The "Paradine" Letters, Part 4

These are the Siren's final thoughts on The Paradine Case, at least for these purposes. If you haven't already, please go to Some Came Running to read the Mighty Glenn Kenny's Part 3.

David O. Selznick's foreign discoveries stick together.

Dear Glenn,
Since you’ve covered the formal beauties of this movie so well, I thought I’d use my last go-round to talk about Hitchcock's second- or third-choice actors and their performances. I adore her, as longtime readers know, so I’ll start with Alida Valli.

Here, as in The Third Man and Senso, she’s madly in love with a man who doesn’t love her back. (You could also make a case for Eyes Without a Face in that vein.) It’s an odd pattern for such a beautiful actress. Interesting, too, that after Alida Valli herself suffered greatly during the war in Italy, she often played women scarred by the past, although it’s also pretty plain that Mrs. Paradine was bad news from the start. Valli was still learning English during filming, but her voice and intonations are beautiful; I love to hear the consonants roll off her tongue when she looks at Gregory Peck and says, speaking of Louis Jourdan as Latour, “You are not to destroy him. If you do, I shall hate you as I have never hated a man.”

A bit overdressed for the occasion

The Siren once expressed reservations about Valli in this movie, but the last viewing erased them. She is, as Charles Coburn’s solicitor Sir Simon Flaquer remarks, “Fascinating, fascinating.” The caressing way she leans in slightly when she wants something from Peck, the near-dominatrix tone she adopts when she realizes he may go after Jourdan despite her warnings, and the queenly bearing she has at all times, add up to someone who merits all the constant chatter about her. (Don’t you love the moment when Latour, in so many words, tells Keane, “She’s bad, bad to the bone”?)

In the very beginning, when the Scotland Yard men arrest Mrs. Paradine in a deferential way that suggests they're escorting her to the theater, she asks the butler to bring her “black lamb." That turns out to be a coat so lavish it could keep all of Mayfair warm. Once it’s fastened, she turns and checks herself in the mirror: Even on her way to prison, Mrs. Paradine is, at all times and in all ways, conscious of the effect she is having. That little mirror-check may be her one moment of true human weakness. Her love for Latour is not weakness, but a Wagnerian fire.

This is pretty much the same look he trains on Coburn.

Tony Keane, the supposedly legendary barrister played by Peck, doesn’t have a chance with her. Whatever Mrs. Paradine wants, we know instinctively it isn’t this walking mass of rhetoric and (formerly) high principles. We hear quite a bit about "Tony's brilliance" but on screen — and this is a problem with the script, along with its admitted talkiness — there are almost no scenes to show he’s anything of the sort. He loses his head early on, and it stays lost. Too, Peck lacks the requisite passion in his scenes with Valli. No torch fires up behind his eyes when he looks at her. Maybe maintaining all that lava-hot lust for Jennifer Jones in the earlier Duel in the Sun had exhausted him. Maybe he (or Selznick) was unwilling to have his character’s betrayal of sweet Ann Todd be that blatantly sinful. Whatever the cause, Peck is the weakest link, and as he is the main character, that is a non-trivial problem. But one thing he nails in great style is his final speech, where he says, with stunning obviousness at that point, “Everything I have done seems to have gone against my client," yet he still makes you feel the magnitude of the man’s failure. Peck was pretty much born to address a jury.

Sexual harrassment, 1947-style.

Ah, Ann Todd as Gay — lovely, charming, initially clueless: “Nice people don’t go about murdering other nice people.” Peck does has some chemistry with Todd; their early scenes are playful and teasing, with much affection and a kiss that tells you this married couple still has sex. (They have no kids.) Todd manages to convince me that a woman would push her husband to keep representing Mrs. Paradine, Gay’s reasoning being that if Tony walks away, part of him will always yearn for the maybe-murderess. The scene that establishes Gay as a woman with the strength to do such a thing is the one you describe so well, at the dinner party. After he fixates on her bare shoulder, Laughton as the well-named Lord Horfield settles his bulk way too close to Gay on the sofa. Then he grabs her hand, ostensibly to look at her ring, with such force that she has trouble yanking it away. She tells him off in a very British fashion — by complimenting his wife — and moves to the other side of the room, where Keane is talking to the hostess. Gay's adored Tony hasn’t noticed a thing, or gone to check on her; it’s an early scene, but we already see the selfishness lurking behind Keane’s upright facade.

Just out of frame is Tetzel's cigarette holder, with which she prevents Coburn's monocle from upstaging her.

Joan Tetzel as Judy Flaquer sees it too; she tells her father, “Men who’ve been good too long get a longing for the mire and want to wallow in it.” For that reason, I don’t think she is going to have her own Paradine. She’s far too clearsighted, an audience surrogate who says what everyone else is thinking. I like her confidence and her chic, the fact that she’s still living with her father, doesn't seem to resent him a bit, and wipes him out at chess. Charles Coburn as her father is Charles Coburn, monocle twinkling away, sage and amusing, amusing and sage, but that is no bad thing, at least in my book. He gets a wonderful line about photographs: "The social footsteps of time."

Jourdan's first American close-up was a honey.

When Hitchcock’s path crosses Selznick’s in the canteen of the afterlife, he probably still fumes about Jourdan’s casting, but Jourdan is excellent. I don’t think his beauty ruins the material at all. (It’s odd that in interviews Hitchcock always referred to the character as a groom, when he’s a valet in both the book and the movie.) Of course it helps immensely that Colonel Paradine was blind, because otherwise, if you don’t want your wife to sleep with the valet, you hire Eric Blore.

I like Robin Wood’s brief musings:

Jourdan worked in only two other distinguished films in the 1940s, both quite central to their respective directors' work, and both underrated by most critics: Minnelli's Madame Bovary and Hitchcock's The Paradine Case. The former inflects Jourdan's persona in the direction of aristocratic decadence, while retaining the sense of vulnerability. The latter, far more remarkably (especially in the 1950s), eliminates the decadence altogether yet defines the character, at least by implication, as gay. We are informed that Jourdan as the valet has no interest in women, has totally resisted the advances of Mrs. Paradine (Alida Valli, no less), and has been completely dedicated to his master, Colonel Paradine. The valet's dedication is the moral center of this remarkable film, and is combined very disturbingly with Valli's erotic dedication to Jourdan — although Hitchcock later felt Jourdan's character should have been rougher and more "manly" to account for the frustrated Valli's fixation upon him.

Now that I think about it, Wood may well be right that Jourdan, whose character's end is by far the most tragic, is the moral center here, and not Todd. The evidence that Latour is gay leaped out very strongly at me during the last couple of viewings, and was reinforced by another line, spoken to Alida Valli by Leo G. Carroll, playing the prosecutor: “As soon as you learned of his indifference to women, you determined to overcome that indifference.”

Fun couple

I’ll close by noting the excellence of the penultimate scene, in which we learn Mrs. Paradine’s fate. It’s dinner time chez Lord and Lady Horfield, where the table is the length of a subway car and husband and wife deliver their lines through candelabra that would not disgrace the Hall of Mirrors. Laughton (who, remember, disliked “toffs”) throughout the trial scenes plays Horfield as an Olympian autocrat, amusing himself with bon mots while pushing the jury to a foreordained conclusion. Ethel Barrymore reportedly had her best scene cut, but she is very touching here, even if her Oscar nomination remains something of a mystery. (Stephen Whitty points out that the longer version seen by Academy voters that year may have had that scene.)

Here, Laughton delivers possibly the most macabre line in all Hitchcock: “It’s surprising how closely the convolutions of a walnut resemble those of the human brain.” As he inspects a walnut he just cracked, even though it is not a close shot, we see that indeed it does, horrifyingly, resemble what a brain would look like if you sawed open someone’s skull. Ethel Barrymore timidly tries to get a bit of feeling out of him (“Doesn’t life punish us enough, Tommy?”) And he snaps back, “Must I listen to more of your silly pity for every scoundrel, man or woman?” Thus is raised the question of whether the worst sociopath in the entire movie has been the one on the bench.

