by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was the 1949 Warners comedy-farce A Kiss in the Dark, which was next in sequence after Make Your Own Bed on the Jane Wyman tribute disc I had recorded from TCM and which, if anything, turned out to be equally as delightful if not more so. It helped that she had a more appealing co-star this time — David Niven — instead of Jack Carson, and instead of the slapstick of Make Your Own Bed this film’s humor was basically farce but crossed over into a surprising number of genres, ranging from Capraesque high-culture-pretensions-get-deflated to a gallery of Sturgesian eccentrics. Indeed, one could argue that just as Stanley Donen’s Charade (1963) is the best Alfred Hitchcock film Hitchcock didn’t make, so A Kiss in the Dark is the best Preston Sturges film Sturges didn’t make himself.
The director is Delmer Daves but this appears to be a Schreiber film in which the writer, Harry Kurnitz (who also produced and got a special credit for doing both), had far more to do with its quality; throughout the movie Kurnitz, adapting a story called “Cleopatra Arms” by Everett and Devery Freeman (they were brothers, born two years apart — Everett in 1911 and Devery in 1913 — and Charles wondered why on earth their parents gave them such similar and dorky names), brings a mordant sensibility and a rapier wit to the proceedings. The film opens with Jane Wyman in a mock-Middle Eastern costume and setting with some appropriately cheesy music playing in the background — and then we get one of those shots in which the camera cranes backwards and we see that the original image is just a set: she’s a model and she’s being costumed and posed in this tacky setting for her latest ad picture. The photographer is a mad eccentric who can only work when he’s listening to the classical piano of Eric Phillips, and the film cuts from the photographer on a high, unstable ladder waiting for the broadcast of Phillips’ latest concert to begin to an empty stage with a grand piano on it.
It seems that Phillips (David Niven), frustrated by the breakneck pace of the gigs his manager, Peter Danilo (Joseph Buloff) — did Kurnitz or one of the Freemans deliberately name this character after the male lead in The Merry Widow? — has booked for him on the strike-while-the-iron-is-hot principle, has developed a paralyzing case of stage fright that requires him literally to be pushed onto the stage to perform and cued as to exactly what he’s supposed to play since he can’t remember what’s on his program. (There is no music on his piano; apparently we’re supposed to believe that he’s one of those artists, like Toscanini, who has developed a reputation for being able to play entirely from memory and can’t afford to break that image by starting to display scores in front of him.) He finds that in order to invest his money, Danilo has bought a string of gas stations and also the Cleopatra Arms, a run-down apartment building in Morningside Heights — whose former owner, Horace Willoughby (Victor Moore, a bit less annoyingly whiny than usual), sold it to Phillips only because he thought that as an artist, Phillips would be sensitive enough to run it in the same spirit as Willoughby has and be equally fair and sympathetic to the tenants.
Among the tenants are Polly Haines (Jane Wyman) — who thanks to Kurnitz’ effective use of a “plant” in his plot has been indirectly connected to Phillips well before they actually meet — and Mr. Botts (Broderick Crawford), who works in a boiler factory at night and sleeps during the day … when he can; mostly he chews out the other tenants for making any sort of noise. The fish-out-of-water aspects of Phillips’ relationships with the other tenants — and his burgeoning love with Polly and the jealousy of her boyfriend, Bruce Arnold (Wayne Morris), a football star turned insurance salesman who concocts the idea of selling Phillips a $1 million insurance policy on his hands so he and Polly can get married on his commission — are told nicely, though there’s a rather jarring bit in which Phillips is playing the title song (actually an oldie by Victor Herbert, who died a quarter-century before this film was made) and Polly compliments him, saying, “You see? There’s nothing wrong with music just because people happen to like it” — she’s saying this to a superstar pianist who, we’ve been told earlier, has just sold 27,000 tickets for an upcoming concert at the Hollywood Bowl! One central plot gimmick is that Willoughby tries to figure out a way to get Botts out of the building — he’s the one resident who doesn’t fit his image of all the tenants forming one big, happy family — and after Botts punches him out and Phillips is afraid to risk hurting his hands by striking back, Phillips hits on the idea of moving a grand piano into Polly’s room, setting it next door to Botts’s room and practicing on it all day, thereby killing two birds with one stone: he can keep in practice and the sheer volume of his playing (he always seems to lead off with the famous “Heroic” polonaise by Chopin) will persuade Botts to move.
A Kiss in the Dark is an appealing film and a very, very funny one that keeps veering off in unexpected directions — it’s the sort of script that deploys a lot of the old clichés but in such fresh and unusual combinations it seems more original than it is — and it’s nice that Kurnitz and Delmer Daves don’t make Eric Phillips choose between his concert career and life as an ordinary person: at the end of the movie Eric and Polly, now married, board the train together to go to Los Angeles and his sold-out concert at the Bowl. Even composer Max Steiner, not usually known for a sense of humor, gets into the spirit of things, supplying a background score full of ironic quotes from the classics that, like the script itself, help bridge the gap between Eric’s and Polly’s characters and make it seem right to us that they should come together at the end. A Kiss in the Dark is a real charmer, the sort of movie that makes following old films worthwhile, and though it’s a comedy Niven plays it nimbly with some of the same panache he brought to his serious role in the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger A Matter of Life and Death — and Wyman, cast as the representative of ordinary, down-to-earth humanity, matches him and shows off her skills as a farceuse.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Salty/Woodshed, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film at the library was Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which somehow fell through the distribution crack and went straight from the festival circuit to DVD even though it was based on a work by a major writer (the late David Foster Wallace: a 1999 short-story collection that was also turned into a stage play in 2000) and starred talented and semi-“name” actors like Julianne Nicholson and John Krasinski. (Krasinski also directed and wrote the script.) Though the central protagonist is a woman, Sara Quinn (Nicholson) — who plays a graduate student who responds to a romantic breakup by deciding to do a research project about how the feminist movement and its changes in the dating landscape have affected men — it’s so close to Steven Soderbergh’s breakthrough movie Krasinski might as well have called it sex, lies and audiotape. The establishing shot showing Sara talking to her thesis advisor about her research project doesn’t occur until the end of the movie (showing that airy attitude towards chronology that afflicts many filmmakers today, though it works better here than it has in a lot of films that have been non-linear for no apparent reason).
Most of the film consists either of her interviews with the various men she uses as subjects in her research — shot in a sterile-looking office with the men pouring out their sexual confessions into the microphone of her voice recorder — or scenes from her life that illustrate the central theme of the movie, which is essentially that men are assholes and will say and do just about anything to get into a woman’s pants, and then to get the hell away from her once they’ve finished fucking her and before she has a chance to latch on to them and demand an emotional commitment or anything more than just sex. There are a lot of ironies surrounding this movie — including the fact that this heavily anti-male movie was written and directed by a man based on a story source by another man, and the way feminism doesn’t seem to have changed the male-female dating game at all, at least from the man’s perspective, except that it’s given women yet another excuse to avoid having sex with men. (One gets the distinct impression from this movie that the only males who truly respect the people they have sex with are Gays.) The film is presented as a sort of memorial to Wallace, whose birth and death dates (1962-2008) are shown at the start of the end credits — and certainly if you watch this movie knowing that Wallace not only died young but committed suicide, its misanthropy seems to make more sense.
