Self-Styled Siren

For the Love of Film III: Last Night I Dreamt I Went to the NFPF Again

2012-02-01T09:00:00.005-05:00

The trio of films had been a mixed stew, and Graham Cutts wondered if he had the right crew. His assistant director might have been spreading himself too ambitiously around the production, he complained…[the A.D.] was writing script and title cards, designing the sets, preparing the cast, supervising the costumes and props.

Oh for pity's sake, those assistant directors, always running around making themselves indispensable. Why don't they just go out and direct their own dadgum movies, if they think they're so smart?

In the case of that trio of films mentioned up there, that's exactly what the A.D. in question did.

Hardly anything is known about these films; no prints survive, no press materials or production files. But it is clear that the position and authority of director Graham Cutts was gradually reduced as Alfred Hitchcock moved from job to job, from strength to strength. Ten years later, Cutts would be looking for day work in any studio while HItchcock was in the uncomfortable position of having to give not very significant employment to his former boss.

Aha. Now we're interested, Mr. Spoto. Wouldn't it be nice to see one of these 1923 and '24 efforts, seeing as how this Hitchcock gentleman turned out to be rather a worthwhile filmmaker, in his own small way? "No prints survive"--aw, nuts.

But with Hitchcock, the plot always twists. In this case, we jump-cut to New Zealand more than 80 years later, where a cache of 85 films was discovered, repatriated and preserved by our pals at the National Film Preservation Foundation. Among them were Upstream, a John Ford film previously thought lost, and the two movies our blogathon money helped restore, The Sergeant and The Better Man.

And, when they got to the bottom of the wrapping paper, lo and behold--three reels, or one-half, of The White Shadow, the movie Alfred Hitchcock was so energetically meddling with in 1924. After it was restored in New Zealand, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screened it in Los Angeles last fall, with a new score by composer Michael Mortilla.

What's that? you weren't at the screening? Neither was the Siren, now that you mention it. Heigh-ho, another great filmgoing party that WE MISSED. Let's call Brad and Angelina and see what they're doing Saturday night.

To get serious, one of the recurring motifs here at Self-Styled Siren is access--the continuing quest to see movies that remain frustratingly out of our reach. Our friends at the NFPF know how we feel, truly they do. They have streamed a number of the rescued films on their website, at no charge. It's part of their commitment not only to film history, but to bringing that history to as wide an audience as possible.

Streaming requires some serious lolly, however. In this case, it will take about $15,000 to put The White Shadow online and record the score. So, after asking our readers for their thoughts, the Siren, together with goddess Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and (for the first time this year) her intrepid partner from Down Under, Roderick Heath of This Island Rod, have decided to help the NFPF get The White Shadow out there on the Web, for four months on their site, free, for anyone to see.

There you have it: the mission and fundraising goal of this year's For the Love of Film blogathon, occurring in the merry month of May, from May 13 to May 18, 2012. Let's point out all the angles.

1. This, my friends and patient readers, is a call for participation and posts. The not-so-shocking twist this year is that bloggers are requested to post on any aspect of Hitchcock, which of course suggests topics as diverse as--oh, come on, how hard can that be? Or, as always, posts on all matters film-preservation-related are equally welcome. The Siren's comments section is open for business, as are Marilyn's and Rod's. You don't have to know what you're going to write (you think the Siren knows yet? puh-leez) but do let us know if you're in.

2. We may not be holding the actual hoedown until May, but when it comes to promoting the blogathon to your readers, there is no time like the present. Rod Heath has created some spiffy banners, which will not only dress up a blog no end, but will also get out the good word.

3. David Wells, who keeps the NFPF website humming, will be doing the same for the For the Love of Film Facebook fan page, putting up photos and clips. Just click on that link to become a fan. It will keep you up to date on developments, and even better, becoming a fan helps us raise money. There is also a handy section with a nuts-and-bolts description of just what a blogathon is, should you require that information.

4. Marilyn, whose energy suggests she may have been a military general or perhaps a studio head in a past life, this year has put together a package of sponsor opportunities to businesses who want to help out the NFPF and The White Shadow. There are two levels of sponsorship; both come with benefits that will spread a message to the blogathon's movie-loving base. Anyone interested should email Marilyn at ferdyonfilms(at)comcast(dot)net.

5. Raffle prizes are on offer again this year, courtesy of the NFPF. If you would like to donate a prize yourself, contact Marilyn--that address again is ferdyonfilms(at)comcast(dot)net.

6. Finally, you say you're so excited, you want to donate some money already? Knock yourself out. The NFPF has already set up a donor link, exclusively for the blogathon, right here.

The first year, we helped restore two silent movies. Last year, we raised money for the Film Noir Foundation and their efforts to restore 1950's The Sound of Fury, a key film from the blacklisted director Cy Endfield--and the blogger participation and number of donors rose even higher. This year, we are working to get a piece of film history out there for everyone to see, with a score that's worthy of its importance.

Let's get the word out. Like Jack Favell, we only want to see justice done.

The Shrike (1955)

2012-01-29T14:26:00.007-05:00

The Siren, after musing here several times that she would like to see The Shrike, was able to achieve that goal via the kind offices of a reader. She has no idea why this picture is so goshdarned hard to see. Given that it's based on a 1952 Pulitzer-winning play by Joseph Kramm, the Siren is inclined to finger our old friend the ULP, or underlying literary property, as Lee Tsiantis once explained here. The Siren usually feels bad about writing up movies that are more or less completely out of circulation, but she’s offering some thoughts on this one for several reasons.

One, some patient readers have also expressed interest. Two, it’s interesting in ways that don’t necessarily demand seeing it. Three, it stars Siren nemesis June Allyson.

And what you undoubtedly want to know is, “Is she any good?” Why yes, she is. If you’re a June Allyson fan who hasn’t quit reading this blog in disgust, you’ll admire her on the merits. If you dislike Allyson’s screen persona as the Siren does, then you will probably agree that here we have the definitive June Allyson performance. She’s perfect. That gurgling voice, like Jean Arthur with pernicious anemia; that pageboy bob, the demure gaze, the button-nosed girlishness--all of that finally creating a portrait of a woman who will TEAR YOUR SOUL APART.

Jose Ferrer, who directed and starred in the play on Broadway, knew what he was doing when he cast Allyson as Ann Downs. This gal is subtle. Joan Crawford’s Harriet Craig drifts around her house like an iceberg in search of a liner to sink, and everyone knows she’s a bitch, she’s practically got it embroidered on the sofa cushions. In the few analyses you can find out there of The Shrike, Ann Downs is usually described as a shrew--a different bird from the prey-impaling one of the title, but you get the idea. But played by Allyson, Ann isn’t very shrewish at all. As she torments poor husband Jim (Jose Ferrer, who also directed) right into an entrée of phenobarbitol and a subsequent holiday in the state mental ward, she rarely raises her voice. All her little undermining remarks, even her small displays of temper, are delivered with the same kittenish mannerisms that Allyson brought to everything from Good News to that ghastly remake of My Man Godfrey. It’s pretty seriously brilliant.

Misogyny is a word that the Siren deploys with caution, to avoid lessening its impact; usually a simple sentence such as “The heroine was a complete dingbat” will suffice. Discussing The Shrike without misogyny, though, would be the equivalent of discussing Gone With the Wind without bothering to mention the Civil War. It’s the essence of the movie--an unshakable male conviction that the little woman full of advice for your career is really trying to eat your entrails like an after-dinner mint. Ann is onscreen plenty, as when she’s visiting Jim in the loony bin, making it clear he must stay there until he’s knuckled under to all her demands. Or, she’s in his flashbacks, bugging him to give her a part in his play (he’s a theater director), carefully clipping out his bad reviews or sweetly bringing up ways he can metaphorically shoot himself in the nuts. Her perspective is nowhere to be found, though. She’s a frustrated actress, but if she’s frustrated that’s her problem. At no point, not even after a miscarriage leaves her barren, does it occur to Jim to tell Ann to get a hobby or just get the hell out of the house. Yeah, yeah, it’s 1955--she could at least go out to lunch or volunteer at the Junior League or something. Instead, the movie’s attitude toward Ann is summed up by a shrink who’s questioning her, when he asks in a sort of Congressional-hearing tone, “Mrs. Downs, are you familiar with the term castrating?”

No, no, it’s all about Jim’s suffering, which Ferrer underlines in black magic marker via extravagantly long takes of his own tortured and sometimes tear-stained face. As the director of this film, Ferrer cares about himself, at a suitable distance he cares about the other actors, and that’s pretty much it. The Shrike exhibits Joshua Logan levels of camera cluelessness. At one point Ferrer emerges from a hospital room and walks across a hall that stretches away into a geometric film-noir grid. And the Siren yelled from her cozy perch on the living-room sofa, “You idiot! That’s a great shot! Hold still a second!” But Ferrer keep moving. And that means the camera must, too.

He is, however, good in this, as is the entire cast, including Mary Hayley Bell, a.k.a. Juliet and Hayley Mills' mom, playing an ancestress of Nurse Ratched who’s possessed of a Karo-syrup Southern accent. The Shrike, then, is a well-acted sociological artifact and not really a neglected gem. But if you can track it down, it will give you plenty to think about, including whether Allyson was miscast in all those other movies, and not this one.

What the Siren Will Be Doing on the Night of Feb. 26

2012-01-25T13:21:00.006-05:00

To her recollection, the Siren has never posted about an Oscar race, as opposed to the ceremony, but there's a first time for everything. This year, there are two movies up for Best Picture that are deeply concerned with film history: Hugo and The Artist. The Siren worshipped Hugo, as you know. The Artist was not as accomplished but she still found it a lovely movie, albeit one with parts that didn't work.

During the run-up to Oscar season (a long series of ceremonies fused in the Siren's mind as the "You Can't Make Me Care" awards), there's been a lot of venom directed at both these pictures online. (Greg Ferrara recently discussed that phenomenon under topic 5 of this post.) Why this is happening, the Siren couldn't tell you. There's a lack of proportion when some critics dislike a middlebrow, well-received movie, a type of anabolic rage that the Siren works mightily to avoid. She doesn't hold back because she aspires to become The Blessed Siren. She tempers her words because she wants to have some white-hot invective left if she should ever have to review something like, I don't know, Human Centipede 2.

The Siren has no quarrel with those who find Hugo or The Artist to be flawed to one degree or another--well, beyond marshaling cogent and irrefutable explanations of why with Hugo they're wrong. Marilyn Ferdinand was resolutely uncharmed by The Artist. Comrade Lou Lumenick responded to Hugo with, in essence, "meh." But there is one strain in the anti-Hugo, anti-Artist camps up with which the Siren will not put. That could be called the "ugh, a film about film history" strain.

It probably isn't Slate's fault that the Siren reached the outmost limit of enough when she saw these two discussions. It was bound to happen at some point, but that point came when in part two, Dan Kois weighed in with:

Are you ready for the most self-important Oscars ever??? Troy, you’re absolutely right that this year’s nominations skew oooooold. They’re also cinema-obsessed. Glen Weldon of NPR had it right when he tweeted that nods for The Artist and Hugo have essentially guaranteed that this Oscar ceremony will be well-nigh insufferable. ('The cinema. Dreams made of light, flickering in the dark. Film is the very language of the soul …') On Oscar night, I’m playing a drinking game in which I down a cocktail every time Martin Scorsese calls his movie 'the picture.' We've already made a reservation in the penthouse suit of our local hospital.

Mm-hm. Let's rewind the reel. Dave Kehr and others write frequently about the legions of films that have dropped out of circulation. We write about how hard it is to see some films even from major auteurs such as Raoul Walsh and Ernst Lubitsch, let alone someone arcane like Alfred E. Green. Huge swaths of the general public don’t want to see a black-and-white movie (and for that reason alone, the Siren doesn't think anyone should "barf" over an Artist win). Outside the major cities, the revival house is on the verge of extinction, and the people running the few that survive tell bloodcurdling tales of their struggles to obtain prints. Thirty-five millimeter is about to bite the dust (read here and sign the petition, the Siren hasn't even the heart to summarize). There is an overwhelming tilt toward the new on the big, high-traffic movie sites. About four years ago, Internet film writers--cinephiles, in other words, mostly young ones--were surveyed to compile a list of the 100 best films; two-thirds of the films selected were produced after 1970.

In light of all that, if you have a problem with a few minutes of people talking about light passing through film or the magic of the movies or whatever, while some old clips scroll by at the Kodak Theatre, then what the Siren says to you is suck it up.

The Siren stated her, ah, displeasure on Twitter and got a very polite and collegial response from Dana Stevens and Kois himself, Kois asking "Can't we lobby for the Oscars to deliver the message without the rhetoric?" and adding, "Use video. Use storytelling. Build an appreciation for film history without lectures." Fair enough, although the Siren thinks complaining about pompous writing in an Oscarcast is like complaining that the soy sauce is salty. The Siren will take Mr. Kois at his word, and has no hard feelings.

Even so, the Siren hereby declares her rooting interests ahead of the 84th Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Feb. 26. Forgive her language in advance.

The Siren wants an Oscar ceremony so stuffed with old-movie clips that the fanboy contingent chokes on their Cheetos. She wants tributes, she wants high-flown overwritten paeans, she wants audience reaction shots of dewy 20-year-old starlets looking puzzled as shit at the sight of Janet Gaynor.

The Siren will go further. If Michel Hazanavicius wins, she wants him to take that list of silent-movie inspirations he did for Indiewire, name-check them all and cause Wikipedia to crash from all the people looking up "King Vidor" at the same time. Then, she hopes Hazanavicius praises City Lights, which he said inspired The Artist more than any other film, and then she wants him to spell out the Amazon.com URL for The Chaplin Collection Volume Two letter by fucking letter.

Of course, the Siren hopes Scorsese wins. And if he does, she wants him to talk about the tragedy of decaying film stock. She wants him to point at the executives in the audience like Burr McIntosh ordering Lillian Gish into the snowstorm and demand to know what the hell they think they are doing, trashing 35 millimeter. She wants him to mention projection speeds, she wants an explanation of three-strip Technicolor and dye-transfer, she wants black-and-white deep-focus and a history of lenses from the Lumiere brothers on, she wants him to tell the suits to let poor Frank Borzage out of the vaults. She wants Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest film-preservation champions this country has ever produced, to get up there and talk longer than Greer Garson, talk until the violinists dangle their bows and wonder if they should grab a cup of coffee, talk until one single human being out there who has never seen a silent film sits up and says, "Gee, I should check one of these things out."

It won't happen. But if the Siren were a true pessimist, she'd blog about politics, not movies.

Out of Line

2012-01-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

Prompted by Letter From an Unknown Woman, below, the Siren has been thinking about line delivery. In that column the Siren talks about the way Joan Fontaine as Lisa tells her soldier suitor that she has someone else. Fontaine doesn’t play that as a lie, which would be the obvious choice. She plays it as truth, which to Lisa it is.

One thing that defines a talented actor is the ability to take a line in a script, recognize the straightforward way to play it, then pull the words in a direction that the audience doesn’t expect or that reveals something hidden about the action. A perfect line delivery transfixes the Siren, causes her to go back later and say, “What is this actor doing here?” This no minor skill. It’s crushingly hard. Those critics who talk about actors primarily as vessels of the film director’s vision--like Bishop Berkeley who said, as Martin Gardner put it, that we are all just “ ‘sorts of things’ in the mind of God”--have they ever sat for hours watching an actor struggle to put something under a line, even if the director is standing there repeating the words exactly as he wants them? The Siren has not only watched that, she’s been that actor on a couple of long-past occasions. That’s a big part of why she writes about acting the way she does.

The Siren isn’t necessarily talking about simple negation, where the line is angry, so you play it cool, or the line is sweet, so you say it like an insult. The Siren is thinking about layer and nuance that are so full and so natural that once the actor speaks, it becomes hard to conceive of the line being said any other way.

Take Rhett Butler’s kiss-off, probably the most famous line in the history of cinema. The way Clark Gable utters that sentiment isn’t the way Margaret Mitchell describes it at all. In the novel, during the long speech where Rhett tells Scarlett that his feelings for her are dead, he shrugs, sighs, and then: “He drew a short breath and said lightly but softly, ‘My dear, I don’t give a damn.’ ” Mitchell had no “frankly”--that was David O. Selznick’s contribution. Gable still could have played it Mitchell’s way, but he didn’t.

The Siren always thought the novel Gone With the Wind made it clear that Scarlett wasn’t getting Rhett back. You can fight to keep a man who’s angry at you. You will never, ever, ever have a chance in this world with one who has grown indifferent. Now look at Gable, above. That isn’t indifference. There’s only a little anger, mostly from the way his eyes snap. But the touch of venom in Gable’s voice, and the twist of his mouth, and his stance, show a man who’s trying to wound. And when a man cares enough to want his words to hurt, he presents a possibility. A faint, feeble one, but a possibility nonetheless. Whether it was because the director(s) and Selznick didn’t want the door to slam forever, or because Gable himself didn’t want to play love extinguished, the line as Gable says it gives Scarlett a chance.

So, for her own amusement, and she hopes yours, too, the Siren came up with an off-the-cuff list of lines--some famous, some that the Siren just happens to like--that exemplify what she's talking about. This isn’t meant to be definitive in any way; it’s just a start. The Siren feels certain her patient readers have their own entries.

Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce: “You might as well get this straight. Those kids come first in this house. Before either one of us. Maybe that's right and maybe it's wrong. But that's the way it is.” The whole movie turns on this admission. It could be said angrily, defensively, self-righteously or apologetically, especially since this marks the climax of a nasty fight with her husband. Crawford, so often accused of overplaying, opts for blunt resignation, as though Mildred’s reminding Bert Pierce that the rent is due.

Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man: “But--that was just by way of being a good Christian act.” Mary Kate Danaher has, to this point, shown a harridan streak you could measure in square acres. She’s made her attraction to John Wayne’s character obvious--as a matter of fact, he just kissed her, and she gave him a “wallop”--but this line shows the heart that we’ve been hoping would turn up. Sean Thornton tells Mary Kate that he appreciates her cleaning his cottage, and O’Hara responds with gentle sincerity, suddenly becoming the woman he saw all along.

John Wayne in The Searchers: “That’ll be the day.” Of course, he says that at least three times, often enough to pique Buddy Holly’s interest. The Siren particularly likes the line as Wayne’s rejoinder to Jeffrey Hunter’s half-strangled, furious “I hope you die.” There isn’t a crumb of machismo or even warning. It’s the factual declaration of a man who knows a boy hasn’t a prayer of besting him, or even waiting him out. Ethan Edwards has torments and raging neuroses aplenty. Fear of someone else’s anger isn’t one of them.

Cary Grant in His Girl Friday: “What were you thinking with?” This endlessly funny movie, so wise about journalists and what makes a man and a woman right for each other, turns that throwaway remark into a shimmering romantic gem, a love declaration that ranks well up in the Siren’s pantheon. “I thought you didn’t love me,” sobs Rosalind Russell. And Grant replies with a mixture of irritation, tenderness, reproach and a bit of hurt--he's hurt that Hildy thought he was going to be noble. He loves her, and nobility is for chumps, and come on Hildy, what did you think he was, a chump?

James Cagney in White Heat: “Oh, stuffy, huh? I’ll give ya a little air.” Whereupon Cody Jarrett fires about four or five shots into the car trunk that holds the man who was complaining he couldn’t breathe. The Siren includes this because it’s such a template for all the merrily psychopathic gangsters to come: gunfire as self-amusement. Cagney doesn’t telegraph the joke, he just makes it, and he speaks with his mouth still full of chicken, so off-hand that you know the decision was made just that fast.

Joan Bennett in The Reckless Moment: “Everyone has a mother like me. You probably had one, too.” Lucia Harper says that to the blackmailer, Donnelly (James Mason), who could destroy her life. He is already half in love with her, this woman who deploys all her intelligence and courage to protect her feckless daughter and absent husband. Donnelly tells Lucia that her daughter is lucky to have a mother like her, something the audience has been thinking for quite some time, and she doesn't respond with indignation or rebuke--it isn’t ”would you treat your own mother this way?”--or confusion or modesty at the compliment. Instead, it’s almost like she’s blurting it to herself, because she’s annoyed with Donnelly for forcing her to point out the obvious.

Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise: “And let me say this, with love in my heart: Countess, you are a thief. The wallet of the gentleman in 253, 5, 7 and 9 is in your possession. I knew it very well when you took it out of my pocket. In fact, you tickled me. But your embrace was so sweet.” The Siren could have filled her entire list with lines from Lubitsch movies, where a huge part of the humor comes from playing around with expectations. (Like Jack Benny, dead serious in To Be or Not to Be: “Maybe he’s dead already! Oh darling, you’re so comforting.”) An actor could easily take this line toward dry, ironic or mocking. Marshall tells the Countess she’s a thief like he’s the Dueling Cavalier telling Lina Lamont, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday: “Would you do me a favor, Harry?...Drop dead.” No nastiness, no anger, not even triumph--it’s childlike glee at her own daring.

Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate: “Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” A serenely maternal suggestion. Any line, and the Siren means that literally, any single line of Mrs. Iselin’s could be included here, Lansbury is that good. This one, though, sums up the performance as a supreme example of underplaying. Give the ornate speeches of this megalomaniac even a touch of the cartoon villain, and the whole movie collapses like--OK, the Siren will resist that one.

Orson Welles in The Third Man: “Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful. Like the fellow said, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.” A deservedly immortal speech, as fine a summation of a cynical outlook as exists in any medium. And how does Welles speak it? With boundless good cheer. Harry Lime does not consider himself to be delivering bad news. That’s why you learn more about Lime’s utter amorality from this little pep talk than you did only a minute or two earlier, when Harry points out that he could easily throw his old friend off the top of the Ferris wheel.

Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

2012-01-20T06:50:00.006-05:00

(Ahead of Turner Classic Movies's Max Ophuls in Hollywood night, the Siren is posting the first column she did for the now-defunct Nomad Wide Screen. The Siren posted an excerpt last year, but this is the original column in its entirety. It concerns Joan Fontaine's performance in Letter From an Unknown Woman, which airs at 11:15 pm EST. Our old friend Lee Tsiantis popped into comments to mention, if you did not see it, that immediately after the 1 am screening of The Exile, TCM will show the alternate, "European" ending to that film, straight from the vaults of the Library of Congress. Lee is too modest to mention, so the Siren will do it for him, that TCM's first screening of Caught came about because he chose it for their Employee Picks series. All this, plus The Reckless Moment. And exactly one week from tonight is Joan Fontaine night, which includes the just-rescued-from-rights-hell-by-TCM treasure, The Constant Nymph. The Siren suggests a tagline: "TCM takes the sting out of Monday.")

I date my abiding passion for Joan Fontaine to my first viewing of Letter from an Unknown Woman, Max Ophuls' 1948 masterpiece, as pure an example of a woman's picture as exists. Women's pictures--that romantic subset of golden-age melodrama where, as Molly Haskell said, "the swirling river of a woman's emotions is as important as anything on earth"--have always been my favorite genre. One reason for my partiality is that these films stand or fall on the female star as much as on the director. And so it was Fontaine who caught my imagination playing a character, Lisa Berndl, who endures unrequited love from beginning to end. Pain is a key element in women's pictures--the pain of abandonment, of losing men, children, society's respect--but Fontaine recognized that the script and Ophuls' direction would show that for her. She couldn't play pure suffering, a passive course for an actor that risks the audience becoming restive or even contemptuous. Fontaine had to play reckless, willful determination, and she had to play it based on something more than physical or emotional yearning.

I'm always amazed when I read discussions of this famous movie that don't mention a crucial point--when Lisa falls in love with pianist Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan, also giving his best performance), she falls in love with his art. Her first appearance is as a 14-year-old clambering around a moving cart piled with his books, his scores, his instruments, all the paraphenalia of an artist's life. "I wondered who owned such beautiful things," she says. Fontaine was 30 years old when she made the movie, and while she doesn't look that age, she doesn't look 14, either. But Fontaine has a girl's energy down perfectly, the way movement comes in spurts, awkward one moment and graceful the next. Lisa doesn't yet have the ability to conceal fascination, she doesn't even have the desire to do so. She stops and gives her whole focus. When she sneaks into Stefan's rooms, her face shows a fleeting sense of wrongdoing only at the beginning and when she flees at the end; while looking around she is too thrilled to care.

Lisa has been living in this shabby-genteel boarding house with her mother, a woman who seems nice enough but as ordinary as a bar of soap. We get glimpses of the girl's routine: shapeless clothes, drab furniture, dimwitted playmates, a whole day set aside each week to beat the dust out of the rugs. Lisa is one of those creatures who sometimes arise in such an environment, intelligent and sensitive in a way wholly unsuited to the life laid out for her. And so she falls in love, not with a face or a voice, but with the sound of a piano. Lisa listens to Stefan's practicing with an expression as ardent as any she shows later. When Lisa finally sees Stefan and pulls the door open for him--which Fontaine does not tenderly, but with a swift jerk--she isn't enamored for the first time. She is already in love, her feelings bound up with his music. His handsome face is just the fulfillment.

Her mother finds a fat, affable husband, and Lisa leaves Vienna for Linz. Before she goes, she makes one last humiliating attempt to see Stefan, who comes reeling home with another woman and never sees Lisa waiting for him on the landing above. She is far from resigned, however. In Linz, Lisa is courted by an impossibly stiff, good-looking lieutenant. And again art comes into play--she strolls around the town square with the soldier, listening to a proficient but uninspired military band. They play an amiable tune with none of the febrile emotion of "Il Sospiro," the Liszt piece played by Stefan and heard on the soundtrack again and again. Fontaine moves her eyes between the lieutenant and the band, and her boredom becomes almost frantic. She heads off the officer's proposal by telling him she is already engaged, a scene Fontaine plays not as telling a lie, but revealing a secret truth, relief uncoiling her body as she finally blurts it out.

Later, when she works as a model in a dressmaker's shop, Fontaine again flips expectations. She is ill at ease walking in the elegant clothes, she is tremulous when waiting in the snow to catch Stefan's eye, but she is no stammering wreck when he finally begins his seduction. Of course not, why would she be? These are conversations she has already played out in her head. In the train car at the carnival, she isn't tongue-tied. She wants desperately to hear Stefan, but when she does talk the words pour out like the painted scenery unspooling behind them. Like all great Romantics, Lisa hurtles toward the fate she's chosen. Jourdan kisses her, and Ophuls' camera shows the actor's head blotting out that of Fontaine--but it isn't obliteration, it's apotheosis.

Lisa's later life finds her trapped in a more golden version of the boarding house at the beginning, with a kind but severe husband and a house decked not with pictures and musical scores, but with swords and guns. Fontaine's movements are more assured, but she talks to her husband with the polite distance you might use for a father-in-law. Even when she addresses her son, whom she clearly loves, she seems to talk to herself: "Can't you call him father?" Later, after Lisa encounters Stefan and her husband knows she is going to leave, he tells her she has free will and she replies, "I can't help it." Fontaine won't look at him during this exchange, but her face shows deception, not shame. Lisa claims she has no choice, but she has chosen every step, and she knows it.

When David Thomson wrote about this movie in the Guardian in January, he claimed (after faulting Fontaine's acting, which is crazy talk) that the movie is not Lisa's story, but that of Stefan. This is only half-right. Letter is Lisa's story, but the tragedy is Stefan's. When she goes to see him for the last time, Lisa immediately asks him to play, a request that echos a moment years earlier when she knelt and to hear him play on a creaky, ill-tuned piano, and listened with a face more rapt than when he kissed her later. Now, when she finds his piano locked, Fontaine's face already registers the betrayal that's coming. She's lost him, but he has lost his art to hedonism. Lisa pursues her Romantic ideal; he does not.

There are many great women's pictures about unrequited love, such as The Old Maid, or thankless devotion, such as the 1941 Back Street. The key difference between the female characters in those movies and Letter from an Unknown Woman is Fontaine. She helps turn Ophuls' film into a tale of obsessive love not as masochism, but a heretical, even noble pursuit.

TCM Alert: Renoir and Ophuls

2012-01-15T08:42:00.006-05:00

Two films on TCM this month demand that you record them or, if you aren't equipped to do that, that you find someone with a DVR who is willing to take bribes.