I want to be clear that I don’t consider The Paradine Case top-flight Hitchcock, but I’d place it solidly in the middle tier, as one of the best examples of what he could do outside his comfort zone. There is no way The Paradine Case deserves to be ranked dead last and dissed as hard as it was in a recent Indiewire rundown of Top 25 Hitch. I hope that at least we may persuade some people to take another look.

The sum of the Paradine parts:

Glenn, Part 1

The Siren, Part 2

Glenn, Part 3

The "Paradine" Letters, Part 2

(The Siren is having a dialog with her Close Personal Friend Glenn Kenny about the much-maligned The Paradine Case. Part 1 was published yesterday at Some Came Running and should be read before the Siren's post. This is her reply.)

Screen cap from Glenn: "Two Profiles"

I believe you’re right: Hitchcock definitely contributed to his film’s low reputation. I’ve written before about cases of actors who dislike their own work, and it can be true of directors as well, especially directors who were working in a commercial vein and who cared about audience reaction and box office. Hitchcock was an artist who wanted to make hits, and The Paradine Case was a flop. Plus, Hitchcock didn’t get his way on some big decisions, and he never liked the original novel (by Robert Hichens) much to begin with.

Hitchcock wrote a draft script with wife Alma Reville, but Selznick was unsatisfied. At this point in his career, Selznick was always unsatisfied. He’d become Hollywood’s Tinkerer Supreme. So Hitchcock suggested that Selznick bring in Scottish playwright James Bridie, who later worked on Under Capricorn and Stage Fright, to do a rewrite. But Bridie hated the States, and so he sailed back to England and mailed in his pages as he went along. This didn’t work, and I can’t imagine why anyone thought it would, given the vagaries of transatlantic mail in 1946.

Ben Hecht was brought in briefly for additional dialogue. The canny Hecht quickly saw that the project was snakebit. He agreed to help on the fly, for $10,000 and a promise that his name would not be put on whatever resulted. Reportedly the only part of Hecht’s dialogue that survives is Peck’s courtroom meltdown. Head censor Joseph Breen of the Hays Office sent along his usual artistic enhancements, including a warning not to show a prison toilet or to film anything that suggested Todd and Peck were in their bathroom at the same time.

The Happy Hitchcock Gang

Meanwhile Selznick was consumed with finishing Duel in the Sun, and The Paradine Case had to take a number. By the time shooting began, there was still no finalized script, and Selznick was rewriting. Hitchcock was frequently working from pages that Selznick had sent down that very morning. “This, of course, drove Hitchcock to distraction,” was Peck’s understated recollection.

Hitchcock’s filming ideally had an express-train rhythm. The Paradine Case was more like a Greyhound bus making unscheduled stops. And then there was the cast, made up almost entirely of actors he didn’t want. Hitchcock requested Robert “Long John Silver” Newton for Latour the valet, got Louis Jourdan, and sulked about that apparently until the day he died. Hitchcock’s prior experience with Charles Laughton had been sheer misery, although Laughton turned out to be the least of his worries. Hitchcock didn’t see the point of Selznick's ballyhooed "Valli" (as she was billed), and as you mention, he told Selznick that Gregory Peck was no one’s idea of a barrister (and he wasn’t wrong). Not to mention that this was Hitchcock’s last film under his seven-year Selznick contract, and he was itching to go independent. Filming took four months. That’s not including retakes.

The final product was about three hours long. Selznick cut it down to just over two, while still finding room to insert close-ups in the middle of Hitchcock’s treasured long takes. It sat on the shelf for months while Selznick worked to convince everybody to go see Duel in the Sun.

Publicity time. I guess Laughton didn't smoke Chesterfields.

The Paradine Case finally wound up with a big December 1947 premiere at two separate cinemas in Westwood, reviews that amounted to “it’s OK I guess,” and box-office receipts totaling about half what it had cost.

No wonder that years later, once he got a nice young man like François Truffaut to confide in, Hitchcock’s retrospective assessment of The Paradine Case was essentially, “Oh god, not that one.”

But the Siren, perverse mortal that she is, long ago adopted this pain-in-the-neck film as her very own pet Hitchcock orphan (along with Lifeboat and Rope). It is slow, yes, but it whispers along like silk, until that courtroom climax fells the audience right along with Anthony Keane. And it is exquisite to behold. When you made a movie for David O. Selznick, in exchange for putting up with all those damn memos, you got big-time production values. Franz Waxman composed a wonderful score, one of my favorites, both romantic and sinister. Travis Banton designed the gowns, which was no bit of trivia but rather an area that mattered to both Selznick and Hitchcock. Banton's contributions are simple but effective; in early scenes, Ann Todd wears stainless white, while Alida Valli is a column of black.

Over a million 1947 dollars' worth of set.

And Thomas Morahan was the art director. When I saw this as a girl I couldn’t get enough of the interiors: the way Maddalena Paradine glides proudly through a convent-like prison; the luxurious London house where Anthony and Gay Keane retreat to live their perfect upper-crust lives; the firelit room where Judge Lord Thomas Horfield (Charles Laughton) makes his spidery attempts to put his hands on Mrs. Keane, while Lady Horfield (Ethel Barrymore) watches helplessly. And then there's that Old Bailey courtroom set, so meticulously accurate that building it is said to have eaten up one-third of the budget.

Glenn calls this screen cap "Garmes Glory"

Everything significant seems to take place indoors, or at night. The cinematography is velvet noir, shadows menacing the rich and pampered instead of the grubby and low-rent. (DP Lee Garmes was in the prime of his career, his next film being Nightmare Alley.) Valli and Todd never looked more beautiful, and for that matter, neither did Peck, with his noble profile and silvered temples. (Hitchcock wanted him to have a mustache, and even that got nixed, on the grounds that British barristers aren’t permitted facial hair.)

It is, as you say, a melodrama — a women’s picture — filtered through Hitchcock’s feverish preoccupations, full of thwarted loves and twisted seductions. Keane begins by admiring Mrs. Paradine’s beauty, determines to save her, and then gradually descends into life-shattering obsession.

When someone does praise The Paradine Case, they often want to discuss it as a dry run for Vertigo. But I see Ann Todd's character as the moral center. This is Vertigo with an extra helping of Barbara Bel Geddes’ point of view, and more sympathy going to the woman cast aside so a man can recklessly pursue his sexual doom.

(The next installment in the "The 'Paradine' Letters" will be at Glenn's place on Monday, May 4th.)

Charles Laughton: Actor as Artist

The folks at New York City’s Film Forum have just started a three-week, 35-film tribute to Charles Laughton. Obviously, they love the Siren and want her to be happy. That’s her working theory, anyway. April of this year will mark a full decade since the Siren began spinning in her corner of the Web. And Laughton was one of the first people she chose to write about.

What makes you adopt an actor? How do you decide that here’s a performer you will seek out, regardless of the vehicle? The Siren is always drawn to an actor who takes a 20-foot-high screen and gives you a focused, intelligent performance that fills out every square inch. That’s Laughton. His kind of acting is, sadly, not very fashionable anymore. Even Simon Callow, who wrote a fantastic biography that focuses almost entirely on the acting, admits Laughton’s fame these days is tied to The Night of the Hunter, his one-off directorial masterpiece. Laughton’s acting is “virtually unknown by anyone under 40,” Callow wrote recently.

Or, in some cases, worse than forgotten. “Laughton's mannered performances are liable to elicit laughter today,” sniffs one writer reviewing Callow’s book. This prompts the Siren to a rare display of temper. Mannered? What could be more mannered than some contemporary actors who wait for the camera to discover each tiny effect as they overact their underacting? (That is, if indeed they are actors; of late the Siren has endured too many nonprofessionals cast by wannabe Bressons.) You can keep that kind of pallid realism, where the goal is to be the closest thing to real life. Sure, it’s close. And real life is being on hold with the airline, or flossing your teeth, or staring into the middle distance while trying to recall whether you took your vitamins. The Siren doesn’t require tedium to be all that accurate.

