Spike Lee was in my Twitter feed today, saying, "I was NO WAY this HOT when we did Do the Right Thing." Once again my beloved New York is, as Auntie Mame said, "hot as a crotch."
But there is nothing like a heat wave to fill the Siren with love for her fellow New Yorkers. There they are, the grimly embarrassed men daring you to stare at the enormous sweat stains on their chest; the women in varying stages of undress, their hair scraped back in styles you could christen "I Give Up"; the toddlers in their sun hats and smudged sunscreen, clutching their bottles as though wondering how Mommy let things get this out of hand.
The Siren feels for them all, as she unfurls her parasol and hopes the heat doesn't turn the skin under her freckles bright red. We're trying, aren't we? We're trying so hard not to exert ourselves too much by, say, starting a riot. We're just working to avoid the greatest New York City sin of 'em all: becoming a bore on a single topic.
The movies offer several bards of the New York heat wave. Three who really get it, as indeed they get everything about the city, are the aforementioned Mr. Lee, Martin Scorsese and the late, very much lamented Sidney Lumet. When Lumet died the Siren didn't post a tribute, but this weather prompts her to rectify that, in her own small way. The magnificent Dog Day Afternoon has been in her mind for a few days--those people in the stifling bank, willing themselves not to move as they seem to listen to the drip of their own sweat. Even more so, though, the Siren has been thinking about 12 Angry Men, from 1957.
Nowadays it's a well-loved movie, despite its near-incomprehensible box-office failure. The way it was made is well-known too, from the television origins to the two-week rehearsal process (a Lumet trademark) to the way it was shot one angle at a time, to save on camera set-ups. One particularly brilliant moment is the establishing shot of the jury room, which Henry Fonda (in Mike Steen's Hollywood Speaks) said took all day to set up and ran about two minutes on screen. And the Siren dearly loves an even earlier glimpse of the defendant, played by an uncredited John Savoca, who seems to have disappeared afterward. You could argue that the shot tips the movie's hand; the sad-eyed, clearly terrified Savoca draws your sympathy from the beginning. The Siren cannot look at the kid without wanting to drape an arm around his shoulders, give him a motherly squeeze and hand him a sandwich and a Coca-Cola Icee. But it also raises the stakes, putting the audience on board with Henry Fonda's desire to at least give the boy the courtesy of a full deliberation.
But afterward Lumet's methods were different, Fonda told Steen:
Say, the camera would be on two actors for a scene. After that scene was gotten, Sidney would say, 'Now take their coats off, loosen the ties and put some sweat on them, and we'll shoot scene ninety-two,' which is forty pages further, but requiring the same setup or camera and light position.
Let's look at that title, 12 Angry Men. Well, why are they angry? The script gives you reasons for many--Ed Begley is a bigot, Lee J. Cobb has transferred his anger at his own son to the defendant--but on the simplest, most fundamental level they are angry because there's a heat wave on and they are stuck in this deliberations room with a water fountain and ineffective fan and no AC, and Henry Fonda won't let them vote guilty and get the hell out of there. He's fighting not only their preconceptions, but their physical discomfort. At first, the other jurors want nothing more than to go home and, like the Coo-Coo Pigeon Sisters in The Odd Couple, sit in front of the icebox in the altogether. In fact, if you think about it, Fonda is the least angry man there. Mostly he's just rational. But 11 Angry Men and One Rational Guy in a White Suit would have been hard to fit on the marquee, I suppose.
Cold makes New Yorkers bundle up and scurry along and lets us indulge our natural tendency to stay out of each other's way. Heat takes away the physical barriers and leaves us contemplating each other unadorned, and that's by no means always a good thing. Scan the jury room and you will see a full range of the way New Yorkers cope with heat. Some lash out, like Cobb and Begley. Some try to ignore it, like E.G. Marshall. Some crack jokes or work their tails off just trying to be agreeable. Not all of them have pure motivations for their final votes. But in the end, you also see New Yorkers rising to overcome yet another of this city's indignities, its frankly terrible climate, and as Lee would say, do the right thing.
There's a heat-related plot point that the Siren always relished on a personal level. She's written before about her years in a non-air-conditioned apartment in Harlem. It was right over the elevated part of a subway line. So a key revelation--that witnesses who claimed to have heard something during the murder couldn't have possibly, because the noise of a passing elevated train would have muffled it--was spotted immediately by the Siren and her two roommates when we watched this one long-ago sweltering summer. The noise made by the subway in our apartment when the windows were open was, in fact, so deafening that we watched a lot of foreign movies. You could read the subtitles.
One last thing. The Siren notes that yesterday's temperature of 104 in Central Park broke the New York record, of 101 degrees, previously set for that date in….
The Siren’s dearest wish for the summer holidays of her patient readers is that they will bring along a book so good that they are utterly absorbed, and they sit by the pool or beach or lake or whatever and forget to get into the water, unless dragged there by a trio of urchins (ahem). Such was her experience on vacation in Lebanon with Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
The great migration Wilkerson refers to is the move made by about six million black Americans, from the South where they were concentrated at the beginning of the 20th century, to cities in the North and West. The exodus took decades, from 1915 to 1970, and Wilkerson argues that the changes it wrought were as profound as those brought about by the immigrants who came through Ellis Island.
To bring her narrative down to scale, she focuses on three who made the move: Ida Mae Gladney, who went from picking cotton in Mississippi to a home in Chicago; George Starling, who left brutal oppression in Florida for Harlem; and Robert Foster, a doctor who moved from Louisiana to success in California. This trio gives The Warmth of Other Suns the emotion and sweep of a great novel. It is not a perfect book; the author has a couple of style tics, and Wilkerson’s faith in the historical importance of her story (and she sure convinced the Siren) also leads her to the journalist’s habit of repeating her points. But those are quibbles. The Siren loved these people and finished the book deeply sorry that she could not ever meet them herself.
“Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making,” writes Wilkerson. “They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable...They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” A large part of The Warmth of Other Suns is given to showing what they left--the violent, pitiless racial caste system of the South. A native Southerner herself, the Siren is well versed in that history. It’s one thing to have the general knowledge, though, and quite another to be hit with Wilkerson’s accretion of detail. Story by story, she shows the cold horror of what African-Americans endured, from the ghastly beatings and lynchings, down to the endless petty humiliations.
And so we come to a passage that has stayed with the Siren well past finishing the book. The Siren’s deepest cinematic love is for Hollywood films made before the mid-’60s. This story of Robert Foster (then called by his middle name, Pershing) attending the Paramount theater in Monroe, La., in the 1930s, shows what some Americans went through just to see those movies.
He could see the double glass doors in front and a crowd forming outside. He knew to ignore the front entrance. It was off-limits to people like him.
He went to get his ticket. It was a more complicated affair than it had to be, owing to the whims and peculiarities of how Jim Crow played out in a particular town or establishment. For a time, there was a single ticket agent working both booths--the window for the colored and the one for the white. The agent swiveled between the two openings to sell the movie tickets, a roll to the white line and then a pivot to the colored. It created unnecessary confusion and waiting time for one line or the other, the waiting borne more likely by the colored moviegoers than the white, as waiting to be served after colored people would have been unacceptable to the white clientele. By the time Pershing was nearly grown, the swiveling ticket agent was dispensed with in favor of altogether separate windows and ticket sellers, which would cost a little more but would move the white and colored lines along more quickly and more in keeping with the usual protocols of Jim Crow.
The Paramount fancied itself like one of the great opera houses of Europe with its crimson velvet curtains and pipe organ rising from the orchestra pit. A double-wide staircase ushered theatergoers to its box seats. But Pershing would not be permitted near them. He followed the colored crowd to the little door at the side entrance, while the white people passed through the heavy glass doors...
The side door opened onto a dark stairway. Pershing mounted the steps, anxious to get a seat before the lights went dim. He went up one flight, two flights, three, four, five flights of stairs. The scent of urine told him he was getting closer to the colored seats.
At the top of the stairs, there was Bennie Anderson, the colored ticket taker, ready to take his stub. The urine aroma was thick and heavy now. The toilet was stopped up most of the time, and the people did what they had to. Some relieved themselves on the way up. Pershing thought they did it on purpose--a protest maybe for the condition of the place, not registering that it was other colored people who had to suffer for it. He could understand it, but he didn’t much approve.