The Siren's sole viewing of the 1946 Diary of a Chambermaid, directed by Jean Renoir, happened years ago via a VHS tape that was in crappy shape even by the crappy standards of VHS rentals at the time. For the life of her the Siren does not understand why this movie is so elusive these days. When she saw it, the Siren thought it was the best of Renoir's American films and, she hastens to tell you, she likes the others plenty. Anyway, TCM is screening it at 1:30 am EST on the morning of Jan. 18, so the Siren will have an opportunity to see if she still feels the same way.

The second film comes as part of a complete "Max Ophuls in America" night on Jan. 23, and kudos to the good souls at TCM for programming this one. The evening begins at 8 pm EST with The Reckless Moment and continues via Caught and Letter from an Unknown Woman, which the Siren won't ramble on about here at the moment, although she may later. But for the Siren, the real rarity is The Exile (1947) at 1 am EST on the morning of Jan. 24. She missed that one at the BAM retrospective a while back and she plans to pounce now. The Exile is, of the four, the most ridiculously hard to see at the moment and to the Siren's knowledge this will mark its TCM debut.

Also noted: Monday Jan. 30 is Joan Fontaine night--five movies, including Born to Be Bad and The Constant Nymph. We addicts have possibly seen all these but, still--Joan!

(The top still comes from the site Notes on Cinema, which has an interesting screen-cap essay about the use of doors in Diary of a Chambermaid.)

Margaret (2011)

2012-01-12T10:01:00.006-05:00

Anyone following a film critic on Twitter has seen the hashtag: #teammargaret. Since early December, Team Margaret has been shaking its pompoms on behalf of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, which was shot in 2005 but released only last year. According to the Los Angeles Times, the movie was held up by a protracted legal battle centered on efforts to get a cut than ran for the contractually specified time of 150 minutes. A two-hour-twenty-nine-minute version of Margaret hit a few theaters last fall and promptly vanished. A group of critics requested, via a petition started by Jaime Christley, that distributor Fox Searchlight provide them with an opportunity to see the movie.

So Team Margaret was born, and lives, and Margaret is getting a second chance in a few venues, including the Cinema Village in Manhattan, where the Siren got around to seeing it. Margaret is being championed by people the Siren respects a great deal, and the Siren does not, as a matter of temperament or habit, enjoy being the grumpy contrarian who rolls her eyes over the pet hamster everyone else thinks is adorable. But one word that recurs even in Margaret raves is "mess." The Siren concludes that she lacks affinity for mess.

From the opening shots, warning bells sounded for the Siren, along with the plucking, plaintive score. The camera shows people crossing the street in bouncing, wave-like slow-motion that highlights every flaw in movement and appearance. There are eight million stories in the naked city, check out the faces of a few. As prologues go, at least it's honest; this one story out of eight million will be going by at the same slow, unflattering gait.

In the opening scenes, teenager Lisa (Anna Paquin) is accused of cheating by a teacher (Matt Damon). She responds with a sullen I'm-not-the-only-one defense and gets off with "don't do it again." She meets a gangly boy, supposedly her friend, who's trying to ask her out, and Lisa demonstrates the traits she will show throughout by refusing either to accept his invitation or to give him a graceful means of ending the conversation. Lisa goes home, brushes off her younger brother and digs an impressive wad of cash out of her dresser so she can shop for a cowboy hat. She goes shopping for said cowboy hat and gazes in shop windows. The shopping trip will change Lisa's life, but even at this point there are overextended scenes and marginal characters.

The bus accident that precipitates the rest of the action is caused by Lisa spying a cowboy hat on a bus driver and asking him where he got it, as she canters alongside the moving vehicle. Instead of ignoring her, the driver tries to respond--whereupon he slams through a red light and into a pedestrian played by Allison Janney. Few pay such a hideous price for a fleeting moment of stupidity, and during the agonizing minutes it takes the pedestrian to bleed to death, as Lisa holds her and two passersby try to help, Margaret briefly takes off. The film offers no better acting and no sharper observations about the behavior of ordinary New Yorkers than in this scene. The confusion and numb shock of the police's arrival and questioning, and Lisa's shattered attempt to bypass her mother when she arrives home, are also well done. So are the moments when Lisa showers off the blood while her mother tries to clean her daughter's boots in the kitchen sink.

At first Lisa lies to protect the bus driver, concerned that he might have a family and could lose his job. Later she goes to visit him and, upon observing that he does indeed have a family and is clearly afraid of losing his job, she decides to retract her statement; later still, she spearheads a lawsuit. Anyway, Lisa's shower marked the end of the Siren's hopes for Margaret. Despite Lisa's simultaneous self-absorption and lack of self-knowledge, her failure to empathize with anyone in this crowded movie save herself, it's clear Lonergan loves his heroine. No walk she takes from point A to point B is too mundane, no phone call she makes too dreary or static for inclusion. What could be Lisa's lone meeting with a police officer is stretched into two or three, plus an encounter with his colleague and some phone chats. Lisa and the accident victim's best friend meet with an attorney--twice--only to be told they require a different sort of attorney; and then Lisa and the friend meet with him a few times.

If you do not love Lisa--and the Siren wanted Veda Pierce to eat the girl for breakfast--good luck. There's Jeannie Berlin as Emily, the victim's friend, a spectacularly real, recognizable performance. And there's a marvelous little scene where a bright student questions English teacher Matthew Broderick's interpretation of a line from King Lear and the teacher responds with lordly annoyance. Otherwise the many supporting characters, while played by laudably unaffected, skilled actors, offer scant respite. Some, like Lisa's chilly father, played by Lonergan himself, are just dull. Some, like Lisa's mother (J. Smith-Cameron), are as nerve-shredding as Lisa. Others are stereotypes, like the mother's boyfriend, a foreign businessman played by Jean Reno with courtly gentleness even up through the scenes where people start arguing over whether he's an anti-Semite.

Even when a conversation achieves a semblance of the rapid, rambling, funny way that New Yorkers actually talk, the movie is so arrhythmic that all humor withers--the Siren's fellow audience members were silent as the tomb. Some classroom arguments center on whether America Deserves What Was Done to Us, a clumsy and slanted way to focus on Lisa's nebulous guilt twinges and how sometimes violence just happens to innocent people. Other classroom interludes bring up apposite literary quotes (such as the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that gives Margaret its title) in an overdetermined manner that made the Siren wish Lonergan would just throw up an epigraph like Michael Curtiz.

The Siren never warmed to the choices made for script, camerawork or editing. A late, head-scratching reference to an abortion seems worth a smidge more exposition in a movie that finds time for crash courses in Mideast issues, personal-injury law and the correct way to shout approval after an opera. The cousin of the accident victim comes to town and she, Lisa and Emily discuss their intent to sue over the accident. Lonergan puts this on screen--but for the culmination of the suit, the cousin is on speakerphone. During one meeting between Lisa and the luckless police officer who's dealing with her, you get two cuts to the parking lot outside the police station. But when Lisa makes a (reciprocated) pass at Matt Damon, the camera bolts away as soon as she starts to dive for his crotch. Maybe the Siren is a pervert, but she would much rather see how that proceeded than wonder why the hell she's looking at a parking lot.

That question--why am I looking at this?--is one that's seldom asked during a great or even serviceable movie, no matter how abstruse. And that question came again and again. The Siren lost count of the pans across buildings. Two highflying helicopters circle, the anxiety of that image diminished by the fact that the movie is still preoccupied with tort law. A boat drifts down the river during a legal meeting; moments later, puzzlingly, the backside of the boat disappears behind a building. The goal, the Siren supposes, is to tie Lisa's dilemma to the larger one that 9/11 gave New Yorkers. But Margaret dawdles so much, its through-line is so slack and its heroine so selfish, that scotch-taped city cutaways can't give the film a connection it hasn't earned.

Favorite Old Movies Viewed in 2011

2012-01-06T09:34:00.007-05:00

When they were passing out the ranking compulsions, the Siren skipped the line. Oh sure, she makes lists, but they don’t tend to focus on ordinal progression. The Siren’s lists are more like clumps. Never, not once has the Siren left a cinema or turned off a DVD and mused, “I must re-shuffle my Intriguingly Investigatible List for 1939.” It just isn’t how she thinks. Maybe the Siren is too soft-hearted to put artists who pleased her way back in the queue, sternly reminding posterity that their movie wasn’t as good as Rules of the Game. Maybe she’s lazy. Probably both.

Given this personality trait, the Siren hasn’t been making lists of Best Old Movies Seen for the First Time in 20Whatever. That’s a little selfish of her, in that the Siren enjoys such lists from other film writers. But she always lacked an ordering principle, a model she could take to heart.

This year, the Siren found one, through Clara at Via Marguta 51. Two things that the Siren liked about this list. One, while it’s composed of links back to Clara's reviews, the descriptions are limited to two sentences or less for each movie. Second, the list is purely about pleasure, its presence or absence. That’s it; no heavy theory or lofty judgments, just pure reaction, posted without any apparent desire to convert or impress. This, thought the Siren, is a methodology ripe for adoption.

In that spirit, the Siren offers her own list of 20 favorite old movies watched for the first time in 2011. The list is based on nothing more than the amount of joy the Siren got from each movie this year, and is ordered by that principle alone.

1. Gone to Earth (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1950). Not just beautiful; it also has soul.

2. The Constant Nymph (Edmund Goulding, 1941). Are you a little weary of the Siren's partisan asides on Jean Negulesco, Fred Zinnemann, George Stevens and Clarence Brown? Rejoice, because this year the Siren will, in addition, be spreading the good word about Edmund Goulding.

3. So Evil My Love (Lewis Allen, 1948). Ray Milland, Ann Todd and Geraldine Fitzgerald at their peak in this glorious gaslight noir based on a celebrated Victorian murder. The Siren recognized the case about midway in, and the windup still shocked her.

4. World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973). Slow start (some walkouts); then Fassbinder’s hero smushes a fedora down on his head and starts running around this fabulously decorated futuristic world asking nosey questions, like Sam Spade turned loose in the sci-fi section at Comic Con. At that point, of course, the Siren was hooked.

5. Union Depot (Alfred E. Green, 1932). The smuttiness masks a romantic heart--just like Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s character.

6. You and Me (Fritz Lang, 1938). Fritz Lang could do anything.

7. Night World (Hobart Henley, 1932). One of Busby Berkeley’s first choreographed numbers, “Who’s Your Little Who-Zis?”, particularly fabulous because the dancers are contained by an approximation of a real nightclub stage. Plus, a great performance by Clarence Muse as the one character with real heartache, and heart.

8. Yield to the Night (J. Lee Thompson, 1956). The Siren joins the Diana Dors fan club.

9. La Bandera (Julien Duvivier, 1935) The Siren’s new favorite Foreign Legion epic, complete with transvestites, a topless dancer, and Robert Le Vigan almost stealing the movie from Jean Gabin.

10. Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (Norman Foster, 1948) Enthralling opening, via Russell Metty. Psychologically complex noir with a touching love story at the center.

11. The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (Robert Siodmak, 1945) Unlike James Agee in his review, the Siren was excited to see a movie about incest that made it past the censors, especially with Siodmak directing. Geraldine Fitzgerald rules and George Sanders is almost as good as in This Land Is Mine.

12. Born to Be Bad (Nicholas Ray, 1950) The Siren is convinced Nicholas Ray loved that staircase as much as the actors.

13. Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933) Only Borzage could take a beautiful young girl’s love for a cruel, selfish jerk and make the Siren root for the girl to get her man.

14. Girls About Town (George Cukor, 1931) Kay Francis is lovely, but it’s Lilyan Tashman’s show, all the way. Chalk this one up for the sisterhood.

15. Roughly Speaking (Michael Curtiz, 1945) Failure can be as loving a bond for a couple as time or triumph.

16. The Strip (László Kardos, 1951) Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden and some fantastic jazz-club ambience. And Mickey Rooney is completely at home in it.

17. Lady on a Train (Charles David, 1945) A film to make tough-talking young critics (looking at you, Simon Abrams) clear their throats and say, “Yeah, it’s really cute.”

18. The Sleeping Tiger (Joseph Losey credited as Victor Hanbury, 1954) Losey always strikes the Siren as gall-and-wormwood bitter, and here that's perfect. Alexis Smith vibrates with suppressed sex and rage, as does Dirk Bogarde.

19. Hallelujah I'm a Bum (Lewis Milestone, 1933) The movie that finally made the Siren see what others see in Al Jolson.

20. Moss Rose (Gregory Ratoff, 1947). More Victorian atmosphere, with Peggy Cummins, Ethel Barrymore and above all Vincent Price.

New Year's Eve with Diana Dors

2011-12-31T13:12:00.012-05:00

The Siren didn't get you a Christmas present. Or a Hanukkah gift, or a Kwanzaa offering, or anything else, and she's sorry, because she loves you all, she does. So here's her gift to you, for New Year's: a link. Click right here and watch the 1956 British noir/social drama, Yield to the Night, in its entirety. The movie stars Diana Dors and was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who went on to helm Ice Cold in Alex, Cape Fear and Guns of Navarone. It's on Region 2 (and was screened a couple of years ago at the Film Forum) but isn't available on DVD here in the U.S. The link was given to the Siren by the generous gentleman named Dan Leo. And now she passes it along.

The Siren warns you, because she can’t deal with the guilt if she doesn’t, that this downbeat movie will not have anyone clinking the champagne glasses. Still, it does have a New Year’s Eve angle--basically, a PSA--which the Siren will note in due course. But at some point soon, please, carve 90-some-odd minutes out of your schedule and watch. Then come back and read this post.

Did you do it? Good. If you didn't, oh, what the hell; this movie is not about plot twists.

Whoever programmed for the PBS Alabama affiliate during the Siren’s girlhood had a raging obsession with a children’s movie called The Amazing Mr. Blunden, or perhaps had acquired a royalty-paying interest in it. Whatever, the (wo)man threw Blunden on the schedule on a regular basis. The Siren and her sister saw Mr. Blunden so many times we'd talk back to the screen in Bama-bred British that would have had Tom Shone grimacing in pain: "Tew layte, Mistah Blunden! Yew're awwlways tew layte!"

The Amazing Mr. Blunden meant Young Siren thought Diana Dors was a character actress who looked like this

and it was a few years before she found out that au contraire, Dors spent her time at the top looking like this:

Dors has a small part in David Lean's towering version of Oliver Twist and a larger one in A Kid for Two Farthings, Carol Reed's entry in that great genre, "Cry Your Eyes Out Over an Animal.” Neither movie prepared the Siren for Yield to the Night. It was Dors' big acting break and, despite the way her career played out, melancholy proof that she deserved other parts as good as this one.

Yield to the Night boasts a pre-credits opening that starts with a shot of a woman’s feet, surrounded by pigeons, seamed stockings tapering down into high heels. We follow her as though spying, the camera crouching and peering from behind fountains, through banisters and gates. She gets into a taxi and when she emerges we see the back of her platinum head and the sway of her coat with each step. Her black-gloved hand tries a key in an ornate door as a chrome-trimmed car pulls up. The ominous, drumming soundtrack gives way to the cocktail-ready music on the car’s radio as this mink-clad woman’s foot is shown, shoeless on the gas pedal. She slides her elegant pump back on and walks around the front of the car. Through the windows of another parked car, we watch her lean through the open window to gather her packages from the day’s shopping. The mink lady opens her front door, the one we just saw. The blonde’s feet are reflected in a hubcab before we move up to her little cloth clutch, and she takes out what we’ve surely been expecting--a gun. The mink lady reaches through the car window for more packages, and the blonde fires into her back. Then, finally, we get a good look at the face of the blonde as she continues to fire and the victim collapses.

And what do you know--the blonde is Diana Dors, tossing the gun pointedly between the mink lady’s prostrate legs. As people rush to the scene, there’s a zoom to that sensual face as Dors savors the one moment of heavily qualified triumph this character is ever going to get. The expression begins to dissolve into apprehension almost right away, as a man looks up at her in bewilderment.

A socko opening, worthy of being compared to Wyler’s version of The Letter.

As soon as the credits are over, here’s our blonde in prison. No trial scenes--they would be silly anyway, since Mary Hilton (Dors) didn’t exactly try to commit the perfect murder. Yield to the Night is not a whodunit, but on one level a whydunit, Hilton’s time on the British Death Row alternating with flashbacks to show How She Came to This, a noirish backstory combined with chilling prison scenes.

The film quickly establishes prison’s relentless infantilization of the condemned woman. The male chaplain and lawyer call the prisoner “Mrs. Hilton” and talk to her in an optimistic head-patting way that they clearly don’t even buy themselves. But to the women who guard her, Mary is “Hilton,” like a schoolgirl. Regal-featured Yvonne Mitchell plays the guard, Hilda MacFarlane, who forms the closest bond with Mary. In her first scene, MacFarlane fetches sleeping tablets, prescribed to get Hilton through the first night of knowing she’ll be hanged in less than three weeks. Then she lays a black cloth across Mary’s eyes; the lights in the cell are always on, probably to prevent Hilton from using darkness to cheat the hangman.

Hilton can’t choose her books or her pastimes, she can’t even cut her own nails. The guards do it for her while she sits in the bath, perfect skin gleaming with water, arm passively outstretched, in a recurring image that evokes both the birth of Venus and the death of Marat. Yet Hilton still tries to claw back life’s decisions; one of the first things she says to the guards is a peevish, “I don’t want any cocoa.” She demands to go to bed early, she sweeps chess pieces onto the floor, she must be coaxed to eat. Hilton can flash resentment at reminders of her fate, such as late in the movie, when a hapless substitute guard tries to go through the door--always shut and elaborately ignored--that leads to the execution chamber. Dors’ expression and her acid “Not that one” are more frightening than her demeanor when committing murder. Other times, she relishes reminding the guards of their ghoulish duties, telling MacFarlane that a black cloth over the eyes is what you’d put on someone facing a firing squad. The guards fuss over Hilton, making sure she wears her cloak on cold walks, keeping her inside during inclement weather, cleaning and bandaging her blistered heel; it’s an all-female world of denial and futility.

The flashbacks show Mary as a white-hot beauty who asserts herself less than does Hilton, the bare-faced, straw-haired, sullen prisoner. She meets the agent of her doom, the feckless, handsome Jim (Michael Craig), and falls in love with him almost immediately. Mary doesn’t care that at their first encounter, Jim is selecting a bottle of her favorite perfume (“Christmas Rose”) as a gift for another woman. As her affection for Jim grows, his interest wanes, as it always does with such men. All he wants is an easy road to an easy life. Mary--already married and stuck with a dead-end job in a dead-end postwar Britain--can’t give it to him.

The attempts to hold him become frantic after he dumps Mary for the rich woman she’ll eventually shoot dead in the street. Despite his essential worthlessness, Jim is educated, a piano player with copies of poetry lying around his dingy flat. He pretends the books are leftovers from school, but Mary doesn’t believe him. There is, in this wastrel, a thread that she could pick up to a life that isn’t just days behind a counter and evenings with panting men. Those loud, vulgar suitors aren’t altogether bad sorts; they treat her with some kindness, certainly more than she receives from Jim. But Dors’ face as she looks at her lover shows yearning not just for him, but for something beyond the seediness.

At the time she made Yield to the Night, Dors herself was married to a man who could be charitably described as not worth the trouble. The Siren wonders if that parallel ever crossed the actress’s mind, or if she was too in thrall to her husband to note the coincidence. Dors’ looks were extraordinary, a boneless oval face dominated by extravagant lips that today’s actresses spend thousands failing to achieve. And her figure, mamma mia; not to mention that the fashion in British underpinnings was evidently less confining than on our side of the Atlantic. In any event, the Siren finds Dors as strong in the flashbacks as she is in the harsher prison scenes, because Dors makes you believe that a woman who looks like that would still obsess over a man who doesn’t want her. Now of course, this happens in real life all the time; but on screen, many’s the sex symbol who would have a hard time selling that kind of self-abnegation.

The climax of the flashbacks comes on New Year’s Eve, as Mary, ravishing in a white lace dress that she spent her last cent on, waits by the telephone for Jim’s call. And here is the New Year’s PSA: if you are thinking of standing someone up for the first time in 2012, watch this scene and repent. If at some point in your dissipated existence, you already stood up someone, watch this scene, then go to your room and think about what you did.

Movies that stack the deck in favor of an obvious social message seem to fare badly with critics these days, but the Siren simply doesn’t care as long as the drama works; and Yield to the Night is a striking movie whatever your beliefs. In 2006 film scholar Melanie Williams paid tribute in The Independent; she quoted director Thompson: "For capital punishment you must take somebody who deserves to die, and then feel sorry for them and say this is wrong. We did that in Yield to the Night: we made it a ruthless, premeditated murder." The filmmakers were aided by real life; the release of the movie came shortly after the execution of Ruth Ellis, a case later dramatized in Dance With a Stranger. (If you scroll down, there is a good account of the Ellis case at this marvelous London history blog, including an ineffably creepy photo of the bullet holes she left, visible to this day on the wall of a Hampstead pub.)

Yield to the Night is often described as a fictionalized account of the Ellis case, but that isn’t correct. Joan Henry wrote the book and screen treatment several years before Ellis committed murder. Henry herself had served eight months in two prisons for unknowingly passing a bad check, and she spent years afterward campaigning for prison reform, even making an earlier movie with Thompson, The Weak and the Wicked. That film also starred Dors. In a final, cold coincidence, Ellis and Dors knew each other from Ellis’ brief work on a more typical Dors vehicle, Lady Godiva Rides Again.

Life, then, conspired at the time to give Yield to the Night a ghastly relevance. Williams compares its effect to Orwell’s essay on witnessing a hanging, where “it's only when he sees the condemned man do something as simple as walk around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet on the way to the scaffold, a tiny, futile gesture of self-preservation on the brink of death, that Orwell is struck by the ‘unspeakable wrongness’ of what is about to happen.” More than fifty years on, watching Diana Dors’ last bits of physical affection--a few seconds spent picking up a cat in a prison yard--the Siren still found the movie relevant. She wishes it weren’t.

Christmas Anecdote: "I Was Even More Nuts Than I Generally Am." (With Bonus Links)

2011-12-21T11:17:00.012-05:00

The holidays are upon us, and it is time for the Siren's annual rituals. These include, but are not limited to:

1. Preparing to bake, the Siren's annual substitute for baking.

2. Cleaning out rooms in a frenzy that would do the Clean House crowd proud.

3. Forgetting one key Christmas present until the very last minute.

4. Tuning in to TCM to watching holiday movies that she's already seen. This year's selections include The Man Who Came to Dinner, because Ann Sheridan steals a couple of scenes from Bette Davis, and people stole scenes from Davis about once every leap year; It Happened on Fifth Avenue, because of all the character actors and the post-war jokes about not being able to find an apartment in New York; and the really not-very-good-at-all MGM Christmas Carol, viewed because

5. Charles Dickens is the Siren's favorite novelist and everything he ever touched spells Christmas to her, a fact that TCM is acknowledging this month, although technically their tribute is tied to his birthday.

6. Getting weepy over Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," which makes the Siren think of people listening to it during World War II.

That last has particular force this year due to the Siren's new Twitter addiction, which dependency she happily passes on to you: Real Time World War II, tweets from an Oxford history graduate, Alwyn Collinson, about what was happening on that day in World War II. (You don't have to join Twitter to read it, by the way, although it's worth the trouble.) The feed made its debut on Aug. 31, on the eve of the war's beginning, so we are in 1939. In the past months, the Siren has learned about Bernard Montgomery's short-lived campaign to get his men to use condoms with hookers, an idea that did not sit well with his superiors; the birth of the Molotov cocktail during the Soviet invasion of Finland; and that the most popular Christmas dolls in London in 1939 were Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. Though there's the occasional bit of comic relief, most of the tweets are as dark as you'd expect.

Still, given that the Siren loves movies from that era so much, it's an incredible thing to see the onslaught of news that was accompanying what some say was the greatest year in Hollywood history, Gone With the Wind premiering in Atlanta even as Finland fought desperately for its life.

Naturally, all this is leading up to an anecdote, from Rosalind Russell's autobiography, Life Is a Banquet. As Christmas 1942 approached, Russell was about five months pregnant with her only child, Lance. Her brother George was in California, training to drive tanks with George S. Patton's Sixth Armored Division. Russell went to visit him earlier that month and found him eating a mixture of meat, grease and blowing sand as he sat on the ground in the freezing desert wind. Instead of indulging in the Siren's routine at five months into a pregnancy, which included strenuous activities such as reheating leftovers and elevating her feet, Russell went to her brother's commanding officer and said she wanted to organize a Christmas party for the men. She went back to RKO, where she was making Flight for Freedom, and got the money from the studio.

When I think of the logistics involved in that party, I shudder. I was even more nuts than I generally am, because you are more nuts when you're carrying a child. I hired buses. I enlisted hundreds of women--starlets, secretaries, stenographers, pals.

We had a meeting on an RKO sound stage, and I told the girls what I wanted them to wear. Flat heels and warm clothes. Not one of them paid any attention; they came with the tall spike heels and the short flimsy dresses and nearly froze to death.

We had to figure out where the buses could stop so the girls could use the facilities, and we loaded the buses with coffee and Danish pastries. We sent a truck ahead with a portable dance floor and a Christmas tree. We took a whole show with us, orchestra and all. (Red Skelton came and played Santa Claus.)

The Siren pauses to let everyone digest that last image. Informed by George's CO that she couldn't invite one division and just leave out the other, Russell found herself arranging a Christmas party for two armored divisions. George, meanwhile, had been persuaded to go to officers' training camp and departed already. The Siren ponders the fact that it's Dec. 21 and she still hasn't decided what we're having for Christmas dinner, and continues.

Arriving at the base, we got out of our buses and beheld an astonishing sight. The dance floor had been put down, and it was surrounded by great M-4 tanks. The soldiers were studded on the tanks like flies on flypaper…

We roped off the dance floor and gave the boys tickets, like movie tickets. Each fellow had four or five, good for a dance apiece. The girls all stood in the middle of the dance floor, and three or four hundred soldiers were allowed on at one time, and they and the girls jitterbugged together. Then those boys would go off and three or four hundred more boys would come on. The girls really had to dance, and they were absolutely wonderful. The boys were, too. We didn't have a single untoward incident. I'd been very worried that if we got some dingalings in there, we'd be hearing screams from underneath the cactuses, but nothing like that happened….

I was the M.C. (I wore a fur coat, party because it got so cold in the desert at night, partly because I was trying to cover my pregnancy.) We had brought spotlights with us, and in the spillover from the lights you could pick out boys sitting all over the dance floor, and other boys piled up on those tanks. Some chairs had been set down in front for the brass, and before General Woods took his, he called for a lot of the soldiers who were stuck way in back to come closer. I remember a boy plumped down right in front of him. There was the general sitting, watching the show, and this kid leaned his head right back against the general's knees. It was very sweet, and I thought, only in the good old U.S.A. A kid couldn't lean against Hermann Goering's knees in Nazi Germany, he'd get killed.

Later Santa Claus handed out surprises, and there was more music. It was a great party.

On the way home we fed the girls again, at about three o'clock in the morning, in Palm Springs. They'd worked for forty-eight hours without an ounce of sleep. And those boys had been so glad to see something dainty and pretty. They were on their way overseas, and one knew some of them would never come home again.

(In 1974, I was named 'Sweetheart of the Super Sixth' and invited to a reunion that was being held down in Disneyland. I went, and there in the convention hall I looked around at all the men with their bald heads and their paunches and their wives, and it struck me with a shock that the Christmas party had been thirty years ago. If a young man had gone into the army at thirty, he'd be sixty now; if he'd gone in at twenty-five, he'd be fifty-five…

Now the children of Patton's army smiled up at me with their shiny, untroubled faces. I told them that they must think about some of the men who hadn't come back, but I knew there was no way for them to feel what I was feeling.)

*****

In the holiday spirit of gift-giving, the Siren now shares some of what she's been reading about the blogosphere lately.

