Hold Back the Dawn, at Last on Blu Ray

The Siren is inordinately pleased to announce that the home-video gods have heard our pleas: Hold Back the Dawn, Mitchell Leisen’s best film, from one of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder’s best scripts, is out today, July 16, on glorious region-free Blu Ray from Arrow. The first pressing will contain a booklet with the Siren’s essay about the film, so if you want one, you need to put some hustle in it à la Georges and Anita.

The Siren’s longtime patient readers will no doubt recall the Siren’s intense dislike of any praise for an old movie that starts, ends, or continues in any way with “It’s so modern!” or, worse, “It could have been made last week!” Righty-o, last week, because the present-day woods are chock-full of Wilders and Leisens etc.

However.

Hold Back the Dawn remains relevant to Our National Moment. Spookily relevant, as the Siren describes the plot:

“A refugee from an ‘undesirable’ country, one with a U.S. immigration quota that won’t get around to him for nearly a decade, finds himself stuck in a Mexican border town with hundreds of other desperate refugees, all looking for a way in.”

The Siren wonders what Brackett and Wilder would say once they’d read this week’s newspapers. (They’d probably get their hats and coats and head straight back for the afterlife.)

With the kind permission of Arrow, the Siren is posting an excerpt from her much-longer booklet essay.

The movie opens with [Romanian-born Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer)] striding into a movie studio and desperately offering a story pitch to a director named Dwight Saxon, played by Leisen himself, for the bargain price of $500. (In a nice inside-reference, Leisen is shown on the Paramount set directing Veronica Lake and Brian Donlevy in I Wanted Wings.) ‘My papers give my occupation as a dancer, which is correct, in a general way,’ he says as the flashback begins. To a savvy American (or any would-be immigrant) in 1941 this was an alert. The quotas were small, and made even smaller by a clause in the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924: Officials could refuse admittance to anyone likely to be a ‘public charge.’ Iscovescu is, as plainly as could be under the Production Code, a gigolo, and a potential public charge if ever there was one.

Even as played by Charles Boyer, he of the tender eyes and chocolate-ganache voice, Iscovescu is one cold article. The unnamed border town he’s stuck in has become so full of would-be immigrants that no hotel rooms are available — until a refugee hangs himself in one at the Esperanza, and Iscovescu pounces without a second thought. Leisen’s camera emphasizes the cramped boredom of the town, having Boyer cross and re-cross certain parts of the set. The border checkpoint is marked by a fence (‘it might as well be a hundred feet high,’ fumes Georges), palm trees and a massive ‘UNITED STATES’ over the gate; the interior is seen only in glimpses. At first, glum, sardonic Georges comes to life only when in the company of fellow gold-digger Anita.

Paulette Goddard, born on Long Island and American down to her lacquered toenails, gives not the slightest impression of being any kind of foreigner. But Anita is such a delightful presence in the movie it scarcely matters, scheming to take her rich sucker to the cleaners while she keeps a weather eye on Boyer. In contrast to de Havilland, whose dialogue as Emmy is achingly sincere, Brackett and Wilder give Anita nothing but firecrackers: ‘Your door was unlocked. I just dropped in to borrow a cup of sugar.’ Goddard’s best work outside of her Chaplin films often involved a scene where she gets to tell another character the facts of life, as in The Women. Here it’s when Anita tells Emmy the truth about Georges: ‘I know what you’re thinking — this woman’s a tramp, and she’s in love with him. Well, I am a tramp, and I am in love with him.’ Anita’s essentially an amoral person, but what sells the scene is the sympathy that flickers across her face when she sees how deeply Emmy is hurt.

Exquisitely pretty De Havilland, who got the role on loanout from a highly reluctant Jack Warner, was perhaps an odd choice for a schoolteacher who’s reached her mid-twenties and remained a virgin. But the script suggests Emmy is sheltered more than anything, a good Catholic girl (she and Boyer have a lovely scene in a Mexican church) who has dreamt of romance and is uncommonly vulnerable to anyone offering it.

[snip]

And like everyone else in Hold Back the Dawn, Emmy isn’t a saint, as Brackett and Wilder show by giving her the film’s most searing line. U.S. sentiment about immigration in 1941 was decidedly, even virulently “con”; polls showed most Americans wanted the refugees kept out. Brackett and Wilder allude to that as Emmy rhapsodizes to Georges about the promise of America: ‘You see, it’s like, um — like a lake. Clear and fresh and it’ll never get stagnant while new streams are flowing in.’ ‘Well,’ says Georges, ‘your people are building pretty high dams to stop those streams.’ ‘Just to keep out the scum, Georges,’ replies Emmy.

And yes – aside to Karen Green, Yojimbo and others – you bet the Siren discusses The Affair of the Cockroach.

If you don’t know what she means by that, by all means, buy the disc and find out.

A Bookish Cinephile Christmas

Over at Indiewire's Criticwire, the smart, fine and funny Matt Singer has been running a critics' survey for a while, and this week was the first time the Siren participated. The question was, "'Tis the season for gift giving. If someone's looking to buy a film-related book for the cinephile in their life this holiday season, what would you recommend?"

The Siren confined herself to one book, because naming more felt like cheating and because Matt, bless his heart, hasn't got all damn day. So the Siren picked City of Nets by Otto Friedrich, which she's mentioned here often.

But Glenn Kenny, in the same survey, brings up a salient point (as is his wont): what kinda cinephile are we talkin' about? Is our Hypothetical Cinephile someone who adores stars and their foibles? somebody who digs Hollywood history? an auteurist? a writer? an iconoclast? a consumer of deep-and-meaningful critical theory?

So the Siren decided to suggest a few more books she likes and has read recently, say over the past couple of years. And because the holidays don't need more frustration, this is also limited to books that are either in print, or easily available via ABE Books and the like.

(The last three books were written by people the Siren considers friends, but she admired these critics' writing long before she got to know them in person.)

The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre by Stephen D. Youngkin
An exhaustively researched book that appears to have taken up a substantial portion of its author's life, with impressive results. You can't imagine anyone wanting or needing to know anything about Lorre that isn't here. The cumulative effect is tragic, as are so many Hollywood stories, but The Lost One is also a conclusive argument for Lorre the artist. Every movie, every play or other work is treated with care, if not always respect--Lorre himself didn't have much respect for the likes of Mr. Moto. Youngkin recreates all of Lorre's worlds in such detail that you feel how strange it was to be uprooted to, say, Paris, and the boarding house where Lorre and his companion Celia Lovsky stayed with fellow refugees in 1933: "He and Celia lay in their twin beds, eyes open, without speaking. Sleep was impossible with the thunderous speeches of Hitler coming over the radio from the floor above and the angry, indignant rejoinders of their fellow Germans: 'False! False!...Lies.'"

Ideal for: The character actor connoisseur and anyone who's intrigued by the emigre experience in Hollywood.

Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille by Scott Eyman
You know something? The Siren loves being wrong, when she finds out she's wrong in a good way. Which we will define as: The Siren thought she didn't like someone's movies, but in fact, she hadn't been looking at the right movies, and/or she hadn't been looking at the movies she knew in the right way. Which is a convoluted way of saying that the Siren rolled her eyes over a lot of Cecil B. DeMille for many years, and she shouldn't have. This biography, by the excellent writer and film historian Scott Eyman, helped immensely in knocking some sense into her. DeMille was far more complicated and even admirable as a person than he's usually been depicted, and he was a superb visual craftsman and storyteller. Meticulous detail about DeMille's huge role in Hollywood history, too. Superb opening that describes DeMille rewriting Billy Wilder's lines (yes, you read that right) on the set of Sunset Boulevard. Who else but DeMille would have had the nerve? Who else but DeMille would have gotten away with it?

