by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I wanted to see was The Social Network, which was released last Thursday and is the more-or-less true story of the founding of Facebook. Charles was surprised that I wanted to see this because neither of us has a Facebook account — though he is logged in on Facebook’s older but now far less “cool” competitor, MySpace (it seems like the only people still using MySpace are aspiring musicians wanting a place to promote their bands) — but I explained that I had read the book on which it was based, Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, and had enjoyed the book so much I was looking forward to seeing the movie. The book basically treated Facebook as the project of a bunch of nerdy students at Harvard who found themselves unable to compete for girlfriends (or fuck buddies) with their fellow students who were either better looking, richer or both, and two nerdy students in particular, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, who’s taking over the role of Spider-Man from Tobey Maguire in the next series entry).
The film opens with Zuckerberg at a restaurant with his latest girlfriend, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), who’s so disgusted with his self-absorption and anti-social ways she’s about to become his latest ex-girlfriend. Out of revenge, Zuckerberg goes home to his room at Kirtland Hall in Harvard and starts punching away at his computer, writing a series of ever more insulting blog entries about her. When Saverin and their other two roommates get hold of the idea, it snowballs into a bizarre stunt that reveals their testosterone-fueled simultaneous hatred and lust for women. They decide to hack into Harvard’s computers and get hold of all the female students in the so-called “facebooks” — the film doesn’t explain how the term originated but Mezrich’s book does. It seems that for years each Harvard dormitory put out a “facebook,” a directory of every student living there every term, complete with photos for those who wanted to contribute them — and at the time the film begins, the fall of 2003 (it’s startling indeed to get that time cue and realize that Facebook has grown from nothing to a major part of the online world in just seven years!), the dorms have just decided to computerize this information and make the facebooks available online.
Spitting out a lot of computer jargon — Aaron Sorkin’s script is full of barely comprehensible computerese spoken by characters who sometimes seem more adept at communicating in it than they do in normal English — that supposedly explains what he’s doing, Zuckerberg successfully grabs all the female faces from the facebook profiles and, after briefly considering putting up a Web site comparing them to farm animals, decides instead to load them two by two and give visitors to his site, called Facemash, the option of clicking on the photo they consider the hotter of the two. Within hours the site has gone viral among virtually every male member of the Harvard student body (and it seems among every male member’s member as well) and generated so much traffic it’s crashed Harvard’s entire computer system. The stunt earns Zuckerberg six months of academic probation but also makes him a notorious figure across campus and gives him the “cool” cachet he’s been seeking all along — and the entry into women’s pants he was seeking too (though the film features surprisingly little actual sex or indications thereof, given Mezrich’s theme — a bit soft-pedaled in Sorkin’s script but still very much there in the film — that Zuckerberg and his colleagues may have willed Facebook into existence from their brains but their brains were being governed by their dicks).
Among the people attracted to Zuckerberg’s combination of computer expertise and insolence are the Winkelvoss brothers, Cameron (Armie Hammer) and Tyler (Josh Pence), who are upper-class aristocrats, row on the Harvard crew (and are training for the Olympics) and have had the idea for a Web site called Harvard Connection, which would allow students on campus to post their own profiles and network with each other online. After having gone through two programmers previously, they make a deal with Zuckerberg to write the code for their site — only Zuckerberg stalls them for a month and a half while instead creating his own version called thefacebook.com. When the Winkelvoss brothers find out that Zuckerberg has stolen their idea, they’re understandably pissed about it but they refuse to do something so ungentlemanly as to take them to court; instead they pursue administrative remedies on the Harvard campus and even win a meeting with then-Harvard president Larry Summers (Douglas Urbanski), the racist, sexist creep whose appointment as President Obama’s economic czar was the first indication we had, even before Obama formally took office, that he was going to betray all his progressive promises and suck up to Wall Street. Summers regards the Winkelvosses’ food fight with Zuckerberg as exactly the sort of petty intra-student dispute the president of Harvard shouldn’t have to bother with no matter how influential the Winkelvosses’ relatives are or how much money they contributed to the university, and he ushers them out of his office in an angry mood about how they’ve wasted his time.
Zuckerberg and Saverin make a deal to start a corporation and market thefacebook.com to students and staff at other colleges — part of the appeal in its early days is its exclusivity (originally Facebook was open only to people with an e-mail address ending in “.edu”) — and Saverin, whose family has money, puts in first $1,000 and then $18,000 as seed capital in exchange for 30 percent of the company and the title of chief financial officer. The relationship is a troubled one from the beginning and a good illustration of the old moral that one of the surest ways to ruin a friendship is to go into business together; Saverin wants to accept advertising and monetize the site right away while Zuckerberg wants to keep it going until it achieves the critical mass to attract major advertisers while still being considered “cool.”
Along the way Zuckerberg picks up another partner, Sean Parker (a marvelous performance by Justin Timberlake with just the right combination of arrested development and moral seediness), who was fired from Napster and another (unnamed) major Internet startup, who’s checking his e-mail at his latest trick’s house (so he, too, is driven largely by his dick!) when he sees her computer open to Facebook and decides that it’s the next big thing he’s been looking for to redeem himself. Accordingly he gets in touch with Zuckerberg and induces him to move out to Silicon Valley, California to be where all the major computer people and potential backers are so he can expand the company and dump the spoilsport Saverin — who’s insisting on staying in New York and trying to get nickel-and-dime advertisers (one of them played, in a credited cameo, by screenwriter Sorkin) to put money into the company. All along Saverin has been drawn as a man with one foot in the door of respectable success — he makes the Phoenix Club, one of Harvard’s prestigious “Final Clubs” that are supposed to put their members in touch with the world’s ruling class and prepare them to become part of it (though he doesn’t get into the most prestigious of the clubs, the Porcellian), and he’s got a business internship in the Big Apple, though he quits it on the first day because he still thinks his future is with Facebook — and the mutual resentment between him and Zuckerberg grows as the two are separated by a continent and Parker turns Zuckerberg’s life in California into one big, endless frat party with bottomless supplies of girls, booze and (at least for Parker and his girlfriends and buddies) drugs.
Unable to get Zuckerberg even to return his calls, Saverin freezes the Facebook accounts — and Zuckerberg and Parker retaliate by rewriting the partnership agreements so they can later freeze Saverin out of all but a token share of the company. Then one of Parker’s parties gets raided by the cops and he’s arrested on drug charges — and Zuckerberg coldly freezes him out of the company (though this is much less apparent in the movie than the book). The film tells this story in a series of flashbacks while the characters are supposedly testifying in depositions being taken for the two lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg, one by the Winkelvosses and one by Saverin, and though the time sequence sometimes gets a bit confusing (a number of critics have compared the film to Citizen Kane, but Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz kept a clear distinction between present and past while Sorkin and director David Fincher frequently leave theirs muddled — also, since the story takes place over less than seven years, the characters don’t change appearance during the movie and that makes it harder to tell just when we are) it does contribute to the moral sense of the story, and at the end we get a few titles that explain that the Winkelvosses settled for $65 million and signed a nondisclosure agreement, Saverin settled for an undisclosed amount and did not sign a nondisclosure agreement (if he had there’d have been no movie, since he was Mezrich’s principal source for his book) and Zuckerberg became the world’s youngest billionaire (according to the Wikipedia page on him he’s currently worth $9 billion). At the end we see Zuckerberg alone and the Beatles’ song “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” comes up on the soundtrack (which until then has been pretty routine; quite a few songs appear but they seem to be chosen for little more reason than they would be the sort of things the characters would be listening to; there’s no real attempt until the very end to match the songs to the emotional mood of the scenes as was done quite successfully in the Twilight-series film New Moon); the song fits but it’s an obvious choice and it occurred to me that, since the whole theme of the film is friendships destroyed by success, Cyndi Lauper’s “Money Changes Everything” might have been a better choice.
When I read Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires it occurred to me that the character from history — or at least historical fiction — Zuckerberg most resembled was Shakespeare’s Richard III. (Indeed, when I read The Accidental Billionaires I had been considering starting a Facebook page, and the book persuaded me not to; I decided I wasn’t going to contribute to making this horrible person even one iota richer than he already was.) Zuckerberg didn’t have his rivals and no-longer-necessary partners physically murdered the way Richard did, but he did eliminate them with the same single-minded ruthlessness: just as Richard aimed himself for the throne of England and didn’t care how many people he had to kill to get there, Zuckerberg aimed himself with a single-minded drive towards protecting Facebook, making it the biggest site on the Internet and making himself a billionaire no matter how many people he had to screw over and destroy on the way. The Social Network was directed by David Fincher — the man who made the third Alien movie and a serial-killer film called Se7en (the numeral was part of the official title) I found so disgusting I swore never to watch a Fincher film again — a rule I broke this time only because I’d read the source material and could be assured that at least it didn’t feature any grisly murders — and it’s quite well made, complete with appropriate atmospherics and real skill at making the frat-party air around Zuckerberg and Facebook come alive — though I think the real quality of the film comes from Sorkin’s script, which is witty and well characterized even though it pretty much ducks the overall critique of capitalism itself the material almost seems to demand.
