Watching Movies with My Mother-in-Law: Love in Karnak (Gharam fi al Karnak, 1965)

The Siren has admitted before to gaps in her viewing history, and one of them is Egyptian cinema. She hasn't even seen a full film by the great Youssef Chahine. What little viewing she has done has been accomplished on trips to Paris--clips, sequences and scenes watched with her Lebanese mother-in-law, Zahra. Zahra grew up watching these movies in cinemas in Beirut and her home town, Tyre, and she has always been happy to expound on her favorites with her non-Arabic-speaking daughter-in-law. Zahra is also an indefatigable channel-surfer, so the movies have been viewed piecemeal, as she flips through the many Arabic channels they get via satellite.

With Zahra I've watched dance numbers by the exquisite Samia Gamal, romantic scenes with the actress Raqiya Ibrahim, songs from Leila Mourad. I've watched social dramas like one set in a hospital in a desert, which had an extraordinary sequence showing a riot for water. None of them were subtitled, and the Siren often hasn't bothered to ask for a translation, especially for songs, as the reply is so frequently "She's singing about loooove." From Zahra I hear about what she thought of the actresses and the movies, what she heard of the stars in magazines and newspapers, which scenes she remembers best.

On this visit, we came across a musical number from a film starring the Syrian-Egyptian singer Asmahan, the one big rival to Umm Kulthum. Asmahan died in 1944, age 25, under circumstances even the non-conspiracy-minded Siren finds fishy. The Siren watched with Zahra as ball-attired men and women waltzed around Asmahan. The singer's voice was magnificent and she had presence so strong you barely notice what else is in the frame.

"Is she singing about loooove?" inquired the Siren.

"No," retorted Zahra, as one who says take that, smart aleck. "She is singing about Vienna. How beautiful is Vienna." The chorus sank to the floor, champagne glasses aloft, and Zahra added solemnly, "And they should interdire this song."

"But why?"

"She is telling everyone to drink!" Zahra threw back her head and roared with laughter.

The Siren didn't realize it, but she was revealing the true extent of her ignorance, because this song is extremely famous.



So this post is in no way a deep or analytical look at the rich history of Egyptian cinema. It is, rather, about the pleasures of viewing unfamiliar movies with someone you love.

Last week the Siren and Zahra were on the sofa while Zahra flipped through news channels and the many romantic-type TV serials that play a lot during Ramadan. She lighted on a movie that looked very promising to the Siren: Mad Men-era costumes for a musical number being performed in an ancient Egyptian temple.

"Look," Zahra said. "This is the movie that has Lina's dance."

Explanation here. The Siren was married in Tyre in 2000, in a ceremony and reception organized by Zahra with military precision and detail. My husband told me it was going to be small. I arrived to find that in Lebanon, "small" means the ballroom of the local hotel, champagne, dancing, a five-foot-tall cake that you cut with a sword, 150 guests and enough food to feed them all through a four-month siege by the Prussians. It was, of course, a roaring good time.

And one of the Siren's favorite moments was a dance performed by her husband's cousin, Lina, who has spent years studying classical Arab dance. (Please note: My mother-in-law detests the term "belly-dancing." "It's classical, it's folkloric," she says. "It is not vulgar.")

Lina danced beautifully, but this information was completely new to the Siren. "You're telling me that when Lina danced at our wedding, she was doing a number from this movie?"

"Yes."

"Somebody did a dance number from a movie musical at MY wedding? An OLD movie musical?"

"Yes," grinned Zahra. "You're pleased?"

"That," I said, with strong emphasis, "is THE COOLEST THING EVER."

"OK," said Zahra, setting down the remote. "We'll watch. I think Lina's dance is coming up."

Zahra told me the movie was called Love in Karnak (Gharam fi al Karnak, 1965) and was produced, written and directed by Aly Reda. Mahmoud Reda (the Siren has been unable to track down the precise relationship, and Zahra herself wasn't clear on it) was the man on screen sneaking around the ancient temple wearing a bowling shirt. Reda, a major figure in Arabic dance, clearly took some film-dance influence from Gene Kelly. His moves were very athletic and very balletic. "Many female dancers in Arab cinema," said Zahra. "Not many male. He is one of the few."

We were well into the movie and evidently in a dream sequence, with Reda moving gracefully around the temple spying on the proceedings as a pharaoh was carried in on a sedan chair and and a dance number was performed by a chorus line of beauties. "The beauty of our sun," translated Zahra as they sang, "in our country it is always spring." And then the dancers moved to the side, the door swung open and in came the heroine (Farida Fahmy).

"Aha," said Zahra. "Here is Lina's dance." And indeed it was, move for move, although despite Fahmy's skill the Siren's preference was for Cousin Lina. Lina had also incorporated some of the chorus's later moves into her performance.





The dream sequence ended and the scene gave way to Reda and Fahmy's dance troupe building a theatre at Luxor, quite like Judy and Mickey or Summer Stock. Lots of rhythmic shots of hammering, sawing, and people forming work lines and doing fun things like using a plank as a see-saw. In addition to the hero and heroine there was a sidekick in a porkpie hat and there were also plenty of showgirls in mufti, wisecracking away, which did the Siren's heart enormous good. Even Egypt has wisecracking showgirls. They unite the world.

Luxor looked beautiful, clean and empty, as Reda and Fahmy met beside a temple pool and had what was obviously the "big breakup before the make-or-break show opening." "I visited Egypt around this time, in the early 60s," remarked Zahra. "Beautiful. Big boulevards with trees. Lovely hotels. You could drive anywhere. Only 26 million people then."

"Why, how many are there now?"

"Eighty million," she replied. I absorbed that astonishing fact while the scene changed to backstage with a miserable Reda getting ready for his show, and more fabulously smart-mouthed showgirls chatting. Back to the sidekick trying to get Reda to buck up. Then we cut to Fahmy's hotel room, where she was wearing a fetching dress and throwing a bunch of other cute things into a suitcase while nursing one hell of a snit. The sidekick showed up and they argued.

