Gigi (1958): A Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

What the Siren Will Be Doing on the Night of Feb. 26

To her recollection, the Siren has never posted about an Oscar race, as opposed to the ceremony, but there's a first time for everything. This year, there are two movies up for Best Picture that are deeply concerned with film history: Hugo and The Artist. The Siren worshipped Hugo, as you know. The Artist was not as accomplished but she still found it a lovely movie, albeit one with parts that didn't work.

During the run-up to Oscar season (a long series of ceremonies fused in the Siren's mind as the "You Can't Make Me Care" awards), there's been a lot of venom directed at both these pictures online. (Greg Ferrara recently discussed that phenomenon under topic 5 of this post.) Why this is happening, the Siren couldn't tell you. There's a lack of proportion when some critics dislike a middlebrow, well-received movie, a type of anabolic rage that the Siren works mightily to avoid. She doesn't hold back because she aspires to become The Blessed Siren. She tempers her words because she wants to have some white-hot invective left if she should ever have to review something like, I don't know, Human Centipede 2.

The Siren has no quarrel with those who find Hugo or The Artist to be flawed to one degree or another--well, beyond marshaling cogent and irrefutable explanations of why with Hugo they're wrong. Marilyn Ferdinand was resolutely uncharmed by The Artist. Comrade Lou Lumenick responded to Hugo with, in essence, "meh." But there is one strain in the anti-Hugo, anti-Artist camps up with which the Siren will not put. That could be called the "ugh, a film about film history" strain.

It probably isn't Slate's fault that the Siren reached the outmost limit of enough when she saw these two discussions. It was bound to happen at some point, but that point came when in part two, Dan Kois weighed in with:

Are you ready for the most self-important Oscars ever??? Troy, you’re absolutely right that this year’s nominations skew oooooold. They’re also cinema-obsessed. Glen Weldon of NPR had it right when he tweeted that nods for The Artist and Hugo have essentially guaranteed that this Oscar ceremony will be well-nigh insufferable. ('The cinema. Dreams made of light, flickering in the dark. Film is the very language of the soul …') On Oscar night, I’m playing a drinking game in which I down a cocktail every time Martin Scorsese calls his movie 'the picture.' We've already made a reservation in the penthouse suit of our local hospital.

Mm-hm. Let's rewind the reel. Dave Kehr and others write frequently about the legions of films that have dropped out of circulation. We write about how hard it is to see some films even from major auteurs such as Raoul Walsh and Ernst Lubitsch, let alone someone arcane like Alfred E. Green. Huge swaths of the general public don’t want to see a black-and-white movie (and for that reason alone, the Siren doesn't think anyone should "barf" over an Artist win). Outside the major cities, the revival house is on the verge of extinction, and the people running the few that survive tell bloodcurdling tales of their struggles to obtain prints. Thirty-five millimeter is about to bite the dust (read here and sign the petition, the Siren hasn't even the heart to summarize). There is an overwhelming tilt toward the new on the big, high-traffic movie sites. About four years ago, Internet film writers--cinephiles, in other words, mostly young ones--were surveyed to compile a list of the 100 best films; two-thirds of the films selected were produced after 1970.

In light of all that, if you have a problem with a few minutes of people talking about light passing through film or the magic of the movies or whatever, while some old clips scroll by at the Kodak Theatre, then what the Siren says to you is suck it up.

The Siren stated her, ah, displeasure on Twitter and got a very polite and collegial response from Dana Stevens and Kois himself, Kois asking "Can't we lobby for the Oscars to deliver the message without the rhetoric?" and adding, "Use video. Use storytelling. Build an appreciation for film history without lectures." Fair enough, although the Siren thinks complaining about pompous writing in an Oscarcast is like complaining that the soy sauce is salty. The Siren will take Mr. Kois at his word, and has no hard feelings.

Even so, the Siren hereby declares her rooting interests ahead of the 84th Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Feb. 26. Forgive her language in advance.

The Siren wants an Oscar ceremony so stuffed with old-movie clips that the fanboy contingent chokes on their Cheetos. She wants tributes, she wants high-flown overwritten paeans, she wants audience reaction shots of dewy 20-year-old starlets looking puzzled as shit at the sight of Janet Gaynor.

The Siren will go further. If Michel Hazanavicius wins, she wants him to take that list of silent-movie inspirations he did for Indiewire, name-check them all and cause Wikipedia to crash from all the people looking up "King Vidor" at the same time. Then, she hopes Hazanavicius praises City Lights, which he said inspired The Artist more than any other film, and then she wants him to spell out the Amazon.com URL for The Chaplin Collection Volume Two letter by fucking letter.

Of course, the Siren hopes Scorsese wins. And if he does, she wants him to talk about the tragedy of decaying film stock. She wants him to point at the executives in the audience like Burr McIntosh ordering Lillian Gish into the snowstorm and demand to know what the hell they think they are doing, trashing 35 millimeter. She wants him to mention projection speeds, she wants an explanation of three-strip Technicolor and dye-transfer, she wants black-and-white deep-focus and a history of lenses from the Lumiere brothers on, she wants him to tell the suits to let poor Frank Borzage out of the vaults. She wants Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest film-preservation champions this country has ever produced, to get up there and talk longer than Greer Garson, talk until the violinists dangle their bows and wonder if they should grab a cup of coffee, talk until one single human being out there who has never seen a silent film sits up and says, "Gee, I should check one of these things out."

