Women's Costumes at the Movies: Faux Fashion Blogger Edition

My final defeat, which made me cry real tears, came at the end of [Pandora's Box], when [G.W. Pabst] went through my trunks to select a dress to be 'aged' for Lulu's murder as a streetwalker in the arms of Jack the Ripper. With his instinctive understanding of my tastes, he decided on the blouse and skirt of my very favorite suit. I was anguished. "Why can't you buy some cheap little dress to be ruined? Why does it have to be my dress?" To these questions I got no answer till the next morning, when my once lovely clothes were returned to me in the studio dressing room. They were torn and foul with grease stains. Not some indifferent rags from the wardrobe department but my own suit, which only last Sunday I had worn to lunch at the Adlon Hotel! Josifine hooked up my skirt, I slipped the blouse over my head, and I went on the set feeling as hopelessly defiled as my clothes. Working in that outfit, I didn't care what happened to me...

I did not realize until I saw Pandora's Box in 1956 how marvelously Mr. Pabst's perfect costume sense symbolized Lulu's character and her destruction. There is not a single spot of blood on the pure-white bridal stain in which she kills her husband. Making love to her wearing the clean white peignoir, Alva asks, "Do you love me, Lulu?" "I? Never a soul!" It is in the worn and filthy garments of the streetwalker that she feels passion for the first time--come to life so that she may die.
--Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood

The Siren was recently designated a fashion blogger by a European site called Wikio, an honor that left her equal parts amused, flattered and puzzled. Aside from her annual rant about the costume awards at the Oscars, a tribute to Mary Astor's makeup and a brief series of posts about perfume, the Siren can't recall saying much about fashion here at her Web outpost, although certainly clothing and makeup rank high on her list of semi-private obsessions. Yet there she is, right next to the black-belt shoppers of Fashionista and seven notches below the cool gaze of the Sartorialist, who would probably stop the Siren in the street right around the same time Dorothy Lamour showed up in hell with a platter of Mai Tais.

Still, the unexpected accolade made the Siren start thinking about costumes in film. The period stuff does get most of the attention, but sometimes deservedly so, as with Walter Plunkett's incredible designs for Gone with the Wind. Those dresses are so brilliantly in tune with Scarlett's character and the events of the movie that you would swear they all must be in the book. The drapery dress is, but just about none of the others are. William Pratt points out that if Plunkett had followed Margaret Mitchell's descriptions to the letter, Scarlett would have spent 9/10ths of the movie wearing green, the author's favorite color. The "scarlet woman" dress that Rhett throws at Scarlett before Ashley's birthday party, for example, was entirely Plunkett's doing. And the Siren has always wanted a better look at the cloudlike indigo gown Scarlett wears in a brief scene of her New Orleans honeymoon. Look closely and you'll see it's adorned with nine stuffed birds--a witty commentary on the once-starving Scarlett stuffing herself with the finest in Louisiana cuisine.

Other great moments in period costume would have to include Marie Antoinette; Jezebel (that red dress was actually bronze, the better to photograph in black-and-white); The Adventures of Robin Hood (Olivia de Havilland spends most of the movie with her hair completely covered, so when she shows up in her bedroom with her hair down in braids, it's a potent sign of sexual yearning); and Queen Christina (the moment when Garbo turns so the firelight outlines her form under a man's shirt is one of the most sensual in all of 1930s cinema).

But the Siren is always drawn to contemporary costumes, particularly those for women. Louise Brooks's essay on Pabst contains what is still the best explanation of costume and performance that the Siren has ever read. Robert Avrech recently posted about designer Helen Rose, and in comments we discussed how an actor's clothing influences a performance. Confronted with that, plus her new job description, the Siren's palms began to itch and she got that yen, the one that says, "It's time to make a highly idiosyncratic list of things I like so that everyone can argue with me, politely."

As Yojimboen has pointed out, the ins and outs of costume credits in old movies can be worse than Kremlinology. Some of these were undoubtedly purchased off the rack, but as Annie or Daria could tell you, there's an art to selecting the right clothes, too. The Siren is mostly sticking with the screen credit, but if someone knows the real scoop on who did what, by all means tell us in comments and I'll update.

So, ten great moments in women's costume design. Let's hope this makes whoever clicks over from Wikio more happy and less confused.

1. Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (Orry-Kelly)

I’ll be wearing my white lace gown tonight. I’d like you to wear your black and white foulard.
--Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Henry Windle Vale

Cooper has a lot of bitchy moments in Now, Voyager, such as, just to pick one out of a hat, throwing herself down a staircase to ensure her daughter stays chained up as a nursemaid.

But the Siren thinks even trying to order the newly fashionable Charlotte back into this offense to the human eyesight is as evil as it gets. Have you ever seen anything to equal this horror? The hem that hits just the right spot to get that redwood-forest effect every woman wants for her legs. The neckline that rests at her throat only because the climb to the earlobes got too exhausting. The lace at the collar, probably thrown there by Gladys in one of her temper fits. The way the dress droops away from the body, yet clings enough to say, "There is a whole world of lumpy oatmeal under here and brother, you want no part of it." It's a goddamn triumph of costuming. Kim Morgan recently said every woman should have Claude Rains as her psychiatrist, and ain't that the truth--but Dr. Jaquith's one mistake is waiting to talk to Charlotte before they leave together for his cozy sanitorium. The second she entered wearing that monstrosity, he should have said, "Right, we're outta here."

2. Jean Seberg in Breathless (N/A)

Michel: How old are you?
Patricia: A hundred.
Michel: You don't look it.

Throw a rock down any street in America and you will hit a woman wearing tight pants and a t-shirt. And not one of them, no matter how beautiful, will look one infinitesimal fraction as dangerous as Jean Seberg does in Breathless. Seberg wears this getup because it's her job to wear it, but when Godard's camera catches her calling "New York Herald Tribune," you see a warning sign that Belmondo does not. It's more than her beauty. It's the way she walks, not just casual in her clothes, but careless. Another down-market outfit, another wasteful American in Paris, ready to toss things aside for who knows what reason.

3. Audrey Hepburn's suit in Sabrina (screen credit, Edith Head; actual design, Hubert de Givenchy.)

You needn't pick me up at the airport. I'll just take the Long Island Rail Road and you can meet me at the train...If you should have any difficulty recognizing your daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.

Over at Glenn's place there is a discussion under way about the old saw that Jaws and/or Star Wars "killed the movies." The Siren remarked that the movies were neither dead, nor dying, nor even feeling a bit faint. Here she adds that this kind of chic, however, is deader than vaudeville. Just imagine showing up at the fetid underground bunker that is modern-day Penn Station wearing that suit. You'd get fewer stares wearing a sandwich board. The suit isn't the movie's most famous costume; that's the Sabrina dress, a version of which the Siren has in her own vintage-clothing collection. But this moment, as Wilder's camera gloats over Hepburn from the top of her hat to the little dog at her feet, is one of the most thrilling in the history of film fashion. Sabrina, the lovelorn chaffeur's daughter, has learned poise and confidence, the essential elements of style. Even the least observant visitor to Paris sees that a fashionable Frenchwoman wears chic clothing because she IS self-assured, not because she WANTS to be. This, this is what Paris and a genius designer can do for you!