David Cairns' Late Films blogathon was splendid, and you should read the full lineup. But the Siren is going to point out two in particular, starting with David's analysis of Roscoe Arbuckle's last film. Then, to get all the Christmas weepies out of the way, do read this beautiful post at a blog that is new to the Siren, Robert Donat, written by Gill Fraser Lee. The post is about the great actor's last role, in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

Now that she has reduced everyone's stash of Kleenex by a factor of five, the Siren turns to more cheery links...or, er, OK, this could be cheery, depending on your mood. One of Kim Morgan's festive obsessions this month is the original (in the Siren's mind, at least) madman-in-a-sorority-house epic, Black Christmas. The Siren has seen and very much liked Black Christmas, and while it doesn't exactly make you want to run out and sing Christmas carols to strangers, it could be a real pick-me-up for the day when you've been at the mall, you heard Wings' "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime" for the 217th time and you have some serious aggression to work out.

Once you are feeling better, catch up with the TCM festival coverage of the dauntless Dennis Cozzalio, at Slant Magazine's House Next Door blog. If you missed the fest, you won't feel as though you did after you read Dennis' epic tribute.

In preparation for holiday dissipation, Peter Nelhaus, at the Siren's request, posted his reminiscences about the Night He Got Drunk With Nicholas Ray. You will definitely want to read.

Raquelle of Out of the Past has a review of Piper Laurie's new autobiography that makes the Siren want to read the book, even if Ms Laurie, oddly, does not seem to hold Son of Ali Baba in the same fond regard as does the Siren.

At Silent Volume, Chris Edwards has The Wildcat (1921), from Ernst Lubitsch. Not exactly a Christmas movie, evidently, but it has snowmen, and Pola Negri, so, good enough. The Siren particularly loves Chris' description of Paul Heidemann's peculiar smile: "Think of the smile you might put on if your wife ran into your girlfriend at the king’s dinner party, and no one could really afford to look bad, and so things are a little strained, but really, you suspect, you’ll be scoring a three-way out of it later." Ah yes, we all need a specific smile for an occasion like that.

The Siren's eternal favorite screen-cap blog (and she loves them all, as a general rule) continues to be Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, from which this year's Christmas banner (any guesses as to the movie?) is shamelessly borrowed. Want some snow scenes? You got 'em.

Rachel, who graces the comments section here from time to time, has a great blog: The Girl With the White Parasol, which title alone the Siren loves for reasons she need not explain to her patient readers. Latest post is on The Wicked Lady, the number-one box office hit in 1946 Britain, because it gave the people what they wanted: "...kinky sex. Lots of kink. They wanted to see Margaret Lockwood in corsets so tight they had to be censored for U.S. audiences. They wanted to watch her do wicked, awful things like shooting people and poisoning them and sleeping with James Mason outside on the grass. They wanted to see Patricia Roc and Margaret Lockwood get into a slap-fight. They wanted to see cross-dressing and secret passages and noblewomen seducing robbers." Wait, what? Surely the great British public still wants all that? Well, the Siren does, in any event.

The delightful Caftan Woman's choice for Christmas Eve viewing is the same as the Siren's.

Finally, should you be interested, the Siren contributed a year-end Top Ten list to Indiewire. Her list is right here and the full lists from 162 critics are here.

Now, a Christmas gospel interlude, because the Siren doesn't know when her next opportunity to bring up Mahalia Jackson will arise.

This marks the Siren's sixth Christmas at her old building-and-loan-blog. May the Siren's patient readers all have a holiday season that is even merrier, and brighter, than Technicolor.

In Memoriam: Harry Morgan, 1915-2011

2011-12-07T14:50:00.008-05:00

The death of Harry Morgan, age 96, brings one movie immediately to the Siren's mind, and it was only his sixth role, made when he was 28, so early in his career he was still billed as Henry.

In The Ox-Bow Incident, from 1943, he plays a Western drifter who blows into town with Fonda, and they are both caught up in a posse that ends by hanging Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn and Francis Ford, for the crime of stealing cattle. The men they lynched didn't do it. At the end of the film, Fonda and Morgan stand at the bar of a saloon with the guilt-wracked men from the posse. Neither Fonda nor Morgan participated in the killing--they voted to stop it--but they were there, and they feel complicit. Fonda begins to speak about Andrews, in a quiet voice that he knows is carrying all over the silent room. Morgan's face is morose, but his body language fights to be casual, as he hunches his shoulders around his whiskey. After all, he didn't hang the men himself. When Fonda brings up the $500 he's collected for Andrews' widow, Morgan makes a crack, his face trying to relax, one shoulder almost miming the slightest of shrugs: "Not bad for a husband who don't know any better than to buy cattle in the spring without a bill of sale."

The other men shift their eyes to Morgan, almost hopefully--someone whose callousness they can feel superior to. Fonda nudges Morgan with his elbow, then straightens up; he won't let him get away with that. "You should read this letter too," he says, referring to the letter Andrews wrote to his wife just before he died. "You know I can't read," snaps Morgan.

So Fonda reads, his eyes hidden by the brim of Morgan's hat. It's one of the finest scenes of Fonda's career, but Morgan is in the foreground, with only the top of his head and his eyes in the frame. He doesn't move, his expression doesn't seem to shift at all, and yet he is changing before our eyes.

At the end of the letter, the scene cuts to show the opposite side of Fonda. Morgan is off to the left, only a sliver of the back of his head showing. His illiterate character has understood the words as fully as anyone else in that saloon, and we know it from the brim of his hat, as it drops with his head in a gesture that isn't only respect for the dead. Andrews' character spent the last hour of his life knowing he was innocent and he was going to die, and then he did die, strangled at the end of a rope. From the back of Morgan's head, barely in frame, we know the drifter won't ever be able to defend himself from his memories by saying the dead man was a fool. Then the camera, after seeking out the men from the posse once more, moves higher to show the length of the bar and Morgan in the middle. His one good hand is still wrapped around his glass, he still looks in the same direction, but he stands straighter. Then Morgan turns to follow Fonda with a slightly saddle-weary gait.

It was an uncommonly auspicious start to Morgan's career--a great Western for the great William Wellman, playing his best scenes with Fonda, in the same cast with character actors like Jane Darwell and Henry Davenport. With the benefit of hindsight, you can look at this scene and see a gift that was going to mark Harry Morgan's acting, whether he was wordlessly menacing in The Big Clock, having his cozy assumptions worn away in Inherit the Wind, or, year after year, trying to fight insanity armed only with common sense in M*A*S*H.

Morgan listened.

Hugo (2011): The Late Films Blogathon

2011-12-05T12:43:00.019-05:00

(Note: The Siren herein discusses Hugo in great detail, so if you haven't seen it yet, you are warned.)

Certain superficial elements of a film can predispose you in its favor, and so it was for the Siren and Hugo. She hasn’t read Brian Selznick’s graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. But Mr. Selznick is first cousin (twice removed) to the great David O. And because the Siren has an overactive fantasy life, she can daydream of playing that Selznick opposite a contract director named Martin Scorsese, or Marty as she would never have the nerve to call him: “I want two children just like my twins--a gentle, sensitive boy and a girl who’s book-addicted and loves to try out big words. I want an old-movie theme and an impassioned plea for film preservation...Got all that? Because I can send a memo...OK then. Paris, snow, trains, cafes, late 1920s fashion, croissants, a good look at Johnny Depp without any fright makeup, an old-fashioned soundtrack and a bookstore with leather-bound books and a sliding ladder...I think that’s it...No, I guess I can live without a production number or an ocean liner, thanks for asking...WAIT! Don’t go! I forgot. Dachshunds. My favorite dog breed. See what you can do.”

Given all these elements, Scorsese would have had to put conscious effort into making a film that didn’t appeal to the Siren. Thanks be to Thalia, he did no such thing. Instead, Hugo is a gorgeous example of a Late Film, which is why the Siren is writing it up for the Late Films blogathon conducted by that magnificent classic-film blogger, David Cairns of Shadowplay.

Scorsese has just turned 69 years old, which means he’s about to kiss 70 right on the mouth. Age 70 is big stuff, your Biblical allotment “all used up,” as the Gypsy Tanya would say. Though Manuel de Oliveira inspires us all, there is no kidding yourself about 70. Two years ago, when the Siren was having the conversation with David that prompted the Late Films blogathon, one question that came up was that of how a filmmaker approaches advancing age. They often seem to go one of two ways. Option One: Sour. Let all the old preoccupations come storming back in a torrent of pent-up bile. The ne plus ultra of that approach would be Frenzy. Option Two: Mellow out, at least a bit. Realize that while people are no damn good, hey, you’re a director, and you can make them act any way you want in your movie. As Glenn Kenny observed after seeing Le Havre, “Aki Kaurismaki’s transformation into an old softy is a wonderful thing.”

Scorsese is still Scorsese, and he hasn’t become an old softy. Still, Hugo glows with the deep love that comes from cherishing one thing or one person over the lengthening years. More than that, it’s about age and youth reaching out to each other. The film flatly rejects the notion that movies cease to speak to us after the passage of too much time, even after more than 100 years. In doing so, Scorsese also answers anyone who was wondering why, after making so many films depicting adults at their harshest, he would suddenly tackle a kiddie movie.

The orphaned Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) leads a precarious life in a Paris train station, tending the clock, stealing food and trying to stay one step ahead of the stationmaster (Sacha Baron Cohen) who would send him to an orphanage. Hugo’s sole legacy from his clockmaker father (Jude Law) is an automaton, and Hugo has been trying to repair it with parts stolen from an embittered old man (Ben Kingsley) who runs a toy shop in the station. In doing so, the boy befriends the old man’s chatterbox niece, Isabelle (Chloë Moretz). What neither child realizes is that her Uncle Georges is actually film pioneer Georges Méliès, broken and forgotten, convinced that the movies he made with such joy are gone forever, melted into chemicals and turned into shoe heels.

The Siren is no great fan of 3D. She doesn’t actively hate it, but up to now she just hasn’t seen the point. Wall*E and Up, two of the best movies of the past five years, are not much diminished, if at all, by 2D. She appreciated Avatar for reasons that had little to do with the 3D effects. The Siren dislikes the way 3D privileges the foreground of a shot, making whatever happens to be in your lap the thing that you’re focusing on. 3D, in terms of offering the rich, multiple details of a scene and letting the eye discover some brilliant piece of marginal business, hasn’t been a patch on what Gregg Toland or Rudolph Maté could do on an average day on the backlot.

Comes now Scorsese (and cinematographer Robert Richardson) to take 3D’s oddities, laugh at them, and use them more intelligently than ever before. There’s such mischief in fitting a newfangled technique to a movie that pays tribute to the earliest days of film; it’s on a level with Billy Wilder, assigned to write a vehicle for Gary Cooper, the most notoriously laconic actor in Hollywood, and making him a professor of linguistics in Ball of Fire. Scorsese frequently sticks something in front that’s cute but irrelevant, like the camera crew at the Méliès studio who barely distract from the Andy Hardy energy of the people putting on the show in the back of the shot. Dave Kehr said something about Raoul Walsh that stayed with the Siren--that Walsh was a master of suggesting there could be a whole different movie going on in just one corner of his frame. So Scorsese’s camera dances around designer Dante Ferretti's vast train station and the 3D, for once, adds to the sense of all the corners of the shot, as the passengers and the workers merrily play in their own movies.

And the fullness of the images fleshes out the themes as well. Hugo scurries around the station and maintains the clock that keeps everyone on the hop, but he’s apart from it all, a fact thrown into vivid relief when the film shifts from the yearning gaze of Butterfield and his ghostly blue eyes, to what he yearns for: the world as expressed in a panoramic shot of midwinter Paris at night. The city looks so beautiful in that moment that the Siren felt bereft when the camera cut away. But Hugo is as isolated from Paris as a prince in a tower; or, say, as isolated as a boy in bed with asthma while his schoolmates play in the street. His drunken uncle drops him off at the station and goes out on a permanent bender; no truant officer comes to see why Hugo isn’t in school, no station worker knows Hugo also labors there, let alone tries to feed or shelter him. Scorsese knows that a child’s fears of abandonment, the reality of his neglect, are close kin to the fears of age--that no one cares anymore, that your accomplishments won’t even survive as long as you do.

Hugo returns again and again to impermanence and loss, and yet it uses 3D to show delight in the solid, tactile feel of physical objects. The Siren has seldom seen a film that takes such relish in filmmaking’s paraphenalia, the reels, the canisters, the props, the camera. “I would recognize the sound of a film projector anywhere,” says Méliès.

As omnipresent as the stuff of movies is, though, there is a secondary presence almost as important, that of books. Words are Isabelle’s favorite toys, her refuge and her first resort in trouble, as when she staves off the stationmaster with a determined recital of Christina Rossetti. And Hugo mourns his separation from books too; witness his pained reaction when they visit that gorgeous bookstore and its benevolent monarch of a proprietor (Christopher Lee). Later, when the bookseller gravely hands a beautiful copy of Robin Hood to Hugo, and tells the boy that the book is meant to be his, that’s the moment that reconnects Hugo to humanity, the thing that prepares him to perform the same service for Méliès.

It’s all storytelling in this movie, you see. There is so much insistence nowadays on the primacy of form, the constant reaffirmation that film is a visual medium. Yes, yes, yes--no one needs to remind Martin Scorsese of that. Hugo is as lushly visual a picture as any he’s ever made, and it isn’t as though he had been in the habit of neglecting the look of a film before. But story counts, too. Audiences hunger for it, they try to construct one even when the film insists on withholding it. Méliès’ movies told fanciful whirligigs of stories, and Hugo says that is a fine and noble thing.

Scorsese, it’s always said, obsesses over sin and salvation, though his characters indulge in the former far more than they receive the latter. Redemption is Pyrrhic for Travis Bickle. It stays out of reach for Jake La Motta, is never even sought by Henry Hill, is thrown away with both hands by Newland Archer. Even in the warmly affectionate Hugo, the happy ending comes with qualifiers. Isabelle’s parents are still dead. Hugo’s father still died horribly. And Méliès has had 80 films come back from the dead, but 420 are gone for good. Yet it’s surely no coincidence that when Scorsese makes a movie about the love of film, it’s then that he tells us that the imperfect can still be quite, quite beautiful.

For the Love of Film: Story Conference (Your Vote Counts)

2011-11-29T12:02:00.004-05:00

Together with her dauntless blogathon partner, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, the Siren has been discussing plans for the next film-preservation fundraiser, For the Love of Film III: Breaking Dawn.

No? For the Love of Film III: Dream Warriors?

How about Abbott and Costello Meet For the Love of Film?

Geez, tough crowd. All right, why don't YOU come up with something?

No, really, why don't you? You see, Marilyn and the Siren decided to throw the key question at our patient readers, as we determine who should be the recipient of our 2012 largess. We've narrowed the possibilities down to two.

Bright Idea No. 1 would be our old friend the National Film Preservation Foundation, through whom we were able to save two silent films and see those two films become part of a great DVD set, Treasures 5: The West.

Bright Idea No. 2 is something different. One problem faced by film preservationists is the difficulty of finding sufficient numbers of trained people to do this sort of highly skilled, time-consuming and very demanding work. Accordingly, our second option is to have the blogathon funding for 2012 go to fund a scholarship for some Bright Young Thing who wants to study moving-image archiving.

So, all opinions are welcome. As you consider where to put your film-preservation support in the coming year, which Bright Idea is more likely to catch your fancy, and your dollars?

The Siren and Marilyn await your opinions.

Thanksgiving with Loretta, Bing and the Gang

2011-11-22T09:52:00.018-05:00

Fall is by far the Siren's favorite season. As soon as the temperature drops, her energy goes into overdrive and her family is confronted by the spectacle of the Siren, once so listless in the heat of the summer, standing in front of the pantry proclaiming, "I know! Let's alphabetize the spice rack!" From October to December is the best part of the year, as far as the Siren is concerned.

And Thanksgiving is the Siren's favorite holiday, elegant in its simplicity, devoid of anxieties like presents and whether you should put colored or white lights on the Christmas tree--although, for the record, the correct answer is colored. Anyway. Thanksgiving. You get together with people you love, and you eat. A lot. And the prospect of this happy event always makes the Siren philosophical. She walks around the house pulling unwatched DVDs off the shelf and instead of thinking, "Oh criminy, I haven't seen anything," she thinks, "Oh criminy, I haven't seen anything. Isn't that marvelous? Look at all these unwatched entries in the filmography of Hedy Lamarr, just out there waiting for me. Hey Mom! Whatcha doing? Let's watch Experiment Perilous!"

So the Siren thinks back over this year's moviegoing and reflects that in her view, a certain generosity of spirit is by far the most rewarding way to approach film. There will always be names in the credits that make the Siren's heart tingle with joy, and others that cause her to mutter something along the lines of, "All right, Gina Lollobrigida, get it right this time." The great philosopher Wile E. Coyote once said, "Even a genius can have an off day." The flip side of that is, as another great philosopher once said, "Every movie is another chance." Maybe the Siren has seen twenty movies in which Buddy Ebsen irritated the ever-loving hell out of her. (Technically, that's more like ten movies, but hear a Siren out.) Who's to say that number twenty-one won't be the time when she finally says, "Well played, Jed Clampett!"

It could happen. In fact, it has happened. Well, not with Buddy Ebsen, but with others. Three years ago the Siren, in a puckish spirit, put up a list of actors who usually fail to charm her. But now that the Siren has alphabetized her spice rack and rearranged her scarf drawer and she is feeling all cozy and right-with-the-world-ish, she finds herself moved to recall that making a film is incredibly goddamn difficult. It is, and always has been, miraculous that great ones get made. It is miraculous that good ones get made. The Siren is thankful for that, and thankful to those who do good work, even in mediocre films.

The spirit of Thanksgiving, says the Siren, is the spirit of being happy with what you've got. Turkeys are nonrefundable. And not all of those actors served up turkey every time, far from it. So, in celebration of the Siren's favorite holiday, she offers an amended list of amends to 11 of the 20 actors she once griped about. Ebsen, Red Skelton, Dan Dailey, David Wayne, Dolores Del Rio, Betty Hutton, Helen Hayes, Maureen O'Sullivan, Ruby Keeler, even (though this last is a faint, forlorn hope) Sonja Henie, who knows--the Siren hasn't seen their every movie, and better things may await.

1. Bing Crosby. Kim Morgan's wonderful post on him, and The Futurist's enthusiasm for the Road movies, make the Siren realize she was too way hard on Der Bingle. He was a lot, lot more than Father O'Malley. The Road movies are, in fact, some kind of genius, at times as weirdly surreal and funny in their way as the Marx Brothers, if bereft of the Marxes' full-on insanity. And while Bob Hope is most of what the Siren loves about the Road movies, they don't work without the very Bing Crosby "phoniness" that the Siren was bellyaching about. Furthermore, the Siren loves White Christmas.

2. Pat O'Brien. The Siren liked him a lot in several things she didn't mention, including Bombshell and Virtue.

3. Robert Taylor. Rewatched bits of Party Girl, Undercurrent and High Wall; saw him in Conspirator. Asexual Taylor was not, at least not at his best, and as the man also said, it's by our best work that we all hope to be judged.

4. Richard Conte. The Siren was thinking mostly of I'll Cry Tomorrow and Whirlpool when she listed him, although she did acknowledge his terrifying work in The Big Combo. But Conte was also good in New York Confidential and marvelous in The Godfather. Not a particularly versatile actor, but since when did that matter to the Siren, if the performances within the range were good?

5. Ronald Reagan. The Siren should have emphasized how very much she does like him in Dark Victory and King's Row.

6. Glenn Ford. Made a great villain in 3:10 to Yuma. Should have played more heavies, thinks the Siren.

7. Peter Lawford. The Siren loves the way Cluny Brown plays with his layabout image, and gets immense pleasure from his final line in Easter Parade: "Nadine, get out all the hounds. We're going for a walk."

8. Jeanette Macdonald. She really is swell in those Lubitsch musicals.

9. Gina Lollobrigida. Love her in Come September, one of those Mad Men-era confections that the Siren can't resist.

10. June Allyson. Yes, the Siren said JUNE ALLYSON, and it's Trish's fault. Trish reminded the Siren about Executive Suite. All right, the Siren isn't crazy about Allyson in Executive Suite, but she does not ruin the movie. And the movie is good. And the Siren is still trying to see The Shrike.

11. Last, but most certainly not least, the woman who inspired this entire post: Loretta Young. Gretchen, the Siren Done You Wrong. First off, was any other actress so utterly hobbled by the advent of the Production Code? There's Young, keeping unwed house for Spencer Tracy's ghastly character in Man's Castle, and committing adultery with no less a wolf than Warren William in Employees' Entrance. And she's fresh and natural and unaffected and sexy and when she's on screen you are perfectly happy to have her stick around as long she wants. Next thing you know, it's 1937 and she's in Cafe Metropole and what the Siren mostly thinks about Young in that movie is "Siddown, you're blocking my view of Tyrone Power." Still, even Loretta's later career was unfairly treated by the Siren. Cause for Alarm! is an extremely tidy, suspenseful domestic noir and Young's later buttoned-up, tightly controlled manner works perfectly for the suburban character. As indeed it does in The Stranger. The Siren caught Young last year in Wife, Husband and Friend which was fun--it won't stir the lumps out of your gravy or anything, but a very diverting comedy. And, as the Siren remarked at Laura's Miscellaneous Musings, if the Siren absolutely has to watch a nun movie, Come to the Stable is pretty cute. Hand on heart, the Siren is going to be much kinder about Young in the future.

Wait a minute…"Hey Mom! Whatcha doin'? Do you realize neither one of us has ever seen Zoo in Budapest?"

Happy Thanksgiving. May all your turkey be on the table, and not on the screen.

Gone to Earth: A Conversation With Tony Dayoub

2011-11-16T16:52:00.010-05:00

From Nomad Widescreen, an excerpt of my conversation with the very fine writer and critic Tony Dayoub of Cinema Viewfinder, about the sublime Powell/Pressburger movie Gone to Earth, with Jennifer Jones. (This demonstrates also that the Siren was still indulging her classics habit in the midst of the New York Film Festival.) You can read more of the Siren and Tony and Gone to Earth at his place, in a post that covers some additional excerpts. More about Nomad at the end of the post.

Farran Smith Nehme (FSN): In September, after a long day of screenings at the New York Film Festival, Tony Dayoub and I decided to trek downtown to catch a one-shot showing of a 1950 film neither one of us had ever seen. It was Gone to Earth, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ill-fated adaptation of a Mary Webb novel. Film critic and programmer Miriam Bale was screening a rare 35-millimeter print at the 92nd Street Y Tribeca, and Tony and I were flabbergasted to discover a film we both consider a masterpiece.

The likely reason for Gone to Earth’s rarity, compared with the many well-known and frequently revived Powell-Pressburger classics, is that it has a troubled history. Powell preferred developing his own stories over adapting those of others, and he also found the romantic 1917 Webb novel faintly ridiculous, remarking that it was a town-dweller’s overheated view of country folk. But producer Alexander Korda believed the book was a sounder commercial bet than an original screenplay, and Powell’s objections were brushed aside. The movie stars Jennifer Jones as Hazel Woodus, a half-wild, half-gypsy girl who roams the Shropshire countryside with her pet fox, and is loved chastely by a Baptist minister (Cyril Cusack), and carnally by a ruthless squire (David Farrar). She marries the reverend, and he refrains from consummating the union, in the belief that Hazel’s innocence shouldn’t be profaned. But the squire has no such scruples, and he continues to pursue Hazel, even as it remains clear throughout that she belongs not to men but to the earth of the title.

Jones had married the producer, David O. Selznick, just before shooting started. Powell wrote about the making of Gone to Earth in volume two of his autobiography, Million Dollar Movie; he was assaulted with a barrage of the trademark Selznick memos, which the director cheerfully ignored and left to “accumulate in some pigeonhole.” (Pressburger read the memos, “then went back to reading Time and Life.”) Selznick had been reasonably cooperative during filming, just showing up from time to time to check on Jones and take her on weekend jaunts. But when Powell and Pressburger screened the film for him, Selznick popped a Benzedrine and said, “I’m not satisfied with your cut, boys. I’m going to take this picture over.” Powell explained that the Archers, his production company, owned the rights. Selznick listened politely and the parties wound up in court, where Selznick lost that round.

But Gone to Earth didn’t do well upon release, and Selznick had obtained the North American rights. He reshot a third of the footage with Rouben Mamoulian at the helm, slashed away another half-hour, and re-released it in 1952 with the groanworthy title of The Wild Heart. That version, hopelessly marred by all accounts except possibly Selznick’s, flopped, too. There is a Region 2 UK DVD available of the original Gone to Earth, but it has never been available on Region 1 in the US. You may consider this discussion as a plea from Tony and me for someone to give Gone to Earth the full US restoration and DVD release that it deserves.

One thing that goes to show how much of Selznick’s savvy had disappeared by 1952 is that Gone to Earth contains one of Jones’ best performances, possibly her very best. She was coached in the regional accent; it’s probably impossible for an American to judge how accurate the results are, although Powell thought she sounded fine. You can hear inconsistencies and note the fact that Jones’ accent isn’t much like that of Esmond Knight as her father. But Hazel isn’t an ordinary girl; when she first appears she’s dressed half in rags, searching for her fox, and the camera finds her among the hills as though she just emerged from a tree like a figure of mythology. Her strange voice is completely in keeping with her strange nature, and her half-pagan belief in demons, spells and ghostly voices.

Tony Dayoub (TD): It’s ironic that Selznick commits the same crime as the film’s male protagonists. Like them, Selznick, who saw enough spirit in Jones to make her his wife and muse, tries to stifle her rough luminescence, reworking Gone to Earth into his subpar version. Much of the charm of Jones’s performance in the Powell version is reportedly (because I’ve never seen it) lost in Selznick’s The Wild Heart. Why Selznick was unhappy with her portrayal of Hazel is a mystery. Her performance is far superior in Gone to Earth than are her grating histrionics as the similarly wild Pearl in Selznick’s much better known Duel in the Sun (1946). I chalk up his Svengali-like interference to the fact that Selznick’s affair with Jones was in full swing by 1945, with the two marrying a year prior to the UK release of Gone to Earth.

In any case, Hazel’s central dilemma, the subjugation of her wild, feminine spirit by two men — the roguish squire Reddin and Marston, the well intentioned minister — is very reminiscent of ballerina Vicky Page’s inner conflict in Powell and Pressburger’s more famous The Red Shoes. In that film, the talented Page is forced into a triangle where she must choose between sacrificing her career for her composer husband or leaving him behind to continue her rise to stardom under the direction of the dictatorial director of her dance company. Powell and Pressburger also explore similar themes in Black Narcissus, where a group of nuns living in a convent in the Himalayas start succumbing to the lusty temptations offered by their natural surroundings. As it was with the female protagonists of both of these previous films, Hazel’s state of mind is often reflected in the increasingly expressionistic lighting by Christopher Challis (whose camera operator in this film, Freddie Francis, would become a renowned cinematographer in his own right). As Hazel falls prey to the seductive advances of Reddin, who whisks her away to his cluttered, castle-like retreat, the night sky turns a lurid shade of orange, aflame with erotic intentions. This until the milquetoast Reverend Marston summons enough gall to come rescue her from the arrogant Reddin. (At which point Reddin’s servant — played by the reliably comic supporting player Hugh Griffith — enters his master’s drawing room to needle him, “Will there be three for dinner or one?”)

Two more brief excerpts, because Tony and the Siren really did flip for this film, big time:

TD: Powell and Pressburger’s films almost feel like musical compositions with certain audio cues indicating the start of a new movement. This one launches the dreamlike chapter I discussed earlier. But there are other such cues that indicate a supernatural undercurrent. Two immediately come to mind that bookend the film. We discussed the first one soon after watching Gone to Earth – a “phantom” hunting call I think you called it – in which we hear a group of unseen hunters utter the film’s title, an expression which alerts others that their quarry (in this case, Hazel’s Foxy) has hidden itself in a foxhole.

