June 26, 2013: Love Conquers All

"The happiest marriage I've seen in Hollywood is Billy Haines and Jimmy Shields."

--Joan Crawford (left to right, Jimmy, Billy, Joan, and Joan's husband, Pepsi executive Alfred Steele)

Manhandled (1924): The Allan Dwan Dossier

June is Allan Dwan month here in New York, and it's been a long time coming. That's him up there, on the set of What a Widow!, wearing a suit and standing next to the reflector--somewhat in the background, as he's been for too long.

The great director--"The Last Pioneer," as Peter Bogdanovich's book put it--has been dead since 1981. In the years since, he's occupied a somewhat thankless position among celebrated filmmakers. Dwan is a name recognized by most cinephiles worth their salt, but the movies he made don't have the kind of household currency enjoyed by Ford, Hawks, or any number of his contemporaries.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Gina Telaroli and film writer and editor David Phelps are here now with their project, Allan Dwan: A Dossier, a huge labor of love. It's a massive 460-page e-book (either downloadable or readable online, take your pick) that, as Gina explains in her announcement at MUBI, "contains work in 5 languages, by 39 writers, and features 41 new pieces, along with five that we're republishing thanks to some very generous authors." It is being published in collaboration with the splendid folks at LUMIÈRE.

This is the original-language version of the dossier; a full English translation will be available in a few weeks. It is available absolutely free to anyone who clicks; that is, you see, the entire idea.

In the meantime, starting tomorrow, June 5, at the Museum of Modern Art, there is a full-rigged, 35-film Allan Dwan retrospective screening all month. The Siren has a number she's planning to see. Like a lot of people, the Siren has big viewing gaps where Dwan is concerned. Gina recommends: Chances (1931), One Mile From Heaven (1937), Brewster's Millions (1945), Woman They Almost Lynched (1953), The Restless Breed (1957), and the very rare Fighting Odds (1917), East Side, West Side (1927), David Harum (1915), Stage Struck (1925), and Zaza (1923).



The Siren also has a recommendation for the MOMA series: the film she wrote up for the dossier, Manhandled. She picked that one to write about because she'd always wanted to see it, and it's marvelous. But the Siren is breathing some rarefied air with the company she's keeping via this dossier, an incredible array of film writers including Chris Fujiwara, R. Emmett Sweeney, Michael Lieberman, Zach Campbell, Serge Bozon, C. Mason Wells, Daniel Kasman and Dave Kehr; you should most definitely read everything that's been posted in English, and move on to the translations when they're online.

What follows is an excerpt from the Siren's essay, where she discusses the opening of Manhandled, which finds the shopgirl heroine Tessie enduring a subway ride as awful as any in film history. Tessie was played by the immortal Gloria Swanson. She often said Dwan was her favorite director,  and she unhesitatingly described him as a genius.

You can read the essay in full on page 111 of the dossier. At the end of the Siren's write-up, you will find a sad, but important coda about this movie; wouldn't you just know it, the Siren inadvertently chose a film that came with its own film-preservation mystery. As the years rush on, the fight to preserve artists like Dwan only gets harder, and more important.

Swaying with them against her will, Tessie does the dance of the New Yorker trying to avoid too much body contact, no matter how cramped the quarters. She drops her purse, and the men who are bookending her stoop to help her retrieve its contents. But when they reach back up for the straps, she's still got her arms looped through theirs, and for a moment she's suspended in air. Once she's back on her feet and smacking away at her gum, the movement of the car and the crowd dislodges Tessie's impossible hat, an overlarge squashy cloche adorned with what look like marbles—although they're probably supposed to be grapes—swinging from one side like the tassel on a fez. The hat falls to the ground, she does a deep-knee bend to retrieve it, and when she finally comes back up, the hat has lost its grapes.

And, for one marvelously subtle half-minute, the mood shifts. Tessie's face crumples as she looks at that hat, bereft of its ridiculous ornament. It’s clear, instantly, that the fruit was her favorite part, probably the reason she bought it, just as surely as Swanson’s expression shows that she can't afford to replace it.

Then her face regains its old hardness, she pulls the denuded hat back over her hopelessly mussed bob, and the hellish ride continues, complete with a masher all but licking his lips at her from his seat. When she tries to get off at her station, Dwan switches to an overhead shot. Perched in the rafters, poor Tessie tries to disembark and gets pushed back into the car, over and over. She can't manage to leave walking upright; she eventually has to bend over and scurry under a railing. Small as Tessie is, the subway—meaning of course New York itself—has all but brought her to her knees.

Manhattan Thoughts on a Hot Evening

Tonight I stopped by the bank after work. I was all alone in the vast lobby, except for a long wall of ATMs and one young woman in a cheap but pretty dress. As I fed my card and got my cash I realized she'd stepped back from the machine and had started crying. By the time I left she was sobbing, but her back was to me, and the body language said to this longtime New Yorker, "Back off, I don't want comfort."

So all the way home, I wondered why a girl would turn away from the ATM screen and start crying.

If it were a silent movie, she would be crying because she had no money to feed her child at home, and the social worker is about to take him away. She's wondering if she must take the Easy Way and walk the streets.

If it were a pre-Code movie, she'd have told me little Timmy, her kid brother, needs an operation so he can walk again. I'd have withdrawn the maximum and left with her saying "God bless you!" As soon as I was out of sight she'd have walked out, hips swinging, and there'd be Warren William just around the corner, waiting for her. They'd get drunk celebrating at Slim Jim's Speakeasy and laugh at me.

If it's film noir, she's crying because Dan Duryea is going to kill her milksop husband unless she comes up with 10 grand by midnight. He's not much of a husband, but he's all she's got. She walks slowly down the street, smoking a cigarette and thinking of that mean old man across the airshaft, who keeps his money in his mattress, and has no one to miss him if he's gone.

If this were an early 1960s arthouse import, she would be weeping at the futility of man's existence in a postwar world without meaning. As she left the bank, the streetlights on 6th Avenue would cast no shadow.

If it were a 1970s New Hollywood piece, she'd be crying because she finally decided to divorce her uptight, undersexed, Establishment husband, and now he's cleaned out their joint bank account. She goes home and the nebbishy guy who lives downstairs offers to share his Chinese food. They eat it out of the takeout containers, as they sit on the floor of her now-empty apartment.

If this were Manhattan in the early 1990s, as I knew it, she'd be weeping because her dealer told her that her credit is no good.

But this is New York in 2013, and she was most likely weeping because Citibank has plenty of money, and she does not.

Happy Cinco de Virginia Mayo!

From the whimsical suggestion of Comrade Lou Lumenick, who announced on Twitter a craving to see She's Working Her Way Through College, here's a little celebration of the gorgeous Virginia Mayo. A great screen moll, she was exquisite in Technicolor musicals and delightful in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which the Siren will defend to the death no matter how many times you quote James Thurber's horrified reaction at her.



Mayo was discovered by Samuel Goldwyn when she was playing in a Billy Rose revue at the Diamond Horseshoe in New York. The revue was called, and this is the sort of thing the Siren tries to remind herself of when she gets all dreamy-eyed about the golden age of New York nightlife, Mrs. Astor's Pet Horse. Sure enough, like Mack Sennett before her, Virginia Mayo was playing in a horse act, although she was the straight woman, and not playing either end of the horse. The act itself was called "Pansy." (The Siren has no more information than that, nor does she want any.) Samuel Goldwyn swept Virginia Jones, who was performing under her brother-in-law's surname of Mayo, off to Hollywood to become the next Anna Sten.

