The Forbidden Street (1949)

Enough bloodshed. The Siren caught a movie called The Forbidden Street (1949) a few weeks ago on the Fox Movie Channel. Here they occasionally show movies that the Fox studio, for whatever inscrutable boneheaded business-suited reason, has not deigned to release on DVD. (You can read Dave Kehr elaborating on this here and here on his blog.) The original title was Britannia Mews, and it was directed by Jean Negulesco.

I love Negulesco. Some people have guilty-pleasure movies; the Romanian is my guilty-pleasure director. He helmed some genuinely good movies, like Three Came Home and the 1953 Titanic. But since I spent some time mocking Eli Roth, I should step up and admit that my beloved Three Coins in the Fountain and The Bestof Everything do not exactly measure up to Jean-Pierre Melville, either. (Thanks, Noel, for reassuring me that I am not the only person crazy enough to find good stuff in The Best of Everything. And here is a nice take on Negulesco's Woman's World, which the Siren has not seen yet.)

Anyway, like most interesting movies on the Fox channel, Forbidden Street is shown at hours the Siren usually slept through in her pre-mothering days. It opens by showing us Adelaide, a girl from a high-toned family who becomes fascinated with the teeming life of a slum street, Britannia Mews, that lies behind her house. The girl soon grows into Maureen O'Hara, and she remains enthralled with the street. Adelaide falls in love with an alcoholic and penniless artist, Gilbert Lauderdale (Dana Andrews). She marries him against her family's wishes, and together they move into a house in the Mews.

Several things make this movie worthwhile, particularly Andrews, who winds up playing a double role, first as Adelaide's downfall and then her salvation. O'Hara does well with a character who goes through several mutations, some of them rather abrupt, and Dame Sybil Thorndike is a treat as a hideous slum dweller the Mews residents refer to as the Sow. The plot has surprises, as threads are not drawn out the way you would expect. Instead the conflicts come one after the other, the one constant being the street and how it evolves. It is really the story of the Mews, and not Maureen.

But what had the Siren hooked was the beauty of the movie. From the beginning, when the camera looks over Adelaide's shoulder, through a window and down onto the Mews, I couldn't get over how gorgeous the darned thing was. The street is poor, but the camerawork is rich, full of velvety blacks and the glow of the Victorian lamps. I missed the credits so I spent a long while marveling at the way the photography preserved a childlike perspective, from the way we see the marionettes carefully fashioned by Gilbert, to the way Maureen is pictured in her lodgings, a doll in a house she must grow into. A mews has its lodgings on the second floor, as the first one is given over to horse stalls and a carriage house. The characters frequently play scenes in front of the windows in O'Hara's rooms. The camera shows you the other shabby buildings across the narrow street, but the life of the Mews is usually heard and not seen. Adelaide remains suspended above it even as she is trying to join it. Who did this? Was I about to write a scintillating blog post on the wonders of a previously unknown DP?

Eventually the Siren's morning coffee kicked in and she remembered she had IMDB. The site informed her that the cinematographer was Georges Périnal. Yes, Blood of a Poet, The Thief of Baghdad, À Nous la Liberté, The Life and Death ofColonel Blimp, The Four Feathers, that Georges Périnal. The Siren felt as though she had been reading a short story and thinking, hey, this is brilliant, I can't wait to tell people about this unsung genius that I, Campaspe, have discovered, and then she turns to the index and realizes it's Tolstoy.

Due credit also to the art director, Andrej Andrejew, and screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., who did the screenplay based on Margery Sharp's novel. Like a cinephile version of Justice Potter Stewart, at least the Siren knows it when she sees it.

P.S. In her autobiography, Maureen O'Hara dismisses this one, saying the only reasons to catch it are Andrews and Thorndike. Well, she disses Sinbad the Sailor, too, and the Siren thinks it's swell. O'Hara also says the British and American versions are cut so differently they almost amount to different movies.

(Above, Dana Andrews, handsome and successful as he was in the 1940s. His career later skidded due to a crushing alcohol problem. Unlike a lot of other actors, he eventually overcame his drinking. He was admirably candid about his recovery in an era when admitting to addiction was still stigmatizing.)

Cast the First Stone

The Siren has adored Johnny Cash since childhood and looks forward to Walk the Line. She also wants to see Truman. So two of her must-sees are biographical pictures, a genre that is currently the redheaded stepchild of cinephiles everywhere. Those dreary, earnest, plodding biopics. So seldom do they have any verve or daring, says prime detractor David Edelstein, who brilliantly summarizes the good and the bad of biopics in one paragraph, here.

