Drowning in the Mid-Atlantic

Kevin Drum does not like old-time movie accents.

The Siren tells you this not because she wants to call up a flash mob of old-movie fans to launch a cyberattack on his Mother Jones blog until Mr. Drum agrees to sit through a James Cagney retrospective. She wouldn't even have read his post, had it not been pointed out to her in a puckish message from a gentleman known to commenters here as Gmoke. Well, the Siren has seen people put down old movies for all kinds of reasons and as such posts go, this one is reasonably polite. It’s expressed mostly in terms of puzzlement, and not the petulant desire to have us validate the writer’s reluctance to get acquainted with the films of Leo McCarey.

Still, if Mr. Drum had asked the Siren, she’d have said he has things precisely the wrong way round: Old movies have a greater variety of American speech, by far.

Let’s not pretend we don’t know what he's talking about; there is a mid-Atlantic accent used in certain American movies of the 1930s and up through World War II, after which it becomes less and less common until it mostly disappears. (The Siren prefers the term mid-Atlantic because she likes the idea of a bunch of the period’s movie stars out on a Cunard liner somewhere off the coast of Greenland. In her head, they’re downing martinis with Phoebe Dinsmore, the elocutionist from Singin’ in the Rain, and their tones are getting rounder by the second.) Mr. Drum seems to think it didn’t exist outside the backlot, but as some of his commenters pointed out, you could hear that accent in real life by turning on the radio for one of FDR’s fireside chats. But while this speaking manner survives (barely, it seems to the Siren), it does sound odd to modern American ears, more’s the pity. The Siren had an English literature professor who talked this way, and while she grew to love his voice, she admits she spent the first week of the class listening to him say “sonnet” and “meter” and “Percy Bysshe Shelley” and thinking, “Mister, are you putting me on?”

The question of authenticity aside, Mr. Drum errs in two ways.

Error No. 1. This is an accent common to all, most or even an overlarge percentage of old movies. Here the Siren affects Ginger Rogers’ charming Missouri-bred vowels and says, out of the side of her mouth, “Brother, you’re all wet.” You encounter the accent in movies about rich or upper-middle-class people, like My Man Godfrey. You most certainly do not encounter it in Wild Boys of the Road.

Mr. Drum evidently lives in Irvine, Calif., and it’s a pity he couldn’t join the Siren for the four features she just took in at the annual Pre-Code shindig held by New York’s Film Forum. There’s a positive cacophony of American accents in these movies. There’s Lee Tracy in Blessed Event, sounding like he was born under the Second Avenue elevated; Ann Dvorak in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, snapping her words like the hard-luck taxi dancer she is; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. hanging around Union Depot and sounding like a nice middle-class American boy down on his luck; Kay Francis speaking impeccable mid-Atlantic in Girls About Town despite the famous lisp; and Eugene Pallette in the same movie sounding like...Eugene Pallette.

Oh but Siren, comes the objection from Mr. Drum and certain lost souls in his comments thread. They didn’t do real acting back then, the kind where you create a character and come up with the right accent and mannerisms. Those actors just played themselves, and these are come-as-you-are accents.

You don’t say, responds the Siren, as her own Alabama accent comes back. Because Lee Tracy was born in Atlanta; Ann Dvorak was the child of vaudevillians and could sound pure Yale Club if the occasion demanded it, as in Merrily We Live; Kay Francis was born in Oklahoma City and had an itinerant youth that was unlikely to give her a finishing-school accent; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. sounded mid-Atlantic for a while until his accent completed the passage and landed square in Mayfair; and Pallette...okay, you got me there, but when was the last time you heard a know-it-anywhere voice in an American movie? Gilbert Gottfried doesn’t count.

Error No. 2: The mid-Atlantic accent comes into play where it isn’t appropriate. The Siren’s spent all morning — meaning about fifteen minutes, but she truly did work at this — trying to remember a movie where someone was supposed to be a shopgirl or a waitress or a railway detective, and they spoke in an “anyone for tennis?” accent. Can’t do it. The mid-Atlantic accent turns up mostly in movies about rich people and in historical epics.