Give her someone like Charles Laughton, who aimed big, even if from time to time he failed big. Give her the existential truth he dredges up, say, at the climax of Mutiny on the Bounty. God no, it’s not “realistic,” but for all time and no matter who else plays him, there’s Captain Bligh, standing in a rowboat, bellowing: “Casting me adrift 3,500 miles from a port of call! You're sending me to my doom, eh? Well, you're wrong, Christian! I'll take this boat as she floats, to England, if I must! I'll live to see you — all of you — hanging from the highest yardarm in the British Fleet!”

Now if you were an actor in class, assigned the unenviable task of recreating that speech, your action might be something like “placing a curse.” Captain Bligh is, in this MGM production of 80 years ago, a villain, a man who cares more about breadfruit than the human beings under his command. But as an actor, Laughton knows obsessiveness can bring about disaster, or it can keep a person alive. Bligh is transferring all his passion to the task of survival, so he can have his revenge. And Laughton points his hand as though he could reach up and tie the rope around Clark Gable’s neck himself. He’s not merely shouting, he layers hatred and determination under every syllable, pronouncing “ChrisCHUHN” so that the very name carries the wrath of the Almighty.

In other words, this is an actor who performed with ferocious totality. That’s what it takes to etch a character in the public mind. When people joke about Henry VIII picking up half a chicken and tearing the meat off with his teeth, they’re not remembering Holbein. They’re evoking Charles Laughton. Lon Chaney created a good Quasimodo, in the 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one that was quite close to the 19th-century illustrations of Victor Hugo’s book. But when Disney cleaned up the tale of the hunchback and the gypsy, to puzzling effect, they were, quite openly, doing a prettified version of Laughton. That’s because it was his Quasimodo, falling in love with Maureen O’Hara’s Esmeralda in the course of a single shot, who broke hearts. These images are there because Laughton’s performances put them there.

He achieved his effects through subtle methods as well as grand ones. For Rembrandt, a biopic directed by Alexander Korda, Laughton immersed himself in the artist’s work for weeks on end. It’s a somber movie, focused on Rembrandt’s tragic private life, and also on how his paintings gradually lost favor, even as Rembrandt was at the peak of his genius. Aided by the sensitive lighting of cinematographer Georges Perinal, Laughton approaches a canvas as though acceding to its demands. “Every man has a destined path,” says Laughton’s Rembrandt. “It leads him into the wilderness but he must follow it with head high and a smile on his lips.” It is no surprise to learn that Mike Leigh, in interviews, cites Rembrandt as a key influence on Mr. Turner.

Charles Laughton was born in 1899, the son of hoteliers. He worked until his early 20s in his parents’ hotel, starting at the lowest rung of the trade at the insistence of his formidable mother. His upbringing was prosperous, and he went to private schools such as Stonyhurst. He didn’t begin his acting career until his early 20s, after overcoming the strenuous disapproval of his family.

But Laughton, somehow, never identified much with privilege. Off-screen he pulled away from “toffs” all his life. When he played a bank clerk, a servant, a schoolteacher, he brought a rare and deep understanding of what it means to work hard for meager pay and nonexistent rank. And Laughton also reveled in showing what’s behind the petty exercise of power, say by a Victorian toff with his invalid poet-daughter in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or a bootmaker of a similar era in Hobson's Choice, or, in The Big Clock, a CEO who finds a single light burning in a broom closet at his corporate headquarters.

He served in World War I as a private, saw time in the trenches, and was exposed to mustard gas in the last vicious weeks before peace. It damaged his throat and left him with painful, recurring hives for the rest of his life. The emotional effects of his service are harder to discover, because Laughton preferred not to speak of them. Still, Callow points to a possible connection between the ignoble terror of certain moments in This Land Is Mine, and the memories of war, and that feels right. In Jean Renoir’s superb movie about the occupation of a small (obviously French) town, there is a scene where Laughton’s Alfred Lory, a schoolteacher, looks out the window of his cell and sees his headmaster being marched to a firing squad. Lory was supposed to call to him: “Professor Sorel! Professor Sorel!” On the first take, Laughton gripped the bars on the window so hard they broke off.

Laughton had a stormy, complicated marriage to Elsa Lanchester that lasted from 1927 until his death in 1962. He was gay, and Laughton’s era was not, of course, hospitable to same-sex relationships, although the older he got, the more affairs he had, and the more frequently he would confide in people. (As he took a drive with Robert Mitchum during the filming of Night of the Hunter, Laughton confessed to his star that “there is a strong streak of homosexuality in me.” Mitchum’s priceless response: “No shit! Stop the car!”) Most good actors can suggest sexual undercurrents driving their characters, but Laughton treated desire, even in murderers like those in The Big Clock and Jamaica Inn, as an outgrowth of the mind, not merely a physical urge.

Seeing a big portion of Laughton’s work at Film Forum should dispel the notion that he was always massively overweight; he’s in pretty good shape in Mutiny on the Bounty, for example. He was an aesthete who prized the best and highest in music, in literature and in art. (One bond he had with Jean Renoir: Laughton had bought Renoir pere’s The Judgment of Paris for $35,000 in the 1930s.) But this man who loved beauty saw none in himself, no matter if Marilyn Monroe said he was “the sexiest thing she’d ever seen,” no matter if Marlene Dietrich told him before they started Witness for the Prosecution that she’d always yearned to play opposite him. “I look like a departing pachyderm,” he once said. The Siren never reads that joke without a wince. His looks did mean he would never be a leading man, but that is our good fortune; how many Hollywood idols could have created just one of Laughton’s monsters?

The Film Forum series shows that Laughton was also exceptional at more ordinary specimens of humanity. In The Suspect, directed by Robert Siodmak, Laughton is cast as a version of Dr. Crippen, a rare sympathetic figure in the annals of true crime — not least because Crippen may not have actually murdered his wife, a possibility the film toys with, but basically rejects. Philip Marshall (Laughton) is chained in marriage to a vicious shrew (Rosalind Ivan, rehearsing her character in Scarlet Street, but doing it well); inevitably, he falls in love with a gentle young woman (Ella Raines, who seemingly spent much of the 1940s cast as the foil to murderers). Made on an obviously low budget, it is still a fine movie, and Laughton and Elsa Lanchester considered Marshall to be one of his best creations. The tension comes from the question of which will win out, Marshall the murderer, or Marshall, the man who says, with infinite sadness, “I like people and I’ve never wanted to hurt them.” At a key late moment, Marshall is afraid that his secret is about to be discovered during a quiet social evening at home. As his own son fumbles around the spot that could reveal all, Marshall keeps smiling; you can watch the gradual transition, as Laughton’s smile turns into a ghastly mask of dread.

To a director, Laughton on set meant there would always be more than one temperament around, and Siodmak said later that The Suspect forced him into an unusual approach. When Laughton one day barged in declaring that every take had been wrong, all wrong, and would have to be redone, Siodmak responded by reeling around declaiming the actor's lines himself. Laughton became convinced he’d finally encountered a director who actually was a lunatic, as opposed to merely behaving like one. And after that, claimed Siodmak, his star was as gentle as the rain.

Jean Renoir was patient and kind, as he seemed to be with everyone, and mentioned Laughton fondly in interviews. During Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick had his hands full, what with the glory that was Rome and the grandeur that was Kirk Douglas, and let Laughton and Peter Ustinov rewrite most of their scenes together. Billy Wilder, who helped Robert Stephens to a breakdown and James Cagney to leaving the business, described making Witness for the Prosecution as delightful. (The Siren has watched that movie over and over again — it’s Laughton’s funniest, most wholly endearing performance. His scenes with Lanchester are perfection.) Otto Preminger (rather surprising, this one) treated Laughton with the utmost courtesy during Advise and Consent. He probably realized the actor was dying of cancer and that Senator Seb Cooley would be Laughton's last role. Laughton's physical condition caused him to play Cooley (obviously written as a portrait of Strom Thurmond) with spidery stillness. But Preminger also said Laughton asked for direction and was eager to take it.