From A. Scott Berg's definitive Goldwyn, which the Siren hopes you own:

[Goldwyn] provided her acting lessons, voice lessons, speech lessons, and dance lessons. Twice a week, Hollywood's leading charm coach, Eleanore King, instructed her in posture and appearance. A nutritionist put her on a diet. A masseuse "contoured" her face after Miss King pronounced Virginia Mayo's cheeks "too fat for screen work." Goldwyn himself called her every night at nine o'clock, inquiring if she was keeping up with her lessons and if she had brushed her hair one hundred strokes.

After six months of this regimen, Virginia Mayo had improved in every department. But one problem remained. Every time a motion picture camera turned her way, she froze.

Mayo had warmed up quite a bit by 1946. And by 1949, she was positively smokin'.

"Hotcha do, Countess?"






(To celebrate the real Cinco de Mayo, do read the wonderful Bobby Rivers on La Perla, the golden age of Mexican cinema, and the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, right here.)

In Memoriam: Deanna Durbin, 1921-2013

(This, the Siren's tribute to the admirable Deanna Durbin, combines, updates and elaborates on several previous pieces.)

A curly-haired teen stands on a set, surrounded by adoring middle-aged men. She clasps her hands, and the bright eyes look upward as though asking an archangel to give her the downbeat. She opens her mouth, and out comes a soprano you'd associate with a woman twice her age and size.

This is the image of Deanna Durbin, who has died at age 91: winsome, wholesome, able to hit high C without creasing a single dress ruffle. That hasn't exactly kept her name evergreen with modern critics, who react to wholesome as Frankenstein did to fire.

“She was boring, and therefore bored, in movies,” once wrote Richard Brody of Durbin, Universal’s great star for a span that lasted from Three Smart Girls in 1936 through For the Love of Mary in 1949. But really, this will not do. You can accuse her of being tricksy, of lacking truthful emotion on screen. Like many child stars she developed a highly technical mode of acting; Jean Renoir, when he walked off the Durbin vehicle The Amazing Mrs Holliday, said she “was unable to escape from the style that made her famous.” That style, however, included excellent comic timing, an ability to seem fresh no matter how contrived the plot, and striking charisma.

Boring she was not.

Today, the best-known Durbin fact concerns not her films, but her fate. Charles David, who directed her in Lady on a Train in 1945, became her third husband in 1950, after Durbin made him promise to give her what she wanted: "the life of nobody."

Like that other immortal Hollywood walkout, Greta Garbo, Durbin's motivations may have included an ability to read the handwriting on the wall. Before 1949's For the Love of Mary was released, Universal, the studio that Deanna Durbin films once saved from bankruptcy, announced they were ending her contract due to "increasing public apathy." One imagines Durbin snapping, "Likewise, buddy."

She was the highest-paid woman star in Hollywood in 1945 and 1947; she made good investments, and her retirement was comfortable. It needed to be, as it lasted 64 years. When Durbin said goodbye to the movies, it was forever.

David, having kept his promise to his wife, died in 1999. In the early 1970s it was reported that Durbin was living in France, and that she still enjoyed singing. In 1980, tired of reading rumors that she had grown enormously fat in retirement, Durbin released a picture of herself, looking trim and polished, holding up a current issue of Life. She gave an interview to film historian David Shipman in 1983. Otherwise, Durbin refused to talk publicly to the press or anyone else about her Hollywood career, although she's said to have sent pictures to fans. John McElwee of Greenbriar Picture Shows, who calls Durbin his favorite actress along with Norma Shearer, writes that he received a "friendly" note from her dated 1/30/86. That's more than almost anybody ever got from Garbo. Durbin wasn't a hermit, it seems. She wasn't bitter. She was just through.

Three Smart Girls (Henry Koster, 1936) was Durbin’s first starring role for Universal, after MGM signed her for a brief period but failed to exploit her. (The probably apocryphal legend goes that Louis B. Mayer saw a musical short subject Durbin made with Judy Garland and told his staff, "Drop the fat one"--meaning Garland. Durbin was cut instead, and wound up at Universal.) Three Smart Girls is a good-natured precursor to The Parent Trap. It's another movie that tells children of divorce, "You can get Mommy and Daddy back together! All you gotta do is reveal Daddy's girlfriend for the gold-digging tramp she is."

Durbin is the youngest of the three daughters engaged in these shenanigans, and by far the most interesting. She is occasionally too cute, too overemphatic, but when she’s onscreen, everything else recedes. And when Durbin’s gone, and she’s offscreen more than you’d expect, you miss her, despite Ray Milland’s best efforts as the heir to an Australian banking fortune. She has only three songs, the first sung in a boat sailing on a Swiss lake, the second to her father (Charles Winninger) as she’s being tucked into bed. Her voice is lovely, but neither number is a standout.

The third is. Durbin is in a police station, trying to convince the police officer in charge that she’s a Metropolitan Opera star. (If you’re the sort who insists on knowing the plot machinations that got her into that predicament, this movie probably isn’t for you.) She sings Luigi Arditi’s “Il Bacio” to the captain and two cops, and gradually the room fills with other uniformed men, all listening. By the time a man being hauled to the drunk tank tries to stop and get a listen, too, Durbin has become more than the main reason to watch the movie. She’s a star.

She was about 15 when Three Smart Girls came out, and though she's often described as a child star, her little-girl years were already numbered. She made the transition to adult roles--admittedly dulcet, charming adult roles--without much trouble, receiving her first screen kiss from Robert Stack in First Love in 1939. Stack remembered her as "completely self-contained, courteous, private, almost aloof off-camera."  On camera, her rendition of "One Fine Day" from Madame Butterfly brought both him and the crew to tears. But even in 1939, Durbin wasn't eager to stick around the studio. Stack recalled that "Deanna's penchant for leaving the set after her close-ups led to my first love scene with a blackboard."

Durbin's IMDB profile claims she was Winston Churchill's favorite actress, and that he screened One Hundred Men and a Girl after World War II victories by way of celebration. (Maybe. I have also read that Madeleine Carroll was his favorite actress, and elsewhere I was informed That Hamilton Woman was his favorite movie.) In the early 1940s, though, with or without Winston Churchill's approval, Durbin movies continued to rake it in.

The first Durbin movie the Siren ever saw was from the star's peak years: It Started With Eve. This spun-sugar, silly, irresistible 1941 comedy, directed again by Henry Koster, made the Siren a fan ever after. Charles Laughton plays Jonathan Reynolds, some sort of tycoon who's on his deathbed as the film opens. Robert Cummings, Reynolds' devoted but somewhat feckless son, wants to bring his fiancee to meet the old man, but the fiancee is out shopping and can't be found.

Since Laughton could cross the great divide at any moment, Cummings grabs a hat-check girl (Durbin) and drags her to the family mansion to pose as the absent betrothed. Well, one dose of Durbin is all the old man needed, and he recovers. The charade continues due to the fear that Laughton won't survive the shock of realizing his future daughter-in-law is really skinny Margaret Tallichet, who probably couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. Durbin, on the other hand, can sing up a storm and dreams of performing at the Met. Will she get a chance to sing for Leopold Stokowski and marry the rich son? Or is it back to the hat-check counter for her? (Take a wild guess.)