The Siren has a certain fondness for biopics, even bad ones. No one is saying they are all bad, not when one of the pinnacles of cinema, Abel Gance's Napoleon, is a biopic. But biopics have recurring flaws, including one Edelstein doesn't mention. The Siren believes the truly fatal, albeit frequently entertaining, mistakes are made when moviemakers cast a "hot" actor who doesn't fit the subject.

Hollywood violates casting logic in ways big and small. One minor irritant: someone reedlike playing a woman with heft. See Jessica Lange as Patsy Cline, or Diana Ross as Billie Holiday. Mind you, those two ladies gave good, serviceable performances, but the Siren wonders crankily if they'd cast skinny John Malkovich as Winston Churchill.

Maybe they would. Here is

The Siren's List of All-Time "What the Hell?" Biopic Casting Decisions:

1. Clark Gable as Charles Stuart Parnell in Parnell (1937) One sort of wishes James Joyce had commented on that one.
2. Kim Novak as Jeanne Eagels (1957). Lush-figured, somewhat wooden Kim as a sylph-like junkie acting legend.
3. Kay Francis as Florence Nightingale in The White Angel (1936). This one makes the Siren sad, because the good-hearted, well-liked Francis hoped this role would break her usual mold of enduring great sorrow whilst wearing fabulous couture. She just wasn't up to it, though, and was furthered hampered by a script that ignores Lytton Strachey and goes straight for the sainthood angle.
4. John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956). You've probably heard the rumors about the filming of this one near a nuclear test site, and the actors and crew members who later died of cancer. A straightforward summary is here.
5. Cornel Wilde as Omar Khayyam (1957). A twofer--a Baghdad-and-boobs biopic! Wilde's turn as Chopin in A Song to Remember (1945) is also cited sometimes as dreadful miscasting, but the Siren thought he was all right in that one, just fighting a risible script.
6. Jean-Pierre Aumont as the nationalistic Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Song of Scheherazade (1947). It's hard to find, but the Siren has seen this turkey twice and loves it to death. It gives you a French-to-his-toenails actor cast as a simple Russian sailor, "Nicky." (Would you call this guy Nicky?) In true Hollywood fashion, Nicky the sailor has a song in his heart and a big urge to sing it--but he's got to find a piano first. Yvonne DeCarlo's dance to "Capriccio Espagnole" at the end is so transcendently campy it would have flummoxed Susan Sontag.

But, you say, these are all old flicks. Of course casting back then was often ridiculous.

Ha. Moving right along to

7. Colin Farrell as Alexander (2004). The Siren hasn't seen that one, but just the four words "Colin Farrell as Alexander" crack her up.
8. Jude Law as Russian war hero Vasilli Zaitsev in Enemy at the Gates (2001). Not a straight biopic, and not without merit, but despite a valiant effort Law is about as peasant-like as a pair of Gucci loafers. One brilliant piece of casting, however, is Bob Hoskins as Nikita Khrushchev. The movie becomes fascinating as soon as Hoskins shows up.
9. Gary Oldman as Beethoven in Immortal Beloved (1994). Sid's symphonic stylings. Didn't believe him for a moment.
10. For true, throat-clutching horror, let us we hope we never match Jennifer Love Hewitt playing Audrey Hepburn in that 2000 TV movie. This atrocity belongs with "Jackass" in the category of "Movies Whose Mere Existence Moves Me to Despair." Even now, just thinking about Hewitt as Hepburn brings back a twitch in my right eyelid. Ms. Hewitt's career largely has stalled since that outing, and an uncharacteristically vengeful Siren says, "GOOD."

There will always be more on the way. You have probably heard that Sofia Coppola's latest project concerns Marie Antoinette. ("Not that awful woman again," moaned a French lady the Siren knows well. Lack of originality in choosing biopic subjects is another problem altogether.) Coppola's film stars Kirsten Dunst as the doomed monarch, a choice that may well doom the picture as far as the Siren is concerned. Dunst, the epitome of a suburban American blonde, playing the Queen of France? Anything's possible--one of the few decent performances George Hamilton ever gave was as Hank Williams--but I wouldn't put money on it. Come on, she can't even stand up straight. I hope the French are plotting their revenge right now. How about Sophie Marceau as Eleanor Roosevelt?