Oh, there must be a few. In particular, you can probably find a high-tone voice in a low-down setting in the very early talkie era, when the technology hadn’t been perfected and they worried a lot about people recording properly. Even so, the Siren doesn’t expect a landslide of examples. You can rap The Broadway Melody of 1929 for a lot of things, but the showgirls sound like showgirls, not Alice Roosevelt Longworth. A while ago the Siren got a chance to see Strictly Dishonorable, a 1931 John Stahl talkie that, even though it was made after they were supposed to have this stuff figured out, bore all the stagey marks of the early sound difficulties. And the female lead, Sidney Fox, who was adorable, did a perfectly creditable Southern accent. Fox was a New York City native.

Sure, some actors bring the same basic vocal equipment to all their movies; John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn come to mind. But they’re frequently doing more than you might think. Cary Grant tosses his vowels around in the back of his sinuses in His Girl Friday, but goes first class all the way for The Philadelphia Story. C.K. Dexter Haven and Walter Burns do not have precisely the same accents, and the delivery and rhythm of Grant’s speech is entirely different. Barbara Stanwyck was occasionally rapped for bringing a trace of Brooklyn to her every part, but she was perfectly capable of turning it up or down as the occasion demanded: way down for The Lady Eve, way up for Baby Face.

So we come to the same diagnosis as always: The patient hasn’t seen enough old movies. But, as some people like to say in political disputes, the Siren seeks converts, not apostates. Mr. Drum says that to him, great acting is "the ability to precisely control tone, pace, pitch, timbre, tempo, modulation, resonance, accent, and so forth.” The Siren's in a generous mood this week, so here’s what the Siren is gonna do. She’s gonna take suggestions from her commenters for an old, preferably very old movie for Mr. Drum, one that shows “old-timey” actors doing just what he asks. And then she will mail him a DVD, care of the Mother Jones office.

The floor is open, ladies and gentlemen, and you may imagine the Siren saying that in any old accent you please.

Harriet Craig (1950)

A while back, the New York Times published an article in their home section, focused on adjusting your fabulous child-free home decor to the presence of kids. One woman’s solution was to forbid her two children from bringing more than a single toy into the living area, or leaving a toy there. She didn’t want Matchbox cars and Legos in her sightlines.

Harriet Craig, thou livest still.

It’s easy to mock the premise of George Kelly’s 1926 play Craig’s Wife, the source for Vincent Sherman’s 1950 Harriet Craig as well as a 1936 Dorothy Arzner version with Rosalind Russell as the title character (and a 1928 silent that the Siren hasn't seen). The wintry selfishness of Walter Craig's wife drives away everyone, until she is left utterly alone. In Kelly’s vision, Harriet is a housewife obsessed with having a perfect house, and that’s wrong, you see. It’s wrong because a housewife should be focused on...on...well, having a perfect house and just being nicer about it, all right? She needs to let her husband have some fun, and then let him come home to a bunch of little feet doing the time-step, and she should be greeting the man with devotion, not spot-cleaning the drawing room and having conniptions if anyone gets too close to the antique vase.

The Siren has read the play on which Harriet Craig is based, and has seen the more faithful '36 version, and from time to time the Siren has encountered arguments that Harriet’s devotion to her house is a sub rosa feminist statement. The Siren flat doesn't see it, nor does she see much evidence that it was taken that way at the time. Craig’s Wife is a salvo against raw materialism, not an ironic statement on the condition of housewives. But the 1950 version breaks with precedent in several ways, all of which work in its favor. It's a rare case where, although the Arzner is very good (by all means see it) the Siren (gasp) prefers the remake.

The most important reason for that is the presence of Joan Crawford in the title role. Director Vincent Sherman (who was having an affair with Crawford at the time of filming) was known as an expert helmsman for the movie vehicles of female superstars, and he lets Crawford dominate. She probably would have anyway, given she was playing opposite Wendell Corey, but the effect was to undermine the original material in a way that made it more interesting.

That’s because Crawford makes the story about sublimation — not merely sexual sublimation, as is blatantly implied in the 1936 version, but sublimation of intelligence and ambition. Harriet tells her niece (K.T. Stevens, the daughter of Sam Wood) that marriage is a cold-eyed bargain: household skills in return for material security. You’d assume Joan’s body would be part of the bargain, too, Wendell Corey’s body not being much of a factor. The script spells out that Harriet has been evading at least part of that department because she doesn’t want to have kids.