The great Laughton's scenes with Durbin are the funniest ones, and they obviously enjoyed each other. (This fan site says they stayed friends until Laughton's death in 1962.) The chief flaw is that Durbin's rapport with Laughton is much greater than with her supposed love interest. It isn't even that she and Robert Cummings lack chemistry, it's that they barely have enough screen time to get acquainted.

Still, the script was by Norman Krasna and Leo Townsend, and it has the same verve Krasna showed in Wife vs. Secretary and Bachelor Mother. When the doctor finds a forbidden cigar in Laughton's room, Durbin says "Don't look at me, I smoke a pipe." Cummings visits Durbin in her cluttered walk-up and remarks, with no conviction whatever, that it's a nice place. She responds, "Uh-huh. On a clear day you can see right across it."

It Started With Eve, and Durbin herself, always make the Siren wistful for the golden age of American middlebrow culture. Exact dates for this vanished era depend upon which old fogey you're reading, but Durbin singing a pop version of the waltz from Sleeping Beauty is a perfect example. She belonged to a time when educated people were expected to cultivate a taste for classical music, and that music permeates films from the 1930s all the way through the 1940s. Leopold Stokowski and Jascha Heifetz are name-checked in Eve, and the audience would have recognized the names, even the faces, as quickly as they'd have spotted Benny Goodman.

As that era receded, the sight of a pretty young woman singing opera's greatest hits became quaint, and so did Durbin's films. The voice, which made her a star, later made her a relic.

The restlessness set in. By the time she made Lady on a Train, in 1945, she had already tried, and failed, to alter her typecasting with Robert Siodmak’s fervidly sexed-up noir, Christmas Holiday (1944).

Nowadays this is the Durbin movie to cite approvingly, if you are a hip cinephile type, and it is easy to see why. Aside from the kind of auteurist cred that you just don't get from Henry Koster, Christmas Holiday is impeccably twisted. Siodmak and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz take every last one of the fans' expectations, and back over them with a Mack truck. Erstwhile maiden Durbin shows up about 15 minutes in, wearing a black halter gown cut from here to eternity in her role as a barely disguised prostitute. Gene Kelly plays a psychopath, "mother-fixated" which, as David Ehrenstein points out, once was code for homosexual--as if all the delicate talk of Kelly's problems and his mother's hopes that marriage will "fix" him weren't tipoff enough.

The "holiday" of the title is soldier Charlie's (Dean Harens) last leave before heading for the battlefield. Charlie is on his way home, quite possibly with plans to kill the fiancee who's married another guy. Christmas comes into play at a gleaming, moving midnight mass where Deanna breaks down into sobs at the intonation of "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." Durbin also sings Irving Berlin's exquisitely romantic "Always" like a death march.

The narrative structure swerves around even more than Mankiewicz's screenplay for Citizen Kane. The first flashback shows the wreck of Durbin's marriage and the next shows its beginnings, then we leap back again to show the consequences. The Siren's favorite moments are the sequences on the staircase of the New Orleans mansion Durbin is sharing with Gene Kelly and dear old mom, Gale Sondergaard. As Durbin cleans house in whistle-while-you-work style, chirping up and down the stairs and peering in the window, she gradually realizes that Sondergaard is concealing a murder for Kelly.

It's a real poisoned candy-cane of a movie, and therefore wonderful, but the Siren eventually began to wonder if the whole thing was a deliberate attempt to alienate everyone, it is that perverse. It's never been on video and--go figure--it never became a holiday TV staple alongside The Littlest Angel and Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, to name two that bring the Siren to what Ehrenstein calls the true holiday spirit of "suicidal despair."

Durbin must have had some despair herself. Against all expectations, audiences dug the new her. Christmas Holiday made money. Ticket buyers were fine with a slutty-but-repentant Durbin; critics, not so much. ("Imagine a sweet school girl performing the role of Sadie Thompson in Rain!" protested Bosley Crowther.) Sometimes Hollywood's adherence to the tried and true defies not only logic, but its own box-office results. Universal scurried back to the old formulas. By most accounts, it was at this point that Durbin lost whatever interest she'd had in "that asshole business."

Despite Durbin's increasing distaste for her persona and her career, Lady on a Train is delightful. Usually described as a whodunit, it’s more of a farce, the presence of Edward Everett Horton being a huge tipoff. Durbin plays Nikki Collins, a San Francisco heiress who witnesses a murder as her train pulls into Grand Central. With the kind of logic common to Durbin plots, Nikki drafts her favorite mystery author (David Bruce) to help her track down the killer. This is a movie where a single conk on the head can knock a man out cold, only to have him revive minutes later, perfectly able to say something funny. Dan Duryea gets to be menacing and Ralph Bellamy shows up to fail at getting the girl. (Bellamy also has a line toward the end that’s as clear an incest implication as I’ve heard in any movie from that era, and that was, I must say, unexpected.)

Charles David’s direction is able, at times even surprising. The best visual moments include a noirish take on Durbin’s singing of "Night and Day," where’s she shot through a net, and an equally noir-looking scene where Duryea chases Durbin through a shipyard’s storage area, the hills of grain looking even more dangerous than Duryea.

Also interesting, and deeply strange, is the scene where Durbin sings “Silent Night” on the telephone (this is another Christmas-set movie). She lays down on the bed, her hair fanning out on the covers, and sings into the telephone, her expression and the lighting and framing no less romantic than Alice Faye singing “You’ll Never Know” on the phone in Hello, Frisco, Hello. The weird part isn't that the character is crooning a hymn; it’s that her father's on the other end of the line.

Elsewhere Durbin plays with wit and spontaneity, whether she’s shushing a pair of mastiffs, posing as a nightclub singer or handing Horton a ice bucket for a black eye he got while trying to keep her in line. She never looked prettier, either; her future husband shoots her like a man who knew what kind of a jackpot he'd hit.

Deanna Durbin once said her screen persona "never had any similarity to me, not even coincidentally." Perhaps. Post-retirement, no writer ever got close enough to her to find out. The Shipman interview does suggest that the serene self-confidence of Durbin’s characters was consistent with her personality off-screen. The Siren would love to believe that the poised, vivacious woman in Lady on a Train was some part of Durbin herself, the part that decided life away from Hollywood would, after all, be a happier ending.





(The pictures of Durbin in pajamas with future husband Charles David, on the set of Christmas Holiday with Robert See-odd-mack and the final shot are all from Deanna Durbin Devotees. There are many who will always love her.)

The Love Song of Samuel Hoffenstein: Coda

THIS, via the ever-obliging Yojimboen, is Samuel Hoffenstein. Pretty much exactly how one feels he should look.

The response to the Siren's first piece on Hoffenstein was delightful. Particularly touching was how, spurred no doubt by the deep feelings engendered by "Maid of Gotham" and "The Shropshire Lad's Cousin," people went and found out stuff. Longtime Siren commenter Jeff Gee pointed out (as the Siren should have) that the Internet Archive has a nice selection of his poetry. Jeff also mentioned that David Cairns of Shadowplay already had a Hoffenstein tag going.

