The Czech Center, proprietor of the landmark Bohemian National Hall on East 73rd St. in New York City, has inaugurated a “Rooftop Ciné-Concert Series” every Tuesday through August 25th. They are showing silent films, both Czech and American, accompanied by live music.
The selection for tomorrow night, July 21, is intriguing enough to draw the Siren from her lair: Erotikon, a Czech film from 1929 directed by Gustav Machatý. Made four years before his glorious Ecstase (Ecstasy), which introduced Hedy Lamarr to a panting world, the movie is also said to focus on a woman’s sexuality. Which the Siren, as you know, is all for. There is a good discussion of the film here from when it was screened six years ago at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
At the piano on Tuesday will be the wonderful Ben Model, well known to silent film lovers in New York, and an asset to any screening. You can read more about Ben here.
The Siren will be there tomorrow night; if you go too, say hello. There are a lot of outdoor screenings around New York during the summer, all of them fun. But she’s very happy to see the Czech Center doing something different, and working to draw attention to Czech film artists who blazed a trail well before the famous films of the Czech New Wave. The last two films of the series (May Fairy Tale on Aug. 18 and the fantastically titled An Old Gangster's Molls on Aug. 25) look like genuine rarities.
Plus, the building is seriously beautiful.
Here’s the information and the schedule for the remaining films in the series.
Rooftop Ciné-Concert Series: Location: Czech Center, 321 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021
DATE: Every Tuesday, through Aug. 25, 2015 7 pm - Rooftop opens for a welcome drink (cash bar for additional drinks & appetizers) 8 pm – Live music followed by screenings upon sunset
All the silent films are also accompanied by live music.
Please note: In the event of rain, the screenings will be in the elegant ballroom on the 4th floor.
SCHEDULE
JULY 21 Eroticon | Erotikon
Dir. Gustav Machatý, 1929, 85 min., silent film
Live music: Ben Model, piano
JULY 28 Madame X
Dir. Sam Wood (with Gustav Machatý contributing), 1937, 72 min., (early talkie)
Music overture: Joseph Morag, violinist
(JOHN GILBERT ALERT!)
AUGUST 4 A Woman of Affairs
The most complete version of this American silent was discovered at the Czech film archive in Prague.
Dir. By Clarence Brown, 1928, 98 min., silent film
Live music: Henry Grimes, upright bass and Brandon Ross, banjo
AUGUST 11 Blonde Venus
Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1932, 93 min., (early talkie)
Live music: Overture by Pavlína Horáková, singer, accompanied by pianist Drew Spradlin.
AUGUST 18 May Fairy Tale | Pohádka máje
Dir. Karel Anton, 1926, silent
Live music: Nancy Jo Snider, cello
AUGUST 25
WRAP PARTY! Bring back your 1920s and 30s fashion to close out the series!
Film: An Old Gangster's Molls (aka Loves of an Old Criminal) | Milenky starého kriminálníka
Dir. Svatopluk Innemann, 1927, 106 minutes, silent film
Live music: Audrey Vardanega and Sara Barone, piano 4 hands
(Additional information about the series is available here.)
The first movie listed here is the only stone-solid, mind-blowing masterpiece the Siren watched with her mother during this visit. But great as it is, the Siren's got a bit more to say about another, less celebrated film (doesn't she always?). So she's saving that last one for another post.
Play Time (in 70-mm at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center)
The Siren spent years refusing to see this movie in anything other than widescreen, which meant she'd never seen it. And here was the opportunity, smack in the middle of Mom's visit. It says a great deal about my mother that, told we were going to see a 1967 French movie with no stars, no plot and sparse dialogue, made by a director she'd never heard of and screening a good hour's commute from where I live, Mom agreed for all the world as though I'd said "Let's watch Auntie Mame on DVD." And of course, it was worth the years of stubborn patience, it was worth the journey, it was worth standing around the Walter Reade lobby while a sheepish projectionist explained that 70 millimeter can be a bit recalcitrant. The Siren's rendering the title as two words in honor of historian Rick Perlstein, who was urging Chicago residents to see it at the Music Box: "Motion, motion, motion. Even read it as two verbs, a double command: 'Play.' 'Time.'" The print wasn't pristine but the movie dazzles all the same, a stunning feat of imagination that turned the Siren into a kid at a birthday party, gobbling treats at top speed in fear she wouldn't get to it all in time. And in fact, she didn't; at several points a huge laugh from the audience alerted the Siren that she'd been concentrating on the wrong part of the screen. The only time the Siren risked the time it took to glance at Mom and see how she was doing was after Hulot locks himself in his friend's high-tech foyer, a feat the Siren herself once managed in a 19th-century New York building by forgetting a key. Mom was shaking with laughter. The Siren had always heard Play Time described as a satire, and that it certainly is, both pointed and accurate in showing how so-called modern conveniences have complicated the hell out of everything. But there's an essential goodness in this movie--if not flat-out optimism, then an allowance for grace, for kindness, for people to delight you no matter how lost and bewildered we all are. Monsieur Hulot eventually gets his meeting with his heel-clacking bureaucrat. Lovely Barbara does meet up with Hulot during the peerless restaurant scene. As the restaurant falls to pieces around him, the loudmouthed American businessman, far from running the staff ragged and gasbagging about French incompetence, turns calamity into a chance for a Boys' Own Treehouse; if only making Play Time had worked that way for Tati himself. When the lights came up, the Siren turned around to behold every member of the previously severe, holiday-weary audience wearing a huge grin.
What Mom said: "That's one of the best things we've ever seen together."
Bonus: Sheila O'Malley, the Balzac of the Blogosphere, seems to have the same hotline to the Siren's brain as Kim Morgan, where we come up with the same obsessions at the same time. Here's her take this very week on Play Time: "It does not bemoan the fate of modern man, it does not say, 'Oh, look at how we are all cogs in a giant wheel, and isn’t it so sad?' It says, 'Look at how we behave. Look at how insane it is. We need to notice how insane it is, because it’s hilarious.'" From Peter Lennon, who had a go at the English dialogue before Art Buchwald took over, here's an informative, if rather acrid, glimpse into the making of the movie. Finally, check out this charming Japanese poster at Adrian Curry's splendid Movie Poster of the Day.