"He's trying to tell her the show must go on," I announced.

"Precisely."

"I don't need subtitles," I crowed, immensely pleased with my backstage-musical decoding skills. "I don't even need you to translate."




I had to back off that a bit, however, when Fahmy sent the sidekick away with a flea in his ear and the movie moved to the show's opening number, a sword dance by Reda. "He is singing about a blonde," translated an amused Zahra. " 'I am in loooove, the fire of my love burns…' " Almost without exception the dances were shot very simply, but that was fine with the Siren, as she couldn't get enough of the troupe's energy and grace.

Reda left on a motorcycle to bring back Fahmy, and his journey was intercut with the showgirls' number, which Zahra also translated: "This is a popular-type song. 'This is the daughter of the mayor, see how she dances.' " The daughter of the mayor apparently has adorable verve and sways her flouncy skirt quite a bit. "This is how the people look at her"--with hands waggling near their faces. Man the Siren loves her showgirls.

The movie wound down, with Fahmy showing up at the last minute for her big number with Reda, which again showed a lot of Kelly influence, specifically some of the sweeping circular moves from "Love Is Here to Stay" in An American in Paris. And the Siren says if you're going to be influenced by a romantic pas de deux, you could scarcely do better.

Another big number, which Zahra told me was Nubian in origin, and then the final shot, of three poodles seated in the audience. That 42nd Street-type touch cemented the Siren's delight in the movie. It adhered to every backstage-musical trope you could imagine, but it was done with color and sparkle and enchanting sincerity. The Siren would like to see it all one day--with or without subtitles, but most definitely with Zahra.

Tis the Season for Re-Viewing

For the longest time the Siren refused to look up anything about the New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg because she preferred her imaginings of the man--essentially, Uncle Henry in Understood Betsy. There's Verlyn is in the parlor of a 200-year-old farmhouse in Vermont, having his niece or nephew read Sir Walter Scott by an oil lamp while he mends some tack (whatever tack is).

Well, Verlyn is actually a rather trim fellow and much younger than Uncle Henry, and his farm is apparently in upstate New York. The Siren is happy to report, however, that his taste in reading material isn't too far from Uncle Henry's. Verlyn's a Dickens man, something which always makes the Siren feel comradeship with a writer. And he loves Eliot, and he likes to re-read his favorites:

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

The Siren was struck, when reading these paragraphs months ago, at how you could easily substitute re-watching movies for re-reading books. The Siren wants to see some of the Oscar bait out this month (Up in the Air) and some of it she does not. (The Road--are you bloody well kidding me? I don't care how good it is, I am not doing cannibals for Christmas. And that goes double for Precious.) Well, the Siren would love to be one of those encyclopedic cinephiles who has seen everything, new and old (howdy, Glenn, Peter, Andrew, David and the whole sidebar gang) but she keeps running into the same secret, shameful vice:

She re-watches movies. A lot.

One of life's great pleasures for the Siren comes when, like a dolled-up old broad hitting the jackpot at the slots, she flips over to Turner Classic Movies and hits a well-loved film. Somehow it's better when it's random, and not the process of careful selection at the DVD shelves. There's a particular thrill to turning on a TV and finding a movie that suits your life or week or mood precisely, like Mr. Blandings coming on last week as the Siren unpacked, or White Heat popping up just when the Siren needed a shot of Cagney. And when you tune in to a scene you adore, it's like running into a well-loved friend on the street.

The holiday season is a good time for re-viewing, as you naturally hunger for familiarity and warmth. So, in the spirit both of confession and renewal, the Siren is naming, strictly in the order in which they pop into her head, 10 films she's seen about 10 times, and a favorite scene (or two or three). Some I've mentioned before, some I haven't, but you aren't going to find surprises on here. This isn't a list made to impress. It's made to make the Siren happy.

1. The Maltese Falcon: Chipping away at lead. "Well sir, what do you suggest? We stand here and shed tears and call each other names, or shall we go to Istanbul?"

2. The Thin Man: Myrna: You asleep?
Bill: Yes!
Myrna: Good... I want to talk to you.



(Not only does the Siren cherish this scene, she's played it.)

3. Citizen Kane: "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

4. Rules of the Game: The hunt. Octave and Christine in the greenhouse.

5. Letter from an Unknown Woman: Joan, suddenly come back to life in Jourdan's memory, holding the gate for him once more. The Siren has probably seen this movie only about six times because it kills her but she's listing it anyway.

6. The Band Wagon. All of it, but I particularly love trying to figure out what "Louisiana Hayride" is supposed to be doing in the show within the movie. The most utterly incongruous number in the history of American musicals, if you ask the Siren, and that is some accomplishment.



7. Footlight Parade: My favorite 30s musical. Any scene with Cagney makes me happy.

8. Now, Voyager: Claude Rains. Bonita Granville at her bitchiest. "My mother. My mother! MY MOTHER!"

9. Twentieth Century: "I close the iron door..." (A catchphrase with an old boss of the Siren's.)

10. The Pirate: The "Nina" number. Such perfect Gene Kelly, in so many ways.


Oh, what the heck. It's the season of generosity. Here's 10 more.

11. My Favorite Wife: Cary Grant in the elevator. Irene Dunne laughing over the shoe salesman, with one little hand gesture to indicate the guy's height, and another for Cary.

12. A Night at the Opera: When the orchestra strikes up "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" the Siren falls over, every time.

13. Stagecoach: "Looks like I got the plague, don't it?"

14. Captain Blood: Some of the 1930s' most amazing eye candy, but the Siren's favorite is Basil Rathbone, lounging around that prison. Ah, Basil.


15. Shadow of a Doubt: Joe and Herb, discussing the perfect murder. The most obvious counterpoint in the world ("on the nose," in a popular phrase the Siren can't stand for some reason) but Hitchcock makes it perfect, building on their innocent chatter until you find it as unbearable as Charlie does.

16. Stage Door: Any time Eve Arden or Lucille Ball is on screen. "A pleasant little foursome. I predict a hatchet murder before the night is over."

