The House by the River (1950)

“Lang never approached a project casually; he enjoyed making films too much.” 

—Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It

In 1950 Fritz Lang was coming off the box-office failure of a movie dear to his heart, The Secret Beyond the Door. He told Bogdanovich The House by the River was just something he was offered, but “there are certain things in it I liked.” The movie, made for peanuts at tightwad Republic Studios, is a low-budget thriller with a low-prestige cast—a potboiler, a melodrama. So the Siren expected it to be terrific, and it was.

Low budgets don’t matter that much with a talent like Lang’s—he takes the obvious set-ness of the sets and fits it to the story. The house of the title sits in an improbably compact row of other houses, so close to a large, swift river that in real life one good set of spring rains would have them all scrambling for higher ground. The story’s location is often described as the South, and perhaps that was the intent, but judging from the accents, it’s southern Illinois. The characters are affluent, but they seem to have spent everything on the wallpaper and wainscoting with not much left over for little details like furniture.

The movie’s setting is everywhere and nowhere. To the emigrant Lang, it’s just America, tasteless affluence hard by a seething flow of decay and sublimated sex.

Lang was given no real stars for this picture, but the lead, Louis Hayward, is so enjoyable you scramble for his filmography to see what else he’s done. The first line of the movie is spoken by an elderly busybody hoeing her garden: “I hate this river,” she says, as the corpse of something floats past. Stephen Byrne (Hayward) gets up from his writing, easily distracted from something he wasn’t approaching with passion anyway. Stephen’s character is revealed in one affable line delivery—“It’s people you should be blaming for the filth, not the river”—and in his reaction, too disengaged even to glance in the direction of a dead thing. Up in the far background, a pretty young housemaid (Dorothy Patrick) approaches. She’ll be dead in the next ten minutes of runtime, discarded as ruthlessly as the animal.

The House by the River, 88 minutes rippling out from that admirably succinct opening, builds a decayed, feverishly lustful atmosphere. Its antihero blossoms from failed writer to bestselling sensation through the simple expedient of strangling someone. The budget may have been low, but for a Lang lover the movie is full of marvels, from a twisted tree in the river that seems to have a taste for carrion, to a shot of Stephen at the top of a cellar door, cloaked in black on both sides as he searches for a sack to make a shroud for a dead woman.

Fritz Lang is a sexy filmmaker. The Siren has no idea why people often treat this statement as mad. Other directors highlight attraction, eroticism, games. Lang understands those things too, very well indeed, but he is mainly preoccupied with the ways people use sex to torment one another. In The House by the River, that shows in scenes such as the housemaid Emily’s death—the build to Stephen’s seduction attempt is ferociously sensual. So is the aftermath, as the position of Emily’s corpse and the way Stephen leans over her suggests consummation as much as cover-up.

Tortured sex is also evident when Stephen’s wife Marjorie (Jane Wyatt) comes home, flicking down the staircase with the same movements we last saw from the maid. Stephen unlaces Marjorie's corset, she pulls his hands around her waist. She says she should have stayed home, throws up her arms around him in a gesture of wifely affection that also echoes Emily’s corpse—and Stephen flashes on the fish he saw jumping in the river as he and his brother John (Lee Bowman) dumped the girl’s body. There is hunger too in John watching a square dance—he’s in love with Wyatt, but his leg is lame, and through Lang’s camera you sense John focusing not only on his carefree, murderous brother, but also on Wyatt’s hand disappearing inside a partner’s. Sex is even there in the motherly bustle of John’s own housemaid (Jody Gilbert), her vast bosom leaning over him as she coaxes her love object to eat some eggs.

Stephen is a frustrated writer, dedicated enough to submit and re-submit manuscripts again and again, but not enough to get any better at writing. Emily’s death turns Stephen’s one published book into a success, and also releases something in him—talent, we suspect. Inhibitions gone, he writes a book about her disappearance. But the better his book gets, the closer he steps to discovery. Naturally it’s the river, a classic symbol of sensuality, that resolves Stephen’s fate by uncovering death.

(Originally published at the late lamented Fandor.)

The Woman in the Window (1944)

(Some people find spoiler warnings to be an affected annoyance, but the Siren doesn't write this stuff to lessen anyone's pleasure. And so she warns you that this post concerns the ending of The Woman in the Window. See Lang's great movie before you read this, is the Siren's advice.)

In the comments thread to the Siren's post on You and Me, Kevin Deany told a charming story about Fritz Lang's defensive reaction when asked why his films didn't include humor; and this led to some cracks about the term "German humor," to which sallies the Siren nonetheless has a two-word response. The Siren has written before that she finds Lang's films quite sexy (another quality he's occasionally said to lack) and adds that You and Me is very funny.

Plus, the Siren has her own example of an underrated Lang joke, and it's The Woman in the Window, a film she likes very much indeed.

Edward G. Robinson plays a contented professor of criminal psychology, Richard Wanley, who's adrift in Manhattan on a sultry July evening after he's seen his wife and children off to the country. At his club (do men still have those?), Wanley knocks back a couple with old friends, and on his way home he stops to admire a portrait of a beautiful woman in a gallery window. Suddenly, the portrait's subject is standing beside him, as if conjured by the heat cooking his subconscious. The woman, Alice, is Joan Bennett in her most seductive Hedy Lamarr-lookalike phase, and Wanley needs little persuasion to buy her a drink. They repair to Alice's apartment for champagne, and nothing more than that is happening when Alice's lover bursts in and, without much in the way of preamble, starts to throttle Wanley.

Wanley stabs his attacker dead with a pair of scissors. Flush with the classic film-noir determination to make a bad situation worse, he and Alice decide to cover up the crime. Alas, Dan Duryea arrives, puts two and two together and blackmails them. Alice and Wanley decide to bump off Duryea (also the time-honored choice), but Alice botches the poisoning attempt. With Duryea more disgustingly alive than ever, and demanding even more money, Wanley commits suicide. And then, o then...

We see that Wanley has been having a nap in his cozy club chair. Yes, friends, it was all a dream. Still a little freaked out, he exits the club, walks to the gallery window and looks at the portrait, when who should show up? And Wanley takes off in terror, leaving the puzzled beauty on the sidewalk.

What with sample reactions like "copout," "spuriously happy," "it seemed to be tacked on," and "the ending annoyed me so much that it compelled me to re-watch Scarlet Street"--hm, the Siren detects a certain resistance to accepting "it's all a dream" as any kind of a self-respecting film noir ending. There's a few defenders; Brian Kellow allowed as how it "beautifully underlines the inexorable, dreamlike pull of the story." And this gentleman, who helped restore Woman in the Window (without a negative, no less), hated the ending but thought

the technique used in the transitional shot is amazing...Edward G. is sitting in a big overstuffed chair in an apartment, the camera tracks in to a tight close up of his face, then it tracks back revealling him in an entirely different location. There’s no dissolve so you know the crew was flying walls in and out, changing furniture, replacing props, all in a few seconds. Really a great effect.

Well, the Siren, perverse mortal that she is, likes the ending. She can't claim to have seen it coming, but it made sense. Although it also makes sense that many people would hate it. Laughing Boy Fritz Lang plays a practical joke, and a large segment of the audience reacts the way people do to a practical joke: "That's NOT FUNNY."

But the joke doesn't shimmer in out of nowhere, like Jeeves. Girish Shambu (in a video essay the Siren recommends) says, "I find this film, in its own ironic and grim way, to be quite funny." Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (who admittedly didn't like the end either) wrote some mordantly amusing lines, many delivered by Raymond Massey as Wanley's friend, an assistant district attorney. Massey's fossilized appearance can turn a scene into an instant Charles Addams cartoon anyway, more so when he's patting Wanley's shoulder and saying, "We rarely arrest people just for knowing where the body was." There's also the intrinsically amusing fact that Wanley is a professor of criminal psychology, but for all his ability to plan and execute a crime, he might as well be Father O'Malley in Going My Way.