The wonderfully named T. Migratorius came up with a map of Hoffenstein's Manhattan migrations:

FWIW, since he was so elusive, I thought I would look him up on Ancestry.com. Not much there, but some New York locales in his history may make the Siren feel even a bit closer to him.

Ancestry has his June 1917 WW I draft registration card showing him, at the age of 26, employed in "theatrical publicity" and officing at the Eltinge Theater. (I looked it up. It was at 236 West 42nd Street and "now survives as the facade and lobby of the AMC 42nd Street Movie multiplex." Yes, just part of the theater was moved to a new location.)

His entry in the 1930 Census shows him living at an apartment house at 501 Lexington Ave. (now the Hotel Roger Smith) with a wife, Edith. Edith was roughly 7 years Samuel's junior and born in Oklahoma. One wonders how they met.

In the 1940 Census, the last before his death, he was living on Thayer Avenue in Los Angeles, alone with two servants.

What about Edith? The only other thing I found for her was a passenger list from 3/18/31 showing her as a Los Angeles resident traveling from Agua Caliente, Mexico to San Diego. A Mexican divorce, perhaps?

The Siren should have guessed there was an Edith, somewhere.

I've been in love a dozen times,
And fashioned several thousand rhymes;
For love I've suffered much, indeed,
And rhyming makes my spirit bleed;
And yet, I have unhappy times
When I am out of love and rhymes.

Whereupon Samuel Wilson came up with the denouement:

Google News Archive sources indicate a 1938 divorce, Edith citing mental cruelty. A UPI article quoted a poem reportedly written after their honeymoon and dedicated to Edith:

When you're away I'm restless, lonely,
Wretched, bored, dejected.
Only here's the rub, my darling dear.
I feel the same when you're here.

The Siren didn't intend to crowdsource Hoffenstein, but she is glad she did.

And she herself has further findings of a Hoffenstein nature. The Siren was walking through her living room when she glanced up at a shelf filled with books placed there solely for the beauty of their spines. And immediately the air around the Siren turned blue with her curses, because she realized: "@#$%, I've @#$%ing forgotten Salka Viertel."



Salka truly deserves her own post one day, so the Siren will keep this brief. The book is The Kindness of Strangers, Viertel's memoir, which the Siren hasn't re-read in years. Born Salomea Steuemann in Sambor, now part of Ukraine, Salka grew up in a well-to-do and cultivated Jewish family. She married the director and screenwriter Berthold Viertel, whose writing credits include Murnau's Four Devils and City Girl. She had three sons, including Peter Viertel of White Hunter, Black Heart fame. (Peter also married Deborah Kerr, thereby becoming the envy of the world.) Salka moved to California with her family in 1928 for a four-year stay that wound up lasting the rest of her life. She met Greta Garbo and they became friends, perhaps more than friends. She wrote movies for Garbo that included Queen Christina, Anna Karenina and Conquest, and Salka even had a part in Anna Christie. She also co-wrote Deep Valley, a very fine movie.

Salka's home in Santa Monica became a magnet for the European expat community. As the Nazis gained more and more power, Salka tried to help people get out. The glitter and genius of the people surrounding Viertel was astonishing. To read this memoir is to encounter casual sentences like, "It is unpardonable of me not to remember on what occasion I was introduced to Thomas Mann." If you were a European-born intellectual in Los Angeles in the 1930s, you knew Salka Viertel.

So you see why the Siren's first action on taking The Kindness of Strangers down from her shelf was to gently hit herself in the head with it.

If the book has a major flaw, it's the lack of an index, so the Siren flipped to the Hollywood chapters, and way towards the back, in seconds, here's what was found.

I no longer saw those who still represented glamorous Hollywood. Ernst Lubitsch and Sam Hoffenstein died that same year. Embittered, disgusted with Hollywood, post-war Germany, and the whole world, Sam rarely left his house. From time to time he would ask two or three intimate friends for dinner, usually a young screenwriter Elisabeth Reinhardt (no relation to Max) and me. The evening would start with martinis, of which Sam took too many; then he made us laugh with his outrageous blasphemies, uproarious improvisations and solemn Hebrew incantations. Then, invariably, he would become 'Swiftian,' aggressive and bitter, and abused everyone and everything. One morning Elisabeth rang me, in tears. Sam had phoned her at four in the morning, asking her to come; he was alone and feeling ill. When she arrived he was slumped at the telephone, dead. It was a great loss for us all.

"After so many deaths the last/ Is only the locking of an empty house," Hoffenstein wrote in Pencil in the Air. We still don't know his cause of death, but it seems heartbreak became literal. Viertel, who writes of how the Holocaust survivors she met haunted her, and whose own brother was murdered by the Nazis, understood.

If there's one unassailable fact that the Siren has discovered about Hoffenstein, who remains mysterious to her, it's that his humor was hard-won. The best wit is never the product of a light mind; it's a conscious choice made by someone who sees things with harrowing clarity:

Talent in evil
Ends on the gallows,
But genius in evil,
Avoids the shallows,
Rides currents high and free
And fashions heroes for humanity.

The Siren didn't want a death scene to be her last glimpse of a man she had taken to heart. Stubbornly she scanned each page in The Kindness of Strangers, hindered not only by the lack of an index but by Viertel's habit of referring to everybody by their given name; do you realize how many people were named "Sam" in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s?

There's only a handful of other mentions. Viertel quotes Hoffenstein's opening "Proem" from Pencil in the Air: "Wherever I go/ I go too/ And spoil everything." And this, from shortly after she met him:

Often I wondered how this Chassidic soul landed in Hollywood, but he made a lot of money. Hoffenstein's two volumes of verse, one called In Praise of Practically Nothing [sic], had had great success and become very popular. Today, I am afraid, not many people remember them. Expressing himself in exquisite English, slightly tinged with an Irish brogue, he would surprise one by bursting into a YIddish song or Kol Nidre and other Hebrew prayers. When intoxicated, he would improvise for hours in verse which, unfortunately, he forgot next day.

Kindness of Strangers was published in 1969, so alas, Hoffenstein was already becoming obscure by then. And it seems possible that his ode to Gloria Stuart's "Goose with Kirschwasser Aspic" was forgotten once he sobered up the next day:

I won't get up tomorrow,
Or go to bed tonight,
Unless I know the red wine
Is standing by the white.

Oh, I want the red wine,
And I want the white,
Or I'll sleep with my clothes on
Until I look a sight

.

That bit is from another Edna St. Vincent Millay parody; Edna really got it in the neck from Hoffenstein. But did you spot the real mystery?

"Irish brogue."

Irish WHAT? Where did he pick that up, in Oklahoma when he met Edith? Although it does shed some light on "You've Got to See Mamma Every Night or You Can't See Mama at All (Mr. John Millington Synge interprets an American theme)".



The Siren has saved the best for last. It may, in fact, be the best picture she will ever get of what it meant to be Samuel Hoffenstein, or any other screenwriter, in Hollywood.

Viertel met him when she was working on a script for Garbo then called Marie Walewska, the story of the affair between Napoleon and a Polish countess. It later became Conquest. Viertel's script, co-written with S.N. Behrman (another brilliant "Sam") had run aground with MGM producer Bernard S. Hyman, who didn't like it and wanted it rewritten. Hyman called Viertel into a meeting.

