In Memoriam: Juanita Moore, 1914-2014

The clip above is from a so-called soundie, made in 1943 to promote The Mills Brothers’ hit “Paper Doll.” The woman in the lap of the Mills Brother on the far left, best visible at about the one-minute mark, is Juanita Moore. She was 29 years old, and this was the first piece of film that ever captured her. She died Jan. 31, 2014, age 99.

With the exception of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, Moore’s obituaries have been a bit light on biographical material, focusing on her Best Supporting Actress nomination for Douglas Sirk's 1959 Imitation of Life. It's the story of two single mothers, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) and Annie Johnson (Moore) and their daughters. Lora becomes a successful actress as her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) becomes increasingly lonely. Annie's light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane is determined to "pass" for white; Sarah Jane is played by Susan Kohner, who is now the only one of the film’s central quartet still living. The AP, which has offended in the past, added another to the files with the words chosen to describe this women's picture, widely considered a landmark in the treatment of race on the American screen. “Weeper” — “tearjerker” — the Siren will believe that these descriptions are not evidence of condescending sexism when they are commonly applied to something like Spartacus or The Shawshank Redemption, and not until.

So with facts gleaned primarily from Sam Staggs’ Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life, the Siren would like to fill you in on some of Moore’s life outside her one Oscar-nominated triumph. Anyone who reveres Moore, or this film, needs Staggs' book, which is a monument to loving, obsessive completism. It encompasses everything, from costumer Jean Louis to a detailed view of John Stahl’s 1934 version of Fannie Hurst’s novel, even an interview with the anonymous ghostwriter of Lana Turner’s autobiography. Staggs apparently knew Moore well, and she told him a lot about her background, her friends, her times.

Moore was born in Mississippi, the youngest in a family of seven girls and one boy. Her parents moved when she was a toddler to South Central Los Angeles, where they were able to make a good middle-class living from, among other things, running a laundry. At age 15 Moore came down with polio, and she said later that the doctors of the time were not much interested in treating a black girl. Her mother and sisters massaged her legs with olive oil, and she slowly recovered.

She could sing, and she could dance, and at least one teacher planted the idea that Juanita could grow into an entertainer. She attended performances by the Lafayette Players, a pioneering black theatre ensemble, thrilling to shows such as Madame X and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was foreshadowing; throughout her life, with one exception, Moore got stronger, bigger roles with African American theater groups than she ever did in Hollywood.

Moore’s parents were religious, and afraid of the lowdown influences of a life in the theater. She ditched a short stint at college and made her way to Harlem, where she wouldn’t have to worry that Mr. and Mrs. Moore were worrying. Soon Moore was in the chorus line at Small’s Paradise, a “black and tan” Harlem club, meaning that while the audience was mostly white, blacks attended and mingled freely.

Moore married dancer Ananias “Nyas” Berry of the Berry brothers, an act that was one of the few rivals to Harold and Fayard Nicholas in terms of grace and acrobatics. (Here they perform “You’ll Never Know” in Lady Be Good; here they introduce Eleanor Powell in Fascinating Rhythm; Nyas is profiled here, and his own story is quite a saga.)

Ella Fitzgerald became a friend, and Moore had run-ins with Ethel Waters. Juanita Moore was notably polite about almost anyone she ever worked with, but Waters she invariably described as “the bitch of all time” — a phrase she once used, Staggs says, in front of a preacher, who spent the rest of the evening snickering about it.

Moore danced at the Zanzibar, atop the Winter Garden on Broadway. The Berry Brothers performed at the West 48th St. location of the segregated Cotton Club. At first the owners would not let Moore sit in the audience and watch her husband dance. Eventually they consented to let her sit at a remote table, by herself. In Imitation of Life, Juanita Moore’s Annie trawls nightclubs in search of her daughter Sarah Jane. In every place, Annie is seated in Siberia, lest she contaminate the white patrons' tables. As Staggs notes, Moore needed no advice on how to play the way that felt.

As the craze for nightclub entertainment waned, Moore went back to Los Angeles and began to get parts in movies. Small parts. Maid parts. She had a relatively substantial part in Affair in Trinidad, and spoke kindly about Glenn Ford and how hard he worked to make her feel comfortable in that Rita Hayworth vehicle. Director Vincent Sherman, in his autobiography, reminisced about “Juanita Hall” — another black actress, most famous for playing Bloody Mary in South Pacific.

Moore was cast in Band of Angels as a slave owner’s mistress; while Yvonne De Carlo played a plantation owner's daughter who’s sold into slavery after his death, because her mother was a black slave. Despite Raoul Walsh at the helm it’s a tedious picture. Moore had to sashay into one scene wearing a Creole getup, and Walsh told her to whisper bawdy stories in De Carlo’s ear. The result was one moment in the film that doesn't feel strained or silly.

Meanwhile, Moore also became involved with the Ebony Showcase Theatre. It was founded by actor Nick Stewart, who took his profits from playing Lightnin’ on the Amos ‘n Andy show, and used them to build his dream of a dedicated, artistic black acting troupe. For the Ebony, Moore played Ines in Sartre’s No Exit, and other roles over the years. Later she became a founding member of the Cambridge Players.

Her marriage to Berry had ended with his death in 1951. One day Moore was crossing the street, and a bus nearly hit her. The bus driver poked his head out to yell, “You better watch your step, young lady!,” and Moore yelled back at him, “You crazy-ass bus driver, what are you trying to do, kill me?”

They were married the next year and stayed together until Charles Burris died in 2001.

Moore took a job as a waitress at a chicken restaurant to make ends meet. One of her regulars was Marlon Brando; he accompanied her to classes at the Actors Laboratory Theatre, where after an all-night shift she once fell asleep and snored so loudly than Elia Kazan yelled “What the hell is that?” Kazan already knew her, from the part she had played in 1949’s Pinky, a story where yet another white actress — Jeanne Crain — played a tragic mulatto. It was something of a motif in Juanita Moore’s career, white actresses playing mixed-race parts, and Moore making a bit role memorable, this time as a nurse.



If you want to hear Juanita Moore sing, watch the clip above, from Women’s Prison in 1955, in which she sounds wonderful while she’s down on her knees, scrubbing the prison floor.

If you want to see Juanita Moore dance, watch Frank Tashlin’s 1956 The Girl Can’t Help It, here, bookmarked just past the 53-minute mark, when she, Tom Ewell and Jayne Mansfield are watching Eddie Cochran on TV. Moore starts dancing, and it’s delightful, and over way too soon, because the film was about Ewell and Mansfield. Moore was playing the maid. (The adorable screen cap above is from Peter Nelhaus' post about the film, which the Tashlin-skeptical Siren admits is quite a bit better than she remembered.)

The Siren well remembers Moore’s bit in Something of Value, a 1957 film about the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya, where Moore plays a woman who’s beaten until she admits helping the rebels. She was not, on this occasion, anybody’s maid.

Moore was about 45 when Imitation of Life was released (her birth date is a bit fuzzy) and given Hollywood’s unforgiving attitude about women who dare to get older, the film was unlikely to bring her over-the-title stardom in any case. But for a white actor, a performance such as that would surely have brought steady, substantive character work. It worked that way for Thelma Ritter, 45 years old, after one scene in Miracle on 34th Street. It didn’t happen for Moore. Her movie roles after her Oscar nomination were mostly minor, although they did include what’s reportedly a good turn in The Singing Nun (the Siren has never made it through that one). In the theater, she played A Raisin in the Sun in London, and Sister Boxer in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner on Broadway in 1965. In 1970, Moore played an Annie-esque part in the Mexican production Angelitos Negros, based on a film that may or may not have been a direct spin on the original 1934 Imitation of Life (it's complicated). She spoke the lines in Spanish as much as possible, even though she knew she'd be dubbed.

