by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked was The French Connection, which I hadn’t seen since the 1970’s when it was considered a state-of-the-art crime thriller and won the Academy Award for Best Picture as well as Best Actor for Gene Hackman in the lead role of “Popeye” Doyle, a sort of blood brother to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry in his utter disregard for Constitutional due process in his chase after various crooks. The movie was directed by William Friedkin based on a script by Ernest Tidyman (who also wrote the adaptation of the first Shaft film; he and Friedkin also won Oscars for The French Connection, as did the film’s editor, Jerry Greenberg) which in turn was adapted from a nonfiction book by Robin Moore. The same true-life case was the subject of an even better book, Martin Mayer’s Merchants of Heroin, and imdb.com also cited two uncredited writers, Edward M. Keyes (who wrote a novel about drug smuggling that was the basis for part of the script) and Howard Hawks — yes, the Howard Hawks, ace director in the 1930’s and 1940’s known for tough, fast action dramas about people under stress, who’d directed his last film, Rio Lobo, in 1970, a year before The French Connection was made.
The French Connection is one of those movies that’s become so much a part of the unconscious of cinema audiences that its catch-phrases (like “Do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” — a virtually incomprehensible metaphor for heroin use, though it may have its roots in the way some long-time junkies who have collapsed all their veins inject by slashing their feet open and sticking the needle in the wound) and in particular its famous chase scene (Gene Hackman as “Popeye” Doyle commandeers a brown Pontiac and drives under the elevated railway while a sniper who’s just tried to kill him rides the train above him, holds the driver at gunpoint and forces him to bypass the normal stops, and ultimately is shot by Popeye when he finally does get off the train and finds the cop waiting for him) are familiar even to people who’ve never seen it start to finish.
The plot deals with “Popeye” Doyle and his only marginally nicer and more law-abiding partner, Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider in what turned out to be a star-making part for him) — based on real-life NYPD narcotics detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, both of whom have technical adviser credits and small parts in the film — stumbling onto a small-time drug dealer named Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and finding that he’s in line for a major shipment from a French longshoreman turned shipping magnate turned international crook, Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), who enlists a chronically cash-poor French TV personality, Henri Devereaux (Frédéric de Pasquale), to help smuggle the heroin into the U.S. inside the rocker panels of his fancy car (identified on the soundtrack as a Lincoln but looking more like a Chrysler Imperial to me) — and, in case you didn’t know what a rocker panel was before you saw this movie (I didn’t!), it’s the panel under the bottom of the door that, in one of the most frustrating scenes in the movie, the cops who’ve impounded the car stumble on only after they’ve ripped out the entire rest of it and not found the drugs Doyle is utterly sure are there. Doyle is depicted as an out-of-control cop — he’d already killed one of his fellow officers before the film opens and he kills an FBI agent during the final shootout and gets busted out of the narcotics unit — at odds with his superiors who think he’s wasting his time on such a small-time dealer.
The French Connection was a sensation when it was released — and certainly it, like Dirty Harry, reflects the politics of the Nixon administration and its damn-the-Constitution, full-speed-ahead attitude towards fighting crime — but though it’s not a bad movie it doesn't hold up all that well. One thing it does do is depict with a fair degree of accuracy the real nitty-gritty of police work — every show I've seen endorsed as accurate by real cops, and every real cop I've talked to about their profession, describes it as hours of boredom very occasionally interrupted by moments of excitement, and so it’s shown here. For long stretches we see almost nothing but Doyle and Russo tailing Boca during his rounds, waiting for him to do something that will lead them to the higher-ups in the drug ring; Mad magazine’s parody (which lampooned the famous “Do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” line by having the Black junkie Doyle says it to answer back, “No, but I pick my nose in Harlem!”) had one great panel in which Doyle says to Russo, “I thought Bocceballo was getting suspicious always seeing the same car behind him, so I thought of this.” “Yeah,” says his partner, “but isn’t sitting in his back seat a little dangerous?” “Not so loud! He’ll hear you!” Doyle replies.
The car chase (in which stunt double Bill Hickman — who’d driven the car Steve McQueen was chasing in Bullitt — drove for Hackman) is an exciting piece of filmmaking and Friedkin deserves kudos for “scoring” it only with amplified city sounds instead of a thundering music score (The French Connection has a spiky modern-jazz score composed by trumpeter Don Ellis, but Friedkin deploys it quite sparingly instead of drowning the movie in music the way directors of the classic era tended to) and thereby letting his exciting visuals make their effect without audio distraction. The final shoot-out is a bit limp, though — it’s not much of an action highlight, and it doesn’t help our sense of closure that though most of the low-level players in the drug ring are caught, the Big Cheese gets away. (There was a little known sequel, French Connection II, made four years later, in which Charnier kidnaps Doyle and force-feeds him heroin to turn him into an addict; it was directed not by Friedkin but by John Frankenheimer, who took the assignment only on condition that the producers would let him turn Doyle into a heroin addict because he’d always wanted to make a film about a junkie cop — and, not surprisingly, the sequel flopped.)
When new The French Connection was a breath of fresh air — a crime movie not only set but actually made in New York (though The Naked City had beaten it to that particular innovation by 23 years!) and a film that at least attempted a realistic and deglamorized portrayal of police officers and their work — but today it’s a movie that is still somewhat effective but also shows the signs of age and the inevitable rounding off of its hard edges by the many people who’ve imitated its approach since. It’s also got an intriguing name on the producer credits — G. David Schine, the infamous sidekick to Roy Cohn in his days as chief investigator for Red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy, who made this and one other movie (That’s Action, which he both produced and directed, in 1977) before dying in a plane crash with his wife and stepson in 1996 — and there’s also a rather lame trio of Black soul singers, a bunch of Supremes wanna-bes called The Three Degrees, singing a song called “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” that seems to be an oblique comment on the appeal of drug use that is powering all the criminal machinations at the root of the film’s plot.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Verdi: Aïda (Metropolitan Opera, 10/24/09)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Met’s most recent Aïda came from a matinee on October 24, 2009 and featured Violeta Urmana as Aïda, Johan Botha (the white South African tenor who’s garnered good reviews as a potential Heldentenor; he didn’t sound to me like he had the weight and heft for Wagner but his voice suited this role just fine) as Radamès, Dolora Zajick as Amneris and Carlo Guelfi as Amonasro (rather oddly made up to resemble Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz). The production by Sonja Frisell was impressive — perhaps a little too impressive; the Triumphal Scene featured live horses (though not the live elephants you get at the Arena di Verona in Italy) and the main set was clearly based on the famous tomb of Ramses II at Abu Simbel and looked enviably solid and substantial on stage.
Aïda is a peculiar opera because Verdi was writing it largely to the old formula of the French grand opera — the original librettist, Mariette Bey, was a French Egyptologist (who had taken “Bey” as a last name to indicate his love for Egyptian culture, though he apparently saw it in the alternately sympathetic and patronizing way of what’s been called “Orientalism”), and the librettist of record was Antonio Ghislanzoni, a hack Verdi hired to turn Bey’s French prose into Italian verse (and for Aïda’s “O patria mia” in act three and the final duet in act four, Verdi found Ghislanzoni’s verses inadequate and wrote the texts himself) — and yet a lot of it is surprisingly quiet and intimate.
The second scene of act one, in which Radamès receives his commission to lead the Egyptian army against the Ethiopians in the temple of Ptah (the only god in the Egyptian pantheon mentioned in the text), isn’t the big, bombastic slice of De Mille-anticipating cheese it would have been if Meyerbeer were writing this; it’s a marvelous piece of mood setting with the famous part for the unseen high priestess (sung by Ilona Massey in a 1937 Hungarian performance which Louis B. Mayer attended and decided that, if the voice’s body was as beautiful as the voice itself, he would sign her to a movie contract; and later sung by the then-unknown Joan Sutherland in the 1953 Covent Garden production that starred Maria Callas as Aïda — though it’s a common career progression in the movie business it’s rare in opera for someone to rise from minor roles to a star career the way Sutherland did) and only when the choristers cry out “Immenso Ptah!” at the end does it get loud — and the third and fourth acts are surprisingly character-driven and spectacle-free: Aïda worms out of Radamès the secret of which route the Egyptian army is going to take when it marches into Ethiopia, Radamès is condemned as a traitor, Amneris tries to get him off the hook, he refuses to mount a defense at his trial, he’s sentenced to be buried alive and Aïda joins him in the tomb for a final duet that’s one of the most gorgeous pieces in all opera.