It’s a well made movie thanks largely to the matter-of-fact blandness of Krasinski’s direction and the gnomic presence of Nicholson in the lead role: with her slim, boyish body and short hair, she cuts a surprisingly androgynous figure — plot-wise she’s supposed to be the representative of the female gender (she’s the only significant woman character in the piece) but visually she seems more like an interlocutor between the sexes — and her utterly impassive face remains mask-like throughout as she hears men tell her the most outrageous stories about their sex life without her visibly responding at all. Charles complained that the word “feminism” appeared nowhere in Krasinski’s script except at the end, when Sara was explaining her project — but frankly that seemed to me to be the point of the story: that male-female relationships are based on a set of lies, both the ones told by men to get women to have sex with them and the ones told by women to avoid doing so (the idea that straight women might actively and aggressively seek out sex themselves is utterly foreign to the fictional world of this film) and that feminism has only muddied the already dirty waters of heterosexual dating and relationships.
It’s instructive to remember that what we now call “second-wave” feminism (i.e., the women’s movement that began in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s) began at least partly as a response to the so-called “sexual revolution,” which through much of the counter-culture of the 1960’s was experienced by women as simply another piece of social pressure wielded by men to get them to yield — feminism gave counter-culture women tools they could use to resist having sex with men similar to the ways non-counter-culture women historically used the negative status of so-called “fallen women” to make men who were interested in them cough up with marriage, family and lifetime financial support before letting them in the sacred temple of the mons veneris. I remember the cover of Dan Greenburg’s early-1960’s book Scoring, which treated a woman’s body like a pinball table, with various points scored for reaching certain parts and the highest score — of course — posted over the crotch; and both the beauty and the horror of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (a title that’s something of a cheat since the movie doesn’t recognize the existence of any other sort of man!) is the revelation that the attitudes behind that early-1960’s book cover are still prevalent.
Anyone who remembers sex, lies and videotape will be expecting a Big Revelation from the last interview sequence in this film, and it indeed happens — in a story that sounds uncannily like the real-life tale of the woman who soothed the escaped convict who broke into her house and held her hostage by reading him passages from Rick Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life (something that happened far later than David Foster Wallace wrote the source stories for this film!), one of Sara’s interviewees tells a tale of a woman friend who warded off a sexual psychopath by staying focused, and while she was ultimately raped by him she was able to turn off any trauma she might have had from the incident — and, unsurprisingly, soon enough both Sara and the audience realize this man is talking about something he did to a woman. Another welcome treat from this film is the sight of Christopher Meloni (still in the Armani suit, alas) as one of two men who’ve invented a scam for picking up women by hanging out at airports where flights are coming in and zeroing in on the woman whose husband, lover, boyfriend or whatever doesn’t show up to meet her, immediately taking advantage of her vulnerability at being abandoned. I couldn’t help but imagine that this character would ultimately turn into a sexual criminal, raping and killing a woman who didn’t yield to his slimy advances — and then Meloni, in his better-known characterization as Detective Elliot Stabler on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, would go after him and finally arrest him. (Meloni in a dual role as cop and crook: that’s one Dick Wolf and his writers haven’t thought of yet!)
The film at the library was Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which somehow fell through the distribution crack and went straight from the festival circuit to DVD even though it was based on a work by a major writer (the late David Foster Wallace: a 1999 short-story collection that was also turned into a stage play in 2000) and starred talented and semi-“name” actors like Julianne Nicholson and John Krasinski. (Krasinski also directed and wrote the script.) Though the central protagonist is a woman, Sara Quinn (Nicholson) — who plays a graduate student who responds to a romantic breakup by deciding to do a research project about how the feminist movement and its changes in the dating landscape have affected men — it’s so close to Steven Soderbergh’s breakthrough movie Krasinski might as well have called it sex, lies and audiotape. The establishing shot showing Sara talking to her thesis advisor about her research project doesn’t occur until the end of the movie (showing that airy attitude towards chronology that afflicts many filmmakers today, though it works better here than it has in a lot of films that have been non-linear for no apparent reason).
Most of the film consists either of her interviews with the various men she uses as subjects in her research — shot in a sterile-looking office with the men pouring out their sexual confessions into the microphone of her voice recorder — or scenes from her life that illustrate the central theme of the movie, which is essentially that men are assholes and will say and do just about anything to get into a woman’s pants, and then to get the hell away from her once they’ve finished fucking her and before she has a chance to latch on to them and demand an emotional commitment or anything more than just sex. There are a lot of ironies surrounding this movie — including the fact that this heavily anti-male movie was written and directed by a man based on a story source by another man, and the way feminism doesn’t seem to have changed the male-female dating game at all, at least from the man’s perspective, except that it’s given women yet another excuse to avoid having sex with men. (One gets the distinct impression from this movie that the only males who truly respect the people they have sex with are Gays.) The film is presented as a sort of memorial to Wallace, whose birth and death dates (1962-2008) are shown at the start of the end credits — and certainly if you watch this movie knowing that Wallace not only died young but committed suicide, its misanthropy seems to make more sense.
It’s a well made movie thanks largely to the matter-of-fact blandness of Krasinski’s direction and the gnomic presence of Nicholson in the lead role: with her slim, boyish body and short hair, she cuts a surprisingly androgynous figure — plot-wise she’s supposed to be the representative of the female gender (she’s the only significant woman character in the piece) but visually she seems more like an interlocutor between the sexes — and her utterly impassive face remains mask-like throughout as she hears men tell her the most outrageous stories about their sex life without her visibly responding at all. Charles complained that the word “feminism” appeared nowhere in Krasinski’s script except at the end, when Sara was explaining her project — but frankly that seemed to me to be the point of the story: that male-female relationships are based on a set of lies, both the ones told by men to get women to have sex with them and the ones told by women to avoid doing so (the idea that straight women might actively and aggressively seek out sex themselves is utterly foreign to the fictional world of this film) and that feminism has only muddied the already dirty waters of heterosexual dating and relationships.
It’s instructive to remember that what we now call “second-wave” feminism (i.e., the women’s movement that began in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s) began at least partly as a response to the so-called “sexual revolution,” which through much of the counter-culture of the 1960’s was experienced by women as simply another piece of social pressure wielded by men to get them to yield — feminism gave counter-culture women tools they could use to resist having sex with men similar to the ways non-counter-culture women historically used the negative status of so-called “fallen women” to make men who were interested in them cough up with marriage, family and lifetime financial support before letting them in the sacred temple of the mons veneris. I remember the cover of Dan Greenburg’s early-1960’s book Scoring, which treated a woman’s body like a pinball table, with various points scored for reaching certain parts and the highest score — of course — posted over the crotch; and both the beauty and the horror of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (a title that’s something of a cheat since the movie doesn’t recognize the existence of any other sort of man!) is the revelation that the attitudes behind that early-1960’s book cover are still prevalent.
Anyone who remembers sex, lies and videotape will be expecting a Big Revelation from the last interview sequence in this film, and it indeed happens — in a story that sounds uncannily like the real-life tale of the woman who soothed the escaped convict who broke into her house and held her hostage by reading him passages from Rick Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life (something that happened far later than David Foster Wallace wrote the source stories for this film!), one of Sara’s interviewees tells a tale of a woman friend who warded off a sexual psychopath by staying focused, and while she was ultimately raped by him she was able to turn off any trauma she might have had from the incident — and, unsurprisingly, soon enough both Sara and the audience realize this man is talking about something he did to a woman. Another welcome treat from this film is the sight of Christopher Meloni (still in the Armani suit, alas) as one of two men who’ve invented a scam for picking up women by hanging out at airports where flights are coming in and zeroing in on the woman whose husband, lover, boyfriend or whatever doesn’t show up to meet her, immediately taking advantage of her vulnerability at being abandoned. I couldn’t help but imagine that this character would ultimately turn into a sexual criminal, raping and killing a woman who didn’t yield to his slimy advances — and then Meloni, in his better-known characterization as Detective Elliot Stabler on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, would go after him and finally arrest him. (Meloni in a dual role as cop and crook: that’s one Dick Wolf and his writers haven’t thought of yet!)