Des Gens Sans Importance (Boxing Day)
Directed by Henri Verneuil, this 1956 mix of noir and social drama was the last of the Jean Gabin movies the Siren had lingering on her DVR. And, unexpectedly, it has a Christmas link: Gabin's youngest son awakens as his parents are fighting, walks in to see an empty Santa costume on the table, and says, in a voice of stunned disappointment, "Il n'existe pas, Père Noël?" And that counts as one of the LESS melancholy moments in this tale of how Gabin's harsh life as a trucker takes on a brief glimmer of romance when he falls in love with a truck-stop waitress (the improbably gorgeous Françoise Arnoul). Gabin was born to play weary, star-crossed romantics, and Des Gens is most elegantly shot, particularly in the night-driving scenes. The characters are fully, richly drawn; even Gabin's worn-out wife and bitchy daughter have their reasons. But, it must be said, the film is so relentlessly downbeat it makes They Live by Night look like Meet Me in St. Louis. Can be firmly recommended on the merits, but approach in full knowledge that it's going to depress the hell out of you.
What Mom said: "I'm going to bed."
The Happy Time (Christmas Day)
This was a rewatch of a movie that lives on the Siren's DVR until such time as it comes out on DVD (which may be a while; it's based on a play, which was turned into a musical, lord only knows what the rights look like). The Siren chose a movie she'd seen because she needed a palate-cleanser; she saw long ago at the urging of Karen Green, who knows. Set among French Canadians in Ottawa at the turn of the century, The Happy Time is nobody's idea of a forward-thinking depiction of gender roles. Still, it's delicate of touch and sweet of temperament. Sex is constantly present (it's basically about puberty, in the person of Bobby Driscoll as Bibi) but it's handled with wit, not a leer. (Maman to Grandpère, when he appears dressed for a night on the town: "You should be in bed." Grandpère: "It's only a matter of time.") The Siren loves the entire cast, but particularly Charles Boyer (of course, the Siren always loves him) as the benevolent Papa, Marsha Hunt as a beautiful, age-plausible Maman, Marcel Dalio (can you believe this cast?) as Grandpère and, as the womanizing Uncle Desmonde, Louis Jourdan, whose reaction to a full-force slap is the funniest moment he ever had on film. Tyrone Power's bride Linda Christian is here too, surviving a bad blonde haircut almost as well as did Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shanghai. Opened up nicely, but unobtrusively, by director Richard Fleischer, who loves front porches almost as much as the Siren does.
What Mom said: "That was adorable. Poor Bobby Driscoll."
A somewhat disorganized look at Razzia sur la Chnouf, the Siren's favorite among the movies she watched and re-watched last month during a long week stuck (mostly) at home. The Siren has recently been accused more than once of overpraising movies; well, as Pauline Kael used to say, tough, 'cause this one's a pip.
(Also, if you want to hear the Siren (over)praising Three Strangers and apologizing to the shade of the marvelous Geraldine Fitzgerald, hie yourself over to the Cinephiliacs and listen to her podcast with Peter Labuza.)
1. The title. Usually translated as Raid on the Drug Ring, which is as dully misleading as my high school teacher's solemn rendering of a certain French suggestion as "kiss me." "Razzia" migrated from Arabic to French and, surprisingly, turns up in American dictionaries. Most Web translators don't recognize "chnouf." The Siren's in-house translation service says it literally means "powder." Sort of like "blow," only more of a generic term for drugs, like "dope." Except of course, the word dope doesn't sound delightfully like a sneeze when you say it. In any event, in this movie, the chnouf is powdered heroin.
2. The score. Not the dope score, the music score--a restless blare of jazz composed by Marc Lanjean and arranged by Michel Legrand. As it plays over the credit sequence of Jean Gabin's arrival at Orly airport, the music promises that the film will have the same propulsive drive.
3. Jean Gabin. One year past Touchez pas au Grisbi, and in a similar role, as "Henri from Nantes," the ruthless manager of a nightclub that fronts for a drug ring. Gabin was not handsome; he had thickset, irregular features that grew positively lumpy as time wore on. By 1955 it was a face that made you wonder how many punches had landed on it. It's hard to come up with a precise visual explanation for Gabin's scorching charisma; there's the penetrating focus of his eyes, yes, but the Siren also thinks it's his stillness. Never ever do you catch Gabin making a superfluous movement. He lets the action come to him. And when he does put the moves on someone, as he does to Magali Noël, luring her upstairs and gliding up behind the girl to strip her down to her bra--oh daddy. Noël's character Lisette is 22, or maybe 23, the Siren had other things to concentrate on, and Gabin was 51 and looked every day of it. Why, then, should the Siren not look at this coupling with the same uneasiness with which she regards Gary Cooper (56) and Audrey Hepburn (28) in the otherwise delightful Love in the Afternoon? There is no explanation, other than...it's Jean. Bloody. GABIN. It isn't so much that I believe Lisette would immediately want to seduce and be seduced by the man, it's that there's no way I'd believe she wouldn't. (Noël had a big hit with a fabulous little number about outré sexual tastes; it was released the year after Razzia, and who's to say whether Gabin was any part of her thoughts when she recorded it? Maybe we could ask one day, since Ms Noël is still gloriously with us.)
4. The ruthlessness. You want someone to match Gabin in toughness, if not in seen-it-all sex appeal, there are very few names to call; but one is Lino Ventura. He plays a viciously sadistic thug whom we see dispatch one luckless sad-sack of a smuggler with a pickax to the head. Also lending some male menace are Albert Rémy, who's mostly following Ventura's lead (hell, you would too) but is a scary dude nonetheless, and Marcel Dalio. Dalio, as you may expect, is more on the business end, but he's fantastically heartless all the same, like an investment banker who responds to a downtick by imposing the death penalty.