The acting is well done throughout -— it helps that none of these people are so familiar we’re likely to recognize them from other roles and therefore have a hard time suspending disbelief in who we’re told they are — and Eisenberg as Zuckerberg comes off in particular as a kind of über-nerd whose sudden success lifts him into a sybaritic high life he enjoys for a while until it gets in the way of the one thing besides himself that’s really important to him: his Web site. The film, like the book, has been criticized for inaccuracy, and it’s also been suggested by some critics that The Social Network might do to Zuckerberg what Citizen Kane did to Marion Davies: indelibly etch a portrait of him in the public consciousness as an unscrupulous asshole, just as millions of people who’ve never seen a Marion Davies film think of her as the whiny, untalented bitch Dorothy Comingore played as “Susan Alexander” in Citizen Kane. It’s possible Zuckerberg himself worries about this, since as the film was in the final stages of post-production he mounted what, for him, was a major charm offensive: he agreed to be interviewed by The New Yorker for a feature profile (he had refused Mezrich’s interview requests for the book, which probably had a lot to do with why he came off so badly in it) and he went on Oprah Winfrey’s program to announce that, after never having given a publicly recorded dime to any charity, he was giving $100 million to improve the public schools of Newark, New Jersey. (Why Newark? It’s not like he’s from there; he was born in the upscale community of White Plains, New York. His own explanation was that he trusts the two people who would be principally in charge of spending the grant: Chris Christie, Republican governor of New Jersey; and Cory Booker, young African-American Democratic mayor of Newark.)
Zuckerberg comes off as a little less vicious and exploitative in the movie than he does in the book — less because of any fundamental change in the material than the very real charm Eisenberg musters in the role — and, as Charles noted, it’s hard to get too excited about this movie because the other characters are just about as unpleasant as Zuckerberg. The film has an interesting class structure in that it’s a tug of war between three different sorts of people with different relationships to America’s ruling class: the Winkelvosses, who have automatic entrée into it from their ancestry and breeding; Saverin, who’s something of an outsider (he’s part-Brazilian, hence his exotic name and looks) but is working and pulling the right connections to get into it by adoption; and Zuckerberg, the outsider — a nerd and a Jew — who realizes his only way into the ruling class is going to be using his brains to build a company so huge it can’t be ignored and he can bull his way into the elite.
The Social Network has been criticized as inaccurate (but then Shakespeare’s Richard III has also been called a piece of propaganda maligning a decent and capable ruler who never had anybody killed — Josephine Tey’s marvelously imaginative novel The Daughter of Time is a good précis of the case for Richard’s defense) and unfair to Zuckerberg, and in a sense that’s true: judging from both the movie and Mezrich’s book, one would never guess that Zuckerberg is currently in a serious relationship with Priscilla Chen, a girl he knew in high school. (That information comes from the New Yorker profile, which also revealed that Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind: the reason the Facebook logo is blue is that’s one of the few colors Zuckerberg can see.) The Social Network isn’t the movie it might have been if a more socially conscious (and class-conscious) director like Orson Welles or Douglas Sirk had been around to make it, but it’s about as good as one could reasonably expect a story like this to be told today, in an era in which the whole idea of people acting other than in a highly competitive, dog-eat-dog fashion has been effectively trashed and ruled beyond the pale of human nature; the story this film tells is a bunch of rather slimy people grabbing for a gold ring and the slimiest and most unscrupulous of them all getting it — not much of a moral lesson but an all too accurate portrayal of the way the world works today.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
The Beloved Rogue (United Artists, 1927)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Beloved Rogue, a 1927 United Artists production starring John Barrymore as François Villon in a quirky costume drama about 15th century France directed by Alan Crosland (who had directed Barrymore the year before in Don Juan, the first silent film released with a synchronized Vitaphone music and effects soundtrack) and produced by Joseph M. Schenck for Feature Productions. The source for this DVD release, one of the four films in Kino’s Barrymore boxed set (along with the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the 1922 Sherlock Holmes, and the 1928 Tempest), was a version prepared for TV showings in the 1970’s based on a print owned by Paul Killiam, who produced the Silents Please syndicated TV series that showed half-hour condensations of the great silent films, and it came with the TV credits and intro and outro segments by, of all people, Orson Welles.
Welles introduced himself as a good friend and co-worker with John Barrymore, and while that’s a bit of an exaggeration they were on record as having performed together at least once, on a radio show in which they did a scene from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. He also said Beloved Rogue was not one of Barrymore’s better films, and as things turned out it isn’t. I had seen it when this version originally aired on PBS in the 1970’s and had remembered it as better than it now seems — the opening sequence, showing Villon’s father being burned at the stake, was the part that most stuck in my mind, and it’s a wonderful dramatic opening for a film that through most of its length is actually more a comedy than anything else. Villon’s father is depicted as a French aristocrat who was executed either by the English or the Burgundians, who were ruling large chunks of France at the time, for standing up for the rights of the hereditary French kings, and when Villon mere is trying to get Villon fils to drink his baby formula, the baby (played by the infant Dickie Moore) smashes the bottle to the floor and is only satisfied when his nurse gets a wine bottle from the shelf, mixes the milk with it and feeds him that. “If that’s the way John Barrymore was raised, no wonder he became an alcoholic!” I joked.
A title tells us that 25 years have passed and Villon has grown up to be John Barrymore — a considerably more athletic version than we’re used to, courtesy of stunt double Paul Malvern (who later became a producer at Universal in the 1940’s); obviously Schenck was going for the appeal of the Douglas Fairbanks swashbucklers that, along with Mary Pickford’s films, were making United Artists most of its money just then, and possibly also grooming him as a replacement for Rudolph Valentino, who had made his two last films for Schenck’s unit at UA before his sudden death in 1926. The Beloved Rogue features Villon as a romantic revolutionary fighting for the interests of King Louis XI (Conrad Veidt, in his first American film, playing the king much the way he played Ivan the Terrible in the German film Waxworks three years earlier) even though Louis has exiled him from Paris and sentenced him to death should he ever return to the city. Love rears its head in the person of the King’s ward, Charlotte de Vauxcelles (Marceline Day), whom the king plans to marry to Thibault d’Aussigny (Henry Victor), close friend of the king’s cousin Charles of Burgundy (Lawson Butt), who’s planning to take over France by stealth, surrounding Paris with his army and forcing the king to abdicate in his favor.
Of course when Charlotte actually meets Thibault it’s hate at first sight, and she turns out to be a fan of Villon’s poetry (she has one of his books) but still has a hard time believing the scapegrace who’s rescued her is Villon himself. Villon is also shown with a couple of comic sidekicks, Jehan (Slim Summerville) and Nicholas (Mack Swain), and when they’re together they come off like a beta version of the Three Stooges; and he gets to reign over the Feast of Fools, the ancestor of our April Fool’s Day and a celebration in which for one day a year the usual social orders are overturned and a King of Fools is crowned to reign over the Paris carnival. For this purpose Barrymore is made up to look like a clown, with a pepper-pot “crown” on his head, and his moves and gestures in the role seem deliberately copied from Chaplin (well, when you’re going to steal, steal from the best!). The best part of Beloved Rogue is the absolutely stunning visual look, courtesy of art director William Cameron Menzies, who worked on even more amazing films later but whose designs here are still awesome, full of glass paintings and other bits of artifice that make the sets look even more substantial than they are.
The script, based on a story by Paul Bern — the future MGM producer who was found dead under mysterious circumstances shortly after marrying Jean Harlow in 1932 (MGM worked with the police to make it look like suicide, but the modern consensus is that Bern was murdered by a common-law wife he’d jilted years before but who nonetheless had a jealous hissy-fit over his much-publicized marriage to Harlow) — with titles by George F. Marion, Jr. and Walter Anthony, is little more than a pretext for big action and romantic set-pieces. The movie is aiming for the insouciance of Barrymore’s Don Juan the year before, but though he’s perfectly credible in the lead (and Crosland’s direction and Hal Kern’s editing are artful enough that the transitions between Barrymore and Malvern are virtually seamless), and the film overall is a load of artless fun, darker roles in the Barrymore canon like Jekyll/Hyde, Ahab and Svengali showed him off better. (So did the modern-dress roles in films like A Bill of Divorcement and Dinner at Eight that seemed like oblique comments on Barrymore’s own alcohol-fueled self-destruction.) The film was remade in 1938 as If I Were King with Ronald Colman as Villon and Basil Rathbone (playing in a surprisingly mincing, queeny manner) as Louis XI, and I remember that one as being better than this — or would that, too, be a film that would disappoint me if I saw it again?
The film was The Beloved Rogue, a 1927 United Artists production starring John Barrymore as François Villon in a quirky costume drama about 15th century France directed by Alan Crosland (who had directed Barrymore the year before in Don Juan, the first silent film released with a synchronized Vitaphone music and effects soundtrack) and produced by Joseph M. Schenck for Feature Productions. The source for this DVD release, one of the four films in Kino’s Barrymore boxed set (along with the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the 1922 Sherlock Holmes, and the 1928 Tempest), was a version prepared for TV showings in the 1970’s based on a print owned by Paul Killiam, who produced the Silents Please syndicated TV series that showed half-hour condensations of the great silent films, and it came with the TV credits and intro and outro segments by, of all people, Orson Welles.