Make Your Own Bed (Warners, 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Brief Interviews with Hideous Men I suspected Charles was in the mood for a comedy, and certainly I was, so I picked out a 1944 Warner Bros. romp called Make Your Own Bed (the actual title on the opening credit read, “MAKE YOUR OWN BED … and if you don’t!”) that was recently aired on TCM as part of a tribute to Jane Wyman that focused on her “galley years” at Warners. This turned out to be quite an infectious movie, directed by Peter Godfrey (one of those filmmakers I usually can’t stand) with real wit and style. The story began life as a play in 1919, written by Harvey J. O’Higgins and Harriet Ford and called On the Hiring Line. This version was adapted by Richard Weil and written by Francis Swann and Edmund Joseph, and starred Jack Carson as Jerry Curtis, wanna-be private detective who in his capacity as operative for an agency owned by Lester Knight (a nerdy Robert Shayne) was regularly assigned to guard the gift tables at weddings, and on one such occasion placed the district attorney under citizen’s arrest. He’s in love with the Knight agency’s secretary, Susan Courtney (Jane Wyman), and of course Knight is in love with her too, and Jerry dreams of breaking a big case that will enable him to form his own agency and marry Susan.
Meanwhile, Walter Whirtle (Alan Hale) is having trouble keeping servants at his country home, so he drives into the city — it’s his first time behind the wheel of a car in five years and he ends up parking in front of a fire hydrant and getting himself arrested and meeting Jerry Curtis in the same cell — and after a funny scene in which Walter goes to the “Service Employment Agency” and finds himself being asked for his references and financials (the gag throughout this movie being that during World War II there was such a shortage of people ready and willing to work as household staff it was a seller’s market in servants), he hears Jerry say that he generally posed as a butler to give him an excuse to be at those weddings guarding the gifts. Whirtle hits on the idea of hiring Jerry as a butler and Susan as a maid — he thinks Jerry and Susan are already married, not merely engaged — and pretending to them that they’re there to foil a dastardly Nazi plot against him (his main business is cosmetics but he also owns a gunpowder factory) and merely posing as servants, only he really wants them as servants and he manufactures the plot himself. Also in the character mix is Whirtle’s wife Vivian (Irene Manning), a former stage actress until she married him five years earlier; the Whirtles’ next-door neighbor Boris Fenilise (George Tobias), who’s attempting to engineer carrots into the basis for a revivifying drink that will allow pilots to stay up longer and is also romancing Mrs. Whirtle; and a set of real Nazi spies headed by Herr von Ritter (Kurt Katch) and featuring Fritz Alden (Ricardo Cortez), Marie Gruber (Tala Birell), and Elsa Wehmer (Marjorie Hoshelle).
They pass off their German accents by claiming that they’re radio actors who are going to do a show Whirtle’s cosmetics company will sponsor, and at this point I figured the writers were doing the gimmick that the radio show would go on the air and in it there would be secret code alerting German agents and saboteurs to the next big targets. Instead the baddies plan to blow up Whirtle’s gunpowder factory that very night — and eventually, of course, their plan is foiled, though Jerry embarrasses himself by arresting Alden, who’s really Wilson, a federal agent sent to infiltrate the Nazi spy ring. There are a lot of laughs along the way — it may be heresy, but this movie made me laugh harder than Tillie’s Punctured Romance did — and though there’s a lot of choice slapstick in it (it’s a souvenir of the time Jack Warner thought he was going to build up Jack Carson to be his studio’s Bob Hope), the really choice scene of the film is the one in which, realizing that the ducks he and Susan bought for the Whirtles’ dinner can’t be cooked unless their feathers are removed, Jerry whips out a shaving cup and literally shaves the feathers off them with a straight razor — to the accompaniment of an altered version of “Largo al factotum” from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. There’s also a delightful French-farce scene in which, thrown by the Whirtles’ insistence on giving them a room with only one bed — and Mrs. Whirtle’s seeming omnipresence in making sure the two people she thinks are married are literally sleeping together — Jerry spends the night in a bathhouse on the premises which he doesn’t realize is reserved for women. The next morning, the two lady spies use the bathhouse to dress — and he takes a shower in it and the three of them miss each other by seconds. It’s that kind of a movie!
After Brief Interviews with Hideous Men I suspected Charles was in the mood for a comedy, and certainly I was, so I picked out a 1944 Warner Bros. romp called Make Your Own Bed (the actual title on the opening credit read, “MAKE YOUR OWN BED … and if you don’t!”) that was recently aired on TCM as part of a tribute to Jane Wyman that focused on her “galley years” at Warners. This turned out to be quite an infectious movie, directed by Peter Godfrey (one of those filmmakers I usually can’t stand) with real wit and style. The story began life as a play in 1919, written by Harvey J. O’Higgins and Harriet Ford and called On the Hiring Line. This version was adapted by Richard Weil and written by Francis Swann and Edmund Joseph, and starred Jack Carson as Jerry Curtis, wanna-be private detective who in his capacity as operative for an agency owned by Lester Knight (a nerdy Robert Shayne) was regularly assigned to guard the gift tables at weddings, and on one such occasion placed the district attorney under citizen’s arrest. He’s in love with the Knight agency’s secretary, Susan Courtney (Jane Wyman), and of course Knight is in love with her too, and Jerry dreams of breaking a big case that will enable him to form his own agency and marry Susan.
Meanwhile, Walter Whirtle (Alan Hale) is having trouble keeping servants at his country home, so he drives into the city — it’s his first time behind the wheel of a car in five years and he ends up parking in front of a fire hydrant and getting himself arrested and meeting Jerry Curtis in the same cell — and after a funny scene in which Walter goes to the “Service Employment Agency” and finds himself being asked for his references and financials (the gag throughout this movie being that during World War II there was such a shortage of people ready and willing to work as household staff it was a seller’s market in servants), he hears Jerry say that he generally posed as a butler to give him an excuse to be at those weddings guarding the gifts. Whirtle hits on the idea of hiring Jerry as a butler and Susan as a maid — he thinks Jerry and Susan are already married, not merely engaged — and pretending to them that they’re there to foil a dastardly Nazi plot against him (his main business is cosmetics but he also owns a gunpowder factory) and merely posing as servants, only he really wants them as servants and he manufactures the plot himself. Also in the character mix is Whirtle’s wife Vivian (Irene Manning), a former stage actress until she married him five years earlier; the Whirtles’ next-door neighbor Boris Fenilise (George Tobias), who’s attempting to engineer carrots into the basis for a revivifying drink that will allow pilots to stay up longer and is also romancing Mrs. Whirtle; and a set of real Nazi spies headed by Herr von Ritter (Kurt Katch) and featuring Fritz Alden (Ricardo Cortez), Marie Gruber (Tala Birell), and Elsa Wehmer (Marjorie Hoshelle).
They pass off their German accents by claiming that they’re radio actors who are going to do a show Whirtle’s cosmetics company will sponsor, and at this point I figured the writers were doing the gimmick that the radio show would go on the air and in it there would be secret code alerting German agents and saboteurs to the next big targets. Instead the baddies plan to blow up Whirtle’s gunpowder factory that very night — and eventually, of course, their plan is foiled, though Jerry embarrasses himself by arresting Alden, who’s really Wilson, a federal agent sent to infiltrate the Nazi spy ring. There are a lot of laughs along the way — it may be heresy, but this movie made me laugh harder than Tillie’s Punctured Romance did — and though there’s a lot of choice slapstick in it (it’s a souvenir of the time Jack Warner thought he was going to build up Jack Carson to be his studio’s Bob Hope), the really choice scene of the film is the one in which, realizing that the ducks he and Susan bought for the Whirtles’ dinner can’t be cooked unless their feathers are removed, Jerry whips out a shaving cup and literally shaves the feathers off them with a straight razor — to the accompaniment of an altered version of “Largo al factotum” from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. There’s also a delightful French-farce scene in which, thrown by the Whirtles’ insistence on giving them a room with only one bed — and Mrs. Whirtle’s seeming omnipresence in making sure the two people she thinks are married are literally sleeping together — Jerry spends the night in a bathhouse on the premises which he doesn’t realize is reserved for women. The next morning, the two lady spies use the bathhouse to dress — and he takes a shower in it and the three of them miss each other by seconds. It’s that kind of a movie!