Pershing sat hard in the wooden seat and tried not to notice the stuffed upholstery on the main floor below. Sometimes the kids would rain popcorn and soda pop on the white people. At last, the place went dark, and Pershing left Monroe. He was on a bright veranda with Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power out in California. It was a perfect world, and he could see himself in it.
Now the Siren admits that many, if not most, of Wilkerson’s readers do not encounter that story and wonder afterward which movie Foster was seeing, but around these parts that reaction is perfectly understandable. The passage is in a section dated 1933, a year the Siren’s readers will immediately identify as off. Myrna Loy made one movie with Tyrone Power, and it was 1939’s The Rains Came. The material comes from Wilkerson’s interviews with Foster, conducted in 1996 and 1997 when he was almost 80 years old, and it’s possible his memory telescoped the movies he saw as a teen. Still, it’s intriguing that Foster’s mind lit on an image from that particular film, so please excuse the Siren for a moment as she riffs on it.
The verandas were shot in California, but the setting is colonial India. The Rains Came depicts an interracial romance between Tyrone Power’s aristocratic Indian, a doctor like Foster, and Myrna Loy’s adulterous Englishwoman. In the banner year of 1939 it can’t be said to stand out as a masterpiece, but the movie holds up as good entertainment via the talented Clarence Brown. It’s a handsome picture, shot by Bert Glennon and Arthur C. Miller, two cinematographers whose genius with black-and-white could take anyone out of Monroe, La., or anywhere else.
The Siren hasn’t been able to track down exactly how The Rains Came made it past the Production Code’s miscegenation clause. This grimly simple statement (“Miscegenation (sex relationship between the black and white races) is forbidden”) was long interpreted as barring interracial love affairs whether they came via script or casting. (The rule cost Anna May Wong the lead in The Good Earth, scuttled Lena Horne’s chances for Show Boat, and was no doubt a big reason for Merle Oberon’s silence on her own Indian roots.) Thomas Doherty’s biography of Joseph Breen offers no help, and if anyone has information, please share. It’s possible that the story’s origin, in a bestselling novel by Louis Bromfield, and the star power of the white leads for once rendered it a moot point. Ronald Bergan, reviewing a book on images of India in the movies at Bright Lights Film Journal, also points out that Loy’s character “has to die in the end to avoid breaking the taboo.”
Still, anything Foster saw in a cinema in the 1930s would have had to clear not only the Hays Office, but the network of local censors crisscrossing the country, people like Lloyd T. Binford, whose father wrote the Jim Crow laws for Tennessee and who, as head of the Memphis censorship board, banned the 1947 comedy Curley for showing a white teacher with a racially diverse class. Doherty quotes Binford: “I am sorry to have to inform you that the Memphis Board of Censors was unable to approve your Curley picture with the little Negroes as the South does not permit Negroes in white schools nor recognize equality between the races, even children.” This piece of madness caused embarrassment even at the time, and enabled Breen to pose as the broadminded defender of art, saying that “we are opposed to political censorship from outside the industry” and pursuing a lawsuit against the Memphis board, which Doherty says the MPAA lost on a technicality. You see the Siren’s point; a segregated theater was far from the only obstacle facing a black movie-lover (and Foster did love movies) seventy years ago.
The Rains Came’s most celebrated moments are a series of natural disasters. The special effects used to create an earthquake, torrential rains and a dam bursting won an Oscar, and they still look great. The Siren thinks CGI has only the slightest edge, if any, over certain movies shot with miniatures and, in this case, sets that were destroyed one by one using a 50,000-gallon water tank. (She would think that, wouldn’t she, although others agree.)
But no matter how they’re filmed, disasters serve but one, and I do mean one, purpose in Hollywood movies, new or old: They're a conspicuously flashy way for the characters to reassess their lives. (Here the Siren casts a sidelong glance at the much-discussed Contagiontrailer, and wonders whether Steven Soderbergh will break this rule. The movie looks good, but judging by Matt Damon’s tormented demeanor out in the woods, she’s gonna go with no.) Rama Safti (Power) is torn between his calling as a doctor and his position as heir to the Maharajah; Lady Edwina Esketh (Loy, in a role she beat out numerous other actresses for) is married to a rich, but boring old duffer (Nigel Bruce, bien sur) and cheating on him as blatantly as the Code will permit. By the time the dam breaks, Lady Esketh is in love with Safti. And the plague (yes, plague, because an earthquake, flood and a busted dam aren’t enough to get these two to shape up) that follows the other calamities prompts Lady E. to don a nurse’s uniform and minister to the sick, a job that also lets her be close to the man she loves. Witnessing suffering alters Lady Esketh's selfish nature, and Safti falls in love with her at last. Lady Esketh’s death from the plague, and the death of the Maharajah, show Safti he must accept his responsibilities.
Unlike the other two people profiled in The Warmth of Other Suns, Foster came from a prominent family, and he was expected to make a name for himself. The treatment meted out to him in the South, however, always galled this proud man, and in 1953 he left for California. There his highly successful practice eventually grew to include Ray Charles; it was Dr. Foster who sewed up Charles’ hand after the singer put it through a glass coffee table, thereby preserving Charles’ piano-playing. We all owe the doctor for that.
So there is Foster in a segregated movie theater, watching a story that was daring for the time, about an Indian doctor with distinguished roots, who makes it through hardship and loss to claim his rightful legacy.
From "Four Times Truer Than Life," the Siren's post about the very great Lillian Gish, at Fandor. The piece can be read in its entirety at Fandor's Keyframe blog. Please do comment at Fandor, too.
3. “Richard Schickel…thought The Wind verged ‘on the ludicrous’ and continued by saying that Gish failed the ‘basic obligation of stardom, which is to be sexy.’ Whereupon, Louise Brooks rolled over in her gin-soaked grave.” –Dan Callahan, “Blossom in the Dust,” Bright Lights Film Journal
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that Gish isn’t sexy, considering that she spent her entire silent career playing women (and, in Broken Blossoms, a child) who are desired by men, and often wind up seduced and abandoned. It’s no harder to get past Gish’s thin lips and flowing hair to her beauty, than it is to overlook Garbo’s eyebrows or Clara Bow’s oddly drawn mouth. Do those who find Gish a “silly, sexless antique” (Louise Brooks’ sarcastic phrasing of such criticisms) wonder what the male characters are after? Nowadays, are innocence and purity so despised, or so transient, that no trace of their appeal remains? Surely not. Perhaps in our day, those qualities are so firmly relegated to childhood that modern audiences aren’t comfortable with an erotic attraction to innocence–or, in The Wind, with how a young virgin’s terror of sex can coexist with an equally primal yearning for it.
At this point it really may seem as though I am picking on Mr. Schickel, but hey, Dan started it this time. Do read Dan's entire piece on Gish; it is beautifully written and argued, as always, even though I don't agree with him at all on Griffith.
Also, here is a lovely post by Robert Avrech, about Gish's meticulous preparation for her roles. The silent cinema has no more appreciative, sharp-eyed and passionate advocate on the Web than Robert.
Being a partial account of my 15-day stay in Lebanon, with my family. Some names have been changed. Note that most major historical sightseeing, including the ruins of the Alexander Gate and Hippodrome in Tyre, the Sea Castle in Sidon, the Beirut Historical Museum and the ruins of Heliopolis in Baalbek, was accomplished on prior trips. This was more about...well, read on.