Welles introduced himself as a good friend and co-worker with John Barrymore, and while that’s a bit of an exaggeration they were on record as having performed together at least once, on a radio show in which they did a scene from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. He also said Beloved Rogue was not one of Barrymore’s better films, and as things turned out it isn’t. I had seen it when this version originally aired on PBS in the 1970’s and had remembered it as better than it now seems — the opening sequence, showing Villon’s father being burned at the stake, was the part that most stuck in my mind, and it’s a wonderful dramatic opening for a film that through most of its length is actually more a comedy than anything else. Villon’s father is depicted as a French aristocrat who was executed either by the English or the Burgundians, who were ruling large chunks of France at the time, for standing up for the rights of the hereditary French kings, and when Villon mere is trying to get Villon fils to drink his baby formula, the baby (played by the infant Dickie Moore) smashes the bottle to the floor and is only satisfied when his nurse gets a wine bottle from the shelf, mixes the milk with it and feeds him that. “If that’s the way John Barrymore was raised, no wonder he became an alcoholic!” I joked.
A title tells us that 25 years have passed and Villon has grown up to be John Barrymore — a considerably more athletic version than we’re used to, courtesy of stunt double Paul Malvern (who later became a producer at Universal in the 1940’s); obviously Schenck was going for the appeal of the Douglas Fairbanks swashbucklers that, along with Mary Pickford’s films, were making United Artists most of its money just then, and possibly also grooming him as a replacement for Rudolph Valentino, who had made his two last films for Schenck’s unit at UA before his sudden death in 1926. The Beloved Rogue features Villon as a romantic revolutionary fighting for the interests of King Louis XI (Conrad Veidt, in his first American film, playing the king much the way he played Ivan the Terrible in the German film Waxworks three years earlier) even though Louis has exiled him from Paris and sentenced him to death should he ever return to the city. Love rears its head in the person of the King’s ward, Charlotte de Vauxcelles (Marceline Day), whom the king plans to marry to Thibault d’Aussigny (Henry Victor), close friend of the king’s cousin Charles of Burgundy (Lawson Butt), who’s planning to take over France by stealth, surrounding Paris with his army and forcing the king to abdicate in his favor.
Of course when Charlotte actually meets Thibault it’s hate at first sight, and she turns out to be a fan of Villon’s poetry (she has one of his books) but still has a hard time believing the scapegrace who’s rescued her is Villon himself. Villon is also shown with a couple of comic sidekicks, Jehan (Slim Summerville) and Nicholas (Mack Swain), and when they’re together they come off like a beta version of the Three Stooges; and he gets to reign over the Feast of Fools, the ancestor of our April Fool’s Day and a celebration in which for one day a year the usual social orders are overturned and a King of Fools is crowned to reign over the Paris carnival. For this purpose Barrymore is made up to look like a clown, with a pepper-pot “crown” on his head, and his moves and gestures in the role seem deliberately copied from Chaplin (well, when you’re going to steal, steal from the best!). The best part of Beloved Rogue is the absolutely stunning visual look, courtesy of art director William Cameron Menzies, who worked on even more amazing films later but whose designs here are still awesome, full of glass paintings and other bits of artifice that make the sets look even more substantial than they are.
The script, based on a story by Paul Bern — the future MGM producer who was found dead under mysterious circumstances shortly after marrying Jean Harlow in 1932 (MGM worked with the police to make it look like suicide, but the modern consensus is that Bern was murdered by a common-law wife he’d jilted years before but who nonetheless had a jealous hissy-fit over his much-publicized marriage to Harlow) — with titles by George F. Marion, Jr. and Walter Anthony, is little more than a pretext for big action and romantic set-pieces. The movie is aiming for the insouciance of Barrymore’s Don Juan the year before, but though he’s perfectly credible in the lead (and Crosland’s direction and Hal Kern’s editing are artful enough that the transitions between Barrymore and Malvern are virtually seamless), and the film overall is a load of artless fun, darker roles in the Barrymore canon like Jekyll/Hyde, Ahab and Svengali showed him off better. (So did the modern-dress roles in films like A Bill of Divorcement and Dinner at Eight that seemed like oblique comments on Barrymore’s own alcohol-fueled self-destruction.) The film was remade in 1938 as If I Were King with Ronald Colman as Villon and Basil Rathbone (playing in a surprisingly mincing, queeny manner) as Louis XI, and I remember that one as being better than this — or would that, too, be a film that would disappoint me if I saw it again?
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Her Kind of Man (Warners, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Her Kind of Man, not to be confused with His Kind of Woman and actually made five years earlier than that quirky cult film. This is the sort of movie I thought I was getting when I screened Lady Luck: a dark thriller about a gambler and the woman who regards him — much to her grief — as her kind of man. The gambler is Steve Maddux (Zachary Scott), and at the beginning of the movie newspaper columnist Don Corwin (Dane Clark, top-billed) walks into a police station with a woman introduced as Maddux’s girlfriend, singer Georgia King (Janis Paige), after he’s told us via voiceover that what we’re watching takes place on the night the repeal of Prohibition took effect, and it was a really big night for Steve Maddux — even bigger than the 1932-33 New Year’s Eve, which we’re immediately flashed back to. When we hear all that and see the chiaroscuro visuals that illustrate it, we know in front that whatever happened to Maddux, it has to have been bad — either he got arrested or he got killed — and the flashback takes us to Detroit, where Maddux cheats another gambler, Bender (Sheldon Leonard), out of several hundred dollars.
Bender comes to Maddux’s room with a gun but Maddux takes it away from him and uses it to kill him, then he and his accomplice/bodyguard/factotum Candy (a marvelously chilling performance by Harry Lewis) take the body out of the hotel where this took place — only a hotel guest named Fitzroy (Milton Kibbee) sees them, though we don’t find out there was a witness to this crime until many reels later. Georgia decides to pursue her career in New York, and Steve offers to accompany her both because he doesn’t want to separate from her and because he needs to get out of town, pronto. Georgia lands a role in a Broadway show produced by a man named Fordham (Joseph Crehan) and columnist Corwin sees a rehearsal and starts pushing her big-time in his column. He also starts dating her, though she’s reluctant because she’s still Steve’s kind of woman and doesn’t want Don to get in trouble via Steve’s jealousy. Meanwhile, the owner of the casino back in Detroit where Steve was working — and gambling — back when all this started, Joe Marino (George Tobias) — whose wife Ruby (Faye Emerson) is also Steve’s sister — has got an offer to set up a nightclub and casino near the racetrack at Saratoga, and he wants Steve to put in $50,000 for a one-quarter interest.
They rendezvous in Miami — where Steve has detoured en route from Detroit to New York — and Steve makes the $50,000, only to lose almost all of it in a poker game; but it turns out that Marino set up the game and rigged it against Steve, so he still has the $50,000 to invest in the spot. When Steve finally arrives in New York, Georgia is about to make her debut in Fordham’s show, but Steve forces Fordham to sell him Georgia’s contract so she can open in his club in Saratoga instead. He also seduces her back from Don and gets her to marry him. The club at Saratoga is a big success — but Steve cashes out his share and uses it to open yet another club, this one in New York City, to showcase Georgia in the Big Apple and make her a star on Don’s home turf. Meanwhile Don, still in love with Georgia even though she’s married the bad guy, has continued to plug her in his column, so both Steve and the screenwriting committee — Charles Hoffman and James V. Kern, “original” (quotes definitely intended) story; Gordon Kahn and Leopold Atlas, screenplay — regard her success as assured.
Through all of this the other characters have been bird-dogged by New York police detective Bill Fellows (Howard Smith), who’s convinced Steve killed Bender and has made it his personal mission to nail him for it. Georgia’s nightclub contains a secret room where for $100 one can buy a key that opens the door and reveals a fully functioning, and blatantly illegal, casino. The police secretly buy one of the keys and have it duplicated, so Fellows can stage a raid on opening night. Meanwhile, Fitzroy, the witness to Bender’s killing (or at least to Steve’s and Candy’s disposal of the body afterwards), turns up in New York and tells Don what he knows. Don offers him $100 not to tell the story to anyone else and, thinking the revelation will destroy Georgia’s career, refuses to print it.
Unbeknownst to him, Fitzroy has also told Detective Fellows, giving him the evidence he needs not only to raid Steve’s illegal casino but arrest him for Bender’s murder. On the night of the opening Don learns about the raid and tries to warn Steve, but Candy won’t let him into the casino room without a key; when Candy tells Steve that Don tried to crash the casino without a key, giving a cock-and-bull story about how the police were about to raid it, Steve says that as much as he hates Don — and vice versa -— Don has never lied to him, so if Don says there’s going to be a raid, there’s going to be a raid. Naturally, Steve realizes this too late to stop it, and there’s a big shoot-out in which Steve kills Ruby Marino — and Joe, incensed at the murder of his wife by her brother, decides to go after Steve himself and kills him just before the police, who are interested in Steve alive rather than dead, get to the scene.