Ideal for: Smart-alecs like the Siren who haven't been giving the man his full due.

The Sound of Silence: Conversations with 16 Film and Stage Personalities Who Bridged the Gap Between Silents and Talkies by Michael G. Ankerich

The Siren has strong preferences in interview books. She likes to hear from people who were a few rungs down, as well as those at the top. She loves a good story but she definitely wants to hear about the work. Above all, she wants an interviewer who knows his stuff, who has seen the movies. Michael Ankerich fulfills all those requirements. And so you get Billie Dove's tales of Marion Davies drinking to get through a horseback outing with Hearst, or how Blondie of the Follies was recut to make Dove the villain; Barbara Boundess, who had a bit part in the scandal of Paul Bern's suicide ("I learned a great lesson through this. It taught me never to go out alone with a married man"); Marcia Mae Jones ("The minute they say, 'Oh, you're that child actress,' I want to scream, because I know it's going to hurt me"); and the late, elusive Barbara Kent ("I've always thought one had to be an exhibitionist to be in pictures. That wasn't me"). Put it this way: this year, the Siren's asking Santa for Ankerich's other book.

Ideal for: The many people who adore this period.

Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne by James Gavin
Admiring but unflinching account of Horne's great talent and also her flaws. Full of first-hand interviews with people who knew Horne. You get not only Hollywood, but also the simultaneous glamor and sleaze of the nightclub circuit and the people who frequented it. And my god, the stories in here--like Horne, called a "nigger bitch" by a 30-year-old white man at the Luau in Beverly Hills in 1960, throwing first a butt-filled ashtray at his head, then a hurricane lamp, then another hurricane lamp. The man wound up bleeding from a cut over his eye, and when the cops arrived and reproached her, Horne flashed back, "What do you want me to do? Apologize?"

Ideal for: Those with a passionate interest in music to go along with movie madness; anyone who wants/needs to know more about the history of black performers in Hollywood.

The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson
Until a couple of years ago the Siren had read Ferguson only in snippets. Like all late converts, she's now an evangelist. The legendary New Republic critic joined the Merchant Marines at the outbreak of war and was killed in 1943 at age 36. While his collected film criticism is criminally out of print, it's still pretty easily obtained, and if the used bookstores of America experience a colossal run on Otis Ferguson, maybe somebody will reissue him. To his weekly reviewing duties Ferguson brought scalpel-clean perception and a supremely graceful prose style. Just now, at random, trying merely to pick a passage that would show off the man's writing, the Siren rediscovered the best description of James Cagney she has ever read:

He is all crust and speed and snap on the surface, a gutter-fighter with the grace of dancing, a boy who knows all the answers and won't even wait for them, a very fast one. But underneath, the fable: the quick generosity and hidden sweetness, the antifraud straight-as-a-string dealing, the native humor and the reckless drive--everything everybody would like to be, if he had the time sometime. But always this, always: if as a low type he is wrong, you are going to see why. In spite of writers, directors, and decency legions you are going to see the world and what it does to its people through his subtle understanding of it. And in The Roaring Twenties this genuine article has had the chance of his life; he has deliberately done much that a star would refuse to attempt, because hell, he isn't a star, he's an actor; and in this actor's range of life and death he is not only an actor but an intelligence. You do not even have to like that quicksilver personality to see its effect in art here. And if you do appreciate his personality-legend, his face on this screen will haunt your dreams.

Ideal for: The Siren is considering a program to leave this in hotel desk drawers at film festivals, à la the Gideons.

Mabel: Hollywood's First I-Don't-Care Girl by Betty Harper Fussell
In the early 1980s Fussell became entranced with Mabel Normand and set out to talk with just about anybody who was still alive and had known the actress. This twisty, highly idiosyncratic book chronicles not just the high times and ill fate of Mabel Normand, but also Fussell's relationship to the idea of Normand; what she saw on screen, what she learned from investigating. In many ways this is an exploration of what happens, good and bad, when an admirer digs deep into the life and myth of a star. Piece by piece, the actress whom audiences so adored emerges--not as a role model, a notion Mabel would have hooted at after you explained what the hell you meant, but still a warmhearted, talented woman laboring through some very, very bad breaks.

Ideal for: Silent movie lovers; lovers of a good mystery.

Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman by Dan Callahan
Anyone who's hung around these parts long enough knows the Siren's high opinion of Dan Callahan's writing on film. The Miracle Woman does something that is very unusual: The life is the backdrop to the work, and not the other way around. You want to know about the marriages to Frank Fay and Robert Taylor, the old rumors about Stanwyck's sexual preference, the sad story of her relationship with her son? It's all there. But the focus stays on the movies, with chapters organized around periods and themes in Stanwyck's work: "The Rough-and-Tumble Wellman Five," "Screwball Stanwyck," "Stanwyck Noir." Within those sections, Dan gives detailed looks at the choices Stanwyck the actress is making--the way each character walks, moves, gestures, reacts. He compiles sources to suggest what kind of thinking and goals the actress was bringing to each part, like Stella Dallas: "A fury rises up, crests, then falls as she pulls Laurel away from her father...'Get out,' she says to her husband, making it sound like a choked afterthought. Laurel is crying hard, and Stella takes the child on her lap and tries to comfort her. The little girl keeps on crying, and Stanwyck's face takes on a distant blankness as she says that Mummy is right here."

Ideal for: Stanwyck fans (so, everybody) and any cinephile who takes acting seriously.

In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the Cities by Imogen Sara Smith
Also mentioned briefly here before. The Siren has often backed a fairly tight definition of noir, usually seen as an urban genre. Imogen argues, persuasively, for how noir "flourishes in marginal places...there are recurring noir images out here, too, evoking a transient, brutal, melancholy world." She traces noir in the suburbs (notably in a chapter delightfully titled "Maximum Security: Domestic Noir"), branching out through buses "with their miserable enforced communities of travelers," roaming down interstate highways, even into the plains and saloons of the Western. And brother, can she write.

Whether playing flawed heroes or redeemable villains, Dana Andrews found his niche as film noir's uneasy conscience. He was the most repressed of all tough guys. "It's not difficult for me to hide emotion," Andrews said, "since I've always hidden it in my personal life." His suits seem welded to him like armor. With that boxy mid-century silhouette, further fortified by the fedora, the glass of bourbon, the cigarette that stays jammed in his mouth when he talks, he looks oppressed by the masculine ideal of granite-faced impassivity. Those critics who called him wooden or monochromatic must not have looked into his troubled eyes.

Ideal for: The true noir fiend, the one who's been known to snap, "Why don't you quit cryin' and get me some bourbon?"

When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade by Dave Kehr
Every week in the New York Times, and every month in Film Comment, we have an eloquent voice for film preservation, an advocate wandering the back rooms of studios worldwide to see what's unjustly been left on the shelf. Dave Kehr is, simply, a very great critic and one of auteurism's best advocates. This book of reviews from the Chicago Reader, spanning 1974 to 1986, consists solely of raves, or near-raves. You can pull When Movies Mattered off the shelf again and again, like any great collection of essays. When she read it, the Siren couldn't resist starting with The Leopard, even though that one's in the back: "A social portrait is only successful when it ceases to be strange--when we have the sense of sharing the characters' world, seeing it as they do. If the world of The Leopard seems extraordinarily real, it is because Visconti sees it as ordinary."