4. Jean Harlow in China Seas (Adrian)

During my earliest days at Metro, I was put into movies with Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, and I was always taking their men away from them. Temporarily. It was ludicrous. There would be Jean, all alabaster skin and cleft chin, savory as a ripe peach, and I'd be saying disdainfully (and usually with an English accent, I played a lot of Lady Mary roles) to Gable or Bob Montgomery, "How can you spend time with her? She's rahther vulgar, isn't she?"
--Rosalind Russell, Life Is a Banquet

The Siren would love to tell you this little number is a turning point in China Seas, Tay Garnett's lovable strumpet-on-the-high-seas melodrama from 1935. It isn't, although Harlow wears it in a drinking scene with thoroughgoing louse Wallace Beery, and the jeweled straps do suggest a trap. The neckline is almost modest--right up near the collarbone--as long as you ignore Harlow's obvious lack of underwear and those strips of fabric making an oh-so-scalable ladder down the pure-white arms. Russell was right; it is unlikely Gable would even realize there were other women on the ship.


5. Mary Astor & Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth (Omar Kiam)

Edith: My dear...don't.

The British gave us the cruel expression "mutton dressed as lamb," but it's Americans who gave us its best illustration, in Dodsworth. Poor Ruth Chatterton. Her character may turn out to be a harpy, but here the Siren aches for her. That hairpiece, ridiculous on anyone who's out of the schoolroom, hellishly combined with the ill-judged white fabric and the simpering black-velvet bow at the too-low neckline. And, to complete the picture of humiliation, there's Mary Astor, a piece of carved ivory in a perfectly draped evening gown, necklace nestled in a neckline that's even lower than Chatterton's--yet somehow not the slightest bit vulgar. The scene is one of the most poignant in the movie, as Dan Callahan writes so well here, but the costumes take the contrast even further.

6. Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Robert Kalloch & Edward Stevenson)

General Yen: I'm going to convert a missionary.

From the second she dons a spectacular Chinese robe, every aspect of Stanwyck's movement changes. Her arms float away from her body, she takes longer strides around the room, she suddenly seems conscious of having breasts and hips under the fabric. And you sense, too, that the lack of underpinnings makes her feel just that much more vulnerable to the General, even though she is technically as covered up as she was in her missionary garb.

7. Kay Francis in Mandalay (Orry-Kelly)

They call her Spot White. It should be Spot Cash.

Like Harlow's China Seas dress, this one wins for sheer wow factor. Kay Francis, betrayed by the man she loves, winds up as the top earner in a Burmese whorehouse, and shows she won't let the bastard get her down by strutting down a staircase wearing this. She makes that piece of liquid silver seem worth a crash course in male perfidy.

8. Myrna Loy in The Thin Man (Dolly Tree, wardrobe)

Nick: Have you a nice evening gown?
Nora: What's that got to do with it?
Nick: Have you got a nice evening gown?
Nora: Yes, I've got a lulu. Why?
Nick: I'm going to give a party and invite all the suspects.
Nora: The suspects? They won't come.
Nick: Yes, they will.

The Siren can't remember whether the above-referenced "lulu" is the famous one in the above picture, or the halter-necked black gown Loy wears in the last scenes of the movie. No matter; every good husband who asks a question like that should be rewarded by the sight of his wife wearing something like this, even if nobody ever does show. Maybe especially if no one shows.


9. Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Helen Rose, costume and wardrobe department)

Maggie: You've got a nice smell about you. Is your bath water cool?
Brick: No.
Maggie: I know somethin' that would make you feel cool and fresh. Alcohol rub. Cologne.
Brick: No thanks. We'd smell alike. Like a couple of cats in the heat.

In New York City this past week it has been, as Auntie Mame would say, "hot as a crotch." So of course the Siren had to give a nod to Elizabeth Taylor, who set the standard for riding out a heat wave without air conditioning by donning a slip and trying to seduce Paul Newman. The Siren once had the pleasure of relating Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's censorship history to a confused Argentine male who had just watched it and could not get over, indeed seemed personally offended by, Newman's failure to respond to Taylor's come-on: "It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. There's Elizabeth Taylor! and she's wearing that slip! Thank god you explained this..."

10. Kasey Rogers in Strangers on a Train (Leah Rhodes, wardrobe)

Senator Morton: Poor unfortunate girl.
Barbara Morton: She was a tramp.
Senator Morton: She was a human being. Let me remind you that even the most unworthy of us has a right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
Barbara Morton: From what I hear she pursued it in all directions.

Alfred Hitchcock's attention to what his actresses wore gets a lot of press, usually for Rear Window and Vertigo. Here's one that deserves more discussion. Every time the Siren sees this magnificent movie, she's struck again by the brilliance of Miriam's look, how it represents a summit of Hitchcock's oft-stated preference for buttoned-up women. We've already been told about this mantrap who's cuckolding handsome Farley Granger, and we're expecting maybe Linda Darnell. Instead we get a four-eyed tootsie wearing a simple print dress with cap sleeves and a daintily pointed collar, not nearly as tight, body-conscious or as low-cut as you could go in 1951. Miriam probably wore it because it was vaguely pretty and would be easy to clean if she got popcorn butter on it. And the glasses--the Siren can't be the only one mesmerized by Miriam's eyeglasses. Mind you, the glasses are vital to the plot, but Kasey Rogers wields them the way Dietrich wielded a cigarette. This is an everyday black widow we're dealing with, says that costume, the sort of woman who would show up to a backyard pool party in a full-coverage one-piece and a sarong and, given five minutes' opportunity, would still wind up behind the rhododendrons pulling the swimming trunks off the hostess' husband.

There's an awful of lot of sex in this post, isn't there? There are advantages to this whole fashion-blogger gig...

Repost: Father's Day with John Ford

A fellow blogger recently requested that the Siren send a link to her favorite post. After three years, there was still no question--this is it. She reposts it now, and wishes her readers a happy Father's Day.

My father was a constant reader, a wicked prankster and something of a film buff. His film tastes were pretty eclectic--we went together to see The Pope of Greenwich Village, for example--but his real reverence was for the classics. I remember his description of a scene in The Gold Rush, to give his small daughter a flavor of it in those pre-VCR days when anything silent was hard to come by: "...and then he looks up at the clock, and he realizes, she's not coming. And just like that, you go from slapstick to sad..."

For Dad one filmmaker towered above all others, however, and that was John Ford.