17. All About Eve: Not mentioned much, because it isn't one of those famous barbs, but Sanders, purring to Barbara Bates: "Tell me, Phoebe, do you want someday to have an award like that of your own?...Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it."

18. Mildred Pierce: "Not too much ice in that drink you're about to make for me."

19. To Be Or Not to Be: The Siren's favorite part of the running gag: "So they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt." "I thought you'd react like that."

20. Singin' in the Rain: Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont is a desert-island performance if ever there was one. "What do they think I am, dumb or something? Why, I make more money than Calvin Coolidge--PUT TOGETHER!"



That's all the Siren will allow herself, but if anyone wants to chime in with a few of their own, that would make her happy too. Consider it a gift.

Words and Music (1948)

In an excellent piece in Bright Lights Film Journal, Alan Vanneman asks if Words and Music is "An Unsung Masterpiece?" The short answer is no. What it may be, however, is the ultimate drug for musical purists, those souls who genuinely do not care about plot, dialogue or any other kind of connective tissue in a musical, but instead jump from number to number. When the numbers are from Rodgers and Hart, this has its definite advantages. Along with the Gershwins, this is the team whose songs always stop the Siren in her tracks. There were others equally as fine--Porter, Berlin, Kern, oh yes--but none to surpass.




The usual knock on Words and Music involves the phrase "sanitized biopic." Why yes, the movie does neglect to mention that Lorenz Hart, tormented genius, was tormented in part because he was gay. But it isn't as though gay themes were cropping up in a number of other movies that year, and Hart alone got his subplot scrubbed. Here's the Hart biographical stuff that does make it into the movie: his alcoholism, his unreliability, his self-hatred, his feelings of ugliness, his shortness (he's played by Mickey Rooney) and his doomed attempt to get a Broadway chanteuse to marry him. All true. Even an episode toward the end, where a drunken Rooney reels around the rainy streets of Manhattan after one final opening night and catches his death, amazingly happened in a very similar way. (Although the Siren hopes that Hart did not finally collapse in front of a store selling elevator shoes, as poor Rooney is made to do here.)




Compare this total score for accuracy to Song of Scheherazade, where the filmmakers got two things right: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was Russian, and he composed "Scheherazade."

As for the airbrushed gay theme--the Siren thinks there are signals for the hep, as much as could be under Joe Breen's watchful eye. Check out Hart's overly dependent relationship with his mother (ah, shades of Christmas Holiday) and the singer's delicate references to gosh, just something about Hart that keeps her from marrying him.

Complaining that any MGM movie is sanitized is like yelling at Lassie for shedding. Of course it's sanitized, that's what MGM did. They took life and made it shinier. This is the studio that built a Hall of Mirrors set twice as big as the Versailles original. The real problem with the frame story is that Hart, even played by Puck, is a huge downer, only fleetingly portrayed as the witty life of the party that Hart's real-life friends remembered. The quiet, rather stuffy Richard Rodgers ("Boy Next Door" Tom Drake), robbed by the script of his legendary taste for chorus girls, can't sustain a role as a foil. Perhaps most composers and lyricists just aren't great subjects for biopics, unless they eventually went deaf or crazy.

But anyway, who in their right mind would watch this for the biographical drama? What you should want, and what you get, is Technicolor, great singing, and Robert Alton's choreography, supplemented with Gene Kelly's magnificent "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" , the best dancing the luscious Vera-Ellen ever got to put on film.

What's that? You prefer Cyd Charisse? She's in there too, looking lovely in "On Your Toes" and spinning like a top to "Blue Room."

The Siren loves "Where or When," sung by Lena Horne. There is a melancholy feel to most Rodgers and Hart songs that is easy to overemphasize. Many singers opt for a happy surface with a tear-stained underpinning. Here, Lena flips that, the yearning right out on top, but a certain brightness underneath.

Then notice how Judy Garland takes the complicated and rather strange lyrics to "Johnny One-Note" and renders them clear as rainwater. How much does the Siren miss enunciation...

He may not be a convincing Hart, but Mickey Rooney has some great moments, too. He was one of those triple-threat entertainers who, as Pauline Kael once said about Liza Minnelli, are electrifying when all they need to be is charming. Instead of drawing a performance out of Rooney, a good director (which Norman Taurog pretty much wasn't) had to put a visor on the camera and tone him down a bit. Rooney's Words and Music scenes go back and forth between delightful and way-too-much, but his joyful, no-frills rendition of "I'll Take Manhattan" is perfect, a summary of everything that was best about him as a musical performer. And his duet with Garland (the last they ever did together), "I Wish I Were in Love Again," is almost as good.

Then you see Rooney during Mel Torme's superb rendition of "Blue Moon," doing a depressed drunk act and still managing to mug, and you realize that even if he had magically grown several inches, he was never going to fit in with the socially conscious 1950s, not even in the artier Freed-unit musicals that lay ahead.

There are many other numbers in Words and Music, including this one




which, the Siren is happy to report, is the perfect length for going down to the kitchen and whipping up a sandwich. (It isn't just June Allyson, the Siren can't stand "Thou Swell," finding it strained and cutesy in a way that Hart usually avoided.)

Ann Sothern gets a production number ("Where's That Rainbow?") that Vanneman didn't much care for, but the Siren adores it, mostly for the dancing boys behind Ann. Robert Alton was famous for individualizing the chorus--instead of a kaleidescope of identically clad, synchronized movement, his dancers stand out one by one even while they are backing the main singer. (This biographical entry reads that characteristic as "queer," an interpretation that the Siren found fascinating, although not completely convincing.)

Which brings the Siren to her favorite number, "Mountain Greenery," with a jaw-droppingly young Perry Como and a lovely dancer named Allyn McLerie. (Twenty years later, a very different kind of dancing would cause McLerie to bug out in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) The lyrics are almost goofy, but the dancers and Como put it across with such utter, fetching sincerity that the Siren is charmed every time. To me, the dancers and singers twirling around to "down with noise and clutter, up with milk and butter " are, like the rest of Words and Music, just so utterly MGM, another step on the road to the perfection of The Band Wagon and Singin' in the Rain.