Aïda is one of the most popular operas of all time — it’s been said that the bread and butter operas for any company in the world are “A-B-C,” Aïda, La Bohème and Carmen — and yet it’s also one of the oddest. It’s got glorious spectacle but its most powerful scenes are intimate. Radamès gets one of the most famous tenor arias in the repertoire — and he has to sing it in his first five minutes on stage, which has driven several generations of tenors (most recently Roberto Alagna) nuts. Aïda is billed as a showy dramatic part, yet through much of the action she’s subordinate to Amneris and her big arias are wildly contrasted; “Ritorna vincitor!” is a dramatic scena of shifting moods that begins in visceral anger and ends in a quiet plea to the gods, while “O patria mia” is a quiet, reflective meditation on the joys and beauties of her homeland.
It’s also a problematic opera for the reasons Joseph Kerman noted in his book Opera as Drama; the libretto is a good one in that it makes dramatic sense, the conflicts (love vs. filial duty, love vs. patriotism and national pride) are effective and well drawn, and yet the characters are cardboard and only Amneris even approaches multidimensionality. Radamès in particular is awfully close to the usual operatic tenor idiot, somehow convinced that his girlfriend Aïda is going to be impressed when he conquers, occupies and lays waste to her country; all too easily tricked into giving up Egypt’s big military secret and not one whit bitter at Aïda for having tricked him and sent him plummeting from heir apparent to the Egyptian throne to traitor condemned to death. It’s a well-made opera and yet Verdi created better ones both earlier (La Traviata and Don Carlos) and later (Otello and Falstaff, both based on Shakespeare plays and with Arrigo Boïto as adapter and librettist).
The Met mostly did it honor with this production — Frisell’s sets are spectacular and the camerawork on this project aimed at making the most of them, often shooting from overhead and practically turning the dance of the slave girls into a Busby Berkeley number (it seemed unusual, to say the least, for a live telecast of an opera to be venturing into this sort of territory and giving us vistas the audience in the house couldn’t possibly see) — and the voices are well cast even though Urmana, Botha and Zajick are all “people of size,” filling out Verdi’s romantic roles with large, chunky frames that are the stuff of which thousands of nasty jokes about opera by people who don’t like it (as opposed to the brilliant jokes about opera by the likes of Anna Russell and Ira Siff, who did like it) have been made. I remember an Opera Quarterly review of a video of a Met Aïda in the 1980’s that starred Luciano Pavarotti and dressed him in a costume that “makes him look even bigger than he is — like an office building with a singing head,” and though I don’t know if that was the same production as this one the same could be said of Botha here.
Botha’s singing as Radamès is solid without being especially powerful; the women were better — Urmana seemed a bit low-keyed during the first scene but delivered a riveting “Ritorna vincitor!” and an atmospheric “O patria mia” (though she’s definitely a dramatic Olivero-Callas style Aïda rather than a musical Milanov-Tebaldi-Caballé one), and Zajick, despite her bulk and (like the other principals) singularly unattractive costuming that overemphasized it, managed to make Amneris’s different faces credible as a unified character. If this Aïda wasn’t as stirring as it could have been, the blame lies on the shoulders of the conductor, Daniele Gatti — who took this opera v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, stretching out Aïda’s big arias so much that I feared for Urmana’s breath control and plodding through the opera in nearly 2 1/2 hours (Toscanini nailed it in less than two, and as Gatti creeped along through “Ritorna vincitor!” I couldn’t help but think of Maria Callas’s recollection that when she was first coached in the role by her mentor, conductor Tullio Serafin, he “wanted so much agitation I could barely get the words out”) to the point that much of Aïda sounded like Gatti were re-inventing it as lounge music. Overall, the Met Aïda is a decent performance of a standard repertory opera, vividly staged, professionally sung but, alas, all too lackadaisically conducted and therefore far less exciting or moving than this opera can be.
The Met’s most recent Aïda came from a matinee on October 24, 2009 and featured Violeta Urmana as Aïda, Johan Botha (the white South African tenor who’s garnered good reviews as a potential Heldentenor; he didn’t sound to me like he had the weight and heft for Wagner but his voice suited this role just fine) as Radamès, Dolora Zajick as Amneris and Carlo Guelfi as Amonasro (rather oddly made up to resemble Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz). The production by Sonja Frisell was impressive — perhaps a little too impressive; the Triumphal Scene featured live horses (though not the live elephants you get at the Arena di Verona in Italy) and the main set was clearly based on the famous tomb of Ramses II at Abu Simbel and looked enviably solid and substantial on stage.
Aïda is a peculiar opera because Verdi was writing it largely to the old formula of the French grand opera — the original librettist, Mariette Bey, was a French Egyptologist (who had taken “Bey” as a last name to indicate his love for Egyptian culture, though he apparently saw it in the alternately sympathetic and patronizing way of what’s been called “Orientalism”), and the librettist of record was Antonio Ghislanzoni, a hack Verdi hired to turn Bey’s French prose into Italian verse (and for Aïda’s “O patria mia” in act three and the final duet in act four, Verdi found Ghislanzoni’s verses inadequate and wrote the texts himself) — and yet a lot of it is surprisingly quiet and intimate.
The second scene of act one, in which Radamès receives his commission to lead the Egyptian army against the Ethiopians in the temple of Ptah (the only god in the Egyptian pantheon mentioned in the text), isn’t the big, bombastic slice of De Mille-anticipating cheese it would have been if Meyerbeer were writing this; it’s a marvelous piece of mood setting with the famous part for the unseen high priestess (sung by Ilona Massey in a 1937 Hungarian performance which Louis B. Mayer attended and decided that, if the voice’s body was as beautiful as the voice itself, he would sign her to a movie contract; and later sung by the then-unknown Joan Sutherland in the 1953 Covent Garden production that starred Maria Callas as Aïda — though it’s a common career progression in the movie business it’s rare in opera for someone to rise from minor roles to a star career the way Sutherland did) and only when the choristers cry out “Immenso Ptah!” at the end does it get loud — and the third and fourth acts are surprisingly character-driven and spectacle-free: Aïda worms out of Radamès the secret of which route the Egyptian army is going to take when it marches into Ethiopia, Radamès is condemned as a traitor, Amneris tries to get him off the hook, he refuses to mount a defense at his trial, he’s sentenced to be buried alive and Aïda joins him in the tomb for a final duet that’s one of the most gorgeous pieces in all opera.
Aïda is one of the most popular operas of all time — it’s been said that the bread and butter operas for any company in the world are “A-B-C,” Aïda, La Bohème and Carmen — and yet it’s also one of the oddest. It’s got glorious spectacle but its most powerful scenes are intimate. Radamès gets one of the most famous tenor arias in the repertoire — and he has to sing it in his first five minutes on stage, which has driven several generations of tenors (most recently Roberto Alagna) nuts. Aïda is billed as a showy dramatic part, yet through much of the action she’s subordinate to Amneris and her big arias are wildly contrasted; “Ritorna vincitor!” is a dramatic scena of shifting moods that begins in visceral anger and ends in a quiet plea to the gods, while “O patria mia” is a quiet, reflective meditation on the joys and beauties of her homeland.
It’s also a problematic opera for the reasons Joseph Kerman noted in his book Opera as Drama; the libretto is a good one in that it makes dramatic sense, the conflicts (love vs. filial duty, love vs. patriotism and national pride) are effective and well drawn, and yet the characters are cardboard and only Amneris even approaches multidimensionality. Radamès in particular is awfully close to the usual operatic tenor idiot, somehow convinced that his girlfriend Aïda is going to be impressed when he conquers, occupies and lays waste to her country; all too easily tricked into giving up Egypt’s big military secret and not one whit bitter at Aïda for having tricked him and sent him plummeting from heir apparent to the Egyptian throne to traitor condemned to death. It’s a well-made opera and yet Verdi created better ones both earlier (La Traviata and Don Carlos) and later (Otello and Falstaff, both based on Shakespeare plays and with Arrigo Boïto as adapter and librettist).
The Met mostly did it honor with this production — Frisell’s sets are spectacular and the camerawork on this project aimed at making the most of them, often shooting from overhead and practically turning the dance of the slave girls into a Busby Berkeley number (it seemed unusual, to say the least, for a live telecast of an opera to be venturing into this sort of territory and giving us vistas the audience in the house couldn’t possibly see) — and the voices are well cast even though Urmana, Botha and Zajick are all “people of size,” filling out Verdi’s romantic roles with large, chunky frames that are the stuff of which thousands of nasty jokes about opera by people who don’t like it (as opposed to the brilliant jokes about opera by the likes of Anna Russell and Ira Siff, who did like it) have been made. I remember an Opera Quarterly review of a video of a Met Aïda in the 1980’s that starred Luciano Pavarotti and dressed him in a costume that “makes him look even bigger than he is — like an office building with a singing head,” and though I don’t know if that was the same production as this one the same could be said of Botha here.