One spring Saturday when I was in my early teens, Dad was talking to his adult nephews on the phone. A film recommendation from Dad was something to be taken seriously, and that Sunday morning the Superstation's Academy Award Theater was showing How Green Was My Valley. Our main phone line was in the kitchen and I could hear Dad's end of the conversation. "You should see this one...John Ford, Wales...Maureen O'Hara too...gorgeous...You'll get a kick out of it."

The conversation ended and I caught Dad's eye over whatever he was reading at the kitchen table.

"Get a kick out of it?" I repeated, incredulous.

"Sure," said Dad, affably. "Good movie, isn't it?" As he went back to his book, I swear I heard him chuckle.

Sometime after noon on Sunday our phone rang. It was Cousin R., and he sounded like he was coming down with a cold. "Put that father of yours on the phone," he snapped. I handed the phone to Dad, he put down the New York Times crossword puzzle, and as I leaned across the kitchen table my cousin's voice rose to a volume that carried it well beyond the receiver, especially when my father pulled the phone away from his ear to avoid hearing damage.

"...coal miners...strike...and they go to America...falls in the water...gets sick...accident...the other two leave...won't marry her...ANOTHER accident...goddamnit, I'm gonna get you for this one."

"But it was a good movie, right?" said my father, looking pleased with himself.

"...GREAT movie...I'm going to GET DRUNK."

The conversation ended. Dad returned to his crossword puzzle. "Where's he gonna get a drink?" asked my sister, who had heard the whole thing too. A shrug from Dad.

"He's in a dry county," I reminded Dad.

"It's SUNDAY," added my sister.

The phone rang again. It was another, older cousin, the football coach, who seemed to have caught his brother's cold. "Tell your father we're sending him the liquor tab," he barked.

I hung up and looked at Dad. "You totally tricked them into seeing that movie," I said.

His eyes didn't move from the crossword. "They'll thank me for it later."

Funny that this memory of my father should concern How Green Was My Valley, which has Donald Crisp, 180 degrees from his terrifying drunk in Broken Blossoms, playing one of the most lovable fathers in screen history. Not until Gregory Peck tucked Mary Badham into bed in To Kill a Mockingbird would there be an equally noble, and touching, portrait of fatherhood.

How Green Was My Valley ends with Crisp's death at the bottom of a mine shaft. Ford's camera focuses on the lift bringing other miners to safety. One platform of exhausted men passes us by, and then we see the one we are waiting for, Donald Crisp's head barely at the edge of the frame, cradled by his youngest son. That son, Roddy McDowall, stares past the camera, his beautiful face a bleak mask that reflects every child who ever faced a future without a parent. I've been facing that myself since 1991. Perhaps that's why I haven't watched the movie since.

But Ford wasn't by nature a pessimist, and How Green Was My Valley doesn't end on that shot. Its final montage includes McDowall and Crisp, going for another walk together. Memory isn't enough, but memory has its comforts, even if they're as simple as remembering how your father once lured an audience for one of his favorite films.

Housekeeping; or, Multiple Fragments in Search of a Post

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

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

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



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

Hence the radio silence.

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dude ... Stage Door?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the Love of Film: The Big Reveal

Update: Marilyn has additional behind-the-blogathon and NFPF information at her place, so do read up there too.

A little earlier this evening, the New York Times published news of 75 silent films, previously thought lost, that have been discovered in New Zealand and are being restored through the efforts of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Among them are Upstream, a backstage drama by John Ford--and aren't you dying to see what he did with that genre? There's an early Clara Bow feature, Maytime--and right now Operator_99, Donna Hill, Flapper Jane, Robert Avrech and David Cairns and my other silent-film peeps must be turning cartwheels. And there's also the earliest surviving film directed by and starring Mabel Normand--hoorah for women pioneers! hoorah for Mabel Normand, so much more than a footnote in an infamous murder.

This was all over Twitter and the blogs in record time.

Well, here's something they aren't saying.

At least two of the films being restored are ours. And that includes the very first one, called The Sergeant, a Western from 1910, shot on location in Yosemite Valley before the National Park Service even existed.

What do I mean by ours? We raised the money for them in February, $13,500, through the blogathon we did for the NFPF, For the Love of Film.

That means these films are surviving through the efforts of Marilyn Ferdinand, the powerhouse behind organizing the blogathon; the people from the NFPF who contributed clips, stills and information for the Facebook page and elsewhere; Greg Ferrara, who contributed the video and banners; me; the 80 or so dedicated bloggers and critics who wrote contributions; and, most of all, the 70 or so people who followed the links and donated.



Believe it, folks. Here is an excerpt from the press release about The Sergeant, from Annette Melville of the NFPF.

The exciting discoveries include The Sergeant, one of the earliest surviving narratives shot on location in Yosemite Valley. The one-reeler shows the magnificent terrain prior to the creation of the National Park Service, when U.S. Army cavalry troops kept order, and it is the military presence that provides the backdrop for the story.

In this Western, the sergeant takes his commander’s daughter on a horseback ride along the Merced River. When their horses are stolen by a renegade, they are forced to travel back to headquarters by foot and lose the trail. In the first clip, mounted troops search for the lost couple. The two are found the next day and the sergeant is disgraced. However, the sergeant proves his mettle when he escapes during an Indian attack and leads reinforcements to the rescue. The second clip shows his daring exploit.

The Western was one of many made by the Selig Polyscope Company, the early motion picture company renowned for its “action” pictures. Based in Chicago, Selig sent director Francis Boggs west in 1908 to find authentic locations for Westerns. Shooting films across the Southwest, Boggs made his way to Los Angeles, where he set up the city’s first movie studio. Boggs found that the sunny climate was ideal for outdoor filming and that the area offered a wide array of scenery as well as access to sensational locales, such as Yosemite and Mount Shasta, both used by the company. To act in the films, Boggs hired Hobart Bosworth, one of the first trained Shakespearian actors to crossover to the then-less-respected art of film. Bosworth appears to play the sergeant in this one-reeler, which he probably also directed.

Very little survives from Selig Polyscope Company, aside from Col. Selig’s papers in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After the murder of Boggs on the set in 1911, the company continued on with its popular Tom Mix Westerns, the early serial The Adventures of Kathlyn, and animal pictures (the Selig menagerie became part of the Los Angeles Zoo). However, the company failed to make the transition to features and ended production in 1918.

And here's the part that has the Siren turning cartwheels herself.

About the preservation. This remarkable film—part Western, part travelogue—survives through the single copy shared by the New Zealand Film Archive. The original nitrate distribution print was shrunken but complete. Thanks to funding contributed through “For the Love of Film” Film Preservation Blogathon held from February 14 to 21, 2010, the print was painstakingly copied to modern black-and-white safety negative film. This transfer was made from the negative at 16 frames per second and the tints added digitally to reproduce the colors on the original print.