Unquote, Please

The Siren reads way too much about movies, although the fabulous Sheila O'Malley may have her beat. After a while you start to come across the same quotes again and again. Some are still funny ("I think that 'e' made the whole fuckin' difference," mused Carole Lombard, born plain old Jean Alice Peters.) Some are just true. ("It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter," said Marlene Dietrich, a theory she tested quite a bit in later life.)

But the Siren realized this week that there are several very famous remarks made by famous movie people that she never wants to hear again, although she will, she will. In reverse order, here they are, starting with the one that triggered this post:

5. "After 40 you must choose between your face and your ass."

This is usually attributed to Catherine Deneuve, but the Siren thinks Zsa Zsa Gabor is a more likely source. We have it on Brian Aherne's authority that Zsa Zsa is quite funny when she wants to be and she was always making remarks like this. One reason to hate this quote is that the age at which you must make this decision is always changing. In this month's InStyle it's pegged at 30. Thirty!! So Amy Adams, currently igniting newstands everywhere on the cover of Vanity Fair, chose one or the other four years ago? Rubbish. Mere mortal women figure on losing both the face and the ass at some point (a point well past 30, thankyouverymuch) unless we're blessed with superb genes and/or an unlimited plastic surgery budget. But for most actresses it isn't true at 40, or even 50. The Siren's favorite example is Diane Lane...

but there's plenty of others. Please, let's not pull out this tired old saying every time we see a woman who's dieted too much or has a face that's been injected too often with the scary stuff du jour. And one last thing. This quote is always applied to a woman.



If that's fair, then tell me, which did Mickey Rourke choose?

4. "For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day..."

Usually attributed to Audrey Hepburn. There's more like that afterward but it always turns the Siren into a version of Daffy Duck, muttering "Easy stomach, don't turn over now," so that's all you're getting. Reason number one to hate this "poem" is that it's insipid nonsense. The Siren feeds hungry children every day and they run their fingers through her hair, as well as anything else that's less than five feet off the ground, but the Siren assures her readers that it has no effect on her looks one way or another. The second reason is that although Hepburn apparently liked this tripe and used to quote the whole thing, in public even (which we will let slide because Hepburn really was a generous lady with otherwise impeccable taste), she didn't write it. It was written by someone named Sam Levenson.



If we are going to talk sensible beauty quotes, let's talk about the wonderful Bette Davis vehicle, Mr. Skeffington. Claude Rains, in the title role, tells his vain, selfish wife that a woman is beautiful when she's loved. Davis retorts, as only Davis can, "A woman is beautiful when she has eight hours' sleep and goes to the beauty parlor every day. And bone structure has a lot to do with it, too."

3. "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels."

Often attributed to Ann Richards, but it predates the late, great Texas gov by some years. Rogers included Bob Thaves' Frank and Ernest comic strip, which appears to be the source, in the photos for her autobiography. The Siren cited Ginger for The Performance That Changed My Life, and will defend her abilities against all comers. But as for this quote--it's cute and all, but again, not true. She wore high heels, sure, although take a good look below--compared to today's skyscrapers they're practically flats.



Rogers also rehearsed on slippery Bakelite floors until her feet bled and she probably fantasized about stuffing Fred's top hat up his nose. But she did not do everything Astaire did. Together they were dazzling, but he was self-evidently the greater dancer, which Ginger herself probably would have admitted if you asked her nicely enough. Plus, their duets, carefully designed for maximum beauty on camera, use a lot of forward and side-by-side steps. The Siren is no choreographer, but she's seen these movies over and over, and Ginger doesn't move backwards all that much. Check out "Cheek to Cheek", and see who's moving backwards during most of the first part.

2. "Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."

Oh boo hoo hoo, Marilyn. After the past few months of watching our economy do a face-plant, the Siren thinks a thousand dollars for a kiss is a darned good price, even without adjusting for inflation. And meanie-weenie Hollywood sold your soul for cheap, huh. The people standing by the clothing racks and saying "Can I help you?" to grumpy, dead-broke customers, and the ones getting repetitive-motion injuries at their keyboards and jumping every time the boss calls them in the office for fear they're getting the old pre-Christmas pink slip--they all got a much better rate for their souls.

Most irritating is when this quote is used to illustrate how Marilyn Monroe suffered. She was charming and funny, really good in several movies, certainly she was beautiful, and you could say she had a hard time. Though, it seems to the Siren, not as hard as her colleagues did, standing around on the set waiting for Marilyn to get her act together. But you want suffering, real suffering, the kind to make Melpomene weep? Without Googling: Clara Bow. D.W. Griffith. Orson Welles. Gene Tierney. John Garfield. Dorothy Dandridge. Rita Hayworth. Canada Lee. Charles Boyer. Wallace Reid. Montgomery Clift. Lou Costello. Roscoe Arbuckle. Erich von Stroheim.

1. "He gives her class. She gives him sex."

Oh, Katharine. The Siren hasn't been able to track down exactly when and where Hepburn said this (anyone know?) but it was probably a fairly casual observation, not one supposed to substitute for any other analysis of the all-time greatest dancing team. Even when people don't invoke the quote itself, as David Thomson mercifully did not in his well-written but dead-wrong Astaire piece last Sunday, they regurgitate its assumptions. Astaire was plenty sexy. The routines themselves, as often noted, echo the rhythms of seduction and even the sex act itself, and that ain't possible with a sexless male.

As for Ginger needing more class, the Siren wonders if that was somehow a leftover bit of cattiness because Rogers stole Stage Door right out from under Hepburn. Rogers had a wonderful common-girl persona in the 1930s, but her movies relied on her self-confidence and grace. Check out something like Gregory La Cava's charmingly subversive 5th Avenue Girl, in which Rogers poses as a millionaire's mistress without losing a shred of her honor. The point to Ginger Rogers, and what made her such a perfect on-screen American woman, was that she constantly proved class is a state of mind and not birth.