It won't happen. But if the Siren were a true pessimist, she'd blog about politics, not movies.

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.

Fandor: Simone Signoret

An actress who loses her looks should not be a matter of distress for a critic, unless she loses her talent or a limb along with them, but Signoret’s rapid descent from siren status has always drawn comment. The up-all-night beauty of the prostitute in La Ronde, one of her first major hits, can barely be glimpsed in the exhausted Resistance operative of Army of Shadows 19 years later. Yet the latter film (directed by Jean-Pierre Melville) also revealed that Signoret’s acting, always good, had only deepened.

Blunter than most was David Thomson in the 1975 A Biographical Dictionary of Film: “Gallantry cannot conceal the thought that few women, so dazzling at thirty, have faded so much by fifty.” And reading that entry, few women can conceal an ungallant thought such as, “Hey, Mr. Clooney, at least Signoret started out gorgeous.” Still, Thomson may be grasping an actual point by the wrong end. There’s something heroic in a woman–-Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Marianne Faithfull–-who takes great beauty, smokes it down to the filter and grinds it out under her sole.

Refusing to preserve beauty tells society–-tells men-–that the thing valued above all in a woman is what should be discarded, and not the woman herself. Perhaps Thomson isn’t wrong to write of the “cinematic tragedy” of Signoret’s lost loveliness as though it were a personal affront; in a sense, it is.

From the Siren's essay about Simone Signoret, which can be read in its entirety here at Fandor. Please do leave a comment there as well. This one was a pleasure to write for many reasons, primarily because Signoret's best movies are so good, and Signoret so marvelous in them. One of her best performances, in Marcel Carne's modern version of Therese Raquin, can be viewed through Fandor's subscription service. But the Siren also confesses that as a fan of Signoret, she has been waiting a good long while to express her opinion of Mr. Thomson's entry on the great French actress. Now that the Siren has done so, death--well, it will still sting. But somewhat less so.

Housekeeping; or, Multiple Fragments in Search of a Post

It's been a slow couple of viewing weeks chez Siren. She's had a hard time finding quiet periods to watch things, for one. And for another, what she has seen hasn't exactly brought the Muse sashaying over to her computer keyboard. There were a couple of John Garfield movies, Out of the Fog and Saturday's Children. Out of the Fog had Garfield in delicious bad-guy mode, Ida Lupino looking glorious and James Wong Howe making Sheepshead Bay look the way it should look but undoubtedly never did. Still, no inspiration. Saturday's Children had some lovely, delicate moments in the early scenes but slipped later.

There was The Hucksters, deeply disappointing to the Siren, although Sydney Greenstreet hauling off and spitting on a conference table was an unexpected fillip. But Greenstreet, despite the Siren's deep love for the man, was woefully miscast, Gable failed to charm and Ava Gardner's hairstylist must have had it in for her. Deborah Kerr looked ravishing but her part was wan. The movie looked pretty good but was ultimately toothless; maybe if the Siren watches Mad Men again she will now appreciate it more.

Saw Nightfall at the Film Forum, and a good thing too, since its ravishing beauty (via Jacques Tourneur and Burnett Guffey) needed a big screen. But the plot was preposterous in ways both big and small. Saw Cyrus (oh look! a new movie!) and it had some funny moments, but Marisa Tomei's character was frustratingly underdeveloped and the out-of-nowhere constant zooming made the Siren want to gently take the directors' hands off the camera and hand them some worry beads.



Then there was a Frank Borzage night at the home of some dear friends, where we saw Doctors' Wives, an intermittently interesting early work that the Siren has little to say about, and Young as You Feel, a ghastly relic that the Siren cannot recommend even to ardent Borzage completists. There were three shots where she thought she spotted Borzage; otherwise the only sustaining moments came when the Siren's couchmate (He Knows Who He Is) dissolved into inadequately suppressed giggles every time Will Rogers described himself as "an old meat-packer." That sent the Siren into fits as well and she ended the evening with her Serious Classic Movie Viewer cred in tatters.

Hence the radio silence.

Some weeks back we held a belated house-warming and the Siren shut the door to the hall closet where we had piled all the things we didn't know what to do with, like toolboxes and an old bureau and papers to shred and all the pictures we haven't hung because we don't want to face the inevitable debates: "I hate that one." "I hate THAT one more." "Hey, that was a gift." "Oh, a gift, huh. From who? a sworn enemy?" The door to the closet is right next to the bathroom and during the party the Siren kept one eye peeled to make sure no one opened the wrong door and discovered the secret of our Potemkin housekeeping. Since then, the Siren opens the door from time to time, looks in and says to herself, "I ain't touching this shit," and shuts the door, suddenly gripped with the strong desire for a stiff Scotch.