Other times it was a different story. Even Laughton’s friends and admirers said he was hard to work with. Those directors who emerged with good memories tended to be ones who recognized that Laughton’s extreme seriousness was no act. Garson Kanin, who directed They Knew What They Wanted (long out of sight, not Laughton’s best work, and not part of the series), claimed to have respected Laughton, at least before shooting began. Laughton told Kanin that to play an Italian-American farmer, he would immerse himself in Vivaldi, Dante and Michelangelo. In his book Hollywood, Kanin all but calls this a sham.

But the fact is, that was absolutely Laughton’s approach, as it had been with Rembrandt. Alfred Hitchcock could have testified to that as well. When Laughton was unable to get his walk right as the sinister squire of Jamaica Inn, he refused to continue. He came back the next day saying he’d discovered how to do it, by listening to Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance.

Hitchcock, however, responded to this sort of thing about as well as Kanin did. Hitch liked his actors to be either consummate pros, who got the job done without fuss, or malleable, tentative souls he could push around as he liked. Laughton was the worst of both worlds: a headstrong talent who needed as much time and patience as any neophyte. Laughton's malevolent judge in The Paradine Case (poor Paradine Case, the Siren loves you even if no one else does) was a somewhat better experience. But Hitchcock told Pia Lindstrom years later, with placid malice, “The hardest things to photograph are dogs, babies, motor boats and Charles Laughton.”

Mind you, the Siren understands Hitchcock’s point of view. To see the way Laughton struggled, and directors struggled with him, you need only look at one 70-minute documentary: The Epic That Never Was, which Film Forum is showing on Feb. 22. Made in 1965 for the BBC, it pieces together what’s left of an effort to film Robert Graves’ I, Claudius in 1937. Laughton, who’d already been a memorably depraved Nero in The Sign of the Cross, was obvious casting as the stammering Roman who feigns stupidity in order to stay alive, and ends up as emperor. Josef von Sternberg, who’d just ended his string of sumptuously erotic films with Marlene Dietrich, was likewise a natural to film the dissipation of the ancients.

As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Instead it was a disaster that ended with Merle Oberon (cast as Messalina) wrecking her car and her producer husband Alex Korda deciding that a nice tidy insurance settlement beat the heck out of making this movie.

More than anything, Laughton was ill-matched with Von Sternberg, who wrote, “An actor is rewarded with attention out of all proportion to his services. An actor is turned on and off like a spigot, and like the spigot, is not the source of the liquid that flows through him.” Laughton admired Von Sternberg greatly, but this was not a director who was going to understand why his spigot was studying the exact way a Roman would address the gods. There are many outtakes of Laughton stopping mid-scene, or up and leaving the set. You could say Von Sternberg lacked sympathy. “Acting is nothing remarkable,” he wrote, and meant every word. And in fairness, more often than not, when Laughton stops, it’s difficult at first to figure out why. He sounds fine. Sometimes he sounds great. Imagine you’re Von Sternberg, or, if you prefer, Hitchcock, with the crew seething and the hot breath of the studio executives steaming up the set, and all that’s between you and the film you can already watch in your head is this ACTOR and his insistence on forging things in the smithy of his soul.

“Jesus Christ, Charles, just hit your mark and say the line.”

And then, Laughton addresses the Senate … and soars. In one scene he becomes every belittled, misjudged man who ever stood up and said, this is not who I am. At last it is possible to understand why Laughton placed such significance on the interior. He was acting the other takes, and they were good; in this one, he is being, and it is art.

Those who talk only of the single film Laughton directed, and shrug off the rest, are making a grave mistake. Laughton the director could never have made the shimmering, perfect thing that is Night of the Hunter, if it hadn’t been for Laughton the actor.

Links:

The schedule for Film Forum's Charles Laughton series can be found here. A restored Spartacus is screening this spring after the series concludes. Several rarities are being shown, including Forever and a Day and Arch of Triumph, neither of which the Siren has seen (yet). Also, though Laughton's part amounts to a glimpse, the dazzling Piccadilly is worth your time and includes one of Anna May Wong's best roles.

The Siren has in the past written about Ruggles of Red Gap, The Big Clock, Jamaica Inn and the charming Deanna Durbin vehicle It Started With Eve. She prefers David Cairns on The Man on the Eiffel Tower to her own post, which was written in a state of extreme irritation from the lousy DVD she watched.

Auteurs Gone Wild: A Look at the Series at Anthology Film Archives

Recently, over breakfast at their favorite neighborhood joint, the Siren’s close personal friend Glenn Kenny twitted her gently about that time in the very recent past when she made a crack about auteurism. The Siren thought about it and told him, “You know how people talk about à la carte Catholics? I’m an à la carte auteurist.”

In other words, the Siren has some problems with the rock-ribbed Cahiers-carrying version of auteurism. But let’s face it, the Siren also has pets.

And Anthology Film Archives, via programmer David Phelps, has done an uncanny job of selecting eight of her favorite directors for the now-playing series “Auteurs Gone Wild.” The premise is simple and delightful: A look at those times when genius took a left turn at Albuquerque and wound up making something that doesn’t fit neatly with the other work. The schedule is here, it's all on 35mm, several are not on DVD, and any Siren readers in the New York area should definitely try to catch a few.

The Siren wrote up You and Me a while back, and it’s enchanting. There’s a particularly good analysis of The Bitter Tea of General Yen in Dan Callahan’s Barbara Stanwyck book, and the Siren recommends it. (Victoria Wilson, in volume I of the monumental Stanwyck bio that You Should Be Reading, doesn’t seem to like Bitter Tea all that much, but she gives an excellent rundown on its making and reception.) The Siren doesn’t have a lot to say about A Countess From Hong Kong; it’s often amusing, even sweet, but it’s hard to get over the casting. (Did Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando ever look more sulky?) The Siren wants to get reacquainted with A Woman of Paris, the other Charlie Chaplin film in which he did not star, and she also hopes to see The Saga of Anatahan, Josef von Sternberg’s Japanese-made swan song.

At Mubi's Movie Poster of the Week, Adrian Curry celebrates the series with ravishing posters for all the films. Meanwhile, some thoughts on the others.

The Siren was surprised to find herself heartily disliking Under Capricorn, which Hitchcock made in in London in 1949. The plot concerns a carefree young man (Michael Wilding, a little too lightweight) who goes to colonial Australia to seek his fortune. He finds childhood love Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman) has also moved there after marrying several rungs down the social ladder, and that her sole recreation in this remote location is drinking herself into insanity. The husband is former groom Sam Flusky, played by Joseph Cotten as the most grating, self-pitying nudnik in all of Hitchcock. (Hitchcock said Burt Lancaster would have been better, but the character’s beyond even Lancaster’s redemptive charm.) Hovering around to add to Henrietta's peril is Margaret Leighton as the sinister maid. Made just after The Paradine Case and Rope, Under Capricorn shares those films’ obsessively intricate takes, although the biggest plus here comes from genius Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor. Formalists tend to worship Under Capricorn, and this is one gorgeous film. The confession scene with Ingrid Bergman unfolds in an eight-minute take that seems to make the camera itself an instrument of her isolation and breakdown.

So yes, Under Capricorn looks good. It plays, however, as po-faced and rancid, a romantic melodrama about love with an emotionally abusive spouse — Gaslight, if she tried to work things out with Charles Boyer. Hitchcock later admitted he had little affinity for the material; Cardiff said the long-take process led to a fatal “loss of tempo” for both the actors and the film. Both men knew what they were talking about. The Siren continues to prefer Rope and The Paradine Case (now there’s a Hitchcock whose fans get mighty lonely). But a rare 35mm screening is the ideal place to see for yourself.

