Secret Agent (1936), Josef von Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment (1935) and Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935), Lorre’s U.S. debut.
After that, however, his popularity faded and he latched on to the Mr. Moto series at 20th Century-Fox as a way of keeping himself busy — and when that ended abruptly in 1939 he was reduced to making “B” movies at Columbia, RKO and wherever else would have him. Some of the “B” movies Lorre made around this period were genuinely interesting, including Stranger on the Third Floor (RKO, 1940) — though Lorre’s part is a ludicrously transparent psycho killer and the film’s interest lies in the plot thread of the innocent man (John McGuire) convicted and sentenced to death for one of Lorre’s murders — and The Face Behind the Mask (Columbia, 1941), which cast him in a rare sympathetic role in which he was quite good.
Alas, Island of Doomed Men isn’t one of Lorre’s good movies from this period; it’s the old chestnut about the sinister entrepreneur who runs an island and requisitions ex-cons up for parole to serve as his slave laborers, and the good guy — here, Robert Wilcox (who’s neither attractive enough to be “A” leading man material nor a good enough actor or charismatic enough personality for that not to matter) as undercover federal agent Mark Sheldon. In the opening scene, Sheldon is assigned to get the goods on Stephen Danel (Lorre) — maybe that spelling is supposed to make him seem French, but what we actually hear on the soundtrack is “Donnell,” an oddly Anglo name for a Peter Lorre character! — who’s running his slave-labor camp on the so-called “Dead Man’s Island” off the coast of Florida.
Sheldon is supposed to contact fellow agent Jackson (Addison Richards) and work with him on the assignment — they have overlapping code numbers so they can identify each other, Jackson’s being “46” and Sheldon’s being “64” (I couldn’t help but joke, “Gee, James Bond gets a cool code number like ‘007,’ and what am I stuck with? ‘64’!”) — only as soon as Sheldon shows up in Jackson’s office and the two make the I.D., a sinister-looking man stands on the building’s fire escape, fires a gun at Jackson and dashes off. Jackson is killed and Sheldon picks up a gun off the floor and fires at the fleeing man, but misses him. At first we’re sure the killer was one of Danel’s minions, but in the next scene in another office in the same building we learn it’s Danel himself, as he quickly (too quickly) changes from the black suit he wore for the murder to a white one and talks to one of his underlings that they’ve set it up so one of the agents sent to get him is dead and the other has been framed for his murder. (That jarred because I kept thinking that a ballistics test — which did exist in 1940 — could have proved that Jackson was killed with a different gun from the one Shelton was holding when the police arrived, which seems to be the main piece of evidence against him — or were we supposed to believe that Danel had thrown his gun through the window after shooting Jackson and that was the gun Sheldon picked up and used to fire at Danel?)
The plot holes come fast and furious as Sheldon gets arrested and convicted for the murder, sent to prison, paroled and — sure enough — assigned to Danel’s island camp, where the entire installation is surrounded by an electrified fence and the prisoners are whipped regularly for whatever infractions against his rules Danel and his henchmen can dream up. (The imdb.com entry on this film lists “Shirtless Male Bondage” as one of its keywords.) About all the prisoners seem to be doing all day is breaking rocks on a chain gang à la I Am a Fugitive — one would think that Danel would be having his prisoners doing something that would actually bring him some money — and the main plot interest lies in Sheldon’s growing attraction to Mrs. Lorraine Danel (Rochelle Hudson, a sensitive actress who gets more of a chance to shine here than she did in her two most famous credits, as Mae West’s protégée in She Done Him Wrong and W. C. Fields’ daughter in Poppy, even though she’s pretty evidently channeling her characterization from Mary Astor in The Hurricane) and his attempts to foment a rebellion by getting the guards to switch sides so they can get their hands on the huge diamonds Danel seems to have by the fistful. (Maybe that’s what the prisoners are supposed to be digging up on the rock gang, though we see no evidence of this.)
Island of Doomed Men lurches through the expected clichés to a resolution that makes no sense whatsoever (one minute Sheldon and Mrs. Danel are in the clutches of the unscrupulous convicts and guards — by this time Danel has already been killed with a knife in the back from his long-suffering house servant — and the next minute they’re flying back to the mainland, safe, sound and together), and what interest it has is the surprisingly inventive direction by Charles Barton — he and cinematographer Benjamin Cline work out some beautifully atmospheric shots in noirish half-light — and Lorre’s coolly understated performance as Danel. In a role that could easily have lent itself to eye-rolling villainy (and did from Lorre on other occasions), Lorre is chillingly restrained, able to convince us that he’s capable of wearing enough of a mask that parole authorities willingly send prisoners to him in the belief that he’s helping them rehabilitate (or that Lorraine was willing to marry thinking he’d be a good catch!), and even in his nastiest moments he hangs back enough to keep the character an evil man instead of an unmotivated monster.
It’s a pity a performance this good was wasted on a script this schlocky and clichéd (the writer, in case you’re interested, was Robert Hardy Andrews — this is a film that calls into question my general field theory that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers!); fortunately, better things awaited Lorre — like The Maltese Falcon, which in addition to its major boost to Humphrey Bogart’s career was also a major comeback for Lorre and set the stage for his impressive run at Warners in the 1940’s — though in the scene in which Rochelle Hudson sits at the piano and Lorre bids her play for him, I couldn’t help mashing together two of Lorre’s better-known films and saying, “Play it, Lorraine — play ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’!”
I ran Island of Doomed Men, a 1940 Columbia “B” I’d recently recorded off TCM as part of a night-long tribute to Peter Lorre that also encompassed two of his big mid-1940’s Warners melodramas, Three Strangers and The Verdict. Lorre’s film career began vividly (and indelibly) with the 1931 Fritz Lang thriller M — which he shot in Berlin while simultaneously appearing on stage in Bertolt Brecht’s satirical farce A Man’s a Man (he made the film by day and acted in the play at night) — and his initial foray into the English-speaking film world produced great movies like Hitchcock’s first The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The Secret Agent (1936), Josef von Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment (1935) and Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935), Lorre’s U.S. debut.
After that, however, his popularity faded and he latched on to the Mr. Moto series at 20th Century-Fox as a way of keeping himself busy — and when that ended abruptly in 1939 he was reduced to making “B” movies at Columbia, RKO and wherever else would have him. Some of the “B” movies Lorre made around this period were genuinely interesting, including Stranger on the Third Floor (RKO, 1940) — though Lorre’s part is a ludicrously transparent psycho killer and the film’s interest lies in the plot thread of the innocent man (John McGuire) convicted and sentenced to death for one of Lorre’s murders — and The Face Behind the Mask (Columbia, 1941), which cast him in a rare sympathetic role in which he was quite good.
Alas, Island of Doomed Men isn’t one of Lorre’s good movies from this period; it’s the old chestnut about the sinister entrepreneur who runs an island and requisitions ex-cons up for parole to serve as his slave laborers, and the good guy — here, Robert Wilcox (who’s neither attractive enough to be “A” leading man material nor a good enough actor or charismatic enough personality for that not to matter) as undercover federal agent Mark Sheldon. In the opening scene, Sheldon is assigned to get the goods on Stephen Danel (Lorre) — maybe that spelling is supposed to make him seem French, but what we actually hear on the soundtrack is “Donnell,” an oddly Anglo name for a Peter Lorre character! — who’s running his slave-labor camp on the so-called “Dead Man’s Island” off the coast of Florida.
Sheldon is supposed to contact fellow agent Jackson (Addison Richards) and work with him on the assignment — they have overlapping code numbers so they can identify each other, Jackson’s being “46” and Sheldon’s being “64” (I couldn’t help but joke, “Gee, James Bond gets a cool code number like ‘007,’ and what am I stuck with? ‘64’!”) — only as soon as Sheldon shows up in Jackson’s office and the two make the I.D., a sinister-looking man stands on the building’s fire escape, fires a gun at Jackson and dashes off. Jackson is killed and Sheldon picks up a gun off the floor and fires at the fleeing man, but misses him. At first we’re sure the killer was one of Danel’s minions, but in the next scene in another office in the same building we learn it’s Danel himself, as he quickly (too quickly) changes from the black suit he wore for the murder to a white one and talks to one of his underlings that they’ve set it up so one of the agents sent to get him is dead and the other has been framed for his murder. (That jarred because I kept thinking that a ballistics test — which did exist in 1940 — could have proved that Jackson was killed with a different gun from the one Shelton was holding when the police arrived, which seems to be the main piece of evidence against him — or were we supposed to believe that Danel had thrown his gun through the window after shooting Jackson and that was the gun Sheldon picked up and used to fire at Danel?)
The plot holes come fast and furious as Sheldon gets arrested and convicted for the murder, sent to prison, paroled and — sure enough — assigned to Danel’s island camp, where the entire installation is surrounded by an electrified fence and the prisoners are whipped regularly for whatever infractions against his rules Danel and his henchmen can dream up. (The imdb.com entry on this film lists “Shirtless Male Bondage” as one of its keywords.) About all the prisoners seem to be doing all day is breaking rocks on a chain gang à la I Am a Fugitive — one would think that Danel would be having his prisoners doing something that would actually bring him some money — and the main plot interest lies in Sheldon’s growing attraction to Mrs. Lorraine Danel (Rochelle Hudson, a sensitive actress who gets more of a chance to shine here than she did in her two most famous credits, as Mae West’s protégée in She Done Him Wrong and W. C. Fields’ daughter in Poppy, even though she’s pretty evidently channeling her characterization from Mary Astor in The Hurricane) and his attempts to foment a rebellion by getting the guards to switch sides so they can get their hands on the huge diamonds Danel seems to have by the fistful. (Maybe that’s what the prisoners are supposed to be digging up on the rock gang, though we see no evidence of this.)
Island of Doomed Men lurches through the expected clichés to a resolution that makes no sense whatsoever (one minute Sheldon and Mrs. Danel are in the clutches of the unscrupulous convicts and guards — by this time Danel has already been killed with a knife in the back from his long-suffering house servant — and the next minute they’re flying back to the mainland, safe, sound and together), and what interest it has is the surprisingly inventive direction by Charles Barton — he and cinematographer Benjamin Cline work out some beautifully atmospheric shots in noirish half-light — and Lorre’s coolly understated performance as Danel. In a role that could easily have lent itself to eye-rolling villainy (and did from Lorre on other occasions), Lorre is chillingly restrained, able to convince us that he’s capable of wearing enough of a mask that parole authorities willingly send prisoners to him in the belief that he’s helping them rehabilitate (or that Lorraine was willing to marry thinking he’d be a good catch!), and even in his nastiest moments he hangs back enough to keep the character an evil man instead of an unmotivated monster.
It’s a pity a performance this good was wasted on a script this schlocky and clichéd (the writer, in case you’re interested, was Robert Hardy Andrews — this is a film that calls into question my general field theory that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers!); fortunately, better things awaited Lorre — like The Maltese Falcon, which in addition to its major boost to Humphrey Bogart’s career was also a major comeback for Lorre and set the stage for his impressive run at Warners in the 1940’s — though in the scene in which Rochelle Hudson sits at the piano and Lorre bids her play for him, I couldn’t help mashing together two of Lorre’s better-known films and saying, “Play it, Lorraine — play ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’!”
The Obsession (LIfetime, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I also spent a good chunk of the morning watching a TV-movie I recently recorded from Lifetime, The Obsession (not to be confused with Obsessed, which was actually a better-than-average and genuinely clever Lifetime production which for the first half led us up the garden path and appeared to be about a woman stalking a well-known surgeon because he’d had an adulterous affair with her and then abandoned her, and only in the second half was it revealed that the woman was delusional and the affair had only existed in her head). This one was sort of The Climax meets Lolita: Deborah Matthews (Daphne Zuniga), a career-obsessed architect, is in the process of divorcing her husband Jason (Nels Lennarson, billed fifth — which seems oddly high since he only makes brief appearances at the beginning and end of the film) when the movie opens. She’s a busy architect and he’s already left town for a job on a boat in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico (it’s never quite made clear by writer Christopher Morro just what this job entails), and her daughter Erika (Elise Gatien) is upset that her parents have finally broken up and even more upset that she learned about it by seeing the case file in her mom’s bag. “When were you going to tell me?” she asks, understandably.
The 16-year-old Erika is also an aspiring ballet dancer of unusual talent (at least so we’re told; in the dance routines we actually see she sort of clumps around on point, making the moves but not showing much in the way of grace), whose coach, Leonard Capas (Herbert Beaverstone), suddenly quits the ballet school a week before Erika’s big audition for a career-making internship with Ballet America. Fortunately — or so it seems — the school’s owner, Mrs. Darnell (Patricia Dalquist), lands a replacement almost immediately: Reed Halton (Sebastian Spence), a (relatively) young and hunky ex-dancer who took up coaching a year and a half before after his wife, also a dancer, was killed in a hit-and-run accident by a drunk driver; he explains his knee was injured in the same incident and he had to give up performing as a result. Reed insinuates himself into the lives of both female Matthewses, putting Erika through an intense, grinding practice routine to hone her skills for the audition and in the process changing most of Capas’s choreography in order to make it more openly spectacular and impressive to the Ballet America judges; and making a play for Deborah and actually getting her to have sex with him (her first time since hubby left nearly a year before).
Needless to say, we know that Reed Halton is up to no good well before any of the other characters do — the smoldering glances he casts at Erika as she dances for him are indication enough — though when Deborah and her girlfriend from work, Linda Irving (Jenny Levine), do an Internet search on him they find that he’s got a criminal record as a sex offender: he was the drunk driver responsible for his wife’s death after she tried to leave him, he continued to stalk her, and she took out a restraining order on him which he, of course, ignored. What’s more, Reed — acquiring the almost supernatural power of many Lifetime villains — killed Capas in his home and faked it to look like a suicide, typed up Capas’ “resignation” letter and printed it out on the same computer he used to print his own application for Capas’ job, and had been stalking Deborah and Erika for a year and a half. He was even responsible for the breakup of Deborah’s marriage, since he planted a condom wrapper in Deborah’s husband’s car and used Photoshop to fake a picture of Deborah’s husband kissing another woman and e-mailed it to Deborah, thereby leaving her accusing him of having an affair while he, who really hadn’t been, hadn’t the slightest idea of what she was talking about.
In the end, the cops unravel it all after homicide detective Phil Mackey (William MacDonald) realizes that Capas was actually murdered, and they offer the Matthewses protection — which Reed eludes by luring Mackey to a trap, knocking him out and stealing his car (though, being one of those movie crooks who’s brilliant in some respects and stupid in others, he neglects to steal Mackey’s cell phone or gun!), then heading to the Matthews home for a final confrontation, in which she threatens to murder Deborah unless Erika goes off with him and becomes his lover — she agrees, or at least pretends to, to keep her mom alive until the police, alerted by Mackey once he came to, arrive and shoot Reed dead when he shows up in the doorway with his knife and refuses to drop it. (Since his weapon was a knife without a gun, they could have shot him in the legs and incapacitated him, then taken him alive, but it seems Christopher Morro was more interested in satisfying his audience’s thirst for revenge than giving his villain a shot at due process. The hint of The Climax comes in Reed’s scrapbook, which at least suggests that the reason he obsessed over Erika was that she reminded him of his dead wife, but the gap in writing quality between Morro’s script and either The Climax or Lolita only underscores the gap in acting skills between Sebastian Spence and the people who played this part in The Climax and the two films of Lolita: Boris Karloff, James Mason and Jeremy Irons.
The Obsession is one of those frustrating movies that takes a highly provocative premise and gets only the most superficial dramatic and entertainment values out of it, and director David Winkler doesn’t indulge in any of the oddball angles and “flanging” effects that make some Lifetime movies almost unwatchable but he doesn’t bring much in the way of suspense or thrills either — and, quite frankly, the nicest-looking male in the film is not Sebastian Spence (the role of Reed Halton needed tall, dark and handsome and got sandy-haired, pasty-faced, buff but only moderately attractive) but Nolan Funk as Erika’s boyfriend Jesse, who gets stabbed by Reed in the dressing room of Erika’s audition after Reed’s given Erika the you-have-to-give-your-all-for-art-and-you-can’t-waste-your-time-on-a-man lecture Boris Karloff gave Susanna Foster in The Climax and Anton Walbrook gave Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (which one imdb.com poster counterpointed to The Obsession as the best and worst films ever made about ballet, respectively); Funk’s a bit on the gawky side but he has a nice face, and as Reed’s true nature comes out Winkler’s direction and Adam Sliwinski’s cinematography on Funk become more flattering, the better to make him seem like a preferable alternative for Erika to her ballet-teacher psychopath. One credit that jolted me at first was “Original Music by Peter Allen” — “Just how old is this movie?” I asked myself before realizing that this must have been another Peter Allen!