But the Siren says that in this version, it is clear Harriet's engaging in, let’s say, non-procreative activities to keep her husband Walter in line. Look at the way her face alters at times when she’s talking to him, and the way Corey (who is perfectly cast for once) looks back, like a boy who’s plowing through the broccoli to get to the ice cream. Not to mention Walter acknowledging that wives are “mighty handy gadgets to have around the house.”

The most beautiful part of the set is the central staircase that Harriet swoops up and down as she makes Walter cringe and the maids cry. It’s the focus of several memorable shots, including a wised-up Walter splayed on the sofa — with his shoes on, no less — as he prepares to tell off his wife. The staircase also reminds us of what Harriet wants, which is to climb to high society in the only way that’s open to her.

Screenwriters Anne Froelich and James Gunn work to explain why Harriet is so fiercely materialistic and shallow. They added a mid-movie scene where Harriet visits her mentally ill mother in an asylum, no doubt in order to give Harriet a human dimension. Crawford’s playing, more subtle than in any other part of the film, shows that this mad old lady is the one person for whom Harriet feels real love, and the one person from whom she will never get it.

But a better explanation for Harriet comes later. Walter is about to be offered a promotion that will take him to Japan, without Harriet, and she can’t bear to have him out of her clutches — he goes so well with her Ming vase, after all. Harriet goes to Walter’s boss and persuades him, with diabolical efficiency, that her husband has a gambling problem and can’t be trusted. Crawford underlines the cold manipulation, but she also demonstrates her character’s misused intelligence, wielded now to push the paternalistic boss along the road to the conclusion she wants. This sort of negotiating skill had no outlet at home. Harriet is at last in her element. She was never meant to be organizing dull dinner parties and ruining her niece’s life in her spare time. Harriet should have been across a conference table, barking, “Don’t fuck with me, fellas. This ain't my first time at the rodeo.”

That last Mommie Dearest line is an irresistible recollection to most modern viewers of Harriet Craig, as is “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the dirt." We know Christina and Christopher Crawford saw their mother as a real-life Harriet Craig, only with children to abuse and manipulate rather than  just servants, a niece and a husband. We also know that a number of loyal friends, and Crawford’s two youngest children, have always claimed they saw no Harriet Craig-type side to her.

The Siren would like to add an endnote. If Joan was bringing herself to Harriet, she was also bringing her sense of what a life without a career might have been like. Stardom offers, if nothing else, plenty of opportunity to negotiate and manipulate. Seen that way, Crawford as Harriet is a cautionary tale of what happens when a smart, calculating, highly ambitious woman has nothing but her home decor to occupy her mind.

Because, as far as the Siren is concerned, if you’re flipping out over one extra toy next to the Philippe Starck sofa, you need to get out of the house.



(To the Siren's New York City readers who wish to get out of the house: Harriet Craig, which is not on DVD, is playing tonight only, 7:00 pm and 9:30 pm, at the Clearview Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street.)

Nomadic Existence: The Big Clock and The Reluctant Debutante

From the July 20 edition of Nomad Wide Screen, my appreciation of Kay Kendall in Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante. For the record, I adore Les Girls , and Kendall is a joy in that one as well.

When certain killjoys decide to amuse themselves by asserting that MGM, the most widely known and successful of the major Golden Age studios, wasn't really a great studio at all, I try several methods to silence them. I start with George Cukor, move on through The Wizard of Oz, wave the flag for the Freed unit. If the conversation really gets irksome, however, I play my trump: Vincente Minnelli.

It's a curious thing, then, at least for auteurists, that the spirit that dominates Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante isn't that of the director, but of the star, Kay Kendall. The plot hews to every convention possible; you could take it and graft it onto a mass-market romance paperback with scarcely a single change. The charm of the film is tied closely to Minnelli’s eye for beauty, but even more than that it’s in the playing, and the players are led by Kendall. It was her penultimate movie, and when she made it she was already gravely ill with the leukemia that would kill her two years later. But it's a bright, vivacious performance, the only hint of her health coming from how thin she is.