Fritz Lang spent years telling skeptical interviewers that the Production Code didn't determine the end of The Woman in the Window, he did, and Lang went so far as to tell Peter Bogdanovich that he did it to make the film more plausible. In a way, it does. The film goes from twisted, to bleak, to horrifying, but that's the way a dream often progresses. You're in slumberland, dreaming of, say, a torrid X-rated encounter with Basil Rathbone circa Captain Blood, an example the Siren is pulling out of the purest hypothetical thin air, you understand. And then your creepiest co-worker shows up, and the dream becomes anti-erotic in one quick hurry, and then you hear footsteps on the ceiling and you know the footsteps are after you and when you awake and clutch the sweat-drenched bedclothes, you realize the dream was directed not by Michael Curtiz, but by David Fincher.

Don't lie to the Siren. You've dreamed about sex with a wildly inappropriate partner and found an excuse to skedaddle the very next time you saw the person. Maybe you've even gone to sleep and discovered that your subsconscious has given you permission to go full-dress Raskolnikov on your landlady. Waking up is a release, but there's a catch: Once your mind has revealed all the bits of anxiety playing bumper-cars around your amygdala, you can no longer pretend they aren't there. And Fritz Lang, never one to shy away from bitter truths, says the dream message could be worse.

Wanley says good-bye to his wife, who looks more like his mother than that of his children. And then he goes for a drink and muses that he can't even work up the energy to go see some strippers. And what does his dream bring him? A beautiful woman he never gets to have sex with. A moment of self-defense that he must cover up in the most craven way possible. A co-conspirator who can't manage a poisoning. Consequences he can't evade for acts he didn't even commit. Impotence, in other words, over and over again. Wanley flees from the lady of the evening and his nightmare, but the truth beneath his plumply bourgeois existence is running right with him.

Sure, that's depressing as hell. But it's also pretty funny.

You and Me (1938)

(Another from the late Nomad Wide Screen, posted in full and slightly revised.)

Discovering You and Me, the oddball three-song musical comedy Fritz Lang made in 1938, is like finding out T.S. Eliot loved Groucho Marx (and he did)--where did that come from? The movie is beyond charming, it’s enchanting, all romance and Damon Runyon quips, mixed with left-leaning social realism that goes down easy in part because it’s sung. Oh, Fritz’s preoccupations are there, all right--double lives, pitiless authority, the tyranny of material needs, the criminal underworld--but the touch is light, despite the shadows on screen. The Siren has been a passionate Lang partisan since viewing M in her early teens, and it was exhilarating to sit in the Film Forum last year, when this was shown as part of a “Fritz Lang in Hollywood” retrospective, muttering, “Damn, he could do charm, too.”

The movie opens with a musical number, “You Can’t Get Something For Nothing,” illustrated with a wonderfully abstract set of images of what you can get for something--everything from carrots to one of those terrifying 1930s permanent waves. We move on to the department store where much of the movie is set, and to Sylvia Sidney, who catches a woman shoplifting and eventually refuses to turn her in.



Then comes one of the most purely sexy moments in any film of the era. Handsome sales clerk George Raft is rebuffing the advances of Joyce Compton (the drawling mantrap with a breezy nightclub act in The Awful Truth). As Raft escorts Compton on the down escalator, we discover why--along comes Sidney on the up escalator. Raft and Sidney's hands meet, then slide apart as they pass, in a touch as erotic as a kiss.

They’re in love, and working in retail, but their problems don’t end there--they are both reformed crooks, which explains Sidney’s lenience with the shoplifter. Raft’s parole has just ended, but Sidney’s has two months to go, and there’s the problem: The terms of her parole forbid her to marry. But marry they do, and move into Sidney’s rooms, presided over by the sort of lovable, affectionate, mom-and-pop landlords common to movies but awfully scarce in modern New York. Sidney can’t bring herself to tell Raft that she’s an ex-jailbird. And Raft has been making a big deal out of full disclosure from any woman he loves. That, plus the fact that the department store is staffed entirely with other ex-convicts, many of them from Raft’s old gang, sets up the conflict.



It plays out in expected ways--Sidney tries desperately to keep Raft from discovering her past, and the old gang wants him back--and yet it stays fresh. Raft is often a self-absorbed presence on screen, a big vortex of narcissism sucking the life out of anyone playing against him, but here he achieves chemistry with his fellow actors and most importantly, his leading lady. There’s that escalator, but there’s also a kiss over a spilled suitcase, where Raft’s hat brim just barely clears the edge of Sidney’s as their lips meet. Raft carries Sidney into her darkened apartment on their wedding night, goes keister-over-teakettle as he collides with a lamp, and the actor laughs at himself as I’ve never seen him do in another movie.



Sidney’s allure was peculiar but potent, focused mainly on a wide-eyed stare that she could use to signal hurt, bewilderment, romantic yearning or granite will. Lang gives her every opportunity to turn on the stare in a big way, notably when she emerges from the shower with her hair adorably soaked, her makeup minimal and her eyes agog for Raft. It’s as beautiful as she ever looked in any movie.



Two scenes in You and Me turned the Siren's infatuation with the movie to outright love. One occurs late, when Raft’s old gang has lured him back and they’re preparing to rob the department store where they work. Sidney has gotten wind of the plan, and together with the kindly department store owner (there’s a combination of words one seldom sees) she confronts them. But instead of giving the men a big speech that will shame them straight, she takes a chalkboard and works out, via simple arithmetic, the fact that their individual takes from the heist will be peanuts. The gangsters sit on rocking horses and doll houses in the toy department, taking in this risk-reward lecture from a gorgeous woman, admiring Sidney’s unassailable logic and graceful way with the chalk.

But the best scene occurs about midway, as the gang reassembles and waits for Raft to appear so they can lure him back. And bit by bit, they roll into a percussive number (via the movie’s composer, Kurt Weill) called “Stick to the Mob”--pounding hands, fists, cups, the cutting getting faster and the lyrics darker and wittier, as they recall their days in prison and the morse-code system of taps they used to get news to one another. It should stop the movie cold, and it does, and it’s even more bizarre to consider that this is the last time a musical number pops up. But it’s superb, irrefutable evidence of why Rob Marshall’s dirge-like treatment of the great “Cell Block Tango” in Chicago was such an almighty letdown. “Stick to the Mob” cements You and Me as a movie where all sorts of improbable things might occur--like having your heart warmed by Fritz Lang.



(Many wonderful screen caps, including some that the Siren used here, at MUBI. Also, click here for a few beautiful shots of Lang directing Lorre in M.)

Department of Crabby Dissent: Richard Schickel

For someone who professes to disdain Internet writers, Richard Schickel is one hell of an effective troll.

The last time the Siren roused herself to notice Schickel, he was calling bloggers "idiots" and saying no one read us except our mothers and distant cousins. This caused the Siren to weep hot tears that smudged her mascara, until someone reminded her that while her patient readers have disagreed with her on matters such as late Anthony Mann and whether or not Elizabeth Taylor was a good actress, no one, not even a cousin, has ever called her an idiot.

So here was the Siren reorganizing her lingerie, happily forgetting the existence of Schickel aside from his hilarious Twitter doppelganger, when her friend the fine and gentlemanly Tom Shone of Taking Barack to the Movies reminded her.

Tom, you see, has some big fat problems with Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, which he details in a very funny and characteristically well-written review right here. But then Tom had to go and quote Schickel's review, luring an unsuspecting Siren with a famous publicity shot of luscious Veronica Lake. And the Siren, because she never learns, clicked through to Schickel's full post.

Now the Siren hasn't yet seen Tree of Life, and if she holds true to her usual pattern with new releases she should be catching up with the latest Malick sometime in the winter of 2012-13. She comforts herself that if Malick took four years to edit his latest movie, surely he would not begrudge her taking a couple of years to watch it. But here's the quote.