In the 1970s she made movies like Jules Dassin’s Uptight, and The Mack with Richard Pryor. Still later, a generation that had grown up with Sirk’s movie on TV cast Moore in other roles in films and on TV. She told Staggs of how, on the first day of shooting Paternity, Burt Reynolds took her around the set pointedly introducing her as “Miss Moore. Miss Juanita Moore.” In other words, this is a legend, mind your manners. Moore was deeply touched.

Black folks - like other folks who have felt ignored, underrepresented or stereotyped - have always rooted for the blacks we could find in celluloid. I remember how a showing on TV in the mid-'60s of that 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life ripped like a tornado through our emotions in Conyers, Ga. I couldn't have been older than 12. This melodrama, starring Lana Turner to some but Juanita Moore to us, was about a saintly black woman who worked herself to death for a daughter who chose to pass for white.
-E.R. Shipp, Daily News, 2002

When Richard Pryor was in the army in Germany, according to a 1999 New Yorker profile, he went to a screening of Imitation of Life, and a white soldier laughed loudly at the Annie and Sarah Jane scenes. Pryor and some other black soldiers beat him up. The incident landed Pryor in jail.

It is that kind of movie. Once seen under the right circumstances, it inspires a devotion that will brook no argument. We may disagree about certain elements, about whether the term “camp” applies to elements of the “blonde” storyline, for example. Staggs says yes; the Siren says no, and has written before about the importance of Lana Turner and Sandra Dee’s work. But no fan of this film has any reservations about Moore.

When the Siren first saw Imitation of Life, sometime in her early teens, she was swept away by the unutterable sadness of Annie Johnson, who begins as Lora Meredith’s compatriot in single motherdom, and ends as Lora’s maid. A beloved and respected maid, but a maid nonetheless. All the while Annie adores and tries to protect Sarah Jane, who yearns to escape what she sees as a prison of blackness, and is willing to deny her mother repeatedly to do it. When Sarah Jane is still a little girl played by Karin Dicker, she is caught for the first time passing for white at school. When they return to the apartment, the little girl storms off saying no one is her friend. Lora says, “Don’t worry Annie. I’m sure you’ll be able to explain things to her.” Annie responds, “I don’t know. How do you explain to your child, she was born to be hurt?”

Down the years you develop a relationship with a film you love, and so it has been with the Siren. That line of Moore’s is a killer even on first viewing. But the last time she saw the movie, the Siren was also struck by Moore’s delivery, as she stares after her daughter and seems to speak almost without thinking. There’s an undertone of resignation, a sense that Annie knows she’s telling the truth to someone who does not and can not understand what she means.

Moore’s performance has layers upon layers, right from the great opening, when Sarah Jane and Lora’s daughter Susie are playing on the beach, Lora mistakes Sarah Jane for Annie’s charge, and Annie corrects her: “Yes, ma'am. It surprises most people. Sarah Jane favors her daddy. He was practically white. He left before she was born.” Again, watch Moore’s face as she says that. Annie’s deeply religious, but in the sly light in her eyes is the idea that Sarah Jane’s father was a handsome man, that this was a torrid relationship and Annie remembers that pleasure even now that he’s left her. This is a vibrant, fully sexual woman, though we never see anyone in the picture treat her that way. The closest anyone comes is when Sandra Dee’s Susie asks Annie about “boys. What do you think about kissing, Annie?” Annie responds with “Well, there’s kissing, and there’s kissing,” and again we see the remembrance of love move across her features.

There are many instances where Sirk’s camera, and Moore’s performance, clue us in to the fact that Annie has large parts of her existence that are out of camera range, and thus well away from the white characters and us, the audience. She tries to convince Sarah Jane to go to a church social, telling her that there are plenty of nice boys there, and Sarah Jane snaps back, “Busboys, cooks, chaffeurs.” Annie's hurt tells you that her daughter is rejecting the place that her life revolves around; a black church, full of people she loves, where Annie is herself in a way that she isn’t in the Meredith house.

The final proof of that comes in Annie’s deathbed scene. A heartbroken Lora says to the woman who’s shared her life, “It never occurred to me that you had friends.” And Annie responds, without a trace of rancor, “You never asked.” In that single line reside generations of “the help” who kept their most important selves apart from their employers.

Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, and his other great movies, tell us that when people are forced, against their character and inclination, into prefab roles that society has made for them, the result is agony. Juanita Moore’s career was shaped by forces that had nothing to do with her talent. She had a personality that struck people as nothing much like Annie’s. Staggs says Moore was “a real live wire,” with flashes of anger as well as salty humor. Moore told Staggs she had based Annie on one of her sisters, a devout woman who was the embodiment of Christian goodness.

Yet Annie, despite her suffering, is not passive; warmth and kindness are active choices, all the more so when made under harsh circumstances. Juanita Moore, who left behind friends, family, and millions of admirers, had more of Annie in her than she acknowledged.

(Corrected 3/25/14 for date of death and an error regarding whether Moore had children; she did not.)

Watching Movies With My Mother

(The scene: The Siren's living room, kids and Mr. C in bed. We just finished watching There's Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956)--we both loved it, of course.)

Me: I've seen Vinnie before. (William Reynolds, who plays Fred MacMurray's square-jawed, glowering son.) He reminds me of a lot of those '50s teen actors, like Troy Donahue and...

Mom: Tab Hunter.

Me: Him too. They all played similar types, good-looking...

Mom: Upright...

Me: It makes me appreciate Rock Hudson, he was different.

Mom: Oh yes, he broke the mold. (Pause) Of course, at the time we didn't know which mold he was breaking.

(Grateful hat-tip to Girish Shambu, who also watches Barbara Stanwyck movies with his mother, and who sent me the DVD. Other thoughts on There's Always Tomorrow may be found at Glenn Kenny's place.)

Imitation of a Takedown

When it comes to Internet squabbles, the Siren has been on the wagon for a while, give or take an occasional flare-up.

And then she comes across something like this, where the inimitable Jeffrey Wells does a "respectful takedown" of Douglas Sirk using, of all things, the director's masterpiece, Imitation of Life.

Now the proper thing to do is make like Clark Gable as Rhett Butler: "I apologize again for my shortcomings" — and for being a "film dweeb" who appreciates Douglas Sirk.

Then again, screw propriety, when someone is waving a fire-engine-red cape like this in my face.

Sirk is generally regarded as a pantheon-level guy because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism and conservative suburban milieus in his films are all of an operatic pitch-perfect piece and are meant as ironic social criticism. (Or something like that.)...

Now why, I wonder, have people been doing that? Just to irritate Wells? Come on Glenn, fess up. You too, Filmbrain.

Wells illustrates his post with a scene from Imitation of Life. Trouble is, the scene is enthralling, and it isn't even a high point of the movie. It's a relatively simple sequence wherein ultra-blonde Susie (Sandra Dee) finds out that mixed-race Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) is seeing a white boy in the town.

Wells says this is bad acting. The Siren raises the point, once again, that there are different styles of acting that are appropriate to different movies. Sirk films work with artificiality; they show how people play roles. Kohner is just beginning to grasp the power of her beauty. Watch her take off her shirtwaist almost like the stripper she will later become, turning to give Dee a good look and sashaying over to the bed as if to say, "I'm better-looking than you, white girl, and I always have been." See the flick of hatred, rising up and quickly suppressed, as Sarah Jane looks at her privileged friend. And look at Susie's clueless reaction to Sarah Jane's secret, the hasty way she tries to cover up her gaffe about the "colored boy," the platitudes she mouths while knowing on some level that Sarah Jane has a point. There's nothing wrong with the acting; it isn't naturalistic, and nor should it be. It's perfectly in keeping with the style and themes of the movie.