Edward, My Son is somewhat marred by a (possibly Production Code-mandated) framing device that has an aged Spencer Tracy shuffling up to the camera to ask for a moral judgment from the audience. He plays Arnold Boult, a man whose obsession with an easy life for his only child turned his son into a monster. Or did it? Edward is never seen on camera, a device that Donald Ogden Stewart’s script carries over from the play by Robert Morley and Noel Langley. The effect turns Edward into the picture of Dorian Gray: a reflection of the main character’s gradual corruption. Leaving Edward out of sight leaves the audience to decide whether Boult truly ruined his son, or whether the child was always doomed to inherit the father’s worst qualities. After all, as Edward’s upstanding mother Evelyn (Deborah Kerr) points out in her most emotional scene, many people spoil their children, without the kid turning into a liar, a thief and a bully. Even Edward’s evident alcoholism may be genetics at work, since Evelyn herself turns to drink as Boult's deeds get darker.

George Cukor’s biographer, Patrick McGilligan, labels this one “an ambitious dud,” but the Siren thinks it’s full of great twists and question marks; Tracy never lets you see Boult as a complete villain. Leueen MacGrath, a gorgeous and multitalented woman who was married to George S. Kaufman, is superb as Boult's secretary/mistress, moving from cool calculation to heartbreak. Kerr is excellent early on, but MGM goes crazy with the old-age makeup later in the film, when logic suggests her character is still south of 50, but some smartass added a dowager’s hump. Still, Cukor offers Kerr a haunting fadeout. The camera focuses on Tracy and devoted family doctor Ian Hunter, while a drunk and heartbroken Kerr climbs the steps of her mansion, moving out of the frame for what we know will be the last time.

And in terms of technique, the Siren thought this was the most intriguing film of all, a play that never feels stagey. Cukor uses massively long takes, with sly changes in angle and slow, elegant camera moves that smoothly shift your attention within the frame. It’s one of his most ineffably subtle films.

Henry Hathaway's The Sons of Katie Elder is a Siren favorite. He directed Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which Ben Urwand has been so diligently reintroducing to the public, and Hathaway made a string of great noirs in the 1940s. Peter Ibbetson is definitely none of the above. It’s a dreamy romantic fantasy rather like Smilin’ Through, only considerably darker and with a leading lady — Ann Harding — far more nuanced than Norma Shearer. The title role is played by Gary Cooper. He’s a young man whose childhood sweetheart Mary (Harding) has married a much-older duke (John Halliday in full glower). The duke discovers their love, tries to shoot Peter and winds up dead himself. Peter is sent to prison, but his love for Mary is so powerful that they are able to meet in their dreams, acting out the love that was thwarted in life.

David Shipman says this film did not fare well at the 1935 box office. It’s a delicate conceit that strikes some, like Nick Pinkerton, as positively sappy. Well, the Siren, perverse mortal that she is, adores this movie. The lovers’ connection is entirely spiritual; there’s not the slightest hint that their dreams find them doing anything more carnal than romping through meadows together. Peter was born in France and raised in England; Cooper does great work without the slightest alteration in his sandy Montana voice. The screenplay (based on George DuMaurier’s novel) is utterly, at times painfully sincere. But there are few films more committed to the notion of soul-deep love than this one. Charles Lang’s cinematography, full of light-shafts and dreamy mists, will thrill anyone who loved the Criterion Blu-Ray of The Uninvited. He and Hathaway create a black-and-white world that seems supernatural well before it gives way to the lovers’ dreams. The first section, with Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler playing the lovers as children, is heartrending. Yes, Virginia Weidler; the Siren shall snub her no more.

“One of his worst films,” is how Scott Eyman describes Broken Lullaby in his biography of Ernst Lubitsch. The Siren recommends Eyman’s book, but she doesn’t agree about the haunting Broken Lullaby at all. It’s far from Lubitsch’s most incongruous movie; the Siren would give that honor to Loves of Pharaoh. But it’s definitely an anomaly, with an opening that evokes nothing so much as All Quiet on the Western Front. Phillips Holmes plays Paul, a former French soldier racked with guilt over killing a German boy, Walter Hoderlin, in the trenches. (Like Lew Ayres and Jimmy Butler of No Greater Glory, life had some grim ironies in store for Holmes.) Paul mails the German’s last letter home, then goes to Walter's home town in search of what we moderns would call “closure.” Herr Hoderlin, a kindly old doctor played by Lionel Barrymore, feels bitterness toward the French; Walter's mother (Louise Carter) and fiancee (Nancy Carroll) are still numb with grief. Paul finds himself embraced by the family, and must decide whether to tell them the truth.

It’s based on a play and marks Lubitsch’s first collaboration with Samson Raphaelson, although Broken Lullaby was shot after The Smiling Lieutenant. ("It came out just as morbid and unattractive as I thought it would," was Raphaelson's review.) Bad box office led a desperate Paramount to change the title, post-release, to Broken Lullaby from the original The Man I Killed, babies presumably being an easier sell than corpses. (The Siren likes the original title much better, with its echo of Thomas Hardy’s poem.) The ending can be seen as equivocal, although the Siren points out that Lubitsch is not known for his punitive attitude toward his characters. One shot hooked the Siren. Walter's mother is at his grave, and there are any number of possible ways to film that: the flowers on the grave, the earth, the headstone, the back of the actress’ head. Lubitsch moves in on the mother’s hands unsnapping the clasp of her pocketbook, so close we can see that virtually all it contains is a handkerchief.

****

So, should this series meet with enough success to get a sequel, what offbeat films would the Siren's patient readers suggest? Her own nomination would be Otto Preminger's charming Centennial Summer, because the last thing she expected Otto to do was remind her of Meet Me in St. Louis.

Gigi (1958): A Defense

Kate Aurthur’s ranking of Best Picture winners is not the worst film list the Siren has ever seen, nor even the worst list she’s seen on Buzzfeed. Several movies the Siren reveres did pretty well with Ms Aurthur. Rebecca sits at No. 20, The Best Years of Our Lives is No. 16, It Happened One Night cracks the top 10 at No. 8 and at No. 1 is All About Eve. Any group this large must elicit a correspondingly large amount of disagreement; that is why lists are such reliable traffic-bait.

But the Siren almost didn’t make it through, because the very first item, Ms Aurthur’s choice for the worst Best Picture winner of all time, slapped her across the face like Joan Crawford on a rampage.

Yes, the creepiest, most pedophiliac movie ever to win Best Picture is this list’s worst. How to define “worst” in this context, especially when judging Gigi — a movie musical some people love now, and certainly many people loved in 1958 — against films that were barely movies as we currently recognize them? [NB: I know, I know, forge ahead, please.] This list is, of course, totally subjective: I factored in my personal feelings about each movie, along with how well it has held up, how influential it is, and what it was up against. And then there’s the ineffability of common wisdom, which I also have taken into account. No matter how I feel about Annie Hall or about Schindler’s List, for example, I know I’m in a minority view in my dislike — and that matters. Not with Gigi, though, in which Leslie Caron plays a Parisian girl being trained to be a courtesan who ends up in a push-and-pull relationship with the much older Gaston (Louis Jordan) [sic]. This is the movie that gave us that disturbing cultural artifact, the song “Thank Heaven For Little Girls.” If you want disturbing psychosexual movies from 1958, let’s agree that Vertigo, which was nominated only for Best Art Direction and Best Sound, is preferable. To reiterate: Gigi is the worst.

Pitting Vertigo against Gigi underlines the reason George C. Scott refused to pick up his Oscars: In addition to calling the ceremony “a meat parade,” he considered the idea of artists competing against one another to be absurd. He was not wrong. “Best” means something different for an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and a musical comedy from Vincente Minnelli and Lerner and Loewe. Then again, in cracking a joke, the author has accidentally made a point.