Botha’s singing as Radamès is solid without being especially powerful; the women were better — Urmana seemed a bit low-keyed during the first scene but delivered a riveting “Ritorna vincitor!” and an atmospheric “O patria mia” (though she’s definitely a dramatic Olivero-Callas style Aïda rather than a musical Milanov-Tebaldi-Caballé one), and Zajick, despite her bulk and (like the other principals) singularly unattractive costuming that overemphasized it, managed to make Amneris’s different faces credible as a unified character. If this Aïda wasn’t as stirring as it could have been, the blame lies on the shoulders of the conductor, Daniele Gatti — who took this opera v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, stretching out Aïda’s big arias so much that I feared for Urmana’s breath control and plodding through the opera in nearly 2 1/2 hours (Toscanini nailed it in less than two, and as Gatti creeped along through “Ritorna vincitor!” I couldn’t help but think of Maria Callas’s recollection that when she was first coached in the role by her mentor, conductor Tullio Serafin, he “wanted so much agitation I could barely get the words out”) to the point that much of Aïda sounded like Gatti were re-inventing it as lounge music. Overall, the Met Aïda is a decent performance of a standard repertory opera, vividly staged, professionally sung but, alas, all too lackadaisically conducted and therefore far less exciting or moving than this opera can be.
Too Young to Be a Dad (Lifetime, 2002)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a Lifetime TV-movie I recorded the weekend before last called Too Young to Be a Dad, a pretty quirky film that’s about half typical Lifetime “problem movie” and half something deeper and richer than the norm. The film’s problems start with the dorky title — apparently it was originally shot under the working title A Family’s Decision, which is more ambiguous but at least closer to the final issue of the plot, but Lifetime and its producers evidently decided the more blatant, obvious title was a better attraction for viewers — and continue with the plot structure. Fifteen-year-old Matt Freeman, played by Paul Dano (who was actually 17 when this film was made and six years later would appear in There Will Be Blood in the dual role of minister Eli Sunday and his twin brother Paul), is an academically sensational student who’s just made the honor roll society in his class — the first freshman to do so in the school’s history — when he’s seduced by Francesca Howell (Katie Stewart), whom he’s supposed to be tutoring in math so she can get into a pre-med program in college.
The usual “infallible pregnancy at a single contact” occurs — indeed, when Matt protests that they only did it once and his mom Susan (Kathy Baker, top-billed) says, “It only takes one time,” I couldn’t help but joke, “and in the movies it always happens the first time!” Writer Edithe Swensen and director Éva Gárdos spin off from that basic situation to a whole merry-go-round of family dysfunction: while Matt had always been the perfect little boy, his older sister Alex (Terra Vnesa) had been the family fuck-up, getting lousy grades, taking up with boys and smoking, and also insisting that she wants to go to work and save money for a car instead of going to college immediately on graduation the way mom wants her to. As for dad, Dan Freeman (Bruce Davison) is an executive with a retail chain who’s always traveling around the country to open new stores or something; he’s never around for the kids and, when mom questions him about this, he says he has either to take all those trips or risk losing his job altogether. (Yet another example of how U.S. law virtually demands that people — men and women — relentlessly put their careers ahead of their families, and how the “family values” crowd, obsessed as they are with abortion and homosexuality, is just fine with that and fights against the kinds of parental leave programs European parents have access to in situations like these.)
The Howells, if anything, are even worse than the Freemans; Francesca’s father (Nigel Bennett) is a doctor who works (ironically) at the same hospital where Francesca will have her baby in the closing scenes; he’s willing to fund Francesca’s pre-natal care to the extent his health insurance will cover it but insists that the Freemans come up with the co-pays and deductibles. To do this, Matt willingly accepts banishment to the “alternative school” set up for teenage parents (a rather unctuous school official says that they’ve started sending teen dads as well as teen moms to these schools because they don’t think it fair that the girl should have to give up her academic career while the boy who knocked her up gets off scot-free) despite his mom’s attempt to fight it; he takes a job in a pizza parlor (and gets ordered by his boss to work overtime even though it’s illegal for a boy his age, an interesting precursor of the work-vs.-family demands that have virtually removed his own father from any active participation in his family’s life) and takes on a dedication to paying off his family and covering the bills for Francesca’s care that borders on the masochistic. (Indeed, Dano’s quiet strength in playing these scenes reminded me of Montgomery Clift’s performance in From Here to Eternity, another movie that put its character through such intense, and largely self-inflicted, suffering it took a particularly sensitive actor to play it without making us think the guy was totally crazy.)
The irony of Too Young to Be a Dad is that, for all his alleged unreadiness for fatherhood, Matt is actually approaching the situation far more maturely than any of the grownups in the film (much like James Dean’s character vis-à-vis his parents in Rebel Without a Cause), and the piece builds to a strangely moving climax in which Matt decides against giving up his child for adoption (much to the disgust of Dr. Howell, who not only pushed for adoption but insisted that it be a “closed” one, in which the child’s birth certificate would be reissued in six months naming the adoptive parents as the real ones — closed adoptions are getting less and less fashionable these days, partly because birth parents are demanding more rights and partly because adoptive parents are increasingly concerned about genetic diseases and want access to the birth parents and their DNA profiles and medical histories, and why Swensen didn’t raise open adoption as an option in her script the way the makers of Mom at 16 did is a bit of a mystery) and, with Francesca seemingly an extra in the story even though she is the birth mother, after all, Matt and his parents agree to raise the child (a daughter whom Matt names Genevieve) together. Too Young to Be a Dad isn’t exactly great filmmaking but it is quite a bit less preachy and more moving dramatically than the Lifetime “problem film” norm.
I watched a Lifetime TV-movie I recorded the weekend before last called Too Young to Be a Dad, a pretty quirky film that’s about half typical Lifetime “problem movie” and half something deeper and richer than the norm. The film’s problems start with the dorky title — apparently it was originally shot under the working title A Family’s Decision, which is more ambiguous but at least closer to the final issue of the plot, but Lifetime and its producers evidently decided the more blatant, obvious title was a better attraction for viewers — and continue with the plot structure. Fifteen-year-old Matt Freeman, played by Paul Dano (who was actually 17 when this film was made and six years later would appear in There Will Be Blood in the dual role of minister Eli Sunday and his twin brother Paul), is an academically sensational student who’s just made the honor roll society in his class — the first freshman to do so in the school’s history — when he’s seduced by Francesca Howell (Katie Stewart), whom he’s supposed to be tutoring in math so she can get into a pre-med program in college.
The usual “infallible pregnancy at a single contact” occurs — indeed, when Matt protests that they only did it once and his mom Susan (Kathy Baker, top-billed) says, “It only takes one time,” I couldn’t help but joke, “and in the movies it always happens the first time!” Writer Edithe Swensen and director Éva Gárdos spin off from that basic situation to a whole merry-go-round of family dysfunction: while Matt had always been the perfect little boy, his older sister Alex (Terra Vnesa) had been the family fuck-up, getting lousy grades, taking up with boys and smoking, and also insisting that she wants to go to work and save money for a car instead of going to college immediately on graduation the way mom wants her to. As for dad, Dan Freeman (Bruce Davison) is an executive with a retail chain who’s always traveling around the country to open new stores or something; he’s never around for the kids and, when mom questions him about this, he says he has either to take all those trips or risk losing his job altogether. (Yet another example of how U.S. law virtually demands that people — men and women — relentlessly put their careers ahead of their families, and how the “family values” crowd, obsessed as they are with abortion and homosexuality, is just fine with that and fights against the kinds of parental leave programs European parents have access to in situations like these.)
The Howells, if anything, are even worse than the Freemans; Francesca’s father (Nigel Bennett) is a doctor who works (ironically) at the same hospital where Francesca will have her baby in the closing scenes; he’s willing to fund Francesca’s pre-natal care to the extent his health insurance will cover it but insists that the Freemans come up with the co-pays and deductibles. To do this, Matt willingly accepts banishment to the “alternative school” set up for teenage parents (a rather unctuous school official says that they’ve started sending teen dads as well as teen moms to these schools because they don’t think it fair that the girl should have to give up her academic career while the boy who knocked her up gets off scot-free) despite his mom’s attempt to fight it; he takes a job in a pizza parlor (and gets ordered by his boss to work overtime even though it’s illegal for a boy his age, an interesting precursor of the work-vs.-family demands that have virtually removed his own father from any active participation in his family’s life) and takes on a dedication to paying off his family and covering the bills for Francesca’s care that borders on the masochistic. (Indeed, Dano’s quiet strength in playing these scenes reminded me of Montgomery Clift’s performance in From Here to Eternity, another movie that put its character through such intense, and largely self-inflicted, suffering it took a particularly sensitive actor to play it without making us think the guy was totally crazy.)