Her Kind of Man is a virtual compendium of Warners clichés — the gangster movie, the romantic triangle, the gambling story, even a few musical numbers (Janis Paige’s foghorn-like voice is well showcased in “Something to Remember You By,” less so in “Body and Soul,” and the background score is itself a virtual greatest-hits collection of all the standards by Gershwin, Porter and others Warners’ music-publishing division owned) — and though the writing committee managed a few fresh spins on the old clichés, and director Frederick de Cordova staged it with the typical relentless Warners’ pace and some surprisingly atmospheric visuals (helped in the latter department by cinematographer Carl E. Guthrie), Her Kind of Man would be pretty forgettable except for one element: the superb performance of Zachary Scott. He’d already established this sort of character — the slimy villain with a thin veneer of class and romantic appeal — as his “type” in films like The Mask of Dimitrios and Mildred Pierce, but here he’s playing it to the nines, compulsively watchable and entertaining as a man so detached from normal standards of behavior — while at the same time so good at appearing normal and even likable — that we end up with the same sort of love-hate relationship with the character that Georgia has in the film. It’s the sort of movie Warners could still (in 1946) churn out with a cool professionalism that makes it entertaining, if rather predictable, but it’s Scott’s performance that makes it special.
The film was Her Kind of Man, not to be confused with His Kind of Woman and actually made five years earlier than that quirky cult film. This is the sort of movie I thought I was getting when I screened Lady Luck: a dark thriller about a gambler and the woman who regards him — much to her grief — as her kind of man. The gambler is Steve Maddux (Zachary Scott), and at the beginning of the movie newspaper columnist Don Corwin (Dane Clark, top-billed) walks into a police station with a woman introduced as Maddux’s girlfriend, singer Georgia King (Janis Paige), after he’s told us via voiceover that what we’re watching takes place on the night the repeal of Prohibition took effect, and it was a really big night for Steve Maddux — even bigger than the 1932-33 New Year’s Eve, which we’re immediately flashed back to. When we hear all that and see the chiaroscuro visuals that illustrate it, we know in front that whatever happened to Maddux, it has to have been bad — either he got arrested or he got killed — and the flashback takes us to Detroit, where Maddux cheats another gambler, Bender (Sheldon Leonard), out of several hundred dollars.
Bender comes to Maddux’s room with a gun but Maddux takes it away from him and uses it to kill him, then he and his accomplice/bodyguard/factotum Candy (a marvelously chilling performance by Harry Lewis) take the body out of the hotel where this took place — only a hotel guest named Fitzroy (Milton Kibbee) sees them, though we don’t find out there was a witness to this crime until many reels later. Georgia decides to pursue her career in New York, and Steve offers to accompany her both because he doesn’t want to separate from her and because he needs to get out of town, pronto. Georgia lands a role in a Broadway show produced by a man named Fordham (Joseph Crehan) and columnist Corwin sees a rehearsal and starts pushing her big-time in his column. He also starts dating her, though she’s reluctant because she’s still Steve’s kind of woman and doesn’t want Don to get in trouble via Steve’s jealousy. Meanwhile, the owner of the casino back in Detroit where Steve was working — and gambling — back when all this started, Joe Marino (George Tobias) — whose wife Ruby (Faye Emerson) is also Steve’s sister — has got an offer to set up a nightclub and casino near the racetrack at Saratoga, and he wants Steve to put in $50,000 for a one-quarter interest.
They rendezvous in Miami — where Steve has detoured en route from Detroit to New York — and Steve makes the $50,000, only to lose almost all of it in a poker game; but it turns out that Marino set up the game and rigged it against Steve, so he still has the $50,000 to invest in the spot. When Steve finally arrives in New York, Georgia is about to make her debut in Fordham’s show, but Steve forces Fordham to sell him Georgia’s contract so she can open in his club in Saratoga instead. He also seduces her back from Don and gets her to marry him. The club at Saratoga is a big success — but Steve cashes out his share and uses it to open yet another club, this one in New York City, to showcase Georgia in the Big Apple and make her a star on Don’s home turf. Meanwhile Don, still in love with Georgia even though she’s married the bad guy, has continued to plug her in his column, so both Steve and the screenwriting committee — Charles Hoffman and James V. Kern, “original” (quotes definitely intended) story; Gordon Kahn and Leopold Atlas, screenplay — regard her success as assured.
Through all of this the other characters have been bird-dogged by New York police detective Bill Fellows (Howard Smith), who’s convinced Steve killed Bender and has made it his personal mission to nail him for it. Georgia’s nightclub contains a secret room where for $100 one can buy a key that opens the door and reveals a fully functioning, and blatantly illegal, casino. The police secretly buy one of the keys and have it duplicated, so Fellows can stage a raid on opening night. Meanwhile, Fitzroy, the witness to Bender’s killing (or at least to Steve’s and Candy’s disposal of the body afterwards), turns up in New York and tells Don what he knows. Don offers him $100 not to tell the story to anyone else and, thinking the revelation will destroy Georgia’s career, refuses to print it.
Unbeknownst to him, Fitzroy has also told Detective Fellows, giving him the evidence he needs not only to raid Steve’s illegal casino but arrest him for Bender’s murder. On the night of the opening Don learns about the raid and tries to warn Steve, but Candy won’t let him into the casino room without a key; when Candy tells Steve that Don tried to crash the casino without a key, giving a cock-and-bull story about how the police were about to raid it, Steve says that as much as he hates Don — and vice versa -— Don has never lied to him, so if Don says there’s going to be a raid, there’s going to be a raid. Naturally, Steve realizes this too late to stop it, and there’s a big shoot-out in which Steve kills Ruby Marino — and Joe, incensed at the murder of his wife by her brother, decides to go after Steve himself and kills him just before the police, who are interested in Steve alive rather than dead, get to the scene.
Her Kind of Man is a virtual compendium of Warners clichés — the gangster movie, the romantic triangle, the gambling story, even a few musical numbers (Janis Paige’s foghorn-like voice is well showcased in “Something to Remember You By,” less so in “Body and Soul,” and the background score is itself a virtual greatest-hits collection of all the standards by Gershwin, Porter and others Warners’ music-publishing division owned) — and though the writing committee managed a few fresh spins on the old clichés, and director Frederick de Cordova staged it with the typical relentless Warners’ pace and some surprisingly atmospheric visuals (helped in the latter department by cinematographer Carl E. Guthrie), Her Kind of Man would be pretty forgettable except for one element: the superb performance of Zachary Scott. He’d already established this sort of character — the slimy villain with a thin veneer of class and romantic appeal — as his “type” in films like The Mask of Dimitrios and Mildred Pierce, but here he’s playing it to the nines, compulsively watchable and entertaining as a man so detached from normal standards of behavior — while at the same time so good at appearing normal and even likable — that we end up with the same sort of love-hate relationship with the character that Georgia has in the film. It’s the sort of movie Warners could still (in 1946) churn out with a cool professionalism that makes it entertaining, if rather predictable, but it’s Scott’s performance that makes it special.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Lepke (AmeriEuro Pictures/Warner Bros., 1975)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I wanted an envoi to Tony Curtis and so I picked one of his more obscure movies, Lepke, a 1975 gangster movie directed by Menahem Golan and co-produced by him and Yoram Globus before they started billing their films as “A Golan-Globus Production.” This was co-credited to Warner Bros. and a company called AmeriEuro Pictures, and was obviously an attempt to suck off the market for big gangster films in recent-past settings kicked off by the blockbuster success of The Godfather. I remembered seeing Tony Curtis on a talk show promoting this movie and mentioning that what made Lepke unique was not only that he was one of the few Jewish gangsters to crack the inner precincts of the Mafia (the others were Dutch Schultz — depicted as a character here and played by John Durren — along with later arrivals Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky) but he was also just about the only gangster of his day who was actually imprisoned and executed instead of being shot down by rival gangsters or cops, or managing (as Lansky did) a long life, peaceful retirement and quiet, natural death.
Lepke is a well-done movie, surprisingly unexciting for a gangster tale but good-looking (Andrew Davis’ cinematography actually uses more of the visible spectrum than greens and dirty browns) and decently if not spectacularly acted — with two exceptions, one good and one bad. The bad one is Anjanette Comer as Lepke’s wife Bernice, who delivers her lines in a flat, affect-less manner that makes one wonder how she got a role after just two days of acting classes and who she was having sex with to get the part. The good one is Milton Berle as Bernice’s father, Mr. Meyer, who astonishingly delivers by far the best performance in the entire film; though he has only a few scenes, he’s fascinatingly enigmatic and powerful as the Orthodox Jewish father whose daughter has already been burned in marriage once (her first husband died young for reasons we’re never quite told, though the implication is that he too was a gangster and was knocked off by his colleagues) and who wants to make sure that this time she’s marrying a man worthy of her — and he insists on an Orthodox wedding in a synagogue even though Lepke, a.k.a. Louis Buchhalter, has never seen the inside of one since his childhood.
Lepke begins with a scene more typical of a 1930’s than a 1970’s gangster movie: a black-and-white prologue showing Lepke (played as a boy by Barry Miller — who actually does like he could conceivably grow up to look like Tony Curtis) breaking into a store, getting caught and sentenced to reform school, then ending up in reform school again shortly after his release and treating the authorities in an insolent fashion that lets us know this person is never going to consider any other sort of career besides crime. The script (by Tamar Simon Hoffs and Wesley Lau) is oddly structured and depicts Lepke’s rise in the first hour, built mainly on protection rackets, until it’s derailed by the advent of crusading district attorney Thomas E. Dewey (Richard C. Adams). In the film’s most chilling scene, a group of nine gangsters, including such famous names as Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano (Vic Tayback) and Albert Anastasia (Gianni Russo) meets to decide whether or not killing Dewey is worth the risk; the vote splits 4-4 and Lepke, as the chair of the syndicate, casts the deciding vote to let Dewey live, then orders a hit on Schultz when he announces his plans to have Dewey killed anyway, majority rule be damned.