Movies, I believe, are an essentially worldly medium, playful and romantic, particularly in America, where, on the whole our best directors have stated whatever serious intentions they may harbor as ignorable asides. There are other ways of making movies, naturally, and there’s always a small audience available for these noble strivings—and good for them, I guess. But I’m with Preston Sturges, who gave this immortal line to Veronica Lake in “Sullivan’s Travels”: “There’s nothing like a deep-dish movie to drive you out in the open."

This is, simply put, a lot of hooey. So much so that the Siren doesn't believe Schickel, a man with a deep knowledge of Hollywood history and the CV to prove it, can possibly believe this stuff himself, which is why she called him a troll in the first paragraph. Troll is not a word that the Siren trots out for just any old curmudgeon. But she uses it here, because beating Terrence Malick about the head with Preston Sturges is like using the Marx Brothers to critique Samuel Fuller.

Where, the Siren asks you, does the "playful and romantic" notion leave the blackest of film noir? Force of Evil, Scarlet Street, Sweet Smell of Success, they're romantic? Social dramas like Heroes for Sale and The Crowd and Give Us This Day, anti-war masterpieces like The Eagle and the Hawk and Attack! and All Quiet on the Western Front, tragedies like The Old Maid and Make Way for Tomorrow--they're playful and/or their serious intentions are ignorable asides? It's okay for Michael Powell and Albert Lewin and William Dieterle and Joseph Mankiewicz and Victor Fleming to film their notion of the afterlife, but only because they slipped in some sex and some jokes to keep Richard Schickel from nodding off? Hey, John Ford is serious, but playful--oh wait, but Schickel once used a review of Scott Eyman's splendid Ford biography to unload about how Ford's use of comic relief gave him a big pain in the fundament. Schickel's last book but one was about Clint Eastwood, and if he wants to tell the Siren what's so playful and romantic about Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River, and how to ignore any serious intentions, she's all ears.

The Siren admits that Schickel put himself more firmly than ever on her bad side by implicitly dismissing Days of Heaven. The Siren loves Days of Heaven with a deep purple passion, loves it even more than Badlands, considers it a major way station on her road to appreciating what Dan Kois might call "vegetable movies." "Narratively empty and emotionally unengaging"--Days of Heaven is Wings of the Dove, for crying out loud. If you can't find emotion and narrative content, not to mention romance and eroticism, in Richard Gere's hand closing wordlessly over Brooke Adams' to summon her out of her husband's bed, and the wineglass sinking to the bottom of the river, then the Siren must resort to Dimitri Tiomkin's line to David O. Selznick--you fuck in your way, and I'll fuck in mine.

Schickel thinks post-Badlands Malick is tiresome and bombastic, and in the words of the great philosopher Stuart Smalley, "that's OK." But for Schickel to extrapolate from what he sees as Malick's overreaching, that the ideal way to go after big notions of fate and society and the silence of God or whatever is to hide them, like whoever decided to put zucchini in breakfast muffins, is silly. Yeah, tell it to Fritz Lang. Sometimes the filmmakers beloved by the Siren smuggle their seriousness, as Scorsese put it, and sometimes they hit you with it like a beanball. It's a big, beautiful world of cinema out there. There's room for Sullivan's Travels, and there's room for Terrence Malick.

More Link Love

Available to be read in full at Fandor's Keyframe blog, my list of highlights from the Illuminating the Shadows conference at Northwestern University's Block Museum. Below, the moment that may interest my readers the most; should it prompt a comment urge, the splendid Fandor editor Kevin Lee would love to hear from you over there.

3. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, co-host of Ebert Presents At the Movies with Christy Lemire, mischievously remarked during the panel on the art of writing that he considered Jean-Claude Van Damme to be a movie artist on the level of Buster Keaton. Or near the level of Buster Keaton. Worthy to be mentioned in the same declarative sentence with Keaton, anyway. I don't remember the precise phrasing; I was on stage next to him for the same panel, and PTSD caused me to lose track of my pen. Despite my own appreciation for Van Damme (perhaps one day Fandor will hire me to write up Universal Soldier), I believe I gave Vishnevetsky what is usually referred to as the "side-eye."

At Nomad Wide Screen, my two most recent Retro-Fit columns. First, a piece on Raoul Walsh's fabulous pre-Code, Sailor's Luck, which was screened at the Block conference by the great Dave Kehr.

In a March 6 [New York Times] column about distributors and viewers’ move away from DVDs toward Blu-ray discs and streaming video, Kehr acknowledged the lack of enthusiasm many old-movie hounds feel for yet another shift in format. We greet these shifts, he wrote, with “a mixed sense of hope and fear. Hope, to the degree that the new distribution strategies may make it economically feasible for a broader range of movies to enter the marketplace; fear, grounded in past experience that suggests format changes invariably leave legions of once widely available titles in limbo.” Last week, at a conference held by Northwestern University’s Block Cinema, Kehr introduced a screening of a brilliant movie that is stuck in that very limbo.

The film, Sailor’s Luck from 1933, was directed by acknowledged master Raoul Walsh during the freewheeling era before the Production Code was implemented.

[snip]

Since it’s a Pre-Code feature, there are elements in Sailor’s Luck that would disappear just a year or so later, including Sally Eilers putting on her underwear and Esther Muir leaning over a crystal ball and giving Walsh a chance to point the camera more or less directly between her breasts (albeit from a tactful distance). Enormous hip flasks are brought out at intervals. Jimmy [James Dunn] climbs in a car with possibly the drunkest driver in all of 1930s cinema — giving Walsh an excuse to demonstrate just how good early rear-projection could be, the camera whirling around for queasy-making views of walls, the curb, lampposts, unwary pedestrians.

A scene between Dunn and Eilers dwells on the possibility that they might sleep together; it’s played quietly, in her furnished room, and blocked with enthralling precision, as Eilers sits in a chair across the room, Dunn plops on the bed, Dunn invites her to the bed, she moves only to a closer chair, Dunn lowers the window shades, she raises them. Also startlingly frank is the way the movie deals with the physical peril Eilers finds herself in when she encounters overeager men; confronting Baron Portola (Victor Jory, in the first role of what would be a career full of such parts), she opens the door that he just closed with a mixture of sass and uneasiness.

Next up at Nomad, another postcard from another conference, a film-noir fest at Manhattan's New School that was hosted by celebrated director Guy Maddin and the fine film writer and all-around goddess Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun. Guy presented The Chase, from 1946, starring a not-bad-at-all Robert Cummings (stop giggling); and Kim gave a loving introduction to Wicked Woman from 1953, starring the mesmerizing Beverly Michaels:

Morgan is a huge partisan of this work, calling it a “Poverty Row masterpiece,” and the film lived up to its introduction. Wicked Woman has a naturalistic feel, its low-rent atmosphere giving it a sense of realism that you don’t get from most higher-budget studio films of the era. Morgan particularly loves the movie for its star, whose character Morgan described as a woman “overcompensating for being in a man’s world"...Her character, Billie Nash, steps off a bus in a one-horse town early in the film, and just watching her lounge into the station and ask where she can find a cheap room is enthralling. The maintenance routines of a down-at-the-heels blonde are right up front, with Michaels rummaging around for something to wear and touching up her platinum roots with a slight grimace over the burning bleach. The movie constantly uses Michaels’ height (she was five-foot-nine, but looks taller), as she folds her limbs into a cheap chair that’s too small or stretches out a lanky arm to grab something from the fridge. (“I could watch her open a beer all day,” says Morgan.) Michaels’ stature gives a piquant flavor to her interactions with neighbor Charlie Borg (Percy Helton), one of the oiliest lechers I’ve ever seen—as Morgan put it, “every sleazy man who ever hit on a woman rolled into one.” Helton is so short that his bald head is level with Michaels’ collarbone, and his conversations with Michaels find him mostly talking to her breasts.