Vertigo, winner of the Sight and Sound “Greatest Film of All Time So Take That, Citizen Kane Award,” concerns a troubled ex-policeman who falls in love with the gorgeous and possibly insane woman he is hired to tail. When he attempts to save her from her demons, she winds up dead, or so he thinks. Then the ex-cop spots his lost love’s doppelganger on the street, and works to turn her into the image of that dead woman — dye job, new wardrobe, new makeup. The audience soon finds out it’s the same woman, and she’s sane, although the ex-cop is plainly not. Our two-timing woman loves this man, and tries frantically to please him, but in the end, she falls off a bell tower.

Now turn to Gigi, from Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay, based on Colette’s story of a Parisian girl who’s descended from a line of courtesans and is being taught to take over the family business. But Gigi’s a lousy pupil, so far from considering a man’s happiness that she does not hesitate to clean his clock when they’re playing cards. The man in this instance is Gaston, a wealthy friend of the family who’s always had mistresses and enjoys Gigi’s company for the relief it brings from their demands, and from society’s. One day Gaston realizes that Gigi is no longer a little girl, and that he’s in love with her. He proposes to make her his latest mistress, although Gigi has spotted the flaw in this arrangement: It makes her disposable, and she’s in love with Gaston, and doesn’t want to be thrown away. Gaston in turn realizes that he loves Gigi too, and he doesn’t want to force her into a life that is utterly wrong for her. And so he marries her instead.

As Cosmopolitan might say, two makeovers, two very different results.

And one question: Why is Gigi, which ends with its vivacious heroine happily married to a rich man who loves her the way she is, a sick-sick-sick movie; while Vertigo, in which the lovelorn female lead tries to turn herself into a fictional character and winds up stone dead, is a “preferable” depiction of male-female relations?

Let’s see, which Oscar winners displayed sufficient rectitude to wind up near the top? Oh look, there’s Silence of the Lambs at No. 5, now there’s a movie that knows how to treat a lady. In The Godfather Part II, we have Kay Corleone getting the door slammed in her face as she tries to embrace her children; there’s The Godfather, where Talia Shire’s husband beats the living hell out of her; and let’s not mention (because Ms Aurthur doesn’t) the marital rape in Gone With the Wind (No. 11) and the speech in All About Eve about how a career means nothing for a woman if you turn over in bed and your man’s not there.

Fine movies, sure, but you see the point: Why pick on Gigi? If it were just Buzzfeed, the Siren might have shrugged and called for madder music and stronger wine. But alas, the woods are full of people saying Gigi is terrifying, the worst, chauvinist and hateful (et tu, Vadim?).

This wounds the Siren to her feminist core. She loves Gigi.

Yes, Gigi, played by 27-year-old Leslie Caron, is very young. Louis Jourdan, who plays Gaston, was 37. In the original Colette novella, Gigi is 16 and Gaston is 33, and in 2014, that is, as Ms Aurthur states, considered creepy.

Gigi, however, is set in 1900 in Paris. In that time and world, it was not unheard-of for a 16-year-old to get married, much less was it considered too young to embark on a career as a courtesan. Scowling at the sexual morals of an earlier time is fun and all, but it’s not an especially rewarding critical approach.

Let’s look at “Thank Heaven For Little Girls,” the song that freaks out Buzzfeed. These are not complicated lyrics, but the Siren’s emphasizing some salient lines anyway:

Thank heaven for little girls
For little girls get bigger every day. 

Thank heaven for little girls
They grow up in the most delightful way.

Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
One day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling.
Thank heaven for little girls
Thank heaven for them all,
No matter where no matter who
Without them, what would little boys do?
Thank heaven . . . thank heaven . . .
Thank heaven for little girls!

Maybe you don’t want Maurice Chevalier, who turned 70 during filming, singing about little girls, period. But he isn’t saying, “Thank heaven for little girls because I want to have sex with them,” which would of course be “pedophiliac” and horrifying in many eras besides our own. The lyrics say “I like little girls because they grow up into beautiful women.” In other words this song, a frequent target of the irretrievably literal-minded, is the senior citizen who coos at your cute kid, “That one’s gonna be a heartbreaker.” If the correct response to such a sally is to smash the old buzzard over the head with your handbag and shriek “Get away from my child, you psychopath!!” then the Siren freely admits she’s been doing it wrong.

Furthermore (and the Siren can’t believe she has to point this out) there is not a single act of rape, whether statutory or not, in this film. No character shows a sexual interest in girls under 16, and that includes Chevalier as Honore Lachaille. It’s the opposite of pedophilia: People wait until they’re old enough by the Parisian standards of the time, and that’s that.

Up until the point where Gaston takes a look at Gigi in a grown-up dress and realizes she’s a young woman, he has no romantic or sexual interest in her. She’s a chum. She’s fun. And when she does show up in the dress, happy and proud as all teenagers are when they put on the trappings of an adult, Gaston’s reaction isn’t “hubba-hubba.” He yells at Gigi that she looks “like an organ-grinder’s monkey.” If a 16-year-old and a 33-year-old in love is disturbing, hey, here you go — Gaston is disturbed when confronted with a playmate who’s suddenly attractive. They have a blistering row and he stomps off, only to realize that as Gigi has grown up, so have his feelings.

Minnelli probably would have loved to direct My Fair Lady, but that film couldn’t be made until the record-breaking Broadway run was over. So he took on Gigi, which tracks the other musical so closely that dear old Bosley Crowther suggested Lerner and Loewe might want to sue themselves. (Ms Aurthur has the backlot-bound, slower and stiffer My Fair Lady at no. 15, in evident indifference both to the plot similarities and the fact that Eliza Doolittle is also a teenager, plus Henry Higgins is 20 years older than Eliza and is her teacher to boot.) Minnelli wanted to bring fin de siecle Paris and caricaturist Sem to life. Along with production designer Cecil Beaton (and despite Charles Walters, who had to take charge of some post-production reshoots), Minnelli did the impossible. He made Paris look even more beautiful than it is.

He did the same for every woman in the movie, as Janet Flanner wrote when she reported from the Paris set for The New Yorker that the film was “peopled…with some of the most extraordinary-looking young-and-old beauties that Paris has seen in a while.” Minnelli was lavish, but never vulgar. His camera admires. It does not leer, at Caron or any other woman, no, not even the lushly leer-able Eva Gabor.

But, you protest, this girl is being trained to be a prostitute. How is that acceptable to a feminist? Well, this feminist does not have a problem with consensual sex work. Much less does the Siren have a problem with sex work as a way that two old ladies once used to make a living that probably beat the hell out of taking in laundry or whatever else was open to the average woman in 19th-century France. Tante Alicia (Isabel Jeans) earned enough to live in grand retirement in a mansion with servants. Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold) has a much smaller budget, but she’s still keeping Gigi in basic comfort. She’s also supporting her daughter, Gigi’s mother, who’s rejected “the life” and is heard only from off-camera as she trains to be what sounds like the worst soprano since Susan Alexander stank up the opera house in Citizen Kane.

Alicia and Mamita, as Mme. Alvarez is called, are shrewd women who have made their way through life armed with their wits, and with attractiveness that is as much cultivated as it is natural. They call their own shots. When Eva Gabor’s Liane, Gaston’s mistress (who's pretty clearly older than he is), makes a phony suicide attempt, Tante Alicia waves it off for the dumbshow it is: “The usual way, insufficient poison.” These are not, perhaps, the rules these ladies would prefer to play by. The Siren thinks in our own era, Alicia’s basilisk eyes would be trained on the CAC-40, not the next wealthy protector for her niece. But it is, let’s repeat, 1900. In any era, you play the hand you’re dealt.

Gigi, far from being “creepily” youth-obsessed, has a complex and entrancing view of the stages of life. We see the heroine going from bewilderment at the games “The Parisians” play, to trying to play them herself. Gaston sees middle age edging closer, while he’s using the same kinds of women for the same thing and wondering why “It’s a Bore.” Meanwhile, Chevalier’s big number isn’t “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” It’s “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore.”