5. The sleaze. This is not a film that glamorizes drug addiction. It's brutally frank about the degradation of addiction without the least intention of preaching. There's a pulpy atmosphere to the whole thing, but the sleaze reaches its apex when Lila Kedrova comes on the scene as a heroin addict, Léa. It was Lila Kedrova's first film role, recreating the part she'd played onstage and won a French award for. Her wide-set eyes seem to contain both all the knowledge you'd get from hard living, as well as a faint hope that every once in a while her low expectations will be wrong. In one of the most astonishing scenes in a movie that frequently rocked the Siren back in her seat, Kedrova drags Gabin to a low-down nightspot. On the dance floor is a black man, moving sinuously to the music, and Kedrova, who's just had her fix, gets up and with heavy lids and back-tilted head, begins to move in time with him. He closes in on her, their dance becomes an unmistakable prelude to copulation and then they sink to the floor, and all we can see now are the backs of the club's patrons, as they close in to watch the rest of the show. The racial aspects of the scene are extremely disturbing, but as pure filmmaking and acting by Kedrova, it's extraordinary.
6. The cultural signposts. Such as Ventura, coming off a hard night beating the hell out of people, sliding into a booth and demanding that Gabin pass the paté. Which makes two movies (the other being Grisbi) where criminals plot their misdeeds over paté and a nice crusty baguette. Also: how everyone refers repeatedly to "Henri from Nantes" as though this is similar to saying "Henri from Dodge City," when all the Siren could think of was good King Henri and the Edict of Nantes--is that what she's supposed to get? Is it a nerdy joke, or Nantes a tough town? And one more: Gabin and Kedrova at a downmarket nightspot drinking what appears to be champagne--out of snifters. This is the sort of thing that obsesses the Siren. Is that a mark of French cool, snifters for the champers? If she were French, would that tell the Siren something about the club or the characters? (It didn't say anything to the Siren's Parisian husband other than, "That's weird.")
7. The twist. (Obviously you should skip this item if you don't want to know.)
Gabin's character turns out to be a cop. Now this is a twist the Siren might expect with, say, George Raft, who listened to Billy Wilder pitch the lead in Double Indemnity and asked about the "lapel bit." What lapel bit? asked a dazed Wilder. You know, responded Raft, "where the guy flashes his lapel, you see his badge, and you know he's a detective." Told there was no lapel bit, Raft refused the part. There's no lapel bit in Razzia but all the same, the Siren didn't twig to Gabin's cop-ness until just before the movie revealed it. And it's interesting, in that Henri is deep, deep undercover doing some very bad things. He sics the clearly psychopathic Ventura on that smuggler I mentioned, knowing the little guy is going to die, and die horribly. It makes Henri a truly complex character, one who never seems like a good guy even after the "lapel bit." (It was, according to David Shipman, the first time the perpetual rebel Gabin played a cop.)
8. The director. The Siren hasn't seen other films from Henri Decoin, although she certainly will now, but X. Trapnel, Yojimboen, Shamus and others would never forgive her if she neglected to mention that he was the first husband of none other than the divine Danielle Darrieux.
Which means he would have been a cool person even if his job involved sorting pencils at the Circumlocution Office. This year, the Siren discovered Jean Grémillon; and now she definitely hopes 2013 brings more Decoin into her life, including Battement de Coeur.
This week, at the site MUBI, the Siren has a long essay about Jean Grémillon and the new DVD set of three of his films (Le ciel est à vous, Lumière d'été and Remorques) from Criterion's no-frills Eclipse label. This is part of the discussion of Remorques, the Siren's favorite of the four she's seen, the other being Gueule d'Amour. (New Yorkers, take note: Remorques plays at the Film Forum today, at 1 pm, 4:40 pm and 8:20 pm.) They are all wonderful; discovering Grémillon has been a highlight of the Siren's cinematic year.
All three of the movies are deeply rewarding, but it's the simplest one, Remorques, that has the greatest beauty. It's helped by the presence of Michèle Morgan and Jean Gabin, two stars so blindingly charismatic that their merest eye contact is worth pages of exposition. To this Remorques adds Prevert's gorgeous dialogue (he rewrote much of the script), and Grémillon's passionate feel for the freedom of the sea and the confinement of land.
Gabin plays André, a tugboat operator ("remorques" translates as "towline") who makes a dangerous living rescuing boats from the storm-tossed waters off the Brittany coast. He's married to Yvonne (Renaud again--Grémillon loved this actress, with good reason); their relationship is loving, if not quite happy. She's grown tired of André's profession, tired of constantly fearing for his safety. Quietly, persistently, she's trying to persuade him to give it up. But he doesn't want to, not really, despite his frequent expressions of disgust for the low pay and wretched conditions. Gabin plays his scenes with Renaud with a mixture of real affection and wariness; she's trying to detach him from his one source of excitement, the one place where he's strong and in control. Yvonne is a Spanish-moss spouse--lovely but potentially suffocating.
André's crew rescues the vessel of Marc (Jean Marchat), a craven captain who's willing to let his boat go down so he can collect the insurance. His wife, Morgan, naturally has come to loathe him. Unable to spend another minute with the man, she takes a raft to Gabin's boat. Morgan and Gabin snipe at one another on board, they meet again onshore, they talk...
Remorques is a romantic melodrama, and these films are always built on emotions that are common, even when the situations are not. Here's a man who has lingering love for a good wife whose needs have become dreary and whose presence is no longer exciting; and here's a woman married to someone whose once-thrilling attentions turned out to be a cover for contempt and abuse. And the two connect, as such unhappy souls easily might in reality.
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.
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 calledLove 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.
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).