The Siren has a suggestion for anyone itching to use the above-listed quotes. Look up Tallulah Bankhead instead. Now there's someone who could give you an evergreen yarn. The Siren winds this up with Tallulah, from A Southern Album, on the perils of stardom and election season:

"Be careful how you quote me. No swearing, no naughty cracks. This is a campaign year, you know, and I must be discreet. If I'm not, I'll have the whole goddamn Bankhead family on my neck."

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."

Cyd Charisse, 1921-2008

I was less than 10 years old but I can still remember my father's expression when one morning he told me he was going to watch Brigadoon. "Who's in it?" I asked. "Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse." "Cyd Charisse? Who's he?"

With great emphasis: "SHE."

"A lady named Cyd?"

"YES, honey."

"So she was pretty?"

If all goes well with childrearing there aren't many moments where a parent says to himself "what the hell have I produced here?" but this was one for my father, I have no doubt. His face was beyond pained as he said, "All right. We'll watch this movie and then you tell me."

For many fans of Cyd Charisse, Brigadoon probably ranks somewhere between Meet Me in Las Vegas and that bit in The Harvey Girls where she sings (via dubbing) about being from Providence, Rhode Island. But as a child I thought it was swell and I still do. Why does everybody single out Brigadoon for being shot on the back lot? Does Seven Brides for Seven Brothers look like it was shot in Oregon? Does Easter Parade scream "sidewalks of New York" to you? Brigadoon is a fantasy, for crying out loud. Of course it doesn't look like Scotland. That is because Scotland has no magical disappearing 18th-century villages. In the Siren's view, Vincente Minnelli struggling with Cinemascope, which he disliked, had more to do with some of the movie's awkwardness than the obvious sets.

But there is still a lot to love. Minnelli lit the interiors to resemble Flemish paintings. The scene in the crowded Manhattan bar is brilliant. Van Johnson proved he could really act, and the Lerner and Loewe score is fabulously beautiful.

Most of all, "The Heather on the Hill" is sublime, with that sexual longing that's in all Charisse's dancing, married to a spiritual feeling in keeping with the film's mysticism.

So the Siren has a special place in her heart for Brigadoon for a number of reasons, but the greatest of these is undoubtedly that the movie was the first time she saw Cyd Charisse, the matchless dancer who died yesterday at age 86.

I think the next time I saw Charisse was in Singin' in the Rain. I like to think this was probably my father's introduction to her, as he was in the Army around this time, and could easily have been in an audience reacting exactly the way David Shipman describes here:

If you were in an air-force cinema, circa 1952, you'll never forget the sound which greeted the appearance of Cyd Charisse halfway through the climactic ballet in Singin' in the Rain. The audience to a man greeted the sinuous leggy beauty with a loud and prolonged 'Ooooaah!' As she slithered round an understandably bewildered Gene Kelly, there was uproar in the cinema. Cyd Charisse didn't do more than dance in Singin' in the Rain and people remember her in it.

It was a star-making turn such as few performers ever get. Up to that time the beautiful Texan had been getting herself married, having a son, getting divorced, then getting married to singer Tony Martin in 1948 and having another son. (One early role the Siren would like to see: Cyd's brief turn as Galina Ulanova in the notorious Mission to Moscow.) There were movies along the way as Hollywood gave her dancing numbers in generally inferior musicals and tried to find use for her in straight roles. She never comfortably adapted to non-musical parts, despite a pretty good late-career performance in the underrated Two Weeks in Another Town.

It was her run of musicals at MGM in the 1950s that guaranteed her immortality, including Singin' in the Rain and another masterpiece that followed it, The Band Wagon. Fred Astaire called "The Girl Hunt Ballet" his favorite dance. Charisse, who had been in a couple of noirs without making much of an impression, took a Mickey Spillane spoof and danced a femme fatale for the ages: "She was bad...she was dangerous. I wouldn't trust any further than I can throw her. But she was my kind of woman."

As in The Band Wagon, Charisse's greatest moments usually cast her as a woman whose jazzed-up dancing is seen as slumming somehow. In that sense she was perfectly of the 1950s, her sensuality boiling along under the surface as she gives her frequently wooden line readings. Then the music starts, she begins to dance and all hell breaks loose. You realize that here is the real Cyd, a dose of sex so strong that at some point in the dance her partner, even a great like Astaire or Kelly, seems bowled over by it.

So in The Band Wagon, she's a ballerina with a bad attitude about musicals, until she and Astaire go "Dancing in the Dark." In Meet Me in Las Vegas, she's a ballerina again, horrified by her contract to perform in Vegas, giving a nice-but-no-more bit from Swan Lake--and then all but igniting the film stock with "Frankie and Johnny."

She gave her best all-around performance in It's Always Fair Weather as a woman who harbors a brain under the bombshell exterior, sporting some dangerously feminist ideas in a cab scene with Gene Kelly, then raising the gym roof with a chorus of punch-drunk boxers in "Baby, You Knock Me Out." Her final musical at MGM had her taking the old Garbo role as a defrosted Soviet in the Ninotchka remake, Silk Stockings, discovering the power of her own beauty in a number partnered only by some lingerie and the items of the title. Her last great dancing part, in Nicholas Ray's Party Girl, brought the two-sided Cyd to some sort of apotheosis, as she tries to set Robert Taylor straight while performing two dances that would turn any good man bad.

For years now the Siren had occasionally searched around for current pictures of Charisse, and she always looked radiantly happy and beautiful. It was a great life, but it's still a sad day for us. The Siren leaves the final word to Astaire: "That Cyd! When you've danced with her, you stay danced with."

Is this a dance which I see before me? Or, Dance as Soliloquy

The Siren has always mentally divided Hollywood dance sequences into different types. There is the first kind, the dance as staged interlude.