The irony of Too Young to Be a Dad is that, for all his alleged unreadiness for fatherhood, Matt is actually approaching the situation far more maturely than any of the grownups in the film (much like James Dean’s character vis-à-vis his parents in Rebel Without a Cause), and the piece builds to a strangely moving climax in which Matt decides against giving up his child for adoption (much to the disgust of Dr. Howell, who not only pushed for adoption but insisted that it be a “closed” one, in which the child’s birth certificate would be reissued in six months naming the adoptive parents as the real ones — closed adoptions are getting less and less fashionable these days, partly because birth parents are demanding more rights and partly because adoptive parents are increasingly concerned about genetic diseases and want access to the birth parents and their DNA profiles and medical histories, and why Swensen didn’t raise open adoption as an option in her script the way the makers of Mom at 16 did is a bit of a mystery) and, with Francesca seemingly an extra in the story even though she is the birth mother, after all, Matt and his parents agree to raise the child (a daughter whom Matt names Genevieve) together. Too Young to Be a Dad isn’t exactly great filmmaking but it is quite a bit less preachy and more moving dramatically than the Lifetime “problem film” norm.
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Pregnancy Pact (Von Zerneck-Sertner/Lifetime, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Lifetime movie I watched last night was The Pregnancy Pact (imdb.com’s entry doesn’t have the definite article but all Lifetime’s publicity does), inspired by the alleged “pact” made by high-school girls in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 2008 that they would all seek to get pregnant simultaneously, or as nearly so as the vagaries of biology and the willingness of their boyfriends to have unprotected sex with them would allow them to. The “pregnancy pact” story was first reported nationwide in Time magazine and within a few months was pretty well debunked, and Lifetime and its producers, Robert M. Sertner and Frank von Zerneck (the same duo whose company made Mom at 16), tried to have it both ways: depicting the “pact” but saying it only involved four of the 18 girls at Gloucester’s high school who got pregnant during that school year, and loading the opening credits with disclaimers that it wasn’t a true story but was “inspired” by one.
The movie turned out to be surprisingly good, less because of any special sensitivity on the part of writers Teena Booth and Pam Davis and director Rosemary Rodriguez than due to the sheer power of the issues raised and the ability of the filmmakers to depict them relatively coolly instead of milking them for the obvious sources of emotion. There are so many stories raised by the events in Gloucester — at least as shown here — including the effects of religious repression (the high-school nurse resigns in protest when the school board, citing moral objections to contraception — this is a majority Roman Catholic community — refuses to allow condoms to be distributed in school), the folly of “abstinence education” when it flies in the face of teenage hormones, the irresponsibility of the girls involved (and their utter lack of a sense of reality in terms of just what taking care of a baby entails), the ways parents frequently react in these situations in ways that are just totally counterproductive, and the even greater irresponsibility of the boys who got the girls pregnant in the first place — summed up by one particularly cruel line at a poolside party some of the teenage boys are throwing: “I hope she has other friends that want to get knocked up.”
It’s also a story about the media — the catalyst for the story is 20-something reporter for a teen-oriented blog (albeit apparently a professional one with an infrastructure of reporters and, at least we assume, enough ad revenue to pay for itself) who returns to Gloucester to cover the story after she spent two years there, during which she herself got pregnant (and her boyfriend from back then is now the school’s assistant principal and he’s married with two kids of his own) and later told him she’d had an abortion, but in reality waited too long and ultimately gave the baby up for adoption. The Pregnancy Pact may be a little too blatant for its own good about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, but I’m hardly likely to object to a movie in which the good guys are the people (the blogger and the nurse) who are trying to get the town to accommodate itself to human nature as it is, while the bad guys are the religious fanatics who think that by denying contraception to teenagers they can stop them from having sex — and the insensitive, boorish parents who, instead of supporting their pregnant daughters (and their sons who got them that way), threaten them with the law or other sorts of punishment and take a nasty, judgmental attitude towards the whole thing. (I’ve read that in some schools there are girls who are genuinely surprised when they get pregnant because sex education has been so gutted they literally don’t understand the connection between heterosexual intercourse and pregnancy.)
It’s also directed with a refreshing lack of the visual tricks that mar quite a few Lifetime movies, and the acting is generally quite good — notably Thora Birch as the blogger, Sidney Fox (a girl named Sidney?); Madisen Beaty as Sara Dougan, daughter of the head of the Gloucester town council; and Nancy Travis and James McCaffrey as her parents — he’s unemployed and jealous of her for being the breadwinner of the family, which only adds to the stresses when Sara is finally “outed” as pregnant. There are also some appealing soft-core porn scenes between Beaty and Max Ehrich as her boyfriend, Jesse — and though in general the guys in this movie were too twinkie to appeal much to me, Ehrich was not only hot (and blessedly director Rodriguez gave us a lot of bare-chested shots of him!) but also a good actor, ably nailing a rapid-fire confusion of emotions as he’s buffeted by a torrent of stressors (especially when his dad, an attorney played by Douglas M. Griffin, first threatens him with a statutory rape charge, then offers to give the Dougans the money to “take care of” — i.e., abort — Sara’s baby, then demands that Sara have a paternity test to make sure Jesse is the father) and ultimately triggers an episode in which Sara drinks herself almost to catatonia after Jesse learns about the so-called “pact,” thinks he’s been used only as a stud service, and angrily breaks off with her.
Though The Pregnancy Pact starts falling back a little too heavily on melodramatic clichés as the end approaches, it’s still a surprisingly good movie and an example of how well Lifetime can deal with certain kinds of issues if its producers, directors and writers approach them in the right constructive spirit.
The Lifetime movie I watched last night was The Pregnancy Pact (imdb.com’s entry doesn’t have the definite article but all Lifetime’s publicity does), inspired by the alleged “pact” made by high-school girls in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 2008 that they would all seek to get pregnant simultaneously, or as nearly so as the vagaries of biology and the willingness of their boyfriends to have unprotected sex with them would allow them to. The “pregnancy pact” story was first reported nationwide in Time magazine and within a few months was pretty well debunked, and Lifetime and its producers, Robert M. Sertner and Frank von Zerneck (the same duo whose company made Mom at 16), tried to have it both ways: depicting the “pact” but saying it only involved four of the 18 girls at Gloucester’s high school who got pregnant during that school year, and loading the opening credits with disclaimers that it wasn’t a true story but was “inspired” by one.
The movie turned out to be surprisingly good, less because of any special sensitivity on the part of writers Teena Booth and Pam Davis and director Rosemary Rodriguez than due to the sheer power of the issues raised and the ability of the filmmakers to depict them relatively coolly instead of milking them for the obvious sources of emotion. There are so many stories raised by the events in Gloucester — at least as shown here — including the effects of religious repression (the high-school nurse resigns in protest when the school board, citing moral objections to contraception — this is a majority Roman Catholic community — refuses to allow condoms to be distributed in school), the folly of “abstinence education” when it flies in the face of teenage hormones, the irresponsibility of the girls involved (and their utter lack of a sense of reality in terms of just what taking care of a baby entails), the ways parents frequently react in these situations in ways that are just totally counterproductive, and the even greater irresponsibility of the boys who got the girls pregnant in the first place — summed up by one particularly cruel line at a poolside party some of the teenage boys are throwing: “I hope she has other friends that want to get knocked up.”
It’s also a story about the media — the catalyst for the story is 20-something reporter for a teen-oriented blog (albeit apparently a professional one with an infrastructure of reporters and, at least we assume, enough ad revenue to pay for itself) who returns to Gloucester to cover the story after she spent two years there, during which she herself got pregnant (and her boyfriend from back then is now the school’s assistant principal and he’s married with two kids of his own) and later told him she’d had an abortion, but in reality waited too long and ultimately gave the baby up for adoption. The Pregnancy Pact may be a little too blatant for its own good about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, but I’m hardly likely to object to a movie in which the good guys are the people (the blogger and the nurse) who are trying to get the town to accommodate itself to human nature as it is, while the bad guys are the religious fanatics who think that by denying contraception to teenagers they can stop them from having sex — and the insensitive, boorish parents who, instead of supporting their pregnant daughters (and their sons who got them that way), threaten them with the law or other sorts of punishment and take a nasty, judgmental attitude towards the whole thing. (I’ve read that in some schools there are girls who are genuinely surprised when they get pregnant because sex education has been so gutted they literally don’t understand the connection between heterosexual intercourse and pregnancy.)