The film also does a good job of dramatizing the racist antagonisms between the Jewish and Italian gangsters who are battling for control of New York City’s rackets, and eventually Luciano decides that protection rackets have run their course and the real money is in drugs, which he (correctly) guesses will be the coming thing once Prohibition is repealed. Lepke decides to establish his own opium connection in China, but the whole thing runs afoul of both Dewey and the FBI, for which Lepke’s former attorney Robert Kane (Michael Callan) is now working, and in the second part of the film Lepke is forced into hiding because the New York police, the FBI and Luciano’s gang are all after him. (One ironic touch is that during part of his underground period he lives in the back room of a movie theatre that continually shows gangster films.) He finally cuts a deal with the feds, using Walter Winchell (Vaughn Meader), of all people, as his go-between, in which he’ll plead guilty to a drug rap, serve 12 years in prison and avoid New York jurisdiction — only the judge who takes his plea double-crosses him and announces that at the end of his federal sentence he will be turned over to New York, where he’ll be tried for murder, convicted and executed.
Lepke is a decent movie, not bad but not especially good either, and while it’s interesting to see Tony Curtis (née Bernard Schwartz) in one of the few roles in which he got to play his real-life Jewish ethnicity, he’s not an especially menacing figure and one can’t help thinking James Caan from the Godfather cast would have been a better choice.
I wanted an envoi to Tony Curtis and so I picked one of his more obscure movies, Lepke, a 1975 gangster movie directed by Menahem Golan and co-produced by him and Yoram Globus before they started billing their films as “A Golan-Globus Production.” This was co-credited to Warner Bros. and a company called AmeriEuro Pictures, and was obviously an attempt to suck off the market for big gangster films in recent-past settings kicked off by the blockbuster success of The Godfather. I remembered seeing Tony Curtis on a talk show promoting this movie and mentioning that what made Lepke unique was not only that he was one of the few Jewish gangsters to crack the inner precincts of the Mafia (the others were Dutch Schultz — depicted as a character here and played by John Durren — along with later arrivals Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky) but he was also just about the only gangster of his day who was actually imprisoned and executed instead of being shot down by rival gangsters or cops, or managing (as Lansky did) a long life, peaceful retirement and quiet, natural death.
Lepke is a well-done movie, surprisingly unexciting for a gangster tale but good-looking (Andrew Davis’ cinematography actually uses more of the visible spectrum than greens and dirty browns) and decently if not spectacularly acted — with two exceptions, one good and one bad. The bad one is Anjanette Comer as Lepke’s wife Bernice, who delivers her lines in a flat, affect-less manner that makes one wonder how she got a role after just two days of acting classes and who she was having sex with to get the part. The good one is Milton Berle as Bernice’s father, Mr. Meyer, who astonishingly delivers by far the best performance in the entire film; though he has only a few scenes, he’s fascinatingly enigmatic and powerful as the Orthodox Jewish father whose daughter has already been burned in marriage once (her first husband died young for reasons we’re never quite told, though the implication is that he too was a gangster and was knocked off by his colleagues) and who wants to make sure that this time she’s marrying a man worthy of her — and he insists on an Orthodox wedding in a synagogue even though Lepke, a.k.a. Louis Buchhalter, has never seen the inside of one since his childhood.
Lepke begins with a scene more typical of a 1930’s than a 1970’s gangster movie: a black-and-white prologue showing Lepke (played as a boy by Barry Miller — who actually does like he could conceivably grow up to look like Tony Curtis) breaking into a store, getting caught and sentenced to reform school, then ending up in reform school again shortly after his release and treating the authorities in an insolent fashion that lets us know this person is never going to consider any other sort of career besides crime. The script (by Tamar Simon Hoffs and Wesley Lau) is oddly structured and depicts Lepke’s rise in the first hour, built mainly on protection rackets, until it’s derailed by the advent of crusading district attorney Thomas E. Dewey (Richard C. Adams). In the film’s most chilling scene, a group of nine gangsters, including such famous names as Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano (Vic Tayback) and Albert Anastasia (Gianni Russo) meets to decide whether or not killing Dewey is worth the risk; the vote splits 4-4 and Lepke, as the chair of the syndicate, casts the deciding vote to let Dewey live, then orders a hit on Schultz when he announces his plans to have Dewey killed anyway, majority rule be damned.
The film also does a good job of dramatizing the racist antagonisms between the Jewish and Italian gangsters who are battling for control of New York City’s rackets, and eventually Luciano decides that protection rackets have run their course and the real money is in drugs, which he (correctly) guesses will be the coming thing once Prohibition is repealed. Lepke decides to establish his own opium connection in China, but the whole thing runs afoul of both Dewey and the FBI, for which Lepke’s former attorney Robert Kane (Michael Callan) is now working, and in the second part of the film Lepke is forced into hiding because the New York police, the FBI and Luciano’s gang are all after him. (One ironic touch is that during part of his underground period he lives in the back room of a movie theatre that continually shows gangster films.) He finally cuts a deal with the feds, using Walter Winchell (Vaughn Meader), of all people, as his go-between, in which he’ll plead guilty to a drug rap, serve 12 years in prison and avoid New York jurisdiction — only the judge who takes his plea double-crosses him and announces that at the end of his federal sentence he will be turned over to New York, where he’ll be tried for murder, convicted and executed.
Lepke is a decent movie, not bad but not especially good either, and while it’s interesting to see Tony Curtis (née Bernard Schwartz) in one of the few roles in which he got to play his real-life Jewish ethnicity, he’s not an especially menacing figure and one can’t help thinking James Caan from the Godfather cast would have been a better choice.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Silver Blaze (Granada TV, 1988)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked out an old episode of the British TV series The Return of Sherlock Holmes from 1988 starring Jeremy Brett in an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze, one of the best-loved Holmes stories, in which a racehorse trainer is found dead on the moors at Dartmoor and his star horse, the favorite of the upcoming Wessex Cup, disappears. Like all the Holmes shows with Brett, it’s a faithful adaptation of a story from Conan Doyle’s canon — much of John Hawkesworth’s script comes verbatim from the source — and it’s an exciting tale, well adapted and staged by director Brian Mills. I must confess I still have my doubts about Brett as Holmes — to me, as I’ve said in these pages before, Basil Rathbone will always be THE Sherlock Holmes (deliberate paraphrase of the opening of Conan Doyle’s Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia”), even though of Rathbone’s 14 films as Holmes only the first one, The Hound of the Baskervilles, comes from the canon. If I had to pick a second-favorite Holmes, it would be Robert Stephens, star of Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (the only Holmes film made by a major director!); Brett deserves acknowledgment as only the second actor (after silent-era veteran Eille Norwood) to play Sherlock Holmes in the entire Conan Doyle canon, and he’s certainly good enough for these reference versions, but to me he’s just a bit prissy and queeny to rank among the very top-drawer interpreters of Holmes.
Still, the shows in this series I’ve seen have been consistently high-quality, sensitively and faithfully adapted, generally well acted (it’s especially welcome that Edward Hardwicke plays Dr. Watson as a man of normal, or even slightly above-normal, intelligence who genuinely contributes to Holmes’ detective work, not the comic-relief idiot played by Nigel Bruce in the Rathbone films) and handsomely staged, convincing in their evocation of the Victorian period and benefiting from being filmed in Holmes’ (and Conan Doyle’s) home country and therefore being able to take advantage of the actual locations the author had in mind. The only bone I’d have to pick with this version is that I’d always thought of the characters of Col. Ross (owner of Silver Blaze) and Silas Brown (the rival trainer who captured the horse on the moor after it had killed his own trainer in self-defense) as much larger and physically robust than the actors that play them here, Peter Barkworth and Russell Hunter, respectively. I’d also thought of the Wessex Cup as a horse race taking place on a large track with a grandstand and an audience of thousands — here it seems like a race run on grass for a crowd the size of a garden party — but then that’s a kind of hazard when you’re watching a movie based on a book or story you’ve read often and formed a strong imaginary image of what the characters looked, sounded and acted like!
I picked out an old episode of the British TV series The Return of Sherlock Holmes from 1988 starring Jeremy Brett in an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze, one of the best-loved Holmes stories, in which a racehorse trainer is found dead on the moors at Dartmoor and his star horse, the favorite of the upcoming Wessex Cup, disappears. Like all the Holmes shows with Brett, it’s a faithful adaptation of a story from Conan Doyle’s canon — much of John Hawkesworth’s script comes verbatim from the source — and it’s an exciting tale, well adapted and staged by director Brian Mills. I must confess I still have my doubts about Brett as Holmes — to me, as I’ve said in these pages before, Basil Rathbone will always be THE Sherlock Holmes (deliberate paraphrase of the opening of Conan Doyle’s Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia”), even though of Rathbone’s 14 films as Holmes only the first one, The Hound of the Baskervilles, comes from the canon. If I had to pick a second-favorite Holmes, it would be Robert Stephens, star of Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (the only Holmes film made by a major director!); Brett deserves acknowledgment as only the second actor (after silent-era veteran Eille Norwood) to play Sherlock Holmes in the entire Conan Doyle canon, and he’s certainly good enough for these reference versions, but to me he’s just a bit prissy and queeny to rank among the very top-drawer interpreters of Holmes.