Just to show she thinks the genre has produced truly worthwhile films, the Siren lists a few she likes:

Julia (good movie, though, as Edelstein says, "the only true thing in this picture is that there were Nazis in Germany")
Isadora
Yankee Doodle Dandy (the most genuinely thrilling flag-waving fadeout of all time)
Man of a Thousand Faces
Lawrence of Arabia
Lenny
Love Me or Leave Me (That's three with Cagney. What can I say.)
Ed Wood
Coal Miner's Daughter
Pride of the Yankees
Papillon (Debating whether this one counts. Leaving it in.)
Sid and Nancy
Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
The Story of Adele H.
Young Mr. Lincoln
The Nun's Story

[Corrected 11/29/05, with thanks to JG]

Baghdad and Boobs

No, this isn't a political post. It is a digression on a Hollywood genre. One IMDB reviewer calls these movies "Grecianized Near-Easterns," others call them sand-and-sandals. The Siren calls them Baghdad-and-boobs.

I have a big soft spot for these cinematic baubles, and Maureen O'Hara is one reason. A fair-skinned redhead myself, flicks like Sinbad the Sailor (1947) assured me that if I pursued an acting career I need not fear typecasting. I envisioned myself at casting calls for a "Scheherazade type." I could even bring my own chiffon, to audition with that cute little see-through square that passed for the veil in these movies.

O'Hara's autobiography dispenses with Sinbad in one line, and the Siren thinks this unfair. It's a most enjoyable movie, with a delicious framing device. There is a lighthearted, almost spoof-like aspect to it that works well. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. has the requisite dash, but unlike his dad he had a certain fey quality that hindered him as an action hero. Sinbad turns this into an advantage by emphasizing the title character's braggadocio. Is he a real hero, or a loudmouth con artist? You find out at the end, after plenty of sparring with O'Hara's trademark feisty princess.

As a girl I also enjoyed Son of Ali Baba with Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie. My memory has faded, but even watching that one on the Turner Superstation in the 1970s I think I realized Curtis was a lot more Brooklyn than Baghdad. They changed the ending of the old story, possibly because someone realized that in 1952, seven years after World War II, mass murder of forty thieves might not play in Peoria.

Piper Laurie even made another Baghdad-and-boobs flick in 1953, The Golden Blade, with Rock Hudson (stop giggling. No, I haven't seen it). Something about redheads seems to have made studio execs think, "Now where did I put that heavily edited edition of the Arabian Nights?" Rita Hayworth got the girdle-and-veil treatment, with a Biblical twist, in Salome. And while it isn't part of the genre, I still crack up when I see Shirley MacLaine as an Indian princess in Around the World in 80 Days. If you look closely you can see her freckles in a couple of close-ups. Wonder why they never got around to Moira Shearer?

Hollywood churned these things out by the urnful in the 1940s (often with poor, doomed Maria Montez) and into the 1950s, with occasional forays even after that, such as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in 1974.

The only Baghdad-and-boobs saga that the Siren (and possibly anyone else) can consider a masterpiece is the 1940 Thief of Baghdad. Among its advantages were the brilliant Michael Powell, an uncredited William Cameron Menzies (six directors worked on the movie, all told), and dialogue by Miles Malleson that actually managed to evoke some cadences of a Khayyam translation without sounding ridiculous. It had the exacting Alexander Korda who, legend has it, looked at the Baghdad set and ordered, "Tear it down, build it three feet higher, and paint it pink." Finally, it gave us Sabu, a gifted and charismatic child actor who had the rare ability to react without mugging.

In case you're wondering, yes, the Siren does realize these films resemble true Arabic culture about as much as Mamie Van Doren resembles Marie Curie. But she cut her cinephile teeth on Busby Berkley musicals and figures realism is overrated anyway. These are fairy tales. If they teem with appalling Middle Eastern stereotypes (and boy do they), at least the heros are allegedly Arab or Persian too, albeit played by toothy Westerners. Talents like Turhan Bey and Sabu usually had to content themselves with supporting roles. Whereas today, of course, they'd be getting ... supporting roles.

Sabu's career was sadly limited by the typecasting of his time. When the Siren looks at something like The Mummy, however, she has to question whether he would have fared much better today. Perhaps he'd have found a place with independent filmmakers, but there wouldn't be much for him in the standard big-budget offering. The old days gave us patronizing Orientalism, but in the Siren's view, mainstream Hollywood manages to grow worse with age.