Ideal for: Discerning auteurists; aspiring film critics who want to See How It's Done, Kids; the many fans of Dave's splendid writing.

That ends the Siren's list. For the movie-lover who might require something a bit more esoteric, a handful of suggestions: Things I Did...and Things I Think I Did, by Jean Negulesco (not much on the movies but he gives good yarn); anything by Oscar Levant, but the best is The Memoirs of an Amnesiac, one of the most howlingly funny autobiographies of all time; Marlene Dietrich's ABC (contains her astrological, love and wardrobe advice as well as her recipe for schnitzel); An Orderly Man by Dirk Bogarde; any of Anita Loos' three books on Hollywood, but especially The Talmadge Girls.

The Siren has over the years found a large number of great film books via the kind suggestions of patient readers, so if you also know a good one, speak up.

Ten Movies the Siren Should Love…But Does Not

So, Tony Dayoub of the terrific blog Cinema Viewfinder has been tweeting his tour of Elizabeth Taylor's filmography, and having a good time doing it. Last night he watched Father of the Bride, Vincente Minnelli's beloved 1950 comedy, starring Taylor at her most gorgeous and featuring one of the most imitated bridal gowns of all time. And the Siren tweeted back that she should find this movie charming; after all, it stars Joan Bennett, who was ten different kinds of fabulous, and Spencer Tracy, who had a fine, laid-back and natural way to his comedic acting. And it's Minnelli, and the Siren adores Minnelli to the point where she can mount a ringing defense of Brigadoon's being shot on the back lot. And yet the Siren is firmly uncharmed, although she was unable to explain why in 140 characters or less.

This led to her thinking of other movies that have classic status and a number of elements that should hit all her sweet spots, and yet she's never tempted to sit down and get reacquainted with them when they pop up on Turner Classic Movies, or when someone posts or tweets about them. So, for the sheer undiluted hell of it, she came up with ten.

Now lists like this are risky, in that people do not generally care to have their beloved favorites maligned. The Siren apologizes in advance, and assures her patient readers that she sees virtues in all of these movies, even if it's just the presence of a great actor. You will also notice that the list is almost entirely comprised of some of the Siren's most beloved directors. And nothing here alters that devotion, but you'll have to accept that as a given. The Siren isn't going to clutter things up by waving around her Billy Wilder-loving credentials, for example.

Still, something about each of these films irks the Siren to the point of nonenjoyment. Usually that's related to deficiencies of humor, theme or performance, although there's a couple of films that, in the words of X. Trapnel's grandmother, "don't have looks eyes like."

So if the Siren's list includes a deep personal favorite, go ahead and take your revenge in comments: "Oh yeah? Well I'VE never liked [insert name of movie the Siren has praised to the skies]." Just remember the one rule at the Siren's place: No dissing Citizen Kane. That is not and never has been a joke. Otherwise, have at it.

P.S. Over at Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny has posted a response, in which he links to his defense of the second Man Who Knew Too Much and offers his approving thoughts on Kiss Me, Stupid. Check it out! The Siren loves the post title alone.

1. Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1950)
The Siren hastens to say that the late Elizabeth Taylor is the one thing she really does like about the movie. Taylor makes the most of an underwritten role, and you really believe she loves her Pop. However. For one thing, it bothers the Siren that Taylor is so young, although she realizes full well that this is the age at which many people got married in the 1950s, and Taylor herself was married when it was released. Still, it's off-putting. As is Tracy's open jealousy of his son-in-law, and if you ask the Siren, his character talks down to Joan Bennett way too much, and she's clearly a lot smarter than he is. More than anything, the comedy falls short of the mark, both too sour and not sharp enough. The Siren's final curmudgeonly observation is that Taylor's celebrated wedding dress is way too mid-Victorian for her taste.

2. You Can't Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938) Back in his IFC blogging days Vadim Rizov took this one apart. Heart of the matter:

Grandpa Martin Vanderhof (played by Lionel Barrymore) [is] a lovable old coot who lets whoever wants to follow their flighty impulses and desires (fireworks! mechanical dolls! ballet!) take up space and pursue them, no matter how impractical or unsafe.

Like all free spirits, Grandpa Vanderhof doesn't believe in paying the income tax. In [one] infuriating scene… he plays rhetorical cat-and-mouse with a frustrated representative of the IRS, demanding to know what good his 22 years' owed back-taxes would do. The representative says they need warships, but crafty grandpa -- three years before World War II -- says we haven't used those since the Spanish-American War. Nor does Grandpa use the roads ever, and he certainly doesn't believe in Congress because, you know, Congress, haw haw.

The Siren agrees with Vadim in every particular. We're both Capra fans, but You Can't Take It With You is for the birds.



3. Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942) To the Siren, this will always be one-half of a great movie. My word, Katharine Hepburn is gorgeous in it. The Siren would say it's tied with The Philadelphia Story for the title of Hepburn at Her Most Ravishing. And if the Siren is lucky enough to catch the first half, she'll watch it for the way the actress lounges down a hallway and swings her legs off that desk. The chemistry with Tracy would give Antoine Lavoisier a heart attack. But the ending--oh my stars and garters, that ending, in which Hepburn is humiliated because sure, she can wear the hell out of a chic suit and write circles around any man in sight, but what that does matter if she burns his breakfast--that ending is so hideous, so cringe-inducing that the Siren can't watch it. She can't even watch much past the midpoint because she knows the finale is coming. TCM says the ending was changed after an audience preview. And before you go after the Siren for imposing 2011 viewpoints on a 1942 movie, let it be said that when the rewrite was presented to Hepburn, she "termed it 'the worst bunch of shit I ever read.'" God, don't you love her even more for that?

4. Kiss Me, Stupid (Billy Wilder, 1964) The Siren likes Kim Novak very much in this movie; Pauline Kael was 100% right that "her lostness holds the film together," to the extent that it hangs together at all. People tell the Siren to just try to get past Ray Walston, but how, exactly? He's all over the movie. As is Dean Martin, a hit-or-miss talent for the Siren; here his character is just too creepy for words.



5. The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962) This is one movie the Siren would watch again in its entirety because it's so damn beautiful, and that is no small virtue in her eyes. But the truth is that she finds the dialogue, and the performances of Anthony Perkins and Jeanne Moreau, mannered and dull.



6. Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941) The Siren doesn't believe that the indisputably great Hawks had much of a feel for Tennessee or its inhabitants. Nor does she care for the preachiness of this movie, or find Alvin York's conversion to Army superhero to be particularly convincing on screen, even if it did happen in real life. For what it's worth, co-screenwriter Howard Koch later expressed something of the same doubts: "If you render under all the Caesars, past and present, what they demand of us, there is little left for God. They get what they want--power, glory, money or whatever--and He comes out on the short end." The Siren does like the "Give Me That Old Time Religion" conversion scene a lot, though.

7. Guys and Dolls (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1955) Truly, the Siren does not get any of the love for this one. You want to revive an unjustly neglected Mankiewicz, the Siren suggests The Late George Apley or Five Fingers, both terrific. Guys and Dolls' abstract sets might--might, although the Siren has her strong doubts--have worked had the casting had been better. But look, people say it all the time because it's true: Frank Sinatra should have played Sky Masterson, not Nathan Detroit. Vivian Blaine, by all accounts a marvel as Miss Adelaide on stage, never quite catches fire here, and her fights with Sinatra are mechanical. Brando mangles his every love song, none worse than "A Woman in Love." The one saving grace for the Siren, aside from her beloved Jean Simmons dancing in Havana, is the marvelous Stubby Kaye.