Monday, January 4, 2010
Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert (ORF, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided last night to run the 2010 “Neujahrskonzert” from Vienna which I’d downloaded from OperaShare — PBS had shown a version of this on Friday night but theirs, I knew from previous experience, would be laden down with narration (by Julie Andrews, whose only real connection with Austria was starring in the film The Sound of Music) and contain only portions of the concert, with a lot of jabber over them. Whoever uploaded this seemed to have got the direct feed from ORF 2, the Austrian TV channel which filmed it, since there was a blessed minimum of narration (in German) and between the two halves of the concert there was a 20-minute intermission feature called simply “Inside” (in English!) that had no narration at all: I suspect it was staged that way so stations in the various countries airing it could add commentary, as they chose, in their country’s native language.
The concert was conducted by Georges Prêtre, who in the early 1960’s was being touted as the Great Young Hope among Europe’s conductors and got to record with Maria Callas (her two albums of French opera arias and her 1964 “completes” of Carmen and Tosca) and others. Somehow he never got much traction from the critics but managed to have a decent career anyway — and here he was, ringing in 2010 with a bang at the traditional Vienna New Year’s Day concert. The concert is held in the Vienna Musikvereinsaal with enough flowers in the building to outfit 100 funerals, and tradition dictates (when Walter Cronkite hosted the annual PBS broadcasts of these concerts he described an institution almost literally drowning in traditional this and traditional that!) that most of the repertoire be from the Strauss family: founder Johann Strauss, Sr. (listed as “Johann Strauss Vater” on the credits and titles to distinguish him from his far more famous son) and his sons Johann, Jr. (who wrote most of the waltzes we think of as “Strauss”), Josef (who in some ways was a more advanced and interesting composer than his brother) and Eduard (generally considered the weakest of the three).
The only Josef work we got was the “Frauenherz” polka-mazurka (one of the most engaging pieces on the program, and surprisingly slow for a work supposedly based on dance rhythms) and the only Eduard piece was a quadrille based on themes from Offenbach’s opera Die schöne Helena, and while we actually got a piece from the Strauss father besides the “Radetzky March” that traditionally ends the concert (and to which the audience is always invited to clap along in time) — a charming gallop called “The Carnival in Paris,” interestingly the best pieces on the program were non-Strauss in origin: the overture to Otto Nicolai’s opera The Merry Wives of Windsor (Nicolai is part of the tradition because he founded the Vienna Philharmonic in 1842) and the overture to Offenbach’s opera Die Rheinnixen — apparently his comic-opera take on the Rhinemaidens the rest of us know best from Wagner’s Ring. The Rheinnixen overture sounded immediately familiar even though I’d never heard it before, because Offenbach recycled its beautiful first theme for the “Barcarolle” in The Tales of Hoffmann, and the piece was lovely and showed that light music can plumb greater depths than it did under the Strausses. (There was one other non-Strauss piece: the “Champagne Galop” by the Danish composer Hans Christian Lumbye.)
The picture quality was surprisingly good — I hadn’t expected this much from a data download that I hadn’t encoded to DVD format — and the camerawork was genuinely interesting; they tried to make it look like something other than a filmed concert, sometimes to great effect (especially the dance numbers, filmed as usual in other rooms of the hall than the one the orchestra is performing in — though I can’t help thinking the audience in the hall must feel short-changed — and the program, which was sponsored by Rolex, made a great to-do about the fact that the dancers’ costumes were designed by Valentino), sometimes rather dubiously — I’m still trying to make up my mind how I felt about them transforming the traditionally penultimate number, “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” into a literal travelogue of the real Danube, tracing it from Switzerland through Germany, Austria, Hungary and finally to its delta in Romania. I have an interesting relationship with the “Blue Danube” because I remember hearing it through my childhood mostly in pop arrangements on 78 rpm recordings by dance bands — and when I got a two-sided Victor 78 of it played by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra I was literally blown away by hearing it played in Strauss’s original orchestration by a fabulous orchestra and a brilliant conductor.
Then I heard it as part of the soundtrack for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey in a version by an equally illustrious orchestra and conductor — the Berlin Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan — and the music in Karajan’s hands (as in Stokowski’s) took on an epic sweep that made it worthy accompaniment for a beautifully staged sequence of a spaceship docking on a space station. Prêtre’s performance was hardly in the same league as Stokowski’s or Karajan’s, but it still managed to make a case for this piece as a beautiful composition and not just an infectious pop waltz — even in this peculiar context in which tradition (again!) dictates that the audience interrupt the opening violin trill with applause, giving the conductor an excuse to stop so he and the entire orchestra can bark out the greeting, “Prosit Neujahr!’ (that’s “Happy New Year” in German, in case you couldn’t guess), following which they “take it from the top” and play the piece start-to-finish. It was fun watching this concert — especially in complete form (rather than squished into an hour-and-a-half time slot the way PBS does) and without all the interstital jabber — though the completeness had its “down” side as well: it’s the sort of experience for which the phrase “too much of a good thing” was invented.
The succession of over two hours’ worth of light-music compositions, all (except for the Nicolai and Offenbach overtures) sounding pretty much like each other, gets a bit wearying after a while and one aches to hear something a little darker and moodier, just for the sake of contrast — reason enough that American orchestras are eschewing the Strauss-waltz tradition for their New Year’s concerts: last year the New York Philharmonic gave an all-French program that ended with Ravel’s Boléro, and this year they did an all-American program featuring Copland, Gershwin and Cole Porter — though they’d have been better advised to recruit a Broadway singer like Brian Stokes Mitchell for the Porter songs than Thomas Hampson, an opera and lieder star who wasn’t exactly at home in Porter’s idiom and who, like a lot of opera singers who go “slumming” in American pop songs, had virtually no clue how to sing the syncopated rhythms basic to this material. So I guess there’s something to be said for symphony orchestras on New Year’s sticking to light music in the vein they know well.
I decided last night to run the 2010 “Neujahrskonzert” from Vienna which I’d downloaded from OperaShare — PBS had shown a version of this on Friday night but theirs, I knew from previous experience, would be laden down with narration (by Julie Andrews, whose only real connection with Austria was starring in the film The Sound of Music) and contain only portions of the concert, with a lot of jabber over them. Whoever uploaded this seemed to have got the direct feed from ORF 2, the Austrian TV channel which filmed it, since there was a blessed minimum of narration (in German) and between the two halves of the concert there was a 20-minute intermission feature called simply “Inside” (in English!) that had no narration at all: I suspect it was staged that way so stations in the various countries airing it could add commentary, as they chose, in their country’s native language.