I also spent a good chunk of the morning watching a TV-movie I recently recorded from Lifetime, The Obsession (not to be confused with Obsessed, which was actually a better-than-average and genuinely clever Lifetime production which for the first half led us up the garden path and appeared to be about a woman stalking a well-known surgeon because he’d had an adulterous affair with her and then abandoned her, and only in the second half was it revealed that the woman was delusional and the affair had only existed in her head). This one was sort of The Climax meets Lolita: Deborah Matthews (Daphne Zuniga), a career-obsessed architect, is in the process of divorcing her husband Jason (Nels Lennarson, billed fifth — which seems oddly high since he only makes brief appearances at the beginning and end of the film) when the movie opens. She’s a busy architect and he’s already left town for a job on a boat in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico (it’s never quite made clear by writer Christopher Morro just what this job entails), and her daughter Erika (Elise Gatien) is upset that her parents have finally broken up and even more upset that she learned about it by seeing the case file in her mom’s bag. “When were you going to tell me?” she asks, understandably.
The 16-year-old Erika is also an aspiring ballet dancer of unusual talent (at least so we’re told; in the dance routines we actually see she sort of clumps around on point, making the moves but not showing much in the way of grace), whose coach, Leonard Capas (Herbert Beaverstone), suddenly quits the ballet school a week before Erika’s big audition for a career-making internship with Ballet America. Fortunately — or so it seems — the school’s owner, Mrs. Darnell (Patricia Dalquist), lands a replacement almost immediately: Reed Halton (Sebastian Spence), a (relatively) young and hunky ex-dancer who took up coaching a year and a half before after his wife, also a dancer, was killed in a hit-and-run accident by a drunk driver; he explains his knee was injured in the same incident and he had to give up performing as a result. Reed insinuates himself into the lives of both female Matthewses, putting Erika through an intense, grinding practice routine to hone her skills for the audition and in the process changing most of Capas’s choreography in order to make it more openly spectacular and impressive to the Ballet America judges; and making a play for Deborah and actually getting her to have sex with him (her first time since hubby left nearly a year before).
Needless to say, we know that Reed Halton is up to no good well before any of the other characters do — the smoldering glances he casts at Erika as she dances for him are indication enough — though when Deborah and her girlfriend from work, Linda Irving (Jenny Levine), do an Internet search on him they find that he’s got a criminal record as a sex offender: he was the drunk driver responsible for his wife’s death after she tried to leave him, he continued to stalk her, and she took out a restraining order on him which he, of course, ignored. What’s more, Reed — acquiring the almost supernatural power of many Lifetime villains — killed Capas in his home and faked it to look like a suicide, typed up Capas’ “resignation” letter and printed it out on the same computer he used to print his own application for Capas’ job, and had been stalking Deborah and Erika for a year and a half. He was even responsible for the breakup of Deborah’s marriage, since he planted a condom wrapper in Deborah’s husband’s car and used Photoshop to fake a picture of Deborah’s husband kissing another woman and e-mailed it to Deborah, thereby leaving her accusing him of having an affair while he, who really hadn’t been, hadn’t the slightest idea of what she was talking about.
In the end, the cops unravel it all after homicide detective Phil Mackey (William MacDonald) realizes that Capas was actually murdered, and they offer the Matthewses protection — which Reed eludes by luring Mackey to a trap, knocking him out and stealing his car (though, being one of those movie crooks who’s brilliant in some respects and stupid in others, he neglects to steal Mackey’s cell phone or gun!), then heading to the Matthews home for a final confrontation, in which she threatens to murder Deborah unless Erika goes off with him and becomes his lover — she agrees, or at least pretends to, to keep her mom alive until the police, alerted by Mackey once he came to, arrive and shoot Reed dead when he shows up in the doorway with his knife and refuses to drop it. (Since his weapon was a knife without a gun, they could have shot him in the legs and incapacitated him, then taken him alive, but it seems Christopher Morro was more interested in satisfying his audience’s thirst for revenge than giving his villain a shot at due process. The hint of The Climax comes in Reed’s scrapbook, which at least suggests that the reason he obsessed over Erika was that she reminded him of his dead wife, but the gap in writing quality between Morro’s script and either The Climax or Lolita only underscores the gap in acting skills between Sebastian Spence and the people who played this part in The Climax and the two films of Lolita: Boris Karloff, James Mason and Jeremy Irons.
The Obsession is one of those frustrating movies that takes a highly provocative premise and gets only the most superficial dramatic and entertainment values out of it, and director David Winkler doesn’t indulge in any of the oddball angles and “flanging” effects that make some Lifetime movies almost unwatchable but he doesn’t bring much in the way of suspense or thrills either — and, quite frankly, the nicest-looking male in the film is not Sebastian Spence (the role of Reed Halton needed tall, dark and handsome and got sandy-haired, pasty-faced, buff but only moderately attractive) but Nolan Funk as Erika’s boyfriend Jesse, who gets stabbed by Reed in the dressing room of Erika’s audition after Reed’s given Erika the you-have-to-give-your-all-for-art-and-you-can’t-waste-your-time-on-a-man lecture Boris Karloff gave Susanna Foster in The Climax and Anton Walbrook gave Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (which one imdb.com poster counterpointed to The Obsession as the best and worst films ever made about ballet, respectively); Funk’s a bit on the gawky side but he has a nice face, and as Reed’s true nature comes out Winkler’s direction and Adam Sliwinski’s cinematography on Funk become more flattering, the better to make him seem like a preferable alternative for Erika to her ballet-teacher psychopath. One credit that jolted me at first was “Original Music by Peter Allen” — “Just how old is this movie?” I asked myself before realizing that this must have been another Peter Allen!
Sunday, May 10, 2009
The Young Racers (American International, 1963)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked a film I’d recorded recently from TCM: The Young Racers, which turned out to be an American International melodrama about auto racing from 1963. The movie advertised itself as having been filmed during actual Grand Prix auto races, and it showed — the racing scenes were consistently the film’s most exciting portions — while in between was a rather weird romantic melodrama centered around Team Lotus driver Joe Machin (William Campbell), an unscrupulous nit both on the track and in the bedroom, where he tackles an unending series of female sexual conquests so relentlessly he makes James Bond look like a monk by comparison (and the Bond analogy isn’t really reaching — Campbell looks a lot like Sean Connery in the Bond films of the time and I suspect the resemblance helped him land the role).
Machin has a long-suffering brother/manager, Robert (R. Wright Campbell, who also wrote the movie — so he, like all the other actors in this piece, had to struggle through his own overwrought and frequently incomprehensible pseudo-philosophical dialogue), and he’s also being tracked by driver-turned-writer Stephen Children (Mark Damon, top-billed, who according to imdb.com was voice-doubled throughout the movie by the young William Shatner — and I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t notice Captain Kirk’s voice coming out of Mark Damon’s body!). Stephen is mad at Joe Machin for having seduced away his girlfriend Monique (Béatrice Altariba) and then abandoned her; Stephen was willing to take her back but she regarded herself as damaged goods (“I’m a slut now,” she explains) and declined. So Stephen hatches a plan to follow Machin around the Grand Prix circuit and write a book that will expose him as the unscrupulous asshole he is, and in order to do that he actually wins the job as the second driver on Team Lotus — only as he works with Machin he actually starts to admire the guy and they end up as friends.
Meanwhile Machin has his own crisis of conscience; he sees a child in a toy race car tip over and crash, and though the pedal-powered car wasn’t traveling anywhere near fast enough to hurt the kid, Machin takes that as a sign of his own mortality and loses his edge on the track; in the next Grand Prix he lets up towards the end and comes in second instead of first, and in the race after that he crashes and decides to retire, in the process renewing his commitment to his wife and presumably stopping the 007-style playing around he’d been able to do when he was still a star driver. The film clearly looks backwards to The Racers — the 1954 vehicle for Kirk Douglas as a similarly arrogant win-at-all-costs driver who ultimately regains his humanity — and forwards to Grand Prix, the 1966 John Frankenheimer racing epic that, like this film, presents the Formula One circuit as a sort of giant bathhouse on wheels in which the only concerns of the drivers are winning and sex, pretty much in that order.
It’s also a frustrating movie because it’s a mediocre film that could have been a good one; the director is Roger Corman, who was clearly the best director American International had under contract at the time (not that that’s saying much for him, but his films are consistently better and more watchable than the rest of the dreck AIP was turning out, and some of them are engagingly aware of their own campiness); the cinematographer is the veteran Floyd Crosby (Academy Award winner for Murnau’s last film, Tabu, in 1931 and rock musician David Crosby’s father), and he makes the refractory Pathécolor process glow with a vivid sheen more modern cinematographers should emulate instead of drenching everything in dirty browns and greens; the sound man is a young up-and-comer named Francis [Ford] Coppola (who made his directorial debut while working on The Young Racers — Corman let him use his crew and cast members, including William Campbell and female lead Luana Anders, to make Coppola’s first film as a director, Dementia 13, during down time on the Irish locations of The Young Racers), who supposedly is in the movie as well, unbilled; and the overall atmosphere is not that of an AIP cheapie but of a potentially quality production gone subtly but unmistakably wrong.
Part of the problem is that the three leading men simply look too much alike — Charles and I both took a while to realize that Stephen Children and Robert Machin were supposed to be different people, since Mark Damon and R. Wright Campbell looked all too much like each other — indeed, Campbell looked more like Damon than he did like William Campbell, his real-life brother who was playing his brother in the film!) — and you keep having to wait for the other characters to address them by name just to find out who is who. The main problem with this movie, though, is R. Wright Campbell’s almost literally unspeakable dialogue and the thick air of pretension that hangs over it all, as if the writer took a basic soap-opera plot and tried to overlay it with an air of psychological and philosophical “depth” that in fact was about as deep as a puddle. Charles thought this movie would have been suitable Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fodder; I didn’t think it was that bad but it certainly wasn’t as good as it could or should have been! There also doesn’t seem to be any reason why the movie should have been called The Young Racers — the male leads don’t seem all that young — except one suspects AIP’s marketing department was so relentlessly driven to selling to the teenage audience they wanted the word “Young” in the title of every movie the company made that could even remotely support it.
I picked a film I’d recorded recently from TCM: The Young Racers, which turned out to be an American International melodrama about auto racing from 1963. The movie advertised itself as having been filmed during actual Grand Prix auto races, and it showed — the racing scenes were consistently the film’s most exciting portions — while in between was a rather weird romantic melodrama centered around Team Lotus driver Joe Machin (William Campbell), an unscrupulous nit both on the track and in the bedroom, where he tackles an unending series of female sexual conquests so relentlessly he makes James Bond look like a monk by comparison (and the Bond analogy isn’t really reaching — Campbell looks a lot like Sean Connery in the Bond films of the time and I suspect the resemblance helped him land the role).
Machin has a long-suffering brother/manager, Robert (R. Wright Campbell, who also wrote the movie — so he, like all the other actors in this piece, had to struggle through his own overwrought and frequently incomprehensible pseudo-philosophical dialogue), and he’s also being tracked by driver-turned-writer Stephen Children (Mark Damon, top-billed, who according to imdb.com was voice-doubled throughout the movie by the young William Shatner — and I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t notice Captain Kirk’s voice coming out of Mark Damon’s body!). Stephen is mad at Joe Machin for having seduced away his girlfriend Monique (Béatrice Altariba) and then abandoned her; Stephen was willing to take her back but she regarded herself as damaged goods (“I’m a slut now,” she explains) and declined. So Stephen hatches a plan to follow Machin around the Grand Prix circuit and write a book that will expose him as the unscrupulous asshole he is, and in order to do that he actually wins the job as the second driver on Team Lotus — only as he works with Machin he actually starts to admire the guy and they end up as friends.
Meanwhile Machin has his own crisis of conscience; he sees a child in a toy race car tip over and crash, and though the pedal-powered car wasn’t traveling anywhere near fast enough to hurt the kid, Machin takes that as a sign of his own mortality and loses his edge on the track; in the next Grand Prix he lets up towards the end and comes in second instead of first, and in the race after that he crashes and decides to retire, in the process renewing his commitment to his wife and presumably stopping the 007-style playing around he’d been able to do when he was still a star driver. The film clearly looks backwards to The Racers — the 1954 vehicle for Kirk Douglas as a similarly arrogant win-at-all-costs driver who ultimately regains his humanity — and forwards to Grand Prix, the 1966 John Frankenheimer racing epic that, like this film, presents the Formula One circuit as a sort of giant bathhouse on wheels in which the only concerns of the drivers are winning and sex, pretty much in that order.
It’s also a frustrating movie because it’s a mediocre film that could have been a good one; the director is Roger Corman, who was clearly the best director American International had under contract at the time (not that that’s saying much for him, but his films are consistently better and more watchable than the rest of the dreck AIP was turning out, and some of them are engagingly aware of their own campiness); the cinematographer is the veteran Floyd Crosby (Academy Award winner for Murnau’s last film, Tabu, in 1931 and rock musician David Crosby’s father), and he makes the refractory Pathécolor process glow with a vivid sheen more modern cinematographers should emulate instead of drenching everything in dirty browns and greens; the sound man is a young up-and-comer named Francis [Ford] Coppola (who made his directorial debut while working on The Young Racers — Corman let him use his crew and cast members, including William Campbell and female lead Luana Anders, to make Coppola’s first film as a director, Dementia 13, during down time on the Irish locations of The Young Racers), who supposedly is in the movie as well, unbilled; and the overall atmosphere is not that of an AIP cheapie but of a potentially quality production gone subtly but unmistakably wrong.
Part of the problem is that the three leading men simply look too much alike — Charles and I both took a while to realize that Stephen Children and Robert Machin were supposed to be different people, since Mark Damon and R. Wright Campbell looked all too much like each other — indeed, Campbell looked more like Damon than he did like William Campbell, his real-life brother who was playing his brother in the film!) — and you keep having to wait for the other characters to address them by name just to find out who is who. The main problem with this movie, though, is R. Wright Campbell’s almost literally unspeakable dialogue and the thick air of pretension that hangs over it all, as if the writer took a basic soap-opera plot and tried to overlay it with an air of psychological and philosophical “depth” that in fact was about as deep as a puddle. Charles thought this movie would have been suitable Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fodder; I didn’t think it was that bad but it certainly wasn’t as good as it could or should have been! There also doesn’t seem to be any reason why the movie should have been called The Young Racers — the male leads don’t seem all that young — except one suspects AIP’s marketing department was so relentlessly driven to selling to the teenage audience they wanted the word “Young” in the title of every movie the company made that could even remotely support it.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Documentary on Queers and the Military Airs in June
“Ask Not” Focuses on Human Costs of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Photos, top to bottom: Ben Gomez, Col. Stewart Bornhoft (ret.)
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Though the local PBS affiliate, KPBS-TV (channel 15, cable 11) isn’t scheduled to show it until June 21, at 11 p.m. (the rest of PBS is scheduled to show it June 16), the San Diego Public Library held a preview screening of the Independent Lens TV documentary Ask Not May 3. Made by openly Gay filmmaker Johnny Symons, Ask Not deals with the U.S. military’s continuing exclusion of open Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals from service under the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy enacted by Congress in 1993. Ask Not focuses on the human costs of the policy as well as the potential consequences for America’s national security, and also depicts two campaigns aimed at building public opposition to the policy and pressuring Congress to reverse it and allow Queers to serve openly in the U.S. military.
The library’s screening of Ask Not featured two live guests who are active in the campaign against “don’t ask, don’t tell.” One was Ben Gomez, a veteran and current board member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center who said he quit the military when he met his current partner, Jeffrey, and decided it was more important to live an open life as part of a Gay couple than to continue to serve. The other was retired colonel Stewart Bornhoft, a colleague of Gomez’s in the United Veterans’ Council of San Diego County and a strong opponent of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Ask Not mixes new footage with archival scenes, including shots of President Harry Truman defending his 1948 executive order ending racial segregation in the U.S. military and demanding that African-Americans serve alongside white servicemembers instead of in separate units. Director Symons effectively contrasts Truman’s forthright stand with Bill Clinton’s wimp-out on the similar issue of lifting the ban on Queers in the military — even though Truman, who issued his order when he was facing an election instead of just after he’d won one, was in a more precarious political position — and suggests that had Clinton shown the guts and determination Truman did, this issue would now be ancient history and Queers would be serving openly in all branches of the U.S. military. The film also shows a clip of professor Charles Moskos, who not only wrote the first draft of “don’t ask, don’t tell” but even coined the name.