Well, it's only 9:30 am right now and besides, the housewarming guests drank up all the Scotch and it hasn't been replaced. (That isn't a reproach, guys; we had fun doing it.) So the Siren brewed a cup of nicely smoky lapsang souchong and decided to clean out her computer files instead. The Siren wouldn't show you that hall closet's interior if you came over with an armful of gardenias, a sonnet to her left eyebrow and a large bottle of 30-year-old Talisker. But herewith, because her Scots-Irish ancestral blood deplores waste of any kind, and because otherwise the cupboard is bare, a glance at some of the unfinished fragments that have been lurking on the Siren's hard drive.



Here we have the notes for Siren's abortive stab at a comparison between Criss Cross and Touchez Pas au Grisbi, two movies that she saw back-to-back and that still strike her as complementary.

Oddly, it was the French film that ultimately had a less cynical outlook, holding out the possibility of loyalty and even love. Yvonne DeCarlo speaks for the Americans when she snaps at Burt Lancaster: "Love, love! You've got to watch out for yourself."

Criss Cross is even better than The Killers, one of its predecessors, at least in part because of DeCarlo. Her beauty is just lights-out, on a level with the earlier film's Ava Gardner. Unlike Gardner, however, DeCarlo really acts in this movie. She is very good as Anna, Lancaster's ex-wife, showing us a woman who may have some good qualities deep down, but meanwhile is out for herself. Burt Lancaster's magnificent looks help his portrayal of Steve who is, it must be acknowledged, a bit of a drip. Steve takes up a lot of his narration blaming fate, when we can see he's the author of his own misfortunes.

Both of the movies flip sex roles--Steve the drippy romantic, Anna the practical hustler; Gabin the loyal mate, his partner the feckless damsel-in-distress.

Jeanne Moreau really, really, really cannot dance. DeCarlo, on the other hand, tears up the floor.

The opening graf of a planned post on the splendid The Late George Apley. If this one pops up on TCM, by all means watch it.

It has a dry, witty script by Philip Dunne and a wonderfully funny performance from Ronald Colman whom, as her readers know, usually hits the Siren like a big ol' dose of Nyquil. Mr. Siren, who was in the same room trying to beat an external hard drive into submission, at one point looked up and remarked with mild irritation, "You're laughing a LOT at this one." He would have had a much better time just watching it with me.

This is an excellent example of a post the Siren abandoned because she was being entirely too pissy. And no, she won't tell you who it was who aroused her ire, and there are no prizes for a correct guess, either.

Dude ... Stage Door?

There are I-don't-know-how-many actresses and films out there to illustrate your thesis that everything was so much better without feminism, and you choose--Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door?

Okay, don't let me stop you. Maybe next week you'll follow up with how things in Hollywood were a lot better before they invented panchromatic film. I want to be sympathetic here, because I happen to prefer old movies myself. Hence my blogging about old movies. And of course it is a truism that you are entitled to your opinion. But thematic evaluations are supposed to be rooted in something, preferably something connected to the movie. You can't just watch Bringing Up Baby and decide it's all a metaphor for the Boer War.

Yes, we are all better off without that one. It was only going to get worse from there.

Here, to close out this collection of unrelated fragments, are the Siren's notes on My Last Breath, as her British edition titles Luis Buñuel's autobiography.

The book is, surprisingly, in rough chronological order but Buñuel still meanders from topic to topic, detouring for a while and then swerving back onto the road. He was born in the Aragon region of Spain in 1900, at a time when the area was poor and the peasants still lived in much the same way they had for centuries. His father was relatively well-to-do, however, and Buñuel received a good Jesuit education, right up to the day he was expelled, much to the Siren's relief. (Come on, this is Buñuel. You don't want to hear about him being a complete altar boy, do you?) He went to Madrid in the 1920s to be educated at the university, and there Buñuel seems to have met everyone who was anyone in Spain at the time, from the young Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali to King Alfonse.

He started out studying insects and claims he could recognize and give Latin names for many well into his old age. Eventually he switched to philosophy, but then he moved to Paris. There he made the revolutionary Un chien andalou and L'Âge d'Or, the latter film distinguishing itself by being the first Buñuel to be banned (for about fifty years, as a matter of fact).

In the same way that Buñuel's films can focus on seemingly extraneous details (in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, people going on and on about their dreams, as Bunuel does here) and exclude the information you are dying to know (what, exactly, happened to Don Jaime's wife in Viridiana?) the director gives one chapter apiece to his most prolific years as a filmmaker, in Mexico and in France. He is happy to give you a recipe for a Buñueloni (the Siren would love to order one of these at her next blogger outing) but doesn't want to tell you much about, say, Gerard Philippe.

So now we've used up some leftovers. There's about a half-dozen more lurking around, but the Siren promises she won't drag those out until the next time she's just seen a Will Rogers movie and is stumped for material.

If you've seen anything brilliant lately, by all means, tell.

Update: In a nice coincidence prompted by TV5's showing Grisbi last night (Mr. S watched too), James Wolcott posts about the Becker film. The dancing amused him too. Even funnier: Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough, which may well be playing on a double bill with The Oscar in some midnight-camp-palace of the afterlife.

And the in-depth take on Nightfall that the movie deserves, from Kim Morgan, at Noir of the Week. The Siren was still not keen on the woozy plotting, but Kim points out all the brilliance that made the Siren pretty much love the thing anyway. And Simon Abrams at Slant Magazine liked the movie less than either Kim or me, but makes his case very well (Simon has particular problems with the ending).