Raymond De Felitta, the Siren's email correspondent below, has put part one of his George Stevens musings online at Movies Til Dawn. The Siren has an abiding love for anyone working to resurrect a neglected or downtrodden reputation in classic film, and this promises to be a great effort. The Siren herself has a high opinion of Stevens, especially Shane, A Place in the Sun, Giant, Gunga Din, Swing Time, The Talk of the Town, Penny Serenade, Vivacious Lady and The Diary of Anne Frank. She loves Raymond's contention that Stevens' "sense of time and space within an individual scene became increasingly abstract and--paradoxically--more emotional as his work went on after the Second World War." Worth reading even if Stevens has not been a personal favorite--perhaps particularly if that's the case. The Siren also realized, looking at Stevens' filmography, that pre-1935 and Alice Adams (another good film), his credits are a viewing black hole. So if anyone has a recommendation for early Stevens, let us know, by all means. Update: "There is nothing about this that even vaguely resembles what was then considered 'normal' directorial staging": Part Two is up, with a close look at scenes from A Place in the Sun and The More the Merrier.



Libertas, the Website run by Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, has undergone a remake over the past year. Once marked by a hectoring tone that was not to the Siren's taste, Libertas is still very much an explicitly conservative film site--which would appeal to some of the Siren's readers, and not to others. But Apuzzo and Murty have worked to turn it into a place that's focused on pointing out films they love, rather than decrying films they can't stand. In terms of the Siren's own cinematic inclinations, she has long been a fan of Jennifer Baldwin, who has commented here from time to time as The Derelict and has her own blog at Dereliction Row. She's a good writer who covers classic film with a passion anyone here can identify with, and the Siren recommends her essays to one and all. The Siren, a Fritz Lang freak from way back, was especially smitten with Jennifer's post about Human Desire; she focuses on the great Gloria Grahame.

At Laura's Miscellaneous Musings, another pre-Code that ties in neatly to a couple of things I screened recently: Made on Broadway, from 1933. Haven't seen it. Sounds nifty. It stars Sally Eilers, so fresh and adorable in Sailor's Luck, and Laura says it has overtones of Chicago.

Nomadic Existence: Von Sternberg's Two Shanghais and Fritz Lang's You and Me

More from my Retro-Fit column at Nomad Widescreen. The Feb. 16 column, on my two favorite Josef von Sternberg movies:

Both stories share a lot more than setting — they bore into the unsavory urges a class-bound and hypocritical society tries to bury. Above all, both movies are preoccupied with duplicity — who needs to use it, and who scorns it. Marlene Dietrich, as Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express, was once Magdalen, a good woman, or as good as the sensual Marlene could be. Now she’s a grifter working her way up and down (ahem) the China coast. The key to Shanghai Lily, however, is that she’s honest about her dishonesty; indeed she takes a certain pride in it. When she runs into Clive Brook, the stuffy doctor she still loves, he tells her, fatuously, “I wish you could tell me there had been no other men.” And Lily’s wholly unembarrassed riposte is “I wish I could, Doc, but five years is a long time.” Anna May Wong, her performance like a furnace heating the entire movie, shares that disdain for pretense: “I confess, I don’t quite know the standard of respectability that you demand in your boarding house,” she tells the old lady who’s mistaken her for a model of propriety. It’s the other train passengers — Clive Brook and his problems with trust, the French “officer,” the priest whose rhetoric doesn’t match his true nature — who cling to deception. And the good ones can band together only when they abandon deceit.

With The Shanghai Gesture, Mother Gin Sling (played by Ona Munson in the best role that ill-starred actress ever got) manipulates, all right, but her maneuvers can be seen a long way off by anyone not blinded by their own lies. Anyone who isn’t Walter Huston’s hypocritical diplomat, in other words. Nobody bands together in The Shanghai Gesture; if this crowd had been on the Titanic, they’d be the ones trying to steal the life jackets.

Speaking of Fritz--this week's column, in which I delight in LAHNG's You and Me:

There are many adjectives that recur in descriptions of Fritz Lang movies; charming isn’t one of them. Discovering You and Me, the oddball three-song musical comedy Lang made in 1938, is like finding out T.S. Eliot loved Groucho Marx (and he did) — where did that come from? The movie is beyond charming, it’s enchanting, one moment after another of romance and Runyonesque wit, mixed in with a dose of left-leaning social realism that goes down easy in part because it’s sung. Oh, Fritz’s preoccupations are there, all right — double lives, pitiless authority, the tyranny of material needs, the criminal underworld — but the touch is light, despite the shadowy cinematography. I have been a passionate Fritz Lang partisan since viewing M in my early teens, and it was an exhilarating experience to sit in the Film Forum when You and Me was shown as part of this year's “Fritz Lang in Hollywood” retrospective, happily muttering over and over, “He could do this, too.”

The movie opens with a musical number, “You Can’t Get Something for Nothing,” illustrated with a wonderfully abstract set of images of what you can get for something — everything from carrots to one of those terrifying 1930s permanent waves. We then move into the department store where much of the movie is set, and we see Helen (Sylvia Sidney) catching a woman shoplifting and eventually refusing to turn her in. Then comes one of the most purely sexy moments in any film of the era. Handsome sales clerk Joe Dennis (George Raft) is rebuffing the advances of a drawling mantrap of a customer, Joyce Compton, who has a memorable musical cameo in The Awful Truth. As he escorts Compton on the down escalator, we discover why he isn’t interested — here on the up escalator comes Sidney. Their hands meet as they pass, in a touch as erotic as a kiss.

As always, linking to Nomad is as dicey as robbing a department store or boarding a train for Shanghai, but for the time being, this link to von Sternberg seems to work, and you can find the Lang column here. Otherwise, heigh-ho for the thirty-day free trial. By the way, there is a lovely series of screen caps from You and Me, including that escalator, at MUBI.

For the Love of Film (Noir): Call for Posts

Zowie, a beautiful YouTube clip from the inimitable Greg Ferrara on the Siren’s blog. She doesn’t do clips very often. And look at the banner, with beauteous Joan Bennett getting her fatale-ism on with dear Fritz Lang, the Siren’s favorite autocrat.

Something’s afoot. Monocle-shopping? A boudoir interior-design rethink chez Siren? Valentine’s Day reservations, perhaps?

Better than that, way better. It is time for us to band together once more to do our bit for film preservation. Yes, it is the Call for Posts for (crescendo)

For the Love of Film (Noir)

The concept is simple. This year as last, the Siren and the great Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films are calling on bloggers to band together. Together we will urge people to donate in order to restore and preserve endangered film.

Donations this year go to the Film Noir Foundation, which marvelous organization, under the leadership of Eddie Muller, works to save movies in this beloved genre, movies from many eras and from many countries. Eddie is a gentleman, a wit and a scholar, a man with an incredible love for and dedication to film. Marilyn and I are proud to be helping the foundation to which he has devoted so much.

And this year, in a nifty plot twist, we know the film to be restored ahead of time--a fine and important noir called The Sound of Fury, aka Try and Get Me.

Fritz is gracing the banner for a reason; The Sound of Fury tells the same story as Lang’s celebrated 1936 Fury. Directed by Cy Endfield, who was fated to be blacklisted later on, The Sound of Fury stars Lloyd Bridges in as good a role as that fine actor ever got to play. When the Siren announced that this was the film to be restored, several of her distinguished, all-seeing commenters popped up to remark that they preferred this version to the Lang. As Marilyn noted before, when Lloyd’s sons--Jeff and Beau, you may have heard of them--saw the film, they were “blown away” by Lloyd’s performance. More from Marilyn:

A nitrate print of the film will be restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, using a reference print from Martin Scorsese’s personal collection to guide them and fill in any blanks. Paramount Pictures has agreed to help fund the restoration, but FNF is going to have to come up with significant funds to get the job done. That’s where we come in.

Our Facebook page is updated continuously with information about the blogathon, including ideas for posts, should you need any.

This year as last, we are offering raffle prizes to donors. The loot includes:

1. The brand-new deluxe DVD edition of The Prowler

2. A DVD documentary on Eddie Muller, The Czar of Noir, featuring his short film with Marsha Hunt, The Grand Inquisitor.

3. Illustrator Steve Brodner will be contributing a drawing of Lloyd Bridges as a raffle prize during the blogathon. Look in the photo album on the Facebook page for samples of his work.