One sequence showing part of the campaign by military leaders and conservative lawmakers to keep the ban on Queers in the military in place — the infamous scene in which U.S. Senator Sam Nunn (D-Georgia) brought cameras inside a ship to show the close quarters in which sailors lived, and suggest that straight male sailors in this environment couldn’t function if they knew there might be Gays in their midst — hit Gomez especially hard. “I was in the room on the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy when that scene was filmed,” he recalled. Gomez said he was terrified at the possibility of being exposed, and also disgusted at the way he was being used as a living prop to uphold a policy aimed at booting him and his fellow Gays out of the military.
“The military is the only federal agency that discriminates” against Queers, Gomez said. Every other federal employer — including the FBI, CIA and ultra-sensitive National Security Agency (NSA) — is covered by a non-discrimination policy. (So much for the argument, often heard during the Cold War, that Queers couldn’t be tolerated in sensitive positions involving national security because they’d be vulnerable to being blackmailed into turning traitor and giving away intelligence information or other crucial secrets to an enemy.)
Citing a claim made during the film that the military is falling short of its recruitment goals — it was when the film was shot but now, probably due to the recession, the military is meeting and even exceeding its quotas — Gomez pointed out that the military has lowered its standards, letting in drug abusers and even convicted felons, while continuing to exclude open Queers. “There is a recruiting station in the middle of Hillcrest, in our own neighborhood,” Gomez lamented, “and they’ll take a felon but not one of us. I don’t see how you can question the patriotism of any American.”
Indeed, one of the activist groups depicted in Ask Not, the Right to Serve Campaign, directly targets recruiting offices. Their members organize civil-disobedience actions, going into recruitment centers, offering to sign up, then telling the recruiters they are openly Gay or Lesbian. When they are turned down, they either occupy the recruitment office or block the entrance to it, sometimes chaining themselves in place, until the recruiters call the authorities and have them arrested. Right to Serve co-director Jason Reitan appears in the film, comparing his group’s actions to the sit-ins staged by African-American college students at white-only lunch counters in the South in the early 1960’s and saying they feel empowered by committing civil disobedience and getting arrested.
The other organization profiled in the film is an above-ground group named Call to Duty, which staged a nationwide tour in 2006 that featured openly Queer veterans speaking about their experiences and demanding the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They didn’t always go to friendly audiences, either; in the film the members of Call to Duty are shown speaking at a Georgia military school right after they’ve seen cadets on drill chanting homophobic slogans as part of their cadences. The Call to Duty tour finished at UCSD but many of the participants stayed together and organized a new group called Servicemembers United, whose Web site, http://servicemembersunited.org/, promotes Ask Not and its upcoming showings on PBS.
According to Bornhoft, Americans are ready to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” and permit open Queers to serve in the U.S. military. The online study guide for the film cites a Washington Post/ABC poll from 2008 that says 75 percent of Americans support allowing open Queers to serve — up from 44 percent when “don’t ask, don’t tell” was passed into law in 1993. Within the military itself, Bornhoft said, “polls were taken of people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan that asked two questions: do you think there are any Gays in your unit, and do you think that would be a detriment? The people who answered the first question no answered the second question yes. The ones who did know Gay people in their units went on to say, ‘And it wouldn’t be a problem.’”
Bornhoft also pointed out that one of the most horrible consequences of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is that, in an institution based on “duty, honor, country,” it not only allows but actually requires Queer servicemembers to lie about an important part of who they are. “’Honor’ involves telling the truth,” he explained. “We were taught never to be satisfied with a half-truth. This law mandates that you lie about who you are. There are 65,000 Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual people on active duty with the U.S. military and one million veterans.” Bornhoft argued that once Queers are allowed to serve openly in the military, the anti-Queer stereotypes in the ranks will break down and straight servicemembers will accept their Queer colleagues as fully equal. He said that “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which was sold as a way to preserve “unit cohesion” from the alleged threat posed by openly Queer people in the ranks, actually destroys unit cohesion because “the basis of unit cohesion is that if you tell me something, I can believe it.”
One nagging issue left over from the Queer rights movement’s historic roots in the political Left is that many Queers have strong anti-war, anti-military convictions and are willing to accept equal service as a civil-rights issue but don’t think it’s all that important. The question came up during the post-film discussion at the library screening, when one audience member said he didn’t think the U.S. has fought a morally justifiable war since 1945 and Queers should question whether they want to be part of an institution whose role is as a worldwide enforcer for U.S. imperialism.
Ironically, filmmaker Symons said he had similar doubts before he made the film. “One of my earliest childhood memories is marching in a protest against the Viet Nam war,” Symons wrote in an essay in the online discussion guide. “As an adult, I was no more inclined to embrace the military than I had been as a child. But after I realized I was Gay, I witnessed the pervasiveness of homophobia and became actively involved in fighting for the same values that the military strives to uphold — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. … Stories of injustice are prevalent, but the saga of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ struck me as a particularly blatant example of institutionalized discrimination. … The military will admit Gays and Lesbians, and send them into combat, but only on the condition that they hide an essential part of their identities.”
Indeed, perhaps the most poignant story told in the film is that of “Perry” — not only is his real name not used, but his face and all exposed parts of his body are deliberately blurred whenever he’s shown — who left an openly Gay life in San Francisco to enlist in the Army and was sent to Iraq. “Perry” says in the film that — contrary to the tales of other Queer servicemembers and veterans, who describe quite active sexual subcultures within the U.S. military despite the omnipresent fear of discovery, court-martial and discharge — he was too scared even to seek out other Queer servicemembers as friends. What’s more, he says that once he was actually involved in combat, especially the brutal house-to-house fighting of urban warfare in Iraq, his sexual orientation slipped from the forefront of his consciousness and he became just another grunt, concerned only about surviving and doing his job.
Responding to the question of why Queer activists who are also anti-war should fight for the right of Queers to serve openly in the U.S. military, Bornhoft said, “Those people who have different views from yours ought to have the right to serve. Some people are motivated by the educational benefits. Some want the right to serve their country. Some want to join to get out of the situation they’re in” — a reference to the fact that for many working-class people, the de-industrialization of America has left the military as virtually the only form of upward mobility still available to them. Neither the film nor the speakers mentioned that many people join the military not knowing they’re Queer, but find that out when they’re surrounded by people of their own gender in heavily sex-segregated environments and realize they’re drawn to some of them, emotionally and sexually.
One aspect of the issue discussed more extensively in the discussion than in the film itself is the transformation the U.S. military is going through as it attracts more and more women, and gives them greater responsibilities. Ironically, some of the sexual tensions supporters of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy cited as reasons to keep open Queers out have surfaced among heterosexual servicemembers as the military becomes more gender-integrated. What’s more, women servicemembers have frequently complained of being sexually harassed or even raped by their male colleagues — and their commanders have often either refused to do anything to stop it or have actually taken the side of their harassers or rapists.
Women in the service are also subject to so-called “Lesbian-baiting,” according to the study guide for the film. “A woman can be accused of being Lesbian in retaliation for a poor performance review of a man under her command; when she spurns a man’s sexual advances; or when she accuses a man of sexual harassment,” the guide explained. Perhaps because the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy provides this convenient cover for sexist men in the military to eliminate women, a disproportionate number of Queer-related discharges are of women. In 2007, women made up 14 percent of total Army personnel but 46 percent of all members discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The same year, 49 percent of “don’t ask, don’t tell” discharges in the Air Force were of women, though they made up only 20 percent of the service’s total personnel.
Ask Not shows the human cost of “don’t ask, don’t tell” not only in its effect on its victims but on the national security. About 12,500 servicemembers have been kicked out under “don’t ask, don’t tell” since the policy was enacted in 1993, and every year about 4,000 servicemembers whose enlistments are over choose not to re-up because they no longer want to be forced to stay in the closet under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” What’s more, hundreds of servicemembers — including some of the people who went on the Call to Duty tour — have critical intellectual skills needed for an effective response to terrorism, including skills in Arabic, Farsi and Korean.
The May 4 Los Angeles Times reported on a pilot program to recruit documented immigrants to the U.S. who have these language skills and promise them a fast track to U.S. citizenship if they enlist — but, according to the article, they’ve been far more successful in recruiting speakers of Chinese, Korean and Indian languages than people who know Arabic, Farsi, Pashto and other languages spoken by people in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Indeed, one of the Call to Duty tour members interviewed in the film said he was convinced the U.S. could have learned of the 9/11 attacks in advance and prevented them if the military weren’t so concerned about discharging Queer Arabic speakers.
Much of the effort of various organizations concerned with this issue is going into supporting a bill in Congress, the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (H.R. 1283), sponsored by Congressmember Ellen Tauscher (D-California). The bill would repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” and apply the same policy of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation to the military that exists in the rest of the federal government. It would also allow people previously discharged from the military for violating “don’t ask, don’t tell” to re-enlist without penalty, and would allow military authorities to discipline servicemembers for same-sex sexual harassment under the same policies that now apply to heterosexual harassment. H.R. 1283 does not cover gender identity.
Locally, San Diego County’s two Democratic Congressmembers, Susan Davis and Bob Filner, are both on board as co-sponsors of H.R. 1283. Though there are Republican House members on the co-sponsor list, none of San Diego’s Republicans have signed on. Part of the grass-roots effort of the local groups is to get the San Diego City Council to go on record supporting repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a position all California’s other major cities have taken but one which, given San Diego’s large active-duty population and historic ties to the military, would be especially significant from here. One argument local advocates are hoping would be effective not only with the City Council but local Republicans is the cost issue. Estimates of the total cost of “don’t ask, don’t tell” — both the enforcement of it and the expense of training people to replace those discharged under the policy — range from $191 million to $361 million since 1993, and one estimate sets the price tag of the policy as $35 million per year.
One big question mark is the position of President Obama. Like President Clinton, he promised during his campaign to end discrimination against Queers in the military. Since he was elected, he’s been silent on the issue. “There’s been evidence from Obama’s administration that he would support it,” said Gomez, “but he’s pushed it down in priority levels. This is not one of his administration’s priorities right now.” Since the law that enacted “don’t ask, don’t tell” prevented the President from ending the discrimination by executive order, activists are concentrating on moving Congress and getting a majority of House members to co-sponsor H.R. 1283 (right now they’re at 140 co-sponsors and they need 218), then winning at least three Republican Senators to make sure the bill can be debated without being filibustered.
W. (Lionsgate, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran us the film W. (the period is part of the actual title, separating it from M, O, Q, Z and other films with one-letter titles), Oliver Stone’s 2008 biopic of George W. Bush made and released while he was still president — which sets it aside from such other pre-Presidential biographies of American presidents as Young Mr. Lincoln and Sunrise at Campobello, though it has something of the same intent: to show how the future President was raised and thereby depict the qualities (or lack of same) he brought to the office and how his upbringing contributed to how he governed.
W. is basically two stories, told in parallel and intercut with each other: Bush in the period from the 9/11 attacks to the start of the Iraq war, and Bush from 1966 (his drunken frat-boy antics at Yale are shown in almost too much detail) to 1999, showing how he drank and drugged (the drinking is shown, the drug use is just hinted at) his way out of all the opportunities his dad’s money and connections could create for him until he found himself, found God, gave up the drinking (and whatever else), knuckled down to at least a pretense of running the Texas Rangers, ran for governor of Texas and ultimately used that office as a stepping stone to the presidency. When I first heard that Stone was shooting this film, my reaction was disbelief; I couldn’t understand why anybody would bankroll a film about Bush while he was still in office, or who they thought the audience for it would be. The people who liked Bush weren’t about to pay money to see a film about him directed by Oliver Stone, and the people who didn’t like Bush — including me — weren’t about to pay money to see a film about him at all, especially while he was still president and we could see far more of that Alfred E. Neuman mug and that whiny, petulant voice than we wanted to on the TV news for free. Now that Bush is out of office, we could bring a little more perspective to the movie and enjoy, or at least absorb, it for what it was.
What’s most interesting about the film is how sympathetic it is; Stone’s (and his screenwriter, Stanley Weiser’s) portrait of Bush is very much like the way Stone portrayed Richard Nixon in his earlier Presidential biopic, presenting his failings much more in sorrow than in anger — though any serious explanation of What Made W. Run is hamstrung from the get-go by the fact that he’s a relentlessly non-introspective person. One of the things that separates the Bush story from most addiction narratives — which is essentially how it’s presented here — is that one obligatory part of the addiction memoir is an account of how the recovering addict grew or changed as a result of the struggle to get off alcohol and/or drugs and what he or she discovered about human nature — both generally and his/her own — in the process. Bush doesn’t seem to have discovered a damned thing; he gave up some bad habits but doesn’t seem to have learned anything from either the experience of addiction or the experience of recovery, and to the extent that sobriety changed him, it seems (at least as it’s depicted in the movie, which tallies to what we know about his life) just to have sharpened his sense of entitlement.
Bush the active alcoholic was your typical spoiled rich kid, convinced that the world owed him a living because he was part of a family better than the ordinary run of humanity. Bush the recovering alcoholic — especially given the fact that a minister was his principal source of support in his recovery — seems to have got even more of a sense of himself as a child of destiny, marked for greatness not only by his parentage but literally by divine favor. Though it’s not depicted here, he’s known to have told his friends during the contest over the 2000 election outcome that they shouldn’t worry about how the final count would turn out because God had destined him to be president — and one Bush anecdote that is told in the film, though in a different context than the real one (indeed, a lot of the famous Bush pronouncements, including “Is our children learning?,” appear in the movie but are shoe-horned by Weiser into different contexts from the real ones — and one speech, in which Bush responds to losing his 1978 Congressional race to Democrat Kent Hance because Hance projected a more credible down-home image by saying, “I’ll never be out-Texaned or out-Christianed again,” seems to come not from Bush but from George Wallace, who famously reacted to his unsuccessful run for governor of Alabama as a racial moderate in 1958 by saying, “I’ll never be out-niggered again”), is how he said that he didn’t need to take advice from his father over what to do about Iraq and Saddam Hussein because “I have a higher Father that I answer to.”
By far the strongest aspect of W. is the relationship between Bush Jr. and Bush Sr. — indeed, when James Cromwell’s name came up in the credits as the actor playing the first President Bush, I couldn’t help but chuckle over the similarity between his role here and his part as Prince Philip in The Queen, where he was also a part of a hereditary ruling family who was being driven crazy by the scapegrace antics of his son. W. is a compelling piece of filmmaking in many ways. Stone’s direction is competent and assured, and avoids flashy camera tricks just for the sake of flashy camera tricks — though there are a few interesting angles, including one of his fraternity initiation at Yale in which liquor is forcibly poured down his throat and Stone seems to want us to make the connection, without underlining it too hard, between that and the waterboarding to which Bush’s administration subjected alleged terrorists at Guantánamo and in Iraq and elsewhere. Weiser’s script is well constructed and contains enough titles and other devices to make sure we always know when, as well as where, we are — a duty to the audience many filmmakers who make non-linear movies deliberately neglect.
The acting is also quite fine; Josh Brolin as W. isn’t anywhere near as dorky-looking as the real one — but then who, at least in Hollywood, is? — but he powerfully projects the character’s feelings of inadequacy and his re-invention of himself as a good ol’ Texas boy. Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush is just poignant enough to make us feel for her and wonder how presidential wives in general handle the First Lady gig — it must be harder for stay-at-home ones like Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon and Laura Bush than it is for women whose husbands allow them to maintain some degree of personal autonomy (Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton and now Michelle Obama) — and the actors playing the familiar faces around Bush in his Presidential years are mostly on target (though it’s difficult to tally Scott Glenn’s Donald Rumsfeld with the real one, who managed at once to seem both more avuncular and more sinister than his movie avatar): Richard Dreyfuss is almost unrecognizable as Dick Cheney (though well before the Cheney we knew from the Bush years even existed — photos of him as a young man show yet another cookie-cutter young conservative from the Nixon administration and betray little hint of how he would age — Marlon Brando, playing the villainous head of the world’s oil industry in the 1980 thriller The Formula, offered an uncannily exact premonition of the W.-era Cheney); Toby Jones gives us Karl Rove the vulgar political operative rather than Rove the Right-wing visionary (I was a bit disappointed that a historically-minded director like Stone didn’t mention that Rove’s intriguing role model was Mark Hanna, who essentially did his sort of job for William McKinley); Thandie Newton is almost uncannily accurate visually as Condoleeza Rice and, in action in the film, comes close to dramatizing Charles’ old, bitter joke about her (“Bush’s geography teacher”); and Jeffrey Wright does justice to Colin Powell, the closest the Bush administration had to a truly tragic figure.