Adultery at the Movies; Or, How to Get Rielle Photos Out of Your Head

The Siren is obsessing over a news story again. Briefly distracted by news that Bernie Madoff got the living hell stomped out of him in prison, she found herself confronted by John Edwards. I've been avoiding the Edwards saga because, frankly, I really liked the jerk's health-care proposals. So once it became obvious that I had thrown my support behind a self-regarding horse's ass, I sort of checked out. Tea Parties, Oscars, the bond market, the Finnish dock workers' strike--I would read anything that got me away from John & Elizabeth & Rielle & Andrew.

This week, however, I tore myself away from the fed-funds rate and read that GQ interview with Rielle Hunter, the one where she proves her dedication to the image of women everywhere by stripping to her scanties and plopping down next to Dora the Explorer. I can explain my madness only by comparing it to the impulse that had me watching The Oscar, although in all fairness The Oscar had better photography and Eleanor Parker looks better half-naked. My brain froze, my eyelids drooped, I started to wonder what was for dinner, and still I read on in search of one sentence that would show some form of self-awareness. There are no words for this woman's vacuity, only images--it's the Pyramids, it's the steppes of Russia, it's the pants on a Roxy usher. And I kept muttering to myself, over and over again, "Jesus wept, John, YOUR TASTE."

So, in order to clear her brain of the stuffed-animal clutter that is "Hello America, My Name Is Rielle Hunter," the Siren started to think about Adultery at the Movies, where love is set to Rachmaninoff, "Un Sospiro" or Max Steiner and not the Dave Matthews Band. Here are images from ten movies where people lie and sneak and cheat on their spouses, but by god, they do it with someone worthy and they do it with style.



1. The Earrings of Madame de...


2. Letter From an Unknown Woman


3. Children of Paradise


4. Brief Encounter


5. Now, Voyager


6. The Postman Always Rings Twice


7. A Summer Place


8. That Hamilton Woman


9. Strangers When We Meet


10. Deception

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.

Seeing Red on The Red Shoes

I am often asked why The Red Shoes, of all our films, became such a success in every country of the world. More than a success, it became a legend. Even today, I am constantly meeting men and women who claimed that it changed their lives...I think that the real reason why The Red Shoes was such a success, was that we had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and that, and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.
--Michael Powell, A Life in Movies

Boris Lermontov: 'The Ballet of The Red Shoes' is from a story by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured by an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the Ball. For a time all goes well, and she is happy. But at the end of the evening she is tired and wants to go home. But the red shoes are not tired. The red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.
Julian Craster: What happens in the end?
Lermontov: Oh! In the end she dies.
--from The Red Shoes, screenplay by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell

Melodrama! Kitsch! Ham! Entirely undistinguished choreography!
--Alastair Macaulay, New York Times Arts and Leisure section, Aug. 31, 2008

There are movie reviews that you read and disagree with, but enjoy for their spirited argument and wit. There are reviews that you disagree with and do not enjoy, but which you acknowledge are well-argued or have a certain misguided insight.

And then there are reviews that make you wonder why the critic bothered at all, so lacking is the piece in any affinity for the moviemakers, sense of history or ability to draw well-supported conclusions about the aims or accomplishments of the movie. Until today the Siren thought the 2008 Palme d'Or in such boneheadedness had been won by a certain ill-judged take on Sunrise. She was wrong. Alastair Macaulay, the dance critic for the New York Times, won it today with a "tribute" to the 60th anniversary of The Red Shoes.

He starts by observing the initial British release wasn't a huge financial success and that "nobody could guess that it would become one of the highest-earning British movies of all time." So right off the bat we realize Macaulay's research has been, let's just say light. Director Michael Powell didn't guess, he knew he had made a great movie and was extremely frustrated at the failure of the British distributors to give it a chance to build in U.K. cinemas. He found an ally in Bill Heineman of the board of United Artists, who lobbied hard to give the picture a chance in the U.S.: "If the public see this film, they'll go. Their kids will take them to see it." Heineman was right; the film was booked into a 200-seat New York theatre called the Bijou and marketed to balletomanes, which as Powell drily noted meant "half the little girls in America." It ran for two years and seven weeks.

This movie, filmed in a beautifully romantic style that was quite unlike anything seen before, and which influenced directors from Minnelli to Scorsese, to Macaulay "often looks as though it will turn into something much more conventional." It's about the "standard story of a woman's choice," you see, love or art. Standard, not classic or eternal, because isn't this life-versus-art thing something we've all worked out at this point? And the choice is "presented to the aspiring ballerina Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) at a melodramatically high pitch." This is the first occurence of the term melodrama used as a perjorative, but it will not be the last. Macaulay seems to think that the movie, with a central character based on two of history's most self-dramatizing impresarios and concerning itself with a theatrical art that conveys emotion through image, should really be toned down a bit. The best he can say for The Red Shoes is to point out a few scenes in which it "manages to transcend its own melodramatic and kitschy nature."

Other pearls follow.

"You look at the movie, and you marvel that these girls want to devote themselves to such an art." Because no one ever dreams of a consuming, lifelong devotion to a singularly beautiful and ephemeral art, especially not when it's lovingly filmed by the likes of Jack Cardiff.