And the visuals — how in the name of Lana Turner's hair dye can anyone who loves movies not love the visuals? The angle through the railings as Dee knocks on Kohner's door. The shot through the window of Kohner hiding from her mother. Kohner taking off her dress. The impeccable framing. The way the conversation is blocked, the camera moving at just the right moments and the two girls positioned in just the right way to convey their relationship.

Mr. Wells flatters himself when he styles this as a takedown. Rather, it is the lament of a schoolboy — a dweeb, if you will — forced to watch icky girl stuff, rather than the manly men doing manly things in manly ways who form the proper study of all serious critics. Sirk's subject matter, it seems, is a large part of the rap against him:

Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the '50s and early '60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances.

Four assumptions lurk here. One, that contemporary critics are a good yardstick by which to measure a film's worth. Because if you want to know how time is gonna judge a director, the first place to look is Bosley Crowther.

Second, that the sufferings of tidy, proper women are somehow a lousy subject for a filmmaker. Surely this argument was put out of its misery by Virginia Woolf all the way back in 1929.

Three, that "visually lush" is a negligible quality. The Siren has nothing to say to that; it's on the level of the Emperor Joseph II complaining to Mozart about "too many notes."

Four, that there is nothing below the visually lush surface of a Sirk film. That is the shakiest assertion by far.

You see, when we film snobs have the secret clubhouse meetings, during which we plot ways to force people to watch movies about boring girls and their poky old mothers, we come armed with the words of Douglas Sirk, who gave some long interviews late in life after he went blind, a fate he bore patiently. And in those interviews he shows, repeatedly, that he knew precisely what he was doing:

The stories that I got were, without exception, very trite, without any element of life to them. But still the content of the trite novel could be vivified--you could wake it up--you could put something into it.

It isn't particularly difficult to grasp what is going on in a Sirk movie. Just because there is depth to the movie doesn't mean you need the secret decoder ring they hand out in film studies to find it. In fact, the Siren could introduce Mr. Wells to a whole flock of people who get teary over this movie; it still plays to the emotions, if you watch it with an open mind. Imitation of Life is a shattering statement on American attitudes about race, about working women and their relationships with their children, about how children and mothers are often fated to bring one another agony. It's all right there on screen. You just have to get past the fact that the movie is done in a style that has disappeared — much to our loss, I'd say.

As the Siren has always said, the only rule at her own place is "No dissing Citizen Kane." Some of her commenters dislike Sirk. And (here the Siren adopts her Stuart Smalley voice) that's okay. But please, Mr. Wells, don't try to make your case by pretending a filmmaker was all surface, when even a cursory glance at the films and the words of the filmmaker shows otherwise. Most of all, please don't insult those of us who do like him.

For the Love of Film: The Lineup Grows (UPDATED)

Update: The number of bloggers pitching in to help raise money just keeps growing and growing; look below for the latest. Roger Ebert, for forty years one of this country's most visible, honored and well-loved critics, has alerted his many Twitter followers to the blogathon. Anyone who has read Ebert's columns or books or watched his television show knows he has spent his career urging people to watch great films from every era, and his support for us means a great deal.

It's time to remind our contributors of the rules of the blogathon. They are few, but important:

1. Post on any topic related to film preservation, at any time during the week of Feb. 14 through Feb. 21.

2. Include the donation link for the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support. The link is right here:

https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=1001883&code=Blogathon

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

3. Send your link to Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films (http://www.ferdyonfilms.com) and to me here(http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/). We will be keeping track of the submissions and linking to them on our respective blogs.

4. Follow the links here and at Marilyn's site to read the contributions of your felllow writers; remember too that nothing gladdens a blogger's heart like a nice comment.

And, most important of all,

5. DONATE GENEROUSLY to the NFPF, and urge your readers to do the same. Film preservation is an expensive process, and our aim is to raise as much money as possible to support the NFPF's work.

In about one week forty-eight hours, on Sunday Feb. 14, the Film Preservation Blogathon, For the Love of Film, will be upon us. The Facebook page is being continually updated so please, keep checking things out. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Marilyn Ferdinand of the most excellent Ferdy on Film and Stylin' Greg Ferrara of Cinema Styles, we have 642 766 fans and more than twenty thirty forty fifty bloggers who have committed to posting something that week.

The fine folks at the National Film Preservation Foundation have really gotten into the spirit, lending us photos and clips from films that their efforts have saved. Do have a look.

Because of course, the important part is to contribute to the NFPF. If everyone who visits these blogs the week of February 14th kicks something, anything, into the kitty, we could be responsible for saving even more films. And wouldn't that be much, much better than the usual run of sad bonbons and wilted bouquets this time of year?

Like I told Marilyn...


This Valentine's Day, Give Her What She Really Wants: Nitrate.

The lineup so far, in addition to Marilyn, Greg and me, includes:

Peter Nelhaus of Coffee Coffee Coffee and More Coffee will review The Penalty, starring Lon Chaney.

Dwight Swanson of Home and Amateur will blog about the restoration of Think of Me First as a Person.

Louie Despres at El Brendel will be writing about El's Mr. Lemon of Orange.

Bucky Grimm will be coming out of blogging semi-retirement at "Mindless Meanderings"

Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder will be blogging about the 1922 Sherlock Holmes.

Justin Muschong of Brilliant in Context

David Cairns of Shadowplay

Operator 99 of Allure will look at the films listed in a 1931 edition of Photoplay and tally the survivors and the lost.

MaryAnn Johansen of Flick Filosopher will review Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver.

Lou Lumenick of the New York Post will be writing about To the Last Man and how it fell into public-domain hell.

Glenn Kenny of Some Came Running

Kendra of Viv and Larry

Vince of Carole & Co.

Ryan Kelly of Medfly Quarantine

Ivan G. Shreve of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear will be pulling out the stops with at least two pieces, one on Fred Allen's IT'S IN THE BAG! (1945) and UCLA's restoration of its "alternate" version and the other I've titled "The Singular Case of the Magazine Magnate," which will discuss Hugh Hefner's role in funding the restoration of some of the Universal Sherlock Holmes films.

Jacqueline T. Lynch of Another Old Movie Blog plans to write on Vertigo.

Flickhead knows how to make the Siren happy; he's writing about nitrate.

JC Loophole (still one of my favorite noms de blog--a W.C. Fields ref?) of The Shelf plans a post called "Restoring Film, Preserving Art and Curating Culture."

Rob Gonsalves of Rob's Movie Vault will be blogging about the documentary The Race to Save 100 Years.

Director Jeffrey Campbell of The Last Lullaby (and) Peril

The one and only David Ehrenstein of FaBlog will post about Max Reinhardt's great filming of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Meredith of Or Maybe Eisenstein Should Just Relax will write on The Red Shoes.

Brian of Stinky Lulu will be writing about Who Killed Teddy Bear?

Filmmaker Max Sacker will be contributing from Berlin.

Tom K. of Motion Picture Gems will be writing about the message in Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon.

Donna at Strictly Vintage Hollywood will be posting on Valentino's lost film Uncharted Seas and a second post to be announced.

Michael Guillen of The Evening Class has tentative plans to write on the Lola Montes restoration (and as far as the Siren is concerned, every blogathon needs some Ophuls) and indices to San Francisco's Noir City and Silent Film Festivals.

Catherine Grant of Film Studies for Free plans to post a set of links to online material about film restoration, preservation and archiving.

Arthur S. of This Pig's Alley plans to post on two neglected Raoul Walsh films, including Me and My Gal.