When Charles and I watched the 1956 film Helen of Troy I was struck at the uncanny parallel between its depiction of the Trojan War and Bush’s invasion of Iraq: “The Greeks openly and proudly declare their intention to launch a pre-emptive war against Troy; they reject Troy’s peace feelers (which is what Paris is doing in Sparta in the first place) out of hand; the moment they see a bit of the wreckage of Paris’s ship emblazoned with the Trojan royal eagle (which looks more like a Navajo blanket than anything else) they assume it’s the vanguard of a Trojan attack — they’re spooked about Trojan intentions because in this version of the tale they’ve already sacked Troy once before — and Nestor (Guido Nolan), the old wise man who tries to talk them out of the attack, gets treated like Colin Powell: ignored, shut out of the decision-making loop and ultimately persuaded to be a ‘good soldier’ and sign on to a policy he knows will be disastrous.” In W., Powell makes the objections behind the scenes his aides have assured us he did in real life — indeed, he predicts virtually the entire disastrous outcome of the war — though like the “good soldier” he was he ultimately goes before the United Nations and repeats all the administration’s propaganda and outright lies.
Here Stone mixes in archival footage of the real Colin Powell addressing the U.N., just as at other points in the movie he includes clips of the real Bush, Cheney and others in the administration; most of the junctures work well — remember, this is the director who in Nixon reproduced the 1960 TV debates between Nixon and Kennedy by intercutting archival footage of the real Kennedy with newly shot scenes of Anthony Hopkins re-enacting Nixon’s part — but a few, particularly the ones involving trying to accept Richard Dreyfuss and the more formidable real Dick Cheney as the same person, jar. In the scenes showing the buildup to the war in Iraq, W. comes across as Captain Ahab with Saddam Hussein as his own Moby Dick — a monomaniac unwilling to be dissuaded from launching the war or even delaying it (one of the most chilling scenes is the one between Bush and a hapless Tony Blair, played by “Mr. Fantastic” Ioan Gruffudd, who’s trying to get him at least to delay the war until the United Nations weapons inspectors finish their work) — and after major combat operations have ended, Bush has posed on the aircraft carrier under the “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” sign, and the occupation forces don’t find the weapons of mass destruction Bush and his associates were so sure he had, Bush regards their non-existence as a personal insult.
On one level W. is a well put-together movie, but on another level it doesn’t really work because we never get the sense of how what we see of Bush in the flashback scenes shaped what Bush became as President — and that, as I noted above, is a function of the bizarrely unreflective nature of his character, the way he seems to regard any sort of introspection as a fundamental betrayal of his self-image as a man of destiny, a man of action, a man who (as Hitler said of himself — and no, I’m not making any more of the parallel than this!) moved through events with the assurance of a sleepwalker, a man whose fundamental arrogance and sense of predestined privilege shaped not only his ascent to the presidency but what he did with it. That’s the part of Bush’s character that really doesn’t get shown in this film, perhaps because it would have been virtually impossible for Stone and Weiser to put it on the screen without making Bush seem certifiably crazy (which he clearly isn’t; for all the detachment of his thinking from objective reality, he didn’t sink into the sort of basket-case depression Nixon fell into in the last months of his presidency). As it is, W. is the effort of some talented, dedicated filmmakers who tried their best to be sympathetic, to see some good in this man without totally buying into his world-view (as most of Bush’s defenders did during his presidency — more than most Presidents, Bush seemed to divide the country into roughly equal-sized groups of people who thought he could do no wrong and people who thought he could do no right — as opposed to Obama, who has his own cadre of bitter opponents who think he can do no right but whose supporters are considerably more nuanced in their appraisal of him than Bush’s are, and ready — if not to lash out at him the way some Democrats did at Clinton when he ended up responding to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 by governing essentially as a moderate Republican thereafter — at least to write about him in tones of disappointment and sorrow), but the fact is that George W. Bush simply isn’t a complicated enough person to be the stuff of which protagonists of great dramas are made.
I ran us the film W. (the period is part of the actual title, separating it from M, O, Q, Z and other films with one-letter titles), Oliver Stone’s 2008 biopic of George W. Bush made and released while he was still president — which sets it aside from such other pre-Presidential biographies of American presidents as Young Mr. Lincoln and Sunrise at Campobello, though it has something of the same intent: to show how the future President was raised and thereby depict the qualities (or lack of same) he brought to the office and how his upbringing contributed to how he governed.
W. is basically two stories, told in parallel and intercut with each other: Bush in the period from the 9/11 attacks to the start of the Iraq war, and Bush from 1966 (his drunken frat-boy antics at Yale are shown in almost too much detail) to 1999, showing how he drank and drugged (the drinking is shown, the drug use is just hinted at) his way out of all the opportunities his dad’s money and connections could create for him until he found himself, found God, gave up the drinking (and whatever else), knuckled down to at least a pretense of running the Texas Rangers, ran for governor of Texas and ultimately used that office as a stepping stone to the presidency. When I first heard that Stone was shooting this film, my reaction was disbelief; I couldn’t understand why anybody would bankroll a film about Bush while he was still in office, or who they thought the audience for it would be. The people who liked Bush weren’t about to pay money to see a film about him directed by Oliver Stone, and the people who didn’t like Bush — including me — weren’t about to pay money to see a film about him at all, especially while he was still president and we could see far more of that Alfred E. Neuman mug and that whiny, petulant voice than we wanted to on the TV news for free. Now that Bush is out of office, we could bring a little more perspective to the movie and enjoy, or at least absorb, it for what it was.
What’s most interesting about the film is how sympathetic it is; Stone’s (and his screenwriter, Stanley Weiser’s) portrait of Bush is very much like the way Stone portrayed Richard Nixon in his earlier Presidential biopic, presenting his failings much more in sorrow than in anger — though any serious explanation of What Made W. Run is hamstrung from the get-go by the fact that he’s a relentlessly non-introspective person. One of the things that separates the Bush story from most addiction narratives — which is essentially how it’s presented here — is that one obligatory part of the addiction memoir is an account of how the recovering addict grew or changed as a result of the struggle to get off alcohol and/or drugs and what he or she discovered about human nature — both generally and his/her own — in the process. Bush doesn’t seem to have discovered a damned thing; he gave up some bad habits but doesn’t seem to have learned anything from either the experience of addiction or the experience of recovery, and to the extent that sobriety changed him, it seems (at least as it’s depicted in the movie, which tallies to what we know about his life) just to have sharpened his sense of entitlement.
Bush the active alcoholic was your typical spoiled rich kid, convinced that the world owed him a living because he was part of a family better than the ordinary run of humanity. Bush the recovering alcoholic — especially given the fact that a minister was his principal source of support in his recovery — seems to have got even more of a sense of himself as a child of destiny, marked for greatness not only by his parentage but literally by divine favor. Though it’s not depicted here, he’s known to have told his friends during the contest over the 2000 election outcome that they shouldn’t worry about how the final count would turn out because God had destined him to be president — and one Bush anecdote that is told in the film, though in a different context than the real one (indeed, a lot of the famous Bush pronouncements, including “Is our children learning?,” appear in the movie but are shoe-horned by Weiser into different contexts from the real ones — and one speech, in which Bush responds to losing his 1978 Congressional race to Democrat Kent Hance because Hance projected a more credible down-home image by saying, “I’ll never be out-Texaned or out-Christianed again,” seems to come not from Bush but from George Wallace, who famously reacted to his unsuccessful run for governor of Alabama as a racial moderate in 1958 by saying, “I’ll never be out-niggered again”), is how he said that he didn’t need to take advice from his father over what to do about Iraq and Saddam Hussein because “I have a higher Father that I answer to.”
By far the strongest aspect of W. is the relationship between Bush Jr. and Bush Sr. — indeed, when James Cromwell’s name came up in the credits as the actor playing the first President Bush, I couldn’t help but chuckle over the similarity between his role here and his part as Prince Philip in The Queen, where he was also a part of a hereditary ruling family who was being driven crazy by the scapegrace antics of his son. W. is a compelling piece of filmmaking in many ways. Stone’s direction is competent and assured, and avoids flashy camera tricks just for the sake of flashy camera tricks — though there are a few interesting angles, including one of his fraternity initiation at Yale in which liquor is forcibly poured down his throat and Stone seems to want us to make the connection, without underlining it too hard, between that and the waterboarding to which Bush’s administration subjected alleged terrorists at Guantánamo and in Iraq and elsewhere. Weiser’s script is well constructed and contains enough titles and other devices to make sure we always know when, as well as where, we are — a duty to the audience many filmmakers who make non-linear movies deliberately neglect.
The acting is also quite fine; Josh Brolin as W. isn’t anywhere near as dorky-looking as the real one — but then who, at least in Hollywood, is? — but he powerfully projects the character’s feelings of inadequacy and his re-invention of himself as a good ol’ Texas boy. Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush is just poignant enough to make us feel for her and wonder how presidential wives in general handle the First Lady gig — it must be harder for stay-at-home ones like Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon and Laura Bush than it is for women whose husbands allow them to maintain some degree of personal autonomy (Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton and now Michelle Obama) — and the actors playing the familiar faces around Bush in his Presidential years are mostly on target (though it’s difficult to tally Scott Glenn’s Donald Rumsfeld with the real one, who managed at once to seem both more avuncular and more sinister than his movie avatar): Richard Dreyfuss is almost unrecognizable as Dick Cheney (though well before the Cheney we knew from the Bush years even existed — photos of him as a young man show yet another cookie-cutter young conservative from the Nixon administration and betray little hint of how he would age — Marlon Brando, playing the villainous head of the world’s oil industry in the 1980 thriller The Formula, offered an uncannily exact premonition of the W.-era Cheney); Toby Jones gives us Karl Rove the vulgar political operative rather than Rove the Right-wing visionary (I was a bit disappointed that a historically-minded director like Stone didn’t mention that Rove’s intriguing role model was Mark Hanna, who essentially did his sort of job for William McKinley); Thandie Newton is almost uncannily accurate visually as Condoleeza Rice and, in action in the film, comes close to dramatizing Charles’ old, bitter joke about her (“Bush’s geography teacher”); and Jeffrey Wright does justice to Colin Powell, the closest the Bush administration had to a truly tragic figure.
When Charles and I watched the 1956 film Helen of Troy I was struck at the uncanny parallel between its depiction of the Trojan War and Bush’s invasion of Iraq: “The Greeks openly and proudly declare their intention to launch a pre-emptive war against Troy; they reject Troy’s peace feelers (which is what Paris is doing in Sparta in the first place) out of hand; the moment they see a bit of the wreckage of Paris’s ship emblazoned with the Trojan royal eagle (which looks more like a Navajo blanket than anything else) they assume it’s the vanguard of a Trojan attack — they’re spooked about Trojan intentions because in this version of the tale they’ve already sacked Troy once before — and Nestor (Guido Nolan), the old wise man who tries to talk them out of the attack, gets treated like Colin Powell: ignored, shut out of the decision-making loop and ultimately persuaded to be a ‘good soldier’ and sign on to a policy he knows will be disastrous.” In W., Powell makes the objections behind the scenes his aides have assured us he did in real life — indeed, he predicts virtually the entire disastrous outcome of the war — though like the “good soldier” he was he ultimately goes before the United Nations and repeats all the administration’s propaganda and outright lies.
Here Stone mixes in archival footage of the real Colin Powell addressing the U.N., just as at other points in the movie he includes clips of the real Bush, Cheney and others in the administration; most of the junctures work well — remember, this is the director who in Nixon reproduced the 1960 TV debates between Nixon and Kennedy by intercutting archival footage of the real Kennedy with newly shot scenes of Anthony Hopkins re-enacting Nixon’s part — but a few, particularly the ones involving trying to accept Richard Dreyfuss and the more formidable real Dick Cheney as the same person, jar. In the scenes showing the buildup to the war in Iraq, W. comes across as Captain Ahab with Saddam Hussein as his own Moby Dick — a monomaniac unwilling to be dissuaded from launching the war or even delaying it (one of the most chilling scenes is the one between Bush and a hapless Tony Blair, played by “Mr. Fantastic” Ioan Gruffudd, who’s trying to get him at least to delay the war until the United Nations weapons inspectors finish their work) — and after major combat operations have ended, Bush has posed on the aircraft carrier under the “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” sign, and the occupation forces don’t find the weapons of mass destruction Bush and his associates were so sure he had, Bush regards their non-existence as a personal insult.
On one level W. is a well put-together movie, but on another level it doesn’t really work because we never get the sense of how what we see of Bush in the flashback scenes shaped what Bush became as President — and that, as I noted above, is a function of the bizarrely unreflective nature of his character, the way he seems to regard any sort of introspection as a fundamental betrayal of his self-image as a man of destiny, a man of action, a man who (as Hitler said of himself — and no, I’m not making any more of the parallel than this!) moved through events with the assurance of a sleepwalker, a man whose fundamental arrogance and sense of predestined privilege shaped not only his ascent to the presidency but what he did with it. That’s the part of Bush’s character that really doesn’t get shown in this film, perhaps because it would have been virtually impossible for Stone and Weiser to put it on the screen without making Bush seem certifiably crazy (which he clearly isn’t; for all the detachment of his thinking from objective reality, he didn’t sink into the sort of basket-case depression Nixon fell into in the last months of his presidency). As it is, W. is the effort of some talented, dedicated filmmakers who tried their best to be sympathetic, to see some good in this man without totally buying into his world-view (as most of Bush’s defenders did during his presidency — more than most Presidents, Bush seemed to divide the country into roughly equal-sized groups of people who thought he could do no wrong and people who thought he could do no right — as opposed to Obama, who has his own cadre of bitter opponents who think he can do no right but whose supporters are considerably more nuanced in their appraisal of him than Bush’s are, and ready — if not to lash out at him the way some Democrats did at Clinton when he ended up responding to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 by governing essentially as a moderate Republican thereafter — at least to write about him in tones of disappointment and sorrow), but the fact is that George W. Bush simply isn’t a complicated enough person to be the stuff of which protagonists of great dramas are made.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Anvil: The Story of Anvil (Independent, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we went to see at the Ken was called Anvil: The Story of Anvil (some of the promo materials and the imdb.com listing put an exclamation point after the first “Anvil,” but the actual credits don’t), a documentary about an obscure heavy-metal band from Canada that came heartbreakingly close to achieving international superstardom in the 1980’s — they’re shown playing a Japanese heavy-metal festival in 1984 on the same bill as the Scorpions, Whitesnake and other future stars — only, for reasons that remain mysterious mainly because the film’s director, Sasha Gervasi (a former Anvil roadie from the glory days of the 1980’s), doesn’t seem all that interested in them, they never quite made it to the top rung of the music business and ended up back in Canada, working day jobs and putting the band together every time there’s a backer offering them the opportunity to record or tour.
There are brief interview segments from people who were in bands that became superstars, like Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Slash of Guns ‘n Roses and Velvet Revolver, remembering how good Anvil sounded in the 1980’s and how in particular their album Metal on Metal and its title song (and if Anvil has a signature song, that’s it) sounded to these other musicians like a ground-breaking record that was going to show the way to the heavy-metal future. About the only reason for Anvil getting so heartbreakingly close to the brass ring only to have it slip from their fingers that the film offers is that they were signed, not to a major record label, but to a small company called Attic that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) offer them state-of-the-art production.
The axis of Anvil is in two musicians, singer, lead guitarist and principal songwriter Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, who met in high school and decided they would get together, form a band and do that for the rest of their lives. They’re a four-piece band and the other two members that we see in the film joined in the mid-1990’s after Anvil’s brief almost-heyday — there’s no clue as to what happened to the original members or whether they achieved stardom on their own or with other bands (though I’m inclined to think not because I’m sure the filmmakers would have mentioned it if they had) — though there’s a notice on the end credits that the bassist quit after principal photography on the film was finished.
A number of the reviewers have called Anvil a sort of real-life version of This Is Spinal Tap, and the similarities are evident — the near-identical names of Spinal Tap’s director (Rob Reiner) and Anvil’s drummer; a sequence backstage before an Anvil gig in Transylvania and they briefly look lost while they’re trying to find their way to the stage (echoing one of the funniest scenes in Spinal Tap), a visit by Kudlow and Reiner to the real Stonehenge (in Spinal Tap the band performs in front of a mock-up of Stonehenge that, thanks to a mistake by one of the band members, is about one-twelfth the size they intended), and even — when they hook up with the super-producer Chris Tsangarides (whose other credits include Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy) — a piece of electronic equipment in Tsangarides’ home studio with a volume control that, yes, goes to 11.