It’s also directed with a refreshing lack of the visual tricks that mar quite a few Lifetime movies, and the acting is generally quite good — notably Thora Birch as the blogger, Sidney Fox (a girl named Sidney?); Madisen Beaty as Sara Dougan, daughter of the head of the Gloucester town council; and Nancy Travis and James McCaffrey as her parents — he’s unemployed and jealous of her for being the breadwinner of the family, which only adds to the stresses when Sara is finally “outed” as pregnant. There are also some appealing soft-core porn scenes between Beaty and Max Ehrich as her boyfriend, Jesse — and though in general the guys in this movie were too twinkie to appeal much to me, Ehrich was not only hot (and blessedly director Rodriguez gave us a lot of bare-chested shots of him!) but also a good actor, ably nailing a rapid-fire confusion of emotions as he’s buffeted by a torrent of stressors (especially when his dad, an attorney played by Douglas M. Griffin, first threatens him with a statutory rape charge, then offers to give the Dougans the money to “take care of” — i.e., abort — Sara’s baby, then demands that Sara have a paternity test to make sure Jesse is the father) and ultimately triggers an episode in which Sara drinks herself almost to catatonia after Jesse learns about the so-called “pact,” thinks he’s been used only as a stud service, and angrily breaks off with her.
Though The Pregnancy Pact starts falling back a little too heavily on melodramatic clichés as the end approaches, it’s still a surprisingly good movie and an example of how well Lifetime can deal with certain kinds of issues if its producers, directors and writers approach them in the right constructive spirit.
Murder on the High Seas (Love Bound) (Peerless, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles returned I ran him Murder on the High Seas, which we downloaded from archive.org and which was billed as a 1949 production by J. H. Hoffberg even though it was clearly older than that. It turned out to be a 1932 film called Love Bound — Murder on the High Seas seemed like an arbitrary title since the titular murder on the high seas only occurred seven minutes before the end of the film, but Love Bound seemed even more ambiguous. It’s one of those early-1930’s indies that took a provocative premise and got far less out of it than its dramatic potential; directed by Robert Hill and produced by Al Herman from a screenplay by George Plympton based on a story by James R. Gilbert, with director Hill also credited with “adaptation,” it’s the story of golddigging vamp Verna Wilson (Natalie Moorhead), who as the film opens has just won a $120,000 court judgment against her latest wealthy admirer, John Randolph, Sr. (Montagu Love).
Randolph’s wife (played by silent-screen veteran Clara Kimball Young) is ready to leave him over this, but his son Dick (Jack Mulhall, another silent-screen alumnus, billed first) insists that Randolph would never actually have done the down ’n’ dirty with someone like Verna Wilson and sets out to prove that by documenting her history, in partnership with her corrupt attorney (William V. Mong), of framing rich married men and winning settlements from them. The American Film Institute Catalog’s assemblers never got to see this one and their synopsis is a bit confusing and not all that reflective of the actual film: it describes Verna as an “actress” (there’s no reference in the movie to her having any above-ground career or source of income), and it also mentions rather perplexedly that Photoplay’s entry on this film “in the day” listed Moorhead as playing both “Verna Wilson” and “Vera Wendell.” In fact, Verna Wilson is the character’s real name and “Vera Wendell” an alias she adopts to get out of the country on the S. S. Romania (also sometimes spelled S. S. Rumania) after she learns that Jimmy Wilson (Lynton Brent), an ex-con with a grudge against her, has just been released from prison.
Dick Randolph goes on the Romania disguised as Dick Rowland, assistant to Texas oil millionaire “Lucky” Morrison — the real Morrison was scheduled to sail on the Romania but had to cancel at the last minute and so Dick Randolph sneaked his family chauffeur, Larry (Richard Alexander), onto the ship disguised as Morrison. On the voyage the supposed Morrison cruises Verna/Vera as part of Dick’s revenge scheme, and an octogenarian British baron (Tom Richards) cruises her for real — but she actually falls legitimately in love with Dick himself, and the film comes to a surprisingly ambiguous ending in which Verna’s lawyer shoots Jimmy, Dick tells Verna she isn’t interested, and Verna says, “Then I’ll just have to go off by myself,” and walks down the ship’s deck with the clear implication (in the one visually inventive scene in an otherwise straightforwardly directed movie) that she’s going to commit suicide by hurling herself overboard.
Murder on the High Seas/Love Bound had a compelling plot premise and under better auspices it could have been a genuinely great film — especially with a better actress in the lead as the gold-digging vamp; all through the film I kept wishing for Barbara Stanwyck in the role. There’s nothing really wrong with it as it stands; all it needed was either more money or a more inventive director (like Edgar G. Ulmer or Robert Florey) more adept at using the money producer Herman had couldn’t have fixed — a story that cries out for the chiaroscuro visuals and mordant writing of classic film noir doesn’t get them (and though noir usually isn’t considered to have started until the early 1940’s there are plenty of films from the early 1930’s, including indies like Sensation Hunters and The Phantom Broadcast as well as major-studio programmers like Safe in Hell, that are noirs in virtually all but genre name — and Murder on the High Seas a.k.a. Love Bound emerges as that sort of frustrating film that could have been good and instead is just rather mediocre.
When Charles returned I ran him Murder on the High Seas, which we downloaded from archive.org and which was billed as a 1949 production by J. H. Hoffberg even though it was clearly older than that. It turned out to be a 1932 film called Love Bound — Murder on the High Seas seemed like an arbitrary title since the titular murder on the high seas only occurred seven minutes before the end of the film, but Love Bound seemed even more ambiguous. It’s one of those early-1930’s indies that took a provocative premise and got far less out of it than its dramatic potential; directed by Robert Hill and produced by Al Herman from a screenplay by George Plympton based on a story by James R. Gilbert, with director Hill also credited with “adaptation,” it’s the story of golddigging vamp Verna Wilson (Natalie Moorhead), who as the film opens has just won a $120,000 court judgment against her latest wealthy admirer, John Randolph, Sr. (Montagu Love).
Randolph’s wife (played by silent-screen veteran Clara Kimball Young) is ready to leave him over this, but his son Dick (Jack Mulhall, another silent-screen alumnus, billed first) insists that Randolph would never actually have done the down ’n’ dirty with someone like Verna Wilson and sets out to prove that by documenting her history, in partnership with her corrupt attorney (William V. Mong), of framing rich married men and winning settlements from them. The American Film Institute Catalog’s assemblers never got to see this one and their synopsis is a bit confusing and not all that reflective of the actual film: it describes Verna as an “actress” (there’s no reference in the movie to her having any above-ground career or source of income), and it also mentions rather perplexedly that Photoplay’s entry on this film “in the day” listed Moorhead as playing both “Verna Wilson” and “Vera Wendell.” In fact, Verna Wilson is the character’s real name and “Vera Wendell” an alias she adopts to get out of the country on the S. S. Romania (also sometimes spelled S. S. Rumania) after she learns that Jimmy Wilson (Lynton Brent), an ex-con with a grudge against her, has just been released from prison.
Dick Randolph goes on the Romania disguised as Dick Rowland, assistant to Texas oil millionaire “Lucky” Morrison — the real Morrison was scheduled to sail on the Romania but had to cancel at the last minute and so Dick Randolph sneaked his family chauffeur, Larry (Richard Alexander), onto the ship disguised as Morrison. On the voyage the supposed Morrison cruises Verna/Vera as part of Dick’s revenge scheme, and an octogenarian British baron (Tom Richards) cruises her for real — but she actually falls legitimately in love with Dick himself, and the film comes to a surprisingly ambiguous ending in which Verna’s lawyer shoots Jimmy, Dick tells Verna she isn’t interested, and Verna says, “Then I’ll just have to go off by myself,” and walks down the ship’s deck with the clear implication (in the one visually inventive scene in an otherwise straightforwardly directed movie) that she’s going to commit suicide by hurling herself overboard.
Murder on the High Seas/Love Bound had a compelling plot premise and under better auspices it could have been a genuinely great film — especially with a better actress in the lead as the gold-digging vamp; all through the film I kept wishing for Barbara Stanwyck in the role. There’s nothing really wrong with it as it stands; all it needed was either more money or a more inventive director (like Edgar G. Ulmer or Robert Florey) more adept at using the money producer Herman had couldn’t have fixed — a story that cries out for the chiaroscuro visuals and mordant writing of classic film noir doesn’t get them (and though noir usually isn’t considered to have started until the early 1940’s there are plenty of films from the early 1930’s, including indies like Sensation Hunters and The Phantom Broadcast as well as major-studio programmers like Safe in Hell, that are noirs in virtually all but genre name — and Murder on the High Seas a.k.a. Love Bound emerges as that sort of frustrating film that could have been good and instead is just rather mediocre.