On the beach at Trouville, Honore is pursuing a likely (adult, for crying out loud) prospect. But he spies Mamita, with whom he once had an affair, and says, “I must tell you that you upset all my plans for the weekend! I came prepared for battle, and an old wound prevents me from charging.” What follows is the movie’s most tenderly romantic song, performed by two elderly people as the sun sets.



“Am I getting old?” “Oh no, not you.” Excuse the Siren a sec, she’s got something in her eye.

The Production Code Administration, diminished in 1958 but still in there swinging, took a long hard look at Gigi, but the Siren’s sources don’t indicate that what has Ms Aurthur calling Gigi's defenders "criminals" was the obstacle. Instead, what got the PCA riled up was the prostitution angle. After the usual horse-trading over the script, the objections boiled down to a single line: “To 'take care of me beautifully' means I shall go away with you, and that I shall sleep in your bed." Minnelli pleaded to be allowed to film that as written and have the censors make their call after seeing how it played. In the end, he said, Leslie Caron spoke the line so innocently that it passed without a murmur. Bad call for posterity, it seems. If Minnelli had ended on Gigi falling off a bell tower, maybe this thing would have lived up to the moral standards of Buzzfeed.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), With Bonus Anecdote

The Siren is pleased to announce that the Criterion Collection edition of Alfred Hitchcock's 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much has hit the street, and her essay on this marvelously compact tinker-toy of a film is up at their website. This Man has been languishing in murky public-domain editions that completely failed to do it justice; Criterion has made it sparkle again, the better to find new admirers. The Siren was tickled to death to be name-checked by the celebrated J. Hoberman in his review, but even more so was she pleased to find out that Hoberman, like her, prefers the original to the remake.

Here, a brief excerpt from the Criterion essay:

Hitchcock had seen M and at first wanted Lorre to play the gang’s hit man. So in the spring of 1934, he cabled Paris, where Lorre and his longtime love Celia Lovsky were living in glum poverty. Back in Berlin, Lorre’s successful stage career had included notable roles for Bertolt Brecht, and the thunderbolt of M, released in 1931, gave the actor the greatest hit of his career. But less than two years later, as soon as Hitler became chancellor, Joseph Goebbels began putting restrictions on Jews in the film industry. By July of 1933, they had been banned from films altogether. Lorre, a Hungarian-born Jew, got out of Berlin early that year.

With Lovsky, he moved first to Vienna, then to Czechoslovakia, then finally to Paris, where even his excellent French couldn’t get him much more than small parts. At age thirty, his struggle with morphine addiction was already more than seven years old and had necessitated a recent and expensive “rest cure,” which ate up what little Lorre had earned so far in France. According to Stephen D. Youngkin’s biography The Lost One, when Lorre left for London to take up the first good movie role he’d been offered in many months, the actor had to borrow the cost of a ticket from his brother.

The Siren used The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre by Stephen D. Youngkin as a reference, and she reiterates her enthusiastic recommendation. It's a wonderfully complete resource on the actor's life and work. Since we were just discussing one of the films that Peter Lorre made with Sydney Greenstreet, from Youngkin's book here's a glimpse of this perfect team at work--sort of.

In their game of cat and mouse, Lorre did the stalking. When Greenstreet warned him he would cut off both his hands if he did not stop projecting himself into his scene, Lorre amiably checked, "Fine, then I'll play the scene with stumps and steal the whole show." Irving Yergin said thatt Lorre loved to tell of being on the set of The Conspirators (1944) with Sydney Greenstreet and Hedy Lamarr, who was wearing a low-cut dress. "Hey Sydney," he joked, "you're the only person on the set with a pair of tits." According to Lorre, production was held up for two hours while Greenstreet and Lamarr chased him around the set, no doubt fitting one reviewer's description of the actors as a "Pekingese and a great dane out for a romp." Lorre wrapped his take on one of his favorite stories with Jack Warner fining him ten thousand dollars for the day.

What I Watched With My Mother: The Also-Ran Edition

After a long hard slog of a December, the Siren has emerged, ready for updates. And she has excellent news: Our hard work to put The White Shadow online for viewing has been recognized by the Online Film Critics' Society, with a special award to the "For the Love of Film" blogathon, Fandor and the National Film Preservation Foundation for our fundraising efforts. This is a wonderful accolade that is shared by everyone who contributed to the blogathon.

And our work has benefited many, many people. The online streaming of The White Shadow has proven so popular (almost 40,000 viewers and counting) that the NFPF has decided to keep it available for viewing on their site through Jan. 31. So watch, and watch again; we worked hard and we earned it.

Meanwhile, back chez Siren, your sometime blog hostess was entertaining her mother over the holidays, and after long days of decking the halls etc., we'd unwind by watching a number of old movies. Re-capping that viewing seemed like a good way to start 2013, so here are brief impressions of What I Watched With My Mother. The next post will feature the ones we liked best; this is the Also-Ran Edition. The Siren will get the one true dud out of the way first, since Mom always told her the meal goes better if you start with the food you like the least.

Susan Slept Here (Christmas Eve movie)

Ugh.

Not "ugh" because it's a romantic comedy about a 17-year-old (Debbie Reynolds) and a 50-year-old (Dick Powell). (Yeah yeah, Powell's character claims he's 35. So do a lot of people.) The Siren's been happy with May-December story lines before, including Love in the Afternoon, The Constant Nymph, and To Catch a Thief. No, it's "ugh" because whatever it takes to make this couple remotely plausible, let alone palatable, neither the stars, nor screenwriter Alex Gottlieb, nor director Frank Tashlin have it. Maybe a more obviously appealing, crush-able male lead might have helped (one friend suggested Robert Mitchum). Maybe, although the Siren (who's 0-6 with Tashlin now) finds that this director's interest in Eros goes no deeper than the first wolf-whistle. Powell looks more interested in what's in his highball glass than anything else. And if you don't buy what the script is selling, then this movie is tedious and crude, just a bunch of labored jailbait gags about whether or not Susan, whose mental age seems to hover around 12, will Sleep Here.

What Mom said: "I think you would have to see this when you're a kid and fall in love with it. Otherwise it's hard to overlook how icky it is."

Background to Danger
World War II spy caper that we watched for Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, and those gentlemen were the best things in it, naturally. Good stuff includes Lorre, as an agent of Our Soviet Allies, sitting cross-legged on a desk and demanding a better class of vodka. There's also a striking shot of Greenstreet walking away from the camera--his coat drapes off his incredibly wide shoulders like a set of curtains, and he looks like a medicine-show wagon trundling down a street. The Siren liked the Turkish setting and the trains and the way that all the romance and stranger-danger of compartments is put to great use. The director was Raoul Walsh, the cinematographer was Tony Gaudio, William Faulkner did uncredited work on the script--why, you might well ask, is this such a mix of good, bad and meh? It isn't nearly as consistent and accomplished as Jean Negulesco's The Mask of Dimitrios one year later. One reason is that Dimitrios wisely foregrounded Lorre and Greenstreet and used an Eric Ambler plot to much better effect; Background to Danger is baggily constructed, with more than its fair share of convenient double agents and talking killers. The major problem, however, was nailed by Mom: "This needed Humphrey Bogart." Instead you get George Raft at his most humorless and mechanical. Also includes Brenda Marshall looking marvelous in Soviet Chic, all high-necked sweaters and astrakan-collared coats. Unfortunately, all she does is hand Lorre vodka (although that's an important task, goodness knows).

What Mom said: See above.