4. A full set of all nine posters for the Film Noir Foundation’s NOIR CITY film festival, held each year in San Francisco since 2003.

5. A set of all three NOIR CITY SENTINEL annuals. Noir City is the Foundation’s flagship publication.

6. Programs from NOIR CITY 8 and 9

7. An autographed copy of Eddie Muller's first novel, The Distance.

Here are the Rules for Blogathon Participants, as elegantly simple as black-and-white:

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

2. In your post, include the all-important donation link for the Film Noir Foundation.

3. Send the link to your post to Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films (http://www.ferdyonfilms.com; email ferdyonfilms@comcast.net) and to the Siren here (http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/ or via email, campaspe101@yahoo.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; remember too that nothing gladdens a blogger's heart like a nice comment.

And, most vital of all,

5. DONATE GENEROUSLY to the Film Noir Foundation, and urge your readers to do the same.

Our grand total last year was more than $30,000 in contributions and matching funds; those funds saved films through the National Film Preservation Foundation. One of the Siren’s great joys was seeing the spreadsheets and realizing that there were some large gifts, and also a great many people kicking in small donations, one after the other, until the numbers really began to add up. It all counts. It all helps.

This year, the Siren has received some queries about participation, and thought perhaps others might have similar concerns. Switch on the desk lamp, it's time for the Blogathon Q&A. If you have other questions, the Siren will be right here in comments.



1. I neglected to participate last year. I feel such torments of guilt, like Van Heflin in Act of Violence. Please, can I redeem myself by contributing a post this year?

We called off Robert Ryan. Come back. All is forgiven.

2. Can I post that week even if I don’t sign up now?

Sure, just let us know when you do.

3. I am a blogger based outside the U.S., and I would like to contribute a post.

Please do! We love the international character of the blogathon.

4. I love film and want to do my bit, but my blog is focused on food/mascara/politics etc. Can I still contribute?

Absolutely. To cite one example, last year Tinky Weisblat, at the time primarily a food blogger, did a wonderful post and included a recipe. Marilyn tried the recipe out and pronounced it delicious; the Siren was all set to cook it herself but then she ripped the lace on her apron and got depressed.

Anyway, the post itself should be about film noir, and the donation link should be there. If the topic of the post is “False Eyelashes in Film Noir,” that would be...completely awesome, actually. The Siren would read that. She might even post that herself.

5. I want to write about a new movie that I consider to be noir. Is that all right?

Knock yourself out, dollface. Although, if you are writing about a new movie because you secretly prefer new to old, for heaven’s sake don’t say so outright as the Siren will be deeply hurt.

6. I wrote a post a while back about film noir, and I don't like to brag, but it was great. This post got me a fan letter from my Cousin Millicent. It got me a date in a hot tub. It got me a paying critic job. Can I repost this inspired post for the blogathon?

All right, all right! If you haven't got anything shiny new we won't go all Veda Pierce on you. Please do freshen it up, however, with an appeal for donations and the all-important donation link.

Anyway, surely you get the general idea. This year as last, there is no obnoxious door policy at the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon. You may come as you are. And you don’t have to know what you will write about now; the promise to post is enough.

Tonight, the Siren plans to start updating this post with names of contributors, and Marilyn plans to do the same. Let us hear from you!

Five Big Yearnings

The Siren doesn’t usually post about the truly random movie thoughts constantly flitting around her brain, but she’s been pondering this all weekend and wanted to hear what her patient readers had to say. It’s prompted by looking at the schedule for Fritz Lang in Hollywood, an incredible series scheduled for the Film Forum in January/February 2011. Now the Siren has Lang on the brain anyway, what with For the Love of Film (Noir) working to preserve a remake of a great Lang movie, and writing about the terrific House by the River at Fandor--available here, and no firewall anymore. The Siren has a hell-or-high-water must-see series list that includes (but is not limited to) The Secret Beyond the Door, You and Me, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Joan!) and An American Guerrilla in the Philippines, none of which she’s seen yet. But there’s also Moonfleet, which she saw again recently on a very good DVD, but yearns to see on a big screen.

So the Siren got to thinking. Of all the movies she’s already seen on DVD, TCM or VHS, which ones would she most like to see on a big screen in a great print?

Here are five. This list is just for starters, of course, but these are very serious yens. The fact that they’re all black and white is...interesting. And unplanned.




1. The Crowd. The Siren’s twins were about seven months old and still waking up in the middle of the night from time to time. The feed/change/settle routine for a total of two (2) babies usually equaled about 90 minutes of activity, and ended that morning at about 5 am. The Siren was in the habit of putting on TCM during this process. So she gets the last baby to sleep and is about to collapse back in bed, and goes back to the living room to turn off the TV. And noticed The Crowd was about to start. And thought, “Let’s take five minutes to see how this looks.” A little over 100 minutes later, it was time to get ready for work. And when the Siren, so sleepy she was swaying slightly on her feet, ran into an equally movie-mad colleague (we used to share custody of a VHS of Letter from an Unknown Woman), she chattered at him about The Crowd to the point where he put up both hands and said, “I have never seen you like this about a movie.”

Perhaps it isn’t the sort of quote people pick for an ad in Variety, but “So good mothers of infant twins choose it instead of sleep” is one hell of a recommendation.

The Crowd isn’t on DVD. Now the Siren is very, very cognizant of the special issues involved in preparing a good DVD release of a movie as old as The Crowd. She knows she whines a lot. But this isn’t merely the best silent movie the Siren has ever seen. Without hesitation she will name it as one of the greatest movies ever made in this country or anywhere else. So hearing that there is no Crowd on DVD is like planning a trip to MOMA, only to have them tell you that Starry Night has been stashed in the broom closet. Well, let’s hope Warner Brothers is on the case.

If, however, the Siren could see this one on screen, hand on heart, she promises to shut up already about the DVD.




2. The Long Voyage Home. You know who else wants to see this on a big screen? John Nolte of Big Hollywood. The Siren can’t remember his exact words, but the phrase “crawl over broken glass” may have occurred in there somewhere. Mr. Nolte’s love for John Ford, and appreciation for this lesser-known film, is one of those heartwarming instances of cross-aisle harmony that sustain us all in these partisan times. This is another that the Siren watched by chance on TCM, and the brilliance of Thomas Mitchell, the incredible tenderness and sympathy afforded these men doing a spirit-sucking and lonely job, and above all the deep-focus cinematography of Gregg Toland put her in traction. If John should be in town when this one comes on screen, in a gesture of Ford-loving solidarity the Siren will not only crawl with him to see it, she’ll buy his popcorn, as long as neither one of us brings up Obama. Or Jafar Panahi.

(The screen grab above is from a series posted at Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, always and forever one of the Siren's favorite stops on the Web.)




3. Love Affair. Because Christmas is coming, and the Siren yearns to see Charles Boyer give Irene Dunne her present.





4. The Fallen Idol. The Siren regards The Third Man with the same awestruck reverence as everyone else--more, even. There are, she suspects, not that many fans of the movie who went so far as to name their only daughter Alida. And yet, given a choice between Harry Lime and Baines larger than life, at the moment she’d pick Baines. “We ought to be very careful, Phil. 'Cause we make one another.” “I thought God made us." “Trouble is, we take a hand in the game.” This screened last year at Film Forum--while the Siren was in Paris.

(Gorgeous screen grab is from Coffee, Coffee, And More Coffee, where Peter Nelhaus is in the habit of posting coffee-drinking images from all kinds of movies. Patient readers should stop by and thank Peter for this dose of Michele Morgan.)




5. David Copperfield. David Ehrenstein, where are you? Are you still banging the drum for early George Cukor? Because the Siren is right there with you, and she’s never seen an adaptation of Charles Dickens (her favorite novelist) to surpass this one. Nor will there ever be a Micawber to equal W.C. Fields. And Karen shares the Siren’s love for Freddie Bartholomew.