Address Unknown (Columbia, 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I had on TCM for a pretty quirky and unusual 1944 movie that is at once an anti-Nazi propaganda piece typical of the period and a decidedly off-beat one. It’s called Address Unknown and was made by Columbia in 1944, starring Paul Lukas — who’d previously played both Nazis (notably in Confessions of a Nazi Spy) and anti-Nazis (notably in Watch on the Rhine) and here is cast as Martin Schultz, a German-American immigrant who in the early 1930’s is running an art gallery in San Francisco in partnership with his long-time friend Max Eisenstein (Morris Carnovsky). The two business partners, who are also each other’s best friends and are about to be linked dynastically — Schultz’s son Heinrich (Peter van Eyck) is seriously dating Eisenstein’s daughter Griselle (K. T. Stevens, who gets an “Introducing” credit) — when they decide that Schultz should move back to Germany and settle in Munich so he can buy the new artwork in Europe and the gallery will have a presence on both sides of the Atlantic.
Unfortunately, Martin — along with his wife Elsa (Mady Christians) and their younger children — arrive in Germany just when Hitler is taking power, and Martin is contacted by Baron von Friesche (Carl Esmond), a member of the old-line German nobility and also a fanatical true believer in Nazism. Under the Baron’s tutelage Martin too becomes an intense Nazi, and in time accepts a major job at the Nazi ministry of culture. Meanwhile, Griselle has put off her marriage to Heinrich and traveled to Germany with the Schultzes to pursue her dream of being an actress (an odd plot point since one would wonder why a U.S.-born girl who speaks perfect English and good but noticeably American-accented German would try for an acting career in the German- rather than the English-speaking world), and after a side trip to Vienna she’s cast in a major play in Berlin — only the night she’s supposed to open, a Nazi censor orders her director to delete lines from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount that were written into her part — you know, all the lines about blessed are the meek, the righteous, the peacemakers, etc. (This makes the Nazis sound even more Nietzschean than they really were.) She goes ahead and speaks them anyway, whereupon the censor stops the performance and reveals that she’s really a Jew, turning the audience into a lynch mob that drives her from the theatre and forces her to flee for her life.
She seeks shelter at Martin Schultz’s home — and he, putting loyalty to the Nazis above loyalty to the family of his partner and best friend, refuses to let her in and she’s cornered by the Nazi police and shot dead on his doorstep. Then Schultz gets a series of mysterious letters from the San Francisco side of his gallery, supposedly about moving artworks but actually written to seem like they’re some sort of code — and Schultz gets in trouble when the Baron informs him that it’s illegal for Germans either to send or receive coded letters. Schultz tumbles down the Nazi hierarchy even faster than he rose, and at the end he’s either killed or sent to a concentration camp (the film keeps it chillingly ambiguous as to which) and the last letter from San Francisco is returned “address unknown” — and it’s revealed that the “code” letters weren’t written by Max at all but by Heinrich, who set up his father to look like an anti-Nazi spy as his revenge against him for letting the Nazis kill his girlfriend.
Address Unknown was based on a 1938 anti-Nazi book by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor (though she took author’s credit merely as “Kressmann Taylor” to keep her gender ambiguous) that was what’s called an “epistolary novel,” told exclusively in the form of letters supposedly written by its fictional characters. It’s an awkward form to dramatize (unless you do the Love Letters/Dear John schtick of just having two actors reading the alternating letters aloud) and, though Kressmann has a co-credit on the script with Herbert Dalmas, the dramaturgy is a bit awkward and anyone not knowing that it was based on an epistolary novel would be wondering why mail has such an important role in the workings of the story (to the point where, towards the end, Schultz is literally cringing with fear every time his doorbell rings to announce the arrival of the mail carrier).
The film was directed by William Cameron Menzies and photographed by Rudolph Maté — though that doesn’t stop it from containing some of the most incredibly obvious process work ever put on screen, especially in the establishing scene at the beginning set in San Francisco — but it certainly shows the Menzies touch even though he didn’t do the set designs as well (he left that to Walter Holscher and Columbia art department head Lionel Banks), especially in the forced perspective of a lot of the backdrops: the rooms in this movie look longer than one would expect from their real-life equivalents, with higher ceilings and an overall air of way more empty space than is needed for their functions.
I certainly chuckled when I saw the office of the Nazi bigwig to which Schultz is summoned when he’s trying to explain that he has nothing to do with the coded letters and he’s no threat to the Nazi regime; it was a long, long, long office with the entrance at one end and the desk of the official Schultz is there to see at the other, forcing Schultz to make a long, humiliating walk down this seemingly endless corridor. What was amusing and ironic about that was that this office design was pioneered by Benito Mussolini — and in 1933 Columbia had distributed a sympathetic documentary on Mussolini and Italian fascism called Mussolini Speaks, which had shown that office, and it had inspired Columbia president Harry Cohn (and Sam Goldwyn as well) to build similar offices for themselves.
Address Unknown suffers from the contrivances Taylor invented to keep her plot moving (including the unbelievable quickness with which Schultz transitions from decent guy to ferociously racist Nazi) and from the surprising cheapness of the production (though it had at least one major star, a prestigious director and an original music score by “name” composer Ernst Toch, Columbia still treated it as little more than a “B” movie), but if you can overcome the plot’s creakiness it’s a quite good movie, effective anti-Nazi agitprop and also an unusual showcase for Lukas, who rarely got to play a role with this much range and depth; his final rat-in-a-cage scene in which he realizes that the Nazis he so enthusiastically embraced are about to destroy him and there’s not anything he can do about it is especially powerful and vividly acted by a man who’d already proved he could play both villains and heroes, and here is (though much more villain than hero) a little bit of both.
This morning I had on TCM for a pretty quirky and unusual 1944 movie that is at once an anti-Nazi propaganda piece typical of the period and a decidedly off-beat one. It’s called Address Unknown and was made by Columbia in 1944, starring Paul Lukas — who’d previously played both Nazis (notably in Confessions of a Nazi Spy) and anti-Nazis (notably in Watch on the Rhine) and here is cast as Martin Schultz, a German-American immigrant who in the early 1930’s is running an art gallery in San Francisco in partnership with his long-time friend Max Eisenstein (Morris Carnovsky). The two business partners, who are also each other’s best friends and are about to be linked dynastically — Schultz’s son Heinrich (Peter van Eyck) is seriously dating Eisenstein’s daughter Griselle (K. T. Stevens, who gets an “Introducing” credit) — when they decide that Schultz should move back to Germany and settle in Munich so he can buy the new artwork in Europe and the gallery will have a presence on both sides of the Atlantic.
Unfortunately, Martin — along with his wife Elsa (Mady Christians) and their younger children — arrive in Germany just when Hitler is taking power, and Martin is contacted by Baron von Friesche (Carl Esmond), a member of the old-line German nobility and also a fanatical true believer in Nazism. Under the Baron’s tutelage Martin too becomes an intense Nazi, and in time accepts a major job at the Nazi ministry of culture. Meanwhile, Griselle has put off her marriage to Heinrich and traveled to Germany with the Schultzes to pursue her dream of being an actress (an odd plot point since one would wonder why a U.S.-born girl who speaks perfect English and good but noticeably American-accented German would try for an acting career in the German- rather than the English-speaking world), and after a side trip to Vienna she’s cast in a major play in Berlin — only the night she’s supposed to open, a Nazi censor orders her director to delete lines from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount that were written into her part — you know, all the lines about blessed are the meek, the righteous, the peacemakers, etc. (This makes the Nazis sound even more Nietzschean than they really were.) She goes ahead and speaks them anyway, whereupon the censor stops the performance and reveals that she’s really a Jew, turning the audience into a lynch mob that drives her from the theatre and forces her to flee for her life.
She seeks shelter at Martin Schultz’s home — and he, putting loyalty to the Nazis above loyalty to the family of his partner and best friend, refuses to let her in and she’s cornered by the Nazi police and shot dead on his doorstep. Then Schultz gets a series of mysterious letters from the San Francisco side of his gallery, supposedly about moving artworks but actually written to seem like they’re some sort of code — and Schultz gets in trouble when the Baron informs him that it’s illegal for Germans either to send or receive coded letters. Schultz tumbles down the Nazi hierarchy even faster than he rose, and at the end he’s either killed or sent to a concentration camp (the film keeps it chillingly ambiguous as to which) and the last letter from San Francisco is returned “address unknown” — and it’s revealed that the “code” letters weren’t written by Max at all but by Heinrich, who set up his father to look like an anti-Nazi spy as his revenge against him for letting the Nazis kill his girlfriend.