A dreadful symmetry occurs when we hear the call again in the film’s finale, this time referring to a fatal accident that befalls one of the characters. Though there are hunters present, this is definitely not a call coming from them. If not from them, then who is it from?...I’d like to think it’s the pagan spirits that Hazel and her mother believed in. Though I don’t think it’s as clear onscreen, Webb’s novel depicts a bewildered Hazel fleeing from Squire Reddin and his hunting partners, believing they are mystical huntsmen of Welsh lore. Though Hazel’s pet, Foxy, manages to evade Reddin in Gone to Earth’s opening scenes, it would appear that Hazel and Foxy’s fate are inextricably linked by a primal atavism. Observe earlier in the film how Reddin chases Hazel through a county fair while on horseback, the way he would one of the animals he hunts. Even the minister’s intentions in marrying her are apparently more a matter of taming her free-spiritedness than having any romantic or sexual motivation. The final utterance of “Gone to Earth,” can then be attributed to those same pagan huntsmen, finally laying claim to Hazel after she quite literally has “gone to earth.”

FSN: When Selznick was battling the Archers in court, Powell asked Pressburger where they’d gone wrong with the man — what did he want? “Sex,” Pressburger told him. “You’re not serious,” responded Powell. “Why, the film reeks of sex.” And so it does, just not Selznick’s kind of sex, as Pressburger pointed out.

The movie also evokes the border of Wales, the land of Powell’s ancestors, with wonderful beauty and clarity. Powell was pleased with Gone to Earth and thought Jones was “splendid.” He formed a close friendship with the troubled actress and later told her, “you were the most beautiful woman I ever worked with”—one hell of a tribute from a man who immortalized many stunning women. Thelma Schoonmaker, the film editor who has worked with Martin Scorsese ever since her Oscar-winning efforts on Raging Bull in 1980, was married to Powell from 1984 until his death. She screened Gone to Earth in Seattle in 2007. Schoonmaker told a reporter that her husband “loved the eventual movie, but he was afraid you could hear the crackle of the page whenever they did a movie based on a novel.” I’m convinced that if this movie were more widely known, most viewers would respectfully disagree.

The Siren notes here that Nomad Widescreen, where she could be read alongside Tony, Glenn Kenny, Simon Abrams, Kurt Loder, Karl Rozemeyer and Vadim Rizov, is no more. The editors and writers at Nomad were uniformly excellent, and the Siren was always proud to be associated with them.

(Updated 11/17/11, with correction and the fourth photograph above, courtesy of the ever-courteous Yojimboen. Also a link to Tony's excerpts at Cinema Viewfinder.)

Noel Coward Tells Marlene, "Snap Out of It, Girl"

2011-11-01T15:04:00.008-04:00

The patient readers of this blog deserve their reputation for good manners, but all the same, the Siren has been sensing some faint, far-off clouds of discontent over the past six weeks. A certain bewilderment, you could say. There’s a sense of people restraining themselves from saying: “Siren, the last time I came calling you were talking about Mid-Atlantic accents and Gene Tierney’s overbite and in the comments people were complaining about Wendell Corey and everything was right as rain. Then, without warning, for a month it’s been crime and pink films and sex addicts and now you’re quoting Pauline Kael writing about Brian De Palma and Siren [a deep, ragged breath] I just don’t know who you are anymore.”

Fret not. Like Judy Holliday in It Should Happen to You, the Siren is the same as she’s always been, only in a different way. And to prove it, here is one of the Siren’s favorite letters of all time, reprinted in Maria Riva’s book about her mother, Marlene Dietrich.

By the end of 1956, Dietrich had been carrying on a five-year affair with Yul Brynner, which was starting to wind down in an acrid funk of infidelity, ennui and Dietrich’s endless dissections of her lover’s behavior and motives. She wrote her dear friend Noel Coward a letter about a transcontinental flight she had taken with Brynner. The lovers had been having some “where is this all going, don’t you love me anymore” encounters. She arranged to get herself on the same plane with Brynner and was despondent when he downed three drinks without talking to her. Later Dietrich took some sleeping-pill suppositories, which she called “Fernando Lamas,” because like Lamas' acting, they put her to sleep so quickly. She awoke (or so she thought, she acknowledges she might have dreamt it) to Brynner trying to climb into her berth, and she became distressed when he said “there’s too many people around” and climbed back out, that striking Marlene Dietrich as being no kind of obstacle to real desire.

Dietrich’s letter tapers off in a series of laments about her unhappiness, how can she perform in Las Vegas, etc. etc. It is, in short, one of those humorless messages only people clinging to a waning relationship can produce, a microanalysis of behavior that requires only momentary thought to understand. Astonishing, and comforting, isn’t it--Dietrich, a real Siren, not just one on the Internet, indulging in the kind of “why do you think he did that? what does it mean? what is he trying to tell me?” conversations that mere mortal women, and men, have all the time.

Coward wrote her back immediately, in the greatest rejoinder to such moaning that the Siren has ever read. So perfect is this response that when the Siren read it years ago, she marked the page and later re-read it several times when her own love life was demanding it. The Siren has handed the book, open to that page, to lovesick friends, and read the letter over the telephone, too.

Here it is, Coward’s advice on getting over “Curly” (his nickname for Brynner), punctuation, capitalization and spelling as in the original.

Oh, darling.

Your letter filled me with such a lot of emotions the predominant one being rage that you should allow yourself to be so humiliated and made so unhappy by a situation that really isn’t worthy of you. I loathe to think of you apologizing and begging forgiveness and humbling yourself. I don’t care if you did behave badly for a brief moment, considering all the devotion and loving you have given out during the last five years, you had a perfect right to. The only mistake was not to have behaved a great deal worse a long time ago. The aeroplane journey sounds a nightmare to me.

It is difficult for me to wag my finger at you from so very far away particularly as my heart aches for you but really darling you must pack up this nonsensical situation once and for all. It is really beneath your dignity, not your dignity as a famous artist and a glamourous star, but your dignity as a human, only too human, being. Curly is attractive, beguiling, tender and fascinating, but he is not the only man in the world who merits those delightful adjectives...Do please try to work out for yourself a little personal philosophy and DO NOT, repeat DO NOT be so bloody vulnerable. To hell with God damned ‘L’Amour.’ It always causes far more trouble than it is worth. Don’t run after it. Don’t court it. Keep it waiting off stage until you’re good and ready for it and even then treat it with the suspicious disdain that it deserves...I am sick to death of you waiting about in empty houses and apartments with your ears strained for the telephone to ring. Snap out of it, girl! A very brilliant writer once said (could it have been me?) ‘Life is for the living.’ Well that is all it is for, and living DOES NOT consist of staring in at other people’s windows and waiting for crumbs to be thrown to you. You’ve carried on this hole in corner, overcharged, romantic, unrealistic nonsense long enough.

Stop it Stop it Stop it. Other people need you...Stop wasting your time on someone who only really says tender things to you when he’s drunk...

Unpack your sense of humor, and get on with living and ENJOY IT.

Incidentally, there is one fairly strong-minded type who will never let you down and who loves you very much indeed. Just try to guess who it is. X X X X. Those are not romantic kisses. They are un-romantic. Loving ‘Goose-Ex.’

Your devoted ‘Fernando de Lamas’

The Siren is sorry to report that when Dietrich read Riva the letter over the phone, and Riva gave it a hearty second, the great woman snapped, “Oh, you two Sagittarians! You always agree! Neither of you can understand how one man can a be a woman’s whole life!” Dietrich followed that up with an off-color description of Coward’s sexual activities and hung up.

Good advice is seldom appreciated at the time that it’s given. But Coward remained a friend to Dietrich a lot longer than Curly did. In 1973, when he made his last public appearance, Coward had Dietrich on his arm.

Lucking Out and Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark

2011-10-25T22:26:00.018-04:00

October is Pauline Kael month, with three major books released in one transom-crushing batch. One is The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, which I haven’t yet received, although I’m familiar with most of what’s in it. Another is a biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, by Brian Kellow. And the third is James Wolcott’s memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.

Wolcott has long been a friend to this blog (and, as Tom Watson points out, a friend to many other blogs). He is a personal friend to me. But I was reading Wolcott long before I met him, and this book shows why I still pounce on every word he writes. I turn his sentences this way and that, I flip clauses, I analyze word choice, only to give up, as Bluegirl did. I can’t imitate his prose, I can’t even claim it as an influence; all I can do is hope that if I read him long enough, osmosis might help me out.

As if that weren't enough, he also has an impeccable sense of structure. Lucking Out is built of five parts and a coda. The first deals with Wolcott’s arrival in New York to work at the Village Voice, after being granted a wish by the world’s most unlikely fairy godmother, Norman Mailer. The third covers his years on the punk scene at CBGB’s and sundry other downtown crawlspaces. The fourth examines (a carefully chosen verb) his encounters with the hyperventilating world of 70s porn, and the fifth circles back to the writing scene. The second section, and the coda, focus on his long friendship with Kael; those sections are the heart of the book.

I’ve read some reviews suggesting Wolcott has folded his switchblade for this one and avoided the kind of verbal slashings that helped make his name. Maybe those reviewers read over phrases that reduced me to unbecoming cackles, like “John Simon, then at the unpopular height of his Dracula impersonation;” “Renata Adler, she of the bell-ringer braid;” or “Sontag gagging with laughter is not a picture to linger over.” And maybe stories like John Cale trying to strangle Wolcott when he didn’t understand Cale’s beer order are one of those male-bonding things that I don’t get; Jim does remark afterward, “I didn’t take it personally.” Then again, those reviewers are right that Lucking Out is essentially a warmhearted book. No excuses are made for difficult people--such as Lester Bangs, James Agee’s only rival in the “Self-Destructive Critic” sweepstakes--but they’re still drawn with sympathy and due appreciation for talent.

That’s why I say the Kael sections are the centerpiece, written as they are with affection undimmed by more than thirty years. Reading the book, I thought, god, no wonder the woman drew so many writers into her orbit: She was fun. She’s hilarious during a talk-show foray, where Ed Asner and his stomach acid sour the mood before Kael and Wolcott even get a chance to go on camera. Just sitting around the offices of the New Yorker with her, listening to her read letters from people outraged by her pan of Seven Beauties, sounds like fun. Accompanying her to a screening even of a catastrophically bad movie, like George C. Scott’s The Savage Is Loose, must have been a hoot. Wolcott describes it as “a Darwinian allegory that was like Gilligan’s Island goes Lord of the Flies.” Asked by an overeager, protocol-violating publicist what she thought of the film, Kael chirped, “Tell him to bury it.”

Clearly Wolcott’s own refusal to hold his fire must have been reinforced by sustained contact with Kael.

I can almost hear Pauline’s characteristic, pithy response: ‘Tough.’ (Which sometimes, depending on the situation, had a ‘shit’ attached.) It was often what she said when someone expressed queasy apprehension on some point of possible offense, a retort that was made not with anger or defiance but with a snorty impatience for euphemism, false shirking the truth, or, worse, killing a joke.

Kael took keen interest in her friends’ romances, too, although she had some odd ideas about courtship; Wolcott describes her coming out of Blue Velvet and saying, “It might make a wonderful date movie.” On another occasion, she suggested that he ask out a mutual acquaintance. When Wolcott reminded her that the proposed date was a lesbian, Kael responded, “Oh, that. So what. Aren’t you up for a challenge?"

I cherish this book. It isn't nostalgia, that tattered paper valentine that arrives sometime around St. Patrick's Day. It's a chance to visit another world with a critic supreme, who's as generous here as he's always been to struggling writers.

Reading Lucking Out before A Life in the Dark is a good idea. You go from Wolcott’s time when “there was no happier calling than making Pauline laugh,” to a view of her whole life. I was familiar with Kellow’s calm, meticulous writing and research from his biography of the Bennett sisters, which I also recommend. It’s good to see Kellow bring his determined “on one hand...on the other hand” approach to Kael in this excellent biography. Because with Kael, there is always another hand. She was controversial from the moment she picked up a pencil.

She was, and this should never be under-emphasized, a self-made woman, born into none of the literary or Ivy League connections that can elevate a critical career to this day. Her early childhood, on a chicken ranch in Petaluma, California, was marred by financial catastrophe, after which her father moved the family to San Francisco. She went to Berkeley, never finished, and worked at a strikingly disparate series of jobs, including cooking, sewing and, significantly, running a repertory house. In between she pursued an ill-judged taste for relationships with gay men, and had a daughter, Gina, whose father refused involvement in her upbringing.

Stints of writing at City Lights, McCall’s and The New Republic followed, as well as “Circles and Squares,” Kael’s attack on what she saw as the absurdities of the auteur theory as propounded by Andrew Sarris. That essay caused a longstanding feud--sort of. In this, as in her other bridge-torching opinions, Kael said her piece and, at least publicly, moved on. “There was a certain clean detachment to many of her broadsides against other critics; she was often astonished to learn that the objects of her critical wrath were under the impression that she hated them personally,” writes Kellow.

The fame she gained from articles like “Circles and Squares,” as well as her bestselling first book, I Lost It at the Movies, led eventually to Kael’s job at The New Yorker. She was forty-eight.

Here Kael’s highest point as a critic begins--and her personal life forms the pattern it would follow afterward. Kellow writes that by the time she was at The New Yorker, Kael was through with men--dating them, anyway. Pauline Kael never once in her life lacked for the presence of men. She constantly cultivated friendships and became famous for out-of-the-blue phone calls to other writers, even to people who had simply written her a letter.

But at this point Kellow’s book also shifts in tone, and becomes almost an intellectual history. Kael’s reviews dominate Kellow’s book as they did her life. All the famous pieces swing back to please or irritate in turn, with Kellow reconstructing the stories behind them. Did she really dislike Badlands and rhapsodize over Yentl? Yes, she did. She also proclaimed Steven Spielberg’s promise all the way back with Sugarland Express and raved over Michelle Pfeiffer when the actress was considered just another blonde. Kael saw Casualties of War as the best of the late-80s cycle of Vietnam War movies; Kellow quotes her review, and shows that no one could give you more of what it’s like to watch Casualties of War than Kael, with her emotional response and that “we” that Renata Adler found so irritating.

We in the audience are put in the man’s position: we’re made to feel the awfulness of being ineffectual. This lifelike defeat is central to the movie. (One hot day on my first trip to New York City, I walked past a group of men on a tenement stoop. One of them, in a sweaty sleeveless T-shirt, stood shouting at a screaming, weeping little boy perhaps eighteen months old. The man must have caught a glimpse of my stricken face, because he called out, ‘You don’t like it, lady? Then how do you like this?’ And he picked up a bottle of pink soda pop from the sidewalk and poured it on the baby’s head. Wailing sounds, much louder than before, followed me down the street.)

Kellow’s scrupulous approach means that his book can be read with pleasure by a Kael fan, and profitably combed by a Kael detractor looking for unflattering stories. The worst episode in the biography concerns the “Raising Kane” essay, published by the magazine and later expanded into a book. Several writers, particularly Peter Bogdanovich, later showed that Kael, in her zeal to promote Herman Mankiewicz’s role in Citizen Kane, had seriously misunderstood the process of making the film. Even more distressing is Kellow’s account of how Kael used research from UCLA assistant professor Howard Suber without crediting him in the article, and without more than a single $300 payment to him.

Kael’s relationship with The New Yorker’s Olympian editor, William Shawn, varied from mildly fractious to hugely frustrating. Shawn, shown here as a towering figure in the history of passive-aggression, never got used to Kael’s blunt writing, nor even her opinions. While her negative review of Badlands was still being printed, Shawn told her that Terrence Malick “is like a son to me.” Kellow records Kael’s response--“Tough shit, Bill”--in a perfect echo of Wolcott’s memory.

There were ruptures in later years--including one with Wolcott, who wrote a piece about the Paulettes for Vanity Fair that angered Kael. (Those who know the story will see its melancholy foreshadowing in Lucking Out.) I attended a panel on Kael at the New York Film Festival, where Kellow took exception to Manohla Dargis’ remark that the Kael of his book lacked “an equal passion for, and pleasure in, life beyond the screen.” It wasn’t like at all, he said; Kael’s life was full of music, books, art and friends.

And that is the picture I got from this biography. There is Kael, the steel-plated critic, criticizing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, getting a letter from George Roy Hill with the genteel salutation, “Listen, you miserable bitch...”--and using the letter to entertain people at parties. And then there is Kael, stricken with Parkinson’s, running into Hill at a restaurant after he received the same diagnosis. She “clutched his hand warmly and gave him the name of her massage therapist.” Despite the title, this was not a life in the dark.

*****

All film writers eventually must deal with Kael, like it or not. I will always love my friend Dennis Cozzalio’s post, in which he details how often he thought she was wrong, but captures what she meant to those of us out in the hinterlands in the Paleolithic times before the Internet. My father had a subscription to The New Yorker, and every week I would pick it up and start an argument with Kael. The argument had to remain in my own head, as that was well before the Web made it possible to storm into a comments section and tell off a critic. Usually, I didn’t want to tell off Kael, not exactly, no matter how much I objected to what she had written, and I objected to quite a lot. I wanted to ask her questions. I wanted some interaction with that brain. I would read her capsules in the front, or her ever-lengthening reviews in the back, and marvel at the syncopated, give-a-damn writing style and her utter faith in her own judgment. The fact that she was a woman mattered to me, too. Growing up in Alabama, I did not encounter many women with that kind of intellectual aggressiveness.

Only gradually did I realize how widely Kael is criticized, even despised. The volume of things for which Kael is faulted begins to approach the size of her own output. She had too much power and wielded it unwisely. She collected acolytes, she started feuds. She overpraised Last Tango in Paris, she was blind to the virtues of Dr. Strangelove. She had no consistent set of criteria. She placed too much emphasis on screenwriters. Her kinship with ugly ducklings meant she gave too much credit to Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand. She sent David Lean into a spiraling depression with her review of Ryan’s Daughter. She helped ruin Orson Welles and the piece that did it, “Raising Kane,” showed lack of ethics, as did her stint in Hollywood, as did her rave over the rough cut for Nashville.

She palled around with filmmakers, tuts Dargis, as though friendships with Woody Allen and Robert Altman kept Kael from hating Stardust Memories or 3 Women--the latter judgment prompting Altman to scream at her in the middle of an airport. (Altman got over it; Allen did not.) Others fault her for lack of loyalty to directors we now idolize. She never expounded “a theory, a system, or even a consistent set of principles,” points out A.O. Scott. And my response is, “well, thank god for that.” But the question also arises, is that the highest goal of criticism? Start Your Own -Ism?

The above objections--whether I agree with them entirely, in part, or not at all--can be supported with evidence from Kael’s life and writing. It’s another, patronizing strain in Kael bashing that gets under my skin. I could, if I wanted to indulge in the euphemism that Kael hated, call it a double standard. Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, can write a dismissal of Ingmar Bergman in the pages of the New York Times, and encounter little more than vigorous dissent. Kael, though, is often presumed to have other motivations wafting around her little head. Gary Indiana, at Artforum (in a piece that Wolcott also quotes) sneers that Kael “clearly had a thing for Warren Beatty, for Paul Newman, for various stars whose worst performances, in her view, paradoxically contained their best work; she rhapsodized over horrible hack directors whose ‘honest’ formulaic dreck she preferred to ‘pretentious’ films by superior directors.” Funny he should mention that. I keep encountering writers who clearly have “a thing for” Kael--like Michael Atkinson, who memorialized her in the Village Voice as “the hot-pants Queen Victoria of American film criticism,” and “the focus of gossip (a film critic!) that speculated on her liaisons with colleagues and with certain testosterone-dizzy filmmakers.”

Richard Brody also vaults to mind. For ages now he has used his perch at the online version of The New Yorker, the magazine that Kael’s marquee appeal helped keep afloat for years, to swat her at every opportunity for a voluminous array of sins. He quotes, with sorrowful relish, the story David Denby told about Kael’s lunch with Nicholas Ray; Denby said Kael spent her time describing the flaws in Ray’s movies, despite the man’s evident illness. To recap the links so far, Kael’s writing was entirely too personal, and her personality was heartless to boot. She appears in a post about John Cassavetes, whose movies Kael consistently loathed. Cassavetes physically bullied Kael, but in the Brody cosmology it is Kael who comes across worse, for denying the greatness of Cassavetes in the first place. Brody's contributions to the latest flurry of interest in Kael include the idea that 5001 Nights at the Movies still weren’t enough for her to write about all the movies that Brody thinks she should have written about. It has long since gotten hard to keep up. Last week, along came an offering that begins with Clint Eastwood and quickly swerves into Kael's dislike of Eastwood. Eastwood once commissioned a psychoanalysis that revealed Kael's supposed attraction to him. Brody says that theory is "nonsense," but apparently not nonsensical enough to be unworthy of block-quoting. The piece ends with a sort of victory tarantella concerning all the many, many ways in which Kael's opinions were wrong and, in an unanticipated bit of felicity, Brody's opinions were right. And why would anyone esteem a critic with whom they frequently disagreed? Because critical opinion is not an unyielding, unanimous and permanent entity? Because the critic wrote well? How quaint.

Nowhere is Brody’s animosity toward Kael more evident than in his discussion of her Shoah review, which he calls “so grotesque as to seem willful.” He continues, “The wild subjectivity of her approach to the film—her writing about the feelings of her backside rather than the feelings of the people in the film or of its maker—suggests, overall, the basic problem with her criticism.” How about this for a willful suggestion about Kael’s overall basic Shoah problem: She didn’t like the movie. For the record, my own attempt to watch Shoah when it was screened on PBS in the late 80s ended sometime around the three-hour mark. I didn’t like it either, for several of the reasons that Kael cited; like her, I preferred The Sorrow and the Pity.

In a whiplash-inducing gear-shift at the end, Brody says Kael might have written a swell autobiography, where her “assumptions” and her “prejudices” and her insistence on putting herself in her movie reviews would have been quite apposite. That’s the ticket, a nice little memoir. So much more profitable a use of her talents than puttering around West 43rd Street, being the most famous film critic of all time.

In comments sections, where bloggers and cinephiles flex their intelligence at one another, pretense is abandoned. Jim Emerson, a (qualified) Kael admirer, once excerpted Renata Adler’s attack on Kael and collated some Kael defenses; the brief thread this prompted is illuminating. There’s a comment from one film blogger, alleging that her fans “don't want film criticism, they don't like cinema either, they just want to have fun reading fiction, and inflamatory diatribs [sic].” Someone else remarks, “The problem with Pauline Kael is that one gets the impression that she dismissed films on the basis that they didn't get her sexually aroused.” (Adler went after Kael for what she saw as a hectoring use of the second person. Kael always said she found “one” prissy and disingenuous, and this one agrees with her.) Adds another commenter, “[he’s] right about Kael's sexual fixations, but that isn't the sole problem. There's also the fact that there's no rhyme or reason to her approach. She would, time and again, praise one movie to the skies for certain qualities, and then turn around and trash another that possessed those same qualities;” he winds up by saying Kael had a “borderline psychotic degree of subjectivity.”

When I read threads of this sort, I consider dropping by to say, “I wonder why Andrew Sarris and Manny Farber--both of whom had some blind spots and occasionally reversed themselves--don’t inspire certain people to call them irrational, or psychotic, or to speculate about their sexual fixations.” But I don’t comment, because I don’t really wonder why. I don’t wonder at all.

God knows I begrudge no one the right to tear their hair out over a Kael review, or even over her entire body of work. I disagree with her all the time, much more often than I second her thoughts. That’s the whole goddamn point to Kael. I put my hand over my mouth when she acknowledges the beauty of a woman’s picture I love like Now, Voyager, only to call it “a shlock classic.” I grieve when she refuses to see merit in my own pets, like Joan Crawford--I suppose because I’m emotional about Crawford. Still, I’m not interested in some guy’s psychoanalysis of why she didn’t like Last Year at Marienbad. As a friend remarked to me, once you go there, “you might as well go all the way and speculate whether she was having her period during the screening.”

I’m arguing that through a decades-long career, Kael earned the courtesy of having her film judgments evaluated without veiled sexism. She clearly wanted that herself. My favorite part of Kellow’s biography was the story of Kael’s visit to a hardware store in Great Barrington:

“It happened to be Mother’s Day, and the proprietor gave her a gift, adding in a condescending tone, ‘Because you look like you’re a mother or a grandmother.’ ‘Fuck you, Charlie,’ Pauline replied. ‘Do you know I’ve written ten books?’”

New York Film Festival 2011: Wrap

2011-10-23T00:16:00.013-04:00

The Siren is late with this New York Film Festival wrap-up, but she felt like she owed it to Carey Mulligan, if no one else.

Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)
Once upon a time the Siren took acting classes, and one day we embarked on a story-telling exercise. The idea was for the actor to take the stage and describe an incident from his life. His classmates would then tell him which parts they didn’t believe. First up was an earnest young woman from New Jersey--we’ll call her Angie. The Siren has forgotten most particulars of Angie’s story, but it began with a great deal of Boone’s Farm wine, which Angie said she consumed because she was young and foolish and “I thought you had to be drunk to have a good time.” The story ran through some mildly embarrassing hijinks. When Angie finished, there was a short silence.

Then, loud and clear from the back of the room came the voice of a guy from Tennessee: “We-ell, first of all, I don’t believe that you don’t have to be drunk to have a good time.”

And therein we have the Siren’s obstacle with Shame. She doesn’t believe having tons of sex is this big a drag. Porn--OK, maybe, when it reaches the point where it's your whole sex life. The Siren has known people who preferred porn to a partner. They became too put off by the fact that doing it with someone else involves mess and noise and exertion and flawed bodies--not to mention pre- and post-coital conversational formalities. Rich, handsome, single Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is addicted to porn, all right, but that sure doesn’t mean he won't go out and get laid with obsessive, addictive and utterly joyless regularity.

Director Steve McQueen must know many people have the Siren’s attitude, and he responds by daring the audience to find anything in his movie erotic, up to and including his lead actor’s traffic-stopping beauty. Much of the sex and nudity is shot from pitiless angles with the kind of office-building lighting that makes even the dewiest interns look like they have a case of stomach flu. The strategy reaches its nadir with a threesome, as the lugubrious score (the movie’s worst flaw) keeps sawing away to emphasize, "This is sad, this is dreary, so whatever you do, DON'T GET TURNED ON."

What saves the film from risibility is that sex-addiction isn’t its primary theme. Rather than perversion (actually, you don’t even get to see anything that qualifies as perverted, so if that's the selling point for you, consider this the Siren’s Consumer Report)--as the Siren was saying, rather than perversion, Shame is about near-fatally damaged people. Brandon is unable to connect with a single human being in one of the world’s most crowded cities. His trauma is obvious, but never specified--a good choice, since it would take a lot to explain a man this shattered. The two best scenes in the movie, consequently, have no sex at all. Both are shot in bravura long takes that enable the actors to show a huge range of reactions to one another. The first is Brandon’s attempt at a real date with a pretty coworker. The scene becomes a death-spiral of awkwardness, Fassbender showing that his character has only a vague notion of how to socialize when neither fucking nor the immediate possibility of fucking is involved.

The second is an extended fight, shot from the back of Brandon’s couch, between him and his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). She’s moved into his Dwell-ready apartment because her own life is also a mess. Now, you may recall that the Siren did not cotton to Mulligan in Drive. Well, here she was marvelous. She’s a perfect take on a certain kind of rootless urban girl, self-sabotaging her own desultory pursuit of a career and throwing herself at men who transparently don’t give a damn. There's a suggestion of incestuous attraction, but whatever Brandon's desires may be, at this point he does have one boundary, and Sissy is it. The feeling he has for her is as close to ordinary affection as he gets, and it’s painful to watch him provoking her into a fight, because it’s obvious why he’s doing it: She’s preventing him from pursuing his addiction.

The Siren can’t call Shame wholly successful, no way. But it has some extraordinarily accomplished acting, it's heartfelt and sometimes moving. Uneven efforts like this one can be more interesting to watch and discuss than many more coldly efficient products.