In conclusion, speaking of movies that deserve restoration, big-screen unspooling, DVD cases with luxurious little booklets and just one whole hell of a lot more respect than they have received in the past, let’s talk about Julien Duvivier’s La Fin du Jour. The Siren mentioned that Dennis Cozzalio posted about it, but she didn’t do his splendid essay justice. It’s an elegant, deeply sympathetic and altogether marvelous piece of film criticism that will make you want to bite your arm off at the elbow in frustration if you haven’t seen this tantalizingly hard-to-find masterpiece. Really, please, go read it.

Anecdote of the Week: Not a Good Experience, but Not a Bad Picture

The Siren reads Virginia Heffernan's "The Medium" column on Sundays in the New York Times Magazine, and she usually enjoys it. This past Sunday, Ms Heffernan took up the topic of Website comment sections, using as an example the comments on Anne Applebaum's column in the Washington Post. The Siren does not read the Washington Post columnists, as their politics frequently give her a twitch in her right eyelid, but it seems that the people who post on the WaPo site lack respect for Ms Applebaum's credentials, do not engage with Ms Applebaum's writing, are rude and occasionally bigoted and probably post just to see themselves "published."

And the Siren absolutely could not relate.

Indeed, the Siren looked at her own comments section, and felt the same proprietary thrill that a homeowner gets from realizing she has the prettiest rose trellis on the block. Part of that is a question of scale, of course. Still, the Siren does love her comments oasis here. The post on The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami turned into a small discussion of Directors Behaving Badly, and whether indeed most of them ever behave any other way, and the tribute to Jack Cardiff eventually segued into a discussion of the very notion of "auteur." If Ms Heffernan gets tired of the mosh pit of WaPo comments, she is more than welcome to stop by and pull up a virtual armchair.

So the Siren says, once more, many thanks to her wonderful commenters, and she is contributing to the two discussions by posting an anecdote that relates to both prior topics merely by being about Fritz Lang. It's from Henry Fonda's long interview in Hollywood Speaks, the highlight of a very good book. He was an actor who was interested in the process of moviemaking and alert to the different methods and goals of the directors he worked with. Fonda was very aware, for example, of what lay behind Wyler's notorious retakes. That does not mean, however, that Fonda could suffer Fritz gladly--not many could. But the Siren always thinks, reading this particular passage, that Fonda did understand what was making Lang tick. He just didn't want to deal with it.

So here is Fonda, discussing Lang in general and The Return of Frank James in particular. Mike Steen asks Fonda if he was happy making that movie.

No. Because again, it was Lang. Oh shit, he came to me with tears in his eyes and said he'd learned his lesson and so forth. Why Zanuck ever thought he would be the right kind of director for a Western I don't know, 'cause he wasn't at all. He was the same man he'd been on the other one I did with him, You Only Live Once, in the sense he was preoccupied with his camera. He painted with his camera...

...In The Return of Frank James I had a scene where I come into a barn hunting down John Carradine, who has killed Jesse. I had to come in to a point, look around, hear something and exit. That's all there was to the scene. We were about five hours doing it because Lang decides he wants cobwebs from the overhead beam down to the post that stood where I had to stop for a moment. So they send to the special effects department, and a guy comes down and blows cobwebs around. It's easy to do. But then Lang would come in and break holes in them to make them look like old cobwebs. Pretty soon he was breaking so many holes that the entire thing collapsed, and the effects guy would end up having to do it over. I sat there watching. By this time I knew Lang so well I would make bets with guys that we would be three hours, fucking with the cobwebs in a scene where I come in and stand for two seconds, then walk out!

Fonda goes on to talk about filming near Lone Pine and encountering a beautiful fallen tree. John Ford, said Fonda, would have "said 'Oh shit!' and put a tripod down and shot it. But not Lang." Lang made the crew move the enormous log and then ordered a camera platform built to change the angle. Fonda got off easily, however, considering he said Lang also killed three horses on the location by forcing them to run too hard at high altitude.

"So it was not a good experience," said Fonda, "but it was not a bad picture. Somebody saw it on television the other night and told me they enjoyed it. Anyway, I didn't enjoy working with Fritz Lang."

Bette Meets 90-Take Willie

(The Siren returns from hibernation to join in Goatdog's William Wyler Blogathon. Please follow the links at his place for more on the great, yet curiously underappreciated Wyler.)


She was difficult in the same way that I was difficult. She wanted the best.--William Wyler at the American Film Institute tribute to Bette Davis





It was 1931. Bette Davis was 23 and still new on the Universal lot, scrambling for parts like the other starlets. William Wyler was 29, "not a very good director" by his own admission and struggling to prove he deserved his break despite the (justified) perception that he owed his job to being Carl Laemmle's relative. Davis was auditioning for a part in A House Divided and had hurriedly put on the only size 8 dress she could find. The dress was cut low, and when Davis walked by, Wyler remarked in a voice that carried to every corner of the crowded soundstage, "What do you think of these dames who show their tits and think they can get jobs?" The humiliated actress didn't get the role, which went instead to future flameout Helen Chandler.

So when Wyler, now contracted to Samuel Goldwyn and on his first loan-out to Warner Brothers, showed up to film Jezebel, Davis reminded him of his taunt--and the irony, now plain, that he had made the remark about an actress more willing than any in Hollywood to forego sex appeal when the character required it. Wyler searched his memory for the incident and drew a nice tidy blank, but he apologized to Davis and said he had been having a hard time in those days.

As filming began Davis must have known about Wyler's reputation for repeating takes until the actor was a nervous wreck. Henry Fonda was warned by Humphrey Bogart, who'd made Dead End with Wyler the year before, "Jesus, don't touch it. Don't go in there." But Wyler also had a string of excellent movies under his belt, having guided fine performances from a hopeless alcoholic (John Barrymore in Counsellor at Law), an actress in the twilight of her career (Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth) and even an actress whose chief qualifications at the time were dazzling beauty and a bed shared with a prominent producer (Merle Oberon in These Three). Davis knew her own self-discipline and fine talent, and she made her bet on Wyler.

Besides, the attraction between actress and director was already evident.

Although Jezebel is often described as a sop to appease Davis after she didn't get Scarlett O'Hara, the Siren's research indicates this isn't the case. The play (produced in 1933, three years before Margaret Mitchell's novel was published) was purchased for Bette Davis by Warner Brothers in 1937, while David O. Selznick was still actively searching for a Scarlett and no decision had been made as to casting. Selznick saw Jezebel , no doubt accurately, as the Warners' way of cashing in on the anticipation surrounding Gone with the Wind and was furious. So in fact, according to GWTW historian William Pratt, Jezebel (which was released in March 1938, eight months before Selznick ever met Vivien Leigh) was the factor that put a period to any chance Davis had at the part. Davis herself always denied the "consolation prize" idea, but in her sunset years she loved to intimate she had come close to Scarlett. Alas, that isn't true either--she was never very high in the running. As early as 1937, when Selznick was working out distribution deals, he rejected an offer from Warner Brothers that was contingent on casting Errol Flynn and Bette Davis and told friends that he would cast Katharine Hepburn as Scarlett before he would consider Davis.

Despite its being forever linked with GWTW, Jezebel is its own animal, a movie just as concerned with the fate of a strong-willed woman in a rigid society, but more harshly realistic about the ways society revenges itself. As a girl the Siren much preferred Scarlett to Jezebel's Julie Marsden. She hated the way Julie is humiliated, not merely in the excruciating ball sequence, but also when she is coldly rejected in favor of the vacuous Margaret Lindsay (a perfectly cast actress whom Davis couldn't stand in real life). Ashley makes his sexual attraction to Scarlett quite clear, but once Henry Fonda rejects Julie, it as though he never loved her at all. Later in life the Siren came to see that Jezebel--while it cannot compare with GWTW's vast historical canvas, indelible characters and peerless production values--is the more biting social commentary.