Still, the shows in this series I’ve seen have been consistently high-quality, sensitively and faithfully adapted, generally well acted (it’s especially welcome that Edward Hardwicke plays Dr. Watson as a man of normal, or even slightly above-normal, intelligence who genuinely contributes to Holmes’ detective work, not the comic-relief idiot played by Nigel Bruce in the Rathbone films) and handsomely staged, convincing in their evocation of the Victorian period and benefiting from being filmed in Holmes’ (and Conan Doyle’s) home country and therefore being able to take advantage of the actual locations the author had in mind. The only bone I’d have to pick with this version is that I’d always thought of the characters of Col. Ross (owner of Silver Blaze) and Silas Brown (the rival trainer who captured the horse on the moor after it had killed his own trainer in self-defense) as much larger and physically robust than the actors that play them here, Peter Barkworth and Russell Hunter, respectively. I’d also thought of the Wessex Cup as a horse race taking place on a large track with a grandstand and an audience of thousands — here it seems like a race run on grass for a crowd the size of a garden party — but then that’s a kind of hazard when you’re watching a movie based on a book or story you’ve read often and formed a strong imaginary image of what the characters looked, sounded and acted like!
Saturday, October 2, 2010
The Kids Are All Right (Mandalay Vision, Antidote Films, Focus Features, Universal, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Kids Are All Right, directed and co-written (with Stuart Blumberg) by Lisa Cholodenko, whom I remembered from a few years ago as the writer-director of the marvelous film Laurel Canyon. The buzz around this film had been strong and the premise is certainly provocative: a long-term Lesbian couple, Nicole a.k.a. “Nic” (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), have two teenage children, 18-year-old daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and 15-year-old son Laser (Josh Hutcherson), but their own lives together — especially their sex lives — have become routine and boring. The kids are biologically their own — Joni is Nic’s daughter and Laser is Jules’s son — but they were both fathered by a sperm donor, and as the film begin Joni stumbles on the file her mothers had kept on the donation and calls the sperm bank.
She learns that both she and Laser have the same biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a restaurateur (he owns a hole-in-the-wall gourmet place called WYSIWYG — an old computer-world acronym for “What you see is what you get” in the era, the 1980’s, when graphic user interfaces were still unusual, that probably sails over the heads of younger audience members) and organic farmer. Though Nic and Jules (the fact that both her female leads have “masculine” names is itself an indication of Cholodenko’s agenda, bending not only straight stereotypes of how Queer people live but Queer people’s own stereotypes about who we are and why) picked Paul as their donor at least partly because he was going to college and studying international relations, they learn once Joni and Laser track him down that he dropped out relatively quickly and has lived his adult life in a sort of suspended adolescence, burning through a little black book and having affairs with a lot of women — including his current flame, Tanya (Yaya DaCosta), a hot African-American who works as his assistant at the restaurant and who’s a good deal more serious about him than he is about her.
It’s a typical Cholodenko ironic joke that Nic and Jules are Lesbians who have lived like a straight couple (down to Nic, a nurse, seeing herself as the breadwinner of the family and looking askance at Jules’ attempts to forge a career of her own — at one point Jules tells Nic, “You just wanted a wife!”) while Paul is a straight man who’s lived like a Gay man, maintaining a boyish mien (Ruffalo’s loose posture and ability to project his character’s self-centeredness is an acting triumph, especially the way he acts “boyish” while still convincing us the character is 38 years old — he was actually 42 when he shot the film! — and making it believable that so many women in the movie find him irresistible) and avoiding anything that smacks of marriage, family or adult responsibility (though he has been able to make his business at least a small-scale success). Jules’ latest attempt at a career is landscape gardening, and for reasons Cholodenko and Blumberg powerfully hint at without making explicit — to help her out financially? To become part of the family that, after all, includes his only biological progeny? To get into Jules’s pants? All of the above? — Paul hires her to do his garden as her first project.
Proximity works its magic and Paul and Jules end up in bed together, pounding away at each other (there are a lot of sex scenes in movies today, but Ruffalo actually manages to act during one; his depiction of sex is full of furious energy and rapid-fire fucking that projects the character he’s been given, a man for whom sex is a burst of physical intensity rather than anything that seals or is part of an emotional commitment). Paul actually ends up more or less falling in love with Jules, seeing in her a way to the emotional stability and family orientation that’s the biggest single lack in his own life — and she begs off with the words, “I’m married,” suggesting that the situation wouldn’t be any less (or more) complicated if the spouse she was cheating on with Paul were a man. Out of this bizarre mixture of motives that reflects the complexity of real life rather than the neat little packages in which most movies tie up human emotions and behaviors, Paul invites Nic, Jules and the kids to his home for dinner — and Nic finds Jules’s hair in the bathroom and in Paul’s bedroom and catches on to the affair. Then she returns to the dinner table and, in yet another one of the ironies in which Cholodenko’s works abound, Paul offers a toast to “an unconventional family” just as the unconventional family is coming apart for the most conventional reasons conceivable: jealousy, ennui and empty-nest syndrome (the film takes place at the end of summer, just as Joni is about to go off to college).
The title is an ironic evocation of the mid-1960’s Who song “The Kids Are Alright” [sic — I was taught in grammar school that the neologism “alright” was never all right] that indicates the kids might be all right but their parents aren’t, and the film is full of ironies — including the subplot involving Laser’s (we’re told that Nic and Jules named their daughter after Joni Mitchell — and indeed there’s an hilarious scene where they and the others at Paul’s dinner table try to make it through an amateur sing of one of Mitchell’s convoluted lyrics — but we’re never told why their son is called that) best friend Clay (Eddie Hassell), whom at first Nic and Jules think might be Laser’s Gay boyfriend but in fact is a bit of a homophobe, not enough of one to shun a friend whose parents are both female but enough of one to keep calling him a “fag” — they tell Laser they don’t mind him hanging around a boy or even having sex with him; they just don’t like Clay and don’t think he’s good enough for their son. As with Laurel Canyon, the moral of The Kids Are All Right is that it’s precisely the people who think they’re the most unconventional who are in fact the most conventional — the “counterculture” is actually far less “counter” than its members like to think it is.
I’d been a bit worried about this movie because the situation of the long-term Lesbian falling in love (or at least lust) with a man could be played homophobically — “There’s nothing wrong with her that a good stiff cock up her cunt wouldn’t cure” — the way it was in D. H. Lawrence’s similarly plotted The Fox — but Cholodenko, who got taken to task for this movie by an imdb.com message board poster who said it was shameful that a real-life Lesbian (her photos on the imdb site suggest that she based Annette Bening’s makeup for the role on her own appearance) would make such a homophobic movie — but I like films that depict sexual orientation in some of its real-life complexity and show that people don’t neatly fit into boxes labeled “straight,” “Gay,” “Lesbian” and “Bisexual” even though a lot of times they like to pretend that they do. (As many qualms as I had about Brokeback Mountain, that was one of the things I thought did work about it: the fact that Ennis and Jack didn’t fit any a priori ideas about sexual orientation — they weren’t straight, they weren’t Gay and they weren’t really Bi, either, though Jack did seem the more “Gay” of the two — and not just because he was the bottom in the sex scenes — just as Nic seems the more “Lesbian” of the two women here.)
There’s even the rather quirky fact that in order to excite themselves sexually, Nic and Jules watch, of all things, Gay male porn (courtesy Colt Studios, which gets an acknowledgment in the credits for providing the clips seen in the film) — indicating that for all their love of each other and long-term commitment to their relationship, both of them are still excited by the idea of a penis even if they can live (and fuck) well enough without the real thing. I noticed I liked The Kids Are All Right better than Charles did — that was true of Laurel Canyon as well — and what I liked about it was precisely its transgressive quality, its refusal to fit its characterizations into stereotypical molds of sexual orientation, and it ends as it should end — with Nic and Jules reconciling and getting ready to address the next phase of their lives, now that Joni has left the nest and Laser will soon follow — not because Cholodenko and Blumberg are making some self-consciously “liberal” point about the legitimacy of Lesbian relationships but because they’ve drawn these characters as two people (not two women, or two Lesbians, but two people) who are far better off together than they would be apart.
The film was The Kids Are All Right, directed and co-written (with Stuart Blumberg) by Lisa Cholodenko, whom I remembered from a few years ago as the writer-director of the marvelous film Laurel Canyon. The buzz around this film had been strong and the premise is certainly provocative: a long-term Lesbian couple, Nicole a.k.a. “Nic” (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), have two teenage children, 18-year-old daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and 15-year-old son Laser (Josh Hutcherson), but their own lives together — especially their sex lives — have become routine and boring. The kids are biologically their own — Joni is Nic’s daughter and Laser is Jules’s son — but they were both fathered by a sperm donor, and as the film begin Joni stumbles on the file her mothers had kept on the donation and calls the sperm bank.