For the exhibition print, color film will be cut in for the red- and amber-tinted intertitles so that the film can be enjoyed today as it was originally seen by audiences in 1910. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is supervising the preservation and will house the nitrate source material, preservation masters, and access copies so that they will remain available for years to come.

Here's the credit that will be attached to the film from here on out. The Sergeant will be included on Treasures V, part of the NFPF's DVD box-set series of films preserved through their efforts.




Beautiful, isn't it?






Because the blogathon donations qualified for matching funds from the federal government (hoorah for government funding! sorry, couldn't resist), we can take credit for about $27,000 of preservation money. That means our efforts will also help save another Western, The Better Man (Vitagraph Company of America, 1912) "a Western in which a Mexican-American outlaw proves himself the better man," according to Marilyn. The Siren doesn't know as much about this one, but will be sharing details as soon as they are available.

Update: Clips from The Sergeant are now up at the NFPF site, so go over and take a look. And here is a partial list of some of the most exciting discoveries from New Zealand.

And one note. Perhaps you didn't donate in February. The rent was due, the cat was sick, the kids had cavities, Nathan Detroit showed up at the door to remind you of a pressing debt of honor. It is not too late. The donation link still works. And the NFPF is still working to repatriate all those films, and there will always be others.

Meanwhile, the Siren's busting out the champagne.

(The first two stills are from The Sergeant; the third is from The Better Man.)

A Brief Poetic Interlude, Via Stephen Vincent Benet

...author, of course, of The Devil and Daniel Webster. This one's for Lance Mannion and anyone else who's suffering through this heat spel.

From "Metropolitan Nightmare":

There wasn't any real change, it was just a heat spell,
A rain spell, a funny summer, a weather-man's joke,
In spite of the geraniums three feet high
In the tin-can gardens of Hester and Desbrosses.
New York was New York. It couldn't turn inside out.
When they got the news from Woods Hole about the Gulf Stream,
The Times ran a adequate story.
But nobody reads those stories but science-cranks.

Until, one day, a somnolent city-editor
Gave a new cub the termite yarn to break his teeth on.
The cub was just down from Vermont, so he took his time.
He was serious about it. He went around.
He read all about termites in the Public Library
And it made him sore when they fired him.

So, one evening,
Talking with an old watchman, beside the first
Raw girders of the new Planetopolis Building
(Ten thousand brine-cooled offices, each with shower)
He saw a dark line creeping across the rubble
And turned a flashlight on it.

"Say, buddy," he said,
"You'd better look out for those ants. They eat wood, you know,
They'll have your shack down in no time."

The watchman spat.
"Oh, they've quit eating wood," he said, in a casual voice,
"I thought everybody knew that."

—and, reaching down,
He pried from the insect jaws the bright crumb of steel.

Happy Sunday. The Siren returns tomorrow with other news.

Anecdote of the Week: "Dark, you idiot! We're photographing in black and white."

All those critics grinding Sex and the City 2 into the sidewalk with their heels made the Siren think of another movie shot in Morocco--or rather, Morocco, Warner Brothers, which was probably more fun. Such were the Siren's thought processes. So here, from his autobiography Ladies' Man, is Paul Henreid describing a day on the set of that movie he made with Michael Curtiz and Humphrey Bogart.

At one point we were supposed to be shooting in a Moroccan street filled with vendors, a cart, a donkey and a crowd of people. Curtiz reviewed the set before we started and said, 'It's very nice, but I want a poodle.'

The prop man was upset. 'Mike, you never told me that. We don't have one.'

'Well, get one,' Curtiz snapped.

'All right.' Nervous now, the prop man said, 'What size?'

'What size? A big one, a big one!' Curtiz turned away in annoyance.

'What color?' the prop man persisted.

Curtiz threw his hands up. 'Dark, you idiot! We're photographing in black and white.'

'It's going to take about half an hour.'

Curtiz rolled his eyes. 'You think time is nothing? All right, all right!'

We went back to our dressing-rooms, and Mike and I started a game of chess while Bogey kibitzed. In half an hour the prop man poked his head in happily. 'I have it now, Mr. Curtiz. Will you come and look?'

'Pauli, don't touch the pieces. I think I have you mate in three moves.' And Mike went out. We went with him so he wouldn't accuse us of cheating, and there on the set was a beautiful black standard poodle. Mike looked bewildered. 'What do I want with a dog?'

'You said you wanted a poodle.'

'I wanted a poodle in the street,' Curtiz shouted. 'A poodle, a poodle of water!'

'Oh my god, you mean a puddle!'

'Right. A poodle, a puddle, that's what I want, not a goddamn dog!'

All in all I found Mike Curtiz a charming man...

Meanwhile, links of interest:

David Cairns posts something he must have known I would have to link to.

Glenn Kenny writes up Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road with his signature panache, at Mubi. (I guess I need to change that name on my sidebar, but I'm resisting.)

Gorgeous Lawrence Harvey could no more portray sweet or warmhearted than he could sing Tosca, but give him a snake-eyed assassin or soul-dead careerist to play and he was more than equal to the task. Kimberly Lindbergs takes a look at his first role--a greed-crazed villain in House of Darkness--at Movie Morlocks.

The Siren has never much cared for Grace Kelly's Oscar-winning role in The Country Girl; doesn't like the script, doesn't like the movie, doesn't like Kelly in the movie. But, at Another Old Movie Blog, Jacqueline T. Lynch makes a good case for all three--and brings up the too-little-acknowledged fact that "nearsighted people are almost always glamorous and elegant," which made the Siren smooth down her skirt and squint even more closely at her computer screen.

If you want a corrective to the Siren's lack of enthusiasm for The Fall of the Roman Empire, start right here at Ferdy on Films.

Finally, in her anniversary post, the Siren shamefully neglected to thank Stephen Whitty, who has pointed his New Jersey Star-Ledger and Newhouse News readers her way more than once. Stephen shares the Siren's regard for women's pictures. And yesterday, in a witty and pointed article, he also lamented the lack of modern movies aimed at women: "Every summer, studio execs act like Guy Pearce in Memento, unable to form new memories. Hey, women go to the movies! Women go to the movies to see other women on screen! We should make more movies like ... wait. What?"

In Memoriam: Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

Dennis is a demonic artist, like Rimbaud. -Brooke Hayward

Don't look for the Siren to be posting at length about the extravagantly gifted, unique, decade-spanning Dennis Hopper, who died today, aged 74. The reason is simple: nothing she could ever hope to write would approach what Matt Zoller Seitz already said with his video appreciation.

RIP, Mr. Hopper.