'What do you think of Sam Hoffenstein?' he asked.

'Very highly. I love his poetry.'

'He is reading your and Behrman's script.'

A few hours later Hoffenstein burst into my office waving the blue-bound script and shouting: 'This is the best screenplay I've ever read. It's brilliant--I could not put it down! Congratulations! Where is Behrman? I must send him a telegram.'

Gottfried heard his shouting and came in. [Gottfried Reinhardt, son of Max, was Hyman's assistant and like most other European expats was a friend of Viertel's.] Hoffenstein repeated what he had said to me, adding more flattering adjectives and suggesting that we all go to Hyman. We had to tell him that not a word of the screenplay should be changed. I said that as I was involved it would be much better if he and Gottfried went alone. Ten minutes later Goldie, Hyman's blond secretary, called and said I should come to his office.

Bernie was sitting behind his desk, two girls in white uniforms attending to him, one to give him a manicure, the other a scalp treatment. He looked gloomy. 'Sam says he likes the script as it is.' Not reacting to Bernie's statement, I asked the girl who was rubbing his scalp if she could grow hair on bald spots. 'Positively, yes' she said. Bernie, now more cheerful, launched into a long explanation. He had not said 'Positively no.' He admitted that there were some good scenes and lines in the script, but it had 'no heart.' It was sophisticated and cold. It did not make you cry. When 'that man' was all alone on St. Helena--he meant Elba--waiting for 'his Empress,' and Marie arrived instead of her, 'this should bring tears into everyone's eyes.' I said that what we wanted to show was Napoleon's growing megalomania, his ruthless use of the Polish Legions without any intention of restituting their country, and Marie's disillusionment with the man she worshiped, her realization that he was an egotistical monster but whom she could not cease loving.

'If you want to feel sorry for Napoleon then let Garbo play him,' suggested Hoffenstein.

But Bernie said sternly: 'I want this film to be the best Garbo ever made,' and went off to lunch in the executive dining room.

Hoffenstein, Gottfried and I left the studio and drove to the 'Little Gipsy,' a Hungarian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. After two martinis we felt much better and were more inclined to listen to Gottfried's analysis of Bernie's psyche. There was no use resisting: the script would be rewritten even if William Shakespeare had been its author. It was imperative for Bernie's ego to start from scratch, because that way he could get used to the story and the characters, and this always took a great length of time. 'For you and Sam and Salka,' he went on, 'it will be leisurely work, pleasant, because you like each other and Bernie is a nice man. I am sure that you can save many scenes from the Behrman script, as in the course of time Bernie will become convinced that everything has been invented under his guidance. This may seem cynical to you and a waste of money, but that's not your responsibility. The more Bernie spends, the closer he is to becoming an executive. On the other hand, if you refuse the assignment, somebody else, much less scrupulous, will tear down Berhman's and Salka's script, and suggest another story, which Garbo will reject, and we'll have to start all over again!'

'Gottfried is right,' said Hoffenstein, and called for the wine list.

The Love Song of Samuel Hoffenstein

The Siren likes screenwriters; she's said that before. But there's one screenwriter she never knew had anything to do with the movies until the wonders of the Internet told her so some years back: Samuel Hoffenstein. Hoffenstein was, to the Siren, a poet. A funny poet, which is an uncommon gift.

Long ago the Siren bought a thrift-store copy of Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing, copyright 1941, originally published in 1928. Right away, the Siren felt the lure of a kindred spirit.

I'd rather listen to a flute
In Gotham, than a band in Butte.

We understood each other, Mr. Hoffenstein and I.

Now, alas, it is too late
To buy Manhattan real estate,
But when my father came to town,
He could have bought for fifty down,
And I should not be where I am:
Yet does my father give-a-damn,
Or ever say, "I'm sorry, boy,"
Or looking at me, murmur, "Oy"?
He does not grieve for what I've missed,
And yet I'm called an Anarchist!

The poems are both louche and nerdy, a combination the Siren finds as irresistible in art as she does in life. Exhibit A is a section called "The Mimic Muse": parodies of other poets, executed with the kind of precision that comes only from knowing what you're mocking really, really damn well. Here we have a favorite, "Miss Millay Says Something Too":

I want to drown in good-salt water,
I want my body to bump the pier;
Neptune is calling his wayward daughter,
Crying 'Edna, come over here!'

It's not Keats, but all the same, the Siren loves this book dearly. It has that devil-may-care Jazz Age vibe, described so well by Raymond de Felitta as "a jangly, up and down and extremely kinky sense of reality."

Some years later, upon the advent of Google, the Siren looked up Hoffenstein and discovered his other career as a screenwriter. A darned impressive career, at that.

And so the Siren loped off to find out more about Hoffenstein and found...

Nada.

All right, that's an exaggeration. The Siren found the filmography and several tributes to the man's poetry. She read his Wikipedia stub, which says that Hoffenstein was born in Russia in 1890, the child of Lithuanian parents. The Siren had long ago taken a flying deductive leap and decided that the name is Jewish, and one does not have to have an overly active imagination to come up with reasons why a brilliant young Jewish man would leave Russia in the first part of the 20th century to come to the U.S. He wrote for Vanity Fair, among other outlets. Wiki claims that in addition to co-writing the book, Hoffenstein helped compose the music for the Broadway version of The Gay Divorce, a claim of which the Siren is skeptical considering the credited composer is Cole Porter, but hey, maybe. He moved to Los Angeles in 1931, wrote many screenplays and was nominated for an Oscar for Laura and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No marriages mentioned, no kids recorded. Hoffenstein died much too soon, in 1947. The Siren can't tell you what killed him.

Any photos? Just this one, on this Website, date unknown, although the style and his evident age suggest early 1930s. If indeed this is Hoffenstein, he seems to have a bit of a self-dramatizing streak, as befits a poet. Oh no, wait; it's Maurice Chevalier. Would that amuse Hoffenstein, or annoy him no end?

The Siren went to her old friend City of Nets, and found this marvelous story about Hoffenstein's first screen credit, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

Once the contracts were signed, Hoffenstein set to work writing a script, and Dreiser, who had discovered a new girl, set off with her for Cuba, leaving no forwarding address. When Hoffenstein finished his script and wanted to get Dreiser's approval, Dreiser could not be found. Paramount sent out official notices that filming would soon begin. Dreiser reappeared in New Orleans, and denounced all previous correspondence as 'the usual Hollywood swill and bunk.' He demanded the right to discuss Hoffenstein's script. With some trepidation, Hoffenstein sent his screenplay to New Orleans and asked if he could meet Dreiser there. 'IF YOU CAN DISCUSS THIS AMICABLY OTHERWISE NOT,' Dreiser wired back. Amicable as could be, Hoffenstein flew to New Orleans, to find at his hotel a note from Dreiser saying that the script was 'nothing less than an insult,' and that 'to avoid saying how deeply I feel this, I am leaving New Orleans now without seeing you. You will understand, I am sure.'

Hoffenstein understood. Paramount understood. The studio went ahead and started making the movie.

This told the Siren that Dreiser, whose Jennie Gerhardt she read in college convinced that the man wrote prose with the express intention of killing her, was at one point trying to kill his screenwriters too. But the anecdote told her little about Hoffenstein, other than that he must not have been the type to get discouraged about a little thing like a famous author throwing a hissy fit over your screenplay of his book.