The concert was conducted by Georges Prêtre, who in the early 1960’s was being touted as the Great Young Hope among Europe’s conductors and got to record with Maria Callas (her two albums of French opera arias and her 1964 “completes” of Carmen and Tosca) and others. Somehow he never got much traction from the critics but managed to have a decent career anyway — and here he was, ringing in 2010 with a bang at the traditional Vienna New Year’s Day concert. The concert is held in the Vienna Musikvereinsaal with enough flowers in the building to outfit 100 funerals, and tradition dictates (when Walter Cronkite hosted the annual PBS broadcasts of these concerts he described an institution almost literally drowning in traditional this and traditional that!) that most of the repertoire be from the Strauss family: founder Johann Strauss, Sr. (listed as “Johann Strauss Vater” on the credits and titles to distinguish him from his far more famous son) and his sons Johann, Jr. (who wrote most of the waltzes we think of as “Strauss”), Josef (who in some ways was a more advanced and interesting composer than his brother) and Eduard (generally considered the weakest of the three).
The only Josef work we got was the “Frauenherz” polka-mazurka (one of the most engaging pieces on the program, and surprisingly slow for a work supposedly based on dance rhythms) and the only Eduard piece was a quadrille based on themes from Offenbach’s opera Die schöne Helena, and while we actually got a piece from the Strauss father besides the “Radetzky March” that traditionally ends the concert (and to which the audience is always invited to clap along in time) — a charming gallop called “The Carnival in Paris,” interestingly the best pieces on the program were non-Strauss in origin: the overture to Otto Nicolai’s opera The Merry Wives of Windsor (Nicolai is part of the tradition because he founded the Vienna Philharmonic in 1842) and the overture to Offenbach’s opera Die Rheinnixen — apparently his comic-opera take on the Rhinemaidens the rest of us know best from Wagner’s Ring. The Rheinnixen overture sounded immediately familiar even though I’d never heard it before, because Offenbach recycled its beautiful first theme for the “Barcarolle” in The Tales of Hoffmann, and the piece was lovely and showed that light music can plumb greater depths than it did under the Strausses. (There was one other non-Strauss piece: the “Champagne Galop” by the Danish composer Hans Christian Lumbye.)
The picture quality was surprisingly good — I hadn’t expected this much from a data download that I hadn’t encoded to DVD format — and the camerawork was genuinely interesting; they tried to make it look like something other than a filmed concert, sometimes to great effect (especially the dance numbers, filmed as usual in other rooms of the hall than the one the orchestra is performing in — though I can’t help thinking the audience in the hall must feel short-changed — and the program, which was sponsored by Rolex, made a great to-do about the fact that the dancers’ costumes were designed by Valentino), sometimes rather dubiously — I’m still trying to make up my mind how I felt about them transforming the traditionally penultimate number, “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” into a literal travelogue of the real Danube, tracing it from Switzerland through Germany, Austria, Hungary and finally to its delta in Romania. I have an interesting relationship with the “Blue Danube” because I remember hearing it through my childhood mostly in pop arrangements on 78 rpm recordings by dance bands — and when I got a two-sided Victor 78 of it played by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra I was literally blown away by hearing it played in Strauss’s original orchestration by a fabulous orchestra and a brilliant conductor.
Then I heard it as part of the soundtrack for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey in a version by an equally illustrious orchestra and conductor — the Berlin Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan — and the music in Karajan’s hands (as in Stokowski’s) took on an epic sweep that made it worthy accompaniment for a beautifully staged sequence of a spaceship docking on a space station. Prêtre’s performance was hardly in the same league as Stokowski’s or Karajan’s, but it still managed to make a case for this piece as a beautiful composition and not just an infectious pop waltz — even in this peculiar context in which tradition (again!) dictates that the audience interrupt the opening violin trill with applause, giving the conductor an excuse to stop so he and the entire orchestra can bark out the greeting, “Prosit Neujahr!’ (that’s “Happy New Year” in German, in case you couldn’t guess), following which they “take it from the top” and play the piece start-to-finish. It was fun watching this concert — especially in complete form (rather than squished into an hour-and-a-half time slot the way PBS does) and without all the interstital jabber — though the completeness had its “down” side as well: it’s the sort of experience for which the phrase “too much of a good thing” was invented.
The succession of over two hours’ worth of light-music compositions, all (except for the Nicolai and Offenbach overtures) sounding pretty much like each other, gets a bit wearying after a while and one aches to hear something a little darker and moodier, just for the sake of contrast — reason enough that American orchestras are eschewing the Strauss-waltz tradition for their New Year’s concerts: last year the New York Philharmonic gave an all-French program that ended with Ravel’s Boléro, and this year they did an all-American program featuring Copland, Gershwin and Cole Porter — though they’d have been better advised to recruit a Broadway singer like Brian Stokes Mitchell for the Porter songs than Thomas Hampson, an opera and lieder star who wasn’t exactly at home in Porter’s idiom and who, like a lot of opera singers who go “slumming” in American pop songs, had virtually no clue how to sing the syncopated rhythms basic to this material. So I guess there’s something to be said for symphony orchestras on New Year’s sticking to light music in the vein they know well.
Boys Beware (Sid Davis Productions, 1961)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards we watched another movie I’d burned to the same disc after downloading it from archive.org: Boys Beware, one of a series of “instructional” films by Sid Davis Productions, made in 1961 and dealing with sleazy Gay pedophiles who hang out at schoolyards and public parks seeking to pick up teenage boys — it seems especially teenage boys with an interest in sports (which made it interesting viewing after reading Rounding Third, a recent Queer book about a budding Gay romance between two boys on a high-school baseball team), since one of the victims, Jimmy Barnes, is a high-school baseball player and another makes contact with his future molester while shooting hoops at a local playground featuring a basketball standard. The interest in these films today is not only in their reflection of community norms current at the time they were made — the narrator, Lt. Williams of the Inglewood Police Department (which endorsed and participated in the film), comes flat out and says that all homosexuals are “mentally ill” — but also in their function as a kind of moral index to people watching them now.
When I looked it up on imdb.com the commentary that came up was by a New Zealander who signed under the screen name “mars_investigations” and posted a paper he (or she?) wrote on the film for a sexuality class, using heavy-duty phrases like “heteronormativity.” Through all the thickets of post-modern prose, this author did make a valid point in that the film totally equated homosexuality with pedophilia (as have a number of supposedly Queer-accepting cultures through history — including the ancient Greeks, who seem to have regarded male-on-male sex as acceptable only in the context of an older man mentoring a younger one) and therefore would have left any genuinely Gay boys in the audience squirming with horror over what the film was saying about them. At the same time, there was a comment on the film on the archive.org site that showed how much the attitudes expressed in it are still current: “I find is VERY amusing and ironic that this film has caused a lot of Queer men to come out of the woodwork and comment on it. The fact that Queer men would come onto this page and make fun of and mock Child Molestation and Rape speaks volumes about what kind of people are after your kids. Why would a 50-year-old movie about molesting kids attract so many Gays? Think about it.”
The idea behind the film — that Gays are mentally diseased sexual predators and that people turn Gay because older Gays molest them and thereby introduce them to the cult — was re-presented seriously by Anita Bryant in her “Save the Children” campaigns of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when she so famously said, “Homosexuals cannot reproduce. Therefore, they must recruit.” What one commentator on Bryant back then called “the vampire theory of homosexuality” is very much alive and well in the so-called “ex-Gay ministries” — though in some respects this film is an anomaly because the conventional psychological wisdom of 1961 was that Gay men were young people who were too close to their mothers, didn’t properly bond with their fathers and rejected “butch” pursuits like sports in favor of … well, drag, dressing up, reading a lot, listening to Broadway show tunes or opera, or whatever the lame stereotypes were — yet the predatory Gay men in this film (one of whom is played by the seediest-looking actor Sid Davis could dredge up and the other, the guy who hangs out at the park restroom, was played by Sid Davis himself) target the boys playing sports, which was supposed to be the sort of suitably butch, manly pursuit that insulated you from recruitment and initiation into the Gay vampire cult.