Plum of Don't Be a Plum plans to post.

Anne Richardson of Oregon Movies A to Z will be interviewing Dennis Nyback about his nitrate stories, as a projectionist.

Gareth of Gareth's Movie Diary plans to write about a vital component of preservation: access to what's preserved.

Brent Walker of the fine Mack Sennett Blog is on board.

Bill Ryan of The Kind of Face You Hate plans to post.

Sarah Baker, author of "Lucky Stars: Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell," will blog about Charlie and Janet's rediscovered films such as The River (1928) and Lucky Star (1929), as well as about helping to release Olive Thomas' 1920 film, The Flapper to DVD; she will post at Flapper Jane.

Paula of Paula's Movie Page, a collection of great movie pics at Shutterfly, is already showing us some link love.

M.K. Rath of Ehmkay is planning a post on preservation's relevance for young people.

The King of Noir, Steve-O, will post about noir and preservation at Noir of the Week.

Gordon Dymoski of Blog This Pal has "a slightly more pop-culture oriented post in mind."

Tinky Weisblat will be writing about Iris Barry of MoMA and "including a recipe of some sort" at Our Grandma's Kitchen.

Betty Jo Tucker of ReelTalk Movie Reviews has publicized the blogathon and plans to participate with a post about the great Martin Scorsese's preservation efforts.

Elizabeth Hansen of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image has pledged to promote the blogathon.

Joe Thompson of The Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion is posting on "Why Do We Need to Preserve Films? A Brief History of Nitrate."

Buttermilk Sky gladdens the Siren's heart by pledging to write about the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business.

Eddie Muller of The Film Noir Foundation, another excellent nonprofit film-preservation outfit, will be contributing an article.

Melissa Dollman, audiovisual cataloguer at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, will be contributing at her Highlights from the Archive Blog.

Adam Zanzie of Icebox Movies will be posting.

Maggie of Silver Screen Dream will post about some favorite movies that need attention, like Love Affair (the Siren loves that one, too) as well as future solutions to classic film distribution.

Dennis Cozzalio of the must-read Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule will be joing us.

Hind Mezaina will be posting from Dubai on her blog The Culturist.

Trisha Lendo and her fellow students in the moving-image archive program at UCLA will be posting from their group blog.

Jenny the Nipper will be posting on CinemaOCD--about "DIY Preservation." (!! Do we have to wear gloves?)

Erik Loomis of Alterdestiny is getting into the spirit in a big, ambitious way, by reviewing one of the NFPF-preserved films each night for seven nights.

Librarian Leo Lo plans to post about the role of libraries in preservation.

Kenji Fujishima of My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second, will post about the greatest of all silent movies (sez me), The Crowd.

Want a reminder of what's at stake? Here's Marilyn's piece on a film badly in need of restoration, from one of the Siren's most revered directors, Douglas Sirk. Michael Guillen of The Evening Class posted a while ago about the restoration of Bardelys the Magnificent from another Siren favorite, King Vidor.

And our banner this week is from another film with a checkered release history that left it in badly in need of restoration, which the magnificent Lola Montes has finally received.

If you need ideas on what to write about, check here on the Facebook Discussions page.

There is no obnoxious door policy at the For the Love of Film Blogathon; all are welcome and you may come as you are. There is no limit to the number of bloggers who can participate and you may post any time next week. Drop me or Marilyn a line at email or comments, or on the Facebook page, and you're in, and most welcome. If you alerted me to your participation, and I somehow haven't added you, prod me again, please. You don't have to know what you are writing about yet, the promise to post that week about restoration is more than enough.

Ten Melos the Siren Would Watch Instead of "Mad Men"

If sticking it out for two-and-a-half episodes of Season 1 and one episode this season can be called trying, the Siren has tried with "Mad Men". She sees the attraction, even if the hype blows her mind--everything from Banana Republic to Barron's, for heaven's sake. The Siren admires the cinematic qualities of the series, the fluid camerawork, the carefully angled shots, the flawless integration of sets and costumes. It's pretty. The actors are pretty. The period detail is enough to warm an old-movie hound's heart. But on the whole, the Siren just doesn't dig it.

Despite the stratospheric sex appeal of Jon Hamm, January Jones and Christina Hendricks, the show is just so goddamned dour. The Siren suspects series creator Matthew Weiner wanted to avoid the nostalgia trap, but this is too far in the other direction. A little soupçon of affection for the past will not turn Mr. Weiner's dead-serious critique into "The Wonder Years Meets Ad Age." The Siren has seen movies from the era, and in those movies, people have a good time--every now and then, you understand, between bouts of weltschmerz. As James Wolcott wrote in Vanity Fair, "Mad Men" "has a seductive look, a compelling mood, a cast that could have been carved from a giant bar of Ivory soap, but zero grasp of the elastic optimism and vigor of the Kennedy years, the let-go spring of release after the constriction of the Eisenhower 50s."

Everyone on "Mad Men" goes around smoking and drinking and eating whatever they hell they want and having office affairs without once looking over their lovers' shoulders for process servers bearing class-action subpoenas, but does anyone enjoy it? Not from what the Siren has seen. It's like Saint Augustine wrote the scripts. Such laughs as "Mad Men" affords are tethered to hindsight--"We never indulge in such sexism/racism/anti-Semitism/homophobia now, and even if we do, we sure don't smoke."

Still, the Siren will probably watch more this season--between Wolcott's liveblogging and Lance's occasional commentaries, she doesn't want to be the clueless playground oddball. But in her heart, she'd rather watch a melodrama from the actual late Eisenhower-early Kennedy era. Good or bad, there's plenty to choose from.

So that's my justification for posting these brief takes on ten films actually made during the "Mad Men" period--dramas, because "Mad Men" is not, god knows, a comedy or a musical. These movies vary widely in terms of quality and critical repute, from bona fide masterpieces to simple soapers. But the Siren likes them all, as she likes a lot of the melodramas from this period. Many directors were exploring widescreen technique to admirable effect, and it was a great era for clothes and interiors. And when you watch the movies, you realize that people were far more aware of what was under society's facade than many suppose. (Two of the movies date to 1959--if Don Draper can fade out to Bob Dylan in 1960 then the Siren can cheat back a single year, she figures.)



Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Social Issue: Racism.
Sets and Costumes: Perfection.
Sex appeal (Low/Medium/High): Beside the point. But John Gavin was in the full flower of his lockjaw handsomeness and Susan Kohner and Sandra Dee were lovely.
Why the Siren Likes It: It's a masterpiece, that's why, one that belongs on any list of the great films of the 1950s. A master class in how to make a movie about misguided, surface-focused people trapped by a hypocritical society, without condescending to or withholding compassion from them. The proof is that 50 years after its release, the thwarted mother-daughter love still reduces many to tears. The Siren bristles when she hears this described as camp. There isn't a single unintentional effect in it. The falseness and glitter are there to throw race, this country's original sin, into high relief. But Sirk doesn't invite the audience to feel superior. He wants recognition, AND he wants identification. In the superb opening scene on the beach, when Lana Turner reacts with gooey middle-class "understanding" to Juanita Moore's having a white-skinned daughter, Sirk didn't want the white liberals in the audience to say, "What a hypocrite." He wanted them to say, "Shit, that's me." (The beautiful screen cap is from Ways of Seeing, the Siren's new blog discovery; several others, equally enthralling, right here.)