"...its 'Red Shoes' ballet could never be danced onstage. (Its dissolving scene changes are sheer cinema, and the ballerina role is too nonstop for any dancer’s stamina.)" Right here we have the part that pissed off the Siren to the point that she sat down at the keyboard. Gosh no, no real dancer could magically jump into those shoes as Shearer does. Excuse me, Mr. Macaulay, but who gives a good goddamn? This is cinema, not a filmed performance. Those "dissolving scene changes" are what a cinephile calls "perfect editing" (by Reginald Mills). Show me the great movie production number that could be danced on stage. "The ballet ceased to be a naturalist conception," said Powell in his memoirs, "and became completely surreal...we were photographing images, not words...There was one contributor to our work whose collaboration was absolutely essential for the success of 'The Ballet of the Red Shoes,' and that was the audience." Preferably an audience that doesn't get all grumpy when they realize "The Girl Hunt Ballet" in The Band Wagon couldn't fit on a real Broadway stage.


"Wallbrook [sic] plays Lermontov not quite realistically; the story’s feverish melodrama comes from him, and he seems at once absurd and hypnotic." The Siren admits that even some lovers of The Red Shoes have had problems with Anton Walbrook's performance. They're wrong, however. Lermontov is generally seen as a stand-in for Sergei Diaghilev, but Powell said he was "really more like" film producer Alexander Korda, whose outsized manner the director wrote about at great length. Some personalities truly are much, much larger than life, larger even than a movie screen. Lermontov's job is to be imposing, a taskmaster who can fire up the artists under his control. In no sense is Walbrook overplaying, and here Powell agrees with the Siren, calling Walbrook "powerful" and "subtle...he goes underneath every line of dialogue, every emotion."

"The film pays fetishistic attention to all of ballet’s detailed contrivance: the elaborate makeup, the constant audience-consciousness, the endless attention to minutiae of musical timing and technical articulation." The Siren loves ballet but admits to a lack of formal knowledge. Still, correct me if I am wrong, but should a dance critic really be characterizing "musical timing and technical articulation" as "minutiae"? And again with the perjorative adjectives: "fetishistic." The movie is about a commitment to art that drives an artist to her grave, and Powell's dedication to showing the incredible preparation that must go into a single performance is part of the movie's realism.



I said realism and I meant it. The ultimate accomplishment of The Red Shoes is the way it combines the dream world of a ballet performance and the spiritual dedication to art, with the actual backbreaking work of the artist and the life sacrifices that ballet demands. Vicky's death scene is sneeringly described by Macaulay as "sheer Tosca" and "sheer Anna Karenina," as though either source is a hallmark of kitsch. Powell's memoirs, which Macaulay might greatly benefit from reading, remark on how the bloodiness of that scene struck the British critics as "bad taste." "The whole point of the scene," Powell countered, "was the conflict between romance and realism, between theatre and life." Indeed, that's the whole point of the movie.

Postscript: Yes, the Siren is back, and the jet lag is hitting her hard this time. She has been up since 5 am this morning and so reacted rather badly to having The Red Shoes, which hit her like a thunderclap when she saw it on the big screen years back, dissed by the paper of record.

I avidly read every comment on every post and ask my patient readers to forgive me for the lack of reciprocal comments on them. In Normandy I had no Internet access at all and in Paris time was short indeed. France was as wonderful as ever, however, despite the strange French habit of insisting "ça n'existe pas" when they can't find something (in this case, the Region 2 of Make Way for Tomorrow, which certainly does existe and which I bought.) I'll let Mr. Powell have the last word on France, where The Red Shoes was shot in part: "Everything that I had been missing over the bitter years came rushing back to me. I knew, as I have always known, that there is no culture like the French culture, taste like French taste, no ménage like a French ménage."

Le Crime de DVD: A cri de coeur from the Siren

This past weekend the Siren saw a great film: Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Jacques Prévert's witty script is an absolute marvel of construction that compresses a large number of fully drawn characters into a complex narrative, and does so in (get this) 80 minutes. (As John McElwee observed this week in his fine review of the film of the moment, "current films too often start with a bang and finish up dog tired.") And the Siren's copy contained a marvelous prologue in which Renoir himself discusses the movie, pointing out the experimental nature of the way it was filmed. The director also talks of his admiration for the performance of Jules Berry as the villain, Batala. It is no wonder Renoir got consistently fine performances from his actors--he respected both them and their craft.

Isn't that great? Aren't you burning to see this 1936 gem now? You are? Tough.

It isn't on Region 1 DVD. The Siren had to get her copy, like samizdat, from a sympathetic blogger she won't name for fear of bringing some sort of corporate wrath on his head. He knows who he is, and he's a mensch. He probably won't mind if the Siren tells you the print is in so-so shape--murky in parts, with the occasional jump. But Monsieur Lange's nowhere near as bad off as Caught, which the Siren also got under-the-table from another, equally wonderful blogger. That Max Ophuls masterpiece, about love, social-climbing and obsession, looked as though it had been filmed through a Mafia widow's mourning veil.