8. Where the Boys Are (Henry Levin, 1960) The Siren can happily deal with retro attitudes toward sex and marriage in Jean Negulesco's "three girls" movies, like Three Coins in the Fountain or The Best of Everything. But there's one problem with this movie right there: you get four girls, and that's one too many. Darryl Zanuck would have made them take one out. Robert Avrech argues that Dolores Hart is quite good here, and she is. But the way poor Yvette Mimieux is treated makes the Siren's skin crawl, and there just isn't enough laughter or romance to make up for it in any way.



9. The Pink Panther (Blake Edwards, 1963) Great look to the film, and a great-looking Capucine, who is high on the Siren's list of Actresses She'll Forgive Anything Because They Are So Ridiculously Beautiful. But just not funny to the Siren; too slapstick, and a lingering cruelty under the humor that rubs the Siren the wrong way. Man, the Siren loves that song in the ski lodge, though.



10. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) This married couple just basically hate one another, don't they? The Siren vastly prefers the original.

Film Noir Coda: "And Then, Mr. Krock..."

As a small treat, to celebrate the end of a job well done by all, here is the oft-told tale of how James M. Cain came to conceive of Double Indemnity--told exceptionally well by Otto Friedrich in City of Nets.

Double Indemnity…derived from an old newspaper story. Back at the dawn of time, back even before Arthur Krock first arrived in Washington to cover the administration of William Howard Taft for the Louisville Times, a terrible thing happened at the printing plant in Louisville. There was an ad in the paper for women's underwear, as Krock recounted the episode to a young writer on the New York World, and it was supposed to say, 'If these sizes are too big, take a tuck in them.' But as Krock was reading through that night's first edition, he saw that somebody had changed the first letter in the word 'tuck.'

Krock ordered the ad changed for the next edition, then summoned the printer and demanded an explanation. The printer couldn't provide one. He couldn't understand how such an embarrassing accident could have happened. Krock remained suspicious. Two days later, he went and interrogated the printer again, in the interrogatory manner that would daunt future presidents and secretaries of state when Krock became Washington bureau chief for the New York Times. The printer confessed. 'Mr. Krock,' he said, trying finally to explain, 'you do nothing your whole life but watch for something like that happening, so as to head it off, and then, Mr. Krock, you catch yourself waiting for chances to do it.'

The young writer to whom Krock told this story, James M. Cain, was fascinated by the idea of a young man yearning to commit the one crime he is responsible for preventing…Cain had once been an insurance salesman, and his father had been an insurance executive, so as Krock's story floated around in his mind over the course of many years, it acquired a characteristically Cainian form: insurance fraud.

Updated final links, including those who slipped in under the wire on Monday, for the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon are right here and right here. Please continue to enjoy.

The Siren by Request: Ball of Fire (1941)

(Requested by Bill Wren of Piddleville, Happy Miser and Oshimoi.)

Ball of Fire is a two-hander--”on the one hand...on the other...” On the one hand, it’s intensely lovable, and was requested by more individuals than any other single movie. On the other hand, despite the amazing array of talent, it’s got some problems. This was the Siren’s second encounter with Ball of Fire, and she spotted the same flaws she did on the first go-round. But she still had a great time.

Ball of Fire was produced by Samuel Goldwyn in 1941, and was the last movie Billy Wilder made before moving on to directing. One of Wilder’s conditions for writing the screenplay was that he be permitted to observe every day of Howard Hawks’ shooting, and Hawks was happy to let Wilder hang around and learn. Wilder biographer Ed Sikov argues that Hawks’ fluid, understated, harmonious visuals were ultimately a stronger influence on Wilder the director than his acknowledged idol, Ernst Lubitsch. Hawks had nothing but praise for Wilder and Charles Brackett as screenwriters. (But when Hawks later claimed credit for pointing out that “hey, this is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs!”, an annoyed Wilder said that had occurred to him on his own, thankyouverymuch.)

Samuel Goldwyn felt aggrieved that his most valuable contract player, Gary Cooper, was having more success in movies made on loanout than in Goldwyn-produced pictures. So Goldwyn obtained Wilder and Charles Brackett on loan from Paramount and put them to work on a vehicle for Cooper. After Wilder rejected a number of old ideas, he hit on a tale he’d written years earlier, concerning a professor of linguistics who gets involved with a burlesque singer and has a run-in with the lady’s gangster associates. Wilder and Brackett set to work on the script that would become Ball of Fire, with Cooper as a professor whose initial interest in jazz singer Sugarpuss O’Shea is her facility with American slang.



Who besides Billy Wilder would look at Gary Cooper, the most laconic speaker in Hollywood, and think, “Linguistics!” Not only is that genius, it’s unparalleled mischievousness, and with Wilder, the two qualities are joined at the hip. Everybody seems to have accepted casting Cooper as a language maven as a self-evidently great idea, with the exception of Cooper himself, who was fine with playing a professor but got the shrieking blue fantods when he laid eyes on the dialogue. According to Sikov, Cooper described his polysyllabic lines as “gibberish” and declared, “I can’t memorize it if it doesn’t mean anything.” The actor made an appointment to complain to Samuel Goldwyn, the only person in Hollywood with more of a reputation for giving English a wide berth, and Sikov observes, “That must have been a real meeting of minds.” Give Goldwyn credit, however. When Cooper emerged from the producer’s office, he’d agreed to do Brackett and Wilder’s dialogue almost without alteration. “Two-dollar words, okay, but not ten-dollar words,” was Cooper’s final say.

Let’s swing here into the things about Ball of Fire that don’t work, so we can move on to the things that do. Counting down in reverse order...

4. Cooper had a point, in the sense that the movie, at 111 minutes, is too long and a bit sluggish. Hawks was aware of this and according to Todd McCarthy, he defended the picture by pointing out that “when you’ve got professors speaking lines, they can’t say ‘em like crime reporters.” Still, one hallmark of a wholly successful comedy is pace, and a screwball (which Ball of Fire is, fundamentally) is fast. The flawless timing of Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday is missing from Ball of Fire. Even Dana Andrews, playing a gangster who might conceivably be a fast talker, is a beat or two slower than he should be. (He’s so handsome, though, that the Siren doesn’t much care; she was drooling over him more than Cooper.)

3. Richard Haydn. The Siren admits to the personal nature of this quibble, but Haydn’s adenoidal speaking manner as Professor Oddly drives her up a wall. She’s convinced that Mel Blanc must have had this actor, in this role, in mind when he voiced Marvin the Martian. Each time Haydn speaks the Siren hears, “The Illudium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator! That creature has stolen the Space Modulator!”



2. Cooper doesn’t have much chemistry with Barbara Stanwyck. The Siren believes Bertram Potts is attracted to Sugarpuss, as with the fabulous line, “Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.” And the Siren believes that Sugarpuss is attracted to “Pottsie”; Stanwyck is so great she could make the Siren believe she’s got the hots for S.Z. Sakall. But when Stanwyck stands on some books and it’s time to get the yum-yum on with Coop, they ignite a Zippo lighter, not a bonfire.