Number of buses you must take to change planes from Air France to Middle East Airlines at Charles de Gaulle airport: Two Who on earth designs an airport that requires buses to get anywhere: The designers of Charles de Gaulle airport Time delay due to lateness of bus, whose passengers included a visibly ticked-off head flight attendant: Two and a half hours Best airport I have ever been in: Rafik Hariri International, in Beirut Distance to Southern port town of Tyre, in Lebanon, from the Beirut airport: About 70 kilometers Time elapsed en route: Two hours
Number of cups of Nescafe consumed by me over 15-day stay in Lebanon: About 48 Number of cups of Turkish coffee consumed: About 16 Availability of American-style coffee in Lebanon: Low Reason I didn’t consume more Turkish coffee in Lebanon: More than one cup and I’m suddenly Ray Liotta in the helicopter scene in Goodfellas. Response of Aunt Raja, upon hearing me wonder out loud whether I should cover up more to blend in with that afternoon’s coffee guests: “Eh. You are young and pretty. Why bother?” My favorite in-law: Aunt Raja
Bottles of sunscreen brought to Lebanon: Nine Number consumed: Five Sunburns sustained by family: Zero (I am proud of this.) Attitude of native Lebanese to sunscreen: Detached amusement How to spot UNIFIL personnel at a beach resort: They are paler than me, and they glisten with sunscreen Days at beach or pool: Seven Diet staples consumed by my children in Lebanon, in descending order of preference: Kibbeh, lahme bajine, kafta, cucumbers, watermelon, pita bread, rice pilaf, chicken soup. Diet staples consumed by me in Lebanon, in descending order of importance: Fattoush, tabbouleh, labneh, kussa, fish, pita. Pounds gained by me on vacation: Zero
Number of treehouses in the locally famous garden of Aunt Hana and Uncle Zein, in Tyre: One Number of ornaments made from Roman pieces salvaged from destruction at construction sites: About four Likelihood of hitting Roman ruins no matter where you try to put a building in Lebanon: High Number of ornaments made from spent and salvaged ordnance in Uncle Zein’s garden: Three, including a cluster bomb. What my Uncle Zein made during the Israeli invasion of 1982, when he couldn’t work in the garden: A carefully polished coffee table from a salvaged olive tree stump Dimensions of table: About four feet by two feet. What my son and I found in the garden upon returning from an outing: A bride and groom posing for wedding pictures What the maid of honor was wearing: A skin-tight black satin spaghetti-strap dress, over a nude-colored, tight, neck-high, full-sleeved shirt, and a hijab headdress over what was obviously an elaborate hair-updo What the bride was wearing: A halter dress with a full tulle skirt and a tight, silver-embroidered bodice, over a tight, white, neck-high, full-sleeved shirt, and a hijab headdress like a white version of the maid of honor’s, only with a veil attached to the back. My son’s reaction to the bride: “There’s a princess in Aunt Hana’s garden!” Aunt Hana’s reaction: “Oh, it’s July. They’re here almost every weekend. Sometimes they call, sometimes they just show up.” Amount Aunt Hana charges for use of the garden in photo shoots: Zero.
Number of car wrecks sustained while I was a passenger in Lebanon: One Accident caused by: A man turning directly, and without any signal, into the path of Aunt Hana’s car Reaction of culprit: Handed Aunt Hana her crumpled license plate and a piece of her fender Damages requested by an entirely serene and polite Aunt Hana: An apology Damages paid up: Yes (grudgingly) Driving advice proffered by Aunt Hana to my husband: “Just remember that everyone else on the road is completely crazy.” Number of cars in Lebanon spotted with people riding on the luggage rack: Three Number spotted with open sides and children riding inside unsecured: Two Number of motorcycle helmets spotted, in a country full of mopeds and scooters: Two, in Beirut Number of cars with infant in lap of front seat passenger: Five Number of cars with infant in lap of driver: Two Number of car seats spotted: Zero Number of car seats we hauled to Lebanon: Three
Distance from Tyre to Tripoli, in the north: 195 kilometers Worst traffic in Lebanon, by common consent: Outside the resort town of Jounieh, north of Beirut Possible cause of bad traffic in Jounieh, aside from number of cars: Drivers’ desire to cram three lanes of traffic onto each two-lane side of the highway Best view on the road from Tyre to Tripoli: The sweeping vista of Jounieh and its bay, as you’re leaving
Number of black canvas bags left on sidewalk in downtown Tripoli while I struggled to strap three not terribly cooperative children into three car seats: One Contents of black canvas bag including, but not limited to: A laptop Hours elapsed in villa of our good friend Mansur’s uncle before bag was missed: Two and a half Calls made by Mansur’s cousin Sami to ask someone to look for the bag: One
Transcript of Sami’s conversation with the doorman of apartment building in downtown Tripoli: Sami: [Arabic] (to me) What was in the bag, besides the laptop? Me: Um...sunscreen. A toy car. Baby wipes. Sami: [Arabic] baay-bee wipes [Arabic]. (To me, slowly and significantly, both eyebrows raised and mouth twitching) What kind of baby wipes? Me: (an embarrassed squeak) Pampers. (afterthought) Sensitive. Sami: [Arabic] Pampers [Arabic].
Time elapsed after Sami’s phone call: About 15 minutes. Number of black canvas bags containing a Lightning McQueen toy, sunscreen, Pampers Sensitive baby wipes and a laptop retrieved from a Tripoli sidewalk by an apartment doorman: One Sami’s laughing reaction to profuse expressions of thanks: “I own this town.” Sami’s occupation: Journalist Sami’s employer: Al Jazeera Location of the villa of Mansur’s uncle: About three kilometers from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. Ressponse of Sami and other relatives to Mansur’s proposed visit in 2007: “Not a good idea this summer. The crossfire keeps setting the orchard on fire.” Parting gift of Sami to the Nehme adults: One bottle homemade arak.
Biggest attraction in Tripoli: St. Gilles Castle Second biggest: Tripoli souk Third biggest: Al Hallab pastry shop Purchased at Tripoli souk: Locally made soap and one pair of traditional silver earrings Haggling: None. Price was already low. Best ice cream at Tripoli souk: Scoops, a good place to get a massive dish of multi-colored ice cream while you wait for a friend (in this case Mansur) to bring your car down. Mansur’s problem with bringing our car: It wouldn’t start. What happened when our car wouldn’t start: A man appeared and told Mansur to pop the hood. Number of times Mansur had seen this person before: Zero What Mansur did: He popped the hood. What the man did: Fiddled around with the engine for a minute and yelled, “Don’t you have a rag back there or something?” What Mansur handed him: My son’s swimming trunks. Man’s reaction: “What is this? Are you kidding me? Oh all right, never mind.” What happened when the man closed the hood: The car started. How long it took to haggle payment for the impromptu auto-tune-up: About two minutes What happened next: An altercation with a merchant who didn’t want Mansur parking in front of his shop Mansur’s mood upon arrival at Scoops ice cream in the Tripoli souk: Stressed Did car continue to work after ministrations by total stranger outside St Gilles Castle?: Yes.
Number of times we got lost in downtown Beirut: Two. Outcome the first time: Got good directions from a man hanging out in front of the Armenian cultural center in Bourj Hammoud. Outcome second time: Said “what the hell,” stopped for lunch at a cafe overlooking Pigeon Rock, then followed the sea back to the highway. Number of buildings seen with visible gun and mortar damage in Beirut: Two, including the still-abandoned Holiday Inn. Number of buildings spotted with mortar damage on first visit to Beirut, in 2000: About twenty.
Location of Beirut apartment of my husband’s close childhood friend Maher: In Hamra, not far from the Corniche, and close enough to where Rafik Hariri was assassinated to have the windows blown out by the explosion. What Maher likes about his neighborhood: “It has always been very mixed. Before the war, nobody even asked what religion you are. You found out at Christmas or Ramadan or if someone got married.” Maher’s occupation: Head chef at a restaurant in Hamra. Highlight of lunch with Maher and his adorable mother Isnat: Maher’s tale of a five-month stint as a chef in a remote part of Nigeria. What the Nigeria job included: Slaughtering his own goats every morning and doing the marketing armed with a semi-automatic weapon. (Let’s see them try that on next season’s Top Chef.) Maher’s comment on why he left: “It occurred to me that it would not really be all that funny to survive the civil war in Beirut and die in Nigeria trying to buy groceries.”
Number of international phone calls made by me in Lebanon: Zero. Number of emails sent: Zero. Number of blog posts, comments, Facebook updates or Tweets posted: Zero. Number of movies seen: Four. In descending order of preference, Win-Win, Morning Glory, True Crime, The Kite Runner.
Return trip to Brooklyn: Uneventful. How jet-lagged am I?: I am typing this at six a.m. EDT.