The good news is that Monsieur Lange is now part of a Region 2 boxed set from the UK, and Caught will soon be available as a Region 2 DVD from BFI Films. The Siren's going to get her own copy of Caught, to go along with Le Plaisir, Letter from an Unknown Woman and The Reckless Moment. Gallingly, however, the last two films were made right here in the good old U.S. of A., as was Caught. Ophuls was as continental as they come, a true cosmopolitan. But it was the independent company of Joan Fontaine (bless her) that made Letter possible, and Universal that distributed it. It was our grand old country that provided the resources for Ophuls to make three phenomenal movies in a row (after letting him languish for six years, but better late than never). And it is our country, and the corporate drones who make the decisions about which movie gets a DVD release, that has failed to release these movies. In all fairness, perhaps it is the French who should have been on the case of Monsieur Lange. But we are also awaiting Diary of a Chambermaid, a superb Renoir film made during his American exile, as well as The Woman on the Beach.

Glenn Kenny performs a great service every Monday Morning with his "Foreign-Region DVD Report," letting us all know about movies available outside the U.S. Serious cinephiles do own region-free players. The Siren does. She has also resorted to VHS for those movies that made it to one format but not the other. But what does it say about us as a society when we concede some of the greatest American art to the tender care of other countries? What becomes of a great film if it is confined to highly expensive overseas orders, bootleg copies made by friends, a late-night Turner Classic Movies screening or the occasional festival screening? You might as well take the score for Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14, stick it in a closet and bring it out once a decade. You're slowly killing the potential audience for the lesser-known movies, virtually guaranteeing that the broad taste for classics as something more than antique curios is fated to wither and die.

You want to see Bigger Than Life, Nicholas Ray's legendary 1956 study of a suburban father's descent into addiction and madness? So does the Siren. So she's picking up a copy next month. When she goes to FRANCE. And she's also getting a copy of Make Way for Tomorrow, which influenced Ozu's cowriter on Tokyo Story and which many critics rank with Citizen Kane as one of the great American films. The French found the money to put together a pretty good version of it. Paramount (a unit of Viacom, which posted $1.6 billion in 2007 profits) has not. The Siren wonders what Leo McCarey, a rock-ribbed patriotic conservative of the deepest dye, would have made of his own country's lack of interest in distributing his best film.

Well, the Siren says it's a disgrace. Don't talk to me about profit margins, complex rights and the cost of restoration. Last year NBC Universal cleared $923 million in profit. The company is owned by GE and Vivendi, both of which have also been known to make money. They could throw a little dough at Ophuls.

No, movie studios are not charities. But neither are they widget manufacturers. They are sitting on a major part of our historical and cultural heritage as Americans. And sitting, and sitting, and sitting, while the films' lifespan becomes ever more precarious. We accept that companies have a responsibility not to pollute or leave a mountain looking like a moonscape. (Well, most of us do. Hard-core Randians probably quit reading before this paragraph anyway.) Why are movie studios not held to a higher standard for this vital responsibility, that of preserving and disseminating the very things that make them special?

Criterion is a splendid company. We all love Criterion. They rock, and furthermore they just released an Ophuls set of The Earrings of Madame de..., La Ronde and Le Plaisir. (Pretty please, could we put some hustle in the Naruse stuff, guys?) But they're not all that big, and they can't do it all themselves. They can't even do it with other outfits like Kino also helping out. As a cinephile the Siren is not content to hang around and wait for Criterion every time someone says "oh, they're supposed to be doing a version." There are thousands of films, and only one Criterion.

[I saw] The Wind at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester's Eastman House one night in 1956. I had never heard of it! And I could find no clue to its history. Gish's clothes were charmingly contrived from all periods, from no period. Her hair was either piled up in a dateless fashion on top of her head or swirling round her throat and shoulders. The Swedish director Victor Seastrom (born Sjöström), in his direction, shared her art of escaping time and place. Seastrom and Gish were meant for each other. After the picture, I could hardly wait to ask the curator of Eastman House, James Card, when and where it was made. He said that it had been made at MGM, in Hollywood, in 1927. 'In Hollywood, in 1927, at MGM?' I said. 'Why, I was there then, working at Paramount! How come I never heard a word about The Wind?'
--Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood

The past decade's pre-code discoveries have emphasized the fact that the film canon shifts constantly. Given a steady stream of classic movies, we look at old films with new eyes and wonder how past audiences missed their evident greatness. Those films in the vault--how do we know there isn't another Man's Castle, another Employee's Entrance in there? Film stock is finite. And The Wind, by the way, isn't on DVD.

The Siren has a waking nightmare that visits her sometimes as she tries to go to sleep, in which the only old movies to be found anywhere are on the AFI Top 100 list. She sees herself ten years from now, wanting to share One-Way Passage with her teenage twins. And she can't. It's off in a basement somewhere, turning to dust. Never mind, the special effects sucked. We can alway rent Casablanca again, right?

Jules Dassin, 1911-2008

The Siren has a friend who is a film editor, and over the years this gentleman has corrected her more than once when she pronounced Dassin "Das-SAHN," in the French way. "He's American," the editor would say. "Don't forget." Dassin would have approved. "I'm American, and that I will stay," he said, in this excellent interview over at the WGA site.