The film also begs the question, where were the parents? Jimmy Barnes, the closest this movie has to a hero, gets picked up while hitchhiking by sleazeball Ralph and develops a friendship with him that ultimately includes just-the-two-of-them weekend fishing trips and there’s no mention of Mr. and Mrs. Barnes’ reaction to all this (I can’t help thinking that a real pedophile would have gone out of his way to ingratiate himself with Jimmy’s parents and win their trust so they’d see him as a responsible adult with whom they could safely entrust their son) until Ralph finally lures Jimmy to a motel room, does heaven knows what with him (certainly Sid Davis wasn’t about to give anybody any ideas about how two men could have sex!), and then Mr. and Mrs. Barnes finally materialize: they’re shown accompanying Jimmy out of juvenile hall, where he’s been given probation in exchange for turning in Ralph (reinforcing, as a lot of more recent real-life cases have done, what a lousy instrument the criminal justice system is for dealing with problems like this — it’s long been my theory that in its understandable zeal to punish people who abuse children sexually, the criminal justice system wreaks more trauma on the poor kids who were victimized and the better choice might sometimes be not to punish the perpetrator if that conflicts with letting the child heal), leaving us to wonder just how and why they took so little interest in their child’s welfare that they let them get that close to a predatory pedophile and didn’t even warn him: “Say, just what interest does this guy have in you, anyway?”
The New Zealander who wrote the comment on imdb.com did make the point that it would be possible to make a film warning teenagers about the danger of being seduced or raped by pedophiles (Gay or straight) without embracing the homophobic assumptions of this one — though even today the Gay = pedophile equation is made by all sorts of people, including the current Pope, whose response to the scandals about sexually abusive priests was to order the seminaries closed to Gays. Boys Beware may seem insufferably quaint, but the moral attitudes behind it are all too alive and well! Interestingly, apropos of nothing, it may just be coincidence but I couldn’t help but notice that the good guys (including Lt. Williams) all drive Chevrolets and the bad guys all drive Fords.
Afterwards we watched another movie I’d burned to the same disc after downloading it from archive.org: Boys Beware, one of a series of “instructional” films by Sid Davis Productions, made in 1961 and dealing with sleazy Gay pedophiles who hang out at schoolyards and public parks seeking to pick up teenage boys — it seems especially teenage boys with an interest in sports (which made it interesting viewing after reading Rounding Third, a recent Queer book about a budding Gay romance between two boys on a high-school baseball team), since one of the victims, Jimmy Barnes, is a high-school baseball player and another makes contact with his future molester while shooting hoops at a local playground featuring a basketball standard. The interest in these films today is not only in their reflection of community norms current at the time they were made — the narrator, Lt. Williams of the Inglewood Police Department (which endorsed and participated in the film), comes flat out and says that all homosexuals are “mentally ill” — but also in their function as a kind of moral index to people watching them now.
When I looked it up on imdb.com the commentary that came up was by a New Zealander who signed under the screen name “mars_investigations” and posted a paper he (or she?) wrote on the film for a sexuality class, using heavy-duty phrases like “heteronormativity.” Through all the thickets of post-modern prose, this author did make a valid point in that the film totally equated homosexuality with pedophilia (as have a number of supposedly Queer-accepting cultures through history — including the ancient Greeks, who seem to have regarded male-on-male sex as acceptable only in the context of an older man mentoring a younger one) and therefore would have left any genuinely Gay boys in the audience squirming with horror over what the film was saying about them. At the same time, there was a comment on the film on the archive.org site that showed how much the attitudes expressed in it are still current: “I find is VERY amusing and ironic that this film has caused a lot of Queer men to come out of the woodwork and comment on it. The fact that Queer men would come onto this page and make fun of and mock Child Molestation and Rape speaks volumes about what kind of people are after your kids. Why would a 50-year-old movie about molesting kids attract so many Gays? Think about it.”
The idea behind the film — that Gays are mentally diseased sexual predators and that people turn Gay because older Gays molest them and thereby introduce them to the cult — was re-presented seriously by Anita Bryant in her “Save the Children” campaigns of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when she so famously said, “Homosexuals cannot reproduce. Therefore, they must recruit.” What one commentator on Bryant back then called “the vampire theory of homosexuality” is very much alive and well in the so-called “ex-Gay ministries” — though in some respects this film is an anomaly because the conventional psychological wisdom of 1961 was that Gay men were young people who were too close to their mothers, didn’t properly bond with their fathers and rejected “butch” pursuits like sports in favor of … well, drag, dressing up, reading a lot, listening to Broadway show tunes or opera, or whatever the lame stereotypes were — yet the predatory Gay men in this film (one of whom is played by the seediest-looking actor Sid Davis could dredge up and the other, the guy who hangs out at the park restroom, was played by Sid Davis himself) target the boys playing sports, which was supposed to be the sort of suitably butch, manly pursuit that insulated you from recruitment and initiation into the Gay vampire cult.
The film also begs the question, where were the parents? Jimmy Barnes, the closest this movie has to a hero, gets picked up while hitchhiking by sleazeball Ralph and develops a friendship with him that ultimately includes just-the-two-of-them weekend fishing trips and there’s no mention of Mr. and Mrs. Barnes’ reaction to all this (I can’t help thinking that a real pedophile would have gone out of his way to ingratiate himself with Jimmy’s parents and win their trust so they’d see him as a responsible adult with whom they could safely entrust their son) until Ralph finally lures Jimmy to a motel room, does heaven knows what with him (certainly Sid Davis wasn’t about to give anybody any ideas about how two men could have sex!), and then Mr. and Mrs. Barnes finally materialize: they’re shown accompanying Jimmy out of juvenile hall, where he’s been given probation in exchange for turning in Ralph (reinforcing, as a lot of more recent real-life cases have done, what a lousy instrument the criminal justice system is for dealing with problems like this — it’s long been my theory that in its understandable zeal to punish people who abuse children sexually, the criminal justice system wreaks more trauma on the poor kids who were victimized and the better choice might sometimes be not to punish the perpetrator if that conflicts with letting the child heal), leaving us to wonder just how and why they took so little interest in their child’s welfare that they let them get that close to a predatory pedophile and didn’t even warn him: “Say, just what interest does this guy have in you, anyway?”
The New Zealander who wrote the comment on imdb.com did make the point that it would be possible to make a film warning teenagers about the danger of being seduced or raped by pedophiles (Gay or straight) without embracing the homophobic assumptions of this one — though even today the Gay = pedophile equation is made by all sorts of people, including the current Pope, whose response to the scandals about sexually abusive priests was to order the seminaries closed to Gays. Boys Beware may seem insufferably quaint, but the moral attitudes behind it are all too alive and well! Interestingly, apropos of nothing, it may just be coincidence but I couldn’t help but notice that the good guys (including Lt. Williams) all drive Chevrolets and the bad guys all drive Fords.
Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked was Tillie’s Punctured Romance, a 1914 production of the Mack Sennett Studio that was Sennett’s first full-length feature. He bought the rights to a 1910 musical called Tillie’s Nightmare — which, according to imdb.com, only ran 77 performances, though that was long enough to give its star, Marie Dressler, one of the biggest hits of the “teens,” a song called “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.” Sennett also hired Dressler to repeat her role as Tillie — even though it was a silent film and therefore audiences wouldn’t get to hear her sing her big hit — and threw just about everyone else under contract to him into the film, including casting Charlie Chaplin as the principal villain (!) and Mabel Normand as “the other woman.”