Kendall had an exceptionally lovely speaking voice, pitched right mid-range with the merest hint of huskiness and an occasional crack in it that is oddly redolent of a British Jean Arthur. She was a tall woman with limbs that seemed to go everywhere at once, but her control of her body was impeccable. Nobody stumbled quite like Kay Kendall--up go the arms, the legs bend and curve, then glide back. It's a bit like watching a Mobius strip try to straighten itself. She had huge eyes, a flawless complexion and a long, strong-boned face; "Careful how you photograph my Cyrano nose, darling," she told Vincente Minnelli before filming. Nose or no nose, the overall effect was gorgeous. Kendall belongs to that rare sorority of beautiful women who are also great clowns.

From the Aug. 2 Nomad Wide Screen, a considerably rewritten and spruced-up version of a post I once did on The Big Clock:

Not all film noir takes place in a seedy underworld; sometimes noir arrives on the commuter train wearing a custom-made suit. So it goes with John Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948), which sets its dark doings and flashback narrative in a top-flight New York corporation that occupies a swank (if somberly lit) Midtown office tower.

The hero (or if you prefer, since this is film noir, the primary sap) is family man George Stroud (Ray Milland), an executive in the massive publishing empire of Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton). One night Stroud gets himself into a terrible pickle by getting drunk with Pauline York, played by Rita Johnson as a trampy soul with a chic exterior. Unfortunately for Stroud, Pauline is also Janoth’s mistress, and Stroud must exit her couch the next morning when their boss drops by unexpectedly. Mistress and magnate fight, and fifty years before anyone ever saw a Viagra ad, Pauline’s tirade shows off some choice euphemisms for “impotent”: “You think you could make any woman happy?...You flabby, flabby...” And that last word is one of the last Pauline utters, as Janoth bludgeons her to death with a sundial.

Well, what’s a self-respecting titan to do in such a situation, except use every last bit of his power to pin the blame on someone else? And the someone else just happens to be Stroud. The main twist in Jonathan Latimer’s highly twisty script (based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing) is that Janoth doesn’t know who he’s after, and Stroud must extricate himself without Janoth’s finding out...

it is Laughton who rules over The Big Clock. In Hollywood movies, most tyrannical managers are openly and loudly abusive. Laughton as Janoth keeps his voice low, forcing subordinates to lean close, which they wouldn't do otherwise. That’s because getting close means they have to look at Janoth’s weedy little moustache and the way he strokes it with one finger, in a gesture as suggestive as it is repulsive. He won't make eye contact, emphasizing his employees' wormlike status. And Laughton speaks every word in an affected, maddeningly casual drawl, underlining that he doesn't give a hoot if he just screwed up someone's life.

Finally, yesterday was the 100th birthday of the fabulous Lucille Ball, and there was a blogathon ball which the Siren, dearly though she loves all of Lucy's incarnations, could not attend, alas, as her opera gloves were at the cleaners. However, the roundup post is right here at True Classics, and the Siren strongly suggests that all Lucy fans click and start reading. The Siren has been working her way through all of them, and is in heaven. Some highlights (so far): Caftan Woman on Lucy's four films with Bob Hope; Clara at Villa Margutta 51 on the use of Spanish dialogue in I Love Lucy; old friend Ivan G. Shreve at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear on I Love Lucy's radio antecedents; R.D. Finch of The Movie Projector on fifteen character actors who appeared on the television show (jaw-dropping, the amount of talent it attracted); a post about Lucy's memoirs at Erin's Silver Screen Scribblings; Ivan again at Edward Copeland's wonderful blog with a 360-degree tour of Lucy's career; and Vince of Carole & Co. on the friendship between Lombard and Ball.

(The wonderful image of Lucille Ball in Stage Door, a movie that is high on the Siren's list of the best of the 1930s, is from the terrific tumblr blog Classic Film Heroines, which is full of such goodies.)

Happy Birthday, Myrna Loy

Myrna Loy, dear, dear Miss Loy. Today is her 106th birthday, bless that talented, loyal, fiercely intelligent and enlightened woman. Do you have a copy of her autobiography, Being and Becoming? If not, what on earth is stopping you? You can get it at ABE Books and any number of other places, and it's worth whatever price they charge.