The Best of Everything (Jean Negulesco, 1959)
Social Issues: Working women and adultery (go together like a horse and carriage in Hollywood movies of all eras), unwed pregnancy, abortion, casting couch, alcoholism.
Sets and Costumes: Great New York exteriors and the ultimate in smart little suits. Best of all, the Mondrian-esque office interiors, which Negulesco, a painter, probably influenced.
Sex appeal: High; Suzy Parker, Stephen Boyd, Louis Jourdan, even Robert Evans looks great.
Why the Siren Likes It: Underrated, influential film whose critical reputation is slowly improving. One of a number of "three [or four] girls" movies from the era, direct ancestors of "Sex and the City." Enjoyable on a number of different levels--as highly informative social artifact, as a proto-feminist tract, as an aesthetic treat, as a showcase for newcomers and old pros. The Siren particularly likes good old Brian Aherne as an ass-pinching executive and Joan Crawford, refusing to play her role as straight office harridan, giving her character both dignity and sensitivity. The beauteous Parker (up top) gets the best line: "Here's to men. Bless their clean-cut faces and their dirty little minds." The best appreciation of this film that the Siren has read is over at Noel Vera's place; he pays great attention to Negulesco's use of Cinemascope.

From the Terrace (Mark Robson, 1960)
Social Issues: Alcoholism, adultery, class snobbery, cutthroat business practices.
Sets and Costumes: High-end all the way. Joanne Woodward doesn't look completely at ease in Travilla, though.
Sex appeal: High. Paul Newman rates an automatic "high" in this category, as does Myrna Loy at any age.
Why the Siren Likes It: A parable about life versus work that everybody calls dated, except "Mad Men" apes the same themes. The Siren wrote a bit about this movie when Newman died; his performance is very good but the direction is noteworthy too, as is the Elmer Bernstein score.



All the Fine Young Cannibals (Michael Anderson, 1960)
Social Issues: Racism, alcoholism, class snobbery, adultery.
Sets and Costumes: Ersatz Southern, then faux bohemian, but extremely well-shot by William H. Daniels.
Sex appeal: Medium, largely because the Siren doesn't get Robert Wagner.
Why the Siren Likes It: Supposedly based on the life of Chet Baker. Jaggedly uneven and no one seems to have a clue about real white Southerners. But deserves to be remembered, if only for Pearl Bailey's haunting performance. For the Siren and those like her, there's also the nifty bit of role reversal for Susan Kohner, the "tragic mulatto" of Sirk's Imitation of Life, in the same movie as the penultimate role for Louise Beavers, of John Stahl's excellent 1934 Imitation of Life. (Poster is from the great Cinema Retro site.)


Return to Peyton Place (Jose Ferrer, 1961)
Social Issues: Working women (don't kid yourself, that's still an issue), rape, incest, adultery, (disguised) abortion, xenophobia.
Sets and Costumes: Meh. The exteriors look great, though.
Sex appeal: High; Eleanor Parker, Tuesday Weld, Carol Lynley, Jeff Chandler if you happen to like Jeff Chandler.
Why the Siren Likes It: Um...hard to say, since by no stretch of the imagination is it a good movie. This one the Siren won't kill you for calling camp. There really isn't anything else you could call it. The first Peyton Place is camp too, but had real value in Franz Waxman's score (heaven), Diane Varsi and the New England ambiance. Return, well, Ferrer was no director, they added lyrics and Rosemary Clooney when Waxman needed neither, and most of the cast looks about as comfortable as a soaking wet cat. But I appreciate Carol Lynley's pursuit of a career over and above a love affair (similar to the reason I liked Valley of the Dolls' fadeout). Mary Astor is great, playing a full-out embodiment of small-minded paranoia and ugliness. And Tuesday Weld manages to have emotional sincerity in some scenes despite playing opposite the stiffest excuse for a Swedish ski instructor you ever saw in your life.


Susan Slade (Delmer Daves, 1961)
Social Issues: Premarital sex, unwed motherhood, the hazards of cigarette smoking.
Sets and Costumes: Beautiful exteriors by master cinematographer Lucien Ballard, and the vaguely Japanese-style house on the Northern California coast, given to Connie Stevens's father by Brian Aherne (there he is again!) is quite an eyeful.
Sex appeal: Medium, though Connie Stevens (above) does her best.
Why the Siren Likes It: Interesting, Sirk-esque late-career movie by the talented Delmer Daves, with several scenes that have lost none of their ability to shock. Dave Kehr: "To an America that needed to believe that 'nice girls don’t,' Daves’s melodramas responded, 'Nice girls do' — or did at least sometimes, when the appropriate distinctions had been made between lust and love, predatory older males and sincere young men, casual encounters and lifetime commitments." Kehr prefers Parrish and Rome Adventure to Susan Slade and the Siren pretty much agrees with him, but Slade is worthwhile and closest to the "Mad Men" school of social history. Peter Nelhaus has a fine review of the movie, in which he compares it to Daves' westerns.


Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962)
Social Issues: Homophobia, subversion, government corruption.
Sets and Costumes: Stiff, cold and forbidding, perfectly in keeping with the machinations of the plot.
Sex appeal: Low. Gene Tierney is in this but she wasn't looking her best. Perhaps because he was making a movie about politicians, Preminger shot everyone with a GargoyleCam.
Why the Siren Likes It: Another masterpiece, a fisheyed look at the Washington influence game, usually taken as a riff on Alger Hiss but full of other echos as well. The scenes of back-door-dealing and blackmail ring as true as they ever did. Those tempted to tag the young, upright conservative senator's operatic torment over his gay attractions as quaint should think back to Jim McGreevey, Larry Craig and their many brethren--not to mention their wives. Despite the Red Scare trappings (and those are somewhat back in fashion, if you've noticed), Advise and Consent is one hell of a prescient movie. (To see just how prescient, the Siren recommends you check out this article by Meredith Hindley, senior writer at Humanities, on "The Transformation of Advise and Consent.") The above is from Ways of Seeing, whose proprietor clearly has excellent taste; for more screen grabs to show just how good this movie is, please click over and check out the rest.


The Light in the Piazza (Guy Green, 1962)
Social Issues: Mental retardation, class snobbery.
Sets and Costumes: Stunningly beautiful Italian setting (Guy Green was a highly accomplished cinematographer), Christian Dior dresses for Olivia de Havilland.
Sex appeal: High; Yvette Mimieux, George Hamilton and Rossano Brazzi, and de Havilland is much lovelier than the frightening lip color above suggests.
Why the Siren Likes It: Tender romance with a great performance by de Havilland, who carries the movie. Recently turned into an acclaimed musical that the Siren, alas, did not see. She does think the movie's insistence on the primacy of love, both parental and romantic, makes it a good choice for a musical treatment. At a time when the common practice was to shut the mentally retarded away in institutions, the notion that a developmentally delayed girl (albeit a beautiful one) deserved to marry a prince of an Italian and have babies was nothing short of revolutionary.


The V.I.P.s (Anthony Asquith, 1963)
Social Issues: Cutthroat business practices, tax evasion, adultery, domestic violence, depression.
Sets and Costumes: Enough to make you fly to Heathrow and wait to get fogged in--if flying were still like this.
Sex appeal: High. (Elizabeth Taylor at this point in her career does the same for a movie as Paul Newman. Elsa Martinelli was nothing to sneeze at, and neither was Richard Burton or Louis Jourdan.)
Why the Siren Likes It: See Return to Peyton Place. Plenty of lush period visuals, and there are pleasures to be had from Orson Welles even in unworthy roles (this one tinged with painful self-parody). But it's a pretty bad movie, though hardly the offense to all civilization that Walter Chaw paints it, and Elizabeth Taylor is an unconvincing version of Vivien Leigh. (Note to Mr. Chaw: Rod Taylor was a native Australian.) The Siren likes this primarily for Maggie Smith as the devoted secretary. I do love Dame Maggie. Christina Hendricks is good, but she still could learn something from what Smith accomplishes with a cliched role. Smith's scene with Richard Burton is the highlight, the so-so writing propped up with perfectly timed and calibrated reactions and beats.