Address Unknown was based on a 1938 anti-Nazi book by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor (though she took author’s credit merely as “Kressmann Taylor” to keep her gender ambiguous) that was what’s called an “epistolary novel,” told exclusively in the form of letters supposedly written by its fictional characters. It’s an awkward form to dramatize (unless you do the Love Letters/Dear John schtick of just having two actors reading the alternating letters aloud) and, though Kressmann has a co-credit on the script with Herbert Dalmas, the dramaturgy is a bit awkward and anyone not knowing that it was based on an epistolary novel would be wondering why mail has such an important role in the workings of the story (to the point where, towards the end, Schultz is literally cringing with fear every time his doorbell rings to announce the arrival of the mail carrier).
The film was directed by William Cameron Menzies and photographed by Rudolph Maté — though that doesn’t stop it from containing some of the most incredibly obvious process work ever put on screen, especially in the establishing scene at the beginning set in San Francisco — but it certainly shows the Menzies touch even though he didn’t do the set designs as well (he left that to Walter Holscher and Columbia art department head Lionel Banks), especially in the forced perspective of a lot of the backdrops: the rooms in this movie look longer than one would expect from their real-life equivalents, with higher ceilings and an overall air of way more empty space than is needed for their functions.
I certainly chuckled when I saw the office of the Nazi bigwig to which Schultz is summoned when he’s trying to explain that he has nothing to do with the coded letters and he’s no threat to the Nazi regime; it was a long, long, long office with the entrance at one end and the desk of the official Schultz is there to see at the other, forcing Schultz to make a long, humiliating walk down this seemingly endless corridor. What was amusing and ironic about that was that this office design was pioneered by Benito Mussolini — and in 1933 Columbia had distributed a sympathetic documentary on Mussolini and Italian fascism called Mussolini Speaks, which had shown that office, and it had inspired Columbia president Harry Cohn (and Sam Goldwyn as well) to build similar offices for themselves.
Address Unknown suffers from the contrivances Taylor invented to keep her plot moving (including the unbelievable quickness with which Schultz transitions from decent guy to ferociously racist Nazi) and from the surprising cheapness of the production (though it had at least one major star, a prestigious director and an original music score by “name” composer Ernst Toch, Columbia still treated it as little more than a “B” movie), but if you can overcome the plot’s creakiness it’s a quite good movie, effective anti-Nazi agitprop and also an unusual showcase for Lukas, who rarely got to play a role with this much range and depth; his final rat-in-a-cage scene in which he realizes that the Nazis he so enthusiastically embraced are about to destroy him and there’s not anything he can do about it is especially powerful and vividly acted by a man who’d already proved he could play both villains and heroes, and here is (though much more villain than hero) a little bit of both.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Eyes of Me (PBS “Independent Lens,” 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie was The Eyes of Me, a documentary by Keith Maitland centered around the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) in Austin, and in particular around four students in the school in the 2005-2006 school year. Chas is an African-American, tall, lanky, dressed in “street” clothes and with an ambition to be a rapper and use rap music to communicate his existence. Meagan is a heavy-set blonde woman with an ambition to be a social worker and a fierce determination to learn to cope with her disability. Debbie is a freshman who has an outgoing personality, a disinterest in boy-girl relationships (she likes boys as friends but isn’t willing to go farther with them). Isaac is a boy from Paris, Texas, darkly handsome (during the film he’s depicted as dating a fellow student named Chastity — who hopefully is not going to decide later in life that she’s a Lesbian and then that she’s a man! — who breaks up with him because he’s seeing someone else; later he’s thrown out of TSBVI for “inappropriate physical contact with a fellow student,” and not only is he charismatically handsome but he’s also the most compelling character among the four even though (or maybe because) he’s the least sympathetic: he’s got the combination of grandiosity (he says at least twice that his ultimate ambition is to be the first blind President of the United States) and irresponsibility that’s supposed to be the early warning symptom of psychopathology.
The film is intensely moving mostly because it’s so matter-of-fact; things happen to these people, some of them typical high-school things and some of them the result of people forced to grow up faster than they were anticipating (for his senior year Chas gets tired of living on campus, rents an off-campus apartment with a roommate, has to get himself legally emancipated at 17 to do so — then loses the apartment and ends up doing the couch-rounds with friends when the roommate walks out on him without paying the rent or bills), that are only tangentially related to their struggles as blind people. The film does an excellent job of showing the sheer cumbersomeness of being blind: the size and weight of Braille books (Chas is shown writing his lyrics in Braille on a clunky typewriter — he has a computer, which he uses to record his songs, but probably can’t afford the sort of specialized printer it would require to do print-outs in Braille) and the sheer difficulty of moving around — in one scene Meagan is being trained in how to cross a street safely and director Maitland mixes the sounds of traffic unusually loudly so we can get an idea of how blind people are forced to use their hearing and develop that and their other senses to make up for the big one they don’t have.
There was an interesting panel discussion afterwards with three students at a similar high school for visually impaired people in San Diego — all boys: Andrew (white, shaved head, dressed in a white T-shirt and black running shorts — an outfit he picked because he’d been an athlete before he lost his sight and it symbolized his determination to stay in shape), Raymond (a heavy-set Latino-looking kid in a dark shirt and blue jeans) and Ian (also Latin-looking but considerably skinnier, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans and the most child-like of the three in terms of his demeanor) — and they, like the people in the movie, discussed some of the myths that surround blind people. One of the most revealing parts of this movie is that it demonstrates how some are born blind, some achieve blindness and some have blindness thrust upon them; Isaac’s story in particular — his retinas were detaching and his grandparents (whom he was living with at the time) had no health insurance, so he couldn’t get eye surgery in time and they ultimately detached completely — is especially heart-rending (and yet another example of the tragedies caused by America’s proud, steadfast refusal to make access to health care a matter of individual right and insistence instead on leaving it to “the market”), while others like Meagan in the movie had some sight throughout their childhoods but gradually lost it.
What’s frequently misunderstood is that there are levels and degrees of blindness — the gap between perfect vision and total darkness is huge and there are some people who can see the difference between light and dark, others who can see vaguely defined blobs and shapes but can’t get enough visual information to their brains to process them as actual objects, still others whose eyes send them huge amounts of light but nothing else (those are the ones who wear the wraparound shades Ray Charles made famous — not to help them see but at least to give them the comfort of darkness instead of just undifferentiated, searingly bright light). Andrew’s story, like Isaac’s in the movie, was one of having normal vision until just about two or three years ago, whereas Ian has been blind since about one and thus doesn’t have the memories of the visual world that some blind people have to fall back on. The teacher who brought these students to the screening fielded a question about how blind people dream by saying that it depends on how long they were blind — someone blind from birth would not dream in visual imagery while someone who had gone blind later on would have dreams involving vision because he or she would be drawing, unconsciously, on their memories of what things looked like when they could still see them.
The teacher also debunked the myth that blind people automatically develop hyper-sensitive hearing to compensate; as is shown by the sequence in the film of Meagan learning to cross streets on auditory cues alone, this is a learned skill and they have to work at it. The discussion also mentioned guide dogs as one way of recognizing whether someone is blind (though I pointed out that with the proliferation of service dogs for people with other disabilities, even that isn’t as definite an indicator as it used to be) along with the blind canes, which blind people frequently use as a sort of artificial set of eyes (which seemed like news to some of the people in the audience, though I’ve seen enough of it — especially when blind people use the buses and their canes help them negotiate the steps to get on and off of them — that I’ve recognized it and known what it was).
I had several questions, including how blind people experience movies — I know some films on TV come with “special audio programs” that describe the visual information in a narration (essentially turning a movie into an old-style radio program) but I hadn’t realized some theatres offer these as well, giving blind patrons a device that broadcasts the SAP to them while the fully sensed people in the audience obliviously watch the film normally — and also how blind people seem to be attracted to music. I couldn’t help but think of the many successful musicians who’ve been blind, including all those bluesmen who had “Blind” in front of their names — Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell — as well as the blind jazz pianists Art Tatum, Lennie Tristano, George Shearing and Alex Kallao (the last a real cult artist who made two LP’s for RCA Victor in the mid-1950’s but pretty much dropped from sight after that before being rediscovered doing a residency at a Sausalito, California bar in 2007) and later stars like Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, José Feliciano (who in some ways had the most remarkable career at all because he was so talented that before he became a star in his own right, he was a successful studio musician even though most studio calls require the ability to sight-read music) and Andrea Bocelli — and I noted that three of the four students featured in The Eyes of Me (the marvelous title comes from one of Chas’s rap songs) were involved in music: Chas is shown working on rap material, Isaac is seen practicing drums, and Debbie stars as Cinderella in the TSBVI school play, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods — a musical.