The Kid With the Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2011)
The Siren got one lovely moment out of the NYFF press conferences, when the Dardenne brothers came onstage to discuss The Kid With the Bike, the story of a friendless boy and his frantic search for belonging. Someone asked about the use of music, and one brother said they hadn’t used any before. The Kid, however, uses a short passage from the Emperor Concerto at several points, as when the title character Cyril (Thomas Doret) is falling miserably asleep. They thought of the music, said M. Dardenne, as a caress: “It’s what Cyril is missing in his life, which is love.” In that declaration is all the power of this movie. Doret has a pugnacious face that could be easily cast as the cafeteria bully, and the character is a volcanically difficult little brat, stubborn and defiant, constantly on the move, usually in the direction of trouble. But from the first moments the Dardennes show why this unlovable child desperately needs love, as he tries to contact his indifferent father, and later is deceived by a charismatic young criminal. In the world the Dardennes create, so urgent and universal is the hunger for affection that when Cyril locks his arms around a stranger, merely to prevent his minders from taking him away, it has the power to involve the stranger in the boy’s life forever. Deeply emotional, and a beautiful film.

*****

Here the Siren offers her ranking of the 15 films she saw at NYFF 2011. The top three get her very strongest endorsement; the next four are highly recommended; the next five are worthwhile, with reservations. The Siren endorses the bottom three only for those with a passion for the directors or for Marilyn Monroe.

A Separation
Le Havre
This Is Not a Film
The Kid With a Bike
Melancholia
Carnage
You Are Not I
Shame
Miss Bala
Woman With Red Hair
The Loneliest Planet
A Dangerous Method
The Turin Horse
My Week With Marilyn
We Can’t Go Home Again

In Memoriam: Barbara Kent, 1907-2011

2011-10-20T09:56:00.009-04:00

"The golden era was the period from 1916 to 1928. It is a neglected period, forgotten often by the very men who enriched it. They have seen their films reissued on television; bad prints shown at the wrong speed have distorted their memory. Perhaps the ballyhoo meant nothing. Perhaps their much-praised pictures were as jerky and as primitive as they appear today.

They were not."
--From the introduction to The Parade's Gone By, by Kevin Brownlow

"I've always said that the pantomime is far more poetic and it has a universal appeal that everyone would understand if it were well done. The spoken word reduces everybody to a certain glibness. The voice is a beautiful thing, most revealing, and I didn't want to be too revealing in my art because it may show a limitation. There are very few people with voices that can reach or give the illusion of great depth, whereas movement is as near to nature as a bird flying. The expression of the eyes--there's no words. The pure expression of the face that people can't hide--if it's one of disappointment it can be ever so subtle. I had to bear all this in mind when I started talking. I knew very well I lost a lot of eloquence. It can never be as good."
--Charlie Chaplin, from the so-called Lost Interview with Richard Meryman, at ednapurviance.org

*****

The Siren has seen only two pictures starring Barbara Kent, who has died at the age of 103. One is the 1933 shoestring Oliver Twist, with Kent as Rose. The other is Flesh and the Devil, in which Kent had the unenviable task of being the forsaken lover to Garbo's lascivious temptress. Still, it's the silent Flesh and the Devil that left a far stronger impression. Sound seemed to diminish this diminutive actress, as it did so many others. In pantomime, her tiny body made her even sweeter and more fragile, and it added poignance to her hurt over John Gilbert's betrayal.

Kent managed to continue her career into the talkie era, but never caught on as a big star, despite marrying her agent in 1934. She got out of the business in 1941. Read enough about Hollywood--or even a little--and you realize Barbara Kent's fate is no sad ending. She got, in fact, about the best you could hope for, short of a star's immortality. She lived a long, long life and, we hope, a good one.

Still, Kent's passing, which leaves Mickey Rooney as one of the only living actors who ever played in a silent, made the Siren well up, though the Siren knows some would tell her it's absurd to cry over the death of a woman you never met, whom you've seen only in two movies.

The Siren always knew she would most likely live to see every silent-film artist depart the planet before she did. But the Siren still wishes she'd gotten the chance to tell Kent, or any of the other artists that Kevin Brownlow has spent a lifetime celebrating, that she's sorry about all the years when so few people were even trying to preserve their legacy. Probably that wouldn't have meant much to Kent, anyway, since she spent most of her life refusing all interviews of any sort; the Times said Kent was sometimes known to deny that she ever had a film career at all. Who knows how she looked back on Hollywood, let alone the silents. Did she see a lost golden age, or just a quaint, irrelevant relic of a former lifetime? The Siren looks at images of the late Barbara Kent, and thinks only that we need to do better.

New York Film Festival 2011: My Week With Marilyn

2011-10-09T14:14:00.005-04:00

If the Siren’s attitude toward Marilyn Monroe could be graphed as a fever chart, it would have two lines. One line would represent the Siren’s opinion of Monroe’s acting, and it would show a steady, if not steep, rise. The other line would chart the Siren’s interest in the Monroe myth. It would resemble a headlong tumble down the south face of K2.

Unfortunately for the Siren’s patience with My Week With Marilyn, the new movie just screened for the press at the New York Film Festival, the myth is still what sells.

In act one, whippersnapper Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) uses his refined upper-class moxie to get a job as third assistant director on Laurence Olivier’s ill-starred directorial outing, The Prince and Showgirl. That part is palatable, as young Colin rushes about making himself indispensable, and there’s a chance for Toby Jones to utter some choice lines, including one delivered on learning of Arthur Miller’s (Dougray Scott) visa troubles: “All those pain-in-the-ass New York intellectuals are Reds.”

The second act is pretty enjoyable. That’s where Colin hangs around as Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) shoots his movie and copes with Monroe’s (Michelle Williams) bizarre work ethic, which included much dedication to the Lee Strasberg distillation of the Method and almost none to such trivia as punctuality and knowing the lines. Little fresh material is evident, except possibly a conception of Monroe’s drama coach Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker) that does not paint her as a complete gargoyle. But it’s fun, even if the score is vacuous, the camerawork never once rises above director Simon Curtis’ BBC-TV roots, and Emma Watson plays a love interest who should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The Siren certainly hopes Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench) really was that charming and understanding. Branagh is hilarious, whether remarking that teaching Monroe to act is “like teaching Urdu to a badger,” or making a priceless face as he fields a call from the absent actress and says, “Colin, it’s for you.”

None of the actors look much like their real-life counterparts. Williams is Monroe-ish only around the cheekbones, and Branagh is Olivier only from the cheekbones up. Judi Dench looks like Judi Dench. Julia Ormond fares worst. She has only Vivien Leigh’s coloring, not her features, but Ormond is still a beautiful woman, and here she’s subjected to lighting and makeup that would have sent the real Leigh into one of her depressive breakdowns. It is one of the film’s strengths, though, that once the initial shock wears off, the lack of physical matching doesn’t much matter. Branagh’s speaking forcefully recalls Olivier’s Old Vic accents, and Williams’ voice blew the Siren away--fully Marilyn, yet believable, consistent and 100% free of parody.

Williams is, in fact, superb. The Siren has lost count of the actresses she’s seen playing Monroe, but Williams leaves them all in the dust. She takes the most imitated woman of all time and manages a performance that recalls every gesture and effect, while still creating a character. It’s a remarkable feat of acting, and Branagh’s work, despite his having to spend too much time musing out loud about Marilyn, is still right up there with Williams.

But what shall it profit an actor to give a good performance in a movie this trite? For any interest in My Week With Marilyn vanishes as soon as the much-vaunted week begins. That’s when we’re supposedly getting to know Marilyn the Woman. And it’s the same goddamn Marilyn we’ve all been seeing since approximately 4:26 am on Aug. 5, 1962. The wounds of her childhood abandonment and loneliness, her rotten luck in love, the pressure oh the pressure. Jesus Christ on a soundstage, you don’t need the Siren to recap any of it. She could hand her Macbook to a stranger on the Columbus Circle subway platform, ask for one paragraph on Marilyn Monroe, and those scenes are what you’d get.

So the Siren’s graph diverges more strongly now than ever. This story that purports to give us Marilyn as she was off-camera only winds up proving what the Siren has always known to be true: Monroe on camera was, and always will be, vastly more worthwhile.

Nomadic Existence: Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

2011-10-08T08:21:00.011-04:00

The Siren is back at Nomad Widescreen this month with something the world probably does not need: a tribute to Breakfast at Tiffany's, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a Blu-Ray. The first part of her essay is concerned with the movie's flaws, chief among them being, it seems almost redundant to mention, Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi. The Siren deals with Yunioshi in the article, because one must, but here among her friends she'd like to offer a few more thoughts on Rooney himself.

One painful aspect of Rooney at Tiffany's is that for the broad public, it's by far his most famous role. That's a pity, because Rooney is still very much with us; he turned 91 on Sept. 23, and long may he thrive. Rooney's incredible career embraces everything from a series of silents, to the definitive screen Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, to his underrated musical work and many outings with Judy Garland, to a surprisingly varied film noir period. That last group of roles is written up here in an excellent piece at Noir City; the Siren saw The Strip this year and was struck by how good Rooney was at being depressive and dark, even in between jazz numbers. He's a consummate trooper, determined to give it his show-biz all whether he's having a heart-to-heart with Spencer Tracy in Boys Town or, in Drive a Crooked Road, he's proving Ryan Gosling isn't the only one who can drive a getaway car.

That is probably why, to this day, Rooney does not appear to understand what the big honking problem is with Mr. Yunioshi. From the actor's perspective, he was given a broadly farcical role and he played the everloving hell out of it, just like he was supposed to, and now everybody is on his case for not being Japanese (or even identifiably human, but let it go). It should also be reiterated that the director, Blake Edwards, bears the ultimate responsibility for Mr. Yunioshi. That's why, as hard as the character is to take, the Siren isn't inclined to berate Rooney for it. The Siren absolutely understands why Mr. Yunioshi pretty much ruins the movie for some viewers, whether or not they're Asian. But she herself pushes Yunioshi aside, to the same mental cubbyhole in which she puts some of Preston Sturges' African-American characters, and concentrates on the party, on the cat, and Audrey.

And so back to Breakfast:

Part of what makes a great comedy is the accretion of comic detail, and Edwards piles up the bits for us, as does the script by George Axelrod. The film’s been a touchstone for fashion lovers for decades, but chic as they are, the costumes in the movie still have comic effect, as in the absurdly large hat and Ray-Bans shrouding Hepburn’s delicate face, or (my favorite) Holly’s earplugs fitted with dangling baubles, like she’s wearing earrings to bed. The film is full of minor characters who sashay in, deliver a brilliant line or two, and depart, never to be seen again. Mag Wildwood (Dorothy Whitney), the model and aforementioned thumping bore: “You know what's gonna happen to you? I am gonna march you over to the zoo and feed you to the yak.” Sally Tomato (Alan Reed), the mob boss: “Snow flurries expected this weekend in New Orleans.” Even the Tiffany’s salesman, played by the unflappable John McGiver, looking at a Cracker Jack ring and saying with complete sincerity, “It gives one a feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity with the past. That sort of thing.” And of all the quoted and re-quoted lines in the movie, the one that sums up its appeal is delivered not by Holly Golightly, but by Martin Balsam’s O.J. Berman, playing Holly's would-be agent: “She’s a phony. But she's a real phony. You know why? Because she honestly believes all this phony junk she believes in.”

That swinging party in Holly's apartment, from Holly’s toga to Mag’s face-plant, is one of the most glorious mixtures of slapstick and sophistication ever filmed, worthy to be placed alongside other shindigs from Duck Soup, My Man Godfrey, and The Philadelphia Story. Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” theme is as good as Elmer Bernstein’s main melody from To Kill a Mockingbird for the purpose of making grown men nudge you in the theater to see if you’ve got a Kleenex in your purse.

Above all, there is Audrey Hepburn. Whether or not you care for this movie is very much dependent on whether you care for her, and I love her dearly indeed. Capote famously did not want Hepburn; he thought she was too genteel, preferring the up-front sensuality of Marilyn Monroe. He had a point. But, having admitted that it’s hard to believe Audrey Hepburn was ever Lula Mae Anybody, let’s also admit that most great stars don’t seem to have come from anywhere, except maybe the forehead of Zeus. And in every other respect, Hepburn nails the part. Her essential sweetness takes the edge off Holly’s avarice, as her face lights up at the sight of the “ninth richest man in America under 50.” Her lovely, overarticulated voice suggests a girl who’s role-playing so often she doesn’t know whether she’s “on” or “off.” Hepburn began as a dancer, and like her other good roles, Breakfast at Tiffany’s uses her ease with her body, as when she cries “Thursday? It can’t be, it’s too gruesome!” and gallops into action. One of the smartest things Edwards does is that opening, where Holly, still in last night’s evening gown, glides along the Tiffany’s windows with her coffee and bread. It’s defiantly literal, but it anchors every part of the character: her practicality and her whimsy, her materialism and her dreams.

New York Film Festival 2011: Trio

2011-10-05T08:22:00.011-04:00

A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi) The Siren’s film of the festival so far. It deals with issues a good number of us will face eventually: a marriage (Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi) in trouble; a child (Sarina Farhadi, an absolute wonder) whose care and education must be secured; and a father deep in the clutches of Alzheimer’s. Into this mix comes an untrained care worker (Sareh Bayat) with money and husband (Shahab Hosseini) troubles of her own. Add the vagaries of the legal system, and this domestic drama takes on suspense that would do Hitchcock proud. Director Asghar Farhadi doles out information scrap by scrap through a searching, subtle camera. The focus on the ethics of lying--whom it helps, whom it hurts--and a child’s painful initiation into the world of adult deceit reminded the Siren of The Fallen Idol, one of her favorite films. The textures of life in some Middle Eastern societies reveal themselves slowly and exquisitely. The Siren was caught by glimpses of things she had observed in southern Lebanon--the many variations in the way women veil; the wide stone steps and big, screenless windows; the tight terraces and eerily quiet buildings that open onto chaotic streets. The performances are so precisely calibrated that watching Hatami cut vegetables or Moaadi open a door with a key reveals volumes about their characters. Often the Siren observes plaintively that more average moviegoers would like old movies if only they could see the right ones. She’s convinced that they would like brand-new foreign ones, too, if we could persuade them to take in something as good as A Separation.

This Is Not a Film (2010, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi). The Siren had no idea what to expect from this work, smuggled out of Iran as Jafar Panahi appeals his sentence for the crime of making films. What she got was a self-portrait of an artist who is as dryly understated and as moving as his actors. Filmed on digital with Jafar Panahi’s colleague, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, this shattering documentary shows one day for Panahi under house arrest--Fireworks Wednesday, an Iranian holiday. Panahi rattles around his apartment, discussing his appeal with his lawyer, feeding a scene-stealing lizard, making tea, and trying to describe the movie that he wants to make. As he marks the elements of a scene by laying tape on his carpet and describing the action, you see that the movie is as beautifully and exactly laid out in his mind as if he had already made it. The title This Is Not a Film is a dark joke; Panahi has been sentenced to six years in prison and banned from directing and screenwriting for 20 years. At one point Mirtahmasb is heard saying we’re “behind the scenes of Iranian filmmakers not making films." Later Panahi, his emotions getting the better of him, says “cut” and Mirtahmasb reminds him, in a gentle sally, that he can’t say that: “It’s an offense.” Panahi shows some scenes from his films on a DVD player, says that location can do the direction for him, and talks about the happy accidents that can take a scene to another level. We see several such accidents here, from a crane that sweeps within a few feet of his terrace like the sword of Damocles, to a chance encounter with a young man collecting garbage. The man tells him, just before a closing shot of heart-stopping perfection, “Mr. Panahi, please don’t come outside. They’ll see you with the camera.” Two weeks ago, it was revealed that Mirtahmasb is one of six filmmakers jailed in Iran, adding his plight to that of Panahi. The ghastly regime in Tehran wants to rob all these artists of what could be their most productive years as filmmakers. This Is Not a Film demonstrates that in doing so, they are robbing us all.

A Dangerous Method (2011, David Cronenberg) Les bon temps at the NYFF could not possibly roule forever, and on Tuesday they hit a brick wall named Keira Knightley. Not since Nicolas Cage and his adenoids damn near ruined Peggy Sue Got Married has the Siren witnessed a movie so heavily damaged by a lead performance. Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein, who at first is being treated by Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), at his Swiss clinic, for that catch-all early 20th-century diagnosis “hysteria.” Later she embarks on an affair with Jung, as he develops a mentor relationship with Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) and all three thrash out the foundations of psychoanalysis. After the screening, director David Cronenberg talked about the near-disappearance of the hysteria diagnosis and how difficult it is nowadays to get a bead on what its manifestations were like. Well, as played by Knightley, hysteria is facial tics, jaw spasms suggesting advanced tetanus, flailing limbs, rolling and darting eyes and sudden marionette-like jerks. None of these elaborate gestures suggest mental illness; instead they suggest distractions born of a superficial performance. Even later, when supposedly cured, or least less hysterical, Knightley is--in a word seldom applied to beautiful actresses--hammy. My old friend Glenn Kenny, for the record, went on Twitter to say “OF COURSE Knightley's performance in Method is disruptive. Her sexuality is the monster in this Cronenberg monster movie.” The trouble with this diagnosis is that Knightley doesn't show sexuality, either. This movie concerns people who spent their lives proving sex is in our minds, but sex is also inextricably corporeal, as indeed is acting. And Knightley is too busy choreographing her bits of business to portray anything recognizable as female lust, let alone release. Fassbender, who was fantastic as the still center of mounting hysteria in the cellar scene in Inglorious Basterds, has a hard time demonstrating passion for Sabina. Then again, he isn’t playing opposite believable illness or desire, just their seventh-generation Xerox copies. When Jung gets a respite in the form of a scene with his wife (Sarah Gadon), or better still Mortenson’s tranquil but savagely observant Freud, the movie fulfills the promise of its plot. The scenes between Jung and Freud are the ones that show thwarted passion, as acolyte and idol form an intense bond, only to grow increasingly distrustful of one another. The script is tight and witty, and A Dangerous Method is a gorgeous film, not merely for the beauty of the settings but for the way Cronenberg’s camera seeks them out. By her last three scenes in the movie, Knightley starts reacting to the people in front of her, and she gains some fitful poignance. But by then it’s too late.

New York Film Festival 2011: Four More

2011-09-29T17:26:00.018-04:00

["Why is the Siren writing up new films?" a few of you have asked. Have the rebels taken over the radio station? Is someone threatening to torch the Siren’s Warner Archive discs unless she cooperates? No, it is far more prosaic: The New York Film Festival is having press screenings, and they said the Siren could come, as long as she sits up straight and doesn’t spill her coffee. And the Siren thought it would be fun to run a newspaper. But nobody asked her, so she decided that writing short takes on new films also would be fun. That’s it. The Siren is still watching TCM. These capsules are not being filed by a robot Siren in a long dress.]

Melancholia (2011) This latest from Lars von Trier, or Prince Motormouth as the Siren now calls him, was unexpectedly marvelous. Divided like Gaul into three parts: a magnificently surreal flash-forward to the apocalypse that is about to hit in the form of a planet colliding with our own; a midsection showing the slow-motion cataclysm that is the wedding of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) to Michael (Alexander Skarsgard); and a finale focusing on Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Justine’s sister, as the end approaches and the extravagantly depressed Justine drifts around uttering downers like the bad fairy at a christening. Despite its plot and preoccupations, Melancholia merits adjectives that the Siren had not previously associated with von Trier: subtle, charming, sympathetic. Some subtlety shows early, as Dunst seems like a normal, albeit disorganized bride--but small things tell us something is terribly wrong with this beauty, until (this is von Trier, after all) the party goes south in a very, very big way. The charm is largely from Kiefer Sutherland as Gainsbourg’s husband, a deeply practical man trying to cope with situations in which practicality is of no use whatever. And the sympathy comes from Gainsbourg as Claire, a caretaker personality par excellence. Justine tells Claire, with ferocious relish, that the world is evil and no one will miss it, but Claire responds to doomsday with, “Where will my child grow up?” The liveliest movie about clinical depression that the Siren can imagine, and do not mistake that for faint praise.

The Turin Horse (2011), which Bela Tarr has said will be his final film, begins with a narrated anecdote about Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown, which was occasioned by seeing the driver of a hansom cab beat his horse. After the story is told over a black screen, the film follows the elderly driver home. He and his daughter put the horse in the stable, and for days the two endure a windstorm as savage, and as exquisitely photographed, as that in Victor Seastrom's The Wind. The drudgery of their lives is shown in relentless detail, from the daughter dressing and undressing the old man, to the way they both eat boiled potatoes with their bare hands.

It is not boring, exactly, despite the long takes that show much of this in real time and despite the resolute lack of extended dialogue. There is plenty of opportunity to think about the despair of poverty, and matters such as: The absence of beauty or ornament in the house, save a glimpse of what could be a photograph of the woman's mother. The lack of books, until a band of gypsies brings one by. How mere cleanliness must seem a dream of luxury, as the daughter rinses the dishes and her face and never uses soap. Why showing kindness to your work animals might also be a luxury. Why a horse might want to commit suicide.

In the background plays the stringed dirge that constitutes the score, as mercilessly repetitive as a music box. The score does switch off from time to time, such as when a neighboring blowhard stomps in, asks for some local hooch, says the end may be nigh and delivers a rant about the debasement of modern society. At other times you hear the wind, whose shrieks and whistles reminded the Siren of the Apaches in Stagecoach. After a second or two spent forlornly hoping some equivalent of marauding Apaches might show up, the Siren began to contemplate why she felt so unmoved by this famed director's swan song, which is so far the only Tarr she has seen.

This high-styled, proudly austere movie presents its bullet points as plainly as many a melodrama--poverty, humanity, mortality, futility. In order to find The Turin Horse great, the Siren would have to believe that Tarr's refusal to give an inch to an audience's desire for characters and a story is a virtue in itself. And/or she would have to believe that through 146 minutes of well water, boiled potatoes and a horse on hunger strike, Tarr had given her insights about people, or behavior, or our place on this earth that are as valuable as those to be had, for instance, from some passengers on a stagecoach to Lordsburg. And the Siren believes neither.

Miss Bala (2011, Gerardo Naranjo) The Siren has been seeing some NYFF films as close to cold as one gets in the digital age. All she had read about this selection from Mexico was that it concerned a beauty-pageant contestant who gets caught up with drug gangs. That sounded as though it might be a thriller. Um, no. Miss Bala is an extraordinarily bleak social drama that happens to feature suspense and a great deal of violence. Stephanie Sigman plays Laura Guerrero, whose simple goal of winning a beauty pageant drags her into the drug wars. Visually and thematically the film recalls Traffic, but the indictment of global folly is even stronger in Miss Bala, which after the first quarter-hour shows not a single moment of social order. The U.S. DEA agents, when they appear, are as brutal to Laura as anyone else. While it has the propulsive drive that comes from outrage, Miss Bala is what they call a hard sit. Events wipe out the heroine’s courage and even her personality, until she focuses on survival and nothing more. This is what swathes of Mexico have become, the film says; and this is what we’ve all signed up for.

Carnage (2011, Roman Polanski) When the Siren watches Supernanny with her husband, he often winds up muttering, “It’s about the parents, this show. It’s always about the parents.” Carnage is a supercharged Supernanny episode, in which the kids have been sent to have lunch in the trailer, while the adults expose their warts via the cut-glass complete sentences of playwright and co-screenwriter Yasmina Reza. John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster play Michael and Penelope Longstreet, the parents of a boy who just had two teeth knocked out by a stick-wielding peer. The parents of the perpetrator, Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz), visit Michael and Penelope’s boringly tasteful Brooklyn apartment to settle things in amicable fashion. How well that goes may be judged from the title. The fun--and the movie had the house rocking with laughter at many points--comes from watching four intrepid performers rage around the set like a wrecking crew sent to knock down the Actors’ Studio. The Siren was hanging on Waltz’s every smirk, and transfixed by Foster’s choice to have her character’s body language get tighter and tenser even as Penelope comes further unglued. The whole effect is highly artificial, but not stagey in the least. The Siren just read Glenn Kenny--"a potential masterclass in staging, blocking, camera angle, shot selection, shot length, pacing in terms of both rhythm of actual cutting and duration of shot”--and seconds the motion. Carnage is smart about class differences; the couples’ exchanges about careers and accomplishments are often more wounding than the open hostilities over the children. The film doesn’t offer much on the topic of parenting. But it’s clear why: The episodes that bracket Carnage tell us that children are acting in their own play. Mom and Dad may storm and stress, but they’re audience members, not directors.

Treasures 5: The West (1898-1938)

2011-09-28T08:37:00.005-04:00

Yesterday marked the release of Treasures 5: The West, a three-DVD set of rarities from our pals at the National Film Preservation Foundation; it's marvel of care and restoration, with 40 shorts and features depicting sites all over the Western U.S. (and one in Canada). "None of the films has been available before in good-quality video. The 3 DVDs come with a book, interactive screens (some with historical maps), new music, and commentary by 23 historians, museum curators, and preservationists," writes the NFPF's Annette Melville.

And what makes Treasures 5 a solid-gold must for readers of this blog and many other film sites is that the set includes The Sergeant and The Better Man. These two one-reelers were restored with the money we--meaning you, me, Marilyn, Greg, and about 50 writers and bloggers--raised in the very first For the Love of Film blogathon. We’re credited in the wonderfully detailed book that comes in the set.

The Sergeant, from 1910, tells the story of how the title character pursues the colonel’s daughter, gets lost, gets rescued, gets demoted (offscreen) and gets her back, all in 16 minutes. The story is not the point, however; it’s essentially a travelogue through Yosemite, with jaw-dropping views of the park’s splendor. You see the forests, the mountain range, and above all the waterfalls and rapids, all so handsomely framed that the Siren would dearly love to see it projected. The director, Francis Boggs, was murdered one year after the film’s release. He directed about 200 films; The Sergeant is one of only nine surviving from him. We can be proud that our hard work and money preserved it.

The Better Man (1912, Rollin S. Sturgeon) also has great rewards, in that it up-ends the prejudiced attitudes towards Mexicans frequently shown in movies. (The notes tell the story of what those attitudes were at the time with just a couple of titles: The Greaser’s Gauntlet and Broncho Billy and the Greaser). The 12-minute Vitagraph film was filmed near the company’s headquarters in downtown Santa Monica; the Siren isn’t familiar with Santa Monica, but she strongly suspects it doesn’t much look like beachfront Wild West any more. In The Better Man, a neglectful husband and father goes out to blow his salary on a poker game while his child lies gravely ill. A Mexican horse thief who’s searching for food happens upon the wife and child, and he is persuaded to seek out a doctor. The ending packs a great deal of emotional satisfaction.

There are more details in the reviews from Dave Kehr and Lou Lumenick, both friends of the blogathon and film preservation in general. The Siren is still making her way through the set and hasn’t yet seen Womanhandled, the near-complete Gregory La Cava that was Lou’s favorite. But she watched Mantrap, from 1926, the Victor Fleming movie that made Clara Bow a star, and oh it is marvelous. Imagine the Siren’s crowing over the DP credit: “James Howe.” Yes, that James Howe. Eugene Pallette, as young and relatively svelte as he was in Chicago, plays a stocking salesman who persuades a wealthy divorce attorney (Percy Marmont) to take a trip to the backwoods. There Marmont encounters Alverna, a former manicurist who has married the lummox (Ernest Torrance) who tends the local general store, and is giving him merry hell in the bargain.

Clara Bow was an enthralling, utterly natural screen actress; even Louise Brooks, that toughest of tough articles, adored her. She takes over the movie from the instant she steps out of a man’s car and gives him the air with such cheery ease the guy may not even realize he’s history. The Siren loves Bow’s complete transparency, the way you feel as though you see her brain working every minute, even when (as here) the character has way more animal instinct than smarts. Watch her throw her arms around her husband and stuff a bonbon in the attorney’s mouth--and man, will Bow ever make your wish women still used fluffy powder puffs. She had one of the saddest lives of any major star; “her private miseries allowed easy access to her volatile emotions,” remarks the Movie Diva, in a terrific post. Mantrap was Bow’s own favorite among her movies, and this DVD of it looks great.

One last note: net proceeds from the sales of Treasures 5 go to the NFPF to further its good work. Need the Siren say more?