Charles was a bit worried about whether he’d like the movie — in particular he was concerned that the sound would be cranked up to comparable volume levels to those of a live heavy-metal concert — but as it turned out he was as charmed by it as I was. Kudlow and Reiner seem to have the sort of relationship that long-term police partners have — an intense emotional bond that doesn’t threaten their ties with their families (Reiner has a long-term marriage and Kudlow gets married during the course of the film — not for the first time, we think, though we’re not told for sure) but in a way transcends them. When they hook up with Tsangarides and he says he can record a state-of-the-art album for them for 13,000 pounds (that’s the entire cost, not just his fee) and give them the big, expansive production they haven’t been able to afford on the albums they’ve been releasing in the meantime, the sessions turn into an intense period of conflict between the two — Kudlow and Reiner seem less like long-term musical partners than like a married couple who’ve been together for years and whose misfortunes have seriously strained their relationship, and Tsangarides seems to be playing the part of their marriage counselor.
At one point Kudlow even fires Reiner from the band, then woos him back with an “apology” that threatens to degenerate into another argument. Earlier we’ve seen their rather disastrous tour of Eastern Europe, promoted by a would-be “manager” named Tiziana Arrigoni, with a lot of Spinal Tap-style mishaps, the band playing their heart out to handfuls of audience members, and finally them returning home to Canada (and Kudlow’s day job making deliveries for a company that does catering to school cafeterias) — but it’s the scenes in England that really are the most emotionally intense and moving parts of this film. The best part of this film is the sheer poignancy of it; one gets the impression that a band like Anvil that came so close to super-stardom and still fell short has a lot more emotional and psychological baggage than a band of high-school friends who never got beyond playing local bars and therefore weren’t tantalized by almost making it and can get together without having these kinds of regrets.
The film has a fascinating story arc as it ends with Anvil invited to play at a heavy-metal festival in Japan — where they once shared the stage with the Scorpions and Whitesnake in 1984 and it looked like the future was theirs — and then when they arrive they see that they’re supposed to lead off the festival at 11:45 a.m. and they wonder who’s going to show up to listen to their music at that ungodly (at least by rock ’n’ roll standards) hour. They fret about having to play their set for five people — and then they actually take the stage and the auditorium is nearly full, creating a kind of worm-turning triumph similar to the big premiere for Plan Nine from Outer Space at the end of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.
Much of the movie turns on the fact that the members of Anvil are all too aware that they’re old (or at least middle-aged) men playing a young man’s game, and their hopes for stardom (such as they are) diminish with each passing year; having spent the money on Tsangarides’ album for them, they come home with the master tape, find the L.A.-based American majors utterly disinterested, get a nibble from EMI Canada — but when their home country’s branch finally decides to pass on them, they’re forced to release the CD themselves and sell it at concerts and online just like a startup band of kids fresh out of high school. If Anvil: The Story of Anvil has a flaw, it’s a typical one among music documentaries — we hear Anvil’s music only in snippets, a few seconds’ worth of a song at a time, and therefore we don’t really get an idea of whether they’re any good or not.
I’m not a fan of heavy metal — I respect the technical virtuosity required to play it (it may not be as hard to do metal as it is classical or jazz but metal, especially the lead guitar parts, requires a good deal more musical skill than punk and the “new wave” and “alternative” styles that have derived from it, though frankly “alternative” music generally touches me emotionally more than metal does) — and judging from what we do get in the film, Anvil seems pretty typical of the genre: ripping lead guitar solos, loud and often double-time rhythms from the bass and (especially) the drums, whiny falsetto lead vocals above it all (though Kudlow is less annoyingly whiny than some metal singers in bands that are major stars) and self-consciously mystical (sometimes darkly so — the stereotype that all heavy-metal musicians worship Satan is silly but there are enough “dark side” references in many metal songs that one can see where that urban legend got started) lyrics that attempt poetry and rarely achieve it — not that you can comprehend them over the volume of the music anyway. Anvil seem to do this style as well as anybody else — certainly as well as some of the major bands that started around the same time they did — and whatever the reason they didn’t become superstars, musical merit doesn’t seem to be one of them!
The film we went to see at the Ken was called Anvil: The Story of Anvil (some of the promo materials and the imdb.com listing put an exclamation point after the first “Anvil,” but the actual credits don’t), a documentary about an obscure heavy-metal band from Canada that came heartbreakingly close to achieving international superstardom in the 1980’s — they’re shown playing a Japanese heavy-metal festival in 1984 on the same bill as the Scorpions, Whitesnake and other future stars — only, for reasons that remain mysterious mainly because the film’s director, Sasha Gervasi (a former Anvil roadie from the glory days of the 1980’s), doesn’t seem all that interested in them, they never quite made it to the top rung of the music business and ended up back in Canada, working day jobs and putting the band together every time there’s a backer offering them the opportunity to record or tour.
There are brief interview segments from people who were in bands that became superstars, like Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Slash of Guns ‘n Roses and Velvet Revolver, remembering how good Anvil sounded in the 1980’s and how in particular their album Metal on Metal and its title song (and if Anvil has a signature song, that’s it) sounded to these other musicians like a ground-breaking record that was going to show the way to the heavy-metal future. About the only reason for Anvil getting so heartbreakingly close to the brass ring only to have it slip from their fingers that the film offers is that they were signed, not to a major record label, but to a small company called Attic that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) offer them state-of-the-art production.
The axis of Anvil is in two musicians, singer, lead guitarist and principal songwriter Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, who met in high school and decided they would get together, form a band and do that for the rest of their lives. They’re a four-piece band and the other two members that we see in the film joined in the mid-1990’s after Anvil’s brief almost-heyday — there’s no clue as to what happened to the original members or whether they achieved stardom on their own or with other bands (though I’m inclined to think not because I’m sure the filmmakers would have mentioned it if they had) — though there’s a notice on the end credits that the bassist quit after principal photography on the film was finished.
A number of the reviewers have called Anvil a sort of real-life version of This Is Spinal Tap, and the similarities are evident — the near-identical names of Spinal Tap’s director (Rob Reiner) and Anvil’s drummer; a sequence backstage before an Anvil gig in Transylvania and they briefly look lost while they’re trying to find their way to the stage (echoing one of the funniest scenes in Spinal Tap), a visit by Kudlow and Reiner to the real Stonehenge (in Spinal Tap the band performs in front of a mock-up of Stonehenge that, thanks to a mistake by one of the band members, is about one-twelfth the size they intended), and even — when they hook up with the super-producer Chris Tsangarides (whose other credits include Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy) — a piece of electronic equipment in Tsangarides’ home studio with a volume control that, yes, goes to 11.
Charles was a bit worried about whether he’d like the movie — in particular he was concerned that the sound would be cranked up to comparable volume levels to those of a live heavy-metal concert — but as it turned out he was as charmed by it as I was. Kudlow and Reiner seem to have the sort of relationship that long-term police partners have — an intense emotional bond that doesn’t threaten their ties with their families (Reiner has a long-term marriage and Kudlow gets married during the course of the film — not for the first time, we think, though we’re not told for sure) but in a way transcends them. When they hook up with Tsangarides and he says he can record a state-of-the-art album for them for 13,000 pounds (that’s the entire cost, not just his fee) and give them the big, expansive production they haven’t been able to afford on the albums they’ve been releasing in the meantime, the sessions turn into an intense period of conflict between the two — Kudlow and Reiner seem less like long-term musical partners than like a married couple who’ve been together for years and whose misfortunes have seriously strained their relationship, and Tsangarides seems to be playing the part of their marriage counselor.
At one point Kudlow even fires Reiner from the band, then woos him back with an “apology” that threatens to degenerate into another argument. Earlier we’ve seen their rather disastrous tour of Eastern Europe, promoted by a would-be “manager” named Tiziana Arrigoni, with a lot of Spinal Tap-style mishaps, the band playing their heart out to handfuls of audience members, and finally them returning home to Canada (and Kudlow’s day job making deliveries for a company that does catering to school cafeterias) — but it’s the scenes in England that really are the most emotionally intense and moving parts of this film. The best part of this film is the sheer poignancy of it; one gets the impression that a band like Anvil that came so close to super-stardom and still fell short has a lot more emotional and psychological baggage than a band of high-school friends who never got beyond playing local bars and therefore weren’t tantalized by almost making it and can get together without having these kinds of regrets.
The film has a fascinating story arc as it ends with Anvil invited to play at a heavy-metal festival in Japan — where they once shared the stage with the Scorpions and Whitesnake in 1984 and it looked like the future was theirs — and then when they arrive they see that they’re supposed to lead off the festival at 11:45 a.m. and they wonder who’s going to show up to listen to their music at that ungodly (at least by rock ’n’ roll standards) hour. They fret about having to play their set for five people — and then they actually take the stage and the auditorium is nearly full, creating a kind of worm-turning triumph similar to the big premiere for Plan Nine from Outer Space at the end of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.
Much of the movie turns on the fact that the members of Anvil are all too aware that they’re old (or at least middle-aged) men playing a young man’s game, and their hopes for stardom (such as they are) diminish with each passing year; having spent the money on Tsangarides’ album for them, they come home with the master tape, find the L.A.-based American majors utterly disinterested, get a nibble from EMI Canada — but when their home country’s branch finally decides to pass on them, they’re forced to release the CD themselves and sell it at concerts and online just like a startup band of kids fresh out of high school. If Anvil: The Story of Anvil has a flaw, it’s a typical one among music documentaries — we hear Anvil’s music only in snippets, a few seconds’ worth of a song at a time, and therefore we don’t really get an idea of whether they’re any good or not.
I’m not a fan of heavy metal — I respect the technical virtuosity required to play it (it may not be as hard to do metal as it is classical or jazz but metal, especially the lead guitar parts, requires a good deal more musical skill than punk and the “new wave” and “alternative” styles that have derived from it, though frankly “alternative” music generally touches me emotionally more than metal does) — and judging from what we do get in the film, Anvil seems pretty typical of the genre: ripping lead guitar solos, loud and often double-time rhythms from the bass and (especially) the drums, whiny falsetto lead vocals above it all (though Kudlow is less annoyingly whiny than some metal singers in bands that are major stars) and self-consciously mystical (sometimes darkly so — the stereotype that all heavy-metal musicians worship Satan is silly but there are enough “dark side” references in many metal songs that one can see where that urban legend got started) lyrics that attempt poetry and rarely achieve it — not that you can comprehend them over the volume of the music anyway. Anvil seem to do this style as well as anybody else — certainly as well as some of the major bands that started around the same time they did — and whatever the reason they didn’t become superstars, musical merit doesn’t seem to be one of them!
City on Fire (Astral Bellevue Pathé, 1979)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode — from their early days as a local show in Minneapolis — based on a really peculiar movie called City on Fire, which I’d thought from the title would be either a sci-fi apocalypse or a juvenile-delinquency or motorcycle-gang movie. Surprise: it was really a disaster movie — in both senses of the word — and it literally dealt with a city on fire. What’s more, it actually had some capable actors, including Hollywood veterans Henry Fonda (as the unnamed city’s fire chief, playing the role with the same endless patience he’d brought to the part of the police commissioner in Madigan 11 years earlier), Ava Gardner (as a TV host who’s also a society woman and has the hots for the leading actor) and Shelley Winters (as the head nurse of a newly opened hospital — well, it couldn’t have been a 1970’s disaster movie without Shelley Winters being in it!).
Winters was her usual obnoxious self but fortunately she didn’t have much footage, and both Fonda and Gardner played their impossible roles with the grace and dignity of two old pros doing the best they could with incredibly anemic material. The rest of it was piss-poor, notwithstanding Barry Newman’s rugged good looks and genuine charisma (not enough to make him a major star, but enough to make him more watchable than anyone else in the movie of his generation), saddled with terrible plot construction and icky dialogue. Next to this one, The Towering Inferno looks like a deathless masterpiece by comparison!
It also doesn’t help that the titular fires — there are two of them, one started in a tenement building by pre-pubescent boys sneaking smokes with stolen cigarettes (which the fire department puts out easily) and one started by a disgruntled oil refinery worker who decides to get his revenge over being passed over for promotion by burning the whole place down — if he’d at least ascended to the top of the installation and screamed “Top of the world, Ma!” as he and it went up in flames the way James Cagney did at the end of White Heat, this would at least have been entertaining — even though it would have reminded us of a much better movie than this one!) — which threatens a firestorm that’s about to engulf a newly constructed hospital and kill everyone inside if our plucky hero, Dr. Frank Whitman (Barry Newman), can’t evacuate them safely in the face of the onrushing flames. This might have been genuinely exciting if the director, Alvin Rakoff, had actually been able to build up any sense of suspense or terror — or if his effects people had been able to create a genuinely convincing fire; as it is, it looks as if the “fire” effects were done by two or three schoolboys with cardboard models in their backyard.
The weirdest thing about this movie was the sheer star power that went into something that lame — the Grapes of Wrath cast member we expect to see on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is John Carradine, not Henry Fonda! — though it also doesn’t help that the writing crew (Jack Hill & David P. Lewis and Céline La Frenière) threw a lot of soap opera stuff into the mix until we got so confused we neither knew nor cared who was sleeping with whom. The MST3K crew got better at ridiculing the movies later on in the run — at one point one of them actually said, “You can’t really make fun of a movie in which so many people die,” which was true — though it was also true that the filmmakers gave us little reason to care about any of these people. I think the movie wasn’t quite 10 minutes old when Charles and I were already curling our fingers and calling, “Hey, fire — FIRE! Come on over here and take out some of these boring people!”
I ran a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode — from their early days as a local show in Minneapolis — based on a really peculiar movie called City on Fire, which I’d thought from the title would be either a sci-fi apocalypse or a juvenile-delinquency or motorcycle-gang movie. Surprise: it was really a disaster movie — in both senses of the word — and it literally dealt with a city on fire. What’s more, it actually had some capable actors, including Hollywood veterans Henry Fonda (as the unnamed city’s fire chief, playing the role with the same endless patience he’d brought to the part of the police commissioner in Madigan 11 years earlier), Ava Gardner (as a TV host who’s also a society woman and has the hots for the leading actor) and Shelley Winters (as the head nurse of a newly opened hospital — well, it couldn’t have been a 1970’s disaster movie without Shelley Winters being in it!).
Winters was her usual obnoxious self but fortunately she didn’t have much footage, and both Fonda and Gardner played their impossible roles with the grace and dignity of two old pros doing the best they could with incredibly anemic material. The rest of it was piss-poor, notwithstanding Barry Newman’s rugged good looks and genuine charisma (not enough to make him a major star, but enough to make him more watchable than anyone else in the movie of his generation), saddled with terrible plot construction and icky dialogue. Next to this one, The Towering Inferno looks like a deathless masterpiece by comparison!
It also doesn’t help that the titular fires — there are two of them, one started in a tenement building by pre-pubescent boys sneaking smokes with stolen cigarettes (which the fire department puts out easily) and one started by a disgruntled oil refinery worker who decides to get his revenge over being passed over for promotion by burning the whole place down — if he’d at least ascended to the top of the installation and screamed “Top of the world, Ma!” as he and it went up in flames the way James Cagney did at the end of White Heat, this would at least have been entertaining — even though it would have reminded us of a much better movie than this one!) — which threatens a firestorm that’s about to engulf a newly constructed hospital and kill everyone inside if our plucky hero, Dr. Frank Whitman (Barry Newman), can’t evacuate them safely in the face of the onrushing flames. This might have been genuinely exciting if the director, Alvin Rakoff, had actually been able to build up any sense of suspense or terror — or if his effects people had been able to create a genuinely convincing fire; as it is, it looks as if the “fire” effects were done by two or three schoolboys with cardboard models in their backyard.
The weirdest thing about this movie was the sheer star power that went into something that lame — the Grapes of Wrath cast member we expect to see on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is John Carradine, not Henry Fonda! — though it also doesn’t help that the writing crew (Jack Hill & David P. Lewis and Céline La Frenière) threw a lot of soap opera stuff into the mix until we got so confused we neither knew nor cared who was sleeping with whom. The MST3K crew got better at ridiculing the movies later on in the run — at one point one of them actually said, “You can’t really make fun of a movie in which so many people die,” which was true — though it was also true that the filmmakers gave us little reason to care about any of these people. I think the movie wasn’t quite 10 minutes old when Charles and I were already curling our fingers and calling, “Hey, fire — FIRE! Come on over here and take out some of these boring people!”