The Siren has seen only a handful of movies since posting about Jezebel, and two, by pure coincidence, were connected to Vichy France. One was Le Corbeau, Henri-Georges Clouzot's film about the effect of a poison-pen writer. Made during the occupation for the German-controlled Continental Films, it pinpoints mob psychology and collaboration so effectively that it managed to unite right and left in France by offending the hell out of both groups. The other was Un amour à taire (A Love to Hide), a telefilm made for France 2 in 2005, that shows the persecution of homosexuals under the Nazis. Clouzot's movie, itself made under circumstances of collaboration and without a single scene of Nazi atrocity, makes far more telling points about the era, but that isn't surprising. The comparison between the two films is somewhat unfair and the Siren admits this right off the bat. It's like watching CSI: New York and sitting down to compare it with The Naked City. Taken together, though, the Siren does think Le Corbeau and Un amour à taire highlight the problems she has with certain fictionalized Holocaust movies.
Le Corbeau would easily have made the Siren's Top 25 Foreign Films had she seen it in time. Set in "the present," it shows a small French town convulsed by a series of poison-pen letters, many of them directed at the place's popular young gynecologist (Pierre Fresnay). On this simple framework Clouzot and his co-screenwriter Louis Chavance build that rare and precious cinema specimen, a genuinely subversive film. Clouzot gives the audience clue upon clue about the identity of the letter writer, who signs the missives "Le Corbeau" (The Raven), and the movie forces viewers to identify with the suspicious locals and make the same mistakes they make. At one point, a key character theorizes to the town doctor that the Raven has a physical deformity. In walks another character, and for the first time you see her pronounced limp. An obvious visual joke, but at the same time Clouzot has guaranteed that neither the doctor nor the audience will ever view the disabled woman in the same way.
The doctor's practice dries up, as previously fawning townsfolk suddenly discover they aren't so sick after all. Wonderfully typical is the local seamstress, whose apologetic tone turns to petulant anger when the doctor refuses to pretend he understands her decision not to come to him. How dare the doctor make her feel bad about her cowardice? She is just the first of a series of aggressive innocents.
Clouzot underlines his points with several recurring motifs. Several times the letters float down from the sky, like bombs, but they are seized eagerly, not avoided. The doctor accidentally drops a particularly incriminating letter into a courtyard and runs to retrieve it. The wide-eyed child who denies having found the letter devours it line by line as soon as the doctor is safely out of sight. As befits a movie about mob psychology, the crowd scenes are particularly memorable. Children burst from a schoolyard, a funeral cortege turns into an ugly rally against a suspect. Eventually, as the consequences of the letters grow more dire and the town's frenzy grows, the final group of suspects are herded into a schoolroom and forced to take dictation (an extremely French form of writing practice that the Siren herself experienced in high school French classes). Dark echos of other roundups occurring when the film was released in 1943 compete with the nasty but undeniable humor of adult "students" bending head over paper and carefully writing out, "Slut! Whore! What about your abortion?"
No such morbid humor occurs in the painfully well-intentioned Un amour à taire, shown on the US version of TV5 recently with a capricious set of subtitles (now you see them, now you don't). The Siren doesn't question the motives of anyone with the spiritual fortitude to tackle this godawful subject matter. The fate of gay men under the Nazi regime hasn't been much dramatized, aside from the groundbreaking play Bent, which the Siren read some years back (she hasn't seen the movie). Somewhere there may be a film that does justice to this part of history. Un amour isn't it, though.
In occupied Paris two gay men, Jean and Philippe (Jérémie Renier and Bruno Todeschini) are busy concealing their affair and trying to stay clear of the Nazis. The childhood friend of Jean, Sarah (Louise Monot), is arrested with her family; as Jews they are all scheduled for deportation. Sarah manages to break free, and Jean and Philippe help her hide. But the safety of all three is jeopardized by Jacques (Nicolas Gob), Jean's brother, who loves Sarah and hatches an underhanded scheme to get her. Eventually Jean is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, and the movie includes a long sequence showing the horrors endured by the gay prisoners in the camp.
At this point, the imperative to remember the Holocaust, always, seems in no danger of being violated by Hollywood, as the crimes of the Third Reich are regularly filmed in one form or another. It is probably no coincidence that most of the fictional movies the Siren considers artistically accomplished--from Enemies to the precise reenactment of The Wannsee Conference--avoid actual depiction of the camps. The effort to dramatize what took place in Auschwitz and its ghastly siblings is always in danger of devolving into melodrama. Melodrama has a fine cinematic heritage but this subject, of all subjects, does not need it. In fact, the stark facts of the Holocaust scream at you to avoid melodrama at all costs. Melodrama, however, is what Un amour serves up, with Nazis interrogating Jean in a manner that owes more to Hitler's Children than Shoah. When Jean befriends a young gay man in the camp, you cringe for what lies ahead, knowing that the companion will die, and die horribly. But this victim's brief appearance in the movie cannot adequately move the audience. He does not have enough presence or life to be more than a way station to Jean's own depressing fate. And if a filmmaker cannot make this death more than that, then the Siren would rather he not show it at all. The death agonies of this human being--just one, mind you, among millions--should wrench an audience to its soul.
Instead of provoking thoughts about what savagery lurks under any civilized surface, or the huge, echoing "Why?" behind the millions of deaths, movies like Sophie's Choice or (god help us) Life Is Beautiful cater to our desire to tease some sort of meaning out of the carnage. It isn't just millions dying a senseless, horrific death under circumstances you weep even to contemplate--it's also a plot device to bring a writer to maturity, to enshrine a father's love for his dewy-eyed child.
Worse, the camp scenes themselves, as intensely as they make the audience feel, play to its smugness. I'm not a Nazi, you think, as you look at the ghastly violence on the screen. I'm too civilized for this. Never again! Can anyone honestly say we have earned that sense of superiority? Surely the Siren doesn't have to go through the sad catalogue of further crimes against humanity committed since World War II. She often thinks of writer David Rieff's bitter remark, "'Never again' might best be defined as 'Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.'"