New York Film Festival 2011 (Plus 1)

2011-09-20T18:58:00.012-04:00

The Siren writes up her brief impressions of five movies she has seen so far at the New York Film Festival 2011. In the order viewed:

Woman With Red Hair (1979, Tatsumi Kumashiro). A so-called pink film; the Siren had seen some of these before but hadn't been aware that they constituted a genre, still less that this genre was what she was going to be confronted with on Day 1, Film 1 of the New York Film Festival's press screenings. You could say the Siren was ill-prepared; the last Japanese film she watched was 24 Eyes. Woman With Red Hair isn't something the Siren particularly wants to analyze at great length, or even short length, but it reminded her a bit of The Devil in Miss Jones, only with much less nudity and much better framing. The lead actress (Junko Miyashita) is gorgeous.

The Loneliest Planet (2011, Julia Loktev). Contempt Goes Backpacking. We spend a long while watching the well-scrubbed couple (Hani Furstenberg and Gael Garcia Bernal) have well-scrubbed sex, in between trekking the wild spaces of the Republic of Georgia, and we await an Event. Then the Event happens and…All right, no spoilers here, so the Siren puts it this way. Martin Amis, in his 1984 article on Brian De Palma, remarks that Body Double (which the Siren loves) "could be exploded by a telephone call." This movie explodes if one character turns to the other on one of many arduous hikes and says, "What the hell…?" Has definite rewards, like the lovely score by Richard Skelton, and some enthralling moments, like a long-distance look at the couple and their guide walking along a riverbank after the Event, and a graceful, deeply emotional shot that zooms in on Furstenberg's hair coiled at her neck. But overall, a frustrating travelogue.

You Are Not I (1981, Sara Driver). Based on a Paul Bowles short story; the film's negative was destroyed in a warehouse flood and recently restored from a print discovered in the writer's own collection. It is the pleasingly spooky tale of a woman incarcerated in an insane asylum, who uses a fiery car accident outside the asylum's gates to escape and return to her sister's house. The Siren loved the black-and-white, bare-trees-in-late-fall ambience, via Jim Jarmusch as cinematographer. Very much of its 1980s New Wave time, including the humor. "Just don't let her get excited," is the advice proffered on how to handle the patient (Suzanne Fletcher), who scarcely moves and is given to thousand-yard stares that would scare the wits out of Nurse Ratched. Didn't seem to be much of an audience favorite, but this is the Siren's kind of Halloween movie.

Le Havre (2011, Aki Kaurismaki) Marcel, a shoeshine man (André Wilms) in the port city of the title, has scant income and a devoted but ailing wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen). He winds up sheltering a Gabonese refugee boy (Blondin Miguel), with the help of a bottomless supply of kindhearted neighbors, one seriously lovable dog, and one cop (Jean-Pierre Daroussin) who says "I don't much like people," but doesn't mean it. A fairy tale about real-world problems that is blissfully unmoored to reality of any kind. Contains a Mickey-and-Judy plot twist, a shot that echoes a Susan Hayward movie (you'll know it when you see it), and a deplorable French pun. The squarest movie the Siren has seen all year, and she's including her TCM viewing here. She was crazy about it, and would have been even if the main couple weren't named Marcel and Arletty.

We Can't Go Home Again (1976, Nicholas Ray). A major restoration of the director's last film, a labor of love by his widow, Susan, and an important piece of film history. The Siren is grateful that it's available, and grateful to have seen it. She only wishes she had actually liked it. Many of the images have power, but the movie itself does not, weighed down as it is by dorm-room philosophizing and students who are painfully unnatural on screen, even though they are evidently playing variations on themselves. Ray's beautiful voice provides the narration, and the movie perks up when he's in the frame. At times it resembles an oddball, self-valorizing version of To Sir With Love, only this "Sir" is preaching psychosexual and political liberation instead of clean clothes and good manners. It's an opportunity to see a celebrated auteur wrestling his demons to the end, but in terms of cinema, the Siren got a lot more out of Born to Be Bad.

And the plus one, such as it is:

I Don't Know How She Does It (2011, Douglas McGrath). The Siren has loathed few novels to the degree that she loathed Allison Pearson's 2002 book about the problems of a hedge-fund manager trying to balance work and the demands of her husband and two kids. The character of Kate Reddy was so spoiled and abrasive that even when she voiced a complaint the Siren has made herself, the Siren's response was, "Oh, go soak your head." The good news is that Sarah Jessica Parker gives Kate some urgently needed warmth, and Aline Brosh Mckenna once again turns in a screenplay that's much better than the book it's based on (the other being The Devil Wears Prada). The bad news is that the movie is slackly plotted, offers nothing to much to look at except Christina Hendricks and Pierce Brosnan (who are wasted with prodigal carelessness), and despite the occasional wry chuckle (mostly via Olivia Munn's Momo), the film has no actual wit. The actors all deserved better, but this is probably the best job that could have been done with the source material.

Drive (2011)

2011-09-14T19:48:00.014-04:00

(Please note: A movie like Drive is best seen cold. The Siren doesn’t discuss the ending, but when she writes up a movie she does so in detail. If you plan to see Drive, she suggests you come back and read this later, if you are so inclined. It will still be here.)

Sometime around May 19 the Siren's Twitter feed started filling up with ordinarily temperate movie writers made dancing machines by the Cannes screening of Drive, the new heist thriller from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Three months later, the word of mouth is more like a bellow, so the Siren was happy to go see for herself, through the kindness of Danny Bowes of Movies by Bowes.

It all begins so well, with Gosling's voice providing what seems like film noir narrative, until you realize he's on the phone setting up a heist. He visits his crusty sidekick, Shannon (Bryan Cranston) to get his souped-up Impala, and waits outside a grim warehouse for two robbers he's never met, like a limo driver picking up some slumming clients. The pursuit sequence that follows made the Siren almost weepy with gratitude for a director who lets her get good and comfortable with a shot, who's got rhythm, damn it, and the nerve to lace the frantic motion of a car chase with pauses that play out just long enough.

Then Gosling meets Carey Mulligan, and suspense strips its gears. Thus the Siren is in the somewhat unexpected position of stating that Drive would be a fine genre picture, if it weren't for all that gooey girl stuff.

We’ll have to call Gosling's character Driver, because he has no name, just like Joan Fontaine in Rebecca. (Wait--isn't that what all the guys at the press screenings said? No? Damn.) He drives getaway cars for a living, when he isn't risking his neck as a stunt driver. Down the hall from him lives Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos, utterly natural and unirritating). Benicio's father (Oscar Isaac) is in prison just long enough for Driver to form a bond with Irene and yearn for All the Things He Will Never Have, and yes, that's the goo the Siren is complaining about. Then the father is sprung from jail, but he owes money to men he met inside. To protect Irene, Driver agrees to help out her husband in a pawnshop robbery. And of course that goes the way of all heists, and flesh…

Gosling is handsome, in his senior-class-ring sort of way; CGI him into the crowd of overage teens in Rebel Without a Cause and nobody'd know the difference. His perfectly muscled body seems made for intimidating the shit out of people. Oddly, however, especially given his recent Youtube exploit, he's not that impressive until he starts whaling away. Take a moment when a former client proposes another heist. Driver growls, "Shut your mouth or I'll kick your teeth down your throat." Two problems, aside from the line's being a bit flavorless, as action-movie threats go; one is that Gosling's voice sounds more breathy than vicious. It could be that the instrument's just too naturally thin and boyish, but his register is in the same neighborhood as Clint Eastwood's, and the voice still isn't doing the job. Second, his exaggerated demeanor is that of a small-time tough, not someone confident he can kick ass wherever, whenever. (***)

And this driver has to remember all the 100,000 roads of Los Angeles, but Gosling shows only one thing at one time. When he's mooning after Irene, that's all he's doing. His blue eyes swim and whatever ruthlessness, torment, demons or scorpions he'd been trying to show are drowned. That's a big problem for a movie that depends on its main character's capacity for violence. Where there's no coil, you don't believe the spring.

Albert Brooks, whose performance as a producer gone psychopath is as good as you’ve heard, gets that in a way Gosling doesn't. He's scary just ordering Chinese food. The waiter forgets the fortune cookies, for a fractional instant all emotion flees Brooks' face, and the Siren feared the waiter might face the same fate as Spider in Goodfellas. It's that instant that shows how dangerous the character is, and not his "Where are my fucking cookies?"

But Brooks isn't around much until the final act. Instead, the movie spends an ungodly amount of time with an unconsummated love story between Driver and Irene. The Siren doesn't begrudge Refn this classic conceit: the interlude where it's established what the hero is fighting for. It's deeply unfortunate, however, that Gosling is fighting for the tapioca presence of Carey Mulligan, diligently overacting her underacting. She plays one note, that note being wounded innocence: eyes wide and slightly damp, lips pouted and slightly bruised. Gosling does his best to convince us that this constitutes irresistible allure, but that's a tall order, asking an actor to play convincing romance with a woman who's avoiding charm like the Spanish flu. Far more arresting are Gosling's scenes with the little boy, who manages a variety of emotion and reaction that Mulligan does not. Infuriating as the Siren found Mulligan's performance, she hesitates to blame the actress entirely; this may well be the way she was told to play it. When Irene lets out a laugh during a nature ramble with Driver, Refn cuts away like she just flashed us.

The critics who loved Drive either seem to find wounded innocence as endlessly fascinating as Refn does, or they shrug it off. But this isn’t something brief enough to ignore, like the Roberta Flack forest-sex in Play Misty for Me. Driver's scenes with Irene make up a good chunk of the movie, and she's around a lot even later. One lengthy shot has Irene at a mirror, in profile, putting a baby clip in her hair, then staring at her reflection. Is she afraid for herself, for her son? Is she melancholy at the thought of a man she can't have? Is she thinking, "Goddamn it, why can't I just hook up with a nice dentist for once?" The Siren can't tell you. Mulligan just looks mad at her hair. And when Driver's true nature is finally revealed to her, she lets fly with a slap that's the least believable moment in the movie, and that's saying something considering that we also see Christina Hendricks rob a pawnshop in five-inch stilettos.

By the end of the Irene section, the Siren was ready to inform Drive's partisans that they've got some nerve promising the return of Bullitt when after the opening credits roll most of what you get is a listless-white-people riff on In the Mood for Love. Then Hendricks showed up in those stilettos, and the goo was gone. (Good god, why couldn't she play Irene?) And from here on out the Siren was much happier, despite her occasional yelps. Once Gosling started acting deranged, the Siren starting believing the tough act a lot more. It's hard not to, when he stalks into a strip joint's dressing room carrying a hammer. Which he proceeds to use. Enthusiastically. While the strippers sit immobile and, I don't know, let their breasts air out. It's a great way to spice up the evergreen tough-guy-busts-up-a-massage-parlor episode, like setting a kneecapping in the Musée Rodin.

Brooks returns to show he had plenty of leftover pathology after Out of Sight, Ron Perlman hulks around complaining about anti-Semitism in the Mob, and Gosling stomps the everloving bejesus out of a bad guy in an elevator, in a scene the Siren found as effective as everyone else did. (Well, almost as effective. The kiss Gosling gives Mulligan just before going Full Metal Joe Pesci on the henchman's face lasts a lot longer than it would from the 4th floor down to the basement.)

Other niggles include the music which, while contemporary, sounds so 80s the Siren was mouthing at her notebook, "And people say I'm retro." The synth-soaked instrumentals aren't bad, and they certainly fit with Drive's dogged determination to cite everything from Thief to To Live and Die in L.A. to, according to Refn himself, Sixteen Candles. But there's also songs playing under some scenes with lyrics like "a real human being and a real hero" and "oh my love, look and see the sun rising through the river." Maybe it's supposed to be ironic counterpoint, but put that kind of stuff in a woman's picture and they'd call it camp.

Speaking of memories--the Siren has seldom encountered a movie so jam-packed with references, and she supposes part of the fun for filmheads is spotting them all, and trying to determine which are intentional and which are inadvertent. The Siren herself is still trying to figure out whether a scene of Driver entertaining Irene and her son by zipping down a freeway culvert was actually supposed to remind anyone of the drag race in Grease. But overall she wishes Refn had either studied the thematically freighted heroines of movies like Shane and Witness a little more, or stuck with what Danny Bowes calls “the ownage.”

(***) Corrected 9/18/11, per Mat and Tony Dayoub. Thanks for following my blog!

Born to Be Bad (1950)

2011-09-08T23:02:00.011-04:00

The Siren has been wondering what it would have been like to kiss Nicholas Ray in 1950.

From this you should not deduce that the Siren has a crush on the man. She likes her sex symbols on the louche side, but not quite that louche. Still, as she watched Robert Ryan lay one on Joan Fontaine for the sixth or seventh time in Born to Be Bad, the Siren found the thought crowding out all attempts at more formal analysis. Back goes Fontaine’s head, way back, so far back Ryan could undoubtedly have told us whether she still had her wisdom teeth. Up go Fontaine’s arms as Ryan embraces some part of her that the camera is tactfully cutting off. Down comes Ryan’s mouth on hers, until you can see that he doesn’t part his hair. Just before the Siren started in on her Ray-kissing reverie, she was reminded of the morning that she was watching a backyard bird-feeder and saw a hawk close its talons on a chickadee, then fly off to have its own breakfast elsewhere.

Perhaps you're wondering about why the Siren was wondering about Ray's kissing, instead of Ryan. OK, she wondered about Ryan too, but that's nothing new. The Siren thought about Ray because this is how actors kiss all the time in his early black-and-white films, with a few variations. Sometimes it's decorated with a small spin or swivel, or commenced with a feint at the neck, or flipped with (oh yeah) the woman on top.

Forget framing. This is the sort of auteurist signature that the Siren lives to point out to people. You can’t say she doesn’t try to add value.

Born to Be Bad occupies a low rung in the Ray canon, perhaps because it was made for RKO under Howard Hughes (oh god, not him again), and of course he meddled in it quite a bit. The Siren will tell you, though, that she liked a lot more than the kissing. She had a great time with this one. And Dave Kehr likes it, too: "lively, vicious and daring," he says. Yes, just so.

Maybe the problem is that it’s occasionally tagged “film noir” (as it is in the IMDB database), and if you watch this movie expecting On Dangerous Ground or even In a Lonely Place, you will be sorely disappointed. The Siren would list Born to Be Bad’s noir characteristics as: 1. It’s in black and white; 2. There’s one character in it who lies a lot and 3. There are a couple of shots where the camera is filming through a window. Otherwise, it’s got a lot more in common with All About Eve, or even Gone with the Wind.

Joan Leslie plays Donna, a fetching young publishing assistant in San Francisco (subject of some breathtaking establishing shots). Her mildly bohemian milieu includes Curtis Carey (Zachary Scott), her filthy rich fiance; a bon-mot-slinging painter nicknamed Gobby (Mel Ferrer); Nick, a he-man novelist (Ryan, who else); and a staircase cunningly placed in the middle of her apartment so that all these people can be filmed drifting up and down it, calling, “Donna, darling, are you there?”. Into this halcyon environment comes Christabel Caine (Joan Fontaine), a delicate blonde attired in tasteful Hattie Carnegie. She’s Donna’s cousin, and she appears in the apartment like the sorceress in the Coleridge poem: “a damsel bright/Dressed in a silken robe of white.” (Except the damsel in the poem is named Geraldine; Coleridge's "Christabel" is the innocent victim. Oh well, the Siren loves the poem, so she still loved the half-baked reference.)

Almost immediately we’re shown that Christabel has an arm’s length relationship with the truth; only a scene or two later it becomes obvious that she’s a magnficently passive-aggressive bitch. Christabel, like Eve Harrington or Uriah Heep for that matter, uses a facade of humility to mask her conniving. She wants Donna’s fiance--or rather, his money and prestige--for herself, and she soon is able to trick Curtis into marrying her. The trouble is Nick, who has a powerful yen for her, a way with words and a kissing technique that she’s loath to give up. So Christabel decides she’ll have both men--and for a while, she almost does.

It’s a women’s picture, in other words, and a good one, too, with the actors in high gear (even Joan Leslie, no great love of the Siren’s, gave Donna a sharp intelligence). Kehr talks about Ray cutting into action; the Siren became obsessed, when she wasn’t concentrating on the kissing, with all the shots of Joan Fontaine crossing rooms. She skitters away from Zachary Scott's embraces because she has to scheme a bit more, he’s breaking her concentration and she doesn't want to sleep with her husband anyway, how dull. She traipses across a gallery hunching her shoulders and pushing back her arms like a schoolgirl, as she tries to persuade Scott to make a move she knows will doom his engagement. In the apartment, she glides away from Leslie with a smile of self-satisfaction as her schemes take root. Again and again Ray shows Fontaine on the move, until her endless to-and-fro becomes of a piece with all the double-crosses she’s trying to pull.

And there’s Ray’s close-ups, often jarringly placed where they aren’t expected, and emphasizing something that had been going unnoticed. In this brittle movie about people and their facades, there’s a striking moment where Christabel is bouncing her Aunt Clara (Virginia Farmer) out of the house. And Ray puts the camera on the old woman’s face, leaving it there as confusion, hurt and abject fear of the future play across it. It establishes Christabel’s villainy far more than kicking around Joan Leslie ever could.

How does Fontaine play Christabel? Think back to a fabulous bit of dialogue from Rebecca, when the odious Mrs. Van Hopper accuses the nameless protagonist of manipulating Maxim de Winter into marrying her: “I suppose I have to hand it to you for a fast worker. How did you manage it? Still waters certainly run deep. Tell me, have you been doing anything you shouldn't?” Fontaine responds with wounded innocence, “I don't know what you mean.” Let’s suppose Fontaine’s character knew exactly what Mrs. van Hopper meant, and had been playing those “tennis lessons” with Maxim for all they were worth. Voila, you’d have Fontaine’s performance in Born to Be Bad. Every bit of Rebecca, now with sidelong calculation, not to mention a headlong sexual union with Robert Ryan that would have scared the second Mrs. de Winter to death.

The similarities with that same year's All About Eve are obvious, even if the script isn’t nearly as good. Take the painter character, a rough parallel to George Sanders in Eve. The Siren was deeply amused by one online reviewer’s reference to Gobby as “codedly gay.” He’s codedly gay in the way that Paul Robeson is codedly black. Gobby is the gay-est pre-1960 character you will ever encounter this side of Franklin Pangborn. Not to belabor this, but even the Siren’s sainted Aunt Doris, the kind of woman who would wonder aloud why Liberace hadn’t found himself a nice girl, would have twigged to Gobby. Ferrer is handsome in his beanpole way, and he has witty lines and well-timed double-takes, but despite her admiration for the actor’s natural, dry, unexaggerated performance, the Siren wasn’t as charmed by Gobby as the script seemed to want to her to be. He acts wise to Christabel early on, and yet he never breathes a word. Gobby lacks, as Addison DeWitt would have said, the killer instinct. Hell, Addison could have disposed of Gobby with one flared nostril.

Ryan was a different matter. Phwoar. His roughed-up handsomeness was at its height, and the Siren could have happily spent half the movie just watching him lean against a kitchen counter. He’s very much secondary to Fontaine, and it isn’t a role to gladden the heart of those who worship Ryan in The Wild Bunch, necessarily, but he seems to be enjoying this rare chance at a romantic lead. And romantic it is; he's got the Rhett Butler part. Like Rhett, Nick has offstage derring-do (he is writing a novel about dangerous times in China, Rhett is running guns), Nick knows that the love of his life is a scheming tramp with the soul of an abacus, and Nick doesn’t care that much because she’s so damn sexy.

All in all, given the fun she had with this movie, and adding it to On Dangerous Ground, In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night, the Siren has to say that with the exception of the brilliant Bigger Than Life, she prefers her Nicholas Ray in black and white.

(One of the best film blogs around is run by the Siren's friend Tony Dayoub, and this post is a belated offering for his splendid Nicholas Ray Blogathon, which just wrapped up. A complete list of Nicholas Ray posts, for the blogathon and elsewhere around the Web, is here. Tony's own take on Born to Be Bad (he liked it, but not quite as much as the Siren) is here. Another Born to Be Bad writeup that focuses intently on the movie's considerable aesthetics, from Jake Cole at Not Just Movies, is here. )

Anecdote of the Week: "The Crisp Tang of Frying Writers"

2011-09-03T18:32:00.004-04:00

The Siren has been offline, mostly, for this past week, due to technical circumstances beyond her control. She won't describe the circs (they're boring) except to note that "That's the darndest thing" is not a phrase you ever want to hear from the nice man at Tekserve. All fixed now.

So the Siren has been visiting some old friends on her bookshelf, one of them being S.J. Perelman. The Siren assumes many of her readers know "Strictly From Hunger," but it is worth the revisit. Full text available here (click through the links marked "Part One" and "Conclusion"). Better yet, buy some Perelman--the Siren thinks his best years were the 1930s and early 40s. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like everybody else's best years...

Also, for the record, if the Siren ever adopts a new nom de blog, she's going with Violet Hush.

The violet hush of twilight was descending over Los Angeles as my hostess, Violet Hush, and I left its suburbs headed toward Hollywood. In the distance a glow of huge piles of burning motion-picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive, I thought, inhaling deep lungfuls of carbon monoxide. Suddenly our powerful Gatti-Cazazza slid to a stop in the traffic.

"What is it, Jenkin?" Violet called anxiously through the speaking-tube to the chaffeur (played by Lyle Talbot).

A suttee was in progress by the roadside, he said--did we wish to see it? Quickly, Violet and I elbowed our way out through the crowd. An enormous funeral pyre composed of thousands of feet of film and scripts, drenched with Chanel Number Five, awaited the touch of Jack Holt, who was to act as master of ceremonies. In a few terse words Violet explained this unusual custom borrowed from the HIndus and never paid for. The worst disgrace that can befall a producer is an unkind notice from a New York reviewer. When this happens, the producer becomes a pariah in Hollywood. He is shunned by his friends, throw into bankruptcy, and like a Japanese electing hara-kiri, he commits suttee. A great bonfire is made of the film, and the luckless producer, followed by directors, actors, technicians, and the producer's wives, immolate themselves. Only the scenario writers are exempt. These are tied between the tails of two spirited Caucasian ponies, which are then driven off in opposite directions. This custom is called "a conference."

The Sunset Gun/Siren Simulcast: Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

2011-08-26T08:12:00.013-04:00

The Siren was on the phone with a fellow writer last year, and the subject of Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven came up. Quoth the lady (and she is a lady): “I kind of sympathize with her.” Respondeth the Siren: “So do I, so do I.”

Let it be said that neither the Siren nor her friend condones, approves of nor has any plans for drowning crippled children, indulging in do-it-yourself miscarriages or committing suicide in hopes our significant others subsequently will be executed for murder. One has certain moral limits.

Yet we were both serious. Tierney's character isn’t unsympathetic to either one of us. “She just wants to be left the hell alone with her man,” remarked the lady. “I get that way sometimes, too,” admitted the Siren.

And we do have company, albeit tongue-in-cheek company. The Siren's idol, James Agee, saw what was billed in 1945 as a tale of an evil woman's obsessive love and remarked, "Audiences will probably side with the murderess, who spends all of the early reels trying to manage five minutes alone with her husband. Just as it looks possible, she picks up a pair of binoculars and sees his brother, her mother, her adopted cousin and the caretaker approaching by motorboat."

Now it can be told: Ellen's other contemporary admirer was Kim Morgan of the exceptional film site (she hates the word blog) Sunset Gun. For her love of John M. Stahl's masterpiece, and considering her kinship with the Siren, Kim agreed to chat via email about our beloved Ellen Berent Harland. Kim has cross-posted at her place, with her own introduction, which you should check out.

*****

Kim:
Oh Gene. Or rather, misunderstood Ellen. A woman trapped in her obsession, of course, in her obsession with her father, but then, also trapped within the un-permissiveness of the times. Permission for Ellen to do…what would Ellen do? Perhaps that's the problem. This is a time when one is not allowed the strength of being… Ellen. I'm not sure when anyone is allowed to be Ellen, exactly, but she is certainly trapped by some force beyond mere psychopathology. Maybe born so impeccable, that unfaltering, that she even frightens herself? She's not normal. Well, she wants to be normal. A woman who yearns for marriage (to Cornel Wilde, though we're never sure why, maybe because he seems normal), a private honeymoon, some damn solace, a few less tedious family gatherings and…then… just maybe the desire to NOT procreate (albeit, she changes her mind a bit late in the game).

I know I'm giving Ellen a big break (maybe she should have remained single) but her superiority is a large part of the problem. You could call that pure narcissism, but that's not what's going on. She never boasts so much as arrives, right? All she needs to do is walk into a room with those startlingly beautiful blue eyes, flop on a couch and eat a sandwich with that perfect overbite. But it's not that she appears a mere mortal trapped in some super-human, celestial cage, she's both sensitive and smart. Maybe a tortured genius. I think this is a woman who suspects that her husband isn't such a great writer after all (I bet you she's got five better novels in her than he does).

She knows men desire her, how can they not? (I love seeing the film on the big screen because always, always, you hear an audible gasp when Tierney first appears -- she's so staggeringly beautiful). But anyway -- men -- they must have her, they yearn for this woman, this is the ultimate trophy (gorgeous, smart, strong, knows her way with a horse and an urn), but in the end, what they really want is 'the girl with the hoe.' Right?

Which then leads me to what you stated when we began this discussion. Of course -- no (I can't believe I have to say this), but I don't endorse the drowning of little brothers (but with those sunglasses? And that lipstick? Oh never mind... ), but what I certainly don't endorse are book dedications from your husband to your adopted sister who's, well, secretly in love with your husband. And vice versa! Come on! To hell with Jeanne Crain. We all saw this coming just as Ellen did.

But, as everyone prattles on like Ellen is the troubled one (and yes… she let the kid drown, but let's try to put that aside for a moment because no one actually knows that for sure, except us, which yes, yes, makes us complicit if we sympathize with Ellen. I'll take that up with Michael Haneke later…). But, returning to the point, it takes Vincent Price to sort all of the obvious 'girl with the hoe' triangle out? And posthumously, in court? Well, thank god for Vincent Price. But, like the pregnancy, he came a bit late into the picture (unlike Dana Andrews who fell for her at death, and in a painting…actually, art connoisseur Price and Andrews have a lot more in common than they think, but that's a whole other movie/story). But this all makes me ponder fantasy scenarios like, where the hell was Eve Arden when Ellen needed her? Or Thelma Ritter? Ellen may have left that delicate slipper on her foot had Thelma been fluffing the pillows. Eve and Thelma would've been on to little Jeanne for the Ann Blyth/Veda Pierce she really is. Christ. But Ellen would never hang around these women. What are they going to talk about? Normal things?

And yet, a woman can't have Vincent Price as her only best GIRLfriend -- I think. Well, after death anyway. Though that would be pretty damn great in life. Come to think of it, maybe she needed Conrad Veidt while living.

But again, Gene/Ellen is a modern type of woman, a poetic, ingenious woman, and I always get the sense that her inner struggle to express whatever power or talent she has, well beyond her beauty is pure torture. Many may look in her eyes and see cold orbs of hate, but I see… Wagner's entire Ring Cycle, and beautiful, damnable Richard W. seems especially appropriate since, for some crazy reason, he also managed to write, in 'Lohengrin,' 'Here Comes the Bride' amidst his Götterdämmerung.
Is this an excuse for her dastardly acts? No, but she does serve to symbolize every trapped, powerful woman flapping around her white picket fenced-in bird cage. That war raging inside her twists into a a full-scale blitzkrieg on the… normal people. Her revenge is her final work of art! Her masterpiece!

So of course Vincent Price is the one left in her corner. He's probably the only person who could conduct an intelligent, lively conversation with her about things like… music, paintings and stylish ways to throw oneself down a staircase. He would appreciate the Keats in her -- 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' -- 'The Beautiful Lady Without Pity.' He liked what he knew. And he was usually right. Oh Ellen… She can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black...

*****

Farran:
You're so right--Ellen is about sublimation. If she could focus that fierce intelligence on art or a career, she might be able to stay away from rowboats.