1. The cinematography. And right now, the Siren’s readers are checking the credits, seeing Gregg Toland’s name, and lining up to feel her forehead and ask if she’s feeling herself today. Yes, complaining about Toland’s cinematography may seem the product of delirium or glaucoma. But this isn’t a question of skill or beauty--of course it’s beautiful, it’s Toland and Hawks--it’s a question of what suits the material. Ball of Fire’s pacing problems are exacerbated by a look that’s disconcertingly gloomy. The house where the professors are compiling their encyclopedia is lit like Xanadu, and instead of emphasizing the contrast between the eccentrics and what one of them calls “a mausoleum,” the visuals just muffle the action further. All the deep-focus shots keep pulling the Siren into the sets, when she wants to concentrate on the conga line.

Nits picked. On to the fun stuff. Again, in reverse order:

4. Oscar Homolka as Professor Gurkakoff, the scientist/mathematician. This may be another perception unique to the Siren, but he’s her favorite dwarf. The Siren once worked for mathematicians, and Homolka’s performance, combining a certain innocence with common sense and kindness with oddball humor, is a compendium of all the things she loved so much about those guys. Coop aside, he’s also the only professor with a little bit of sex appeal. (Like the Siren said, this may be a personal thing...)

3. The movie’s sweetness. Even Joe Lilac (Andrews) gets a signature color that's a nudging joke and some pretty funny moments, considering he’s described as the head of Murder Incorporated. Dan Duryea, one of the movies’ most reliable sadists, also goes easy as thug Pastrami. So do his partner Asthma (Ralph Peters) and the professors’ battle-axe housekeeper Kathleen Howard. But the real tell is the gentle, loving treatment of the Seven Dwarfs. Intellectuals get sent up a lot in American comedy; as stuffed-shirt targets, they--oh all right, we--are irresistible. The profs are babes in the Central Park woods, the first ones you’d pull out of a crowd for a cozy little game of three-card monte. But we like them that way. When Sugarpuss arrives, they’ve got all the equipment needed to join the conga line and overcome a bunch of gangsters. The eggheads do it, however, without changing their essential natures. Witness the lovely scene where, after Haydn has described his sexless, John-Ruskin-esque honeymoon with a watercolor-painting virgin named Genevieve, the professors serenade him with the old Victorian song of the same name. They sing without a trace of condescension or pity; they’re just performing an act of lovingkindness for an old friend.

2. The dialogue. Nobody, but nobody ever venerated and immortalized American slang like Austrian-born Billy Wilder, and this was his chance to shoot the works. “Root, zoot, and cute--and solid to boot!” “Brother, we’re going to have some hoy toy toy.” “Scrow! Scram! Scraw!” “Blitz it, mister, blitz it, will ya!” “Patch my pantywaist.” “A slight case of Andy Hardy.” And one the Siren admires for its Code-proof double entendre: “Shove in your clutch.” What a feast this movie is. And the Siren thinks that while Wilder and Brackett recorded authentic phrases, they also just made shit up, and did it so well you think it’s something you’ve been hearing all your life. Of the lines above, which ones would you have heard on the street in 1941? The Siren can’t tell you. Maybe all, maybe none. Example: when Stanwyck says someone is going to “throw me out on my tin.” The Siren’s heard a lot of euphemisms, and seen a lot of movies, but that’s a new one on her. (She’s adopting it forthwith, by the by.)

And now we come to the Siren’s number-one favorite thing about Ball of Fire, the place where the whole movie comes together.

1. Barbara Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O’Shea. She was, incredibly, fifth choice, behind Carole Lombard, who disliked the character and the story, Jean Arthur, whom McCarthy says Hawks didn’t really want, Lucille Ball, and Ginger Rogers, who was offered the part and turned it down because, she told Goldwyn via her agent, she only wanted to play “ladies” from now on. (Goldwyn’s response: “You tell Ginger Rogers ladies stink up the place!”) That’s an impressive list, and any of them could done have a creditable job. But not like Stanwyck, oh no. She was as sexy in this movie as any in her career, especially in the early scenes with her nightclub costume swaying around those gams like spangled vertical blinds. The Brooklyn that never entirely left her low-pitched voice gets free rein in lines like “Say, who decorated this place, the mug that shot Lincoln?” and “This is the first time anyone moved in on my brain.” Her dawning love for Pottsie is so perfectly calibrated it’s like watching a thermostat turned up notch by notch. Her attack of late-movie remorse over having deceived Pottsie is delivered with one line, “a tramp,” spoken in a way that tells more than her tears seconds later. In a movie stacked with some of Hollywood’s greatest character actors, one gorgeous future leading man and one eternal legend, Stanwyck still carries the whole thing. She is, as Professor Bertram Potts might say, the complete conjugation.

In Memoriam: Tony Curtis, 1925-2010

Son of Ali Baba was the movie in which I had to stand at the top of a hill and tell Piper Laurie, "Yonder lies the castle of my father, the caliph." It came out, "Yondah lies the castle of my faddah," and I never heard the end of it. Forty years later my friend Hugh Hefner quoted it back to me: "Yonder lies me faddah's castle." I said, "Hef, I never said that. And even if I did, whose fault was it that they constructed the line that way, to start a sentence out with yonder? They wrote it, and I got stuck with it." Hef said, "Don't tell people that, Tony. It's a legendary story about you and Hollywood, whether it's true or not."

I've thought about that a lot, and I think I understand what he means. But I'm still sensitive about coming out of New York and being Jewish, and all the mockery of that line sounded to me like a putdown not just of New Yorkers but of Jews. British actors could get away with coming in and playing Roman generals or anything else, but if an American played the same kind of part, he got rapped because he sounded like he came from New York or Boston or some other recognizable place.

To me, "Yondah lies the castle of my faddah"--that mockery--was a lot like the words kike, nigger and fag. It signified a putdown, an inability to accept the differences or the logic of other people. I didn't like it then, and I still don't like it. I didn't like the idea that New Yorkers, in particular, were denigrated by high-tone English assholes, you'll excuse the vernacular.

--from Tony Curtis: The Autobiography, written with Barry Paris, 1993

Of all the words from and about Tony Curtis, these are the ones the Siren instantly recalled on hearing of his death this week, age 85. Not "Yondah…," which he may never even have said, but his furious reaction to the legend, 41 years later. Other actors went on talk shows and sat down for print interviews and laughed or shrugged off the mockery they'd endured. Not Curtis. It needled him, and nothing was going to stop him saying so. He was too much the Bronx native to let a slight pass. He was going to stay worked up about it as long as you kept bringing it up.

Maybe it isn't attractive to everyone, but the Siren loved that about Curtis, suspecting as she does that most actors retain insults a lot longer than they want to let on. Curtis was always ruthlessly frank, whether or not it was going to make him sound like a nice guy. And it's that stubborn, grudge-holding, proud and contrary streak that runs through his best role, Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. Falco has to take a lot of humiliation too, but the reason he is willing to do it is to get to a place where nobody will ever dare mock him again. Such sympathy as you have for Falco comes from Curtis, tearing out his lines like he's pulling the Scotch cork out with his teeth: "I don't want tips from the kitty. I'm in the big game with the big players."

All that is there in some of his other best work, too, like Joker in The Defiant Ones, just about managing the Southern accent and more than succeeding in showing a criminal's dawning awareness that he isn't the only thing in the world that matters. And when it wasn't on screen, it was on set, working itself out in demands for respect that Curtis didn't always get. The Siren thinks of Some Like It Hot and Curtis, who was usually best the first time a scene was filmed, watching Billy Wilder favor Marilyn Monroe as she blew line after line, take after take. And after the picture's done Curtis responds to an inane question about what it was like kissing Marilyn with the spectacularly tasteless riposte, "It was like kissing Hitler." "There's been a lot of bullshit written about that Hitler line of mine," he said. "It was just a throwaway line."