That may seem impossible, given that Wyler's pictures generally affirm rather than challenge social convention, helping to explain the appeal to Oscar voters as well as the films' rejection by those who prefer "termite art." You can read Jezebel as a straightforward women's tale of the comeuppance of a first-rate scheming bitch, and no doubt that is the tale Wyler and Davis thought they were filming. The movie approves of her treatment, audiences then approved of it and audiences today usually do as well. Witness the reviews that refer to the character as "Jezebel," instead of her name, and speak of her "deserved" humiliation at the Olympus Ball. But director and actress, through their careful attention to Julie's character, create something more complicated. Together Wyler and Davis show us an intelligent and headstrong woman who can exert her will only in petty, useless acts of rebellion. Then they show Julie stripped of her autonomy, first in part and then completely.

True to its stage roots the movie has three acts, well-summarized by Nick Davis as The Dress, The Duel and The Disease. Julie Marsden is engaged to Preston Dillard (Fonda) and happily stamping her size-five riding boots all over him. She loves Pres but, with few other outlets for her restless energy, she amuses herself by constantly testing his love. Infuriated by his refusal to leave a board meeting to attend a ballgown fitting with her, Julie rejects her regulation white dress in favor of a vivid red one that is being prepared for the town's most notorious courtesan. (As the town in question is New Orleans, we must be talking about one hell of a whore.) This is a beautifully set-up scene, Julie on a dais and surrounded on three sides by mirrors. Aunt Belle (Faye Bainter, showing why Stinky Lulu has anointed Wyler the Patron Saint of Best Supporting Actresses) and the dressmaker form a Greek chorus of warning and disapproval. (The Siren pauses to ask why, in the 1930s, dresses symbolizing wanton behavior always had some sort of swaying fringe to them. Was it hearkening back to the more sexually liberated 20s?) At first Pres refuses to take his scarlet-clad woman to the ball, then, stung by Julie's suggestion that he is afraid to defend her, he escorts her and sees to it that she is shamed in front of everyone she knows.

According to Davis, Jezebel's script gave the Olympus Ball short shrift and the production manager allotted a half-day to shoot it. Wyler took five days and turned it into the best scene in the film. It is, in effect, a drawn-out death scene, in which you watch the death of Fonda's love for Davis, the death of the old, confident Julie who is certain of her man's love, and the death of Julie's place in society. It is stunningly filmed but wrenching to watch, as they join a full dance floor only to have the other couples leave it, until gradually they are the only ones dancing. The formation is as old as time--the woman in the center, those condemning her forming an unbreakable circle, and the man Julie loves dragging her into the middle to extend her agonies just that much longer. As brilliant as the camerawork is, the Siren finds the scene just about unbearable. Not until MASH, as Sally Kellerman hit the ground in a vain attempt to cover herself, would the Siren encounter a scene that showed such soul-deep humiliation of a woman.

Pres leaves for the north and Julie shuts herself away on her plantation, Halcyon, only emerging to ride her thoroughbred horse in a way that risks breaking her neck each time. Comes word that Pres has returned. Julie, seeing her chance at last, dons the white dress she had rejected a year before and greets Pres, sure of her welcome. "I'm kneelin' to ya, Pres," she croons, sinking to the floor in an unmistakable evocation of a bridal dress being removed on a wedding night. And the Siren always wants to scream, "Get up! get up! don't DO that!" It's almost as lacerating as the ball, because the audience knows what Julie does not--Pres has come back with a Yankee bride. Before Pres can tell her, in comes Amy (Lindsay), Aunt Belle in tow. And here you can see Wyler's hand, because the Davis of Of Human Bondage or Dangerous might have flung her emotions all over the set. Instead, she keeps her eyes focused on Fonda and speaks two words without much emphasis, yet they snap out like her riding crop: "Your wife?" And then you see her denial turn to coiled, deliberate fury, directed at Amy with the politeness Southern women always muster best for those whom they truly hate.

Julie, desperate to win back Pres, begins to manipulate her old beau Buck (an unusually animated George Brent) into provoking Amy at every turn. Pres's brother, Ted, staying at the plantation for plot reasons that remain murky to the Siren, gets more and more hot under the collar until finally he challenges Buck to a duel, which Buck does not survive. Despite the fact that a belatedly remorseful Julie tried to stop the duel, she is blamed by everyone, including the loving Aunt Belle, who delivers the title line in unforgettable fashion: "I'm thinkin' of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God." Act two is over.

Before everyone can leave Halcyon in the same manner Julie once cleared out the Olympus Ball, Act Three is upon us--yellow fever results in quarantine. Julie responds in classic Southern-hostess fashion, telling the guests who now hate her guts, "Ladies and gentlemen, my home is yours, as always." Just in case we didn't realize that yellow fever was serious business in antebellum New Orleans, we get a series of intertitles screaming, "YELLOW JACK!" Ah, how the Siren loves intertitles. Pres hears of his brother's duel and for once it is the nominal hero who swoons dead away. But of course, the leading man can't just faint like a sissy so we learn Pres has come down with the dreaded yellow fever. Julie, suddenly (and, to the Siren, suspiciously) fired with noble purpose, persuades Amy to let her go with Pres to the island where yellow fever victims are being warehoused. The movie ends with Julie cradling Pres's head in her lap, as a simple wagon takes them down to the wharf and an uncertain fate. The swelling music and noble expressions want us to think Julie is choosing redemption through almost certain death. The Siren would much rather think Julie has no plans to die--she believes she's going to nurse Pres through his illness, and she's angling for another chance to hold her man.

So, let's talk about "90-take Willie" and how he directed his actors. The standard image of Wyler is of a director shooting take after take, and when the frustrated actor shrieks "what do you want from me?" he responds with something along the lines of "I want you to do it better." But the image of a rather inarticulate, ESL director doesn't quite play. From an early point Wyler chose his own subjects and his own writers, and he always chose adult stories, frequently from well-known literary sources, and scripts by the best writers in Hollywood. That doesn't suggest a man incapable of telling an actor precisely what he wanted. Wyler reportedly believed that repeating a scene broke down an actor's defenses and unlocked new approaches, but that doesn't mean he never had meaningful discourse with his actors. This fine tribute, by director Josh Becker, repeats a story about Henry Fonda enduring 40 takes of a scene on Jezebel. But Fonda himself recalled it somewhat differently, in an interview in Mike Steen's Hollywood Speaks:

I guess it's rather well known that there are actors who didn't like Wyler, just like there are actors who didn't like Ford or Fritz Lang, etc., because Wyler was known to want to shoot a lot of takes. You know, fifty takes and that kind of thing...I had a very good experience. Wyler and I got along famously. We're still friends. He never took fifty takes, though he might have taken thirty! But it was never without a reason. I've worked with John Stahl [on Immortal Sergeant] who was a director who would take it over and over again without telling you why. It was as though he was saying "If they're going to give me actors like this, what are you going to do?" You know? But with Wyler, every time he did it again he gave you something to think about. He'd say, "This time in the middle the scene react to a mosquito bite." These inventions would just come to him. He was rehearsing with film really! And that wasn't bad because I like rehearsals. So it was a good experience with Wyler, and I liked it very much.

Bette Davis later said that the moment when she began to trust Wyler's direction completely came when he forced her to watch dailies of a scene in Jezebel where she was coming down a staircase. He had shot the scene some thirty times, annoying the living daylights out of her. But when she saw the rushes, she realized that one take had "captured a fleeting, devil-may-care expression" on her face that was perfect for Julie. After that, she endured the takes. And like Fonda, she claimed that Wyler did make suggestions: "He'd remain silent, take after take after take, then when I was exhausted, he'd give a suggestion that would turn the whole scene around and make it live." She also said he "never asked you to make a move that wasn't logical. If you told you to go to a window, there was a reason for it."

With the auteur theory has come the persistent critical notion that directing actors is somehow a minor talent--that it is better to be Fritz Lang, insisting that everyone hit those chalk marks, driving people to near-breakdowns and consequently seldom having the same leading actor twice, than to be William Wyler, with your name attached to many great performances but (allegedly) not to any one overarching vision of film. The Siren says it's a fine thing to be either one.