Love With the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan, 1963)
Social Issues: Premarital sex, abortion, unwed motherhood.
Sets and Costumes: Supposedly low-end, but a mite too clean for all that. Steve McQueen made everything he wore look like a well-broken-in motorcycle jacket.
Sex appeal: High. Look at that publicity shot and tell me different.
Why the Siren Likes It: Has comic moments, but at heart a rather melancholy movie about a still-relevant topic, with legendary leads giving warm, authentic performances despite a wan third act. McQueen seldom let his vaunted cool slip to as much effect as here. When "Mad Men" gives a nudge about how far we've come, we should remember Wood planning an abortion, without hysteria. How many recent Hollywood movies or TV shows have let a beautiful, sympathetic lead do the same?

All right, so it's been a while, have at it. Tell me why I'm wrong about "Mad Men." Point out the movies I missed. (The Apartment isn't there and doesn't belong there; it's a comedy, and a satire, and very funny, and "Mad Men" isn't any of those those things.)

But, as always, play nice. The new banner, which MrsHenryWindleVale recognized without a telescope, is courtesy of the great Glenn Kenny. It is of course Dorothy Malone, from another Sirk masterpiece, The Tarnished Angels. Dorothy is meant to illustrate the Siren's general mood for the past month and probably the next.

Postscript: I've added a link to Peter Nelhaus's fine writeup (with lovely screen caps) of Susan Slade. Despite the deliberately provocative title, my main idea in writing this piece was "Hey, these early-1960s films that I love deserve a second look." So if anyone else has a post on some of these, or a similar movie from 1959-1963, post a link in comments by all means and I'll add it here. I'll start by also linking to Peter's post about Strangers When We Meet (b/w Town Without Pity, which also roughly fits our parameters despite the German setting). The Siren forgot about Richard Quine because--well, see banner above. Because of that.

Awesome screen caps from The Best of Everything right here. Apparently my mistake was not Googling "Suzy Parker."

Nathaniel of The Film Experience has been doing a series on movie references in Mad Men; one post involves a Draper household pillow-talk discussion of The Best of Everything that the Siren is sorry she missed. Great for "Mad Men" fans but rewarding for non-watchers too.

MORE UPDATES:

Vertigo's Psyche gives some love to Siren darling Sandra Dee and her exquisite performance in A Summer Place.

Arthur S., one of the most astute commenters in the film blogosphere, links us all up to a Douglas Sirk interview that is not to be missed.

Surreal Sanders: The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947)

The first thing that strikes you about George Sanders' filmography, after you get over its length, is that he worked with a lot of great directors. Renoir, Hitchcock, Mankiewicz, Duvivier, De Mille, Ulmer, Siodmak. Three good movies for Douglas Sirk, two more good movies for John Brahm. George Cukor, albeit on the misbegotten Her Cardboard Lover. Otto Preminger, for Forever Amber and The Fan--and wouldn't you have loved to see Preminger trying his Prussian dictator act with the unflappable Sanders? For that matter, the Siren yearns to learn whether Sanders bothered to hit any of Fritz Lang's chalkmarks on Man Hunt, or if he just raised an eyebrow and stood where he jolly well pleased. The Siren does know, thanks to Brian Kellow, that Sanders infuriated Joan Bennett by sitting in the director's chair and letting the ladies stand. If you knew nothing else about Sanders, this alone would confirm his sang-froid. I mean, would you sit in Fritz Lang's chair?





Sanders did great work for many of those directors, and even in the lesser movies he was never boring. But he gave three of his best performances for a director judged guilty of vulgarizing literature and "cultural evangelism" by Andrew Sarris and called "that idiosyncrat" by David Thomson. That would be Albert Lewin, the man at right in the still above, a vividly original artist whom the Siren thinks merits more consideration than he usually gets. Of the three Lewin/Sanders films, the Siren ranks The Moon and Sixpence third, although it's interesting and deserves a better fate than the cut-rate DVD currently circulating. The best is The Picture of Dorian Gray, a supremely atmospheric evocation of Oscar Wilde that spooks the bejesus out of the Siren whenever she catches it. Sanders is perfect as the mephistophelian Lord Henry Wotton, who lures Dorian into degradation only to recoil at the results. It is as hard to imagine another actor as Lord Henry as it is to picture Gary Cooper playing Addison DeWitt.

So the Siren has now seen Sanders in The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, which languishes in only-on-crappy-VHS hell. Some say this is his best performance. It isn't--the best are still Addison and Viaggio in Italia--but it is excellent all the same.

The Siren has mentioned her love for Guy de Maupassant, one of those writers Hollywood was always adapting with merry disregard for the fact that the Production Code kept his best bits off-screen. Lewin, who started as a producer, must have known Joe Breen was never going to countenance the ending of the original novel, wherein homme fatal Georges Duroy marries the daughter of his boss and looks at all he has wrought without a trace of self-reproach. Lewin must also have realized he would have to add some version of True Love for his amoral hero because the studios always wanted some lovers around, whether the star was George Sanders or Groucho Marx.

Still, it's easy to see why Lewin would choose this novel. For one thing, the setting must have been irresistible. Lewin takes on the Belle Epoque with the eye of an art collector, and as in all of his movies, he creates a dreamy parallel world where you are supposed to believe in the aesthetics, not the history. The sets on Bel-Ami look like sets, the backdrops look like backdrops, the proportions of the rooms are always slightly off and not one street or cafe recalls anything the Siren has seen in Paris. Probably the underlying reason was a low budget, but the Siren firmly believes that Lewin knew exactly what he was creating with production designer Gordon Wiles, art director Frank Paul Sylos and cinematographer Russell Metty. The effect is still beautiful, like watching characters in dollhouses. You aren't supposed to look and say, "Ah yes, that's exactly what Paris looked like in 1880." Rather, Lewin signals the lack of reality at every turn--this is a fable, decorated with a moral that you can either accept or snip off like the ribbon on a corset.

Sanders' Georges Duroy is nicknamed Bel-Ami by the women he climbs over to get to the top of Parisian society. The Siren's favorite line comes early on. "I have need of a stout stick," says Duroy at the beginning, as he looks at a Punch doll, "to beat my way." He even repeats that bit of subtlety not three minutes later.

Duroy starts his ascent by accepting a job from his friend Forestier, played by John Carradine, whose characters always look as though they are dying of consumption even when they aren't. In Bel Ami, Carradine coughs and signals another tubercular turn, although he is good in the part. Duroy realizes Forestier is dying. Duroy also sees quickly that his friend's writing owes a great deal, maybe everything, to his clever wife Madeleine (Ann Dvorak, a perfect Art Nouveau beauty and delicious in the role). Duroy sets his sights on marrying Madeleine, to the point that he proposes to her by Forestier's deathbed almost before that unfortunate gentleman has completed the formality of dying. Madeleine accepts, and they become quite the Parisian power couple, until Georges is ready to move on via an affair with his boss's wife (an affecting Katherine Emery).

Madeleine tries to ease her loneliness with an affair, and Georges arranges to have a photographer catch the lovers' assignation. (Did Sanders file this idea away for future reference?) In the book Madeleine sleeps with a minister; in the movie it's Duroy's sworn enemy Laroche-Mathieu, and Bel Ami has thrown her together with him. As soon as you see that Laroche-Mathieu is played by Warren William (looking rather ill in this, his last role) you realize Duroy is a gone goose. But before the tale ends, with a well-executed duel, Duroy will dump his boss's wife and attempt to marry the boss's daughter.