There's the type that Busby Berkeley perfected for all time, Dance as Spectacle. As a girl this was not only the Siren's favorite type of dance, it was her favorite type of movie, period. If she could switch on the television and spot showgirls with marcelled hair making big flower-blooming patterns, the Siren's week was made. Since these were always backstage musicals she was convinced for at least the first decade of her life that somewhere there was a stage big enough to accomodate "The Lullaby of Broadway."



Later on the Siren became acquainted, through Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with dance as courtship ...



... and, when she was old enough to get the idea, with dance as consummation.



Astaire and Rogers did this brilliantly but they were far from the only ones. Over at Raymond de Felitta's place you will find him posting a Cyd Charisse number with James Mitchell (later to be Palmer Cortlandt on All My Children) that is indescribably lustful.

But it wasn't until fairly late in the Hollywood musical's flowering that we got what is perhaps the purest form of film dancing, dance as soliloquy. There were few dancers who could carry this off, and in fact Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly have this category almost to themselves, with at least one exception noted below.

In essence, the character's emotions reach such a pitch that he's gotta dance. It's romance that pushes him to this point, usually, either from pure happiness or despair. The most famous dance-as-soliloquy of all time is "Singin' in the Rain," which the Siren adores as much as anyone else but won't discuss here since what's left to say? Another favorite from Gene Kelly is this one, "I Like Myself" from It's Always Fair Weather.



In some ways this is the perfect example of what the Siren is talking about--Kelly is not only ecstatically in love with the ravishing Cyd Charisse, but also celebrating a new outlook on life, after a depressing afternoon in which he discovered that not only can you not go home again, as Thomas Wolfe told us, you also can't go back to the Army or its comradeship. I suppose you could look at it as a re-run of "Singin' in the Rain," which has an almost identical set-up for its centerpiece soliloquy, but in this as in the rest of the film, IAFW is darker and more complicated. The breathtaking impossibility of Gene's dancing around on roller skates is matched with the point in the plot--this kind of happiness is also impossible, fragile and won't last, any more than the giddy trash-can-dancing camraderie in the first part of the movie has lasted.

It's Always Fair Weather was, as de Felitta notes in this splendid write-up, just about the last gasp for the Freed unit. And the Siren completely agrees with Raymond that it's a great shame, because Kelly was poised to take the musical in even more varied and unexpected directions. If you ever get a chance to catch it on TCM, the Siren highly recommends Invitation to the Dance to her readers who are true dance addicts.

But in this category, as in so much, it has to be acknowledged that Astaire got there first, as in this snippet from the spellbinding "One For My Baby" number in the otherwise not-terribly-interesting The Sky's the Limit.

This is a number to savor. There's the perfection of Astaire's take on this type of "romantic" drunk--the way maudlin self-pity alternates with the compulsion to fight anything, up to and including the bar glasses. As in "I Like Myself," there's the fact that while the movements look organic and natural and seem to flow from the character's mental state with great ease, Astaire is expressing it all with steps no mortal man can equal.

Astaire could do that with other soliloquy dances too, including an early example such as "No Strings" from Top Hat, with Astaire singing about the joys of being a bachelor (since before Shakespeare's time, a sure way to mark yourself for Cupid's arrow), then turning it into a sand dance when fate, oopsImean Ginger, intrudes. There's the immortal "Dancing on the Ceiling" from Royal Wedding, where the gimmicky-ness of the turning room actually distracts a bit from how tender the moment is. Or there's the short but lovely number "Yolanda" from the criminally underrated Yolanda and the Thief, where Fred dances with a harp.

The final example the Siren is posting here is Cyd Charisse's exquisite solo from Silk Stockings. This musical is highly regarded by some, including de Felitta and David Thomson, but the Siren finds it pretty thin gruel, perhaps because she treasures every moment of Ninotchka, and while Garbo was a lousy ballerina, Cyd was no Garbo. But this snippet is one of the loveliest parts of the movie, expressing not just love, but the joy to be had in savoring your own beauty. That's definitely a part of all the soliloquies--for a few minutes, these dancers draw the audience, no matter how pudgy, flat-footed or hopelessly arrhythmic, and let us share the way they move. I like myself, indeed.

NOTE: The Siren tried hard to post the video clips in here and failed, utterly, so you'll have to follow the links. This post is a humble and (very) belated offering in Ferdy on Films' Invitation to the Dance blog-a-thon.

The Bell Tolls for Vera Zorina

And there she is, bending gracefully over us all and doing a splendid job of boosting the Siren's traffic (thanks, Mr. Wolcott!)--voilà, Vera Zorina, pictured above in her Waternymph costume from The Goldwyn Follies. Another final-round question for Silver Screen Trivial Pursuit (congratulations, Jonathan). One of Samuel Goldwyn's found-and-losts, like the gorgeous, luckless Anna Sten. Until recently the Siren knew Vera primarily as George Balanchine's second wife and the woman whom Ingrid Bergman replaced in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But the Fox channel ran one of the ballerina's few starring vehicles, a fluffy thing called I Was an Adventuress. And you know what? Zorina wasn't half bad, even when she wasn't dancing.

She had a refreshingly strong profile and a figure that was sheer perfection--toned beyond belief, more buxom and far less sylph-like than later Balanchine stars like Tanaquil Le Clercq or Suzanne Farrell. (However, upon comparison with the above still, the Siren thinks Zorina was padded quite a bit for Adventuress, a pretty common practice at the time.) Her acting is somewhere around the level of Hedy Lamarr on a really good day--definitely not great, but watchable. She has warmth and presence.

I Was an Adventuress was directed by Gregory Ratoff (hey kids, we all forgot him for Great Comic Character Actors and we shouldn't have). According to IMDB the movie was a remake of an Edwige Feuillère vehicle, J'étais une aventurière, and that's all the site says about the original, except that it was banned in Finland. (Your guess is as good as the Siren's.) Anyway, in the Hollywood version Zorina is the accomplice and lure for two crooks, played with gusto by Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre. Stroheim and Lorre have excellent chemistry, more so than the romantic leads. The two con artists give the same sub rosa sense of a bickering couple that you get from the Sidney Greenstreet/Lorre outings, as the Stroheim character tries to rein in Lorre's kleptomania and Lorre swears he'll learn to restrain himself, then lifts another watch.