What Price Hollywood? (1932)

It was exuberant and a little larger than life; it was a romantic story of a decent girl, and of a fellow who did her a good deed. They weren't in love with each other, they were friends, and in spite of her success she was always mindful of him and had compassion for him. She never lost her respect for him, they had a wonderful relationship; he was, in a sense, a father figure. It was a very difficult story to write--it was a balancing act, awkward, funny, touching, and a very human story, different and very interesting. I think that's why it's been remade so many times.
--George Cukor, quoted in David O. Selznick's Hollywood by Ronald Haver

Sometimes it takes more than one viewing to appreciate a movie's worth. So it was with What Price Hollywood?, the breathtakingly good 1932 George Cukor film that the Siren just saw for the second time, after watching and liking it, but under less than ideal circumstances, in late 2008. Famous mostly for being the precursor to three later stories of a woman's star rising while a man's burns out, this movie stands apart from any later version of A Star Is Born, and does so in ways that work almost entirely to its credit. What Price Hollywood? is the best movie the Siren has seen so far this year.

One thing you won't find the Siren doing here, however, is using What Price Hollywood? to run down the 1937 A Star Is Born, an excellent film with one of Fredric March's best performances, or the 1954 Cukor-directed version, which is a masterpiece. It's astonishing that three such good movies were made from the same idea; there are plenty of stories that were made well twice, like Imitation of Life, but three? That must be unique, or damn close. (The 1976 Star is Born, however, despite charismatic leads, thrust "Evergreen" upon a blameless public and therefore cannot be forgiven either in this life or the next.) Instead, the Siren is saying that What Price Hollywood? is no mere dated antecedent, but its own superb self and deserving of the same affection lavished on the other two.

The vital distinction was made by Cukor himself, above: The central relationship is not a romance, but a friendship. Constance Bennett (remember our mercurial Constance, the 20th-century Becky Sharp?) plays Mary Evans, a waitress at the Brown Derby who yearns for stardom but has yet to get a break. Into the restaurant one night reels director Maximilian Carey (Lowell Sherman), top-hatted, white-tied, and half-seas-over. Mary's sang-froid and wit captivate him as much or more than her beauty, and Max takes her to a premiere and later gives her a bit part in his latest movie. So good is Mary that she parlays one line of dialogue into later stardom, and she remains grateful to the man who gave her a break. But they don't become lovers. Instead, Mary the star falls in love with a polo-playing rich boy, who predictably makes her miserable. Meanwhile, Max's drinking goes from a manageable habit to a terrifying dependency that kills his career. Mary refuses to desert him; she intercedes with his producer, puts up with Max's drunken intrusions, pays him just to hang around her set, and finally bails him out of the drunk tank after he kites a check. That night, while staying in Mary's guest room, Max shoots himself. The scandal takes down Mary's career.




Constance Bennett considered this her best picture, which shows her intelligence--stars are wrong about that more often than you might think. As Mary, she's tarter and more ambitious than the two Esthers that followed. She targets Max as soon as he walks in the Brown Derby, negotiating with another waitress so she can take the table: "I gave you Wally Beery last week!" We see her poring over fan magazines and practicing her star mannerisms, but when the daydream ends Mary is all business and realistic about the manipulation that will go into forging a career, as well as the sheer work. Mary isn't naturally brilliant. When Max gives her a bit part with one line, she's terrible; Bennett's face, as she does lousy takes and seems helpless to improve, will hit home with a lot of former acting students. She goes home and practices over and over, Cukor's camera following her feet going up and down the stairs until she finally gets it.

Lowell Sherman was primarily a director but he also acted; the Siren knew him as the agent of Lillian Gish's fall from virtue in Way Down East. Sherman was good, even if that great Griffith silent didn't demand, or get, much subtlety from him. But what a performance Sherman gives as Max. There's no explanation for why he drinks; his one comment when told he should give it up is "What, and be bored all the time?" He doesn't show contempt for his Hollywood trappings, but there's something in Max that stands apart and mocks. The script gives Sherman a lot of lines that could play as nasty; Sherman speaks them in the deadpan manner of a man who long ago gave up hoping anyone was going to get his jokes. Mary does gets his point, all the time, and she tosses the verbal ball right back at him. That is reason enough to believe that he would take her to heart. When Max is viewing rushes of Mary with the producer Julius Saxe (Gregory Ratoff, and you won't believe how young he looks), the director is so sure of his judgment that he lounges back in his seat until his face disappears, feet propped up in front of him. And Sherman gives you every nuanced reaction you could want with just the soles of his shoes.

Brian Kellow, in his excellent biography of the Bennett sisters, suggests that Max's character reads as gay, an analysis the Siren wouldn't dispute. Bennett was (probably) 28 and ravishing, and Max notices, but he never reacts to her as a potential conquest, nor do we see him flirting with any other beautiful women, or even checking them out. More than that, in Max's banter with Mary there's a great deal of the gallant but teasing way that gay men often flirt with women.




It doesn't matter that much to the Siren, though, because What Price Hollywood? shows us a male/female friendship based on simple regard for intelligence, humor, loyalty and kindness. Such relationships are common enough in real life, whether one side is gay or not, but you would never know it from most movies. "The public don't understand relations like between you and Carey," Saxe tells Mary after the director's suicide. But Cukor, Bennett and Sherman did.

The millionaire playboy character, Lonnie Borden (Neil Hamilton), can be seen as problematic; Kellow calls him "tiresome" and the Siren's own adjective would be "insufferable." But the Siren can't believe that in a script this good, the writers didn't know what they were creating. At a polo game Lonnie hits Mary in the backside with a ball (I know, I know), then asks her out to dinner. She quixotically (or sensibly, depending on your viewpoint) decides to stay home and he shows up in her bedroom to drag her, still in her negligee, to the lavish spread he's prepared. This may be intended to play as charming, although a moment when Lonnie force-feeds Mary caviar had the Siren covering her eyes in a way she usually reserves for a director like Dario Argento.




To back up the Siren's take on Lonnie, there's also Cukor: "David [O. Selznick] didn't like cheap jibes about Hollywood or its people, he had a romantic idea that the whole world loves Hollywood...and he didn't want to make anything bitchy or sour." Lonnie's later actions and lines are surely aimed at the unearned snobbery some people had, and have, toward Hollywood. The Siren began to wonder if, in a movie filled with in-jokes, Borden wasn't a poke at the Mdvanis and other European bluebloods who wedded stars — like Constance herself, married to the Marquis de la Falaise de Coudray at the time of filming. Borden, after whining that Mary's scheduled interview is going to scotch their tennis game, develops his theme by attacking her professional colleagues: "You can work with them. But do you have to be intimate friends with them?" This while she is reading a book on high-society etiquette in order to fit in with his crowd. Lonnie polices her clothes, scowling at a bracelet she's putting on until Mary sheepishly responds, "I know, too gaudy, huh. Not with sport clothes. See, I'm learning!" (If you'll permit the Siren a bit of life advice, barbed clothing critiques from a straight man are a 100% surefire sign of a control freak to be avoided at all costs.) When Max hits the skids and Mary is trying to help him, Lonnie further demonstrates his powers of empathy by snapping, "Well, he brought it on himself."