Auntie Mame: Widdecomb, Guterman, Applewhite, Biberman and Black. You want to talk to Mr. Guterman? One moment, sir. I'll connect you. Widdecomb, Guterman, Applewhite, Biberman and Black. Oh, yes Mr. Biberman. You'd like to talk with Mr. Applewhite? Oh, yes, sir, he's in. I'll connect you. Widdecomb, Guterman, Applewhite, Bib-bib-bib-blib-bibman and Black? Oh yes, long distance, how are you? Oh. Mr Widdecomb? I have your San Francisco call for you. Yes, Mr. Biberman? Oh. Did I connect you to Mr. Guterman instead of Mr. Applewhite? I'm sorry Mr. Bibbicome, Bibbibibbib. [She pulls the jack out of the plug and shakes it] Oh Mr. Applewhite, what are you doing in that hole with Mr. Guterman? Yes Mr. Widdecomb? Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I'll try to reconnect you again with San Francisco. Let me see, Mr. Bibibib is in there talking to Mr. Bubbawhite. Where on earth is Mr. Applewhite? Oh, there you are Mr. Applewhite! [She starts to cross cords and desperately plug jacks into holes] Mr. Widdecomb, there's no such place as San Francisco. Please! [She lifts up her console and is horrified to see that it's glowing] Mr. Bibibib? Mr. Widdecomb?
The Siren has chosen the above passage from Auntie Mame for three reasons.
First, she is about to go off-line, big time. For a little more than two weeks, the Internet will, for the most part, have to spin on its axis without her. Vadim Rizov will tweet his last Glenn Beck live-tweet--unless he decides vacations are for lowering blood pressure, not raising it. Victoria, Sian and Annie will waft scented samples at the Siren in vain. Glenn Kenny’s epic Barry Lyndon aspect-ratio thread will draw more comments, but not the Siren’s. Simon Abrams and Ryan Kelly will brunch without her. Kim Morgan will tumble at her beautiful new tumblr, but the Siren shall not see it until she returns the week of July 11.
Second, and saddest, for the Siren, the Web will be full of tributes to the late, deeply lamented Peter Falk, and hers will not be one of them, not until she returns, at the soonest. Maybe not even then. When John Mortimer, creator of the Siren’s beloved Rumpole, passed away, Lance Mannion told the Siren that he’d write a tribute when his heart could take the strain. Lance still hasn’t done it. The Siren feels the same way about Columbo.
Hence, Auntie Mame. Is there any stress, strain or sadness that Auntie Mame can’t help?
But, third and final, being the ultimate New Yorker in many ways, Auntie Mame is also there to share our joys. And this morning, she would be very proud of us. The Siren is sure of that.
The Hard Way, below, got the Siren to thinking about the character of the ambitious heroine’s sweetheart--the one who keeps tugging at her spangled sleeve and reminding her that after all, she’s a woman, and he’s a man, and sure, she’s got the adulation of thousands but is that gonna keep her warm at night?
At least one perfectly logical answer being, "Hell yes, assuming I make some decent investments, it will keep me warm and then some, you boob."
But that’s so rarely the answer a Hollywood heroine gives, which is amusing, considering it’s the real-life answer a lot of big female players in that town give every day. Not in movies. Not in Cover Girl, not in The Red Shoes, not in A Star Is Born, not Lana Turner or Hedy Lamarr in Ziegfeld Girl, not Woman of the Year, not Funny Face, not even poor Anne Hathaway when she’s handed fashion-magazine stardom in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, oh no, she still wants that drippy sous-chef. Mind you, the Siren loves all those movies; yes, even The Devil Wears Prada. It’s just a persistent trope, that’s all.
But the Siren bethought herself also of the 1943 Phantom of the Opera.
All right, all right, you're probably tired of The Phantom of the Opera, but the Siren has enduring affection for this version, more so than the admittedly greater 1925 silent with Lon Chaney. The 1943 version is in Technicolor, and the Siren never gets tired of Technicolor. The script has some wit and bite to it, which the Siren attributes to screenwriter Samuel Hoffenstein, who’s a side obsession of hers. Claude Rains gets a real character with a detailed background and motivations. And Rains, fabulous actor that he was, knew you couldn’t play this 19th century melodrama in any way other than all-out. He chomps at the scenery with such gusto that the Siren imagines him licking his lips and downing a bromo-seltzer between takes.
You can watch below; the part that the Siren is talking about begins around the 7:15 mark. The Siren hopes it brightens your Monday as much as it does hers.
Update: Beloved Siren commenter MrsHenryWindleVale, who knows from sleeve-tuggers, points to Harvey Korman's perfect rendition of the type in the "Torchy Song" skit from the old Carol Burnett Show. No one who didn't love Joan Crawford could do Joan this well, is what I say: "All I have are these miserable scrapbooks, filled with nothing but thousands of articles telling me how wonderful I am."
Embedding is disabled, alas, but part one is here. Part two is here.
An excerpt from the Siren's latest Retro-Fit column at Nomad Wide Screen, concerning the talented but star-crossed actor Lew Ayres.
One thing that sets All Quiet on the Western Front apart is its use of young actors to play young soldiers, a realistic touch that has eluded even latter-day filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, who stuffed Saving Private Ryan with stars who would never again see 30 (or, in Tom Hanks’ case, even 40). Spielberg, in fact, cited All Quiet as an influence on Private Ryan, which has the odd effect of making the 1930 movie seem far more daring and uncompromising than his. Spielberg ends on a weeping old soldier and a waving American flag; Lewis Milestone ends on a row of teenagers marching into a ghostly graveyard.
[snip]
Ayres had made just two movies before he worked with Milestone, and it can’t be denied that his lack of experience shows in a few scenes. But the vast majority of his performance hits the audience with raw, unmediated power. Ayres seems no more able to protect himself from the emotions his role demands than his character, Paul, can protect himself from the horrors of war. In scenes like the young soldiers’ first patrol, or his unforgettable night in a trench with a dying French soldier, Ayres recoils from events like an abused child — which is, in the end, what Paul is. Almost as horrifying as the battle sequences are scenes like the one in which the soldiers rush around their fetid quarters trying to kill rats. Ayres’ agonized face tells you, as no dialogue could, that back home he would never have been so brutal even to a rat, and now he must be even more brutal to the men on the other side of the field.
Ayres followed the triumph of All Quiet with a gangster film, Archie Mayo’s 1931 Doorway to Hell, where he plays a Michael Corleone-like godfather. Standard wisdom on this surprisingly good movie is that Ayres had no business playing a criminal mastermind, and should have swapped roles with James Cagney, who played his underling. It’s true that Ayres, while a fine and sensitive actor, singularly lacked any ability to portray physical menace. (Leonardo di Caprio has the same problem.) But Doorway to Hell is the story of how Louis Ricarno (Ayres) tries to leave his violent life and cannot, and that must be what possessed Warner Brothers to borrow Ayres for the part. And Ayres does beautifully with scenes such as the one where he goes to a plastic surgeon to ask for help in reconstructing his little brother’s shattered face after an auto accident. Where should he find the boy, asks the doctor — and Ayres tells him, with a look his All Quiet character would have recognized, to go down to the undertaker’s.
A brief excerpt from the Siren's brief review of David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, at Barron's Magazine this week.
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition, is more accurately a long, melancholy love story: Boy (author David Thomson) meets movies, gets hitched to movies, spends rest of life veering between passion and petulance, always craving reassurance that his love object is worthy of the care he's lavished on it...The entries that pulse with life are the ones written in the first flush of love and discovery, such as those on Howard Hawks, Luis Buñuel and Cary Grant, or those updated with rekindled ardor, like the one on director Max Ophüls. There are living filmmakers who earn Thomson's admiration, but the author brings his greatest passion to the cinema of the past.
It is, in fact, better to be a dead person in The New Biographical Dictionary, in which even the most treasured working directors can disappoint—such as Baz Luhrmann, wildly overpraised in the past but here found guilty of Australia, a movie journey that even Thomson refuses to make...Actresses, for their part, dismay him by turning 30 or passing 40. At times, Thomson seems to mourn their lost beauty more than they do themselves. Even their efforts to stay in shape can displease him, as he describes how Jodie Foster sometimes looks "sick from exercise," or says young Leslie Caron had "the face of someone who has been doing exercises: tight, preoccupied and dull."
When paraphrasing from memory the immortal words of movie composer Dimitri Tiomkin, below, the Siren tried to link to an old post about this anecdote that she did for Nathaniel R. Alas, it has disappeared. Well, this cannot be allowed to stand. The story, in its full glory, must be available somewhere on the Internet for all to…savor, if that is the word we want here.