Last week the Siren participated in a roundtable at Movie Morlocks, sponsored by the ever-fab Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats. The discussion centered on racist images in classic films, and how much, or even whether, we need to protect impressionable children from it. And it made the Siren think of Loy, who made no excuses for the sins of her era, but rather owned up to her mistakes:

…Those exotics started to predominate. My bit as a mulatto in The Heart of Maryland led to a role that I'm very much ashamed of. Zanuck wrote Ham and Eggs at the Front, a parody of What Price Glory?, casting me as a spy. How could I ever have put on blackface? When I think of it now, it horrifies me. Well, our awareness broadens, thank God! It was a tasteless slapstick comedy that I mercifully remember very little of.

Loy recognized what was behind her "Oriental" phase, didn't like it, but was still able to be scathingly funny about it. After Love Me Tonight (she knew that was a good one--Miss Loy was very smart about most of her roles), she wrote,

They dropped me right back into the vamp mold, loaning me to RKO for Thirteen Women. As a Javanese-Indian half-caste, I methodically murder all the white schoolmates who've patronized me. I recall little about that racist concoction, but it came up recently when the National Board of Review honored me with its first Career Achievement Award. Betty Furness, a charming mistress of ceremonies, who had started at RKO doubling for my hands in closeups when I was busy elsewhere, said that she'd been dropped from Thirteen Women. (Despite its title, there were only ten in the final print.) 'You were lucky,' I told her, 'because I just would have killed you, too. The only one who escaped me in that picture was Irene Dunne, and I regretted it every time she got the parts I wanted.'

Thirteen Women is actually quite an interesting pre-Code; as Filmbrain points out, despite the stereotypical spooky powers that are presumed to be congenital for an Asian beauty, Loy's character goes bad because she's a victim of racism. She is turning her treatment back on her tormentors. But it is easy to see why Loy would lack patience for yet another evil exotic.

On screen Loy was a byword for sophistication; off screen, like Nora Charles, she combined that quality with broadmindedness and old-fashioned common sense. Immediately after Thirteen Women, Loy did The Mask of Fu Manchu, and found herself confronted with a script that asked her to whip a man "while uttering gleefully suggestive sounds." She'd had it with this sort of stuff, and furthermore she'd been reading Freud and picked up a thing or two. She went to producer Hunt Stromberg and refused to film it: "I've done a lot of terrible things in films, but this girl's a sadistic nymphomaniac." Stromberg said, "What's that?", which lack of familiarity with less-conventional sexuality makes you wonder how Hunt Stromberg ever got anywhere as a Hollywood producer, but never mind. Loy replied, "Well, you better find out, because that's what she is and I won't play her that way." Studio contracts being what they were, she did play her that way, but she succeeded in getting Stromberg to trim some excesses. "She wasn't Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," said Miss Loy, "but, as I remember, she just watched while others did the whipping."

The banner above (you can send thank-you notes to the Siren's email address on the sidebar) is from The Barbarian, a pre-Code that the Siren hasn't seen (yet). Filming that scene brought out an example of just how much Loy's coworkers must have loved her.

After I was safely submerged in a sunken marble tub, they scattered rose petals on the water, stationing men to keep them circulating with long, toothless rakes. They keep pushing those rose petals closer and closer to cover me--somewhat overzealously, it seemed. I looked up and saw a ring of familiar faces, Culver City friends and neighbors who worked in the studio. Unaware that I wore flesh-toned garments, they were diligently trying to protect the virtue of a local girl. It was so sweet, but didn't work. Some magazine photographer got in, took a picture that made me look stark naked, and syndicated it all over the world.

Last night, of course, the Siren wanted to watch a Myrna Loy movie, and she did: 1940's Third Finger, Left Hand, a nicely titled Robert Z. Leonard comedy with Melvyn Douglas. It isn't much more than diverting, but the role is a bit unusual for Loy, in that her character is a career woman who has invented a phony husband in order to avoid getting hit on at work. Without a husband, the CEO's jealous wife would push her out in a matter of months; with a ring on her finger, she can do her job. And the CEO's wife? "We're pals," says Loy.

In most of my pictures I complemented the male character, who usually carried the story. This often meant that my roles were subordinate, but that's the way I wanted it. The Bette Davis type of classic woman's role wasn't for me, nor was the Roz Russell female-executive routine, which is what I did in Third Finger, Left Hand.