Are you confused? Because I forgot the subplot about Bel Ami buying a title. Not to mention the love of faithful Clothilde, who meets Bel Ami early on, falls in love with him and thaws his heart a bit, but not enough for him to stop his cheatin' ways. Can she save his soul?

Clothilde is played by Angela Lansbury, here in the full flower of her peculiar, doll's-head beauty, and almost as moving as she was in Dorian Gray. She has great chemistry with Sanders, particularly in a scene where she persuades him to take her to a down-and-dirty boîte--very Toulouse-Lautrec, just as a later scene will evoke Manet. Lewin manages great fake-out shot, panning over a seemingly passed-out woman. The music starts, the woman picks her head up off the table, and it turns out she's the floor show, as she sings the Bel-Ami theme song that recurs through the movie.

Before that, Sanders and Lansbury dance the can-can in one of the Siren's favorite Sanders moments of all time. He and Clothilde are dancing away very nicely, and for a minute he looks almost grim, even as he's kicking (and he had a pretty good leg extension, did George). Then his face softens as--for the only time in the movie--you see Duroy thinking hmm, this is...what is the word I'm looking for...tip of my tongue...hop-kick, hop-kick...why, it's FUN. The Bel Ami/Clothilde romance takes on life after that. Duroy's behavior toward Clothilde will get worse, and her devotion to him less explainable, until you think back to this moment.

Bel-Ami is the spiritual cousin not of Lord Henry, but of Dorian, a man whose sexual allure makes him both art object and instrument of destruction. In Dorian Gray, Hurd Hatfield's affectless beauty and near-uniform line readings keep things abstract; in the Private Affairs of Bel Ami, that's the job of the sets. Sanders was good-looking and he had that prowling baritone voice, but he didn't have Hatfield's perfect face. So he has to convince us of Duroy's sex appeal by some other means.

In the first scene, Duroy has just returned from being a soldier in Algeria. He enters a sidewalk cafe and brushes past a seated woman. She looks up, likes what she sees and saunters over. Sanders barely bothers to size her up--aside from sex, she can give him nothing, so she is nothing, and at first he brushes her off like Cardinal Richilieu dismissing a scullery maid. And, despite the fact that the character is a Frenchman, moreover a Frenchman who has been in the army for several years, you believe it--that Sanders is instantly appealing to a pretty woman, the brush-off, everything. The force of Sanders' charisma is that strong, and it's there because he doesn't care that it's there. And when he goes back to her, and gets her a drink after all, and she beams at him, it makes sense as well. "I've noticed that women take to men who have the look of wickedness," he muses.

More than the air of bored cynicism that Sarris cites, what made Sanders the ideal actor for Lewin was his presentational style. Sanders was so much wittier, so much more clued-in than anyone else on screen that he skewed reality just by showing up (that is, until he met his match in Roberto Rossellini). There are only a handful of actors who could give as much zip to a witticism ("I disapprove of hypocrisy in other people") no matter how labored or wordy.

In addition to deliberately overwrought art direction, Lewin always worked from ornate scripts. And when Sarris and Thomson disparage Bel Ami as too literary, they miss the irony. Duroy speaks almost in a series of epigrams, and yet Duroy can't write. An early, well-shot scene shows Duroy in his meager flat, trying to write an article commissioned as an act of kindness by Forestier, and Duroy can't do it. He has to enlist Madeleine, who in turn has been helping Forestier write all this time as well. Duroy is an artist without artistic talent, working instead to create a life of perfect selfishness. In this he will no more succeed than he does in writing an article, and for that reason the Code-mandated ending works for Lewin's Bel Ami, even if it turns Maupassant's novel upside-down.

Thwarted love and thwarted art is something that pops up, in Technicolor, in all of Lewin's movies, from the burning masterpiece in Moon and Sixpence, to poor lovelorn Basil's Picture of Dorian Gray, to the Flying Dutchman painting the same face down the centuries. In Bel Ami, the Technicolor picture is an anachronistic Max Ernst.



This cheery daub, according to a very amusing blog post, was chosen in a publicity contest sponsored by Lewin's production company. Pitting Surrealists against one another was Lewin's idea of how to lure the American public. No wonder he eventually went broke. The Ernst picture is an obvious summary of the temptations gnawing at all the characters, but it's also a typical Lewin flourish, another way of jolting the audience out of comfy notions about a period piece. How many other Hollywood filmmakers, in 1947, were deliberately reminding the audience of the artificiality of the very thing they are watching?*

The Siren really, really liked this movie, for Sanders, the dialogue, the strong female performances, and for the intoxicated and (yes, Mr. Sarris) evangelical way Lewin throws his artiness at you. Unfortunately, the VHS copy provided to the Siren by an extremely kind reader doesn't do it justice. It's like watching a movie through clear Jell-o. The Technicolor shot of the Ernst looks like early Tex Avery. The even more delirious, equally original Pandora and the Flying Dutchman got a restoration and revival last year, courtesy of Martin Scorsese and George Eastman House. Is it too much to ask that someone complete the reassessment of Lewin, and release a restored Bel Ami?

*Perhaps we will get the answer from the excellent 1947 Project at Category D.

Note: Clear, marvelous images from The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, as well as some publicity stills, are available at this comprehensive Ann Dvorak site. In particular, dig the fantastic set here, the Siren's favorite in the movie, and the composition here and here. The catch: hideous watermarks. However, the site's proprietor says that she will send un-marked scans to people for personal use.

Anecdote of the Week: "Trust Me--I'm an Actor," Plus Links

The Siren just got through reading about the hard times ahead for critics. She also read this piece at Jim Emerson's place and that pointed her to this piece, about how critics are irrelevant in the first place but super-duper-extra-tall-grande irrelevant if they don't like The Dark Knight (got that, Keith)? The Siren must be worse than irrelevant because she never saw the blasted thing and, let's face it, The Dark Knight is not a film she is likely to clutch to her bosom.

However, two can play at this game, damn it. In tune with Jim's first commenter, the Siren plans to start an "Ignore Max Ophuls at Your Own Peril" campaign right after, well, right after she gets done with some other stuff.




However, let it not be said that the Siren refuses all opportunities to expand her viewing horizons. The Siren watched Profondo Rosso some time back. Yes, she did. And she kind of liked it. She didn't like it in the way that might, for example, prompt her to watch it again--ever--but you could say she respected it. So, pending the last of the Constance Bennett thoughts, from another era and continent altogether, the Siren is bringing Profondo Rosso star David Hemmings onstage to cheer us up as we contemplate a world where film critics must love Batman, or suffer the consequences. This one is for Glenn Kenny, who wrote a splendid piece that touched on an encounter with the indefatigable Hemmings in Toronto on 9/11, for Kimberly Lindbergs, who has written of her liking for this unconventional 60s sex symbol, and for Belvoir, because redheads ARE sex symbols, too. Here, in his posthumously published Blow-Up and Other Exaggerations, Hemmings discusses the ways in which actors whiled away their free time in Swingin' London.

...I was invited to join the Bang Club, which involved most of Alvaro's regulars of a Saturday lunchtime and whose principal purpose, as devised by Ian [McShane], was to make friends look foolish.

Once a month, a person was elected 'victim,' and the remainder had to hunt him down, preferably in circumstances that would cause maximum embarrassment. The hunters would then point their index finger with thumb raised and three fingers curled and say, or mouth, 'Bang!', at which point the 'victim' had to die in the most atrocious way possible--in a second. No hesitation was allowed, or procrastination. They had to die on the spot, no matter who the witness or how great the damage. [Screenwriter Ian] La Frenais took out an entire dessert trolley at the White Elephant, having been 'Banged,' and several tables along with it. Few have topped this, and there can't be much more stimulating than to destroy someone's lunch by careering into their table, sprawled across a desert trolley like one of Clint Eastwood's victims across the back of his trusty steed. Of this you can be sure. Trust me--I'm an actor.