Then there's Curtis, enduring an agonizingly long shoot on Spartacus, surrounded by English actors playing Roman generals, turning to dainty Jean Simmons and groaning, "Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?"

Curtis disdained Method acting and was always willing to say so, often at some length. "It drove you crazy because it was all just jerking off in Macy's window," he said; as far as Curtis was concerned, it was all people trying to ape Brando, "but it was Marlon's own personal brand of madness, and it couldn't be duplicated." His own philosophy of acting was something far less personal: "To tell you the truth, I never thought of movies as an art form. I thought of it as a means of entertaining people, or letting them forget whatever it is they want to forget for a few hours in a dark theater. It's not as complicated as a lot of actors like to make it out to be." A philosophy like that probably came in handy for something like 40 Pounds of Trouble.

As hotheaded as he could be, Curtis still paid due respect to those he admired. He called Kubrick "a genius with the camera" and his favorite director, saying he thought Kubrick's greatest skill was his ability to work with actors. Curtis also talked about what he learned from talking to Laurence Olivier: "You know Tony, clothes make the actor. Dress the part, look at yourself, and you are the part."



Looking at Curtis was never exactly a chore. He swings past the camera for barely a few seconds, dancing a torrid mambo with Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross, and you gasp at how instantly you recognize him. It isn't just the searing good looks, it's the angry concentration. Is he playing a gigolo? If so, this is the least fawning gigolo in film history.

He had great talent, too infrequently used, humor and charisma and many flashes of good grace. But the Siren loved his fierceness. If there's an afterlife, she really hopes Curtis is giving Gerald Drayson Adams a piece of his eternally ornery mind.

Anecdote of the Week: You Can Post From Paris, but Not Everything Can Be Exported

As she's mentioned approximately 1,348 times in various social media, the Siren is off to Paris today for a visit with the in-laws. The Siren hates air travel--how heretical of her--but comforts herself with the notion that she could have in-laws in, say, Phenix City, Ala., a town where her father used to try cases and come back muttering that the movie flattered the place. (The Siren hastens to add for any readers in Phenix City that this was 25 years ago and Daddy may have missed the renaissance.)

The Siren always tries to do some shopping in Paris, however small, so here is a small anecdote regarding the perils of that pastime, from Billy Wilder in Hollywood by Maurice Zolotow.

Much of Love in the Afternoon was filmed on location in Paris. While Billy was over there, Audrey [Wilder] suddenly got the most irresistible craving for...a bidet! She had to have a bidet. She could not live without her very own bidet in the master bedroom. She cabled Billy to purchase a bidet and ship it to their Westwood apartment. Unable to locate a French plumbing supply firm which exported bidets, Wilder replied: IMPOSSIBLE TO OBTAIN BIDET STOP SUGGEST YOU DO HANDSTANDS IN SHOWER.

Over at Awards Daily, there is a poll about the Most Influential Film Critics. What struck the Siren about this poll is that there are only about a half-dozen, give or take, critics on the list whose good opinion is enough to get her watching. She won't tell you who they are, with two exceptions. Obviously the Siren's TCM tovarich Lou Lumenick carries much weight with her.

And then there is Glenn Kenny, the only critic named for an individual blog. The Siren suggests you go over and take the poll for the sake of voting for Glenn. The honor of the blogosphere compels you.

The poll, of course, is looking at which critics carry weight with the largest number of people (and in Oscar balloting, which to the Siren is like Kremlinology, only less transparent). But applying it to your own reading is an interesting exercise, and it made the Siren realize most of the critics left off the poll who wield substantial influence over her are either Web-based or have a large Web presence. Her own list would include (but is by no means limited to) Kim Morgan, Dennis Cozzalio, David Cairns, Dan Callahan, Peter Nelhaus, Tony Dayoub, Vadim Rizov, Dan Sallitt, Keith Uhlich, Jim Emerson, David Ehrenstein, Flickhead, Tom Shone and Girish Shambu. There are also wider-ranging bloggers whose film forays the Siren loves, such as James Wolcott (yes, I know he's primarily Vanity Fair, but he's a primo blogger so we like to claim him), Lance Mannion and Sheila O'Malley. And there's a few who've gone silent of late, but still make the Siren snap to attention when they do say something, like Filmbrain and Michael Phillips. These critics often share the Siren's tastes, but a lot of them also tend to like all sorts of things the Siren most definitely does not. They're all a pleasure to read, though, and often that's all it takes. Don't you think?

By that standard, the Siren could also name a lot of her commenters for that poll.

The Siren must now return to staring at her suitcases and waiting for them to speak up and tell her what she forgot. Before she leaves, one more critic who belonged on that poll had anyone consulted the Siren: Stephen Whitty. Please check out Stephen's marvelous exchange with Joan Lowell Smith, who once shared Hollywood digs with goddess-in-the-making Kim Novak.

That's all from Brooklyn for now. The Siren will be posting from Paris at her usual erratic rate. See you soon.

Women's Costumes at the Movies: Faux Fashion Blogger Edition

My final defeat, which made me cry real tears, came at the end of [Pandora's Box], when [G.W. Pabst] went through my trunks to select a dress to be 'aged' for Lulu's murder as a streetwalker in the arms of Jack the Ripper. With his instinctive understanding of my tastes, he decided on the blouse and skirt of my very favorite suit. I was anguished. "Why can't you buy some cheap little dress to be ruined? Why does it have to be my dress?" To these questions I got no answer till the next morning, when my once lovely clothes were returned to me in the studio dressing room. They were torn and foul with grease stains. Not some indifferent rags from the wardrobe department but my own suit, which only last Sunday I had worn to lunch at the Adlon Hotel! Josifine hooked up my skirt, I slipped the blouse over my head, and I went on the set feeling as hopelessly defiled as my clothes. Working in that outfit, I didn't care what happened to me...

I did not realize until I saw Pandora's Box in 1956 how marvelously Mr. Pabst's perfect costume sense symbolized Lulu's character and her destruction. There is not a single spot of blood on the pure-white bridal stain in which she kills her husband. Making love to her wearing the clean white peignoir, Alva asks, "Do you love me, Lulu?" "I? Never a soul!" It is in the worn and filthy garments of the streetwalker that she feels passion for the first time--come to life so that she may die.
--Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood

The Siren was recently designated a fashion blogger by a European site called Wikio, an honor that left her equal parts amused, flattered and puzzled. Aside from her annual rant about the costume awards at the Oscars, a tribute to Mary Astor's makeup and a brief series of posts about perfume, the Siren can't recall saying much about fashion here at her Web outpost, although certainly clothing and makeup rank high on her list of semi-private obsessions. Yet there she is, right next to the black-belt shoppers of Fashionista and seven notches below the cool gaze of the Sartorialist, who would probably stop the Siren in the street right around the same time Dorothy Lamour showed up in hell with a platter of Mai Tais.