The Siren combed through the rest of her film books. No luck.

The Siren ordered The Complete Poems of Samuel Hoffenstein online. When it arrived she tore into the padded envelope, convinced there'd be a magisterial introduction that would tell her about Russia and whether Edna St. Vincent Millay was p.o.'d about "The Mimic Muse" and which uncredited lines of The Wizard of Oz were Hoffenstein. The Siren cracked open the book to find--you guessed it--nothing. It's a Modern Library edition. They're wonderful books, those old Modern Library hardcovers, light and perfectly sized. But they're no-frills, and usually no intros, either.

The sensible approach was the library, of course, but the Siren isn't always sensible. Now in possession of a book that included two later poetry volumes, Year In, Year Out and Pencil in the Air, the Siren was more inclined to let biographical criticism run riot. The poems were so blatantly personal that it was more fun, and more romantic, to piece Hoffenstein together line by line. For example, he was definitely Jewish, and wrote several melancholy poems about life back in Russia and as an emigre.

A tree that walked, but never grew,
A living semblance, but a Jew,
Lost in the United States,
Lost behind the Ghetto gates,
No bird yet wingless, lost in air,
Alone and alien everywhere.

And he also (rather startling, this next bit) probably converted to Christianity.

Now I am a large and mellow,
Mild and philosophic fellow,
Of amiable thought and speech,
Sweetly disposed toward all and each,
A stanch disciple of Saint Paul,
A friend of sparrows as they fall...

He still got a kick out of teasing his poetic betters, with a 9-page, er, tribute to T.S. Eliot:

Hula, hula,
Hula, hula.
Old Mother Hubbard she made my bed.
But what good is it
Since Ivan the Terrible
The Brooklyn Bridge
And Staten Island
Fell on my head?

Hoffenstein has many poems devoted to liaisons with women, who drove him crazy

Lovely lady, who does so
All my waking haunt,
Tell me, tell me, do you know
What the hell you want?

and of whom he didn't have a terribly high opinion.

She walks in beauty, like the night
And so she should, the parasite!

By the time of Pencil in the Air, he's sadder and more serious. He writes a lot about insomnia

At night, when you should sleep, you can't sleep yet;
By day, when you shouldn't, you laugh at sheep yet...

and illness

I paid my taxes, I got sick.
The doctor said I was going quick
Of double multiple complications,
Confirmed by seven consultations.

and postwar despair.

Fear not the atom in fission;
The cradle will outwit the hearse;
Man on this earth has a mission--
To survive and go on getting worse.

Yet his filmography seems to show continuing success. And Hoffenstein was a practical sort, as poets go.

Tax me not in mournful numbers,
Come and make a total haul,
For the residue that slumbers
Is no good to me at all.

Pencil in the Air does find him finally commenting on his day job, as it were, and he felt as deeply appreciated as most screenwriters do. From "The Notebook of a Schnook":

So what happens? The usual factors--
The studio simply can't get actors,
Directors, cutters, stagehands, stages,
Or girls to type the extra pages:
The way it ends, to put it briefly,
Is what happens is nothing, briefly.

Unfortunately, none of this nailed down what the Siren wanted to know. Look at that filmography, studded with so many witty, sophisticated films: Desire. Tales of Manhattan. Lydia (the Siren adores that one). Cluny Brown.

But these are co-writing credits, and it's hard to find out which part of a screenplay came from which writer, even if it's as celebrated a duo as Brackett and Wilder. Maybe one wrote a line, and the other edited it, or flipped it, or gave it to another character. Maybe they passed the pencil back and forth a lot. Who could tell the Siren which part of a Hoffenstein screenplay was Hoffenstein? Did the man who wrote

Maid of Gotham, ere we part,
Have a hospitable heart.
Since our own delights must end,
Introduce me to your friend.

come up with this exchange in Love Me Tonight:

Jeanette MacDonald: What are you doing now?
Maurice Chevalier: I'm thinking. I'm thinking of you without these clothes.
Jeanette MacDonald: Open your eyes at once!
Maurice Chevalier: Oh no, pardon madam. With different clothes. Smart clothes.

Years after imagining A.E. Housman's doleful mien at the circus

I think of all the corpses
Worm-eaten in the shade
I cannot chew my peanuts
Or drink my lemonade.
Good God, I am afraid!

was Hoffenstein the one who had Charles Boyer tell Jennifer Jones, "In Hyde Park, some people like to feed nuts to the squirrels. But if it makes you happy to feed squirrels to the nuts, who am I to say nuts to the squirrels?"

At last the Siren checked out a database to which she has occasional access, and found a Toronto Star article from 1993, about Laura, Hoffenstein's second Oscar-nominated screenplay. The Siren knows some people don't like Laura, but as for her, it's the only Otto Preminger joint she'll drop everything to see once more. And no wonder.

Preminger remembered that Samuel Hoffenstein was imported to pep up the script. Hoffenstein practically invented the part of Waldo for Webb (adding lines like "sentiment comes easy at 50 cents a word!").

Hoffenstein was a contemporary wit of Alexander Woolcott's at the famous round table luncheons in the 1920s.

Aha! So if he wrote Waldo's part as we know it, that means Hoffenstein came up with most of the movie's best lines. And indeed, the Siren can hear it:

"I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves."

"Laura, dear, I cannot stand these morons any longer. If you don't come with me this instant I shall run amok."

"My dear, either you were born in a extremely rustic community, where good manners are unknown, or you suffer from a common feminine delusion that the mere fact of being a woman exempts you from the rules of civilized conduct."

"Ordinarily, I am not without a heart...Shall I produce X-ray pictures to prove it?"

And a key scene of Laura takes place at the Algonquin, the Siren's favorite place for a quiet drink these days. Hoffenstein at the Round Table? He must have fit right in.

A delighted Siren continued, but found only one other article that didn't discuss Hoffenstein as a talented purveyor of light verse and oh-yes-he-wrote-screenplays. Still, the article was a good one: The Los Angeles Times, from 2000. Sylvia Thompson discusses the dinners her mother made at the Garden of Allah villa complex in the early 1940s. Her mother was Gloria Stuart, her father was writer Arthur Sheekman, and the guests often included Groucho Marx, Julius Epstein and Humphrey Bogart. And one more:

Cooking for writers could bring special rewards. Samuel Hoffenstein, writing the screenplay for Laura with his true love, Betty Reinhardt, composed a poem to Ma's "Goose with Kirschwasser Aspic."

The Siren at last had a scene starring Hoffenstein the man, even if it was a cameo. Enjoying himself at a wartime dinner party, composing a poem for the hard-working hostess--Kirschwasser aspic, wonder how he rhymed that. Hoffenstein would only be alive for about three more years, but he and Betty Reinhardt created the Laura script together, and Hoffenstein put Waldo's best lines on the page, and they were in love.

Of course, Hoffenstein's poetry and Hoffenstein's screenplays--no matter which lines of the latter you attribute to him--are pretty cynical. He had a sophistication that said there's no such thing as happily ever after, kiddo, so happy right now better be good enough. Laura's a fleshly movie, there's depravity in the romance--all those heedless, dissolute people rattling around the penthouses.