She liked Melvyn Douglas ("he was a great person, a tireless fighter for liberal causes," noted Loy) and their comic rhythms are very much in tune, even if one inevitably misses William Powell. The Siren would tell you to watch this movie just for a scene where Loy fakes a tough-tootsie Brooklyn persona to embarrass Douglas. She pulls her gum out of her mouth in a string--if that doesn't sell you, it should. There's also her white evening gown in a nightclub scene, and her fake wedding night with Melvyn Douglas; Miss Loy being carried unwillingly over the threshold shows she could do physical comedy as well as she did repartee.

The Siren read Being and Becoming when it first came out in 1987, picks it up all the time to this day, and still recalls many passages without much effort, as you can see. She already adored Miss Loy--from The Thin Man on, there is scarcely a movie the Siren wouldn't be in clover watching, and there's a good deal to worship before that watershed film, too. But Loy's memoirs are special, because they show such a rare thing--an artist whose work means the world to you, whom you can also admire as a person. Not a saint, oh no--wouldn't Miss Loy have hooted at that?--but a woman anyone would have been privileged to have as a coworker, proud to have as a friend.

And so last night, watching Third Finger, Left Hand, the Siren was struck by the character of Sam, a Pullman porter played by the African American actor Ernest Whitman. Whitman is stuck with what passed for black dialect in 1940 Hollywood, but it's an unusual and charming character. He is neither shuffling nor particularly servile, just genial and polite. And when Melvyn Douglas needs a lawyer (he's divorcing Loy--you don't really want me to explain why, do you?) it turns out that Sam has been studying law. He proceeds to run rings around Loy's tony attorney and would-be fiance, Lee Bowman, quoting hilariously abstruse passages from case law until Bowman calls it a night. Sam's character is the one who paves the way for true love.

And when the end credits rolled, the Siren marched straight back to Loy, and this:

During my early years in the studios, movie people were too busy getting a foothold to concern themselves with social conscience. I once asked, 'Why does every Negro in a film have to play a servant? How about just a black person walking up the steps of a courthouse carrying a briefcase?' Well! The storm that caused!

When artists die, there are always some scolds who insist that it simply isn't possible to miss--deeply, personally miss--a woman you were never fortunate enough to meet. The Siren says phooey to that. Because she misses Miss Loy, and always will.

"Loosen the Ties and Put Some Sweat on Them": 12 Angry Men (1957)

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….

1957.

On a Veranda with Myrna and Tyrone

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 Contagion trailer, 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.

It fits, doesn’t it.

Fandor: Lillian Gish

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.

Adding: Sheila O'Malley takes on The Birth of a Nation without fear or favor.

Two Weeks in Lebanon: A Dossier

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.

Ciao for Now

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.

See y’all in about two weeks. Play nice.

So Much for the Sleeve-Tuggers: The Phantom of the Opera (1943)

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.

In addition to all that, there's the fadeout.

Christine, the heroine, is played by Susanna Foster, a pretty woman and a good singer, and she gets two suitors, Anatole (Nelson Eddy, quite animated and appealing here) and Raoul (Mercury Theater veteran Edgar Barrier). So the action’s over, Christine has been rescued from the lower depths of the Gaumont Opéra (the Siren’s favorite building in Paris, not that you asked). Which sleeve-tugger will she choose?

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.

Nomadic Existence: Lew Ayres

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.

Book Review at Barron's Magazine

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."

The Siren's own favorite review of this latest edition came from Dan Callahan, at Slant Magazine.

Anecdote of the Week: "That's Just Not an Orgasm."

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.

Finally, the National Film Preservation Foundation is bringing out a box set on September 27, Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938. This is wonderful news for us all, especially Marilyn and Greg, because the 3-DVD set with book includes The Sergeant and The Better Man, saved through our very first For the Love of Film Blogathon, and 38 other early films about the West. We will all be watching for it.

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.

Department of Crabby Dissent: Richard Schickel

For someone who professes to disdain Internet writers, Richard Schickel is one hell of an effective troll.

The last time the Siren roused herself to notice Schickel, he was calling bloggers "idiots" and saying no one read us except our mothers and distant cousins. This caused the Siren to weep hot tears that smudged her mascara, until someone reminded her that while her patient readers have disagreed with her on matters such as late Anthony Mann and whether or not Elizabeth Taylor was a good actress, no one, not even a cousin, has ever called her an idiot.