A movie like Un amour invites you to identify with the courageous gay men and the strong, supportive Sarah, not the sniveling, two-faced brother. Le Corbeau tells you, in no uncertain terms, not to lie to yourself. For every Jean Moulin and Gilbert Renault, there were thousands in France who kept their heads down and tried not to make waves. When it was all over, they took out the pent-up frustration on some who were genuinely monstrous, as well as others who made convenient targets but may have been far less guilty, such as the women who had affairs with Nazi soldiers. While they were marched through towns with heads shaved, others like Maurice Papon managed to continue their lives with tidy, Vichy-free biographies. In this, too, Le Corbeau is eerily prescient, as a young woman is carried away screaming in a van, even as the guilty party prepares his final letter.
Postscript: This piece is now cross-posted at Newcritics. Of the things she read while preparing this post, the Siren is indebted to this piece about Le Corbeau at Raging Bull and this one at Jigsaw Lounge.
The Siren pauses to mourn the death of the great Ingmar Bergman. Her knowledge of Bergman's filmography is largely confined to his earlier films--The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night, Summer Interlude, The Magician, Persona, The Magic Flute. But the Bergman films she has seen, she loves passionately. Most of all, she loves Fanny and Alexander, that fantastically beautiful ode to family love and the warm, carnal world of art and the theatre.
One of the best film bloggers the Siren has ever read was the late George Fasel of A Girl and a Gun. His family, in what constitutes a very large service to the film-blogging community, has left his archives up at his old blog. In July 2005, a little more than a month before his own death, George posted a piece on Ingmar Bergman, and summed up the director, and what we have lost with his passing, far better than the Siren can:
Bergman could be funny--uproariously funny--when he chose to be: just have a look at The Magic Flute and especially Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), a timeless comedy of great invention. But for the most part, his work bluntly and unapologetically portrayed intense psychic pain, the emotional violence that people did to one another as a matter of course in the name of love, duty, and God. Bergman hurts, and if you don't feel it, you've unplugged your antennae. But he also presents his pain--which you have no doubt he has felt himself many times--with such honesty, clarity, and aesthetic scrupulosity that one can only respect him. He makes his audience work, not just by enduring the agony, but to find out what is really going on, who is the reliable source and who is not, why people say they are lying when they are actually telling the truth, why they subject themselves to injury needlessly.
In spite of the subject matter, it all looks and sounds gorgeous. Bergman first hooked up with DP Sven Nykvist in 1960 and they were still together in Fanny and Alexander; I doubt there was a cinematographer in the twentieth century who could render emotional states by light, shade, framing, and camera positioning with his skill and subtlety. And the casts? Well, consider: Harriett Andersen, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlberg, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Erland Josephson--every one of them willing to do what the boss called for, make it even better, and most of all completely submerge themselves in their characters. I can do something with Bergman films I almost never do otherwise, which is to watch them for performances only...
As [Saraband] finished, I didn't want to believe this was it, that we wouldn't be seeing anything new from this genius. All right, he turned eighty-seven just last week, and a man has a right to throttle back. But I wish he wouldn't. We need his honesty and mastery more than ever.
The Siren was oversold on Le Samouraï, not by any critic, but by the Jean-Pierre Melville movies she saw previously. Having seen Un Flic, which she thought pretty good, Bob le Flambeur, which she thought excellent, and L'Armée des Ombres, which she thought a masterpiece, the Siren was all in a tizzy to Netflix this classic. Le Samouraï, after a patently phony epigraph, opens with a long shot of Alain Delon, barely visible on the bed in a dirty Parisian flat, smoke from his cigarette gathering above his head. And there was this squeak in the background, and the Siren tried to figure out what it reminded her of, until she thought, "Damn. That sounds like the windmill in Once Upon a Time in the West." It's Delon's pet bird, but the association really, really should have warned her. This movie is a cerebrally paced, meticulously framed, fantastically good-looking stiff. The Siren admired its stark construction but it was an endurance test, 105 minutes that felt twice as long as L'Armée did at 145.
In interviews Melville suggested that Jef, a hired assassin and the "samurai" of the title, is schizophrenic, but crazy people are usually livelier than this, at least in the movies. Somewhere around the time Jef got nicked by a bullet the Siren realized there was never going to be a point where she gave two hoots in hell about him. Instead she found herself looking at Delon's face, dour and unchanging in shot after shot, and remembering the verdict of his ex-lover Brigitte Bardot: "Alain is beautiful, but so is my Louis XVI commode." Nathalie Delon (married to Alain at the time) and Cathy Rosier, both gorgeous, apparently had the same acting coach as the star. The police chief (François Périer) was the Siren's favorite. He cracks jokes and has facial expressions.
The Siren can understand the admiration for the steel-colored perfection of Le Samouraï's look. But watching Delon dart around the Metro, in fear for his life, left her as cold as Harry Lime looking down from the Ferris wheel. The Siren has resigned herself to more lonely iconoclasm, but she did find this. Merci, M. Rosenbaum, for expressing a few reservations. And apologies to Girish.
Above left (click to enlarge): Alain Delon, right three-quarters view; Alain Delon, left three-quarters view; Alain Delon looks at a gun; Alain Delon looks at Cathy Rosier; Cathy Rosier looks at Alain Delon. Special bonus: Compare the second shot with this snap of the Delons' son. Joie de vivre runs in the family.
*****
The Siren likes Delon in other movies, particularly Purple Noon, Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard. Good takes on the actor to be found at Cinebeats and Sunset Gun. Kimberly of Cinebeats is a Delon expert, having put together a very groovy fan site for him, which is archived here.
It is a lonely thing, disliking Once Upon a Time in the West. Trawling through the vast store of critics' reviews compiled on IMDB yields approximately five thumbs down. The rest fall all over themselves to call this the greatest Western ever made. The Siren's own husband has already penciled in a date to see it with the kids when they're ready (in about ten years). One of my favorite film writers named his blog after Sergio Leone. (Dennis, please try not to hold it against me.) The film's reputation seems impregnable, and in questioning its greatness the Siren plays an exercise somewhat akin to lobbing a spitball at the Washington Monument. She is resigned to the idea that few, if any, will agree with her piece of contrarianism. She does hope, however, that for the time it takes to read this post, you will at least be able to see the movie through her eyes.