Raymond said he had had a lifelong interest in music and had at one point played piano and violin and has now settled on ukulele (that seems like a bit of a comedown in his ambitions, though it also reinforces my theory that blind musicians seem to gravitate towards the most tactile instruments, the ones played exclusively by touch — saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk remains the only major blind jazz musician I can think of who played wind or brass instruments), and I was left with a fascinating glimpse/look/whatever into the world of the blind (one myth dispelled by the live people discussing the film last night was that blind people — most blind people, anyway — do not get offended when the word “see” is used around them; they accept it as a metaphor for perceiving the visual world in whatever way they can). The Eyes of Me is a marvelous film and manages to pack quite a lot of content into a 56-minute TV running time (though I suspect that, as with some of the other PBS Independent Lens presentations, there might be a longer version extant made either for theatrical showing or DVD release), and it manages the tricky and difficult feat of telling the stories of people with disabilities without milking the tear ducts and making you feel sorry for them.
More information on The Eyes of Me: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/eyes-of-me/getinvolved.html
The movie was The Eyes of Me, a documentary by Keith Maitland centered around the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) in Austin, and in particular around four students in the school in the 2005-2006 school year. Chas is an African-American, tall, lanky, dressed in “street” clothes and with an ambition to be a rapper and use rap music to communicate his existence. Meagan is a heavy-set blonde woman with an ambition to be a social worker and a fierce determination to learn to cope with her disability. Debbie is a freshman who has an outgoing personality, a disinterest in boy-girl relationships (she likes boys as friends but isn’t willing to go farther with them). Isaac is a boy from Paris, Texas, darkly handsome (during the film he’s depicted as dating a fellow student named Chastity — who hopefully is not going to decide later in life that she’s a Lesbian and then that she’s a man! — who breaks up with him because he’s seeing someone else; later he’s thrown out of TSBVI for “inappropriate physical contact with a fellow student,” and not only is he charismatically handsome but he’s also the most compelling character among the four even though (or maybe because) he’s the least sympathetic: he’s got the combination of grandiosity (he says at least twice that his ultimate ambition is to be the first blind President of the United States) and irresponsibility that’s supposed to be the early warning symptom of psychopathology.
The film is intensely moving mostly because it’s so matter-of-fact; things happen to these people, some of them typical high-school things and some of them the result of people forced to grow up faster than they were anticipating (for his senior year Chas gets tired of living on campus, rents an off-campus apartment with a roommate, has to get himself legally emancipated at 17 to do so — then loses the apartment and ends up doing the couch-rounds with friends when the roommate walks out on him without paying the rent or bills), that are only tangentially related to their struggles as blind people. The film does an excellent job of showing the sheer cumbersomeness of being blind: the size and weight of Braille books (Chas is shown writing his lyrics in Braille on a clunky typewriter — he has a computer, which he uses to record his songs, but probably can’t afford the sort of specialized printer it would require to do print-outs in Braille) and the sheer difficulty of moving around — in one scene Meagan is being trained in how to cross a street safely and director Maitland mixes the sounds of traffic unusually loudly so we can get an idea of how blind people are forced to use their hearing and develop that and their other senses to make up for the big one they don’t have.
There was an interesting panel discussion afterwards with three students at a similar high school for visually impaired people in San Diego — all boys: Andrew (white, shaved head, dressed in a white T-shirt and black running shorts — an outfit he picked because he’d been an athlete before he lost his sight and it symbolized his determination to stay in shape), Raymond (a heavy-set Latino-looking kid in a dark shirt and blue jeans) and Ian (also Latin-looking but considerably skinnier, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans and the most child-like of the three in terms of his demeanor) — and they, like the people in the movie, discussed some of the myths that surround blind people. One of the most revealing parts of this movie is that it demonstrates how some are born blind, some achieve blindness and some have blindness thrust upon them; Isaac’s story in particular — his retinas were detaching and his grandparents (whom he was living with at the time) had no health insurance, so he couldn’t get eye surgery in time and they ultimately detached completely — is especially heart-rending (and yet another example of the tragedies caused by America’s proud, steadfast refusal to make access to health care a matter of individual right and insistence instead on leaving it to “the market”), while others like Meagan in the movie had some sight throughout their childhoods but gradually lost it.
What’s frequently misunderstood is that there are levels and degrees of blindness — the gap between perfect vision and total darkness is huge and there are some people who can see the difference between light and dark, others who can see vaguely defined blobs and shapes but can’t get enough visual information to their brains to process them as actual objects, still others whose eyes send them huge amounts of light but nothing else (those are the ones who wear the wraparound shades Ray Charles made famous — not to help them see but at least to give them the comfort of darkness instead of just undifferentiated, searingly bright light). Andrew’s story, like Isaac’s in the movie, was one of having normal vision until just about two or three years ago, whereas Ian has been blind since about one and thus doesn’t have the memories of the visual world that some blind people have to fall back on. The teacher who brought these students to the screening fielded a question about how blind people dream by saying that it depends on how long they were blind — someone blind from birth would not dream in visual imagery while someone who had gone blind later on would have dreams involving vision because he or she would be drawing, unconsciously, on their memories of what things looked like when they could still see them.
The teacher also debunked the myth that blind people automatically develop hyper-sensitive hearing to compensate; as is shown by the sequence in the film of Meagan learning to cross streets on auditory cues alone, this is a learned skill and they have to work at it. The discussion also mentioned guide dogs as one way of recognizing whether someone is blind (though I pointed out that with the proliferation of service dogs for people with other disabilities, even that isn’t as definite an indicator as it used to be) along with the blind canes, which blind people frequently use as a sort of artificial set of eyes (which seemed like news to some of the people in the audience, though I’ve seen enough of it — especially when blind people use the buses and their canes help them negotiate the steps to get on and off of them — that I’ve recognized it and known what it was).
I had several questions, including how blind people experience movies — I know some films on TV come with “special audio programs” that describe the visual information in a narration (essentially turning a movie into an old-style radio program) but I hadn’t realized some theatres offer these as well, giving blind patrons a device that broadcasts the SAP to them while the fully sensed people in the audience obliviously watch the film normally — and also how blind people seem to be attracted to music. I couldn’t help but think of the many successful musicians who’ve been blind, including all those bluesmen who had “Blind” in front of their names — Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell — as well as the blind jazz pianists Art Tatum, Lennie Tristano, George Shearing and Alex Kallao (the last a real cult artist who made two LP’s for RCA Victor in the mid-1950’s but pretty much dropped from sight after that before being rediscovered doing a residency at a Sausalito, California bar in 2007) and later stars like Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, José Feliciano (who in some ways had the most remarkable career at all because he was so talented that before he became a star in his own right, he was a successful studio musician even though most studio calls require the ability to sight-read music) and Andrea Bocelli — and I noted that three of the four students featured in The Eyes of Me (the marvelous title comes from one of Chas’s rap songs) were involved in music: Chas is shown working on rap material, Isaac is seen practicing drums, and Debbie stars as Cinderella in the TSBVI school play, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods — a musical.
Raymond said he had had a lifelong interest in music and had at one point played piano and violin and has now settled on ukulele (that seems like a bit of a comedown in his ambitions, though it also reinforces my theory that blind musicians seem to gravitate towards the most tactile instruments, the ones played exclusively by touch — saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk remains the only major blind jazz musician I can think of who played wind or brass instruments), and I was left with a fascinating glimpse/look/whatever into the world of the blind (one myth dispelled by the live people discussing the film last night was that blind people — most blind people, anyway — do not get offended when the word “see” is used around them; they accept it as a metaphor for perceiving the visual world in whatever way they can). The Eyes of Me is a marvelous film and manages to pack quite a lot of content into a 56-minute TV running time (though I suspect that, as with some of the other PBS Independent Lens presentations, there might be a longer version extant made either for theatrical showing or DVD release), and it manages the tricky and difficult feat of telling the stories of people with disabilities without milking the tear ducts and making you feel sorry for them.
More information on The Eyes of Me: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/eyes-of-me/getinvolved.html
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