And if you think finding out stuff about Samuel Hoffenstein is hard, just try looking up Betty Reinhardt. Who knows, thought the Siren, maybe that affair was over as soon as someone on the Laura set called, "that's a wrap."

No--she double-checked the filmographies--surely not. All of Hoffenstein's subsequent screenplays were written with Reinhardt. Together they wrote the adapted screenplay for Cluny Brown, with its exquisitely funny declarations of love: "I would build you the most beautiful mansion, with the most exquisite and complicated plumbing. I would hand you a hammer, and say 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Madame Cluny Belinski is about to put the pipes in their place.'"

By the time they wrote that movie, Betty was credited as "Elizabeth Reinhardt." The Siren pulled out her introduction-less Modern Library edition of The Complete Poetry of Samuel Hoffenstein, and turned to the title page for Pencil in the Air, published in 1947, just after he died.

There it was below the title: "To Elizabeth."

In Memoriam: Annette Funicello, 1942-2013

"She's the perfect girl next door, she doesn't have a bad bone in her body. She's the sweetest girl I know, and nothing's ever changed."

—Frankie Avalon

"Even sitting in a wheelchair, life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful."

—Annette Funicello

The Siren isn't much for 1960s beach movies, but she always feels a pang when a truly sweet soul has passed on.

(Both quotes from Swingin' Chicks of the 60s.)

In Memoriam: Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

As certain critics age, they seem to drag around years of bad movies like ankle chains. They remind me of Gothic heros, betrayed lovers convinced virtue never existed at all. Once long ago these critics were hurt by a movie, oh yes, many movies, and now they say to each sweet young prospect, "You cannot deceive me! I know what you are!"

Roger Ebert wrote some of the most bitingly funny pans of all time, but he never went that route. He was writing raves right up to the end. Each movie held the possibility of love. He was a true romantic.

Here's how I recall an old "Tonight Show" with Jay Leno where Ebert appeared with Gene Siskel. Like many other people, I grew up with those two bickering in the balcony. Leno had the bright idea of putting soundproof headphones on one critic, so the other could tell the audience what he really thought of his partner. Ebert went first with the headphones. He put them on, paused a second, and with a grin of delight said, "Mozart!" And his hand started beating out a little conducting session.

Leno asked Siskel, so what do you really think of this guy? And Siskel replied calmly, "First of all, I'm a much better critic than he is." The audience roared. Leno cracked up. Even with headphones on, it should have been obvious to Ebert that something was up.

Except he was still conducting. I'm not even sure he turned his head. He was listening to Mozart. Art mattered to him.

Many film writers owe a debt to Ebert. Mine comes from what must have been a 1983 "At the Movies" broadcast. He and Siskel were doing a rundown on the Academy Awards, one of those "If We Picked the Winners" shows.

I don't remember Siskel's choice (although it might have been E.T.). But Ebert chose Tootsie. "It's an almost perfect comedy," he said. Gandhi was going to win, he predicted, "but which movie do you think you'll still want to see in 20 years?"

My kid mind reeled. I'd seen Gandhi, and I'd seen Tootsie. I loved Tootsie, but it was about Dustin Hoffman in drag. Gandhi had Ben Kingsley. Bald Ben Kingsley. With an accent. Bald Ben Kingsley getting assassinated. Gandhi was--OK, it was stuffy. But it was serious. That's what wins Oscars. Right?

In roundabout fashion, Roger Ebert had introduced me to the notion of white elephant art, years before I ever heard the name Manny Farber. He'd also planted the idea that if you had a blast watching a movie, that alone meant it was worth some serious thought.

I haven't watched Gandhi since 1982. Tootsie I've seen several times. Think I'll watch it this weekend.

Rest in peace, Mr. Ebert. You were right about many things.

Rat Pack Rashomon

The Siren has not forgotten her more-patient-than-ever readers, truly she hasn't. It's just that lately her life resembles this:



But she will never abandon her little corner of the Web. (Here the Siren wants everyone to remember the Alamo—specifically, Laurence Harvey making sure the sun catches his ruffles just right.)



Where else can the Siren blather on about Mary Astor's invention of pan-chromatic makeup and Vera Zorina in I Was an Adventuress? It's just that when the irresistible force of life meets the immovable object of work, something's gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give.

Which brings us to this post, involving a man who did rather a good version of that song.



The Siren has been reading The Richard Burton Diaries. You could say, in fact, that the Siren has been obsessing over the Burton diaries. Her only reading time is on the subway, the dadgum thing weighs almost as much as her six-year-old, and yet the Siren lugs it back and forth because she does not want to let it go. The Diaries made her want to revisit some Burton movies (the good ones)—maybe even try out Burton as Trotsky because damn, the part about filming that one is funny. The whole book is delightful—very sad in some ways, but a marvelous picture of a restless, fiercely intelligent mind.

And lord have mercy, how he gossips. Evidently the only person who read it while he was writing it was Elizabeth Taylor, and so he feared no backlash. (Not even from her.) If the Siren tells you that this is, no lie, the only book she's ever read in which someone had a bad word to say about Audrey Hepburn, you'll get the general idea. It's weirdly enhanced by the most maniacal footnotes the Siren has ever encountered, via Professor Chris Williams. Par exemple: if the Burtons stay "at the Plaza Athénée," you get a note elaborating: "Hotel Plaza Athénée, Avenue Montaigne, Paris." The Siren at this point loves Williams almost as much as Burton.

The Siren adores how Burton chronicles his incredibly voracious reading habits in great detail, and she was immediately caught by his acerbic dissection of a certain nostalgic passage in David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon. The two sections, side by side, give a mirror-image view of Hollywood glamour, the Rat Pack, Sinatra, Bogart, and especially Burton and Niven themselves.

But they are quite, quite different. So, we'll give Niv the first word.



It was the 4th of July and Bogart had taken what Niven says was the highly unusual step of inviting women aboard his celebrated yacht, the Santana. That meant David Niven brought along his wife Hjordis (possibly the most universally disliked Hollywood spouse of that or any era, but that's a whole other post, at least). So Lauren Bacall (I do not call the goddess Miss Bacall "Betty" as I have never been introduced) came along to keep Hjordis company. Bacall had her hands full. As Niven tells it,

We dropped anchor in Cherry Cove and Frank Sinatra moored alongside us in a chartered motor cruiser with several beautiful girls and a small piano. After dinner, with Jimmy Van Heusen accompanying him, Sinatra began to sing. He sang all night.

There were many yachts in Cherry Cove that weekend, and by two in the morning, under a full moon, Santana was surrounded by an audience sitting in dozens and dinghies and rubber tenders of every shape and size.

Frank sang as only he can, with his monumental talent and exquisite phrasing undimmed by a bottle of Jack Daniels on top of the piano.

He sang till the dew came down heavily and the boys in the listening fleet fetched blankets for their girls' shoulders. He sang till the moon and the stars paled in the predawn sky. Only then did he stop and only then did the awed and grateful audience peddle silently home.

Now we shall let Burton have his say.