So here was the Siren reorganizing her lingerie, happily forgetting the existence of Schickel aside from his hilarious Twitter doppelganger, when her friend the fine and gentlemanly Tom Shone of Taking Barack to the Movies reminded her.

Tom, you see, has some big fat problems with Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, which he details in a very funny and characteristically well-written review right here. But then Tom had to go and quote Schickel's review, luring an unsuspecting Siren with a famous publicity shot of luscious Veronica Lake. And the Siren, because she never learns, clicked through to Schickel's full post.

Now the Siren hasn't yet seen Tree of Life, and if she holds true to her usual pattern with new releases she should be catching up with the latest Malick sometime in the winter of 2012-13. She comforts herself that if Malick took four years to edit his latest movie, surely he would not begrudge her taking a couple of years to watch it. But here's the quote.

Movies, I believe, are an essentially worldly medium, playful and romantic, particularly in America, where, on the whole our best directors have stated whatever serious intentions they may harbor as ignorable asides. There are other ways of making movies, naturally, and there’s always a small audience available for these noble strivings—and good for them, I guess. But I’m with Preston Sturges, who gave this immortal line to Veronica Lake in “Sullivan’s Travels”: “There’s nothing like a deep-dish movie to drive you out in the open."

This is, simply put, a lot of hooey. So much so that the Siren doesn't believe Schickel, a man with a deep knowledge of Hollywood history and the CV to prove it, can possibly believe this stuff himself, which is why she called him a troll in the first paragraph. Troll is not a word that the Siren trots out for just any old curmudgeon. But she uses it here, because beating Terrence Malick about the head with Preston Sturges is like using the Marx Brothers to critique Samuel Fuller.

Where, the Siren asks you, does the "playful and romantic" notion leave the blackest of film noir? Force of Evil, Scarlet Street, Sweet Smell of Success, they're romantic? Social dramas like Heroes for Sale and The Crowd and Give Us This Day, anti-war masterpieces like The Eagle and the Hawk and Attack! and All Quiet on the Western Front, tragedies like The Old Maid and Make Way for Tomorrow--they're playful and/or their serious intentions are ignorable asides? It's okay for Michael Powell and Albert Lewin and William Dieterle and Joseph Mankiewicz and Victor Fleming to film their notion of the afterlife, but only because they slipped in some sex and some jokes to keep Richard Schickel from nodding off? Hey, John Ford is serious, but playful--oh wait, but Schickel once used a review of Scott Eyman's splendid Ford biography to unload about how Ford's use of comic relief gave him a big pain in the fundament. Schickel's last book but one was about Clint Eastwood, and if he wants to tell the Siren what's so playful and romantic about Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River, and how to ignore any serious intentions, she's all ears.

The Siren admits that Schickel put himself more firmly than ever on her bad side by implicitly dismissing Days of Heaven. The Siren loves Days of Heaven with a deep purple passion, loves it even more than Badlands, considers it a major way station on her road to appreciating what Dan Kois might call "vegetable movies." "Narratively empty and emotionally unengaging"--Days of Heaven is Wings of the Dove, for crying out loud. If you can't find emotion and narrative content, not to mention romance and eroticism, in Richard Gere's hand closing wordlessly over Brooke Adams' to summon her out of her husband's bed, and the wineglass sinking to the bottom of the river, then the Siren must resort to Dimitri Tiomkin's line to David O. Selznick--you fuck in your way, and I'll fuck in mine.

Schickel thinks post-Badlands Malick is tiresome and bombastic, and in the words of the great philosopher Stuart Smalley, "that's OK." But for Schickel to extrapolate from what he sees as Malick's overreaching, that the ideal way to go after big notions of fate and society and the silence of God or whatever is to hide them, like whoever decided to put zucchini in breakfast muffins, is silly. Yeah, tell it to Fritz Lang. Sometimes the filmmakers beloved by the Siren smuggle their seriousness, as Scorsese put it, and sometimes they hit you with it like a beanball. It's a big, beautiful world of cinema out there. There's room for Sullivan's Travels, and there's room for Terrence Malick.

Nomadic Existence: The Cobweb (1955)

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.