The plot is pretty simple — Tillie is a big-hearted farm girl who’s seduced by city slicker Chaplin into stealing her father’s (Mack Swain) cash stash and eloping with him to the big city — actually specified as New York — where Chaplin hooks up with girlfriend Normand and the two plot to steal Tillie’s money and leave her alone and broke. (Interestingly, Chaplin reprised this plot seriously in his 1923 film A Woman of Paris, with Edna Purviance as the farm girl and Adolphe Menjou as the villain.) Various versions of this film exist, ranging in length from 55 to 83 minutes — like a lot of other silent features, especially ones that featured people who later became big stars, it got cut, chopped and channeled in various directions and, after sound came in, was outfitted with musical accompaniment ranging from the silly to the generally appropriate. The version we were watching was about 70 minutes and had recently been shown on TCM, whose host, Robert Osborne, said that Chaplin hadn’t liked making the film. Osborne seemed to think that was because Sennett himself directed — Chaplin had already starting directing his short films himself (and the five-film compilation Chaplin at Keystone, including three films he didn’t direct and two he did, highlights just how much better his comedies got once he was director as well as star) and didn’t want to go back to working for another director (and indeed he never made another film he didn’t direct, unless you count his cameo as himself in King Vidor’s Show People, which he did as a favor to the film’s star, Chaplin’s good friend Marion Davies), but I suspect it was also because Chaplin was all too aware of how totally he was miscast as a villain.
Though Chaplin would essentially revive his character here in Monsieur Verdoux 33 years later, he’s simply unbelievable as a black-hearted creep who plans to seduce a farm girl, steal her dad’s fortune and run off with someone else. I remember the first time I saw Tillie’s Punctured Romance — in the early 1970’s, in a hole-in-the-wall revival house (the sort of place you went to see classic films that were too obscure to play on television in the days before cable, videotapes and DVD’s) — and it was one of the few times I’ve sensed a visceral hostility to a movie from an audience, which I think was because they didn’t believe Chaplin, with all his sympathetic and endearing “tramp” gestures, as the bad guy. What’s more, Tillie’s Punctured Romance simply isn’t a very good movie; about all that happens is a series of scenes in which the three principals travel around L.A. (“playing” New York and giving the film a welcome degree of authenticity from the fact that the city streets are the real thing, not a studio backlot) barely missing each other.
There’s an interesting interlude in which Chaplin and Normand take in a movie — this may be the first film in history that has a film-within-the-film, and the gag is that the internal movie, A Thief’s Fate, mimics what Chaplin and Normand are actually doing. (It’s also amazing when you realize how difficult it was to do a film-within-a-film before the invention of process screens and optical effects: either the film-within-the-film had to be acted on the same stage, and in real time, as the main action, the way Buster Keaton did it a decade later in Sherlock, Jr. — or, as I think was done here, a section of the screen had to be matted off in the camera so the scenes involving the film-within-the-film could be shot on the same strip of film, rewound inside the camera, on the part of the screen that had originally been masked out.)
It’s a good film and it’s funny, but it remains only moderately amusing and doesn’t really build up the kind of till-it-hurts laughter Sennett regularly achieved in his shorts … until the plot takes a turn by which Tillie inherits a fortune from her millionaire uncle (only temporarily; in this version it turns out the uncle isn’t dead after all, though there’s another cut — the one described by Theodore Huff in his biography of Chaplin — in which the uncle is dead but the will leaving Tillie his fortune is invalidated legally and his money goes to the state). She throws a party in her uncle’s home and, while there, catches Chaplin — her supposed husband — and Normand necking. Does she merely register jealousy and leave it at that? Oh, no-o-o-o-o: she has a total nervous breakdown that leads her to get out a gun and start shooting it not only at her man who done her wrong, and the girl he done her wrong with, but everybody at her party — and her guests seem to hang out a lot longer and flee a lot less suddenly than one would expect from people at a party whose host has suddenly gone berserk and is shooting at them. Dressler flees and the Keystone Kops (well, they had to be in there somewhere) go after her and the other two principals, and it ends with her nearly drowning off the pier, the harbor patrol (who are at least marginally more competent than the land-based police) rescue her, and Chaplin and Normand are arrested. The End.
Tillie’s Punctured Romance was a huge hit — enough so that Dressler reprised the role of Tillie in a series of sequels for another studio, World; and Paramount recycled the title for a 1928 comedy (still a silent) with Louise Fazenda and W. C. Fields that had nothing to do with this one plot-wise — and it elevated Chaplin from minor star to superstar and allowed him to write his own ticket from then on, and to give up villainous roles in favor of the sympathetic “tramp” character he would develop the next year at Essanay studio. But it’s one film from the classic era that, despite the star talent and the brilliantly comic ending, does date rather badly.
The film I picked was Tillie’s Punctured Romance, a 1914 production of the Mack Sennett Studio that was Sennett’s first full-length feature. He bought the rights to a 1910 musical called Tillie’s Nightmare — which, according to imdb.com, only ran 77 performances, though that was long enough to give its star, Marie Dressler, one of the biggest hits of the “teens,” a song called “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.” Sennett also hired Dressler to repeat her role as Tillie — even though it was a silent film and therefore audiences wouldn’t get to hear her sing her big hit — and threw just about everyone else under contract to him into the film, including casting Charlie Chaplin as the principal villain (!) and Mabel Normand as “the other woman.”
The plot is pretty simple — Tillie is a big-hearted farm girl who’s seduced by city slicker Chaplin into stealing her father’s (Mack Swain) cash stash and eloping with him to the big city — actually specified as New York — where Chaplin hooks up with girlfriend Normand and the two plot to steal Tillie’s money and leave her alone and broke. (Interestingly, Chaplin reprised this plot seriously in his 1923 film A Woman of Paris, with Edna Purviance as the farm girl and Adolphe Menjou as the villain.) Various versions of this film exist, ranging in length from 55 to 83 minutes — like a lot of other silent features, especially ones that featured people who later became big stars, it got cut, chopped and channeled in various directions and, after sound came in, was outfitted with musical accompaniment ranging from the silly to the generally appropriate. The version we were watching was about 70 minutes and had recently been shown on TCM, whose host, Robert Osborne, said that Chaplin hadn’t liked making the film. Osborne seemed to think that was because Sennett himself directed — Chaplin had already starting directing his short films himself (and the five-film compilation Chaplin at Keystone, including three films he didn’t direct and two he did, highlights just how much better his comedies got once he was director as well as star) and didn’t want to go back to working for another director (and indeed he never made another film he didn’t direct, unless you count his cameo as himself in King Vidor’s Show People, which he did as a favor to the film’s star, Chaplin’s good friend Marion Davies), but I suspect it was also because Chaplin was all too aware of how totally he was miscast as a villain.
Though Chaplin would essentially revive his character here in Monsieur Verdoux 33 years later, he’s simply unbelievable as a black-hearted creep who plans to seduce a farm girl, steal her dad’s fortune and run off with someone else. I remember the first time I saw Tillie’s Punctured Romance — in the early 1970’s, in a hole-in-the-wall revival house (the sort of place you went to see classic films that were too obscure to play on television in the days before cable, videotapes and DVD’s) — and it was one of the few times I’ve sensed a visceral hostility to a movie from an audience, which I think was because they didn’t believe Chaplin, with all his sympathetic and endearing “tramp” gestures, as the bad guy. What’s more, Tillie’s Punctured Romance simply isn’t a very good movie; about all that happens is a series of scenes in which the three principals travel around L.A. (“playing” New York and giving the film a welcome degree of authenticity from the fact that the city streets are the real thing, not a studio backlot) barely missing each other.