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
That Girl from Paris (RKO, 1936/released 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the film Turner Classic Movies had shown just after That Midnight Kiss as part of an entire night of films that dealt with opera to greater or lesser extent: That Girl from Paris, a 1936 RKO vehicle for French soprano Lily Pons (erroneously included on the RCA Victor compilation The American Opera Singer, which theoretically was supposed to showcase U.S.-born performers only but also included Scottish-born Mary Garden and Canadian-born Jon Vickers as “ringers,” along with Italian-born guest artist Enrico Caruso as partner with authentically American Geraldine Farrar in their famous record of the closing section of the love duet from Act I of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly) whose origins were a short story in the March 1928 issue of Brown’s Magazine, “Viennese Charmer” by W. Carey Wonderly.
RKO had first filmed “Viennese Charmer” in 1929 as Street Girl, directed by Wesley Ruggles from a script by Jane Murfin, and seven years later they decided to rework the property as a Pons vehicle. The original Street Girl starred Betty Compson as Frederika Joyzelle from the fictitious European country of “Aregon” (and affecting a horrible accent to sound “Aregonese”), a homeless immigrant running away from a man who accosted her by hiding out in a New York apartment occupied by the four members of a jazz band, whom she builds into a star attraction by singing with them and negotiating a better contract for them with their employer. While Street Girl took place entirely within the U.S., That Girl from Paris starts out in Paris, where Nicole “Nikki” Martin (Lily Pons) is about to marry the impresario Paul Joseph DeVry (Gregory Gaye), who has built her from an unknown to a star and used his clout to get her onto the stage of the Paris Opéra. She’s about to marry the guy when she suddenly has a change of heart and flees the church, demanding that the next time she sings at the Opéra it will be on her own merits and not due to a man’s power, and dashes off to the French countryside.
There she experiences a meet-cute with Windy McLean (Gene Raymond), sax player with an American jazz band called the Wild Cats, when he pulls up his car next to her, thinking she’s hitchhiking, and of course it’s hate at first sight — which only convinces any hardened moviegoer that they’re going to end up in love at the end. When Windy and the rest of his band members — Whammo Lonsdale (Jack Oakie, who was in the original Street Girl as well!), Butch Romanoff (Mischa Auer) and Laughing Boy Frank (Frank Jenks) — sail back to the U.S., Nikki stows away in their cabin (making this film a close relative to the previous year’s Marx Brothers vehicle, A Night at the Opera, though with a great female opera singer as their stowaway instead of a great male one) and manages to sneak into the country by diving through the porthole of the boys’ stateroom.
From then on the film follows the Street Girl template pretty closely, with Nikki getting the boys a better deal from “Hammy” Hammacher (Herman Bing), their boss at a New Jersey roadhouse and also taking over as their star attraction from Windy’s previous girlfriend, dancer Claire Williams (Lucille Ball, moving up from her teeny-tiny bit parts in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films Roberta, Top Hat and Follow the Fleet to a second lead with at least one great comedy sequence; she’s asked that rosin be put on her dance shoes but Nikki has put soap on them instead, and she slips and falls all over the dance floor and proves how great a slapstick queen she was already, 15 years before I Love Lucy). She’s also beset by two immigration agents determined to deport her (some things never change!) and, in order to keep her in the country, the band members decide that one of them shall marry her and they cut cards to decide which one it will be.
Jack Oakie’s character actually gets the high card, but Gene Raymond’s character has fallen genuinely in love with her and thus he demands to do the honor — but when Nikki hears that the band members cut cards for her hand, she has a hissy-fit and turns herself in to the authorities, reunites with Paul Joseph De Vry, and he pulls strings and gets her a spot at the Met in a production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, where she sings the aria “Una voce poco fa” under the direction of her husband-to-be, André Kostelanetz. (She insisted that he conduct her aria even though Nathaniel Shilkret, a fine conductor himself, conducted the rest of the music for the film, including Pons’ pop songs.) Once again, this time in the U.S., De Vry is set to marry Nikki — and once again Nikki runs away, this time to the band members, who practically force a reluctant Windy to marry her inside a taxi as the film lurches to an end.
That Girl from Paris is a nice movie that could have been better. The script is by writers who don’t have great reputations but were solid professionals — P. J. Wolfson and Dorothy Yost (with Joseph Fields credited for “adaptation” and Harold Kussell for “contribution to screenplay construction,” whatever that meant — a particularly inappropriate credit since this script seems more glued together from pieces of other movies than actually “constructed”) — and there are a lot of witty lines and good moments. What it needed was a great director, someone like Ernst Lubitsch, to give it the right air of insouciance and also to get a great performance out of Lily Pons, who emerges under the actual director, Leigh Jason, as a pleasant enough screen personality with a charming (real) French accent but not especially well developed acting skills. (She’d come to prominence as a coloratura soprano in a pre-Callas era in which operas like The Barber of Seville weren’t taken seriously and considered only fit for spectacular vocal display.)
It doesn’t help that “Una voce poco fa” (the aria Dorothy Comingore so famously mangled in Citizen Kane five years later it’s weird to hear it actually sung properly in an RKO movie!) is Pons’ only bit of operatic singing in the film; for the most part she’s either doing coloratura vocalizing or singing pop songs, most of them written by Arthur Schwartz with lyrics by Edward Heyman — they both had credits on great songs, but none of their works here qualify; they’re basically stentorian chips off old operetta logs and not really suitable vehicles for Pons’ voice. Indeed, Jack Oakie gets almost as many vocals here as Pons does — and he turns out to be a perfectly acceptable comic singer whose warbling adds to the film’s entertainment value.
Pons made three films at RKO, I Dream Too Much (1935) — also a pretty leaden movie but redeemed by the young Henry Fonda’s performance as the penniless composer Pons reaches out to and tries to help (though Fonda’s quiet sincerity in the role practically defines the term “overqualified”); That Girl from Paris (the only one of the trio that was a box-office hit) and Hitting a New High (1937), a God-awful movie in which in order to score a nightclub job in New York Pons is obliged to pose as “Ooga-Hunga, the Bird Girl,” who supposedly grew up in the African jungle and sings opera perfectly even though she never heard it until white people discovered her there. (In order to pose as the “Bird Girl” Pons sings a largely wordless aria, “Le rossignol et la rose,” from Saint-Saëns’ opera Parysatis, an utterly lovely piece which is the one point of distinction Hitting a New High has to offer.)
The Street Girl/That Girl from Paris plot line was used by RKO a third time in 1942 for the movie Four Jacks and a Jill — and there are some oddly incestuous connections between the three films: not only does Jack Oakie repeat his Street Girl role in That Girl from Paris, but just months after making this Gene Raymond would marry another Hollywood diva, Jeanette MacDonald, for real; and though Ball wasn’t in Four Jacks and a Jill, her husband (by then), Desi Arnaz, was. The fact that Pons never became a movie star on the level of Geraldine Farrar (in the silent era, which indicates what a good actress she was as well as a great singer!), Jeanette MacDonald (who frankly would have played the female lead in That Girl from Paris far better than Pons did — and not just because of her real-life romantic connection with its leading man!) or Grace Moore — after her trio of films for RKO her only other movie appearance was as one of the guest artists in the 1947 film Carnegie Hall (in which she sang the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé — and sang it superbly) is probably due to the fact that, as great a singer as she was for her repertoire and her time, she didn’t really project the kind of extra-musical charisma needed to make it to cinematic diva-dom.
I ran the film Turner Classic Movies had shown just after That Midnight Kiss as part of an entire night of films that dealt with opera to greater or lesser extent: That Girl from Paris, a 1936 RKO vehicle for French soprano Lily Pons (erroneously included on the RCA Victor compilation The American Opera Singer, which theoretically was supposed to showcase U.S.-born performers only but also included Scottish-born Mary Garden and Canadian-born Jon Vickers as “ringers,” along with Italian-born guest artist Enrico Caruso as partner with authentically American Geraldine Farrar in their famous record of the closing section of the love duet from Act I of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly) whose origins were a short story in the March 1928 issue of Brown’s Magazine, “Viennese Charmer” by W. Carey Wonderly.
RKO had first filmed “Viennese Charmer” in 1929 as Street Girl, directed by Wesley Ruggles from a script by Jane Murfin, and seven years later they decided to rework the property as a Pons vehicle. The original Street Girl starred Betty Compson as Frederika Joyzelle from the fictitious European country of “Aregon” (and affecting a horrible accent to sound “Aregonese”), a homeless immigrant running away from a man who accosted her by hiding out in a New York apartment occupied by the four members of a jazz band, whom she builds into a star attraction by singing with them and negotiating a better contract for them with their employer. While Street Girl took place entirely within the U.S., That Girl from Paris starts out in Paris, where Nicole “Nikki” Martin (Lily Pons) is about to marry the impresario Paul Joseph DeVry (Gregory Gaye), who has built her from an unknown to a star and used his clout to get her onto the stage of the Paris Opéra. She’s about to marry the guy when she suddenly has a change of heart and flees the church, demanding that the next time she sings at the Opéra it will be on her own merits and not due to a man’s power, and dashes off to the French countryside.
There she experiences a meet-cute with Windy McLean (Gene Raymond), sax player with an American jazz band called the Wild Cats, when he pulls up his car next to her, thinking she’s hitchhiking, and of course it’s hate at first sight — which only convinces any hardened moviegoer that they’re going to end up in love at the end. When Windy and the rest of his band members — Whammo Lonsdale (Jack Oakie, who was in the original Street Girl as well!), Butch Romanoff (Mischa Auer) and Laughing Boy Frank (Frank Jenks) — sail back to the U.S., Nikki stows away in their cabin (making this film a close relative to the previous year’s Marx Brothers vehicle, A Night at the Opera, though with a great female opera singer as their stowaway instead of a great male one) and manages to sneak into the country by diving through the porthole of the boys’ stateroom.
From then on the film follows the Street Girl template pretty closely, with Nikki getting the boys a better deal from “Hammy” Hammacher (Herman Bing), their boss at a New Jersey roadhouse and also taking over as their star attraction from Windy’s previous girlfriend, dancer Claire Williams (Lucille Ball, moving up from her teeny-tiny bit parts in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films Roberta, Top Hat and Follow the Fleet to a second lead with at least one great comedy sequence; she’s asked that rosin be put on her dance shoes but Nikki has put soap on them instead, and she slips and falls all over the dance floor and proves how great a slapstick queen she was already, 15 years before I Love Lucy). She’s also beset by two immigration agents determined to deport her (some things never change!) and, in order to keep her in the country, the band members decide that one of them shall marry her and they cut cards to decide which one it will be.
Jack Oakie’s character actually gets the high card, but Gene Raymond’s character has fallen genuinely in love with her and thus he demands to do the honor — but when Nikki hears that the band members cut cards for her hand, she has a hissy-fit and turns herself in to the authorities, reunites with Paul Joseph De Vry, and he pulls strings and gets her a spot at the Met in a production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, where she sings the aria “Una voce poco fa” under the direction of her husband-to-be, André Kostelanetz. (She insisted that he conduct her aria even though Nathaniel Shilkret, a fine conductor himself, conducted the rest of the music for the film, including Pons’ pop songs.) Once again, this time in the U.S., De Vry is set to marry Nikki — and once again Nikki runs away, this time to the band members, who practically force a reluctant Windy to marry her inside a taxi as the film lurches to an end.
That Girl from Paris is a nice movie that could have been better. The script is by writers who don’t have great reputations but were solid professionals — P. J. Wolfson and Dorothy Yost (with Joseph Fields credited for “adaptation” and Harold Kussell for “contribution to screenplay construction,” whatever that meant — a particularly inappropriate credit since this script seems more glued together from pieces of other movies than actually “constructed”) — and there are a lot of witty lines and good moments. What it needed was a great director, someone like Ernst Lubitsch, to give it the right air of insouciance and also to get a great performance out of Lily Pons, who emerges under the actual director, Leigh Jason, as a pleasant enough screen personality with a charming (real) French accent but not especially well developed acting skills. (She’d come to prominence as a coloratura soprano in a pre-Callas era in which operas like The Barber of Seville weren’t taken seriously and considered only fit for spectacular vocal display.)
It doesn’t help that “Una voce poco fa” (the aria Dorothy Comingore so famously mangled in Citizen Kane five years later it’s weird to hear it actually sung properly in an RKO movie!) is Pons’ only bit of operatic singing in the film; for the most part she’s either doing coloratura vocalizing or singing pop songs, most of them written by Arthur Schwartz with lyrics by Edward Heyman — they both had credits on great songs, but none of their works here qualify; they’re basically stentorian chips off old operetta logs and not really suitable vehicles for Pons’ voice. Indeed, Jack Oakie gets almost as many vocals here as Pons does — and he turns out to be a perfectly acceptable comic singer whose warbling adds to the film’s entertainment value.
Pons made three films at RKO, I Dream Too Much (1935) — also a pretty leaden movie but redeemed by the young Henry Fonda’s performance as the penniless composer Pons reaches out to and tries to help (though Fonda’s quiet sincerity in the role practically defines the term “overqualified”); That Girl from Paris (the only one of the trio that was a box-office hit) and Hitting a New High (1937), a God-awful movie in which in order to score a nightclub job in New York Pons is obliged to pose as “Ooga-Hunga, the Bird Girl,” who supposedly grew up in the African jungle and sings opera perfectly even though she never heard it until white people discovered her there. (In order to pose as the “Bird Girl” Pons sings a largely wordless aria, “Le rossignol et la rose,” from Saint-Saëns’ opera Parysatis, an utterly lovely piece which is the one point of distinction Hitting a New High has to offer.)
The Street Girl/That Girl from Paris plot line was used by RKO a third time in 1942 for the movie Four Jacks and a Jill — and there are some oddly incestuous connections between the three films: not only does Jack Oakie repeat his Street Girl role in That Girl from Paris, but just months after making this Gene Raymond would marry another Hollywood diva, Jeanette MacDonald, for real; and though Ball wasn’t in Four Jacks and a Jill, her husband (by then), Desi Arnaz, was. The fact that Pons never became a movie star on the level of Geraldine Farrar (in the silent era, which indicates what a good actress she was as well as a great singer!), Jeanette MacDonald (who frankly would have played the female lead in That Girl from Paris far better than Pons did — and not just because of her real-life romantic connection with its leading man!) or Grace Moore — after her trio of films for RKO her only other movie appearance was as one of the guest artists in the 1947 film Carnegie Hall (in which she sang the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé — and sang it superbly) is probably due to the fact that, as great a singer as she was for her repertoire and her time, she didn’t really project the kind of extra-musical charisma needed to make it to cinematic diva-dom.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (HBO, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Marina Zenovich’s 2008 HBO documentary on the celebrated and controversial director and in particular the sex scandal that forced him out of the United States after he had sex with a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Gailey, during what was supposed to be a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson’s home to which Gailey’s mother had given her permission. Polanski was supposed to have got the girl drunk and split a Quaalude with her, and he was charged with five counts, including rape. Though Polanski himself is represented in this film only in archival clips — mostly interviews he’s done in Europe since the case, in which he’s basically refused to discuss it in a charming but still evasive Continental way — the film features extensive new interviews with the attorneys on both sides of the case, prosecutor Roger Gunson (a devout Mormon who in the archival footage at the time of the case looked like one of the cookie-cutter young Nixon aides who showed up at the Watergate hearings, and about whom it was joked that he pulled the case because he was a Mormon and therefore the only assistant D.A. in Los Angeles County who had never had sex with an underage girl himself — in the current footage he denies that, but his denial has a wry quality that indicates he’s not without his own sense of humor about it all) and defense attorney Douglas Dalton.
One of the most interesting quotes in the movie came from Hollywood insider Anthea Sylbert, who pointed out the vast gap in perception between American and European journalists covering the case: the Europeans thought Polanski was a great director being sacrificed on the altar of America’s sexual Puritanism, while the Americans thought he was a weird little gnome who was probably as perverted in real life as he was in his movies. That perception actually became part of the case against him, as A.D.A. Gunson researched it and decided to take advantage of a Polanski film festival being shown at the Nuart Theatre revival house in L.A. (almost certainly scheduled to take advantage of the sudden notoriety Polanski had got when he was arrested!) — and Gunson went to all the Polanski films at the Nuart and decided that he was particularly into scenes of women being violated over water, and the case fit the pattern of his work since it involved violating a 13-year-old girl after photographing her nude in a Jacuzzi. (An auteur theory of felony.)