There is a book to be written about William Wyler and Bette Davis. The story has the arc of a perfect women's picture. There's that inauspicious first meeting. There's the new meeting years later, on the set of the movie that would win Davis her second Oscar (and the first she truly deserved). Move through the director and star having a torrid extra-marital affair, carried on in the days of studio "morals clauses," when adultery came with the very real risk of ruined careers. Then Davis having an abortion during the filming of the even greater The Letter, and never telling Wyler. Continue with Davis' tale of how her single, highhanded act destroyed their chance for marriage. Then the last film together, where conflict reaches a level than ensures they never work together again. Finally, a meeting on Wyler's set much later in life, where Davis claimed, "I still saw that old gleam in his eye..."

Yes, a good story. But not as good as the movies they made together.

(Material on Davis and Wyler's personal relationship comes primarily from I'd Love to Kiss You: Conversations with Bette Davis, by Whitney Stine. Other sources include A. Scott Berg's Goldwyn and David O. Selznick's Hollywood by Ronald Haver.)

Barbara Stanwyck: The Professional's Professional

Today, July 16, marks the 100th anniversary of Barbara Stanwyck's birth. There was a time when the former Ruby Stevens of Brooklyn was familiar mostly as a white-haired matriarch on television series like The Big Valley, The Colbys or The Thorn Birds. Thank god those days seem to be fading, and now Stanwyck's movie career is deservedly at the forefront. There are many cinephiles who will happily name her as their favorite actress. Well, why should they be any different from Stanwyck's Hollywood peers? Here is just a small sample of what the Siren turned up in her search for what other professionals thought of "Missy," as her friends called her:

Beloved by all directors, actors, crews, and extras.--Frank Capra

She's one of the greatest women and the one of the greatest actresses I ever worked with.
--Walter Huston

The best actress I ever worked with.
--Joel McCrea

Stanwyck, of course, was a brilliant actress. She could do anything.
--William Wellman

Working with Barbara Stanwyck was one of the greatest pleasures of my career.
--Fritz Lang

[Howard Hawks] always ranked her among the best actresses with whom he ever worked.
--Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy

Barbara Stanwyck is a fantastic actress. When she makes a gesture as she speaks a line, she has a way of suspending that motion in mid-air for a split second on a certain word which gives an imperceptible emphasis to that word.
--Mitchell Leisen

A professional's professional, a superb technician with a voice quality that immediately hooked you with its humanness.
--King Vidor

Barbara Stanwyck had an instinct so sure she almost needed no direction.
--Preston Sturges

When [in 1932 Picturegoer] listed the top six female stars (Garbo, Constance Bennett, Dietrich, Chatterton, Shearer and Crawford), [Adolphe] Menjou himself told the editor that in Hollywood Stanwyck was rated above the last two.

--David Shipman

How's that for unanimity? The Siren agrees with Adolphe Menjou, and would in fact rank Stanwyck's abilities above that entire Picturegoer list, even above Garbo, who was an instinctual actress and not the superb technician that Stanwyck was. So on this fine Monday, let us take some time to talk about Barbara Stanwyck. Here, the Siren lists her favorites. She loves the actress in all of these movies, and the titles are ranked solely to indicate how much pleasure the Siren gets out of each performance:

1. The Lady Eve
2. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
3. Double Indemnity
4. Remember the Night
5. Stella Dallas
6. Ball of Fire
7. The Mad Miss Manton
8. Lady of Burlesque (Stanwyck, as Joel McCrea noted, was in burlesque herself and "came up the hard way.")
9. Clash by Night
10. Titanic

Over to you. Name your favorite Stanwyck roles. Did she ever give a bad performance? (Not many actresses who spark that as a genuine query!) Where should she rank in the pantheon of Hollywood actresses?

(Cross-posted at Newcritics. Also, check out Peter Nelhaus's take on Roustabout here.)

The Siren's Top 9 Objections to the AFI Top 100

Because she likes the number 9 better than the number 10. In reverse order, the Siren's problems with who made it, Ma, and who didn't:

9. This morning, my daughter was playing with a set of wooden blocks. There are 30 blocks in the set. Her twin brother reached out and tentatively grabbed one block. This left her with 29. His sister let out a howl that could probably be heard in Newark: "No, MY BLOCKS! MINE!" And I had the same conversation as always. There are a lot of blocks here. Your brother can have his one block.

What reminded the Siren of this scenario was the presence, once again, of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai on this list. These films weren't merely created by a British director, like Vertigo. They are culturally and thematically British, about British history and British empire. Who cares about which country put up the money? Kwai had one American star and two American screenwriters, it is true, but one writer was in France and the other in London because we had, you know, made them leave in order to get work.

We have a massive film industry. We have our own blocks and furthermore, unlike this morning's combatants, we are not four years old. We don't have to take away movies from the British. (The Siren assumes that the howls over the prior inclusion of The Third Man as "American" must have made a dent, since its omission can't be explained otherwise.) And while we are on the subject, A Clockwork Orange, despite Kubrick, doesn't make much sense as an American movie either.

8. No Fritz Lang. Come on--no Scarlet Street? no Woman in the Window? Well, the second one has been hard to see for some time. The Siren hasn't seen it since the 1980s, but its DVD-less state is about to be rectified.

7. Sophie's Choice really isn't a good movie. It is a pretty bad movie with one great performance and an unforgettable climax. The other movies on the list that the Siren considers unworthy can be justified in terms of cultural impact or later influence--even (the Siren swallows hard) something like The Sixth Sense. But Sophie's Choice was recognized as a deeply flawed movie even at the time, and if it had lasting influence on anything other than subject matter and Meryl Streep's (well-earned) career the Siren has missed it.

6. The Siren loves James Cagney. Worships him, in fact. And she loves Yankee Doodle Dandy. But if you are going to do only one Cagney, the one to do is White Heat.

5. Similar beef with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Swing Time is great, but everyone knows Top Hat is the one to beat.

4. You out there, yes you, the one whining about Citizen Kane. Cut it out. No, it is not a "boring movie." No, it did not achieve its status strictly because of "technical stuff." It is one of the most thematically complex movies ever made in this country, an astoundingly rich statement on American success and American failure, as relevant today as it was in 1941. The Siren finds Paradise Lost boring. Nevertheless she does not waste people's time by trying to argue that this means Milton is overrated.

3. If, however, you wish to argue that The Magnificent Ambersons has as much of a right to be here as Kane, the Siren will listen.

2. Famous exchange at Ernst Lubitsch's funeral:

Billy Wilder: No more Ernst Lubitsch.
William Wyler: Worse than that. No more Lubitsch pictures.

While this thought depressed the hell out of Wilder and Wyler, a lack of Lubitsch does not unduly ruffle the mandarins of the AFI. That is ten different kinds of wrong.

1. As Ebert points out, this list is more a marketing tool than anything else, designed to shift DVDs. Given the amount of attention the list generates, and the fact that it is compiled by "filmmakers, critics and historians," does it have to be so SAFE? So many Oscar winners. So many epics and adventure stories, so few women's pictures, so little grit. Everything already widely seen and widely available. Live a little, guys. Is a bit of a surprise too much to ask?

Postscript: Mucho morning-after discussion on this, of course. Edward Copeland tracks the ins and outs on the list, and M.A. Peel at Newcritics looks in depth at the Top 10. Here is Chuck Tryon, giving his thoughts on the value of lists in general, and speculating about the "why" behind some of the MIA. Jim Emerson gives his thoughts, and links to his own list at the bottom of the post. Lots of love to the Reeler for the best two-word summary of the AFI list, and his constructive suggestions for alternatives. A list of "100 Forgotten Films"--now that is something the Siren could applaud.

Still more--Daniel at Check the Fien Print has no tolerance for the D.W. Griffith entry, and a lot of skepticism over how it was chosen.