Constance was merrily cheating on de la Falaise throughout their marriage, and it's a pity Mary doesn't do the same. But when Lonnie picks a fight over Max's latest drunken intrusion, Mary throws out her husband, and not her friend. The Siren loved her for that.



Still, Lonnie isn't the villain of the movie, much as the Siren might want him to be. That role is reserved in a small way for the public that rips off Mary's veil after her wedding, and in a big way for the ravening press that leaps in a pack on any misstep by a star. This is somewhat self-serving; the same press is the agent of Mary's rise. But the sermonizing behind the gossip-column items about Max's downfall, and the reporters on Mary's lawn after his suicide, is still with us in these supposedly more freewheeling times. (Look at the gleeful way Lindsay Lohan is nailed up for everything from getting drunk to showing up somewhere with smudged mascara; the Siren isn't the only one who finds that coverage sick-making.)




Max's suicide is the most celebrated sequence in What Price Hollywood?, and it deserves every bit of its fame. Selznick hired Slavko Vorkapich to develop the montage leading to the fatal gunshot; Haver describes the Yugoslavian immigrant as "the first person working in the American commercial film industry who had a completely intellectual concept about what film could and should do." Together, Vorkapich and Cukor created a montage that turns on the old idea of a man's life flashing before his eyes in his final moments. The concept is almost cliched; the execution is unforgettable. Due credit must also go to Murray Spivack, the RKO sound department head:

I knew that they needed some kind of sound effect to carry this and I thought, 'I've gotta get something unusual, that isn't familiar,' something that sounded like a brainstorm to me--it has to whir, a kind of crazy thing, and it had to increase in speed. So I got a cigar box, tore off the lid, put some rubber bands around it, tied it to a string, and swung it around in a circle faster and faster. And when it was recorded, it sounded just fine.

Brilliant as the sequence is, it isn't even the Siren's favorite. That would be Mary's first entrance to the studio, done from her point of view in a series of tracking shots that dissolve one into the other: behind a truck going through the gates, back past the squatty soundstage buildings, through an entrance partially blocked by a pile of dirt, and into the soundstage, the camera finding Mary around the same time it spots the film equipment and crew, until Mary finds Max at work and she stops, flanked by the lights and the camera, both things framing her and squeezing her in at the same time.

It was Cukor's third film as solo director — he'd only been at it since 1930 — and yet his genius is everywhere, in moment after moment that gives you a world of character in just a minute or two. Max and Mary pulling up to a premiere in a hand-cranked car that's pouring smoke, Mary as delighted as if she were in Cinderella's carriage. Max staggering into Mary's garden and stopping to blow smoke up a statue's ass. The inscription on Max's photo in Mary's living room: "I made you what you are today. I hope you're satisfied." Mary at Lonnie's polo game, where she perches on a table and coos to her maid, "Bonita, I'm all that-a-way over one of those polo players out there. Baby, can he ride!" Max, after being put to bed by Mary for the last time, calling to her and when she responds "yes darling?" replying, without a trace of self-pity, "I just wanted to hear you speak again."

A great, great movie — as yet unavailable on DVD.

Anecdote & Link of the Week: "You still got a lot of Nazis?"

The Siren has just one link today, to a piece by Kim Morgan about her stint at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival. This year Kim presented, among other things, He Ran All the Way, the final film of the great John Garfield, and spoke with Garfield's fabulous daughter Julie. The Siren shares Kim's evangelical fervor on the subject of Garfield's greatness, and since Kim admits to repeating herself on the topic, the Siren will too: Garfield is the actor who truly divides it all into Before and After.

And the Siren echos Kim's question: Where's HIS damn box set?

In small tribute, a brief, piercing passage from Hildegard Knef, the actress who spent some of Garfield's last hours on earth with him.

Garfield's deep-set eyes over the flame of a match.

'How long are you staying?' (he asks).

'I'm flying to Germany in the morning.'

'I'd like to go along! I don't have a passport.'

'To Germany?'

'You still got a lot of Nazis? I'm a Jew.'

'Don't know, they're quiet for the moment.'

'Ours are deafening. It evens things out.'

Son of Fury (1942)

The Siren had a great time with Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamine Blake, which she just saw on impulse. Besides, you know what this blog really needed? Another George Sanders movie, that's what. We were running low.

Given her love of swashbucklers and Sanders, the Siren probably would have seen Son of Fury ages ago if it weren't always billed as a "South Sea Island-er." We all have certain plot elements that make us groan, and when the Siren hears about the South Seas she practically howls. As sure as death, taxes, and Hugh Hefner's girlfriends using too much self-tanner, you will get:

1. Flowers everywhere, waving palm trees, cute little huts, a secluded lagoon (see no. 4);
2. The king/chieftain/whatever, initially itching to kill the Handsome Western Stranger but abruptly turning all wise and avuncular;
3. At least one native girl, usually played by an actress from any corner of the globe except the South Seas, giggling over the HWS;
4. the HWS going swimming with the native girl in the secluded lagoon, so you get lots of underwater shots and the girl dog-paddling in a flirtatious manner;
5. the native girl falling in love and living only to serve her HWS, and the HWS falls in love too because the girls back home are such a drag with their shoes and their petticoats and their bad attitudes and the way they never once think to serve you fish wrapped in a banana leaf.




This shit is so persistent that some of it pops up as late in 1984 in the revisionist version of The Bounty. The Siren finds the setting bearable only if there's a fun twist, like everybody getting washed out to sea at the end of The Hurricane. And the Siren warns you that the South Seas portion of Son of Fury hits all the points. Fortunately the tropical paradise stuff forms only about one-third of the movie, and the other stuff, including Frances Farmer, Sanders and Tyrone Power, is great. Plus, John Carradine is loping around the island with Power, louche and gloomy as ever, and Carradine pulling his endless tape-measure body out of a hammock takes some sting out of Gene Tierney in permed hair and a sarong that drapes carefully over her belly button.

The plot hews closely to the ur-swashbuckler theme of usurped inheritance, with evil baronet Sir Arthur Blake (Sanders, bien sûr) forcing the real heir, his allegedly illegitimate nephew Benjamin Blake (Roddy McDowell), to become his bonded servant. Ben sticks around long enough to grow into Tyrone Power and fall in love with his beautiful cousin Isabel, played with gusto by Frances Farmer. Fed up with his brutal uncle, Power runs away to the South Seas in order to make his fortune so he can come back and get even.

Now when people discuss Sanders, a frequent topic is his way with a drily funny line, and as Addison DeWitt his delivery is a joy forever. But think also to Addison and Eve in the hotel room. As Sam Staggs and others have noted, the scene suggests S&M roleplay to the point where Baxter's collapse onto the bed is a climax in more ways than one, Sanders leaning in for the kill: "And you agree how completely you belong to me?" So often he is playing a man reserved to the point of iciness, but one you just know is a world-class freak once the bedroom door slams shut.