Instead of summarizing the plot, which is widely known and too murky anyway, the Siren will state why she dislikes this movie: It is overlong, badly acted, misogynistic and dull. Dear god is it dull. The movie is often compared to an opera, but the more apt comparison is oratorio--plenty of music, no scenery and no acting. The structure cycles through same, same, one minute of dialogue, gunfight, same.
Then again, Leone's camera doesn't seem to care if we ever get interested or not. Again and again we return to the basic pattern of long shot (flat, sun-bleached, not terribly interesting desert) to close-up (flat, sun-creased, not terribly expressive face), close-up to long shot. It has a sort of lulling rhythm to it, like walking through a gallery and turning your head from portrait to landscape and back again. But like the paintings in the gallery, it just hangs there. Leone is supposed to have choreographed OUTITW's performances to Morricone's pre-written, excellent score, but the tempo doesn't change much even when the music does. Certainly there are references to other filmmakers--better filmmakers--Fred Zinnemann with the opening train station sequence, John Ford with the build-up to the massacre, the funeral sequence borrowed from George Stevens. Some take that as a sign of the movie's greatness, but spotting those only irritates the Siren further, as it reminds her of other movies she could be watching. (She could, for example, watch High Noon AND 3:10 to Yuma in only slightly more than OUTITW's running time.)
Said it before, repeat it here--the grand unifying theme of Western movies is, "who's the man here?" OUTITW gives us two. The first is Charles Bronson. Actors do not usually become stars without some sort of star quality, and Bronson has presence, a great deal of it in fact. But Leone's preference for monumental performances, meaning the actors hold poses for beat after beat after beat while we are supposed to wonder what is happening behind those scrunched-up eyes, is catastrophic for Bronson. The Siren is not kidding when she tells you she prefers Bronson in Death Wish, where at least he gets to move. Here he seems preserved in amber, an actor who manages to overplay his lack of affect. That is its own form of odd accomplishment, but that doesn't make it moving.
The second man, more by dint of blowing Bronson off the screen than the script itself, is Henry Fonda. The Siren often wonders how much of OUTITW's impact, then and now, is due to the stunt casting of Fonda. Holy moly, Wyatt Earp just shot a kid! How could Tom Joad be so mean? But is it surprising that a serious, stage-trained actor with a 40-year career behind him at that point could play a villain? Frank is a figure of pure evil, as such his character arc is more like a straight line, and Fonda's chief virtue is in refraining from the sort of hamminess Anthony Hopkins brought to Hannibal Lecter. Fonda, as always, walks softly. The shock from the against-type casting lasts about 20 minutes, and the movie is, of course, 165 minutes long. You have plenty of time to notice that Frank's villainy is no more fleshed-out or believable than hundreds of others, from Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance to Jack Palance in Shane. The difference is that those villains don't overstay their welcome, mostly popping onstage to punch up the action and heighten the stakes. Here you have to spend a long, long time with Frank, and he never gets any less or any more evil, nor does he get more interesting.
If there is anything the Siren can enjoy about the movie, aside from the deservedly praised opening, it is Jason Robards as Cheyenne. He is so deliciously, cornball hammy he seems to have dropped in from another set. When he is on screen the movie does occasionally lurch to life, as when he pops up in a window, hanging upside-down from a railway car, wearing a marvelous expression somewhere between apprehension and glee. Unfortunately, many of his scenes are played with Claudia Cardinale.
Ah, Cardinale as Jill. Misogyny irritates the Siren, but even more than misogyny she is irritated by those who try to gloss or dismiss the problem, for problem it is. OUTITW puts a woman in the middle of the action, gives her character great thematic importance, and then shows her behaving in ways that simply beggar belief. She's the whore with a heart of gold (heaven help us, and in 1968 yet), but more than that she is all appetite and survival instinct, only minimal brain. Jill is an animal shorn of even the small dignity of an animal's initiative. She spends the movie merely reacting to events. Kidnapped? Guess she better sleep with Frank. Railroad workers need water? fine, and because Cheyenne says so she'll let them pat her backside (one of the most bizarre assertions of workers' rights the Siren has ever heard). Bronson rips her dress? She falls in love with him. Duck? Fine, she'll duck. And whether deliberately or inadvertently, Leone cast an actress who was unable at any point in her screen career to suggest much of an interior life for even a well-written character, as in The Leopard. In Visconti's masterpiece, this most beautiful of actresses can mime the charm of a young girl only by waggling her shoulders a great deal and biting her lower lip at strategic intervals. Here Cardinale mostly holds her head still (thank God for that small favor from Leone's techniques) but reverts again and again to the same lips-slightly-parted stare, as the audience wonders whether false eyelashes and Cleopatra liner were around in the 1880s.
Here the Siren returns to the mystery of talent, and why some actors can project things to the camera that others simply cannot. Garbo, whom Orson Welles flatly called "stupid," could stare into the distance and take the audience on a journey through all the ages of Woman, as we pondered what lay behind that beautiful face. Cardinale's beauty is no less stunning, and yet as she looks into the camera you suspect she is trying to recall whether she left the hot plate on in her trailer. Well, perhaps Garbo could have breathed substance into Jill. But the Siren doubts it.
In his better movies (though the Siren has reservations even about those), Leone choreographs the set-up for violence fully as much or more than the violence itself, such as the justly celebrated final shoot-out in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Siren doesn't mind the lack of realism in this; as she has said before, realism is a style like any other, and an overrated one, at that. But here Leone just does not know when to stop. I will accept two men circling one another for a final confrontation, sizing one another up like dogs and spitting. I will accept them doing it for a longer time than any two armed men probably ever did in the history of the Colt 45. But when they do it for a quarter-hour--and stop for a flashback to boot--it becomes ludicrous. You might as well bring in Russ Tamblyn and George Chakiris and let the characters dance it out. Furthermore, the impact of this, the final confrontation, is lost because this is how ALL the confrontations in the movie have played out. We have been watching menacing poses for two and a half damn hours. A few more just aren't that interesting.