She learns that both she and Laser have the same biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a restaurateur (he owns a hole-in-the-wall gourmet place called WYSIWYG — an old computer-world acronym for “What you see is what you get” in the era, the 1980’s, when graphic user interfaces were still unusual, that probably sails over the heads of younger audience members) and organic farmer. Though Nic and Jules (the fact that both her female leads have “masculine” names is itself an indication of Cholodenko’s agenda, bending not only straight stereotypes of how Queer people live but Queer people’s own stereotypes about who we are and why) picked Paul as their donor at least partly because he was going to college and studying international relations, they learn once Joni and Laser track him down that he dropped out relatively quickly and has lived his adult life in a sort of suspended adolescence, burning through a little black book and having affairs with a lot of women — including his current flame, Tanya (Yaya DaCosta), a hot African-American who works as his assistant at the restaurant and who’s a good deal more serious about him than he is about her.
It’s a typical Cholodenko ironic joke that Nic and Jules are Lesbians who have lived like a straight couple (down to Nic, a nurse, seeing herself as the breadwinner of the family and looking askance at Jules’ attempts to forge a career of her own — at one point Jules tells Nic, “You just wanted a wife!”) while Paul is a straight man who’s lived like a Gay man, maintaining a boyish mien (Ruffalo’s loose posture and ability to project his character’s self-centeredness is an acting triumph, especially the way he acts “boyish” while still convincing us the character is 38 years old — he was actually 42 when he shot the film! — and making it believable that so many women in the movie find him irresistible) and avoiding anything that smacks of marriage, family or adult responsibility (though he has been able to make his business at least a small-scale success). Jules’ latest attempt at a career is landscape gardening, and for reasons Cholodenko and Blumberg powerfully hint at without making explicit — to help her out financially? To become part of the family that, after all, includes his only biological progeny? To get into Jules’s pants? All of the above? — Paul hires her to do his garden as her first project.
Proximity works its magic and Paul and Jules end up in bed together, pounding away at each other (there are a lot of sex scenes in movies today, but Ruffalo actually manages to act during one; his depiction of sex is full of furious energy and rapid-fire fucking that projects the character he’s been given, a man for whom sex is a burst of physical intensity rather than anything that seals or is part of an emotional commitment). Paul actually ends up more or less falling in love with Jules, seeing in her a way to the emotional stability and family orientation that’s the biggest single lack in his own life — and she begs off with the words, “I’m married,” suggesting that the situation wouldn’t be any less (or more) complicated if the spouse she was cheating on with Paul were a man. Out of this bizarre mixture of motives that reflects the complexity of real life rather than the neat little packages in which most movies tie up human emotions and behaviors, Paul invites Nic, Jules and the kids to his home for dinner — and Nic finds Jules’s hair in the bathroom and in Paul’s bedroom and catches on to the affair. Then she returns to the dinner table and, in yet another one of the ironies in which Cholodenko’s works abound, Paul offers a toast to “an unconventional family” just as the unconventional family is coming apart for the most conventional reasons conceivable: jealousy, ennui and empty-nest syndrome (the film takes place at the end of summer, just as Joni is about to go off to college).
The title is an ironic evocation of the mid-1960’s Who song “The Kids Are Alright” [sic — I was taught in grammar school that the neologism “alright” was never all right] that indicates the kids might be all right but their parents aren’t, and the film is full of ironies — including the subplot involving Laser’s (we’re told that Nic and Jules named their daughter after Joni Mitchell — and indeed there’s an hilarious scene where they and the others at Paul’s dinner table try to make it through an amateur sing of one of Mitchell’s convoluted lyrics — but we’re never told why their son is called that) best friend Clay (Eddie Hassell), whom at first Nic and Jules think might be Laser’s Gay boyfriend but in fact is a bit of a homophobe, not enough of one to shun a friend whose parents are both female but enough of one to keep calling him a “fag” — they tell Laser they don’t mind him hanging around a boy or even having sex with him; they just don’t like Clay and don’t think he’s good enough for their son. As with Laurel Canyon, the moral of The Kids Are All Right is that it’s precisely the people who think they’re the most unconventional who are in fact the most conventional — the “counterculture” is actually far less “counter” than its members like to think it is.
I’d been a bit worried about this movie because the situation of the long-term Lesbian falling in love (or at least lust) with a man could be played homophobically — “There’s nothing wrong with her that a good stiff cock up her cunt wouldn’t cure” — the way it was in D. H. Lawrence’s similarly plotted The Fox — but Cholodenko, who got taken to task for this movie by an imdb.com message board poster who said it was shameful that a real-life Lesbian (her photos on the imdb site suggest that she based Annette Bening’s makeup for the role on her own appearance) would make such a homophobic movie — but I like films that depict sexual orientation in some of its real-life complexity and show that people don’t neatly fit into boxes labeled “straight,” “Gay,” “Lesbian” and “Bisexual” even though a lot of times they like to pretend that they do. (As many qualms as I had about Brokeback Mountain, that was one of the things I thought did work about it: the fact that Ennis and Jack didn’t fit any a priori ideas about sexual orientation — they weren’t straight, they weren’t Gay and they weren’t really Bi, either, though Jack did seem the more “Gay” of the two — and not just because he was the bottom in the sex scenes — just as Nic seems the more “Lesbian” of the two women here.)
There’s even the rather quirky fact that in order to excite themselves sexually, Nic and Jules watch, of all things, Gay male porn (courtesy Colt Studios, which gets an acknowledgment in the credits for providing the clips seen in the film) — indicating that for all their love of each other and long-term commitment to their relationship, both of them are still excited by the idea of a penis even if they can live (and fuck) well enough without the real thing. I noticed I liked The Kids Are All Right better than Charles did — that was true of Laurel Canyon as well — and what I liked about it was precisely its transgressive quality, its refusal to fit its characterizations into stereotypical molds of sexual orientation, and it ends as it should end — with Nic and Jules reconciling and getting ready to address the next phase of their lives, now that Joni has left the nest and Laser will soon follow — not because Cholodenko and Blumberg are making some self-consciously “liberal” point about the legitimacy of Lesbian relationships but because they’ve drawn these characters as two people (not two women, or two Lesbians, but two people) who are far better off together than they would be apart.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Secret Beyond the Door (Diana Productions/Universal-International, 1948)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the movie Secret Beyond the Door, a 1948 (though imdb.com gives the date as 1947, 1948 is the copyright date on the print) film noir directed by Fritz Lang from a story by Rufus King and a script by Silvia Richards. I hadn’t seen this one since the 1970’s and I had remembered it as pretentious and not all that interesting, and what’s striking about it now is the sheer amount of talent — Lang, stars Michael Redgrave and Joan Bennett (and a chilling villainess performance by Anne Revere, fulfilling the promise she showed as Boris Karloff’s partner in The Devil Commands — when we saw that movie I commented it was a pity that she and Karloff didn’t get to play the Macbeths), cinematographer Stanley Cortez and composer Miklos Rosza (whose overwrought score just ramps up the melodrama to insane levels) — wasted on a story this silly.
If nothing else this film makes clear the affinity between Lang and Alfred Hitchcock — Hitch modeled his style so closely on Lang’s British reviewers in the 1930’s even called him “our Fritz Lang,” and Secret Beyond the Door not only contains references to films Hitchcock had already made (Rebecca, Suspicion, Spellbound) but anticipations of Hitchcocks still to come (notably Strangers on a Train, Vertigo and Psycho) even though the basic story is quite obviously a conscious attempt to transmute the Bluebeard myth into contemporary film noir. Celia Barrett (Joan Bennett) is a never-married woman whose terminally ill brother Rick (Paul Cavanaugh, who frankly looks old enough to be her father — or even her grandfather — rather than her brother) has been looking after her.
She inherits a large sum from him and her attorney and sort-of boyfriend Bob Dwight (James Seay) has set up a trust fund so that even if she marries a gold-digger, he won’t be able to touch the principal. By chance, Charles and I were watching this after we’d seen part of The Heiress on TCM — also a movie about a decently if not spectacularly rich woman whose guardian (her father, in that case) worried about her losing it to a gold-digging man after he died — and in some ways Secret Beyond the Door comes off as what The Heiress might have been if its heroine had actually married her gold-chasing wastrel boyfriend instead of chillingly leaving him hammering on her door as she stands him up for the final time. (It’s also an indication of how the laws had changed regarding women’s property rights in the 50 years between the 1890’s, when The Heiress takes place, and the 1940’s; in the 1890’s a woman’s property automatically became her husband’s after her marriage, and therefore a rich woman marrying a less well-off man would have had absolutely no legal way to stop him from running through her fortune once she tied the knot.)
On a trip to Mexico following her brother’s death Celia meets Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave), a highly regarded architect and publisher of a profitable architectural journal. She instantly falls in love with him and they’re married in a 400-year-old church that fascinates him professionally. They move back to his home in upstate New York and he holds a housewarming party on the grounds — only a sudden rainstorm forces the guests indoors and Mark shows off his collection of rooms. That’s right, rooms: six rooms whose furnishings he’s (mostly) imported from Europe at great expense, all of them distinguished by the fact that famous murders were committed there — all involving either the killing of a family member or a spouse. There’s a seventh room which Mark refuses to open and insists no one but he will ever be allowed to see. Celia meets David Lamphere (Mark Dennis), Mark’s terminally cold and distant 15-year-old son from a previous marriage, and it’s the first intimation she’s had that he had an earlier marriage — and she hears a lot of gossip about how Mark’s first wife conveniently died just when he needed the large sum of money she left him. Mark gets Celia to break the trust her attorney and ex-boyfriend Bob (ya remember Bob?) set up for her, claiming he needs the money to bail out his failing journal, only Bob warns her the journal isn’t really failing and he must have some other, more sinister purpose for wanting her money.