The film is fascinating, but there’s also a bit of blame-the-dead-guy in Zenovich’s decision to make the judge in the case, Laurence A. Rittenband, her principal villain. She amounts an impressive dossier on him — from his status pre-Polanski as a sort of judge to the stars (he apparently pulled rank with the presiding judge of the L.A. Superior Court to get assigned high-profile trials involving stars like Marlon Brando and Cary Grant) and his own involvements with young women (including dating a 20-year-old at a time when that was considered underage in California) to his extraordinary decision to call a press conference to discuss his possible sentencing of Polanski, a clear violation of the norms of judicial ethics. She also says — and both Gunson and Dalton back her up on this — that Rittenband made them come to court and follow a scripted “argument” over Polanski’s sentencing, and that after the two attorneys had already been through this once, they balked at going through such a sham again — and instead Dalton filed to have Rittenband removed from the case and Gunson, unusually for a prosecutor, did not object.
Rittenband appears in the film as quite a nasty piece of work, insistent that Polanski serve time and at the same time anxious that he not be able to weasel out of it through appeals — so he hit on the idea of sentencing the director to a 90-day psychiatric evaluation at Chino prison (where Polanski was placed in protective custody for fear another inmate would regard him as a child molester and kill him — and where he engaged in pre-production for the Hurricane remake, which producer Dino De Laurentiis had signed him for — though in the event Polanski did not direct Hurricane; Swedish director Jan Troell did) — and when Chino released him after only 42 days Rittenband was determined that Polanski would serve the remaining 48 days in state prison, though with the media at the time demanding far harsher punishment for the director, he wanted to make it look like he was giving Polanski a far longer sentence and then he would summon the lawyers back to court in closed session and reduce it.
The biggest thing I didn’t know about the case before was that Rittenband demanded, as a condition of leniency, that Polanski agree to voluntary deportation from the United States (a pretty amazing condition since immigration is a subject for federal law and therefore Rittenband had no jurisdiction over it) — which made his decision to flee the court and the U.S. as a whole far more comprehensible; if he was going to be forced to leave the U.S. anyway, it made sense that he do so on his own and without surrendering any more of his time to a prison sentence even though it gave him the image of being a “fugitive from justice” and probably also widened the gulf between America’s and Europe’s perceptions of him.
The film’s title doesn’t really get explained until the very end, in which a voice-over heard over scenes of an elaborately uniformed Polanski receiving the great honor of admission to the Académie Française explains that in Europe Polanski is desired — he’s considered a great artist and has been more or less able to make the films he wants to make — while in the U.S. Polanski is still wanted, subject to immediate arrest whenever he sets foot on our soil. (Polanski was actually born in France — though his parents moved back to his father’s native Poland when he was two or three — and therefore he had the right, as a French citizen, to petition the French government to allow him to remain since the charge he finally plea-bargained to, unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, wasn’t on the list of extraditable offenses according to the U.S. extradition treaty with France.)
The film certainly went into much of Polanski’s background —including the fact that his mother died in the Holocaust and his second wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by the Charles Manson gang in 1969 (and, in yet another bizarre application of the auteur-as-felon theory, before the Manson minions were arrested for this crime Polanski was seriously suspected of it himself, based on little more than a superficial resemblance between the crime scene and the sequence in Rosemary’s Baby in which Mia Farrow is painted on with blood) — though it didn’t really go into the effect being separated from the world’s filmmaking center had on Polanski’s subsequent career (he’s made some great films, some lousy ones, and has had opportunities to work with American stars but only abroad). When my husband Charles and I attended the preview screening of The Pianist, probably Polanski’s best recent film (indeed, I’d rate it his best ever), Charles pointed out to me the poignancy of the fact that when he decided to make a Holocaust movie, out of all the Holocaust stories he could have dramatized he chose a true-life tale of a great artist (Polish classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman) prevented by the Holocaust from practicing his art (and the sequence in which he can finally play music again is presented as a far more powerful dramatic climax than the one in which he’s finally liberated as the Nazi occupation government falls).
Obviously the case has affected Polanski psychologically far more than he’s let on in those surprisingly mincing interviews he’s given about it that are shown in this documentary — and the case is a tragedy all around in which the continued vindictiveness of the L.A. justice system (just today there’s an Associated Press story in the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-polanski5-2009may05,0,141438.story, confirming that Polanski’s exile continues because he refuses to risk arrest and incarceration to meet the judge’s condition that he can’t ask for the case to be dropped unless he shows up personally to make the request) keeps Polanski out of the U.S. despite the willingness of the original prosecutor and of the victim herself to let go of the case.
The film was Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Marina Zenovich’s 2008 HBO documentary on the celebrated and controversial director and in particular the sex scandal that forced him out of the United States after he had sex with a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Gailey, during what was supposed to be a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson’s home to which Gailey’s mother had given her permission. Polanski was supposed to have got the girl drunk and split a Quaalude with her, and he was charged with five counts, including rape. Though Polanski himself is represented in this film only in archival clips — mostly interviews he’s done in Europe since the case, in which he’s basically refused to discuss it in a charming but still evasive Continental way — the film features extensive new interviews with the attorneys on both sides of the case, prosecutor Roger Gunson (a devout Mormon who in the archival footage at the time of the case looked like one of the cookie-cutter young Nixon aides who showed up at the Watergate hearings, and about whom it was joked that he pulled the case because he was a Mormon and therefore the only assistant D.A. in Los Angeles County who had never had sex with an underage girl himself — in the current footage he denies that, but his denial has a wry quality that indicates he’s not without his own sense of humor about it all) and defense attorney Douglas Dalton.
One of the most interesting quotes in the movie came from Hollywood insider Anthea Sylbert, who pointed out the vast gap in perception between American and European journalists covering the case: the Europeans thought Polanski was a great director being sacrificed on the altar of America’s sexual Puritanism, while the Americans thought he was a weird little gnome who was probably as perverted in real life as he was in his movies. That perception actually became part of the case against him, as A.D.A. Gunson researched it and decided to take advantage of a Polanski film festival being shown at the Nuart Theatre revival house in L.A. (almost certainly scheduled to take advantage of the sudden notoriety Polanski had got when he was arrested!) — and Gunson went to all the Polanski films at the Nuart and decided that he was particularly into scenes of women being violated over water, and the case fit the pattern of his work since it involved violating a 13-year-old girl after photographing her nude in a Jacuzzi. (An auteur theory of felony.)
The film is fascinating, but there’s also a bit of blame-the-dead-guy in Zenovich’s decision to make the judge in the case, Laurence A. Rittenband, her principal villain. She amounts an impressive dossier on him — from his status pre-Polanski as a sort of judge to the stars (he apparently pulled rank with the presiding judge of the L.A. Superior Court to get assigned high-profile trials involving stars like Marlon Brando and Cary Grant) and his own involvements with young women (including dating a 20-year-old at a time when that was considered underage in California) to his extraordinary decision to call a press conference to discuss his possible sentencing of Polanski, a clear violation of the norms of judicial ethics. She also says — and both Gunson and Dalton back her up on this — that Rittenband made them come to court and follow a scripted “argument” over Polanski’s sentencing, and that after the two attorneys had already been through this once, they balked at going through such a sham again — and instead Dalton filed to have Rittenband removed from the case and Gunson, unusually for a prosecutor, did not object.
Rittenband appears in the film as quite a nasty piece of work, insistent that Polanski serve time and at the same time anxious that he not be able to weasel out of it through appeals — so he hit on the idea of sentencing the director to a 90-day psychiatric evaluation at Chino prison (where Polanski was placed in protective custody for fear another inmate would regard him as a child molester and kill him — and where he engaged in pre-production for the Hurricane remake, which producer Dino De Laurentiis had signed him for — though in the event Polanski did not direct Hurricane; Swedish director Jan Troell did) — and when Chino released him after only 42 days Rittenband was determined that Polanski would serve the remaining 48 days in state prison, though with the media at the time demanding far harsher punishment for the director, he wanted to make it look like he was giving Polanski a far longer sentence and then he would summon the lawyers back to court in closed session and reduce it.
The biggest thing I didn’t know about the case before was that Rittenband demanded, as a condition of leniency, that Polanski agree to voluntary deportation from the United States (a pretty amazing condition since immigration is a subject for federal law and therefore Rittenband had no jurisdiction over it) — which made his decision to flee the court and the U.S. as a whole far more comprehensible; if he was going to be forced to leave the U.S. anyway, it made sense that he do so on his own and without surrendering any more of his time to a prison sentence even though it gave him the image of being a “fugitive from justice” and probably also widened the gulf between America’s and Europe’s perceptions of him.
The film’s title doesn’t really get explained until the very end, in which a voice-over heard over scenes of an elaborately uniformed Polanski receiving the great honor of admission to the Académie Française explains that in Europe Polanski is desired — he’s considered a great artist and has been more or less able to make the films he wants to make — while in the U.S. Polanski is still wanted, subject to immediate arrest whenever he sets foot on our soil. (Polanski was actually born in France — though his parents moved back to his father’s native Poland when he was two or three — and therefore he had the right, as a French citizen, to petition the French government to allow him to remain since the charge he finally plea-bargained to, unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, wasn’t on the list of extraditable offenses according to the U.S. extradition treaty with France.)
The film certainly went into much of Polanski’s background —including the fact that his mother died in the Holocaust and his second wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by the Charles Manson gang in 1969 (and, in yet another bizarre application of the auteur-as-felon theory, before the Manson minions were arrested for this crime Polanski was seriously suspected of it himself, based on little more than a superficial resemblance between the crime scene and the sequence in Rosemary’s Baby in which Mia Farrow is painted on with blood) — though it didn’t really go into the effect being separated from the world’s filmmaking center had on Polanski’s subsequent career (he’s made some great films, some lousy ones, and has had opportunities to work with American stars but only abroad). When my husband Charles and I attended the preview screening of The Pianist, probably Polanski’s best recent film (indeed, I’d rate it his best ever), Charles pointed out to me the poignancy of the fact that when he decided to make a Holocaust movie, out of all the Holocaust stories he could have dramatized he chose a true-life tale of a great artist (Polish classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman) prevented by the Holocaust from practicing his art (and the sequence in which he can finally play music again is presented as a far more powerful dramatic climax than the one in which he’s finally liberated as the Nazi occupation government falls).
Obviously the case has affected Polanski psychologically far more than he’s let on in those surprisingly mincing interviews he’s given about it that are shown in this documentary — and the case is a tragedy all around in which the continued vindictiveness of the L.A. justice system (just today there’s an Associated Press story in the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-polanski5-2009may05,0,141438.story, confirming that Polanski’s exile continues because he refuses to risk arrest and incarceration to meet the judge’s condition that he can’t ask for the case to be dropped unless he shows up personally to make the request) keeps Polanski out of the U.S. despite the willingness of the original prosecutor and of the victim herself to let go of the case.
Monday, May 4, 2009
The Incredible Hulk (Marvel/Universal, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright @ 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Incredible Hulk, the so-called “reboot” of the Marvel Comics franchise in 2008 after the commercial and critical failure of Ang Lee’s Hulk movie in 2003. This time they went for safety, picking a little-known director with an action-adventure background (someone named Louis Leterrier, who got this film as a consolation prize after Jon Favreau beat him for the assignment to do Iron Man), hiring Zak Penn to do the script (he’s the only writer to get credit, though their star extensively rewrote the script — more on that later) and hired Edward Norton to play Dr. Bruce Banner, the rather nerdy scientist who becomes the Incredible Hulk. (Norton, infamous for insisting on rewriting most of the movies he stars in, apparently wrote the basic treatment for this film and also rewrote much of Zak Penn’s dialogue, but the Screen Writers’ Guild refused Norton screen credit.)
I remember this story first from the comic books and the 1960’s cartoons from Grantray Lawrence Animation, and was particularly struck by the idea of a superhero who was not only a rampaging engine of destruction but couldn’t control his identity — he changed when he was sufficiently stressed out to do so, whether he wanted to or not. In this version, Banner becomes the Hulk not the way he did in the comics — through an accidental exposure to gamma radiation when he attempts to rescue young orphan Rick Jones from a nuclear test site and ends up saving the boy but ending up near Ground Zero himself — but as part of a deliberate experiment in which he exposed himself to the rays on purpose, albeit under contract from the U.S. military for an experiment with a profoundly different agenda than the one he was told about.
The fact that Dr. Banner deliberately irradiated himself brings this story even closer to its obvious antecedent, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than it was in the comic book — though oddly the movie this one seems to have been most influenced by is The Fugitive. It’s full of sequences of Dr. Banner hiding in the most out-of-the-way locations — it begins in a favela in Brazil where he’s employed as a day laborer in a bottling plant making a local soft drink called Guaranà, and it ends in a tiny village called Bella Coona, which is supposed to be in British Columbia. (The whole film, except for some second-unit work in Brazil, was shot in Canada even though much of it, including the action climax, takes place in New York City and the marquee of the Apollo Theatre features prominently in the ending.)
The reason he’s forced to do this is because the man who was in charge of the experiments that “Hulkified” Banner, General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (William Hurt), is sending military forces all over the world with the mission to kill Banner because alive he’s standing in the way of their ultimate goal — to create a race of unstoppable soldiers à la George Zucco’s character in the old 1942 PRC “B” The Mad Monster (though the program would seem to raise the objection one of Zucco’s former colleagues actually made in The Mad Monster: how would you get these invulnerable military monsters to stop once you wanted them to?), and the film is essentially a movie-long chase sequence in which Ross’s forces are continually getting Banner trapped only to be unable to capture or kill him once he becomes the Hulk, while Banner himself is attempting to reach the two people he thinks can help him: Dr. Elizabeth “Betty” Ross (Liv Tyler), a cellular biologist and also his girlfriend and General Ross’s daughter; and the mysterious “Mr. Blue” with whom he’s in encrypted e-mail contact, who turns out to be neurologist Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) who may or may not have the ability and scientific knowledge to “de-Hulkify” Banner permanently.
Of course he doesn’t get the chance; Banner goes through the Sterns treatment but then has to Hulk himself again to fight “The Abomination,” a monster also created through the gamma-ray process who had formerly been Ross’s field commander, British officer Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth, who acquits himself quite well even though he wasn’t exactly born to the mantle of an action role). Through much of the movie director Leterrier keeps the Hulk-in-action scenes dark, shadowy and ambiguous, though when we finally do see the Hulk in full-lit action we realize that it wasn’t that Leterrier was going for a Val Lewton effect but because the Hulk is one of the most transparently phony-looking digital image creations in the last 20 years or so of cinema history.
The film includes some back-handed tributes to the 1970’s Incredible Hulk TV series — including two bits of music originally composed for the series and the appearance of both its stars, Lou Ferrigno (who played the Hulk on TV and here appears as a security guard who waves Dr. Banner — incognito — in to deliver a pizza to Betty Ross; Ferrigno also delivers the Hulk’s grunts, groans and six simple words) and Bill Bixby (who’s dead and therefore wasn’t available for a “live” cameo, but was included anyway via a clip of another TV series in which he starred, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, which Banner is supposedly watching on over-the-air TV in his Brazilian slum apartment) — that only make me wonder if the solution to the story’s inherent casting problem used on the TV show (two separate actors, one as Banner and one, a real-life muscleman, as the Hulk) might actually have been better than the one used here, in which Edward Norton himself had to don the green “motion capture” suit and literally go through the Hulk’s motions before the Hulk’s digital image was electronically grafted onto Norton’s body. (Tim Roth also had to do motion-capture for the scenes in which he, as the Abomination, is fighting the Hulk.)
The Incredible Hulk is a good, solidly-made action piece, its comic-book origins well in evidence, and if it isn’t quite as light and rambunctious as Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer it isn’t as laden down with pretensions as Spider-Man 3 and The Dark Knight, either — and in the scenes in which he’s playing Banner on the run (many of them drenched in rain, in yet another nod to The Fugitive — in their parody of The Fugitive, MAD magazine actually had a man wearing a white janitor’s coat, emblazoned with the words “Making Streets Look Like It Just Rained Co.,” in the final panel) Edward Norton actually got to do far more real acting than most people who get roped into a comic-book movie are obliged to do.
The film was The Incredible Hulk, the so-called “reboot” of the Marvel Comics franchise in 2008 after the commercial and critical failure of Ang Lee’s Hulk movie in 2003. This time they went for safety, picking a little-known director with an action-adventure background (someone named Louis Leterrier, who got this film as a consolation prize after Jon Favreau beat him for the assignment to do Iron Man), hiring Zak Penn to do the script (he’s the only writer to get credit, though their star extensively rewrote the script — more on that later) and hired Edward Norton to play Dr. Bruce Banner, the rather nerdy scientist who becomes the Incredible Hulk. (Norton, infamous for insisting on rewriting most of the movies he stars in, apparently wrote the basic treatment for this film and also rewrote much of Zak Penn’s dialogue, but the Screen Writers’ Guild refused Norton screen credit.)