Still, the unexpected accolade made the Siren start thinking about costumes in film. The period stuff does get most of the attention, but sometimes deservedly so, as with Walter Plunkett's incredible designs for Gone with the Wind. Those dresses are so brilliantly in tune with Scarlett's character and the events of the movie that you would swear they all must be in the book. The drapery dress is, but just about none of the others are. William Pratt points out that if Plunkett had followed Margaret Mitchell's descriptions to the letter, Scarlett would have spent 9/10ths of the movie wearing green, the author's favorite color. The "scarlet woman" dress that Rhett throws at Scarlett before Ashley's birthday party, for example, was entirely Plunkett's doing. And the Siren has always wanted a better look at the cloudlike indigo gown Scarlett wears in a brief scene of her New Orleans honeymoon. Look closely and you'll see it's adorned with nine stuffed birds--a witty commentary on the once-starving Scarlett stuffing herself with the finest in Louisiana cuisine.

Other great moments in period costume would have to include Marie Antoinette; Jezebel (that red dress was actually bronze, the better to photograph in black-and-white); The Adventures of Robin Hood (Olivia de Havilland spends most of the movie with her hair completely covered, so when she shows up in her bedroom with her hair down in braids, it's a potent sign of sexual yearning); and Queen Christina (the moment when Garbo turns so the firelight outlines her form under a man's shirt is one of the most sensual in all of 1930s cinema).

But the Siren is always drawn to contemporary costumes, particularly those for women. Louise Brooks's essay on Pabst contains what is still the best explanation of costume and performance that the Siren has ever read. Robert Avrech recently posted about designer Helen Rose, and in comments we discussed how an actor's clothing influences a performance. Confronted with that, plus her new job description, the Siren's palms began to itch and she got that yen, the one that says, "It's time to make a highly idiosyncratic list of things I like so that everyone can argue with me, politely."

As Yojimboen has pointed out, the ins and outs of costume credits in old movies can be worse than Kremlinology. Some of these were undoubtedly purchased off the rack, but as Annie or Daria could tell you, there's an art to selecting the right clothes, too. The Siren is mostly sticking with the screen credit, but if someone knows the real scoop on who did what, by all means tell us in comments and I'll update.

So, ten great moments in women's costume design. Let's hope this makes whoever clicks over from Wikio more happy and less confused.

1. Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (Orry-Kelly)

I’ll be wearing my white lace gown tonight. I’d like you to wear your black and white foulard.
--Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Henry Windle Vale

Cooper has a lot of bitchy moments in Now, Voyager, such as, just to pick one out of a hat, throwing herself down a staircase to ensure her daughter stays chained up as a nursemaid.

But the Siren thinks even trying to order the newly fashionable Charlotte back into this offense to the human eyesight is as evil as it gets. Have you ever seen anything to equal this horror? The hem that hits just the right spot to get that redwood-forest effect every woman wants for her legs. The neckline that rests at her throat only because the climb to the earlobes got too exhausting. The lace at the collar, probably thrown there by Gladys in one of her temper fits. The way the dress droops away from the body, yet clings enough to say, "There is a whole world of lumpy oatmeal under here and brother, you want no part of it." It's a goddamn triumph of costuming. Kim Morgan recently said every woman should have Claude Rains as her psychiatrist, and ain't that the truth--but Dr. Jaquith's one mistake is waiting to talk to Charlotte before they leave together for his cozy sanitorium. The second she entered wearing that monstrosity, he should have said, "Right, we're outta here."

2. Jean Seberg in Breathless (N/A)

Michel: How old are you?
Patricia: A hundred.
Michel: You don't look it.

Throw a rock down any street in America and you will hit a woman wearing tight pants and a t-shirt. And not one of them, no matter how beautiful, will look one infinitesimal fraction as dangerous as Jean Seberg does in Breathless. Seberg wears this getup because it's her job to wear it, but when Godard's camera catches her calling "New York Herald Tribune," you see a warning sign that Belmondo does not. It's more than her beauty. It's the way she walks, not just casual in her clothes, but careless. Another down-market outfit, another wasteful American in Paris, ready to toss things aside for who knows what reason.

3. Audrey Hepburn's suit in Sabrina (screen credit, Edith Head; actual design, Hubert de Givenchy.)

You needn't pick me up at the airport. I'll just take the Long Island Rail Road and you can meet me at the train...If you should have any difficulty recognizing your daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.

Over at Glenn's place there is a discussion under way about the old saw that Jaws and/or Star Wars "killed the movies." The Siren remarked that the movies were neither dead, nor dying, nor even feeling a bit faint. Here she adds that this kind of chic, however, is deader than vaudeville. Just imagine showing up at the fetid underground bunker that is modern-day Penn Station wearing that suit. You'd get fewer stares wearing a sandwich board. The suit isn't the movie's most famous costume; that's the Sabrina dress, a version of which the Siren has in her own vintage-clothing collection. But this moment, as Wilder's camera gloats over Hepburn from the top of her hat to the little dog at her feet, is one of the most thrilling in the history of film fashion. Sabrina, the lovelorn chaffeur's daughter, has learned poise and confidence, the essential elements of style. Even the least observant visitor to Paris sees that a fashionable Frenchwoman wears chic clothing because she IS self-assured, not because she WANTS to be. This, this is what Paris and a genius designer can do for you!

4. Jean Harlow in China Seas (Adrian)

During my earliest days at Metro, I was put into movies with Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, and I was always taking their men away from them. Temporarily. It was ludicrous. There would be Jean, all alabaster skin and cleft chin, savory as a ripe peach, and I'd be saying disdainfully (and usually with an English accent, I played a lot of Lady Mary roles) to Gable or Bob Montgomery, "How can you spend time with her? She's rahther vulgar, isn't she?"
--Rosalind Russell, Life Is a Banquet

The Siren would love to tell you this little number is a turning point in China Seas, Tay Garnett's lovable strumpet-on-the-high-seas melodrama from 1935. It isn't, although Harlow wears it in a drinking scene with thoroughgoing louse Wallace Beery, and the jeweled straps do suggest a trap. The neckline is almost modest--right up near the collarbone--as long as you ignore Harlow's obvious lack of underwear and those strips of fabric making an oh-so-scalable ladder down the pure-white arms. Russell was right; it is unlikely Gable would even realize there were other women on the ship.


5. Mary Astor & Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth (Omar Kiam)

Edith: My dear...don't.

The British gave us the cruel expression "mutton dressed as lamb," but it's Americans who gave us its best illustration, in Dodsworth. Poor Ruth Chatterton. Her character may turn out to be a harpy, but here the Siren aches for her. That hairpiece, ridiculous on anyone who's out of the schoolroom, hellishly combined with the ill-judged white fabric and the simpering black-velvet bow at the too-low neckline. And, to complete the picture of humiliation, there's Mary Astor, a piece of carved ivory in a perfectly draped evening gown, necklace nestled in a neckline that's even lower than Chatterton's--yet somehow not the slightest bit vulgar. The scene is one of the most poignant in the movie, as Dan Callahan writes so well here, but the costumes take the contrast even further.

6. Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Robert Kalloch & Edward Stevenson)

General Yen: I'm going to convert a missionary.

From the second she dons a spectacular Chinese robe, every aspect of Stanwyck's movement changes. Her arms float away from her body, she takes longer strides around the room, she suddenly seems conscious of having breasts and hips under the fabric. And you sense, too, that the lack of underpinnings makes her feel just that much more vulnerable to the General, even though she is technically as covered up as she was in her missionary garb.

7. Kay Francis in Mandalay (Orry-Kelly)

They call her Spot White. It should be Spot Cash.

Like Harlow's China Seas dress, this one wins for sheer wow factor. Kay Francis, betrayed by the man she loves, winds up as the top earner in a Burmese whorehouse, and shows she won't let the bastard get her down by strutting down a staircase wearing this. She makes that piece of liquid silver seem worth a crash course in male perfidy.