They Came to Blow Up America
Alfred Hitchcock supposedly based Saboteur on a true story of German agents sent to sabotage the American war machine; but by the time he got through with the story, almost no trace of the real incident was left. This 20th-Century Fox programmer, in its flag-waving Hollywood way, sticks much closer to the facts of "Operation Pastorius," with details like the German submarine landing right off Amagansett (even enemy agents want a taste of the Hamptons). The film begins with a disclaimer noting that for the sake of national security, the true story of the saboteurs can't be told yet. Which is good. We wouldn't want John and Jane Q. leaving the Rialto convinced that one of the saboteurs was only play-acting for the good of the country, because FBI Agent Ward Bond asked him to. That heroic non-saboteur is George Sanders, wearing his "B-movie heartthrob" hat. He's so handsome and drily funny that the creaky theatrics go down easy. The best part, though, concerns Anna Sten as Sanders' disgruntled not-ex-wife (it's complicated), whom Sanders denounces as crazy to a Nazi commandant ("she throws things, you know"). Sten steals the movie with her two big scenes, further confirmation that whatever folly was associated with her years in Hollywood, it had nothing to do with her acting.

What Mom said: "It would be nice if FBI agents really did show up to tell you that your kids are OK." (At one point Ward Bond visits Sanders' worried Papa (Ludwig Stossel) to reassure him that his son doesn't really wanna blow up America.)

Stolen Holiday
A 1937 Michael Curtiz film about the Stavisky Affair, a topic that has so much potential that it's frustrating to see how off-handedly it's treated here. Kay Francis plays Nicole Picot, a couturier's model who's recruited by Stavisky--oops I mean Stefan Orloff (Claude Rains) as arm candy while he pitches his financial schemes to wealthy businessmen. And here's the first problem; she knows Orloff is crooked, and Rains is (god knows) playing him crooked, and yet the script wants us to believe that Nicole nevertheless does not understand that Orloff is fleecing most of the French upper crust. The Siren loves Francis, but this is a damn-near-unplayable part that nicely illustrates the kind of tosh the actress was starting to get from Warner Brothers as her career waned. And as if there weren't enough for the woman to cope with, she doesn't take that "stolen holiday" with Rains, who's mighty alluring even if he was a half-foot shorter than Francis. No, she runs off with Ian Hunter, who one year later would distinguish himself as the fifth-sexiest man in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Pleasures do include Rains intimidating his nervous Ponzi-schemers; but while there's a little crash course in French bond-issuing rules, it's a waste not to show more of Rains reeling in the suckers. Nicole becomes a dress designer herself, so Kay's Orry-Kelly wardrobe is breathtaking, particularly the spangled dress above, which has what may well be the lowest neckline in 1930s cinema. And there's the airplane Kay and Claude take to Switzerland, a British-made eye-popper that looks as though they decided to bring the double-decker bus concept to air travel.

What Mom said: "It would have been more interesting if she fell in love with Rains."

For the Love of Film III: The Payoff (and Bonus)

We've had a few months for laurel-resting after the hard work and great results of our third "For the Love of Film" blogathon. Together with the dauntless Marilyn Ferdinand and Roderick Heath, we raised money for the National Film Preservation Foundation to stream the three surviving reels of the six-reel silent movie The White Shadow, from 1924.

Its director, Graham Cutts, is a key figure in early British cinema. Even more important, The White Shadow is the earliest surviving feature on the towering resume of Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the earliest surviving film on which Hitchcock collaborated with his future wife, Alma Reville. Hitchcock worked on this movie as assistant director, art director, editor and writer.

Now it's time to savor our results. The two-month run of The White Shadow, which critic David Sterritt calls "one of the most significant developments in memory for scholars, critics, and admirers of Hitchcock’s extraordinary body of work" begins today, folks.

The Siren hands the mic over to Annette Melville of the NFPF:

The opening three reels of the six-reel feature were uncovered in 2011 during research by the NFPF to identify American silent-era titles held by the New Zealand Film Archive...The film was preserved at Park Road Post Production in New Zealand under the supervision of the NZFA and the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The White Shadow will be presented for free streaming, with the following extras:
· Program notes about the film by David Sterritt
· Newly recorded musical score created by Michael M. Mortilla who, with Nicole Garcia, reprises the performance from the gala premiere at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2011
· A short bio of the New Zealand projectionist, Jack Murtagh, who salvaged the film
· Slide shows about the film’s discovery, the New Zealand Film Archive, and the Academy Film Archive

The 43-minute presentation, which will run two months, is made possible by contributors from around the world. “Not everyone has the ability to attend the special screenings of The White Shadow in Los Angeles, Washington, or New York,” said Jonathan Marlow, co-founder of Fandor, the curated on-demand movie service that is donating webhosting for the event. “We’re thrilled to play our part in making this fascinating discovery available everywhere.” Fandor’s gift matches cash donations raised through the Internet fundraising drive organized by the 2012 “For the Love of Film” Blogathon, spearheaded by Marilyn Ferdinand, Roderick Heath, and Farran Smith Nehme. The campaign mobilized support from more than 100 film fans across five continent

Almost everybody loves Hitchcock movies. We went one better. We helped get one back in front of thousands of viewers for the first time in decades. No modesty here: This film is online because we worked our tails off to help get it there.

A thousand thanks, Fandor. Mazel tov, NFPF. And kudos, gang. Spread the word.

Meanwhile, in celebration, the Siren decided to do something she has previously hasn't: offer a list of her Hitchcock favorites. She came up with a dozen. This is one of the richest filmographies imaginable, and yes, there are some towering titles missing, out of mere personal preference. There's another four or five the Siren would gladly rewatch this instant, including Foreign Correspondent, Rope, and The Paradine Case. (Yes. The Paradine Case.) Even so, it's marvelous to revel once more in this man's talent.

Consider this list as the Siren's way of throwing confetti.

1. Shadow of a Doubt
Dark, yes, but also comforting: "He thought the world was a horrible place. He couldn't have been very happy, ever. He didn't trust people. Seemed to hate them. He hated the whole world. You know, he said people like us had no idea what the world was really like."

2. Strangers on a Train
In a crowded field of unbelievable greatness, Robert Walker is the greatest Hitchcock villain of them all. Certainly he's the most psychologically interesting. And this film gave the Siren her most potent Hitchcock scare, when the painting is revealed.

3. Rebecca
An exemplary adaptation and a fabulous ghost story, with a touch of demonic possession. Plus twisted sexual yearnings all over the place, plus George Sanders coming in through the window. Pure beauty to rival any of Hitchcock's Technicolor masterpieces, and if you don't believe the Siren, just ask the folks at the magnificent picture blog Obscure Hollow.

4. Rear Window
If there is a heaven, and some good soul manages to get the Siren on the guest list, they'll let her borrow Grace Kelly's wardrobe.

5. Notorious
Hitchcock's sexiest and most romantic film. If you haven't already, please do read Sheila O'Malley on the love psychology of Dev and Alicia.

6. The Lady Vanishes
Left the Siren fated to spend the rest of her life wishing she could take a long, elegant train ride through a charming European landscape...in 1938. And as allegory it's alarmingly prescient, isn't it?

7. The 39 Steps
The only thing that could make a train ride better would be if the Siren were handcuffed to Robert Donat (who in a just world would have worked with Hitchcock again). An extremely funny movie. "And this bullet stuck among the hymns, eh? Well, I'm not surprised Mr. Hannay. Some of those hymns are terrible hard to get through."

8. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
The Siren's essay on this one will be in the Criterion edition of the film, due in January.

9. Lifeboat
In addition to borrowing Her Serene Highness' clothes, the Siren will also get to hang out with Tallulah. "The trouble with you, darling, is that you've been reading too much Kipling. 'The sins ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one.'"

10. North by Northwest
You know who needs a little more love for this one? Jessie Royce Landis, that's who. "I'm not nervous, I'll be late for the bridge club."

11. Vertigo
A dreamily gorgeous movie, but the Siren scratches her head when this one is called romantic. To her, it's a complete negation of the very possibility of romance, telling us instead that men and women are fated to bring one another nothing but agony. Peter Bogdanovich nails the Siren's feelings, but he also acknowledges that Vertigo is a great film, and the Siren agrees there, too.

12. Suspicion
So much more than the milk.