I remember this story first from the comic books and the 1960’s cartoons from Grantray Lawrence Animation, and was particularly struck by the idea of a superhero who was not only a rampaging engine of destruction but couldn’t control his identity — he changed when he was sufficiently stressed out to do so, whether he wanted to or not. In this version, Banner becomes the Hulk not the way he did in the comics — through an accidental exposure to gamma radiation when he attempts to rescue young orphan Rick Jones from a nuclear test site and ends up saving the boy but ending up near Ground Zero himself — but as part of a deliberate experiment in which he exposed himself to the rays on purpose, albeit under contract from the U.S. military for an experiment with a profoundly different agenda than the one he was told about.
The fact that Dr. Banner deliberately irradiated himself brings this story even closer to its obvious antecedent, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than it was in the comic book — though oddly the movie this one seems to have been most influenced by is The Fugitive. It’s full of sequences of Dr. Banner hiding in the most out-of-the-way locations — it begins in a favela in Brazil where he’s employed as a day laborer in a bottling plant making a local soft drink called Guaranà, and it ends in a tiny village called Bella Coona, which is supposed to be in British Columbia. (The whole film, except for some second-unit work in Brazil, was shot in Canada even though much of it, including the action climax, takes place in New York City and the marquee of the Apollo Theatre features prominently in the ending.)
The reason he’s forced to do this is because the man who was in charge of the experiments that “Hulkified” Banner, General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (William Hurt), is sending military forces all over the world with the mission to kill Banner because alive he’s standing in the way of their ultimate goal — to create a race of unstoppable soldiers à la George Zucco’s character in the old 1942 PRC “B” The Mad Monster (though the program would seem to raise the objection one of Zucco’s former colleagues actually made in The Mad Monster: how would you get these invulnerable military monsters to stop once you wanted them to?), and the film is essentially a movie-long chase sequence in which Ross’s forces are continually getting Banner trapped only to be unable to capture or kill him once he becomes the Hulk, while Banner himself is attempting to reach the two people he thinks can help him: Dr. Elizabeth “Betty” Ross (Liv Tyler), a cellular biologist and also his girlfriend and General Ross’s daughter; and the mysterious “Mr. Blue” with whom he’s in encrypted e-mail contact, who turns out to be neurologist Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) who may or may not have the ability and scientific knowledge to “de-Hulkify” Banner permanently.
Of course he doesn’t get the chance; Banner goes through the Sterns treatment but then has to Hulk himself again to fight “The Abomination,” a monster also created through the gamma-ray process who had formerly been Ross’s field commander, British officer Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth, who acquits himself quite well even though he wasn’t exactly born to the mantle of an action role). Through much of the movie director Leterrier keeps the Hulk-in-action scenes dark, shadowy and ambiguous, though when we finally do see the Hulk in full-lit action we realize that it wasn’t that Leterrier was going for a Val Lewton effect but because the Hulk is one of the most transparently phony-looking digital image creations in the last 20 years or so of cinema history.
The film includes some back-handed tributes to the 1970’s Incredible Hulk TV series — including two bits of music originally composed for the series and the appearance of both its stars, Lou Ferrigno (who played the Hulk on TV and here appears as a security guard who waves Dr. Banner — incognito — in to deliver a pizza to Betty Ross; Ferrigno also delivers the Hulk’s grunts, groans and six simple words) and Bill Bixby (who’s dead and therefore wasn’t available for a “live” cameo, but was included anyway via a clip of another TV series in which he starred, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, which Banner is supposedly watching on over-the-air TV in his Brazilian slum apartment) — that only make me wonder if the solution to the story’s inherent casting problem used on the TV show (two separate actors, one as Banner and one, a real-life muscleman, as the Hulk) might actually have been better than the one used here, in which Edward Norton himself had to don the green “motion capture” suit and literally go through the Hulk’s motions before the Hulk’s digital image was electronically grafted onto Norton’s body. (Tim Roth also had to do motion-capture for the scenes in which he, as the Abomination, is fighting the Hulk.)
The Incredible Hulk is a good, solidly-made action piece, its comic-book origins well in evidence, and if it isn’t quite as light and rambunctious as Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer it isn’t as laden down with pretensions as Spider-Man 3 and The Dark Knight, either — and in the scenes in which he’s playing Banner on the run (many of them drenched in rain, in yet another nod to The Fugitive — in their parody of The Fugitive, MAD magazine actually had a man wearing a white janitor’s coat, emblazoned with the words “Making Streets Look Like It Just Rained Co.,” in the final panel) Edward Norton actually got to do far more real acting than most people who get roped into a comic-book movie are obliged to do.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
That Midnight Kiss (MGM, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was That Midnight Kiss, a 1949 musical from Joe Pasternak’s unit at MGM that was Mario Lanza’s first movie — he got an “Introducing” credit while Kathryn Grayson and José Iturbi were top-billed. The director was Norman Taurog, who got a reputation for handling temperamental performers from his days making Jackie Cooper’s movies as a child — he took over the 1943 Girl Crazy after Judy Garland threatened to quit the production if the original director, Busby Berkeley, continued on the project (though the one sequence Berkeley directed, the big final number on “I Got Rhythm,” is by far the best sequence in the film!) — and though I’m not sure what Lanza was like to work with this early, when he was still an unknown to movie audiences, the stories of his antics later in his career — the primo don rages, the sexual harassment of his co-stars and the flood of obscenities that emerged from his mouth whenever his formidable will was crossed — are almost too well known.
That Midnight Kiss was written by Bruce Manning and Tamara Hovey, and the shadow of Pasternak’s early productions at Universal with Deanna Durbin hangs heavy over this film; Manning was one of the main writers on Durbin’s early hits and Pasternak, who had already given Jane Powell a star build-up along Durbinesque lines, was clearly trying to do the same with Grayson here. She plays Prudence Budell, granddaughter of Philadelphia’s leading arts patroness Abigail Trent Budell (a monumentally overqualified Ethel Barrymore), who in her younger days wanted to be a diva herself but was forced by her family to put such ambitions aside. Now she’s living vicariously through the operatic ambitions of her granddaughter and, having already endowed a symphony orchestra in Philadelphia and hired José Iturbi (playing himself) to be both its piano soloist and its music director, she now proposes to start an opera company of her own and launch her granddaughter’s career co-starring with established tenor Guido Russino Betelli (Thomas Gomez) — only Betelli proves to be an egomaniacal jerk and so homely that when the two sing the love duet “Verrano a te sull’aura” from Lucia di Lammermoor, Prudence keeps turning away from him for fear that if she tries to sing a love duet directly to him, she’ll end up laughing.
Meanwhile, a couple of truck drivers come to the Budell home to move a piano, and one of them is Johnny Donnetti (Mario Lanza), a tenor with a fabulous voice. The other, Artie Geoffrey Glenson (Keenan Wynn), appoints himself as Donnetti’s manager, and at this point the film starts looking like A Night at the Opera without the Marx Brothers — the well-known tenor whose primo don antics get him fired and replaced by the young unknown with a better voice (Lanza’s own, of course — Gomez was almost certainly dubbed in the sequences in which he’s shown singing); when Artie is proffered Glenson’s contract Charles and I couldn’t help but start saying, “The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part … ”
Anyway, despite Abigail’s understandable doubts about launching her new opera company with two unknowns, Donnetti gets the part and they start rehearsing a wide variety of operas — until Prudence meets Donnetti’s former girlfriend, Mary (Marjorie Reynolds, in quite a comedown from her role as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner and Bing Crosby’s girlfriend in Holiday Inn!), and doesn’t get that they’re “former.” She goes into a jealous hissy-fit that lasts for the second half of the movie — at one point she even gets Donnetti to walk out and Betelli briefly reappears to replace him — but of course by the end they’re lovers both on-stage and off, while Mary is neatly paired off with Artie just to get them both out of the way.
That Midnight Kiss is one of those movies whose plot is merely an excuse for the song cues, and Kathryn Grayson was a capable singer but a mezzo-soprano clearly out of her element in coloratura soprano music (she sings big set-pieces like “Caro nome” from Rigoletto, almost certainly transposed down for her voice and taken at slow tempi so she could do the ornamentation carefully and cautiously) — and acting-wise she plods through a part in which the young Jeanette MacDonald would have sparkled. Not that that matters, though, because Lanza is the real star attraction of this movie; younger, thinner and a good deal hunkier than he was later — he looks surprisingly like the young Elvis through much of it — he sings his own opera excerpts (“Una furtiva lagrima” from Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore and “Celeste Aïda” from Verdi’s Aïda) gloriously, in full voice (his tenor lies a bit high for the Verdi, but who cares?), and the two pop songs he’s given to sing, Jerome Kern’s “They Didn’t Believe Me” and Bronislaw Kaper’s “I Know, I Know, I Know” (the one song especially written for this film), he does in a crooning falsetto that’s actually more appealing than the stentorian way he did “Be My Love” (from his next MGM film, The Toast of New Orleans) and other pop material he did later.
For all his deficiencies as a human being, Lanza was a glorious singer, endowing everything he sang with emotion and soul (his record of the “Serenade” from Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince is by far the best of this oft-recorded number, filled with intense heartbreak and longing far beyond virtually every other singer who’s tried this song), and in That Midnight Kiss he’s likable in a part that (as Robert Osborne noted in his introduction to the film) echoes Lanza’s real background: a Philadelphia native from an Italian immigrant family (who, inevitably, own a restaurant — Charles joked that he recognized the Italian-restaurant set as one MGM used again and again but said this was probably the first time we’d ever seen it in color) who served in World War II, came home and got a job as a truck driver; there’s nothing of the off-putting arrogance that seeped through from his real-life personality into his later roles (though The Great Caruso and Serenade remain his best films — despite the de-Gaying of James M. Cain’s novel Serenade for the movie), and before he went on his destructive cycle of putting on the pounds and then having to lose them again for his next film, he was actually quite good looking as well.
That Midnight Kiss — the title comes from the kiss Lanza gives Grayson after he’s hired an orchestra to stand below her house and serenade her, sort of like the opening scene of The Barber of Seville — is no great shakes as a movie, and Kathryn Grayson really wasn’t credible as an opera singer (fortunately for her career MGM backed away from casting her as a prima donna after The Toast of New Orleans and instead gave her three films with Howard Keel, all based on classic American musicals instead of opera: Show Boat, Lovely to Look At and Kiss Me, Kate), but Lanza’s glorious singing and sheer hunkiness make this movie watchable.
The film was That Midnight Kiss, a 1949 musical from Joe Pasternak’s unit at MGM that was Mario Lanza’s first movie — he got an “Introducing” credit while Kathryn Grayson and José Iturbi were top-billed. The director was Norman Taurog, who got a reputation for handling temperamental performers from his days making Jackie Cooper’s movies as a child — he took over the 1943 Girl Crazy after Judy Garland threatened to quit the production if the original director, Busby Berkeley, continued on the project (though the one sequence Berkeley directed, the big final number on “I Got Rhythm,” is by far the best sequence in the film!) — and though I’m not sure what Lanza was like to work with this early, when he was still an unknown to movie audiences, the stories of his antics later in his career — the primo don rages, the sexual harassment of his co-stars and the flood of obscenities that emerged from his mouth whenever his formidable will was crossed — are almost too well known.
That Midnight Kiss was written by Bruce Manning and Tamara Hovey, and the shadow of Pasternak’s early productions at Universal with Deanna Durbin hangs heavy over this film; Manning was one of the main writers on Durbin’s early hits and Pasternak, who had already given Jane Powell a star build-up along Durbinesque lines, was clearly trying to do the same with Grayson here. She plays Prudence Budell, granddaughter of Philadelphia’s leading arts patroness Abigail Trent Budell (a monumentally overqualified Ethel Barrymore), who in her younger days wanted to be a diva herself but was forced by her family to put such ambitions aside. Now she’s living vicariously through the operatic ambitions of her granddaughter and, having already endowed a symphony orchestra in Philadelphia and hired José Iturbi (playing himself) to be both its piano soloist and its music director, she now proposes to start an opera company of her own and launch her granddaughter’s career co-starring with established tenor Guido Russino Betelli (Thomas Gomez) — only Betelli proves to be an egomaniacal jerk and so homely that when the two sing the love duet “Verrano a te sull’aura” from Lucia di Lammermoor, Prudence keeps turning away from him for fear that if she tries to sing a love duet directly to him, she’ll end up laughing.
Meanwhile, a couple of truck drivers come to the Budell home to move a piano, and one of them is Johnny Donnetti (Mario Lanza), a tenor with a fabulous voice. The other, Artie Geoffrey Glenson (Keenan Wynn), appoints himself as Donnetti’s manager, and at this point the film starts looking like A Night at the Opera without the Marx Brothers — the well-known tenor whose primo don antics get him fired and replaced by the young unknown with a better voice (Lanza’s own, of course — Gomez was almost certainly dubbed in the sequences in which he’s shown singing); when Artie is proffered Glenson’s contract Charles and I couldn’t help but start saying, “The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part … ”
Anyway, despite Abigail’s understandable doubts about launching her new opera company with two unknowns, Donnetti gets the part and they start rehearsing a wide variety of operas — until Prudence meets Donnetti’s former girlfriend, Mary (Marjorie Reynolds, in quite a comedown from her role as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner and Bing Crosby’s girlfriend in Holiday Inn!), and doesn’t get that they’re “former.” She goes into a jealous hissy-fit that lasts for the second half of the movie — at one point she even gets Donnetti to walk out and Betelli briefly reappears to replace him — but of course by the end they’re lovers both on-stage and off, while Mary is neatly paired off with Artie just to get them both out of the way.
That Midnight Kiss is one of those movies whose plot is merely an excuse for the song cues, and Kathryn Grayson was a capable singer but a mezzo-soprano clearly out of her element in coloratura soprano music (she sings big set-pieces like “Caro nome” from Rigoletto, almost certainly transposed down for her voice and taken at slow tempi so she could do the ornamentation carefully and cautiously) — and acting-wise she plods through a part in which the young Jeanette MacDonald would have sparkled. Not that that matters, though, because Lanza is the real star attraction of this movie; younger, thinner and a good deal hunkier than he was later — he looks surprisingly like the young Elvis through much of it — he sings his own opera excerpts (“Una furtiva lagrima” from Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore and “Celeste Aïda” from Verdi’s Aïda) gloriously, in full voice (his tenor lies a bit high for the Verdi, but who cares?), and the two pop songs he’s given to sing, Jerome Kern’s “They Didn’t Believe Me” and Bronislaw Kaper’s “I Know, I Know, I Know” (the one song especially written for this film), he does in a crooning falsetto that’s actually more appealing than the stentorian way he did “Be My Love” (from his next MGM film, The Toast of New Orleans) and other pop material he did later.
For all his deficiencies as a human being, Lanza was a glorious singer, endowing everything he sang with emotion and soul (his record of the “Serenade” from Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince is by far the best of this oft-recorded number, filled with intense heartbreak and longing far beyond virtually every other singer who’s tried this song), and in That Midnight Kiss he’s likable in a part that (as Robert Osborne noted in his introduction to the film) echoes Lanza’s real background: a Philadelphia native from an Italian immigrant family (who, inevitably, own a restaurant — Charles joked that he recognized the Italian-restaurant set as one MGM used again and again but said this was probably the first time we’d ever seen it in color) who served in World War II, came home and got a job as a truck driver; there’s nothing of the off-putting arrogance that seeped through from his real-life personality into his later roles (though The Great Caruso and Serenade remain his best films — despite the de-Gaying of James M. Cain’s novel Serenade for the movie), and before he went on his destructive cycle of putting on the pounds and then having to lose them again for his next film, he was actually quite good looking as well.
That Midnight Kiss — the title comes from the kiss Lanza gives Grayson after he’s hired an orchestra to stand below her house and serenade her, sort of like the opening scene of The Barber of Seville — is no great shakes as a movie, and Kathryn Grayson really wasn’t credible as an opera singer (fortunately for her career MGM backed away from casting her as a prima donna after The Toast of New Orleans and instead gave her three films with Howard Keel, all based on classic American musicals instead of opera: Show Boat, Lovely to Look At and Kiss Me, Kate), but Lanza’s glorious singing and sheer hunkiness make this movie watchable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)