8. Myrna Loy in The Thin Man (Dolly Tree, wardrobe)

Nick: Have you a nice evening gown?
Nora: What's that got to do with it?
Nick: Have you got a nice evening gown?
Nora: Yes, I've got a lulu. Why?
Nick: I'm going to give a party and invite all the suspects.
Nora: The suspects? They won't come.
Nick: Yes, they will.

The Siren can't remember whether the above-referenced "lulu" is the famous one in the above picture, or the halter-necked black gown Loy wears in the last scenes of the movie. No matter; every good husband who asks a question like that should be rewarded by the sight of his wife wearing something like this, even if nobody ever does show. Maybe especially if no one shows.


9. Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Helen Rose, costume and wardrobe department)

Maggie: You've got a nice smell about you. Is your bath water cool?
Brick: No.
Maggie: I know somethin' that would make you feel cool and fresh. Alcohol rub. Cologne.
Brick: No thanks. We'd smell alike. Like a couple of cats in the heat.

In New York City this past week it has been, as Auntie Mame would say, "hot as a crotch." So of course the Siren had to give a nod to Elizabeth Taylor, who set the standard for riding out a heat wave without air conditioning by donning a slip and trying to seduce Paul Newman. The Siren once had the pleasure of relating Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's censorship history to a confused Argentine male who had just watched it and could not get over, indeed seemed personally offended by, Newman's failure to respond to Taylor's come-on: "It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. There's Elizabeth Taylor! and she's wearing that slip! Thank god you explained this..."

10. Kasey Rogers in Strangers on a Train (Leah Rhodes, wardrobe)

Senator Morton: Poor unfortunate girl.
Barbara Morton: She was a tramp.
Senator Morton: She was a human being. Let me remind you that even the most unworthy of us has a right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
Barbara Morton: From what I hear she pursued it in all directions.

Alfred Hitchcock's attention to what his actresses wore gets a lot of press, usually for Rear Window and Vertigo. Here's one that deserves more discussion. Every time the Siren sees this magnificent movie, she's struck again by the brilliance of Miriam's look, how it represents a summit of Hitchcock's oft-stated preference for buttoned-up women. We've already been told about this mantrap who's cuckolding handsome Farley Granger, and we're expecting maybe Linda Darnell. Instead we get a four-eyed tootsie wearing a simple print dress with cap sleeves and a daintily pointed collar, not nearly as tight, body-conscious or as low-cut as you could go in 1951. Miriam probably wore it because it was vaguely pretty and would be easy to clean if she got popcorn butter on it. And the glasses--the Siren can't be the only one mesmerized by Miriam's eyeglasses. Mind you, the glasses are vital to the plot, but Kasey Rogers wields them the way Dietrich wielded a cigarette. This is an everyday black widow we're dealing with, says that costume, the sort of woman who would show up to a backyard pool party in a full-coverage one-piece and a sarong and, given five minutes' opportunity, would still wind up behind the rhododendrons pulling the swimming trunks off the hostess' husband.

There's an awful of lot of sex in this post, isn't there? There are advantages to this whole fashion-blogger gig...

"Something about the sound of my own voice fascinates me."

Last Wednesday the Siren went to the Grassroots Tavern, which she had not done in many a year, to record a podcast with John Lichman of Film Threat, Vadim Rizov of Indie Eye, and Dan Sallitt of Thanks for the Use of the Hall. It was a loose-limbed affair touching on many subjects, including fashions in directors, Kurosawa and Wilder, “Une Certain Tendance du Cinema Français,” Avatar and James Cameron, how to maintain civility on the Web, and a little bit of Anthony Mann. The Siren observed that the wine has improved somewhat since she frequented the place, although not all that much.

You can access the chatter at The House Next Door.

Anecdote of the Week: "Oh God, This Is a Dirty Picture"

The Siren has no particular reason for posting this anecdote, other than the way it consistently cracks her up. It concerns Samuel Goldwyn, whose fate it was to figure prominently in many anecdotes that simply never happened. His occasionally fractured English was irresistible to Hollywood wags, and eventually publicity folks just started making stuff up. This story, however, is from A. Scott Berg's excellent biography of the mogul.

Sexual liberation in the sixties turned the motion picture screen into an orgiastic playground, and most of Hollywood's latest product turned Goldwyn off. His private screening of Blow-Up in 1966 was going just fine until the scene in which David Hemmings cavorts with a couple of young girls. "Oh God," Goldwyn cried out, calling a stop to the screening; "this is a goddamned dirty picture!" Not long after that, Goldwyn complained to Billy Wilder that he had seen an even more disgusting disply--Hello, Dolly! Wilder was puzzled--not only because he could not imagine anything scurrilous in that harmless musical but also because Darryl Zanuck had not released it yet. Goldwyn insisted he knew what he saw, and it was one of the filthiest pictures he had ever seen. Wilder asked him to recite the plot. "Sam," he interrupted upon hearing about the drug-taking and sex lives of three aspiring actresses, "I think you're referring to Valley of the Dolls." "That's just what I said," Goldwyn insisted. "Valley of the Hello Dollies."

As the Siren flips to the notes of Berg's books she sees that the source for this bit of utter hilarity is Billy Wilder himself, which may, may mind you make it a teensy bit suspect. Like John McElwee the Siren has never bought the old story of Wilder telling L.B. Mayer--Mayer!--"go fuck yourself" after the first screening of Sunset Boulevard.

But it's a great story, isn't it?

The Siren will be mostly off-line today but she invites you to catch up with the following, as she has been.

Speaking of old dark houses: Six Martinis and the Seventh Art brings you The Bat Whispers.


Film in Focus's Behind the Blog interviews fine film writer and all-around good guy Peter Nelhaus, one of the Siren's first friends in the blogosphere.



The Siren has been tracking Gareth's Watching Movies in Africa project and finally read his entry on Captain Blood, a feast for any admirer of red-blooded 1930s screen manhood.

Gloria uses a splendid photo of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester as a jumping-off point for...well, go read it, I won't spoil it. And Elsa looks quite pretty.

Brian at Bubblegum Aestheticswrites a lengthy and utterly absorbing post on the intertwined, but not-so-parallel lives of two film legends who shared a birthday.

Raquelle at Out of the Past is writing up a storm about TCM's Latino Images in Film (did anyone else catch the original And Now Miguel? lovely film), and she endeared herself to the Siren no end by putting in a good word for George Stevens' great widescreen epic Giant. On a related note, last month Allure ran a post full of scans from Latin American movie magazines.

Another way to get on the Siren's good side: praise Charlie Chaplin.

This also goes back to March, but the Siren has to point out Greenbriar Picture Shows' beautiful elegy for Wallace Reid.

Not classic-era, but kudos anyway: Stinky Lulu issues a defense (albeit somewhat qualified) of Marisa Tomei's unjustly maligned Oscar-winning turn in My Cousin Vinny. Why does everyone complain, year after year, that the Academy snubs comedy, and then pitch a hissy fit when an extremely funny performance wins over actresses doing Important Drama? Yeah, Miranda Richardson was great in Damage. The movie was a mess, and the Siren says this as a longtime Louis Malle lover. The Siren's own pick that year would have been Judy Davis for Husbands and Wives, but all the same, if you fired up Vinny on the DVD player right now, the Siren would happily watch just for the part where Mona Lisa Vito gets out of the car and says, "I bet this place has lousy Chinese food." As an Alabama native, the Siren has to tell you truer words are seldom spoken on screen.