All of Sanders' best roles employ this side of him, and Son of Fury is one hell of an illustration. When the movie opens Sir Arthur is bare-chested and pummeling the stuffing out of some bit player, as part of a late 18th-century amateur boxing match. It isn't the way Sanders lands the punches that tips you off about Sir Arthur, it's the way he savors the moments between, eyes widening and chest heaving in anticipation. Later he beats Roddy McDowell and plays it the same way, prompting the child to declare, "I'll never submit." Hmmm.




But the high point arrives during a masquerade ball, where Sir Arthur catches Ben (now Power) making a passionate declaration of love to Isabel. Sir Arthur summons his nephew to the stables. They enter and have a nice long moment of eye contact before Sir Arthur declares that it's time to continue Ben's education in the "manly art of self-defense," adding, "it is time you learned to give as well as take." They punch one another to the tune of more roaring double entendres--the Siren's favorite, spoken by Sanders of course, being "Take off your coat and your education will begin."

A minute or two later, as the Siren was reeling back on the couch trying to convince herself that yes, she'd heard what she just heard, Power takes an almighty overhead wallop from Sanders and collapses on the floor. And Sanders pulls a whip off the wall and starts flogging him, and there's shots of Power unconscious on the floor, profile prominent and lashes fluttering. The ball guests pound on the stable door and finally break in and someone grabs Sanders' whip out of his hand and begs him to stop "for mercy's sake." Sanders staggers off, sweaty, panting and spent.

People, this is one dirty scene.

Alas, that's the last of Sanders for a while, although once we've dispensed with the island idyll he does come back, thank god. Power flees to Bristol where he's sheltered by a barmaid, played with unaffected sweetness by Elsa Lanchester in a nice couple of scenes. He stows away on a ship bound for the Spice Islands and becomes part of the crew, but not without getting knocked around by the first mate. Power gets physically chastised a lot in his movies, ever notice that?

Anyway, all the sexuality pouring off Sanders makes for a nice contrast with Power, who had a purity that seemed to come partly from his wondrous looks, and partly from something innate. To some it reads as closed-off or wan, to others (like the Siren as well as Myrna Loy, who confessed to being in love with him) it's key to the actor's appeal. Power could play attraction, infatuation and love quite well; base lust, not as much.




So when Power jumps ship with Carradine and meets Gene Tierney, whom he christens Eve (blech), their scenes play even cuter than such stuff usually does and they have to carry off the romance via their beauty. It sure isn't chemistry; Power plays much more believably against Farmer in the earlier scenes. Tierney was very young and utterly exquisite, but what could she do with a screenplay that demands she learn English by looking at Power with shining eyes and chirping, "Earth!" while pointing up at the sky. The Siren kept hoping Sanders would show up shipwrecked, but no dice. No, we go through all the scenes enumerated above, and Power dives for pearls in a really baggy set of swimming trunks, and finally a ship arrives to take him back to England and revenge.

Director John Cromwell has a number of good-to-great movies on his resume, but not much auteur cred. Son of Fury is too uneven to make a solid case for his talents--for that you'd need Caged or The Racket or (the Siren loves this one) The Enchanted Cottage. Gareth McFeely points out that Cromwell seems much more interested in the English scenes than in the island paradise, and the Siren seconds that emotion. For that matter, she could say the same of Arthur C. Miller, the brilliant DP who also shot How Green Was My Valley. The island is just pretty; the streets and rooms of England are enthralling. Miller had a way of lighting scenes so that the foreground looked lushly detailed, sharp and accurate, but the background was left in inky shadows that suggested an era without electricity as well as acres of more period stuff stretching beyond the confines of the set. Plus, everyone looks gorgeous. Even Henry Davenport.

Back in England, Power has brought Farmer a string of pearls and declared that he still loves her. (Farmer is throatily sexy and sinister in her few scenes; it is sad indeed to recall that this was her last movie before she was institutionalized.) Farmer's response is to betray her cousin to Sanders. It's no avail, however; Power's legitimacy is revealed in a court scene and Sanders must hie back to the ancestral manse and plot his next move. It's all building to the final confrontation between Sir Arthur and Ben, but the scene preceding that inevitable fight is the last one to relish in Son of Fury.



Sanders slinks into Farmer's bedroom and says he hopes "you won't forget your poor old father after he's broken and humbled," while looking like he's no such thing. Farmer points out that she's doing fine, since Power has asked her to remain as his wife. And just when you thought Sir Arthur could not possibly get any more deviant, he sidles over to his daughter, picks the pearls up off her neck with a caressing little flourish and purrs, "Now that has possibilities." Moments before Power barges in, Sanders is sitting at the table eating grapes, with little finger-wiggles after each one meets his mouth.

All this, mind you, in 98 minutes. So, is Son of Fury a lost classic in need of reappraisal? Well, no. But it was so much fun the Siren wanted a cigarette afterward.

Anecdote of the Week: "I don't want to kill the woman."

Enter Howard Hawks--partly because y'all are being so nice in that thread down below it is, frankly, getting embarrassing, and partly because the Siren is enjoying the hell out of TLRHB's "Walter Burns of the Day" on Twitter.

Notes from the set of His Girl Friday, courtesy of Rosalind Russell in her autobiography Life Is a Banquet:

We had been shooting two days when I began to wonder if his instructing me that my suit should be kind of hard-boiled-looking was the only advice I was going to get from Mr. Hawks.

He sprawled in a chair, way down on the end of his spine, and his eyes were like two blue cubes of ice, and he just looked at me.

After the second day I went to Cary Grant. 'What is it with this guy? Am I doing what he wants?'

'Oh sure Ross,' Cary said...'If he didn't like it, he'd tell you.'

'I can't work that way,' I said. I went over to where Hawks was sitting. 'Mr. Hawks,' I said, 'I have to know whether this is all right. Do you want it faster? Slower? What would you like?'

Unwinding himself like a snake, he rose from his chair. 'You just keep pushin' him around the way you're doin',' he said. I could hardly hear him but I could see those cubes of eyes beginning to twinkle.

[snip]

Hawks was a terrific director; he encouraged us and let us go. Once he told Cary, 'Next time give her a bigger shove onto the couch,' and Cary said, 'Well, I don't want to kill the woman,' and Hawks thought about that for a second. Then he said, 'Try killin' her.'

"Our distinguished chairman has finally arrived at our reason for being here."

The fifth anniversary of the Siren’s blog came and went on April 19 with no noisemakers, no fetching cocktail dresses, no Gershwin and no one crying to the waitstaff “more champagne!” So the Siren wants to celebrate in her own way, by expressing overdue gratitude to some of the people who showed her kindness from the outset. If, like Margo Channing, you detest sentiment (whatever else this is, it ain’t cheap) you may switch off the radio and huddle in your mink until it’s over.