From Otto Friedrich's forever fabulous City of Nets, the story of Tiomkin, David O. Selznick, and the orgasm music.
David Selznick summoned Tiomkin to his studio one day and asked him to become the seventh composer to try writing the music for Duel in the Sun (1947). He wanted, he said, eleven main themes: a Spanish theme, a ranch theme, a love theme, an orgasm theme--
"Orgasm?" Tiomkin said. "How do you score an orgasm?"
"Try," said Selznick. "I want a really good shtump."
Tiomkin labored for weeks on his eleven themes, then assembled an orchestra and played them for Selznick. Selznick was pleased. Tiomkin labored for weeks more to produce a complete score. It included forty-one drummers and a chorus of one hundred. Selznick kept worrying. He asked Tiomkin to whistle the love theme for him. Tiomkin whistled.
"Fine, fine," said Selznick. "Now the orgasm theme."
Tiomkin whistled. Selznick shook his head somberly.
"That isn't it," said Selznick. "That's just not an orgasm."
Tiomkin went away and worked some more. He combined the sighings of cellos and a brassy stirring of trombones, all in the rhythm of what he later described as a handsaw cutting through wood. Once again, he was summoned to Selznick's studio, once again the orchestra assembled…Everything seemed to go splendidly until the orgasm theme, which Selznick wanted to have repeated, and then repeated again.
"You're going to hate me for this, but it won't do," he finally said to Tiomkin. "It's too beautiful."
"Mr. Selznick, what is troubling you?" Tiomkin protested. "What don't you like about it?"
"I like it, but it isn't orgasm music," said Selznick. "It's not shtump. It's not the way I fuck."
"Mr. Selznick, you fuck your way, I fuck my way," cried Tiomkin. "To me, that is fucking music."
*****
The Block Museum at Northwestern University has posted podcasts of the two panels on which the Siren appeared last month. The first, Past Perfect—Critical Histories, Seminal Touchstones, and Rediscoveries, was moderated by Nick Davis and included Jonathan Rosenbaum, Fred Camper, Dave Kehr and Gabe Klinger. It is available here.
The second panel, Critical Voices: Style, Substance, and Scope—The Art of Film Writing, was moderated by Hank Sartin and included Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Wesley Morris, Scott Foundas, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. It is available here.
The Siren will just go ahead and said it: Nobody, print or online, writes about the art of acting with more insight, detail and profound respect than Sheila O'Malley. To prove the point, please treat yourself to her post about a single scene in Steve McQueen's Hunger.
Oops, one more very important note: TCM's Star of the Month is our very own beloved Jean Simmons. Among the rarities, tonight (tomorrow morning) at 2:15 am EDT, Uncle Silas, which the Siren has always wanted to see as she's crazy about that crazy J. Sheridan Le Fanu.
For someone who professes to disdain Internet writers, Richard Schickel is one hell of an effective troll.
The last time the Siren roused herself to notice Schickel, he was calling bloggers "idiots" and saying no one read us except our mothers and distant cousins. This caused the Siren to weep hot tears that smudged her mascara, until someone reminded her that while her patient readers have disagreed with her on matters such as late Anthony Mann and whether or not Elizabeth Taylor was a good actress, no one, not even a cousin, has ever called her an idiot.
So here was the Siren reorganizing her lingerie, happily forgetting the existence of Schickel aside from his hilarious Twitter doppelganger, when her friend the fine and gentlemanly Tom Shone of Taking Barack to the Movies reminded her.
Tom, you see, has some big fat problems with Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, which he details in a very funny and characteristically well-written review right here. But then Tom had to go and quote Schickel's review, luring an unsuspecting Siren with a famous publicity shot of luscious Veronica Lake. And the Siren, because she never learns, clicked through to Schickel's full post.
Now the Siren hasn't yet seen Tree of Life, and if she holds true to her usual pattern with new releases she should be catching up with the latest Malick sometime in the winter of 2012-13. She comforts herself that if Malick took four years to edit his latest movie, surely he would not begrudge her taking a couple of years to watch it. But here's the quote.
Movies, I believe, are an essentially worldly medium, playful and romantic, particularly in America, where, on the whole our best directors have stated whatever serious intentions they may harbor as ignorable asides. There are other ways of making movies, naturally, and there’s always a small audience available for these noble strivings—and good for them, I guess. But I’m with Preston Sturges, who gave this immortal line to Veronica Lake in “Sullivan’s Travels”: “There’s nothing like a deep-dish movie to drive you out in the open."
This is, simply put, a lot of hooey. So much so that the Siren doesn't believe Schickel, a man with a deep knowledge of Hollywood history and the CV to prove it, can possibly believe this stuff himself, which is why she called him a troll in the first paragraph. Troll is not a word that the Siren trots out for just any old curmudgeon. But she uses it here, because beating Terrence Malick about the head with Preston Sturges is like using the Marx Brothers to critique Samuel Fuller.
Where, the Siren asks you, does the "playful and romantic" notion leave the blackest of film noir? Force of Evil, Scarlet Street, Sweet Smell of Success, they're romantic? Social dramas like Heroes for Sale and The Crowd and Give Us This Day, anti-war masterpieces like The Eagle and the Hawk and Attack! and All Quiet on the Western Front, tragedies like The Old Maid and Make Way for Tomorrow--they're playful and/or their serious intentions are ignorable asides? It's okay for Michael Powell and Albert Lewin and William Dieterle and Joseph Mankiewicz and Victor Fleming to film their notion of the afterlife, but only because they slipped in some sex and some jokes to keep Richard Schickel from nodding off? Hey, John Ford is serious, but playful--oh wait, but Schickel once used a review of Scott Eyman's splendid Ford biography to unload about how Ford's use of comic relief gave him a big pain in the fundament. Schickel's last book but one was about Clint Eastwood, and if he wants to tell the Siren what's so playful and romantic about Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River, and how to ignore any serious intentions, she's all ears.
The Siren admits that Schickel put himself more firmly than ever on her bad side by implicitly dismissing Days of Heaven. The Siren loves Days of Heaven with a deep purple passion, loves it even more than Badlands, considers it a major way station on her road to appreciating what Dan Kois might call "vegetable movies." "Narratively empty and emotionally unengaging"--Days of Heaven is Wings of the Dove, for crying out loud. If you can't find emotion and narrative content, not to mention romance and eroticism, in Richard Gere's hand closing wordlessly over Brooke Adams' to summon her out of her husband's bed, and the wineglass sinking to the bottom of the river, then the Siren must resort to Dimitri Tiomkin's line to David O. Selznick--you fuck in your way, and I'll fuck in mine.
Schickel thinks post-Badlands Malick is tiresome and bombastic, and in the words of the great philosopher Stuart Smalley, "that's OK." But for Schickel to extrapolate from what he sees as Malick's overreaching, that the ideal way to go after big notions of fate and society and the silence of God or whatever is to hide them, like whoever decided to put zucchini in breakfast muffins, is silly. Yeah, tell it to Fritz Lang. Sometimes the filmmakers beloved by the Siren smuggle their seriousness, as Scorsese put it, and sometimes they hit you with it like a beanball. It's a big, beautiful world of cinema out there. There's room for Sullivan's Travels, and there's room for Terrence Malick.
The Siren posts another excerpt from another Retro-Fit column at Nomad Wide Screen, this one on Vincente Minnelli's mad, mad, mad, mad Cobweb, with a cast that includes another eternal favorite around these parts, Oscar Levant.
The Cobweb has all of Minnelli’s dazzling acuity of vision, with every bit of the lush color and striking compositions you find in something like Gigi. It has good performances, with standout work from John Kerr, Oscar Levant, Susan Strasberg, Charles Boyer, Lillian Gish and, above all, Gloria Grahame. What it doesn’t have is a huge emotional hook. The patients at Castlehouse, the aptly named mansion where wealthy people go for what they used to call “rest cures,” just don’t seem that sick. Sure, Sue (Strasberg) is agoraphobic, Mr. Capp (Levant) is depressed and mother-fixated, and Steven (Kerr) is depressed and father-fixated, but they and the other patients have no problem sitting down in the library and conducting a meeting according to proper parliamentary procedure. They help each other, they take turns, they go back to their rooms and have little parties with a phonograph playing and everybody laughing. One old woman can even handle her own wheelchair.