The theme of OUTITW is the bloody track of the railroad, and how it brings the tough-hombre era to an end even as it brings more exploitation. Leone correctly grasps that the idea of space--that, like Huck Finn, you can always light out for the territories--is a big part of our fascination with the push westward. The director's other idea, here as in his Dollars trilogy, is to strip away the myth that out there was something good or noble, and show that greed and violence built the West. He was hardly the first to do that, but he was one of the most thorough. Trouble is, Leone takes every traditional aspect of the Western and, rather than building on it, either mocks it or replaces it with relentless, dour pessimism. So when the end credits roll at long-bloody-last, all you have is a funhouse reversal of Roy Rogers. Once Upon a Time in the West is, finally, as predictable in its darkness as Rogers was in his eternal goody-goodyness.
Viridiana may seem like an odd film to fall in love with, but the Siren did, and hard, back in her college days when she was trying to see every European film denied her back home in Birmingham, Ala. Her first months in New York often found her in the college cafeteria with a copy of the New Yorker, staring at the listings, like a Soviet refugee transfixed by the overstuffed produce aisle at D'Agostino's. Viridiana was an early choice, and a formative experience. Along with Les Enfants du Paradis and a handful of others viewed around age 18, the Buñuel film was an electrifying gateway drug to European cinema. However, there are many things the Siren loved when she was 18 that she loves no longer--Southern Comfort, four-inch heels, false eyelashes--so who knew how'd she react when Turner Classic Movies recently screened the movie.
Happily, the Siren can report that Viridiana still knocks her sideways. It has been dissected many times, by critical minds more refined than hers, but the Siren wants to tell you about why she loves this rather bleak, but utterly brilliant film.
Anybody here familiar with Alabama? To say it's religious down there is like remarking that Manhattan is urban. Now my late father and my beloved mother both grew up a few blocks from a local church--Baptist for Daddy, Methodist for Mom. They attended every Sunday until the day they left home, with the happy result that neither one wanted anything to do with weekly services as an adult. But they were Christian enough to want their offspring to choose a nice denomination to settle down with. So the Siren went often to several churches, spent a long time studying Catholicism, and in the end picked the box marked "none of the above." She was tired of Jesus. He kept turning up in the Siren's daily life, whether she invited Him or not, usually invoked by people who wanted to tell her she was wrong. The Siren started to regard the Lord the way other people saw Chuck Barris--someone who pops up to tell you the gong has rung and the fun's all over.
So the lights go down on Viridiana, and the Siren's eyelids pop. There, up on screen, was every seething, rebellious thought she ever had during a Sunday sermon, or while resisting recruitment for the Brothers And Sisters in Christ club, or listening to Coach Jeffries at the pep rally asking Jesus to help us whup the Spartans on Friday night.
For those who haven't seen it--and if you haven't, what else are you doing that's so important?--a little plot summary. Gorgeous Viridiana (Sylvia Pinal) is a novice at a local convent, and one day she is told she should visit her uncle, local farmer Don Jaime. When Viridiana arrives, her uncle, played by a gloriously lecherous Fernando Rey, is thunderstruck by her resemblance to his dead wife. From there out, he is obsessed with getting his virginal niece into bed. What follows includes a drugging and contemplated rape, a nice little episode of foot fetishism and the uncle's abrupt exit. Don Jaime's illegitimate son Jorge (Francisco Rabal) arrives and he too lusts for Viridiana, but is content to wait for her to see the error of her virginity. She takes over the farm and tries to set up a sort of rural food kitchen for the local beggars, but they prove to be about as salvageable as her uncle. To watch the film is to see Viridiana's Christian ideals taken apart, hanged, burnt, tied up, knifed, buried and seduced into a possible game of strip tute. Maybe others find it depressing. To me, it's pure adrenalin. That night in New York, if I could have found Luis Buñuel, I'd have touched the hem of his garment.
You can find a lot of writing on Viridianaaround the Web, some of it claiming that the film is anti-Catholic but not anti-Christianity, and it really isn't all that shocking anymore. To which the Siren says, poppycock. If you could show the BASIC club or Coach Jeffries this movie, I guarantee they would ban it just as fast as Pope John XXIII did. If Viridiana's sensual pleasure in whipping herself while wearing a crown of thorns didn't do it, the beggars' celebrated burlesque of the Last Supper would. You can easily turn a screening into a game of Spot the Blasphemy.
Christian beliefs are hung out to dry (in one instance literally), but the film has no special contempt for Christians personally. Viridiana isn't a bad sort, just rather dopey and possessed of a virgin's tendency to think all the other characters are making sexual innuendos at her expense. (Sometimes they are, as with Rabal; sometimes they aren't, as when Pinal is invited to milk a cow.) Her vows of poverty aren't admirable, but neither are they especially despicable. They are just Viridiana's particular way of entertaining herself, no more or less worthy than jumping rope or drugging someone's tea.
There is a great deal of political satire too, although in Buñuel's memoirs he said that when General Franco saw the movie he didn't see what the fuss was about. To the Siren, this just demonstrates that dictators aren't always very bright. (John Nesbit at Toxic Universe points out the acid implication of the line, "The weeds have taken over the past 20 years... And beyond the second floor, the house is overrun with spiders.")
But there is little comfort for the do-gooder liberal, either. Buñuel refuses to romanticize poverty. There is nothing ennobling or beautiful about it, whether it is chosen like Viridiana's, or forced by circumstances like that of the beggars. They aren't purehearted children of the sod, oppressed by the system. They're just poor, and creepy, and eager to grab any momentary gratification. Emerging from poverty is purely a matter of luck, as it is for an abused mutt in the movie's other celebrated sequence. Whether you seek it through Jesus or the kindness of the better-off, your illusion of salvation is just that.