The Siren has been thinking about her editor friend's reminder this morning. Because along with the Sunrise jokester from the Oscars, here's another writer the Siren would like to nominate for permanent hiatus: whoever wrote Jules Dassin's obituary for the Associated Press.

Dassin, a leftist activist whose more than 20 films also included "Topkapi," abandoned Hollywood in 1950 during the Communist blacklisting era.

[snip]

Dassin, who was active in leftist political causes, was denounced by Hollywood contemporaries as being a Communist enough to be placed on the era's infamous blacklists.

He moved to London in 1950 to shoot his next film, "Night and the City." Dassin then lived in Italy and France before returning to the cinema with "Rififi."

Did you get the part where he was a leftist? Are you sure? Should we mention it again? Lefty-left-left-leftist, got that? How about the fact that Dassin left the Communist party in 1939? Oops, no space for that. He moved to London to do Night and the City, who knows why. Then Dassin "abandoned" the U.S. after being denounced by vaguely plural "contemporaries" and put on the blacklist. They wouldn't let on just anybody, you know, you had to be "Communist enough." Then Dassin lived in Italy and France and after soaking up the Euroscene he returned with Rififi.

That's what these leftists do, you know. Just up and leave us with nary a backward glance:

He could not find work in Europe for five years, as producers felt American distributors would automatically ban any film with his signature. When Rififi opened, critics wrote about Dassin as if he were European. The New York Herald Tribune reported in 1961, 'At one ceremony, when the award to Rififi was announced, [Dassin] was called to the dais, and a French flag was raised above him: "It should have been a moment of triumph but I felt awful. They were honoring my work and I'm an American. It should have been the American flag raised in honor."'

The Siren knows she sounds grumpy. Well, it's bad enough to lose Richard Widmark and Abby Mann in the same week. It is worse to hear that an American director of exceptional talent, the maker of at least three excellent movies (Brute Force, The Naked City and Thieves' Highway) and two great ones (Night and the City, Rififi) has died at the ripe old age of 96, and then see that the obituary flashing across the newswires is a slanted piece of crap.

It's been sixty years, people. You can stop pretending that protecting us all from Jules Dassin movies was essential for national security.

All right, the Siren feels better now. Surely the day will bring good posts from good bloggers to wash the taste of the AP out of her mouth. The Siren has spent a lot of time reading farewells to the great Richard Widmark. Meanwhile there's the WGA interview. And, there is always Youtube.

P.S. Speaking of Richard Widmark--please check out this post over at Scanners, where Jim Emerson meticulously reconstructs the oft-retold Andrei Tarkovsky incident at Telluride. Glenn Kenny, meanwhile, pays his respects to Dassin's "inspired" run from Brute Force to Rififi. And Steve-O at Film Noir of the Week pays tribute by analyzing the pitch-dark Brute Force.

Just Concentrate on the Beard

The Siren had sworn off this sport for a while, but some things are too good to pass up and besides, Lance started it. TCM is showing The Life of Emile Zola tonight.

MS Encarta on Zola: "He had come to be known as a champion of the innocent, an upholder of justice, and a defender of the downtrodden. As novelist Anatole France declared in his eulogy, Zola had become 'the conscience of mankind.'"

Libertas says: "Whatever you may think of Zola’s politics, don’t let it diminish your enjoyment of Muni’s masterful performance in a perfectly realized film."

The Siren Scrutinizes Security

Let us review, shall we?


This guy




was denied a visa altogether in 2002, and this year was detained for questioning for two and a half hours while U.S. officials made sure he gave just the right answers about the health of his 105-year-old mother.

This guy


shows up in a border guard's computer as a strict no-fly risk, complete with a warning to isolate him and don protective gear. The guard waves him through after two minutes.

Heckuva job there. The Siren feels safe tonight.

Elia Kazan: Enough Already

Not content with his career as a political prognosticator and analyst, Mark Steyn makes occasional forays into film criticism. The death of Bernard Gordon, a blacklisted screenwriter of the 1950s, reminded Steyn of an old grievance, and led to his reprinting a 2003 Atlantic Monthly defense of Elia Kazan. "The arts have little time for anti-communists," declares Steyn.

The mechanism by which Elia Kazan became a pitiable victim of Hollywood liberalism puzzles the Siren no end. Here is a list of the films Kazan managed to complete after testifying before HUAC.

The Last Tycoon (1976)
The Visitors (1972)
The Arrangement (1969)
America, America (1963)
Splendor in the Grass (1961)
Wild River (1960)
A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Baby Doll (1956)
East of Eden (1955)
On the Waterfront (1954)

Here is an abridged list of awards that Kazan was either nominated for or won subsequent to his HUAC testimony.