The staff, on the other hand, can’t even order a set of drapes without causing a chain of catastrophes.
[snip]
And of course, there is Oscar Levant, in his last film role, singing “Mother” while sprawling in a hydrotherapy bath and waiting for his sedatives to take effect. When he looks at the nurse and tells her, “you remind me of my mother,” the line is so funny, and so sinister, that the audience may have a fleeting fear that the movie is going to go very Hitchcock. It doesn’t, of course; the next morning, it’s back to the library and fabric selection.
The fact that the plot hinges on those drapes has come in for a lot of head-scratching over the years. I wonder, do they show this one in interior design class at a place like the Fashion Institute of Technology? They should, they should. Drapes — good lord, did even Cecil Beaton get this worked up over window coverings? Wouldn’t furniture be, well, weightier? The battiness of this MacGuffin has its own internal logic, though. The Cobweb is a movie about a clinic staffed by people who are (with the exception of Lauren Bacall’s too-good-to-be-true art therapist) way, way too self-absorbed, so much so that paisley versus floral versus silkscreen becomes an existential life crisis. Thus does the movie slyly suggest that the patients are picking up on the staff’s narcissism, and not the other way around.
The Cobweb’s original running time was two and a half hours, and producer John Houseman convinced Minnelli to cut it down. Despite the fact that The Cobweb is in no way boring, that was probably a good choice; at its present length, the film’s beauty and roiling, neurotic cast retain a headlong charm. Toward the end, Widmark’s character tries to make the case that the fuss about the drapes was a metaphor for all the human passions unleashed, but he convinces no one. Levant, who spent a lifetime in and out of psychiatric treatment, came much closer to the heart of the matter in a quip he made on set. Director and actor quarreled a lot during the shoot, and Levant muttered to the assistant producer after one spat with Minnelli, “Who’s crazy, anyway — him or me?”
From the keenly observant Arthur S. over at This Pig's Alley, a more in-depth look at The Cobweb, with beautiful screen caps.
One of the Siren’s new movie books this year is King of Comedy, by Mack Sennett. The Siren doesn’t know that much about the very early days of silent film, so she can’t attest to Sennett’s reliability as a memoirist. Judging by Sennett’s style, he seems to be more of a yarn-spinner than a meticulous recorder of an important historical era in the development of the cinematic arts.
He’s funny as hell, though, so who cares.
Here is Mack Sennett, working his way up in Little Old New York, not too long after the era of The Strawberry Blonde.
I hung around the Bowery, picked up an acquaintance here and there through boardinghouse connections, and got a job. At first I was handed a broom and told to sweep out. My rise was sudden. One night they needed a gifted fellow to play the hind legs of a horse, and so I made my debut in this character part.
My vis-a-vis, you might say, was a young and handsome man named Stu Krauss from North Carolina...Stu Krauss moaned when I was made the hind legs of the horse. “I have been the front legs for two months,” he complained, “and I had hoped for promotion. Now you come along and grab the star part of the act.”
I thought that over.
“I don’t get you,” I said.
“Anybody can be the front legs,” Stu said. “The front legs is--or are--[Stu was educated] the straight part. The hind legs do all the acting and get all the applause.”
I thought that over.
“I guess talent will come out,” I said. “I have been recognized.”
“Indeed you have,” said Stu. “The minute you appeared I said to myself, ‘Here is a man who is destined to be the rear end of a horse.’ “
I thought that over.
“I shall try to be humble,” I said.
Above, a picture of Mack Sennett with the love of his life, Mabel Normand, taken from a swell fan site called Looking for Mabel Normand; it has lots of pictures and abundant film clips, too.
*****
Speaking of film history, These Amazing Shadows, in which the Siren can be briefly glimpsed during a segment about The Wizard of Oz, continues to be screened around the country. The Siren’s favorite part of These Amazing Shadows consists of the details about restoration and the Library of Congress archives. Peter Nelhaus recently caught it in Denver and saw director Kurt Norton speak. Raquelle at Out of the Past saw it, also liked it, and sneaked a cellphone shot of the Siren on screen. She says she hopes I’m not mad. I’m not. I just want my readers to know that my skin is not gray in real life.
Further screenings are being held around the country, and the film is still available through video-on-demand. It will be available on DVD through PBS Video and is scheduled to screen on PBS around December 27.
Further to the Siren’s George Stevens Resurrection Drive in partnership with Raymond de Felitta, the estimable Glenn Kenny has started a Tracy-Hepburn Project in which Glenn plans to watch all of their co-starring films. And he's watching them with his better half, Claire, known to Glenn’s readers as “my lovely wife” or “MLW” for short. The first selection was Woman of the Year, and Glenn and Claire agree with the Siren that it's a neglected masterpiece and a landmark in the positive portrayal of career women on screen. Just kidding. He and Claire had pretty much the same problems with it that the Siren did. It's a witty exchange, and the Siren is looking forward to Keeper of the Flame, which is up next.
Finally, the Siren’s longtime blog pal Flickhead has an affectionate post about a new three-disc Blu-Ray set of the three films that Sophia Loren made with Vittorio de Sica. Flickhead puts them in the context of their time, discusses the ebb and flow of de Sica's reputation and most importantly, assures us that Sophia and Marcello Mastroianni look great on Blu-Ray.
“If you don’t like this one,” the Siren told her husband, “I’ll eat the DVD case.”
The Siren admits she said this knowing she was in no danger of having to digest plastic, since she could tell her husband, “Hey, I just bought a four-hour dialogue-free movie about a man matching socks and suffering torments over whether to fold them into squares or invert the top over the foot portion, and by the way the man doing the folding is James Cagney,” and presto, her husband would clear a four-hour hole in his schedule and afterward say things like “Nobody handled fiber content like Cagney, nobody.”
Still, Raoul Walsh’s The Strawberry Blonde is a beloved movie, one with a reputation that quietly extends well beyond hardcore classic-film fans, to horror-film lovers, savorers of superheros and serial killers, to people who really would watch a movie about folding socks. When the Siren mentions The Strawberry Blonde, they get this look James Cagney would call “sappy” and they coo, “That’s a great one.”
Even the credits promise a great movie--Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Jack Carson, Alan Hale, Julius and Philip Epstein, Orry-Kelly, Robert Haas, Perc Westmore, and the sublime James Wong Howe, who is probably perched in the afterlife shooting heaven in glorious black and white.
And then there’s Walsh himself, one hell of a great director, his reputation built in large part on tough-minded movies like What Price Glory?, The Roaring Twenties, They Drive By Night, High Sierra and White Heat. His machismo was entirely authentic, and you could easily believe he’d earned his famous eyepatch in a duel or a revolution somewhere south of the border (although you’d be wrong; it was a freak auto accident).
Here’s something about Walsh, though, as well as other he-man directors of the Golden Age like Michael Curtiz, William Wellman, Howard Hawks and John Ford: Their fearlessness extended effortlessly to matters of the heart. Their strong men have strong needs and strong emotions. (And, as in Walsh’s The Man I Love, so does a strong woman.) That’s the secret to Walsh’s incredible control of tone; it’s seamless because it’s tied to one vision of what makes his protagonists worthwhile. There’s very little cool about a Walsh hero, in the sense of emotion withheld. You find that in the villain from time to time, but not the main guy.
So in 1941 the adventurous Walsh takes on this nostalgic tale of the life, loves and bad breaks of a dentist with a mail-order degree, and he’s a perfect fit. That’s obvious from the opening scene, where Biff (James Cagney) is pitching horseshoes with his old friend Nicolas Pappalas (George Tobias). There’s Cagney, throwing the horseshoes with a dancer’s grace, and there’s Walsh, lingering over a shot of Cagney from behind so you get the full effect of that high-pocketed bantam walk. And then the camera moves over the wall, to a group of well-off college boys and their sweethearts, lying in hammocks and singing to one another. And the movement is ravishing--not flashy at all, Walsh never telegraphs his effects. The shot is so fluid and natural it’s like water flowing out of a spring. From Cagney’s packed-dirt backyard, to the grass and trees and ease of the well-to-do just a few feet away. That one movement of Walsh’s camera gives the Siren a pleasure so intense that she can tell you it’s the precise moment she fell in love with The Strawberry Blonde.