McShane suffered an invidious fate, though, at the hands of the Bang Club. As he was being presented, almost on bended knee, to Princess Margaret at the Empire, Leicester Square, at some premiere or other, from behind the silken ropes the rest of us stood up and, over a rampart of black-tied shoulders, as one we pointed fingers and mouthed 'Bang!'

Ian was caught, dead to rights, between the eyes. Eastwood would have been proud. Theoretically Ian should have fallen on the hapless princess, rolled her down a couple of staircases, taken Richard Attenborough and Judi Dench out with him and generally put the proceedings in peril and confusion. But he chickened out and disaster was, sadly, averted. There is, however, a sort of satisfactory conclusion to this short story. At the far end of the line, waiting patiently, was Vanessa Redgrave. She had not an inkling of the Bang Club, but being sightless, assumed the guns--merely fingers, you realize--were the real thing. She clutched the person next to her...and fainted dead away on the podium. All guns were then turned on Vanessa, as if she had been the target all along. But she revived in moments, as Redgraves will, to curtsy elegantly in front of HRH.

"As Redgraves will"--love it. At one point in his book the actor remarks, "They say Hemmings gives good yarn," and he certainly does. Highly recommended, if you can locate a copy. Hemmings has much to say about location work and the vagaries of an actor's career. Also contains the priceless story of how Michelangelo Antonioni kept shaking his head from side to side during each take on Blow-Up. Hemmings was almost prostrate from performance anxiety until he realized that what he thought were emphatic "no good" signals were in fact Antonioni's tremors from a physical condition.

*****

The links to the 20 Actress meme are piling up even as we speak:

David Cairns eschews mere physical beauty and gives Spring Byington her due. (By the by, David, who is this alleged MP who usurps your rightful place at the top of a "David Cairns" Google search?)
Feta at Terminal Sigma comes up with splendid photos of some silent actresses.
Operator_99 of Allure gives some love to number 21 and has a great picture of a very young Ida Lupino.
Marilyn of Ferdy on Film picks Wendy Hiller. Will the Siren's omissions never cease to haunt her?
Flickhead does indeed get very Continental on us.
Laura plumps for the ravishing Hedy Lamarr.
J.C. Loophole demonstrates impeccable taste.
Jacqueline had an equally hard time as the Siren but all is forgiven because she named Teresa Wright.
Sheila O'Malley ties one hand behind her back and picks favorite performances as well. Show-off.
Cinebeats grooves it, baby. I have seen nothing with Meiko Kaji but she is turning up more places than Marilyn.
Brad Wrolsted wins a link by naming Harriet Andersson.
Hazel at Let's Fold Scarves impressed the Siren no end by also naming performances, and including a Bette Davis film that the Siren actually hasn't seen. Well played, ma'am. Careful, you may get tagged next time. Just ask J.C.
MovieMan0283 does a version with clips.



Jon Swift identifies an important new school of film criticism, derrièrism. Surely criticism cannot be dead when brilliant new schools of thought keep emerging. Take that, Cahiers.

And John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows also does his bit for the critical lexicon, writing up the non-Sirk thrillers of Ross Hunter as Fashion Noir, an inspired term the Siren is adopting as of this very minute. Part one, on Portrait in Black, ends with a touching tribute to the Siren's beloved, doomed Sandra Dee. Part two, on Midnight Lace, ends with a vignette of a Hollywood-dream contest in Texas that will haunt you for days.

Roy Edroso of Alicublog evidently moonlights as some sort of medium, achieving whole-mind psychic melding with Jonah Goldberg. Don't take these sorts of risks for us, Roy. It's only blogging.

Tonio, who has been saying Easy Living is fluff? Send 'em to the Siren, she'll straighten them out. Easy Living is manna from heaven, that's what it is.

(Top, David Hemmings demonstrates the apparent future of critics who do not worship The Dark Knight. Middle picture of David Hemmings on set with Dario Argento is blatantly lifted from Cinebeats. Third picture of David Hemmings with Jane Birkin in background chosen as a lagniappe for David Ehrenstein and Yojimboen. Bottom picture of Lana Turner and Lloyd Nolan in Portrait in Black chosen by the Siren for her own amusement.)

The Alphabet Meme

As Lance Mannion always says, "Homework! They're giving me homework!" Tony Dayoub of Cinema Viewfinder has tagged me with this alphabet meme, which originated at Blog Cabins. Given the joy (and tremendous work) ahead for the Dayoub household after welcoming little Kyle into the world, the Siren couldn't turn this meme down. First, here are the rules:

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. [Here we have a long explanation of how to list Star Wars movies, which the Siren will spare you since--spoiler ahead!--there's no way in hell she's listing a Star Wars movie.] ...Movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgment to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

To these the Siren added her own rule, which confined her to films in the two languages she actually speaks, French and English. (Her French is shaky but even so, the Siren can make out a title.)

That means that even though Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki fits nicely for the letter O, the Siren isn't going to put it there because she doesn't speak Japanese and she feels stupid listing it under a Japanese title she can't pronounce. But it feels like cheating to list it under the English title (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) if I am listing French movies under French titles. And I have to list French movies under French titles because then I can still fit in my favorite Marcel Carné film and have room for my favorite silent as well.

Do you follow that logic? Never mind, here's the list anyway.

The letter X may seem like cheating too but honestly, what was I supposed to do with that one? Is there a movie out there called Xylophone or Xenophon? If so, I haven't seen it. Nor have I seen the X-Files movie and, with apologies to James Wolcott, Xanadu is not something I could list in good conscience.

A partment, The
B lack Narcissus
C rowd, The
D odsworth
E nfants du Paradis, Les
F allen Idol, The
G randes Manoeuvres, Les
H is Kind of Woman
I mitation of Life (Sirk)
J ezebel
K ey Largo
L etter from an Unknown Woman
M agnificent Ambersons, The
N ight of the Hunter
O ne-Way Passage
P aths of Glory
Q uai des Orfevres
R egle du Jeu, La
S caramouche
T rouble in Paradise
U nfaithfully Yours
V iaggio in Italia*
W oman in the Window, The
X, Divorce of Lady
Y olanda and the Thief
Z

*No gotchas here, please, it's in English.

All righty, the Siren hereby tags:
Stinky Lulu. (Get over there and vote for 1945 for the next Supporting Actress Smackdown because if you've got any sense at all, you are dying, dying I tell you to hear Stinky tackle Eve Arden's greatest performance.)

Jacqueline T. Lynch of Another Old Movie Blog. (And check out her terrific list of "10 Things I Like About Old Movies," which post idea the Siren is so totally stealing, and soon.)

Peter Nelhaus of Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee. (The Siren loves his recent piece on John Barry's Tension. Maybe the Siren will list "drinking coffee" when she steals Jacqueline's post idea later on.)

Goatdog of Goatdogblog (Yoo-hoo, Karen--he's got a wonderful Charles Coburn post up, why not check it out?)

Operator_99 of Allure (Not the sort of thing he usually does--he specializes in lovingly detailed portraits of stars both obscure and beloved--but the Siren wants very much to see what his list would look like.)

If you've already been tagged then just consider yourself double-dog tagged.

(Above: The Siren chose to illustrate Les Grandes Manoeuvres because every blog needs a Gerard Philippe photo somewhere on it. The girl he's checking out is Dany Carrel.)