There’s an interesting interlude in which Chaplin and Normand take in a movie — this may be the first film in history that has a film-within-the-film, and the gag is that the internal movie, A Thief’s Fate, mimics what Chaplin and Normand are actually doing. (It’s also amazing when you realize how difficult it was to do a film-within-a-film before the invention of process screens and optical effects: either the film-within-the-film had to be acted on the same stage, and in real time, as the main action, the way Buster Keaton did it a decade later in Sherlock, Jr. — or, as I think was done here, a section of the screen had to be matted off in the camera so the scenes involving the film-within-the-film could be shot on the same strip of film, rewound inside the camera, on the part of the screen that had originally been masked out.)
It’s a good film and it’s funny, but it remains only moderately amusing and doesn’t really build up the kind of till-it-hurts laughter Sennett regularly achieved in his shorts … until the plot takes a turn by which Tillie inherits a fortune from her millionaire uncle (only temporarily; in this version it turns out the uncle isn’t dead after all, though there’s another cut — the one described by Theodore Huff in his biography of Chaplin — in which the uncle is dead but the will leaving Tillie his fortune is invalidated legally and his money goes to the state). She throws a party in her uncle’s home and, while there, catches Chaplin — her supposed husband — and Normand necking. Does she merely register jealousy and leave it at that? Oh, no-o-o-o-o: she has a total nervous breakdown that leads her to get out a gun and start shooting it not only at her man who done her wrong, and the girl he done her wrong with, but everybody at her party — and her guests seem to hang out a lot longer and flee a lot less suddenly than one would expect from people at a party whose host has suddenly gone berserk and is shooting at them. Dressler flees and the Keystone Kops (well, they had to be in there somewhere) go after her and the other two principals, and it ends with her nearly drowning off the pier, the harbor patrol (who are at least marginally more competent than the land-based police) rescue her, and Chaplin and Normand are arrested. The End.
Tillie’s Punctured Romance was a huge hit — enough so that Dressler reprised the role of Tillie in a series of sequels for another studio, World; and Paramount recycled the title for a 1928 comedy (still a silent) with Louise Fazenda and W. C. Fields that had nothing to do with this one plot-wise — and it elevated Chaplin from minor star to superstar and allowed him to write his own ticket from then on, and to give up villainous roles in favor of the sympathetic “tramp” character he would develop the next year at Essanay studio. But it’s one film from the classic era that, despite the star talent and the brilliantly comic ending, does date rather badly.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Christmas on Mars (Warners, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” we watched was one I’d wanted to get in before the holiday season ended: Christmas on Mars, a project of the rock band the Flaming Lips (Wayne Coyne, Bradley Beesley and George Salisbury — all three are credited as co-directors, with Coyne as writer, Beesley as cinematographer and Salisbury as editor) and a movie they apparently worked on for years before they finally finished it. It’s an intriguing film and one well worth watching, even though at the beginning it seems like it’s going to be a typical rock band’s vanity movie, all abstract images on the screen and loud, overbearing music on the soundtrack. As it winds on, however, a dramatic design begins to emerge and we realize the film is literally about Christmas on Mars: a group of human colonists in an otherwise abandoned base on the Red Planet face the loss of their oxygen supply, while the only woman at the station (played by the real-life Mrs. Wayne Coyne) has just given birth to a baby (the screen-filling closeups of the newborn briefly suggest the Flaming Lips were attempting their own unauthorized sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey) and the parallels to the Nativity are stressed by the sign above the main set of the station that reads “BETHLEHEM 2055” (presumably the number represents the year this film takes place).
Though maddeningly unclear in the sort of way modern filmmakers adopt when they want to convince us they’re creating something really “deep” instead of merely being sloppy about the details of their story, Christmas on Mars turns unexpectedly moving, especially when the storylines of the earthling characters connect with that of the “Alien Super-Being” played by Wayne Coyne (one imdb.com poster referred to him as a Martian, but he’s clearly not because he arrives on Mars in a spaceship of his own, a glowing orb that, once he parks it, shrinks to the size where he can stow it in his mouth — figure out how to do that on earth now and you’ll have solved the parking problem!), who one of the characters protests was a really lame Santa Claus (he dresses in a Santa-like costume but without a clear idea of the meaning of that get-up to the earthlings) and the other says he was the greatest Santa ever — which he was, because he secretly repaired the device that filtered out the Martian air and generated oxygen for the humans to breathe, something the humans themselves hadn’t been able to do because they were out of a key, no-longer-manufactured radioactive metal alloy crucial to the gadget’s functioning.
Christmas on Mars is also surprising in that it is not an over-long Flaming Lips music video either — they did do the underscoring, but it’s all instrumental mood pieces, a film score that works quite well in the film but isn’t something you’d want to listen to outside of this context. (According to imdb.com, when one of the scenes from this movie was deleted the Lips took the backing they’d written for it and made it a song on their next CD.) Christmas on Mars isn’t the sort of movie I’d want to watch every day, but on its own terms it’s quite good and considerably more moving than many of the abstract pseudo-tales usually told when a rock band whose members have more money than taste get some camera equipment together and decide it would really be fun to make a movie.
The “feature” we watched was one I’d wanted to get in before the holiday season ended: Christmas on Mars, a project of the rock band the Flaming Lips (Wayne Coyne, Bradley Beesley and George Salisbury — all three are credited as co-directors, with Coyne as writer, Beesley as cinematographer and Salisbury as editor) and a movie they apparently worked on for years before they finally finished it. It’s an intriguing film and one well worth watching, even though at the beginning it seems like it’s going to be a typical rock band’s vanity movie, all abstract images on the screen and loud, overbearing music on the soundtrack. As it winds on, however, a dramatic design begins to emerge and we realize the film is literally about Christmas on Mars: a group of human colonists in an otherwise abandoned base on the Red Planet face the loss of their oxygen supply, while the only woman at the station (played by the real-life Mrs. Wayne Coyne) has just given birth to a baby (the screen-filling closeups of the newborn briefly suggest the Flaming Lips were attempting their own unauthorized sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey) and the parallels to the Nativity are stressed by the sign above the main set of the station that reads “BETHLEHEM 2055” (presumably the number represents the year this film takes place).
Though maddeningly unclear in the sort of way modern filmmakers adopt when they want to convince us they’re creating something really “deep” instead of merely being sloppy about the details of their story, Christmas on Mars turns unexpectedly moving, especially when the storylines of the earthling characters connect with that of the “Alien Super-Being” played by Wayne Coyne (one imdb.com poster referred to him as a Martian, but he’s clearly not because he arrives on Mars in a spaceship of his own, a glowing orb that, once he parks it, shrinks to the size where he can stow it in his mouth — figure out how to do that on earth now and you’ll have solved the parking problem!), who one of the characters protests was a really lame Santa Claus (he dresses in a Santa-like costume but without a clear idea of the meaning of that get-up to the earthlings) and the other says he was the greatest Santa ever — which he was, because he secretly repaired the device that filtered out the Martian air and generated oxygen for the humans to breathe, something the humans themselves hadn’t been able to do because they were out of a key, no-longer-manufactured radioactive metal alloy crucial to the gadget’s functioning.
Christmas on Mars is also surprising in that it is not an over-long Flaming Lips music video either — they did do the underscoring, but it’s all instrumental mood pieces, a film score that works quite well in the film but isn’t something you’d want to listen to outside of this context. (According to imdb.com, when one of the scenes from this movie was deleted the Lips took the backing they’d written for it and made it a song on their next CD.) Christmas on Mars isn’t the sort of movie I’d want to watch every day, but on its own terms it’s quite good and considerably more moving than many of the abstract pseudo-tales usually told when a rock band whose members have more money than taste get some camera equipment together and decide it would really be fun to make a movie.
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