Lance Mannion popped up one day in the comments to a rather batty series of posts the Siren did on Perfume at the Movies, and gave me a link—-my first from a blogger I didn’t already know—-with praise that did my heart good, although he did say I’d drive a Netflix-queue obsessive crazy. (I still collect scent references, by the way. Great perfume counter in Has Anybody Seen My Gal?.)

Girish also swung by early on, adding his erudition and offering tips on movie-viewing in Toronto. We wound up going to the Cinematheque together a few times (Naruse!) considerably brightening a rather lonely time in Toronto.

Peter Nelhaus was the first person ever to respond to my plaint about a disk’s unavailability with a request for my mailing address—but far from the last. Michael Phillips, aka Goatdog, soon did the same. The Siren adores them both.

Filmbrain, otherwise known as Andrew Grant of Benten Films, was someone I got to know via Cinemarati, where he offered warm support and friendship to an insecure Siren.

And then there’s the mighty James Wolcott, aka the Traffic Santa Claus of Small-Time Bloggers, whose kind words sustain the Siren and whose continued links keep her Statcounter from dying of boredom.

Dave Hudson’s many links from his various perches around the web have been the happy source of treasured readers.

Ray Young, the gentleman known as Flickhead, was an early commenter and generous linker, urging me to see more Chabrol after I loved La Ceremonie, for all of which I am forever grateful.

Ivan G. Shreve, whose Thrilling Days of Yesteryear I had been lurking at for a long time before I blogged, was also an early and generous linker.

Dennis Cozzalio is such a difficult, unforgiving sort of person that when I wrote at length of my disdain for his all-time favorite movie, he responded with a warm and funny email that cemented our mutual admiration for all time.

Lou Lumenick’s generous partnership for the Turner Classic Movies “Shadows of Russia” series has, among many tangible benefits, given my mother some happy hours of bragging privileges at the local bodega, church and coffee shop. Mom thanks him, and so do I.

Marilyn Ferdinand’s extraordinary moxie and energy resulted in my single proudest moment as a blogger—helping her to raise more than $13,500 for film preservation.

Greg Ferrara (come back, Greg) did beautiful work on the blogathon icons and home blog, and I am also very grateful to him.

Glenn Kenny, whose talent as a writer gives us all something to aim for, has the Siren’s deep gratitude for many kind words, technical advice, Region 2 DVDs, and for beng a good friend and invaluable sounding board.

David Cairns I thank for Duvivier, The Eagle and the Hawk, Les Visiteurs du Soir, running a brilliant blog and being a great dinner companion.

Dan Callahan I thank for friendship, hospitality, Constance Bennett, Naruse and for writing the best star profiles going.

Robert Avrech I thank for his wise correspondence, his many great posts about early cinema, and for demonstrating that respect and friendship will always trump mere politics.

Annieytown of Blogdorf Goodman was my dear friend long before either one of us started blogging, but I still thank her for links and for her unerring eye for beauty.

Finally, others I am grateful to for their writing, their wisdom, their comments, their emails, their links, and their Internet comradeship: Gloria Porta, Tom Watson, Surlyh, Noel Vera, Karen Green, Yojimboen, Vanwall, X. Trapnel, Operator_99, Arthur S., David Ehrenstein, Tony Dayoub, Sheila O’Mallley, Alex aka Burritoboy, Raymond de Felitta, Kim Morgan, Larry Aydlette, Mrs. Henry Windle Vale, Gerard Jones, Phil Nugent, Dan Leo, Bob Westal, Dan Sallitt, Brian Herrera, Bill Wren, VP81955, Vertigo’s Psyche, Lee Tsiantis, Keith Uhlich, The Derelict, J.C. Loophole, Jacqueline T. Lynch, Dave Kehr, Jenny the Nipper, the Cinetrix, Trish, Tonio Kruger, Andy Horbal, Gareth, Brian Darr, Tom Carson, Nick Dawson, Jim Emerson, Ryan Kelly, Nathaniel R, Edward Copeland, John McElwee, David Bordwell, Michael Guillen, C. Parker, Raquelle Matos, Brenda Cullerton, Siobhan, Tom Sutpen, Richard Gibson, Richard Brody, Vadim Rizov, John Lichman, Laura, Shahn, Camorrista, Kathleen Maher, Chuck Tryon, Kevin Lee, Ed Howard, Dennis Lim and Maud Newton.

And to those the Siren owes thanks, but also knows she omitted because damn it, she always forgets something: Please know that the next time the Siren sees your name, she’ll be smote to the heart and skedaddle back here to add it.

That’s all. Back to our regular menu of long-winded analysis, tributes, oddball anecdotes, digressive lists, occasional bilious nitpicking, hey-looky-here links, planned projects that get shelved due to househunting, house moving or a household down with stomach flu, George Sanders obsession, Joan Fontaine obsession, and meandering but wonderful comments threads that always land on either Frank Borzage, Dimitri Tiomkin, George Brent or Danielle Darrieux.

Most of all, I am grateful y’all keep coming back.

Lena Horne, 1917-2010

From Vincente Minnelli's autobiography, I Remember It Well, 1974.

During my first few months at Metro, the only challenges were to my imagination. Lena Horne came to the studio at the same time, and my first assignments were to direct her musical numbers. Another director would do the rest of the film. Lena complained in her autobiography that because she was black, her many numbers were never integrated into the script. They could thus be cut out of the film if Southern distributors objected. This was, of course, contemptible. Could it have been only 30 years ago that we considered it daring to cast a black actress in a non-servile role? We were raising our puny voices for social progress. They should have been louder.

From Lena Horne's landmark 1981 one-woman show, excerpted in her interview with Ed Bradley, a snippet of which is accessible here.

They said to Max Factor, "Look at this woman. Look at her. Create a makeup to make her look more colored." That's a little something we used to call each other before we got straight. He said, "Okay." Okay, they'll do anything. And he went away, come back about two weeks later with a makeup they created for me. Named it Light Egyptian. Took this Light Egyptian and put it all over Ava Gardner. So I'm gonna tell you, I felt bad for a while. About 12 years.

And a beautiful tribute here, from Sheila O'Malley.

"Something about the sound of my own voice fascinates me."

Last Wednesday the Siren went to the Grassroots Tavern, which she had not done in many a year, to record a podcast with John Lichman of Film Threat, Vadim Rizov of Indie Eye, and Dan Sallitt of Thanks for the Use of the Hall. It was a loose-limbed affair touching on many subjects, including fashions in directors, Kurosawa and Wilder, “Une Certain Tendance du Cinema Français,” Avatar and James Cameron, how to maintain civility on the Web, and a little bit of Anthony Mann. The Siren observed that the wine has improved somewhat since she frequented the place, although not all that much.

You can access the chatter at The House Next Door.