Zorina poses as a countess in order to set up the trio's high-born marks, and her dancing is worked in too, somehow--she's one of those prima-ballerina-fake-countess-grifters that were littering Europe at the time. Would it surprise you to learn that she falls in love with one millionaire she's supposed to be conning? that the couple marry, and one big scene of domestic bliss finds her doing a perfect arabesque in the bedroom? (That was kind of unexpected, actually.) How about that von Stroheim and Lorre are determined to return Zorina to her crooked ways?

Well, I'll tell you what would surprise you--the ballet sequence at the end. The Siren was not expecting to see Zorina's dance partner arrive in full armor, and as he stomped onstage in this Renaissance Faire getup the Siren murmured "Oh, dear." But she should have banked more on George Balanchine's genius, because not only does the dance still work, it is also quite dark and startingly sexual, a different take on the tragic close of Swan Lake. There's a marvelous moment when Zorina bends away from her partner, the move shot straight-on so that she seems to peel away from him like the petal of a flower.

So the movie is ridiculous, but at the same time very enjoyable, with Zorina looking lovely, Lorre approaching the prime years of his Hollywood period and the Balanchine ballet to savor at the end. You can't look at the film and think the brevity of Zorina's career was as terrible a loss as Frances Farmer or Dorothy Comingore, but the Siren did think it was a pity the ballerina's star didn't survive long enough to see her forge a real career in musicals. She could certainly act as well as Cyd Charisse, and her dancing was magical.

A little background here on Zorina. One of the most poignant parts of A. Scott Berg's Goldwyn biography comes when he describes the producer's one-sided crush on Zorina, which played out as The Goldwyn Follies was filming in 1938. The ballerina was just 20 years old and, unlikely as it seems when you read about Goldwyn's behavior, she appears genuinely not to have perceived his feelings for her. Zorina had fallen in love with Balanchine, and was consumed with him both personally and professionally.

Goldwyn, meanwhile, threw everything he had into making her debut as memorable as possible, including hiring Vernon Duke to write the music for the Waternymph ballet. He watched Zorina's screen tests over and over, lavished advice and favors on her, snuck over to Balanchine's closed studio to glimpse her rehearsing. Lillian Hellman, on the lot to try and shake some sense into the Follies script, observed one day that Goldwyn always departed the studio minutes after Zorina did. She alerted colleagues and word spread. With malicious enjoyment, the others in the building started a betting pool based on how many minutes would pass between Zorina's exit and Goldwyn's. After a few weeks of this an enterprising writer followed Goldwyn and discovered that the producer's cab was tailing Zorina all the way to her house. Goldwyn would watch Zorina disappear inside, then order the taxi back to his office.

Like everyone else in Hollywood apart from Zorina, Goldwyn's wife Frances had got wind of her husband's behavior, but she became convinced it was an actual affair. One night she telephoned George Cukor, and her old friend arrived to find Frances descending the stairs, every item she owned packed and ready to go. Cukor ordered her back in the house and that, apparently, was that. After the Follies Zorina never made another movie for Goldwyn, although he loaned her to other studios and allowed her to work in theater. For decades Zorina took this as a comment on her talent; Berg writes that "something so far removed from her dancing as the preservation of a marriage had never even occurred to her."

But it wasn't just Goldwyn's withdrawal that doomed Zorina's career. What finished her chances for real stardom was being sacked from For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1943. Zorina actually spent three weeks on set with Gary Cooper, only to have Paramount abruptly change its mind and replace her with Ingrid Bergman. Bergman had lobbied frantically for the part and was Hemingway's choice as well. The co-author of Bergman's autobiography, Alan Burgess, says Paramount hired Zorina in the first place largely to save money, on the theory that once upon a time nobody had heard of Vivien Leigh, either. TCM's notes also cite an old rumor that Zorina, whose marriage to Balanchine turned out to be unhappy, was having an affair with somebody important.

Burgess says that when the first rushes came back, the studio told the press that "light was apparently draining off Vera's face when she was photographed from above." The Siren has no idea what that means and poor Zorina didn't, either. Ingrid Bergman had her own theory:

The real trouble was that Vera was a ballerina. Yet she had to run around those mountains like a little wild animal. And Vera was afraid of damaging her legs.

They were to her why my face was to me. If an onrushing train came against me, I would protect my face. Vera would protect her legs. So when they saw the first rushes of the film taken in the mountains this came through quite clearly; and they decided that Vera was unsuitable. They took her off For Whom the Bell Tolls, and gave her another picture.

This is an interesting and rather charming explanation on Bergman's part, but the Siren doesn't buy it and never has. For one thing, what was this other picture? Zorina's next, Follow the Boys, came an entire year later and was made for Universal. This article by Robert Osborne seems far more plausible. Zorina wrote in her memoirs that Paramount couldn't have hated her rushes, since all she ever filmed was one short scene where she carried a loaf of bread. The ballerina believed that filming was deliberately stalled while director Sam Wood and Cooper waited for the actress they really wanted, Bergman, to be finished with Casablanca. Zorina said David O. Selznick, who had Bergman under contract, told her many years later that he had engineered her firing.

So many machinations and bitter feelings over a film whose charm has always eluded the Siren. If any of her readers want to praise For Whom the Bell Tolls the Siren would love to hear it, but she always found it dull at best and risible at worst, with all the politics carefully siphoned off and most of the cast sporting every accent conceivable except Spanish. The Siren wishes Zorina were still around. She'd tell the dancer that, in all honesty, she prefers I Was an Adventuress.

Best and Worst of the Best Actor Oscars

It's that time of year again, when Edward Copeland, hardest-working man in Film Blogdom, puts together another Oscar survey. This year, the extravaganza of second-guessing extends to the Best Actor category. Which five performances represent the best the film world had to offer? With which five did the Academy get it forehead-smackingly wrong? The Siren has compiled her list, and you should too. The deadline is tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 1, at the stroke of midnight. This is a huge service that Mr. Copeland performs for us each year, offering a constructive outlet for carping that we would otherwise have to direct at our office mates, our spouses or the television set (and maybe not even the TV if the strike continues). Details are here.