I read David Niven's autobiography yesterday in one sitting. It is very funny though not very well written and is, like all actors' biographies, very anecdotal and full of "and then Mike Todd called me and said 'Get your ass over here'" etc. He describes one scene on Bogart's yacht which is not what happened at all as I was there. He describes Sinatra singing all through the night on a motor yacht with a lot of other yachts around 'awe-struck' he says. Frankie did sing all through the night it's true and a lot of people sat around in boats and and got drunk it's true but Bogie and I went out lobster-potting with Dumbum [Bogart's Danish crewman, according to the every-ready Prof. Williams] while Frankie was singing kept on making cracks about Betty [Bacall] sitting on Sinatra's feet etc. and Frankie got really pissed off with Bogie and David Niv who describes himself as bewitched all through the night was trying to set fire to the Santana at one point because nobody could stop Francis from going on and on and on. I was drinking 'boiler-makers' with Bogie Rye Whiskey with canned beer chasers so the night is pretty vague but I seem to remember a girl having a fight with her husband or boy friend in a rowing dinghy and being thrown in the water by her irate mate. I don't know why but I would guess that she wanted to stay and listen to Frankie and he wanted to go. And Bogie and Frankie nearly came to blows next day about the singing the night before and I drove Betty home because she was so angry with Bogie's cracks about Frankie's singing. At the time Frankie was out of work and was peculiarly vulnerable and Bogie was unnecessarily cruel. But any way it is not at all like Niv's description.

So, the Siren asks the same question as in Kurosawa's great movie: out of these, which is believable?

The SLIFR Poll: It's Not a Comeback, It's a Return

The Siren, as you may have guessed, is having a hard time trying to write about anything in depth at the moment. But here comes Dennis Cozzalio, our old friend from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, with another quiz: MISS JEAN BRODIE’S MODESTLY MAGNIFICENT, MATRIARCHALLY MANIPULATIVE SPRINGTIME-FOR-MUSSOLINI MOVIE QUIZ. This one had a lot of noir and pre-Code questions that were irresistible to the Siren, not to mention the title reference to something that's ONLY one of the Siren's favorite films of all time. (Dennis, you rogue, was that deliberate? A Brodie-signal, like a bat-signal only 100 times better?) 

So here we are. Time for some fun! As usual, to avoid one of her spells, the Siren went with the first answer that popped into her fevered brain. If you want to take the quiz, drop by SLIFR and have at it. And the Siren doffs her cloche to friend Tony Dayoub, who reminded her of the quiz by posting his own answers at Cinema Viewfinder.

1) The classic movie moment everyone loves except me is:
The diner scene in Five Easy Pieces. Perhaps the Siren's retail days gave her too much experience with too many boors. Oh, you're picking on an overworked, underpaid, middle-aged waitress. Vive la révolution!



2) Favorite line of dialogue from a film noir
"I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings."

3) Second favorite Hal Ashby film
Harold and Maude. (The Siren's favorite is Shampoo, one of the best movies of the 70s; she's naming it even though Warren Beatty evidently had a great deal to do with the finished film.)




4) Describe the moment when you first realized movies were directed as opposed to simply pieced together anonymously.
As she's said before, the Siren's father and his regard for John Ford had her realizing this early on; also, the fact that the name "Busby Berkeley" meant big wonderful chorus numbers.

5) Favorite film book
City of Nets, still.

6) Diana Sands or Vonetta McGee?
Pass.

7) Most egregious gap in your viewing of films made in the past 10 years
The Lord of the Rings, I suppose.

8) Favorite line of dialogue from a comedy
"You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Clause."

9) Second favorite Lloyd Bacon film
As of last week's James Cagney triple feature at the Film Forum, without hesitation the Siren cites Picture Snatcher. (Favorite is 42nd Street, bien sûr.)

10) Richard Burton or Roger Livesey?
The most painful answer in the bunch, because the Siren has been immersed in Burton's diaries, and they are nonstop joy, fascination and delight. But the Siren cannot live without I Know Where I'm Going!. Livesey.

11) Is there a movie you staunchly refuse to consider seeing? If so, why?
Lots, but first thought is A Serbian Film. (The Siren strongly advises her gentlest readers not even to Google that one if they don't know it.) Because why would I? The people who boast about how they can sit through anything, do they believe someone greets you at the Pearly Gates to say "Dude, you made it through Cannibal Holocaust! Here's your door prize!" The Siren considers hard-core images of degradation and sadism to be brain pollution. Not to mention a colossal waste of her precious time on earth, considering she just looked at Lloyd Bacon's filmography and realized she's got dozens left.



12) Favorite filmmaker collaboration
The Siren goes with her first thought: Bette Davis and William Wyler.

13) Most recently viewed movie on DVD/Blu-ray/theatrical?
Blu-Ray: The Navigator. Theatrical (not for work): Picture Snatcher.

14) Favorite line of dialogue from a horror movie
"I never drink...wine."

15) Second favorite Oliver Stone film
Born on the Fourth of July. (No. 1: Platoon.)

16) Eva Mendes or Raquel Welch?
Haven't seen Ms Mendes in much, but the Siren suspects she'd pick Welch in any case.

17) Favorite religious satire
Viridiana.

18) Best Internet movie argument? (question contributed by Tom Block)
The Sight and Sound list was good for some fun and games.

19) Most pointless Internet movie argument? (question contributed by Tom Block)
Anything in which the words "Lena Dunham" appear. The Siren signed off forever when someone on Twitter chimed in with, "Jean Renoir had a famous artist parent too." Good grief, enough already. Let's talk about Lloyd Bacon!

20) Charles McGraw or Robert Ryan?
McGraw is one fabulously cool customer, but come on--Ryan.

21) Favorite line of dialogue from a western
"Plantin' and readin', plantin' and readin'. Fill a man full o' lead, stick him in the ground an' then read words on him. Why, when you've killed a man, why try to read the Lord in as a partner on the job?"

22) Second favorite Roy Del Ruth film
Employees' Entrance. (No. 1 is Blessed Event.)

23) Relatively unknown film or filmmaker you’d most eagerly proselytize for
The Siren is passing on this one only because hell, that's her whole blog, right there.

24) Ewan McGregor or Gerard Butler?
Ewan McGregor.

25) Is there such a thing as a perfect movie?
Intellectually, no. Emotionally, sure there is.

26) Favorite movie location you’ve most recently had the occasion to actually visit
A few blocks from the Siren's front door, where they were filming The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Oh joy.

27) Second favorite Delmer Daves film
Probably Susan Slade. (Favorite is A Summer Place, although a whimsical argument could be made that Max Steiner is the auteur there.)

28) Name the one DVD commentary you wish you could hear that, for whatever reason, doesn't actually exist
Billy Wilder on any of his greats.

29) Gloria Grahame or Marie Windsor?
Love Ms Windsor, but Gloria Grahame.

30) Name a filmmaker who never really lived up to the potential suggested by their early acclaim or success
Isn't it a shame that Howard Hawks never managed to top Scarface? KIDDING. The Siren points to her sidebar to reiterate that one good movie, for her, is enough. But because she re-watched Force of Evil recently, the Siren will name Abraham Polonsky as a filmmaker thwarted by the tenor of his times.

31) Is there a movie-based disagreement serious enough that it might cause you to reevaluate the basis of a romantic relationship or a friendship?
Whenever she's asked this question, the Siren likes to point out that she married a man who dislikes John Ford. Her dissent-tolerance is pretty well established.