The movie follows Biff as he deals with his ne’er-do-well father (Alan Hale), falls for the strawberry-blonde Virginia Brush (Rita Hayworth, and incidentally how did her character’s name get past the Breen Office?), sees Virginia stolen away by the double-dealing Hugo Barnstead (Jack Carson, in what Dennis Grunes calls the “role that made Carson Carson”), and eventually realizes true love with the kindhearted Amy Lind (Olivia de Havilland, looking more beautiful even than Hayworth).
Everyone involved in this movie gave it the best they had. The screenplay was by the Epstein brothers, and their particular wit is all over the dialogue, in Amy asking Virginia, as they wait for Biff and Hugo, “What did we come here for if not to be trifled with?”; in Biff’s father saying cheerfully, “I wasn’t cut out to be a street-cleaner, and it’s no use reaching for the stars”; in Biff’s repeated line, “That’s the kind of a hairpin I am.” James Wong Howe--well, if Howe had an autopilot switch he never used it, but here you can worship the gas lamps being lit in the park, the nightime light on a set of lace curtains moving in the breeze, and the long shadows across the floor of the useless office where Biff goes to work for Hugo. Orry-Kelly’s finest moment is a dress that Virginia wears for a dinner party after she’s married Hugo--the neckline is dramatically low, in keeping with the character’s loss of youthful sweetness, but in deference to Breen it’s cut so there’s no visible cleavage from Hayworth’s magnificent poitrine. This was the Siren’s fourth viewing (at least) and she still can’t figure out exactly how Orry-Kelly managed that.
Nor can the Siren completely unravel the mystery of Walsh’s elegantly balanced two-shots. The movie is full of them, and they never get old or static. Biff is up high when he’s talking to his father at one point, side by side with Hugo when Hugo is cheating him once again. When Biff meets Amy in the park, he’s up near the top of a hill, she’s down closer to the bottom, as she’s already attracted to him and Biff doesn’t have the sense to see it. Virginia is up in a carriage, Biff is down on the ground mooning after her. The whole beautiful rhythm of The Strawberry Blonde comes in pairs. And it’s punctuated with music, each familiar old song signaling a transition, as good as an intertitle.
The secondary leads are superb. Where Jack Carson excelled, and where he was perfect for Hugo Barnstead, was in playing the louse who doesn’t believe he’s a louse. Hugo’s efforts to pin his misdeeds on Biff are just the way Hugo thinks the world works. Hugo orders the substandard materials that cause old man Grimes’ death late in the movie, but Carson’s head shakes and his eyes widen in hurt at the suggestion that anyone would think he bore responsibility.
Carson would go on to be the best thing in many a mediocre movie, but Rita Hayworth was generally only as good as her directors. In his autobiography, Walsh recalled that Ann Sheridan, who would have been excellent, turned down the part in a fit of self-sabotaging pique at Jack Warner. The director said that he’d seen Hayworth dance and play some small roles at Columbia. Evidently Walsh missed Only Angels Have Wings, but some self-back-patting was in order, because Hayworth does marvelous work, showing good nature occasionally peeking out from Virginia’s cold-eyed ambition. Hayworth gets better and better as the movie goes on--watch the way she picks up spaghetti with two forks, mocking Hugo’s airs. And, in the penultimate scene, watch her put out a cigarette in Cagney’s dental sink, nine years before Margo Channing doused one in a jar of cold cream.
But it’s the slowly developing romance between Cagney and de Havilland that clutches at you. Biff is a brawler--he has a black eye in what must be more than half his scenes--but Cagney also shows the character’s dreamy, yearning side. Amy starts out trying to shock people with suffragette rhetoric, but it’s her kindness that makes you know she’s meant for Biff. There isn’t any question about whether they will get together--they’re shown married in the opening scene. The suspense becomes whether Biff has really learned to appreciate Amy, or still yearns for Virginia. His dawning regard is shown first in the scene when Amy comes to tell him Virginia has married Hugo, when Biff keeps dropping his eyes to avoid Amy’s sympathy. Later, after they’re married and before Biff goes to prison for Hugo’s crime, there’s a shot of Biff and Amy’s hands together that makes the Siren’s heart turn over. When Biff is in prison, Walsh balances the couple even then, as the nurse Amy pushes patients in wheelchairs and Biff pushes a shovel full of dirt in the prison yard.
Biff is finally released, and he goes to meet Amy in the park where they’ve met so many important times before. “Their reunion was one of the most emotional scenes I ever filmed,” said Walsh. At first Walsh hangs back a bit, and their shots are separate--until Biff and Amy’s love wells up and the director finally moves in, but still not too close, as if to show a bit of respect. Earlier, asked why he’s infatuated with Virginia, Biff replies, “Every fellow has an ideal”--and here he’s found it.
The Strawberry Blonde is another one of mid-century Hollywood’s forays into Gay Nineties nostalgia. The period was closer to them than the 1940s are to us now, but the difference between 1891 and 1941 is a lot bigger than between 1941 and 2011, and so there’s even more period detail to wallow in. But the film slyly, and without nastiness or rancor, insinuates that nostalgia is a mug’s game that can keep a man brooding on what might have been, rather than what is. Like a pretty lover with a bad disposition, nostalgia is something to be trifled with, not obsessed over.
Raoul Walsh: Offhand, I might say The Strawberry Blonde. I kind of liked the swing of it, the old-time music, the characters and the dress. It brought me back to my childhood. I grew up in that area [of New York City], you know.
McGilligan: Did you deliberately sweeten the memory of your past?
Walsh: Yes. A jolly time, good times, all nice people, singing and dancing.
McGilligan: That’s the way it really was, or the way you wanted to remember it?
As the Siren's contribution to her friend Raymond de Felitta's valiant efforts to resurrect the sadly shredded reputation of the marvelous George Stevens, she was going to write up the movie Giant. (Part 3 of Raymond's musings right here; please, pretty please, read them all.) After noodling around for a couple of weeks, she decided that all she really needed was this scene, one that ranks with the Siren's favorites in all of 1950s cinema and constitutes a remarkable piece of acting by the perpetually underappreciated Rock Hudson. Gather round, Stevens lovers and Stevens skeptics, and the Siren will explain.
A primary theme of Giant is bigotry, specifically bigotry against Mexican Americans. We've seen it throughout; Rock Hudson, as the stalwart Texas rancher Bick Benedict, kind to his Hispanic workers by the none-too-exacting standards of the time and place, but patronizing, tone-deaf and inclined to ignore what's going on in front of him. Like many people before and since, he first must find someone he cares about personally in order to comprehend what his wife (Elizabeth Taylor) and son Jordan (Dennis Hopper, in a sensitive and intelligent performance) have understood all along.
Late in the movie, the Benedict family--Hudson, Taylor (as Leslie), Carroll Baker (as their headstrong daughter Luz) and Elsa Cardenas (as Hopper's wife, Juana) have stopped at a roadside diner on their way back from a catastrophic weekend. James Dean, as the oil magnate Jett Rink, got spectacularly drunk at his own tribute dinner and, after making a horse's ass of himself in front of Texas society, confessed his love for Leslie to a near-empty banquet hall--watched by a heartsore Luz, who had loved him herself. Benedict decides a good hearburn-inducing meal will help them get back in touch with the real Texas. Unfortunately, the salt of the Texas earth is going to contain a lot of dirt.
We've already seen Juana, a gentle and idealized young woman, humiliated when she tried to go to a beauty parlor in Rink's hotel to get ready for the banquet. We've seen Jordan stomp into the proceedings and slug a smirking and unapologetic Rink. We've seen also that Benedict's initial reaction (although he later confronts Rink, for personal reasons that go way back) was more discomfort and embarrassment than sympathy with his enraged son. In the four minutes that this scene runs, we see Benedict finally, irrevocably, on course to getting the point.
What a superb rhythm Stevens and his editor, William Hornbeck, bring, as the scene starts with shots looking down the whole of the diner, and then picks up bit by bit as the confrontation grows and the camera gets more intimate with the fight and the people looking on. Raymond writes, with regard to A Place in the Sun, that "for Stevens, its not a matter of where the actors heads, hands etc. actually were that amounts to continuity; rather an emotional continuity and the power of the cut to bring that forward is what he was looking to achieve." Emotional continuity is here in this scene, in spades.