I love the idea of Vincent Price as the one person who understands her to any degree. His character, Russell, tells Ellen he'll always love her, and he would have made a much better life partner for her than Richard (Wilde). Ellen could have been Jill Hennessy to Russell's Sam Waterston. Or even just friends, gleefully prosecuting death-penalty cases and critiquing opposing counsel’s wardrobe.

Amen--a husband who dedicates the book he’s been obsessing over from day one to your freaking sister has got to expect some payback, although we can agree Ellen’s reaction is a wee bit disproportionate. And Ruth's (Crain) love for her sister’s husband is never presented as conniving, but the little minx winds up with just what she wants.

Yet Ellen is memorialized as a monster--”leave her to heaven,” the line from Hamlet about Gertrude. That's ironic to me in a way that probably wasn't intentional, since I always thought Gertrude got a raw deal from her male creator. She’s another woman who's ceaselessly nagged because she wants a man of her own and some peace and quiet.

The movie shows Ellen’s father fixation, and I guess that's something. Usually a femme fatale springs fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, puckering a lipsticked mouth around a cigarette, prepared to pull the wings off men and watch them flop around in a mason jar. But, beautiful as Ellen is pouring her father's ashes out of the urn while riding that horse, don't you feel this one stab at psychology is pat? Half the women I know describe themselves as Daddy's girls. What's this telling us--men want a woman who's never loved another man, including Dad? Now really, who's the one with the jealousy problem?

I always wait for that staircase, for Gene hurling herself down it after carefully leaving one slipper on the top step, like a psychopathic Cinderella. It's a wicked act, but she tells Ruth just before she does it, "sometimes the truth IS wicked." Along with Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven dares to go down some dark maternal byways, into things some may feel, but no one wants to admit--in this case, pregnancy as a cage, one that's about to slam shut for oh, about 21 years. Ellen's on bedrest, its own kind of "Yellow Wallpaper" hell. (Those insipid posies on Ellen's dressing-room wallpaper could drive a lot of women to the brink.) Look at what she's doing beforehand. She's talking to her own sister about the stroll the girl just took with her husband. Couldn't Richard be upstairs talking to his wife? Making sure she isn't bored and terrified, instead of taking it for granted for that she's rubbing her belly and practicing lullabies? So she grabs her most beautiful robe, and re-applies her lipstick, and she even puts on perfume--because she's about to go back to Ellen, the beauty, and leave behind Ellen, the terrarium.

For me, the poignant aspect to Ellen isn't that she's, well, crazy. It's that she's got a face for the ages, but if she isn't willing to play along, if she insists on being the most important thing in her man's life, that face avails her nothing. She still loses her husband to a girl who uses niceness the same way Ellen used those sunglasses in the rowboat: as a cover for the schemes churning inside. And nobody will be on her side, except James Agee, bless him, and Vincent Price, and you, and the Siren, and whoever else is crazy enough to say, "I kind of sympathize with her."

Drowning in the Mid-Atlantic

2011-08-16T11:18:00.008-04:00

Kevin Drum does not like old-time movie accents.

The Siren tells you this not because she wants to call up a flash mob of old-movie fans to launch a cyberattack on his Mother Jones blog until Mr. Drum agrees to sit through a James Cagney retrospective. She wouldn't even have read his post, had it not been pointed out to her in a puckish message from a gentleman known to commenters here as Gmoke. Well, the Siren has seen people put down old movies for all kinds of reasons and as such posts go, this one is reasonably polite. It’s expressed mostly in terms of puzzlement, and not a petulant desire to have us intellectually validate the writer’s reluctance to get acquainted with the films of Leo McCarey.

Still, if Mr. Drum had asked the Siren, she’d have said he has things precisely the wrong way round: Old movies have a greater variety of American speech, by far.

Let’s not pretend we don’t know what he's talking about; there is a mid-Atlantic accent used in certain American movies of the 1930s and up through World War II, after which it becomes less and less common until it mostly disappears. (The Siren prefers the term mid-Atlantic because she likes the idea of a bunch of the period’s movie stars out on a Cunard liner somewhere off the coast of Greenland. In her head, they’re all downing martinis with Phoebe Dinsmore, the elocutionist from Singin’ in the Rain, and their tones are getting rounder by the second.) He seems to think it didn’t exist outside the backlot, but as some of Mr. Drum’s commenters pointed out, you could hear that accent in real life just by turning on the radio for one of FDR’s fireside chats. But while this speaking manner survives (barely, it seems to the Siren), it does sound odd to modern American ears, more’s the pity. The Siren had an English literature professor who talked this way, and while she grew to love his voice, she admits that she spent the first week of the class listening to the way he said “sonnet” and “meter” and “Percy Bysshe Shelley” and thinking, “Mister, are you putting me on?”

The question of authenticity aside, Mr. Drum errs in two ways.

Error No. 1. This is an accent common to all, most or even an overlarge percentage of old movies. Here the Siren affects Ginger Rogers’ charming Missouri-bred vowels and says, out of the side of her mouth, “Brother, you’re all wet.” You encounter the accent in movies about rich or upper-middle-class people, like My Man Godfrey. You most certainly do not encounter it in Wild Boys of the Road.

Mr. Drum evidently lives in Irvine, Calif., and it’s a pity he couldn’t join the Siren for the four features she just took in at the annual Pre-Code shindig held by New York’s Film Forum. There’s a positive cacophony of American accents in these movies. There’s Lee Tracy in Blessed Event, sounding like he was born under the Second Avenue elevated; Ann Dvorak in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, snapping her words like the hard-luck taxi dancer she is; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. hanging around Union Depot and sounding like a nice middle-class American boy down on his luck; Kay Francis speaking impeccable mid-Atlantic in Girls About Town despite the famous lisp; and Eugene Pallette in the same movie sounding like...Eugene Pallette.

Oh but Siren, comes the objection from Mr. Drum and certain lost souls in his comments thread. They didn’t do real acting back then, the kind where you create a character and come up with the right accent and mannerisms. Those actors just played themselves, and these are come-as-you-are accents.

You don’t say, responds the Siren, as her own Alabama accent comes back. Because Lee Tracy was born in Atlanta; Ann Dvorak was the child of vaudevillians and could sound pure Yale Club if the occasion demanded it, as in Merrily We Live; Kay Francis was born in Oklahoma City and lived an itinerant lifestyle that was decidedly not calculated to give her a finishing-school accent; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. sounded mid-Atlantic for a while until his normal speaking accent completed the passage and landed square in Mayfair; and Pallette...okay, you got me there, but when was the last time you heard a know-it-anywhere voice in an American movie? Gilbert Gottfried doesn’t count.

Error No. 2: The mid-Atlantic accent comes into play where it isn’t appropriate. The Siren’s spent all morning--meaning about fifteen minutes, but she truly did work at this--trying to remember a movie where someone was supposed to be a shopgirl or a waitress or a railway detective, and they spoke in an “anyone for tennis?” accent. Can’t do it. The mid-Atlantic accent turns up mostly in movies about rich people and in historical epics.

Oh, there must be a few. In particular, you can probably find a high-tone voice in a low-down setting in the very early talkie era, when the technology hadn’t been perfected and they worried a lot about people recording properly. Even so, the Siren doesn’t expect a landslide of examples. You can rap The Broadway Melody of 1929 for a lot of things, but the showgirls sound like showgirls, not Alice Roosevelt Longworth. A while ago the Siren got a chance to see Strictly Dishonorable, a 1931 John Stahl talkie that, even though it was made after they were supposed to have this stuff figured out, bore all the stagey marks of the early sound difficulties. And the female lead, Sidney Fox, who was adorable, did a perfectly creditable Southern accent. Fox was a New York City native.

Sure, some actors bring the same basic vocal equipment to all their movies; John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn come to mind. But they’re frequently doing more than you might think. Cary Grant tosses his vowels around in the back of his sinuses in His Girl Friday, but goes first class all the way for The Philadelphia Story. C.K. Dexter Haven and Walter Burns do not have precisely the same accents, and the delivery and rhythm of Grant’s speech is entirely different. Barbara Stanwyck was occasionally rapped for bringing a trace of Brooklyn to her every part, but she was perfectly capable of turning it up or down as the occasion demanded: way down for The Lady Eve, way up for Baby Face.

So we come to the same diagnosis as always: The patient hasn’t seen enough old movies. But, as some people like to say in political disputes, the Siren seeks converts, not apostates. Mr. Drum says that to him, great acting is "the ability to precisely control tone, pace, pitch, timbre, tempo, modulation, resonance, accent, and so forth.” The Siren's in a generous mood this week, so here’s what the Siren is gonna do. She’s gonna take suggestions from her commenters for an old, preferably very old movie for Mr. Drum, one that shows “old-timey” actors doing just what he asks. And then she will mail him a DVD, care of the Mother Jones office.

The floor is open, ladies and gentlemen, and you may imagine the Siren saying that in any old accent you please.

Harriet Craig (1950)

2011-08-11T08:03:00.008-04:00

A while back, the New York Times published an article in their home section that was focused on adjusting your fabulous child-free home decor to the presence of kids. One woman’s solution was to forbid her two children from bringing more than a single toy into the living area, or leaving a toy there; she didn’t want Matchbox cars and Legos in her sightlines.

Harriet Craig, thou livest still.

It’s easy to mock the premise of George Kelly’s 1926 play Craig’s Wife, the source for Vincent Sherman’s 1950 Harriet Craig as well as a 1936 Dorothy Arzner version with Rosalind Russell as the title character (and a 1928 silent that the Siren hasn't seen). The wintry selfishness of Walter Craig's wife drives away everyone, until she is left utterly alone. In Kelly’s vision, Harriet is a housewife obsessed with having a perfect house, and that’s wrong, you see. It’s wrong because a housewife should be focused on...on...well, having a perfect house and just being nicer about it, all right? She needs to let her husband have some fun and then come home to a bunch of little feet doing the time-step, and she should be greeting the man with devotion, not spot-cleaning the drawing room and having conniptions if anyone gets too close to the antique vase.

The Siren has read the play on which Harriet Craig is based, and seen the more faithful '36 version, and from time to time has encountered arguments that Harriet’s devotion to her house is a sub rosa feminist statement. The Siren flat doesn't see it, nor does she see much evidence that it was taken that way at the time. Craig’s Wife is a salvo against raw materialism, not an ironic statement on the condition of housewives. But the 1950 version breaks with precedent in several ways, all of which work in its favor; it's a rare case where, although the Arzner is very good (by all means see it) the Siren (gasp) prefers the remake.

The most important reason for that is the presence of Joan Crawford in the title role. Director Vincent Sherman (who was having an affair with Crawford at the time of filming) was known as an expert helmsman for the movie vehicles of female superstars, and he lets Crawford dominate. She probably would have anyway, given that she was playing opposite Wendell Corey, but the effect was to undermine the original material in a way that made it more interesting.

That’s because Crawford makes the story about sublimation--not merely sexual sublimation, as is blatantly implied in the 1936 version, but sublimation of intelligence and ambition. Harriet tells her niece (K.T. Stevens, the daughter of Sam Wood) that marriage is a cold-eyed bargain: household skills in return for material security. And you’d assume Joan’s body would be part of the bargain, too, Wendell Corey’s body not being much of a factor. The script spells out that Harriet has been evading at least part of that department because she doesn’t want to have kids. But the Siren says that in this version, it's clear Harriet's engaging in, let’s say, non-procreative activities to keep her husband Walter in line. Look at the way her face alters at times when she’s talking to him, and the way Corey (who is perfectly cast for once) looks back, like a boy who’s plowing through the broccoli to get to the ice cream. Not to mention something like Walter acknowledging that wives are “mighty handy gadgets to have around the house.”

The most beautiful part of the set is the central staircase, Harriet swooping up and down as she makes Walter cringe and the maids cry. It’s the focus of several memorable shots, including a wised-up Walter splayed on the sofa--with his shoes on, no less--as he prepares to tell off his wife. The staircase also reminds us of what Harriet wants, which is to climb to high society in the only way that’s open to her. The screenplay works on explaining why Harriet is so fiercely materialistic and shallow; there’s a mid-movie scene where Harriet visits her mentally ill mother in an asylum, a scene put there no doubt to give a human dimension to the title character. Crawford’s playing, more subtle than in any other part of the film, shows Harriet’s mother is the one person she feels real love for, and the one person from whom she will never get it.

But there’s a better explanation later on. Walter is about to be offered a promotion that will take him to Japan, without Harriet, and she can’t bear to have him out of her clutches--he goes so well with her Ming vase, after all. Harriet goes to Walter’s boss and persuades him, with diabolical efficiency, that her husband has a gambling problem and can’t be trusted. Crawford underlines the cold manipulation, but she also demonstrates her character’s misused intelligence, wielded now to push the paternalistic boss along the road to the conclusion she wants. And it’s obvious that this sort of negotiating skill had no outlet at home; here, Harriet is at last in her element. She was never meant to be organizing dull dinner parties and ruining her niece’s life in her spare time. Harriet should have been across a conference table, barking, “Don’t fuck with me, fellas. This ain't my first time at the rodeo.”

That last Mommie Dearest line is irresistible to most modern viewers of Harriet Craig, as are a number of others (“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the dirt”). We know Christina and Christopher Crawford saw their mother as a real-life Harriet Craig, only with children to abuse and manipulate and not just servants, a niece and a husband. We also know that a number of loyal friends, and Crawford’s two youngest children, always claimed they saw no Harriet Craig-type side to her. The Siren would like to add an endnote. If Joan was bringing herself to Harriet, she was also bringing her sense of what a life without a career might have been like; stardom offers, if nothing else, plenty of opportunity to negotiate and manipulate. Seen that way, Crawford as Harriet is a cautionary tale of what happens when a smart, calculating, highly ambitious woman has nothing but her home’s decor to occupy her mind.

Because, as far as the Siren is concerned, if you’re flipping out over one extra toy next to the Philippe Starck sofa, you need to get out of the house.

(To the Siren's New York City readers who wish to get out of the house: Harriet Craig, which is not on DVD, is playing tonight only, 7:00 pm and 9:30 pm, at the Clearview Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street.)

Nomadic Existence: The Big Clock and The Reluctant Debutante

2011-08-07T10:26:00.009-04:00

From the July 20 edition of Nomad Wide Screen, my appreciation of Kay Kendall in Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante. For the record, I adore Les Girls , and Kendall is a joy in that one as well.

When certain killjoys decide to amuse themselves by asserting that MGM, the most widely known and successful of the major Golden Age studios, wasn't really a great studio at all, I try several methods to silence them. I start with George Cukor, move on through The Wizard of Oz, wave the flag for the Freed unit. If the conversation really gets irksome, however, I play my trump: Vincente Minnelli.

It's a curious thing, then, at least for auteurists, that the spirit that dominates Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante isn't that of the director, but of the star, Kay Kendall. The plot hews to every convention possible; you could take it and graft it onto a mass-market romance paperback with scarcely a single change. The charm of the film is tied closely to Minnelli’s eye for beauty, but even more than that it’s in the playing, and the players are led by Kendall. It was her penultimate movie, and when she made it she was already gravely ill with the leukemia that would kill her two years later. But it's a bright, vivacious performance, the only hint of her health coming from how thin she is.

Kendall had an exceptionally lovely speaking voice, pitched right mid-range with the merest hint of huskiness and an occasional crack in it that is oddly redolent of a British Jean Arthur. She was a tall woman with limbs that seemed to go everywhere at once, but her control of her body was impeccable. Nobody stumbled quite like Kay Kendall--up go the arms, the legs bend and curve, then glide back. It's a bit like watching a Mobius strip try to straighten itself. She had huge eyes, a flawless complexion and a long, strong-boned face; "Careful how you photograph my Cyrano nose, darling," she told Vincente Minnelli before filming. Nose or no nose, the overall effect was gorgeous. Kendall belongs to that rare sorority of beautiful women who are also great clowns.

From the Aug. 2 Nomad Wide Screen, a considerably rewritten and spruced-up version of a post I once did on The Big Clock:

Not all film noir takes place in a seedy underworld; sometimes noir arrives on the commuter train wearing a custom-made suit. So it goes with John Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948), which sets its dark doings and flashback narrative in a top-flight New York corporation that occupies a swank (if somberly lit) Midtown office tower.

The hero (or if you prefer, since this is film noir, the primary sap) is family man George Stroud (Ray Milland), an executive in the massive publishing empire of Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton). One night Stroud gets himself into a terrible pickle by getting drunk with Pauline York, played by Rita Johnson as a trampy soul with a chic exterior. Unfortunately for Stroud, Pauline is also Janoth’s mistress, and Stroud must exit her couch the next morning when their boss drops by unexpectedly. Mistress and magnate fight, and fifty years before anyone ever saw a Viagra ad, Pauline’s tirade shows off some choice euphemisms for “impotent”: “You think you could make any woman happy?...You flabby, flabby...” And that last word is one of the last Pauline utters, as Janoth bludgeons her to death with a sundial.

Well, what’s a self-respecting titan to do in such a situation, except use every last bit of his power to pin the blame on someone else? And the someone else just happens to be Stroud. The main twist in Jonathan Latimer’s highly twisty script (based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing) is that Janoth doesn’t know who he’s after, and Stroud must extricate himself without Janoth’s finding out...

it is Laughton who rules over The Big Clock. In Hollywood movies, most tyrannical managers are openly and loudly abusive. Laughton as Janoth keeps his voice low, forcing subordinates to lean close, which they wouldn't do otherwise. That’s because getting close means they have to look at Janoth’s weedy little moustache and the way he strokes it with one finger, in a gesture as suggestive as it is repulsive. He won't make eye contact, emphasizing his employees' wormlike status. And Laughton speaks every word in an affected, maddeningly casual drawl, underlining that he doesn't give a hoot if he just screwed up someone's life.

Finally, yesterday was the 100th birthday of the fabulous Lucille Ball, and there was a blogathon ball which the Siren, dearly though she loves all of Lucy's incarnations, could not attend, alas, as her opera gloves were at the cleaners. However, the roundup post is right here at True Classics, and the Siren strongly suggests that all Lucy fans click and start reading. The Siren has been working her way through all of them, and is in heaven. Some highlights (so far): Caftan Woman on Lucy's four films with Bob Hope; Clara at Villa Margutta 51 on the use of Spanish dialogue in I Love Lucy; old friend Ivan G. Shreve at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear on I Love Lucy's radio antecedents; R.D. Finch of The Movie Projector on fifteen character actors who appeared on the television show (jaw-dropping, the amount of talent it attracted); a post about Lucy's memoirs at Erin's Silver Screen Scribblings; Ivan again at Edward Copeland's wonderful blog with a 360-degree tour of Lucy's career; and Vince of Carole & Co. on the friendship between Lombard and Ball.

(The wonderful image of Lucille Ball in Stage Door, a movie that is high on the Siren's list of the best of the 1930s, is from the terrific tumblr blog Classic Film Heroines, which is full of such goodies.)

Happy Birthday, Myrna Loy

2011-08-02T11:15:00.007-04:00

Myrna Loy, dear, dear Miss Loy. Today is her 106th birthday, bless that talented, loyal, fiercely intelligent and enlightened woman. Do you have a copy of her autobiography, Being and Becoming? If not, what on earth is stopping you? You can get it at ABE Books and any number of other places, and it's worth whatever price they charge.

Last week the Siren participated in a roundtable at Movie Morlocks, sponsored by the ever-fab Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats. The discussion centered on racist images in classic films, and how much, or even whether, we need to protect impressionable children from it. And it made the Siren think of Loy, who made no excuses for the sins of her era, but rather owned up to her mistakes:

…Those exotics started to predominate. My bit as a mulatto in The Heart of Maryland led to a role that I'm very much ashamed of. Zanuck wrote Ham and Eggs at the Front, a parody of What Price Glory?, casting me as a spy. How could I ever have put on blackface? When I think of it now, it horrifies me. Well, our awareness broadens, thank God! It was a tasteless slapstick comedy that I mercifully remember very little of.

Loy recognized what was behind her "Oriental" phase, didn't like it, but was still able to be scathingly funny about it. After Love Me Tonight (she knew that was a good one--Miss Loy was very smart about most of her roles), she wrote,

They dropped me right back into the vamp mold, loaning me to RKO for Thirteen Women. As a Javanese-Indian half-caste, I methodically murder all the white schoolmates who've patronized me. I recall little about that racist concoction, but it came up recently when the National Board of Review honored me with its first Career Achievement Award. Betty Furness, a charming mistress of ceremonies, who had started at RKO doubling for my hands in closeups when I was busy elsewhere, said that she'd been dropped from Thirteen Women. (Despite its title, there were only ten in the final print.) 'You were lucky,' I told her, 'because I just would have killed you, too. The only one who escaped me in that picture was Irene Dunne, and I regretted it every time she got the parts I wanted.'

Thirteen Women is actually quite an interesting pre-Code; as Filmbrain points out, despite the stereotypical spooky powers that are presumed to be congenital for an Asian beauty, Loy's character goes bad because she's a victim of racism. She is turning her treatment back on her tormentors. But it is easy to see why Loy would lack patience for yet another evil exotic.

On screen Loy was a byword for sophistication; off screen, like Nora Charles, she combined that quality with broadmindedness and old-fashioned common sense. Immediately after Thirteen Women, Loy did The Mask of Fu Manchu, and found herself confronted with a script that asked her to whip a man "while uttering gleefully suggestive sounds." She'd had it with this sort of stuff, and furthermore she'd been reading Freud and picked up a thing or two. She went to producer Hunt Stromberg and refused to film it: "I've done a lot of terrible things in films, but this girl's a sadistic nymphomaniac." Stromberg said, "What's that?", which lack of familiarity with less-conventional sexuality makes you wonder how Hunt Stromberg ever got anywhere as a Hollywood producer, but never mind. Loy replied, "Well, you better find out, because that's what she is and I won't play her that way." Studio contracts being what they were, she did play her that way, but she succeeded in getting Stromberg to trim some excesses. "She wasn't Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," said Miss Loy, "but, as I remember, she just watched while others did the whipping."

The banner above (you can send thank-you notes to the Siren's email address on the sidebar) is from The Barbarian, a pre-Code that the Siren hasn't seen (yet). Filming that scene brought out an example of just how much Loy's coworkers must have loved her.

After I was safely submerged in a sunken marble tub, they scattered rose petals on the water, stationing men to keep them circulating with long, toothless rakes. They keep pushing those rose petals closer and closer to cover me--somewhat overzealously, it seemed. I looked up and saw a ring of familiar faces, Culver City friends and neighbors who worked in the studio. Unaware that I wore flesh-toned garments, they were diligently trying to protect the virtue of a local girl. It was so sweet, but didn't work. Some magazine photographer got in, took a picture that made me look stark naked, and syndicated it all over the world.

Last night, of course, the Siren wanted to watch a Myrna Loy movie, and she did: 1940's Third Finger, Left Hand, a nicely titled Robert Z. Leonard comedy with Melvyn Douglas. It isn't much more than diverting, but the role is a bit unusual for Loy, in that her character is a career woman who has invented a phony husband in order to avoid getting hit on at work. Without a husband, the CEO's jealous wife would push her out in a matter of months; with a ring on her finger, she can do her job. And the CEO's wife? "We're pals," says Loy.

In most of my pictures I complemented the male character, who usually carried the story. This often meant that my roles were subordinate, but that's the way I wanted it. The Bette Davis type of classic woman's role wasn't for me, nor was the Roz Russell female-executive routine, which is what I did in Third Finger, Left Hand.

She liked Melvyn Douglas ("he was a great person, a tireless fighter for liberal causes," noted Loy) and their comic rhythms are very much in tune, even if one inevitably misses William Powell. The Siren would tell you to watch this movie just for a scene where Loy fakes a tough-tootsie Brooklyn persona to embarrass Douglas. She pulls her gum out of her mouth in a string--if that doesn't sell you, it should. There's also her white evening gown in a nightclub scene, and her fake wedding night with Melvyn Douglas; Miss Loy being carried unwillingly over the threshold shows she could do physical comedy as well as she did repartee.

The Siren read Being and Becoming when it first came out in 1987, picks it up all the time to this day, and still recalls many passages without much effort, as you can see. She already adored Miss Loy--from The Thin Man on, there is scarcely a movie the Siren wouldn't be in clover watching, and there's a good deal to worship before that watershed film, too. But Loy's memoirs are special, because they show such a rare thing--an artist whose work means the world to you, whom you can also admire as a person. Not a saint, oh no--wouldn't Miss Loy have hooted at that?--but a woman anyone would have been privileged to have as a coworker, proud to have as a friend.

And so last night, watching Third Finger, Left Hand, the Siren was struck by the character of Sam, a Pullman porter played by the African American actor Ernest Whitman. Whitman is stuck with what passed for black dialect in 1940 Hollywood, but it's an unusual and charming character. He is neither shuffling nor particularly servile, just genial and polite. And when Melvyn Douglas needs a lawyer (he's divorcing Loy--you don't really want me to explain why, do you?) it turns out that Sam has been studying law. He proceeds to run rings around Loy's tony attorney and would-be fiance, Lee Bowman, quoting hilariously abstruse passages from case law until Bowman calls it a night. Sam's character is the one who paves the way for true love.

And when the end credits rolled, the Siren marched straight back to Loy, and this:

During my early years in the studios, movie people were too busy getting a foothold to concern themselves with social conscience. I once asked, 'Why does every Negro in a film have to play a servant? How about just a black person walking up the steps of a courthouse carrying a briefcase?' Well! The storm that caused!

When artists die, there are always some scolds who insist that it simply isn't possible to miss--deeply, personally miss--a woman you were never fortunate enough to meet. The Siren says phooey to that. Because she misses Miss Loy, and always will.

"Loosen the Ties and Put Some Sweat on Them": 12 Angry Men (1957)

2011-07-23T12:12:00.006-04:00

Spike Lee was in my Twitter feed today, saying, "I was NO WAY this HOT when we did Do the Right Thing." Once again my beloved New York is, as Auntie Mame said, "hot as a crotch."

But there is nothing like a heat wave to fill the Siren with love for her fellow New Yorkers. There they are, the grimly embarrassed men daring you to stare at the enormous sweat stains on their chest; the women in varying stages of undress, their hair scraped back in styles you could christen "I Give Up"; the toddlers in their sun hats and smudged sunscreen, clutching their bottles as though wondering how Mommy let things get this out of hand.

The Siren feels for them all, as she unfurls her parasol and hopes the heat doesn't turn the skin under her freckles bright red. We're trying, aren't we? We're trying so hard not to exert ourselves too much by, say, starting a riot. We're just working to avoid the greatest New York City sin of 'em all: becoming a bore on a single topic.

The movies offer several bards of the New York heat wave. Three who really get it, as indeed they get everything about the city, are the aforementioned Mr. Lee, Martin Scorsese and the late, very much lamented Sidney Lumet. When Lumet died the Siren didn't post a tribute, but this weather prompts her to rectify that, in her own small way. The magnificent Dog Day Afternoon has been in her mind for a few days--those people in the stifling bank, willing themselves not to move as they seem to listen to the drip of their own sweat. Even more so, though, the Siren has been thinking about 12 Angry Men, from 1957.

Nowadays it's a well-loved movie, despite its near-incomprehensible box-office failure. The way it was made is well-known too, from the television origins to the two-week rehearsal process (a Lumet trademark) to the way it was shot one angle at a time, to save on camera set-ups. One particularly brilliant moment is the establishing shot of the jury room, which Henry Fonda (in Mike Steen's Hollywood Speaks) said took all day to set up and ran about two minutes on screen. And the Siren dearly loves an even earlier glimpse of the defendant, played by an uncredited John Savoca, who seems to have disappeared afterward. You could argue that the shot tips the movie's hand; the sad-eyed, clearly terrified Savoca draws your sympathy from the beginning. The Siren cannot look at the kid without wanting to drape an arm around his shoulders, give him a motherly squeeze and hand him a sandwich and a Coca-Cola Icee. But it also raises the stakes, putting the audience on board with Henry Fonda's desire to at least give the boy the courtesy of a full deliberation.

But afterward Lumet's methods were different, Fonda told Steen:

Say, the camera would be on two actors for a scene. After that scene was gotten, Sidney would say, 'Now take their coats off, loosen the ties and put some sweat on them, and we'll shoot scene ninety-two,' which is forty pages further, but requiring the same setup or camera and light position.