Buñuel made this film after a 22-year exile from Spain. (Here the Siren sees a bit of similarity to Robert Altman, another gleefully godless filmmaker: Invited to return to his homeland and make a movie, Buñuel made a lengthy disquisition on what bums they all were.) If Franco wasn't incensed, plenty of others got the point. When Viridiana was released, it was promptly banned in Spain and denounced by the Vatican. Spain's chief censor was forced to resign. Even Sturges and Lubitsch didn't manage to get the censors fired. If that doesn't tell you Viridiana's worth, the Siren doesn't know what will.
From an email invitation Mr. Campaspe has sent to the Siren family's nearest and dearest in the NYC area:
Next Thursday, Aug. 17, BAM is showing the movie Les Tontons Flingueurs. Little known in the U.S., Les Tontons is a masterpiece of such magnitude that it is any cinephile's duty to disseminate it to the world. In the Michelin rating system--based on how far one should travel to experience an event--the movie deserves the maximum 3 stars. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, at last, a movie that is worth a trip to Brooklyn.
To convey how good the movie is, suffice it to say it is the best one by Georges Lautner, surpassing even his series with Belmondo, or his Barbouzes. Les Tontons' dialogue was written by Michel Audiard, who spoke only street French. ("French people drive me crazy," he once said, "but since I don't speak any other language, I have no choice but to converse with them.") So he put all his genius into becoming the poet of spoken French, creating many immortal quotations for the second half of the 20th century. He it is who gave the conclusive definition of a gentleman (someone who can describe Sophia Loren without using his hands.)
The cast reads like a proposal to create a pantheon of movie comics: Bernard Blier, Lino Ventura, Claude Rich, Jean Lefebvre, and Francis Blanche.
Hilarious, witty, ruthless in its social description but genial in its handling of political situations, this movie goes so deep into Frenchness that it reaches the core of the human spirit. In these sorry times, it will restore your faith in the ability of humanity to overcome our idiots, while making clear the amount of work required.
And it is unavailable in the U.S.!
* * * * *
The Siren had never heard of this movie before her husband began evangelizing about it, but it is worth apparently not only the journey, but the cost of hiring a babysitter for the evening. If any of her patient readers are around next week, by all means, check it out.
Above, left to right, Francis Blanche, Lino Ventura and Bernard Blier in Les Tontons Flingueurs. Middle, Michel Audiard.
On a beautiful day in Brooklyn two weeks ago, the Siren sat down in a cafe, opened a newspaper and read that Alida Valli had died at age 84--and felt real sadness, because her daughter is named Alida.
Little more than three years ago Mr. C. and I had a lot of fun discussing names for our boy-girl twins:
"Lucy and Desi."
"Bill and Hillary."
"Nixon and Agnew."
"Nixon and Agnew? which name does the girl get?"
and so forth. When we finally got serious I went through some old movie books and hit on the name Alida, because it is beautiful and unusual but also simple and pronounceable. (Hail Girish, the only one of my film-mad friends who responded to "my daughter's name is Alida" with "Valli" as fast as any game-show contestant.) David O. Selznick marketed his Italian find as just Valli, hoping to echo the single-name impact of Garbo. In this, as in so many of his later-life decisions, he was wrong, because her first name is the business.
The Siren treasures her small connection to Alida Valli, one of the few she has to the Golden Age. When I graduated college, I went to work at a literary agency. One of our clients was Oscar de Mejo, Valli's first husband. I loved his courtly voice and beautiful manners on the telephone, and (yes, I am this starstruck) I also loved the idea that he gave me three degrees of separation from Orson Welles. AND Carol Reed AND Alfred Hitchcock AND Gregory Peck.
So Alida it was, though I had seen only two of the first Alida's films. She made a lot of good movies, but is most remembered for three: The Paradine Case, a minor Hitchcock that the Siren still enjoys a lot; Senso, a legendary Visconti film that the Siren prays will be released soon on DVD; and The Third Man, without question the actress's defining role for audiences outside Italy (and probably inside Italy too).
Good lord she was beautiful, "head-swivelingly beautiful" as Martin Scorsese put it, so stunning that even the hideous raincoat she wears for most of Carol Reed's masterpiece can't douse her light. The opaque, rather chilly quality she had in The Paradine Case was antithetical to a true femme fatale and hurt the movie. But in The Third Man, it's perfect. Her character, Anna, is as hollow and burnt-out as Vienna. Her eyes show life only when Harry Lime is mentioned. That he's worthless doesn't matter; he is all that connects her to the emotions the war blasted away.
The original Alida had bad bumps in her admirable 100-movie career, including a false accusation of fascist sympathies (someone claimed she had an affair with Goebbels!) that almost kept her out of the U.S., a stint in Hollywood that didn't last long enough and a scandal that sidelined her for about three years after she returned to her native Italy. That's just the professional side, and it was fairly minor compared to what her personal life dished out. After the Nazis pushed into Italy, she laid low for a while to avoid having to do propaganda films. Her first love, a fighter pilot, was killed in action. Her mother was shot (though not mortally) by anti-fascist forces for suspected collaboration. The scandal that almost ended her career saw her confirming a man's alibi in a celebrated murder case.
Each phase of Valli's life found her picking up and moving on, to Hollywood after Europe was leveled, back to Europe when Hollywood turned cold, to the theater when movies proved scarce or unfulfilling. And, with confidence even many non-famous beauties don't possess, when the wrinkles began to come, Alida Valli let 'em come.
Mr. Campaspe has Mediterranean coloring, and when the Siren talked him into the name "Alida," she envisioned a daughter with Valli's dark hair and olive skin. In one of life's little practical jokes, my daughter is a green-eyed blonde, a different kind of beauty altogether. But as I read more about Alida Valli's life, I realize I dreamed of the wrong inheritance. My Alida would do better with just her namesake's resilience and grace.