The Benedicts are seated at a back booth, with their menus. Sarge, played by Mickey Simpson, a character actor built along the lines of a brick outhouse, has already insulted the baby ("I'd think that kid would want a tamale") but permitted them to sit by virtue of the Benedicts being white enough to counteract the presence of Juana and Benedict's grandson. The camera looks down the long length of the diner, steel, white paint and red vinyl chairs, as a Spanish speaking family, evidently Mexican, comes in to eat. They timidly take a booth. "Hey you," Sarge calls from the left of the screen.
Cut to Benedict, sitting up, menu sliding back, a profile shot that emphasizes his social stature--the lord of the Reata ranch is not pleased. Leslie tries to talk about planes and arrival times. Back to the camera looking down the diner, Sarge advancing on the family--a woman with her parents, it seems--and telling them to get lost, with a few mispronounced Spanish phrases that are far more insulting than English would have been. (Simpson sounds about as Texan as Fiorello LaGuardia, but he's so good here it doesn't much matter.) From the left we see people at the counter watching the moment over their shoulders, with no more than idle detachment. Sarge towers over the old man, plants the old gentleman's hat on his head like he's a schoolboy, and starts to 86 him. Far in the back of the shot, we see Benedict rise to his feet and begin to advance. The men at the counter turn all the way around.
Benedict walks up with the spreading beer-belly gait of late (very late) middle age, but he's almost as tall as Sarge. Sarge's physical advantage is telegraphed by the way his back almost blots Benedict out of the shot. Hudson's body language isn't that of a man anticipating a fight, just that of an aristocrat pulling rank in the easy expectation that the peon is going to roll over. Simpson's planted feet and posture suggest no such thing.
Cut back to the opposite corner of the diner, now looking at Benedict's back, which is stiffening, a cake tower separating the two men (the Siren loves that) and Sarge pointing to Benedict's grandchild: "That there papoose down there, his name Benedict too?" The waitress is the only one in the diner who takes a look. Benedict turns; everyone else is still focused on him.
Back to the first shot, only closer in. "Yeah, come to think of it"--it may in fact be the first time Benedict has truly thought of it, and his voice finally gets aggressive on the next part of the line--"it is." Now to the Benedict booth for the first time since the confrontation began, Juana staring ahead in silent misery, her son just visible at the bottom of the frame, and Leslie in profile--hand resting on her pearls.
Sarge's back again, full-length; the old man has sat back down. Sarge pulls him back up and Hudson's first move is covered up by the actor's bulk--you only see Benedict's leg bowing out as he almost crouches to push back. Back against the counter Sarge goes; the men seated in the middle of the shot have abandoned all pretense of not watching the floor show. Benedict stands there like he's waiting for Sarge to pump him gas.
And we hear the first punch--we don't see it--we're back at the booth, Leslie giving a start, Luz's jaw set, Juana refusing to turn around. A couple more punches are heard until we're at a new angle and Sarge's huge frame landing on top of a table. And the impact of his body starts up the jukebox playing the mega-hit "Yellow Rose of Texas" as he slowly rises to his feet. Benedict's back look relaxed--way too relaxed, in a way that signals once more that this fight isn't going to go well for him.
Sarge lands another punch and the camera pulls back to Benedict landing on the floor, legs underneath him as though he slipped on a wet spot, not someone who knows he's in danger, but someone who figures this is all going to work out as soon as he's back on his feet. Benedict gets to his feet; more bad news, he doesn't exactly look steady. The Benedict table stirring, Leslie sitting up further, Luz's hand wavering at her face as if to say this is so unpleasant. The grandson, too interested to start crying.
Facing the counter now, Benedict and Sarge holding one another, Sarge punching only a hair above the belt. Benedict against the Mexican family's table, hands finally up. They circle one another and Benedict gets in a right to the jaw, his best punch so far and the best he's gonna get. Benedict's face in a brief moment of triumph, then Sarge lands another punch and he goes down.
And--the Siren loves this shot--we shift suddenly to the perspective from the kitchen, and the back of the cook, looking dead at the door as a man exits the counter on the right, and on the left Sarge still whales on Benedict.
Sarge's face shows more confidence than ever. A tremendous punch at Benedict who goes down again, an off-camera whimper from (probably) Luz and back to the corner booth, Leslie really clutching the pearls now, Juana barely turning her head.
Benedict down on the floor, looking up--another shot the Siren loves, one of sheer bloody aristocratic stubbornness, incredulity still in the tilt of his eyebrows.
One more fairly decent punch for Benedict, shot from the back of the diner again. The screen evenly divided, the Mexican man standing on the left, the waitress pudgily waiting it out on the right.
Then, as Benedict wallops Sarge onto a table, dig the view through the window--the livestock truck with cows grazing on hay, and the oil derricks on the left. More customers cutting their losses and beating it. More Luz and Leslie, the baby still placid in his mama's lap. Benedict pulling up Sarge like a sack of grain--he's not going to hit a man when he's down, not Bick Benedict.
Our first shot through the outside windows, people peeking in, and then the waitress in her doughy stupor, a sign on the right of her that we're about to see again in short order.
Sarge's quickest, harshest, most brutal punch, and Benedict's fastest meeting with the floor yet. The baby really wondering what's going on now. Sarge standing over Benedict, his face saying "I've got you now." Benedict's hair flopping comically and blood coming out of his mouth; Luz sitting way up in her seat to see if her father is capable of getting up, then putting her hand on her mouth like he's embarrassing her at a school dance. The camera trying to get up from the floor with Benedict as he seems to hug Sarge's waistband. A higher-angle shot of the Benedict table. Benedict up against the counter, and Sarge lands a punch that sends Benedict sailing over the counter, and Stevens pulls the camera back again so what we notice is mostly the soles of Benedict's shoes. Luz finally crying. The baby leaning back against mama. Benedict staggering to his feet and Sarge almost centered behind him, Sarge sure of his victory now. The cook still lounging on the left.
Benedict's head on the counter. He turns around. Now look at his expression, pushed to the side of this lummox, hair still flopping--he knows he's going to lose, but by god he's going down swinging. From the back of Benedict we see them, absurdly, still raising their fists like this is a boxing match and not a rout--more punches, more Luz almost hysterical--two more punches from Benedict and the waitress momentarily a bit worried. The baby finally upset, Sarge half-grinning, Luz again calling to her father, more punches, a blindingly fast cut to the Benedicts, more Sarge, Luz's head on her arms, and then a look through the neon sign on the window--Sarge's Place--at Benedict going down. (The military nickname for Sarge's character sarcastically evokes the one soldier we see in this movie, Sal Mineo's brief cameo as the young Hispanic ranch hand, Angel, who is killed in action offscreen. It's worth noting, because Stevens, novelist Edna Ferber and screenwriters Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat probably knew it, that Latino Americans have won more Congressional Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group.)
Leslie finally runs to her husband, leans over him and we get our first Stevens dissolve, to Sarge looking down at Benedict, with that sign on the left. He turns and grabs it (it isn't a very big sign) and dumps the notice on Benedict's chest. Leslie looks up. A close-up of Sarge, his expression hovering somewhere around smug, and then a swoosh in to the sign: "WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE"--the words surrounded by foodstains, heaving up and down with Benedict's labored breathing.
It's a rare movie fistfight that functions as character development, and this one plays like gangbusters. The metronome of that Mitch Miller march is bouncy enough to take the edge off the brutality, but martial enough to underline the epic nature of this battle. This is the climax of what the movie has been slowly pushing at Bick Benedict, the realization that his seigneurial little gestures toward Hispanic Texans are not, and never have been, enough. At some point, he has to pick a side and fight for it. But this isn't a noble fencing match, it's a doomed gesture against a system that isn't going to change anytime soon. And it isn't a complete epiphany for Benedict, Hudson's face and body show that to the end. There's too much lingering surprise for that. It's only when he's pulling his head off the counter that Benedict appears to realize that he's going down. And as Leslie is trying to comfort him, Benedict still doesn't know precisely what the hell just happened. It's Leslie who will have to explain at the fadeout, just a few scenes later.