Let's look at that title, 12 Angry Men. Well, why are they angry? The script gives you reasons for many--Ed Begley is a bigot, Lee J. Cobb has transferred his anger at his own son to the defendant--but on the simplest, most fundamental level they are angry because there's a heat wave on and they are stuck in this deliberations room with a water fountain and ineffective fan and no AC, and Henry Fonda won't let them vote guilty and get the hell out of there. He's fighting not only their preconceptions, but their physical discomfort. At first, the other jurors want nothing more than to go home and, like the Coo-Coo Pigeon Sisters in The Odd Couple, sit in front of the icebox in the altogether. In fact, if you think about it, Fonda is the least angry man there. Mostly he's just rational. But 11 Angry Men and One Supernally Rational Guy in a White Suit would have been hard to fit on the marquee, I suppose.

Cold makes New Yorkers bundle up and scurry along and lets us indulge our natural tendency to stay out of each other's way. Heat takes away the physical barriers and leaves us contemplating each other unadorned, and that's by no means always a good thing. Scan the jury room and you will see a full range of the way New Yorkers cope with heat. Some lash out, like Cobb and Begley. Some try to ignore it, like E.G. Marshall. Some crack jokes or work their tails off just trying to be agreeable. Not all of them have pure motivations for their final votes. But in the end, you also see New Yorkers rising to overcome yet another of this city's indignities, its frankly terrible climate, and as Lee would say, do the right thing.

There's a heat-related plot point that the Siren always relished on a personal level. She's written before about her years in a non-air-conditioned apartment in Harlem. It was right over the elevated part of a subway line. So a key revelation--that witnesses who claimed to have heard something during the murder couldn't have possibly, because the noise of a passing elevated train would have muffled it--was spotted immediately by the Siren and her two roommates when we watched this one long-ago sweltering summer. The noise made by the subway in our apartment when the windows were open was, in fact, so deafening that we watched a lot of foreign movies. You could read the subtitles.

One last thing. The Siren notes that yesterday's temperature of 104 in Central Park broke the New York record, of 101 degrees, previously set for that date in….

1957.

On a Veranda with Myrna and Tyrone

2011-07-16T11:44:00.012-04:00

The Siren’s dearest wish for the summer holidays of her patient readers is that they will bring along a book so good that they are utterly absorbed, and they sit by the pool or beach or lake or whatever and forget to get into the water, unless dragged there by a trio of urchins (ahem). Such was her experience on vacation in Lebanon with Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

The great migration Wilkerson refers to is the move made by about six million black Americans, from the South where they were concentrated at the beginning of the 20th century, to cities in the North and West. The exodus took decades, from 1915 to 1970, and Wilkerson argues that the changes it wrought were as profound as those brought about by the immigrants who came through Ellis Island.

To bring her narrative down to scale, she focuses on three who made the move: Ida Mae Gladney, who went from picking cotton in Mississippi to a home in Chicago; George Starling, who left brutal oppression in Florida for Harlem; and Robert Foster, a doctor who moved from Louisiana to success in California. This trio gives The Warmth of Other Suns the emotion and sweep of a great novel. It is not a perfect book; the author has a couple of style tics, and Wilkerson’s faith in the historical importance of her story (and she sure convinced the Siren) also leads her to the journalist’s habit of repeating her points. But those are quibbles. The Siren loved these people and finished the book deeply sorry that she could not ever meet them herself.

“Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making,” writes Wilkerson. “They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable...They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” A large part of The Warmth of Other Suns is given to showing what they left--the violent, pitiless racial caste system of the South. A native Southerner herself, the Siren is well versed in that history. It’s one thing to have the general knowledge, though, and quite another to be hit with Wilkerson’s accretion of detail. Story by story, she shows the cold horror of what African-Americans endured, from the ghastly beatings and lynchings, down to the endless petty humiliations.

And so we come to a passage that has stayed with the Siren well past finishing the book. The Siren’s deepest cinematic love is for Hollywood films made before the mid-’60s. This story of Robert Foster (then called by his middle name, Pershing) attending the Paramount theater in Monroe, La., in the 1930s, shows what some Americans went through just to see those movies.

He could see the double glass doors in front and a crowd forming outside. He knew to ignore the front entrance. It was off-limits to people like him.

He went to get his ticket. It was a more complicated affair than it had to be, owing to the whims and peculiarities of how Jim Crow played out in a particular town or establishment. For a time, there was a single ticket agent working both booths--the window for the colored and the one for the white. The agent swiveled between the two openings to sell the movie tickets, a roll to the white line and then a pivot to the colored. It created unnecessary confusion and waiting time for one line or the other, the waiting borne more likely by the colored moviegoers than the white, as waiting to be served after colored people would have been unacceptable to the white clientele. By the time Pershing was nearly grown, the swiveling ticket agent was dispensed with in favor of altogether separate windows and ticket sellers, which would cost a little more but would move the white and colored lines along more quickly and more in keeping with the usual protocols of Jim Crow.

The Paramount fancied itself like one of the great opera houses of Europe with its crimson velvet curtains and pipe organ rising from the orchestra pit. A double-wide staircase ushered theatergoers to its box seats. But Pershing would not be permitted near them. He followed the colored crowd to the little door at the side entrance, while the white people passed through the heavy glass doors...

The side door opened onto a dark stairway. Pershing mounted the steps, anxious to get a seat before the lights went dim. He went up one flight, two flights, three, four, five flights of stairs. The scent of urine told him he was getting closer to the colored seats.

At the top of the stairs, there was Bennie Anderson, the colored ticket taker, ready to take his stub. The urine aroma was thick and heavy now. The toilet was stopped up most of the time, and the people did what they had to. Some relieved themselves on the way up. Pershing thought they did it on purpose--a protest maybe for the condition of the place, not registering that it was other colored people who had to suffer for it. He could understand it, but he didn’t much approve.

Pershing sat hard in the wooden seat and tried not to notice the stuffed upholstery on the main floor below. Sometimes the kids would rain popcorn and soda pop on the white people. At last, the place went dark, and Pershing left Monroe. He was on a bright veranda with Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power out in California. It was a perfect world, and he could see himself in it.

Now the Siren admits that many, if not most, of Wilkerson’s readers do not encounter that story and wonder afterward which movie Foster was seeing, but around these parts that reaction is perfectly understandable. The passage is in a section dated 1933, a year the Siren’s readers will immediately identify as off. Myrna Loy made one movie with Tyrone Power, and it was 1939’s The Rains Came. The material comes from Wilkerson’s interviews with Foster, conducted in 1996 and 1997 when he was almost 80 years old, and it’s possible his memory telescoped the movies he saw as a teen. Still, it’s intriguing that Foster’s mind lit on an image from that particular film, so please excuse the Siren for a moment as she riffs on it.

The verandas were shot in California, but the setting is colonial India. The Rains Came depicts an interracial romance between Tyrone Power’s aristocratic Indian, a doctor like Foster, and Myrna Loy’s adulterous Englishwoman. In the banner year of 1939 it can’t be said to stand out as a masterpiece, but the movie holds up as good entertainment via the talented Clarence Brown. It’s a handsome picture, shot by Bert Glennon and Arthur C. Miller, two cinematographers whose genius with black-and-white could take anyone out of Monroe, La., or anywhere else.

The Siren hasn’t been able to track down exactly how The Rains Came made it past the Production Code’s miscegenation clause. This grimly simple statement (“Miscegenation (sex relationship between the black and white races) is forbidden”) was long interpreted as barring interracial love affairs whether they came via script or casting. (The rule cost Anna May Wong the lead in The Good Earth, scuttled Lena Horne’s chances for Show Boat, and was no doubt a big reason for Merle Oberon’s silence on her own Indian roots.) Thomas Doherty’s biography of Joseph Breen offers no help, and if anyone has information, please share. It’s possible that the story’s origin, in a bestselling novel by Louis Bromfield, and the star power of the white leads for once rendered it a moot point. Ronald Bergan, reviewing a book on images of India in the movies at Bright Lights Film Journal, also points out that Loy’s character “has to die in the end to avoid breaking the taboo.”

Still, anything Foster saw in a cinema in the 1930s would have had to clear not only the Hays Office, but the network of local censors crisscrossing the country, people like Lloyd T. Binford, whose father wrote the Jim Crow laws for Tennessee and who, as head of the Memphis censorship board, banned the 1947 comedy Curley for showing a white teacher with a racially diverse class. Doherty quotes Binford: “I am sorry to have to inform you that the Memphis Board of Censors was unable to approve your Curley picture with the little Negroes as the South does not permit Negroes in white schools nor recognize equality between the races, even children.” This piece of madness caused embarrassment even at the time, and enabled Breen to pose as the broadminded defender of art, saying that “we are opposed to political censorship from outside the industry” and pursuing a lawsuit against the Memphis board, which Doherty says the MPAA lost on a technicality. You see the Siren’s point; a segregated theater was far from the only obstacle facing a black movie-lover (and Foster did love movies) seventy years ago.

The Rains Came’s most celebrated moments are a series of natural disasters. The special effects used to create an earthquake, torrential rains and a dam bursting won an Oscar, and they still look great. The Siren thinks CGI has only the slightest edge, if any, over certain movies shot with miniatures and, in this case, sets that were destroyed one by one using a 50,000-gallon water tank. (She would think that, wouldn’t she, although others agree.)

But no matter how they’re filmed, disasters serve but one, and I do mean one, purpose in Hollywood movies, new or old: They're a conspicuously flashy way for the characters to reassess their lives. (Here the Siren casts a sidelong glance at the much-discussed Contagion trailer, and wonders whether Steven Soderbergh will break this rule. The movie looks good, but judging by Matt Damon’s tormented demeanor out in the woods, she’s gonna go with no.) Rama Safti (Power) is torn between his calling as a doctor and his position as heir to the Maharajah; Lady Edwina Esketh (Loy, in a role she beat out numerous other actresses for) is married to a rich, but boring old duffer (Nigel Bruce, bien sur) and cheating on him as blatantly as the Code will permit. By the time the dam breaks, Lady Esketh is in love with Safti. And the plague (yes, plague, because an earthquake, flood and a busted dam aren’t enough to get these two to shape up) that follows the other calamities prompts Lady E. to don a nurse’s uniform and minister to the sick, a job that also lets her be close to the man she loves. Witnessing suffering alters Lady Esketh's selfish nature, and Safti falls in love with her at last. Lady Esketh’s death from the plague, and the death of the Maharajah, show Safti he must accept his responsibilities.

Unlike the other two people profiled in The Warmth of Other Suns, Foster came from a prominent family, and he was expected to make a name for himself. The treatment meted out to him in the South, however, always galled this proud man, and in 1953 he left for California. There his highly successful practice eventually grew to include Ray Charles; it was Dr. Foster who sewed up Charles’ hand after the singer put it through a glass coffee table, thereby preserving Charles’ piano-playing. We all owe the doctor for that.

So there is Foster in a segregated movie theater, watching a story that was daring for the time, about an Indian doctor with distinguished roots, who makes it through hardship and loss to claim his rightful legacy.

It fits, doesn’t it.

Fandor: Lillian Gish

2011-07-14T20:25:00.008-04:00

From "Four Times Truer Than Life," the Siren's post about the very great Lillian Gish, at Fandor. The piece can be read in its entirety at Fandor's Keyframe blog. Please do comment at Fandor, too.

3. “Richard Schickel…thought The Wind verged ‘on the ludicrous’ and continued by saying that Gish failed the ‘basic obligation of stardom, which is to be sexy.’ Whereupon, Louise Brooks rolled over in her gin-soaked grave.” –Dan Callahan, “Blossom in the Dust,” Bright Lights Film Journal

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that Gish isn’t sexy, considering that she spent her entire silent career playing women (and, in Broken Blossoms, a child) who are desired by men, and often wind up seduced and abandoned. It’s no harder to get past Gish’s thin lips and flowing hair to her beauty, than it is to overlook Garbo’s eyebrows or Clara Bow’s oddly drawn mouth. Do those who find Gish a “silly, sexless antique” (Louise Brooks’ sarcastic phrasing of such criticisms) wonder what the male characters are after? Nowadays, are innocence and purity so despised, or so transient, that no trace of their appeal remains? Surely not. Perhaps in our day, those qualities are so firmly relegated to childhood that modern audiences aren’t comfortable with an erotic attraction to innocence–or, in The Wind, with how a young virgin’s terror of sex can coexist with an equally primal yearning for it.

At this point it really may seem as though I am picking on Mr. Schickel, but hey, Dan started it this time. Do read Dan's entire piece on Gish; it is beautifully written and argued, as always, even though I don't agree with him at all on Griffith.

Also, here is a lovely post by Robert Avrech, about Gish's meticulous preparation for her roles. The silent cinema has no more appreciative, sharp-eyed and passionate advocate on the Web than Robert.

Adding: Sheila O'Malley takes on The Birth of a Nation without fear or favor.

Two Weeks in Lebanon: A Dossier

2011-07-12T06:57:00.013-04:00

Being a partial account of my 15-day stay in Lebanon, with my family. Some names have been changed. Note that most major historical sightseeing, including the ruins of the Alexander Gate and Hippodrome in Tyre, the Sea Castle in Sidon, the Beirut Historical Museum and the ruins of Heliopolis in Baalbek, was accomplished on prior trips. This was more about...well, read on.

Number of buses you must take to change planes from Air France to Middle East Airlines at Charles de Gaulle airport: Two
Who on earth designs an airport that requires buses to get anywhere: The designers of Charles de Gaulle airport
Time delay due to lateness of bus, whose passengers included a visibly ticked-off head flight attendant: Two and a half hours
Best airport I have ever been in: Rafik Hariri International, in Beirut
Distance to Southern port town of Tyre, in Lebanon, from the Beirut airport: About 70 kilometers
Time elapsed en route: Two hours

Number of cups of Nescafe consumed by me over 15-day stay in Lebanon: About 48
Number of cups of Turkish coffee consumed: About 16
Availability of American-style coffee in Lebanon: Low
Reason I didn’t consume more Turkish coffee in Lebanon: More than one cup and I’m suddenly Ray Liotta in the helicopter scene in Goodfellas.
Response of Aunt Raja, upon hearing me wonder out loud whether I should cover up more to blend in with that afternoon’s coffee guests: “Eh. You are young and pretty. Why bother?”
My favorite in-law: Aunt Raja

Bottles of sunscreen brought to Lebanon: Nine
Number consumed: Five
Sunburns sustained by family: Zero (I am proud of this.)
Attitude of native Lebanese to sunscreen: Detached amusement
How to spot UNIFIL personnel at a beach resort: They are paler than me, and they glisten with sunscreen
Days at beach or pool: Seven
Diet staples consumed by my children in Lebanon, in descending order of preference: Kibbeh, lahme bajine, kafta, cucumbers, watermelon, pita bread, rice pilaf, chicken soup.
Diet staples consumed by me in Lebanon, in descending order of importance: Fattoush, tabbouleh, labneh, kussa, fish, pita.
Pounds gained by me on vacation: Zero

Number of treehouses in the locally famous garden of Aunt Hana and Uncle Zein, in Tyre: One
Number of ornaments made from Roman pieces salvaged from destruction at construction sites: About four
Likelihood of hitting Roman ruins no matter where you try to put a building in Lebanon: High
Number of ornaments made from spent and salvaged ordnance in Uncle Zein’s garden: Three, including a cluster bomb.
What my Uncle Zein made during the Israeli invasion of 1982, when he couldn’t work in the garden: A carefully polished coffee table from a salvaged olive tree stump
Dimensions of table: About four feet by two feet.
What my son and I found in the garden upon returning from an outing: A bride and groom posing for wedding pictures
What the maid of honor was wearing: A skin-tight black satin spaghetti-strap dress, over a nude-colored, tight, neck-high, full-sleeved shirt, and a hijab headdress over what was obviously an elaborate hair-updo
What the bride was wearing: A halter dress with a full tulle skirt and a tight, silver-embroidered bodice, over a tight, white, neck-high, full-sleeved shirt, and a hijab headdress like a white version of the maid of honor’s, only with a veil attached to the back.
My son’s reaction to the bride: “There’s a princess in Aunt Hana’s garden!”
Aunt Hana’s reaction: “Oh, it’s July. They’re here almost every weekend. Sometimes they call, sometimes they just show up.”
Amount Aunt Hana charges for use of the garden in photo shoots: Zero.

Number of car wrecks sustained while I was a passenger in Lebanon: One
Accident caused by: A man turning directly, and without any signal, into the path of Aunt Hana’s car
Reaction of culprit: Handed Aunt Hana her crumpled license plate and a piece of her fender
Damages requested by an entirely serene and polite Aunt Hana: An apology
Damages paid up: Yes (grudgingly)
Driving advice proffered by Aunt Hana to my husband: “Just remember that everyone else on the road is completely crazy.”
Number of cars in Lebanon spotted with people riding on the luggage rack: Three
Number spotted with open sides and children riding inside unsecured: Two
Number of motorcycle helmets spotted, in a country full of mopeds and scooters: Two, in Beirut
Number of cars with infant in lap of front seat passenger: Five
Number of cars with infant in lap of driver: Two
Number of car seats spotted: Zero
Number of car seats we hauled to Lebanon: Three

Distance from Tyre to Tripoli, in the north: 195 kilometers
Worst traffic in Lebanon, by common consent: Outside the resort town of Jounieh, north of Beirut
Possible cause of bad traffic in Jounieh, aside from number of cars: Drivers’ desire to cram three lanes of traffic onto each two-lane side of the highway
Best view on the road from Tyre to Tripoli: The sweeping vista of Jounieh and its bay, as you’re leaving

Number of black canvas bags left on sidewalk in downtown Tripoli while I struggled to strap three not terribly cooperative children into three car seats: One
Contents of black canvas bag including, but not limited to: A laptop
Hours elapsed in villa of our good friend Mansur’s uncle before bag was missed: Two and a half
Calls made by Mansur’s cousin Sami to ask someone to look for the bag: One

Transcript of Sami’s conversation with the doorman of apartment building in downtown Tripoli:
Sami: [Arabic] (to me) What was in the bag, besides the laptop?
Me: Um...sunscreen. A toy car. Baby wipes.
Sami: [Arabic] baay-bee wipes [Arabic]. (To me, slowly and significantly, both eyebrows raised and mouth twitching) What kind of baby wipes?
Me: (an embarrassed squeak) Pampers. (afterthought) Sensitive.
Sami: [Arabic] Pampers [Arabic].

Time elapsed after Sami’s phone call: About 15 minutes.
Number of black canvas bags containing a Lightning McQueen toy, sunscreen, Pampers Sensitive baby wipes and a laptop retrieved from a Tripoli sidewalk by an apartment doorman: One
Sami’s laughing reaction to profuse expressions of thanks: “I own this town.”
Sami’s occupation: Journalist
Sami’s employer: Al Jazeera
Location of the villa of Mansur’s uncle: About three kilometers from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.
Ressponse of Sami and other relatives to Mansur’s proposed visit in 2007: “Not a good idea this summer. The crossfire keeps setting the orchard on fire.”
Parting gift of Sami to the Nehme adults: One bottle homemade arak.

Biggest attraction in Tripoli: St. Gilles Castle
Second biggest: Tripoli souk
Third biggest: Al Hallab pastry shop
Purchased at Tripoli souk: Locally made soap and one pair of traditional silver earrings
Haggling: None. Price was already low.
Best ice cream at Tripoli souk: Scoops, a good place to get a massive dish of multi-colored ice cream while you wait for a friend (in this case Mansur) to bring your car down.
Mansur’s problem with bringing our car: It wouldn’t start.
What happened when our car wouldn’t start: A man appeared and told Mansur to pop the hood.
Number of times Mansur had seen this person before: Zero
What Mansur did: He popped the hood.
What the man did: Fiddled around with the engine for a minute and yelled, “Don’t you have a rag back there or something?”
What Mansur handed him: My son’s swimming trunks.
Man’s reaction: “What is this? Are you kidding me? Oh all right, never mind.”
What happened when the man closed the hood: The car started.
How long it took to haggle payment for the impromptu auto-tune-up: About two minutes
What happened next: An altercation with a merchant who didn’t want Mansur parking in front of his shop
Mansur’s mood upon arrival at Scoops ice cream in the Tripoli souk: Stressed
Did car continue to work after ministrations by total stranger outside St Gilles Castle?: Yes.

Number of times we got lost in downtown Beirut: Two.
Outcome the first time: Got good directions from a man hanging out in front of the Armenian cultural center in Bourj Hammoud.
Outcome second time: Said “what the hell,” stopped for lunch at a cafe overlooking Pigeon Rock, then followed the sea back to the highway.
Number of buildings seen with visible gun and mortar damage in Beirut: Two, including the still-abandoned Holiday Inn.
Number of buildings spotted with mortar damage on first visit to Beirut, in 2000: About twenty.

Location of Beirut apartment of my husband’s close childhood friend Maher: In Hamra, not far from the Corniche, and close enough to where Rafik Hariri was assassinated to have the windows blown out by the explosion.
What Maher likes about his neighborhood: “It has always been very mixed. Before the war, nobody even asked what religion you are. You found out at Christmas or Ramadan or if someone got married.”
Maher’s occupation: Head chef at a restaurant in Hamra.
Highlight of lunch with Maher and his adorable mother Isnat: Maher’s tale of a five-month stint as a chef in a remote part of Nigeria.
What the Nigeria job included: Slaughtering his own goats every morning and doing the marketing armed with a semi-automatic weapon. (Let’s see them try that on next season’s Top Chef.)
Maher’s comment on why he left: “It occurred to me that it would not really be all that funny to survive the civil war in Beirut and die in Nigeria trying to buy groceries.”

Number of international phone calls made by me in Lebanon: Zero.
Number of emails sent: Zero.
Number of blog posts, comments, Facebook updates or Tweets posted: Zero.
Number of movies seen: Four. In descending order of preference, Win-Win, Morning Glory, True Crime, The Kite Runner.

Return trip to Brooklyn: Uneventful.
How jet-lagged am I?: I am typing this at six a.m. EDT.

Ciao for Now

2011-06-25T09:32:00.003-04:00

Auntie Mame:
Widdecomb, Guterman, Applewhite, Biberman and Black. You want to talk to Mr. Guterman? One moment, sir. I'll connect you. Widdecomb, Guterman, Applewhite, Biberman and Black. Oh, yes Mr. Biberman. You'd like to talk with Mr. Applewhite? Oh, yes, sir, he's in. I'll connect you. Widdecomb, Guterman, Applewhite, Bib-bib-bib-blib-bibman and Black? Oh yes, long distance, how are you? Oh. Mr Widdecomb? I have your San Francisco call for you. Yes, Mr. Biberman? Oh. Did I connect you to Mr. Guterman instead of Mr. Applewhite? I'm sorry Mr. Bibbicome, Bibbibibbib. [She pulls the jack out of the plug and shakes it] Oh Mr. Applewhite, what are you doing in that hole with Mr. Guterman? Yes Mr. Widdecomb? Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I'll try to reconnect you again with San Francisco. Let me see, Mr. Bibibib is in there talking to Mr. Bubbawhite. Where on earth is Mr. Applewhite? Oh, there you are Mr. Applewhite! [She starts to cross cords and desperately plug jacks into holes] Mr. Widdecomb, there's no such place as San Francisco. Please! [She lifts up her console and is horrified to see that it's glowing] Mr. Bibibib? Mr. Widdecomb?

The Siren has chosen the above passage from Auntie Mame for three reasons.

First, she is about to go off-line, big time. For a little more than two weeks, the Internet will, for the most part, have to spin on its axis without her. Vadim Rizov will tweet his last Glenn Beck live-tweet--unless he decides vacations are for lowering blood pressure, not raising it. Victoria, Sian and Annie will waft scented samples at the Siren in vain. Glenn Kenny’s epic Barry Lyndon aspect-ratio thread will draw more comments, but not the Siren’s. Simon Abrams and Ryan Kelly will brunch without her. Kim Morgan will tumble at her beautiful new tumblr, but the Siren shall not see it until she returns the week of July 11.

Second, and saddest, for the Siren, the Web will be full of tributes to the late, deeply lamented Peter Falk, and hers will not be one of them, not until she returns, at the soonest. Maybe not even then. When John Mortimer, creator of the Siren’s beloved Rumpole, passed away, Lance Mannion told the Siren that he’d write a tribute when his heart could take the strain. Lance still hasn’t done it. The Siren feels the same way about Columbo.

Hence, Auntie Mame. Is there any stress, strain or sadness that Auntie Mame can’t help?

But, third and final, being the ultimate New Yorker in many ways, Auntie Mame is also there to share our joys. And this morning, she would be very proud of us. The Siren is sure of that.

See y’all in about two weeks. Play nice.

Nomadic Existence: Madam Satan (1930)

2011-06-19T07:48:00.006-04:00

From my Retro-Fit column at Nomad Wide Screen, a look at Cecil B. DeMille's Madam Satan. It's one of those pre-Code movies that the Warner Archive people have recently made available, and it's getting some small buzz on Twitter and elsewhere due to its sheer, well, craziness.

Be warned, however, that said craziness takes a while (about an hour) to manifest. First you must endure the rather pallid Kay Johnson, who plays Angela, moping around about husband Bob's (Reginald Denny) infidelity, and you must accept Roland Young's playing a randy sidekick, before it's at long last time for everyone to put on some Adrian costumes and start partying on an insanely large zeppelin.

The Siren wonders if she could have worked harder to make that into a metaphor for life...aren't we all, in some sense, waiting to party on a zeppelin? No? Maybe it's just the Siren.

Anyway, until that point, the main reason to watch is a certain singer and actress who once had some craziness with the Marx Brothers and found herself played by Susan Hayward in a 1950s up-from-alcohol biopic. Read on:

But then, thank goodness, we shift to the apartment of Bob’s bit on the side, Trixie, played by Lillian Roth. For later generations, Roth’s claim to fame would be writing the first major recovery memoir, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, about how she plummeted into alcoholism and degradation and reclaimed her life through Alcoholics Anonymous. By the time Roth published it, in 1953, her movie career was so long over it was a dim memory for most, and Madam Satan shows how big a shame that was. Roth could dance, she could sing and she was sexy beyond belief. When she flings off her rumpled satin robe and twitches her pelvis to the “Low Down” number, the vaudeville energy of this rather plump, frowsy jazz baby ignites the entire movie. Even the other actors catch fire around her, from the accompanist calling, “Put some pepper in it, Papa wants to sneeze!” to Roland Young snapping, “I wouldn’t marry you to keep warm on an iceberg.”

At long last, we’re on the zeppelin, and things start to cook. It’s a ravishing bunch of sets, like the unholy offspring of Metropolis and The Hollywood Revue of 1929 — big ramps and shiny Bakelite staircases angling up and down. People mill about in a series of costumes as marvelously tasteless as anything MGM ever did. Particularly worth waiting for are the woman whose symbolic “fish” costume has her attached to a toy fisherman, and another dressed as “the call of the wild,” complete with a stuffed elephant and leopard and a yard-wide white wool wig.

And there’s that lightning/electricity dance number, which begins and ends without explanation of any kind. One minute the guests are hanging around the zeppelin whooping it up, the next, a large group of people are dancing around an electrified pseudo-god and you’re agog at the costumes that crawl right up the chorus girls’ backsides — or I was, anyway — and then, just as abruptly, it’s back to the arriving guests.

Johnson acquits herself better in the second half, vamping her husband in a “flames of hell” costume and affecting a passable French accent: “Who wants to go to hell weeth Madam Satan?” Still, a brief moment where Johnson has a sort of dance-off with Roth is a mistake — tart or no tart, Roth wipes the floor with her. Johnson and Denny have a rather dull tryst and then, as if sensing this won’t suffice in terms of dramatic action, DeMille unmoors the zeppelin and everyone has to parachute off. He has great fun shooting the panicked guests and their landings in various venues in and around the Central Park reservoir — at times it’s so close to a rescue sequence in The Towering Inferno that I wondered if Irwin Allen had ever seen Madam Satan.