Academy Awards
1964 Nominated, Best Director, for America, America (1963); Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, for America, America (1963)
1956 Nominated, Best Director, East of Eden (1955)
1955 Won, Best Director, for On the Waterfront (1954)

Berlin International Film Festival
1996 Honorary Golden Berlin Bear
1960 Nominated, Golden Berlin Bear, for Wild River (1960)

Cannes Film Festival
1972 Nominated, Golden Palm, for The Visitors (1972)
1955 Won, Best Dramatic Film, East of Eden (1955); Nominated, Golden Palm, for East of Eden (1955)


Directors Guild of America, USA
1987 Lifetime Achievement Award
1983 DGA Honorary Life Member Award
1964 Nominated, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for America, America (1963)
1962 Nominated, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for Splendor in the Grass (1961) 1958 Nominated, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for A Face in the Crowd (1957)
1956 Nominated, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for East of Eden (1955)
1955 Won, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for On the Waterfront (1954)

Golden Globes, USA
1964 Won, Golden Globe Best Motion Picture Director, for America, America (1963)
1957 Won, Golden Globe Best Motion Picture Director, for Baby Doll (1956)
1955 Won, Golden Globe Best Director, for On the Waterfront (1954)

National Board of Review, USA
1996 Won, Special Citation for lifetime achievement in direction.

Venice Film Festival
1955 Won, OCIC Award, for On the Waterfront (1954)
1954 Won, Italian Film Critics Award, for On the Waterfront (1954); Silver Lion, for On the Waterfront (1954); Nominated, Golden Lion, for On the Waterfront (1954)

Writers Guild of America, USA
1964 Nominated, WGA Award (Screen) Best Written American Drama, for America, America (1963)

What an odd parallel universe is inhabited by Mr. Steyn and those like him, one where Kazan's accomplishments are considered incomplete because Hollywood failed to grant him a 10-minute standing ovation, and didn't get rid of those pesky protesters outside the theater. The honorary Oscar was voted unanimously. The Siren watched the Oscar ceremony and saw Kazan accept his award. The television cameras showed her at least half in the auditorium were on their feet and applauding. She heard no boos. But the presence of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro onstage, Warren Beatty on his feet applauding, that means nothing to Steyn if Ed Harris and Nick Nolte and some other weenie libs are sitting quietly in their seats.

For Mr. Steyn and the professional indignation specialists over at Libertas, it will never be enough that Kazan went on to have a distinguished, artistically fulfilling and lucrative career after his testimony. He must be loved, not despite, but because of his having named names.



Well, to quote something Samuel Goldwyn probably never said, include me out. The Siren loves Kazan's films. As a man? Let us hear Irene Mayer Selznick on that matter. She produced A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. At the time Kazan was called before the committee she was his close friend, and they were working to produce a play that later flopped. She thought her left-leaning Hollywood friends were exaggerating the danger; Kazan in turn told her to read I.F. Stone and the Daily Compass, showing her a picture of a camp allegedly being readied for dissidents. He told Selznick that he would never testify, that he was prepared to work in Europe if necessary.

That was brave talk, and I admired him for it. To those in comparable trouble, some bigshots included, he gave advice and strength. ...

One evening during our brief run I was approached in a restaurant by Gadge's movie agent, who told me that Gadge was a hero and I would be proud of him; all I had to do was pick up the bulldog edition of the Times.

I read the paper with total disbelief. My head reeled. The unimaginable was there in print: Gadge had done an about-face politically. He had caved in and named names. He also had bought a quarter-page for an ad, defending what he had done and exhorting others to follow his lead. ...

However much he had wanted to stick to his principles, he simply didn't. He let down those who believed in him. I was the least of his victims, I only lost some illusions.

I made no effort to get in touch. From then on, when we met, [Kazan's wife] Molly cut me dead. Gadge was tentative. For years his action estranged him from a lot of people he cared about, and I include myself among them. Some never forgave him. He was, on the whole, the man who was least forgiven, because he had been the epitome of courage and strength. After Molly died, he and I drifted back together and we're friends today--I think.

As Jacob Weisberg pointed out in Slate, no recent revelations, including the Venona transcripts, improve "the case that Hollywood Communism was a significant threat to democracy." Steyn may or may not realize that he would look ridiculous arguing that the crowds yelling "Tovarich! Tovarich!" at the end of Action in the North Atlantic were a danger to our American way of life. Perhaps that is why, despite asserting that aiding the blacklist was no sin, he works so hard to absolve Congress (and, far from coincidentally, the party running it at the time) from blame:

Nor is the fact that Hollywood’s belief in its own heroism derives from a moment of colossal Hollywood cowardice any obstacle. The blacklist “victims” weren’t blacklisted by the government but by the studios–Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney–the same folks who run Hollywood today.

This rather elides the fact that the first blacklist was established the day after the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt of Congress. Implying the government had nothing to do with it is disingenuous at best. “Placement of primary political and moral blame on HUAC for what happened to people during the blacklist is obviously correct," wrote Art Eckstein at that bastion of Bolshevism, Front Page Magazine. And whence this alleged Hollywood "belief in its own heroism" that Steyn condemns? As Selznick makes clear above, the hell of the era was the spectacle of friends and colleagues turning upon one another like rats in a trap.

The blacklist ultimately did no one any good--neither those who testified, nor those who refused, nor those who avoided all involvement, nor those who were just out in the hinterlands buying tickets. Certainly if Steyn were a real cinephile, as opposed to an ideologue, he would realize that the sadly truncated filmographies of people like Marsha Hunt, Dorothy Comingore and Zero Mostel are the real blot on the film world, not a tepid ovation. Kazan went on to flourish. By testifying he was, quite obviously, trying to save his own career. As Weisberg says, that doesn't make him a villain.

It doesn't make him a martyr, either.