Celia finds the key to that mysterious room number 7 in Mark’s in-home office (unlike most movies about architects, Secret Beyond the Door never shows us Mark actually designing or building anything) and cuts down one of the candles in her bedroom to obtain wax to make an impression of the key so she can have it duplicated. She also catches Miss Robey (Barbara O’Neil), Mark’s maidservant, who’s been wearing a scarf around her face to hide unsightly scars left over from an auto accident — only her face isn’t scarred (she had the accident but later had the scars repaired with plastic surgery, only she never bothered to tell anyone and kept her face concealed for fear Mark was only keeping her on for sympathy and would fire her if he found out she wasn’t really injured) — and of course the night she decides to use the key and enter room 7 she discovers it’s an exact duplicate of her room, in which madman Mark intends to murder her because all his life he’s been controlled by women — first his mother, then his sister Caroline (Anne Revere) and then his first wife — and he’s convinced he murdered his first wife.
Only it turns out [spoiler alert!] the real murderer is Caroline, who killed Mark’s wife (though the script is a bit unclear as to her motive) and is now attempting to use mind control to get Mark to kill Celia. Fortunately, Celia manages to figure out how to break Caroline’s hold over Mark in time; Caroline does her Mrs. Danvers impression and sets fire to Mark’s home, thereby symbolically destroying the evil hanging over them as well as conveniently taking herself out and allowing a weird excuse for a happy ending in which Mark, supposedly cured of his psychological demons, and Celia are shown back in love and on track to make their marriage work after all. Secret Beyond the Door was lampooned when it was new — “Because he thought his mother didn’t love him, the poor fellow developed a terrible, but of course forgivable, compulsion to kill women,” James Agee sniffed in his Nation review — and it hasn’t aged especially well despite the extravagant visual effects Lang and cinematographer Cortez lavished on it: it’s one of the best-looking films ever shot in the noir style, but all the atmosphere can’t conceal the silliness of the story or the sheer number of plot points (like Robey’s imposture and David’s twitchiness) that lead nowhere.
Part of the problem is Joan Bennett: she’d made two first-rate films with Lang (and the same producer, her real-life husband Walter Wanger), The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, but in both those she was playing the villainess — and playing her superbly. This time around she seems oddly flat and affect-less playing a woman we’re supposed to like and care about — and Richards’ script gives her a voice-over narration which Bennett delivers with all the emotional intensity of a woman ordering a blue-plate special at a cheap restaurant. Secret Beyond the Door is the sort of bad movie one regrets more than usual because the talent involved could easily have created something great instead of this dreary pseudo-psychological thriller in which Lang comes off as an inferior imitator of Hitchcock — who got virtually his whole style from Lang in the first place!
I ran the movie Secret Beyond the Door, a 1948 (though imdb.com gives the date as 1947, 1948 is the copyright date on the print) film noir directed by Fritz Lang from a story by Rufus King and a script by Silvia Richards. I hadn’t seen this one since the 1970’s and I had remembered it as pretentious and not all that interesting, and what’s striking about it now is the sheer amount of talent — Lang, stars Michael Redgrave and Joan Bennett (and a chilling villainess performance by Anne Revere, fulfilling the promise she showed as Boris Karloff’s partner in The Devil Commands — when we saw that movie I commented it was a pity that she and Karloff didn’t get to play the Macbeths), cinematographer Stanley Cortez and composer Miklos Rosza (whose overwrought score just ramps up the melodrama to insane levels) — wasted on a story this silly.
If nothing else this film makes clear the affinity between Lang and Alfred Hitchcock — Hitch modeled his style so closely on Lang’s British reviewers in the 1930’s even called him “our Fritz Lang,” and Secret Beyond the Door not only contains references to films Hitchcock had already made (Rebecca, Suspicion, Spellbound) but anticipations of Hitchcocks still to come (notably Strangers on a Train, Vertigo and Psycho) even though the basic story is quite obviously a conscious attempt to transmute the Bluebeard myth into contemporary film noir. Celia Barrett (Joan Bennett) is a never-married woman whose terminally ill brother Rick (Paul Cavanaugh, who frankly looks old enough to be her father — or even her grandfather — rather than her brother) has been looking after her.
She inherits a large sum from him and her attorney and sort-of boyfriend Bob Dwight (James Seay) has set up a trust fund so that even if she marries a gold-digger, he won’t be able to touch the principal. By chance, Charles and I were watching this after we’d seen part of The Heiress on TCM — also a movie about a decently if not spectacularly rich woman whose guardian (her father, in that case) worried about her losing it to a gold-digging man after he died — and in some ways Secret Beyond the Door comes off as what The Heiress might have been if its heroine had actually married her gold-chasing wastrel boyfriend instead of chillingly leaving him hammering on her door as she stands him up for the final time. (It’s also an indication of how the laws had changed regarding women’s property rights in the 50 years between the 1890’s, when The Heiress takes place, and the 1940’s; in the 1890’s a woman’s property automatically became her husband’s after her marriage, and therefore a rich woman marrying a less well-off man would have had absolutely no legal way to stop him from running through her fortune once she tied the knot.)
On a trip to Mexico following her brother’s death Celia meets Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave), a highly regarded architect and publisher of a profitable architectural journal. She instantly falls in love with him and they’re married in a 400-year-old church that fascinates him professionally. They move back to his home in upstate New York and he holds a housewarming party on the grounds — only a sudden rainstorm forces the guests indoors and Mark shows off his collection of rooms. That’s right, rooms: six rooms whose furnishings he’s (mostly) imported from Europe at great expense, all of them distinguished by the fact that famous murders were committed there — all involving either the killing of a family member or a spouse. There’s a seventh room which Mark refuses to open and insists no one but he will ever be allowed to see. Celia meets David Lamphere (Mark Dennis), Mark’s terminally cold and distant 15-year-old son from a previous marriage, and it’s the first intimation she’s had that he had an earlier marriage — and she hears a lot of gossip about how Mark’s first wife conveniently died just when he needed the large sum of money she left him. Mark gets Celia to break the trust her attorney and ex-boyfriend Bob (ya remember Bob?) set up for her, claiming he needs the money to bail out his failing journal, only Bob warns her the journal isn’t really failing and he must have some other, more sinister purpose for wanting her money.
Celia finds the key to that mysterious room number 7 in Mark’s in-home office (unlike most movies about architects, Secret Beyond the Door never shows us Mark actually designing or building anything) and cuts down one of the candles in her bedroom to obtain wax to make an impression of the key so she can have it duplicated. She also catches Miss Robey (Barbara O’Neil), Mark’s maidservant, who’s been wearing a scarf around her face to hide unsightly scars left over from an auto accident — only her face isn’t scarred (she had the accident but later had the scars repaired with plastic surgery, only she never bothered to tell anyone and kept her face concealed for fear Mark was only keeping her on for sympathy and would fire her if he found out she wasn’t really injured) — and of course the night she decides to use the key and enter room 7 she discovers it’s an exact duplicate of her room, in which madman Mark intends to murder her because all his life he’s been controlled by women — first his mother, then his sister Caroline (Anne Revere) and then his first wife — and he’s convinced he murdered his first wife.
Only it turns out [spoiler alert!] the real murderer is Caroline, who killed Mark’s wife (though the script is a bit unclear as to her motive) and is now attempting to use mind control to get Mark to kill Celia. Fortunately, Celia manages to figure out how to break Caroline’s hold over Mark in time; Caroline does her Mrs. Danvers impression and sets fire to Mark’s home, thereby symbolically destroying the evil hanging over them as well as conveniently taking herself out and allowing a weird excuse for a happy ending in which Mark, supposedly cured of his psychological demons, and Celia are shown back in love and on track to make their marriage work after all. Secret Beyond the Door was lampooned when it was new — “Because he thought his mother didn’t love him, the poor fellow developed a terrible, but of course forgivable, compulsion to kill women,” James Agee sniffed in his Nation review — and it hasn’t aged especially well despite the extravagant visual effects Lang and cinematographer Cortez lavished on it: it’s one of the best-looking films ever shot in the noir style, but all the atmosphere can’t conceal the silliness of the story or the sheer number of plot points (like Robey’s imposture and David’s twitchiness) that lead nowhere.
Part of the problem is Joan Bennett: she’d made two first-rate films with Lang (and the same producer, her real-life husband Walter Wanger), The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, but in both those she was playing the villainess — and playing her superbly. This time around she seems oddly flat and affect-less playing a woman we’re supposed to like and care about — and Richards’ script gives her a voice-over narration which Bennett delivers with all the emotional intensity of a woman ordering a blue-plate special at a cheap restaurant. Secret Beyond the Door is the sort of bad movie one regrets more than usual because the talent involved could easily have created something great instead of this dreary pseudo-psychological thriller in which Lang comes off as an inferior imitator of Hitchcock — who got virtually his whole style from Lang in the first place!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)