When looking over the long list of Oscar-winning Best Actors, the Siren was struck by two things. First, she's seen nearly all of the movies. Second, a big chunk of the list is awfully dull. Not bad, just boring. Well-meaning. Earnest. Didactic. Sidney Poitier isn't bad in Lilies of the Field, he's very good, but the movie is a snooze. Ditto Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer, Ben Kingsley in Gandhi...just nothing the Siren wants to sit down and watch again.

So for her Best Best Actor list, the Siren used this single yardstick: which five performances, if shown on TCM tonight, would likely glue the Siren to her couch, no matter what she had to do? So, with that alone in mind, here are the Siren's top five, in reverse order.

The Best


5. Charles Laughton, The Private Life of Henry VIII. The Siren doesn't expect to find this one very high on the final list, due mostly to its age. But god is Laughton good, so much so that our collective memory of Henry is neither Shakespeare nor Holbein, but rather the lusty, impulsive figure that Laughton creates here. He is, as Simon Callow says, "more Henry than Henry."


4. Alec Guinness, The Bridge on the River Kwai. Courageous, pigheaded, utterly bonkers, Guinness carries the weight of a script that has him standing in for all the mythical glories and bloody illogic of imperial Britain. His performance is so superb that the moment you glimpse Nicholson's madness is the moment of his greatest heroism, as he is carried out of the hotbox--the colonel is still fighting for that crisp self-discipline. And you realize, looking at Guinness's wobbly yet triumphant walk, that a sane man would have snapped.


3. James Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy. As George M. Cohan, the flag-waving showman and songwriter, Cagney steals everything but the floorboards in the most sheerly enjoyable biopic of all time. The Siren never gets tired of Cagney turning a tuneless voice and a weird, high-pockets dance style into the movie's greatest virtues. That final walk down the White House staircase, which gradually becomes a hoof-step expressing all the joy of Cohan's patriotism and his vanished theatrical world, was reportedly improvised on the spot by Cagney.



2. Fredric March, The Best Years of Our Lives. March is usually described as a flashy, scene-stealing actor, but his two finest moments in this movie are played in silence. There's March's expression as he walks into his home and sees Myrna Loy, flesh and blood instead of the image he yearned for through all his time at war. And then there's March's face, tired and hung over, trying to find himself in the picture on the mantelpiece, a photo of a man he will never be again.


1. Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront. Brando had to be number one, but which to pick--this one, or The Godfather, in which he is equally brilliant? Well, The Godfather is the better movie but like a judge at the Olympics, the Siren is awarding extra points here for degree of difficulty. Simple human decency will never have the glittering, seductive fascination of greed, power and violence. Brando gives us an ordinary man of somewhat less than average intelligence, and makes that man's struggles with his conscience not only interesting, but moving.

The Worst

With the exception of No. 4, the Siren probably wouldn't watch these again even if she were snowed in and without other entertainment at the Missoula International Airport.



5. Lee Marvin, Cat Ballou. Here we have the major, major problem with the Academy Awards: Rarely has the Academy known what to do with comedy. On the infrequent occasions that it honors a comic performance, it picks the wrong damn one. This example isn't as egregious as the Siren's number one, but it still hasn't aged well, assuming you ever thought it was all that great. Listen, the Siren finds Marvin appealing too--the man had cool to spare. But when Cat Ballou is viewed dispassionately, without all the awe at his incredible Lee Marvin-ness, the fact is that his timing is leaden and overall his drunk routine isn't a patch on W.C. Fields. Somewhat amusing in spots but the best actor of 1965? No wonder Richard Burton's drinking began to get worse at this point.


4. Spencer Tracy, Captains Courageous. To a younger generation the once-unquestionable reputation of Spencer Tracy as the best actor in Hollywood is sometimes understandable, and then again, sometimes not. "You never catch him acting!" said his enraptured colleagues. True enough in something like Bad Day at Black Rock. However, not only can Tracy be found acting in Captains Courageous, he can be found indicating, mugging and just plain hamming it up. The accent is inexcusably dreadful but it's only the most obvious manifestation of Tracy's phoniness as a Portuguese fisherman. Freddie Bartholomew is a good deal more truthful in his transition from sniveling brat to nice kid. The Siren maintains that Bartholomew is the one who gives Tracy more believability, not the other way around.


3. Bing Crosby, Going My Way. The story goes that Noel Coward, at the peak of his popularity, one day found himself surrounded by a large group of reporters shouting questions. "Mr. Coward! Mr. Coward!" bellowed one. "Have you anything to say to the Star?" "Certainly," replied Coward. "Twinkle." Bing Crosby here takes that admonishment, and turns it into an entire performance.


2. Al Pacino, The Scent of a Woman. The intelligent, carefully calibrated actor of Dog Day Afternoon and The Godfather movies hides behind a wall of shouting, tangoing, full-throttle mannerisms. The mere thought of watching the movie again gives the Siren a headache.



1. Roberto Benigni, Life is Beautiful. The Siren left the movie with her lace hanky soaked to the hem with her tears, ready to snatch Roberto Benigni bald-headed for this nauseating exercise in audience manipulation. The man has an enormous talent for slapstick but no taste whatsoever. He's so busy being touching and humane and the endearing character whose comic eccentricity makes him the island of sanity in an ocean of madness that he can't be bothered to REact to anyone, including his beautiful, ghost-eyed son.

NOTE: The Siren hasn't seen Ray, Capote, Gladiator, The Last King of Scotland, The Last Command, The Way of All Flesh and In Old Arizona.

*****

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Tom Watson's excellent brainchild, Newcritics. As a celebration, all this week we are contributing posts on the one bit of media that touched our lives in the past year. You will not be surprised to hear that the Siren's post is still under construction, but meanwhile do mosey over to Newcritics and have a look around.