Laver's Law: The Illustrated Cinematic Guide

Turner Classic Movies has declared September an unofficial cinema history month. They are beginning a months-long series of screenings of The Story of Film, and showing a variety of movies alongside that series. The list is so rich that it has the quixotic effect of depressing the Siren; she cannot see it all, cannot even get a DVR big enough to hold it all.

The schedule prompts the Siren to go public with one of her deepest, most tenaciously held opinions:

Laver's Law applies to cinema.

Laver's Law was the creation of James Laver, an art historian and curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, who helped create the field of fashion history as we know it today. His law is, as it should be, of the utmost elegant simplicity. In a book called Taste and Fashion (1937), he proposed that the way we regard fashions in clothing forms a predictable cycle over time. One item, such as a dress, will be regarded in a number of ways as the years roll on.

Here then the Siren offers illustrated examples of her own, using Laver's categories (although the Siren's allowing herself the privilege of rounding off in a couple of instances), based as usual on nothing more than her own whimsical brainwaves. This is how these films look to her; they may well look different to you, and if you want to play at home, have at it.

The point is that in just a few more years, these films may look different to everyone. Certain films are born great and stay that way; but canons are not immune from fashion. This year's whipping boy may be on my grandchildren's college syllabus. If the Siren has been caught dissing a treasured favorite, comfort yourself with the thought that time's winged chariot may yet run me off the road.

The first two are, obviously, not regarded as either indecent or shameless now:

Indecent: 10 years before its time
Peeping Tom (1960)

Shameless: 5 years before its time
Citizen Kane (1941)

Outré: 1 year before its time
Confession of a Nazi Spy (1939)

Smart: 'Current Fashion'
Upstream Color (2013) (The Siren herself thinks this one's going to date badly, but right now, it's as smart--in the sense of modish--as it gets.)

Dowdy: 1 year after its time
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Hideous: 10 years after its time
Love Actually (2003)

Ridiculous: 20 years after its time
Kalifornia (1993)

Amusing: 30 years after its time
Return of the Jedi (1983)

Quaint: 50 years after its time
How the West Was Won (1963)

Charming: 70 years after its time
The More the Merrier (1943)

Romantic: 100 years after its time
Fantomas (1913)

Beautiful: 150 years after its time
(Time-wise, this is a major cheat...but the Siren is willing to bet that this will still be beautiful in 2045.)

Heaven Can Wait (1943): The Lubitsch Touch of Crime

Heaven Can Wait (1943) is one of the Siren's favorite Lubitsch films, which means in turn that it is one of her favorite films, period. It was made at 20th Century Fox, which you'd also know just from the title card above. (On Twitter, Comrade Lou Lumenick once asked if Darryl Zanuck had a needlepoint artist on salary; you could tell who were the real classic-movie hounds just by looking at who found that hilarious enough to retweet.) Fox films aren't part of the Turner library and they have only begun screening at Turner Classic Movies in the past few years. Rejoice, Heaven Can Wait makes its TCM debut this Saturday at 6 pm EDT, part of the TCM Summer Under the Stars day dedicated to Charles Coburn.

To celebrate this event, the Siren has slightly spruced up a 2006 post about this movie and offers it here. The intervening years have only strengthened her conviction that Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait is the wisest commentary on marital happiness that she has ever seen.

***

Last weekend the Siren escaped, with her family and a dear friend, up the Hudson River to a country house. The local rental place had Heaven Can Wait (1943), a movie so delicious the Siren would eat it with a spoon if she could. It has probably been twenty years since she saw this one, and here it was, restored to dazzling beauty by the Criterion Collection. (The DVD does have a few oddly faded sequences; from Daryl Chin via DVDBeaver, here is a good, but depressing, explanation of why this is so.)

Amazing what Ernst Lubitsch could get from actors who seldom shone as bright elsewhere. Kay Francis gave the performance of her career in Trouble in Paradise; Jack Benny, so great in radio and TV, never equalled To Be Or Not to Be on screen. The immensely likable Don Ameche was a second-string star all his life, but in Heaven Can Wait you could swear you were watching one of the greatest light comic actors of all time. Gene Tierney, young and a bit tremulous as Ameche's great love, does fine work showing her character's gathering strength.

Arrayed around them are a group of ferociously funny character actors. Lubitsch probably didn't have to work all that hard to get brilliance from these pros, but Samson Raphaelson's script gives them so much to work with; even the child actors playing young Henry and his schoolgirl sweethearts are excellent.

There is Laird Cregar, the sinister detective in I Wake Up Screaming, here playing a Satan so sophisticated and well-dressed that the Siren's host asked, "is that Anton Walbrook?" Henry Van Cleve (Ameche) goes to Hell (and a very elegant Hell it is, too, decorated in what appears to be Deco's Last Gasp) and attempts to explain to His Excellency why he deserves eternal damnation. His Excellency, for his part, sits down to vet Henry, since he doesn't want the place getting all touristy. "Sometimes it seems as though the whole world is coming to Hell," he laments.

Charles Coburn plays Hugo Van Cleve, living vicariously through his grandson's peccadillos; and Allyn Joslyn is Cousin Albert, with looks and demeanor reminiscent of Ralph Reed.

Excellent exchange, mid-movie:

Albert: The family understands your humor, but it's a typical kind of New York humor.
Hugo: In other words, it's not for yokels.

We have Eugene Pallette as Tierney's Kansas City pa. The Siren hereby issues a big mea culpa for not mentioning Pallette in her post about voices. There is no one, absolutely no one with a voice like this actor's any more. If you put a double bass through a cement mixer, you might get the voice of Eugene Pallette. He and Marjorie Main have the Siren's favorite scene in the movie, a fierce dispute at the marital breakfast table over who gets to read the Katzenjammer Kids. The butler Jasper, forced to mediate between the warring funny-paper fans, was played by the great, pioneering actor Clarence Muse. Mercifully, he has no "humorous" dialect tics or cutesy gestures. Instead, he's just as funny as the two flashier actors at either end of the table: "I've got great news..."

What makes this movie as sophisticated and challenging as it was in 1943 is Lubitsch and Raphaelson's thrillingly adult view of marriage. It's not the Pecksniffian view of adultery rampaging through every editorial page circa 1998, but the wry, Continental take that says I have been faithful, in my fashion. Couples and the remnants of couples swirl through the movie, pursuing all sorts of marriages in all sorts of ways. Henry's grandfather Hugo (Coburn) was, we suspect, entirely faithful, and rather wishes he hadn't been. Henry's parents are loving but rather daffy, and not very aware of what their son is up to — in the Lubitsch/Raphaelson view, this is not at all a bad way to raise a child.

For proof, compare the lovable Henry to his perfect prig of a cousin, Albert, whose briefly glimpsed parents seem completely in tune with one another's stiffness and reserve. Later, Henry and wife Martha (Tierney) raise another child much as Henry was raised, and that son turns out all right, too. Martha, for her part, has homespun middle-American parents who barely speak to one another, and Martha is the most purely good character in the movie. So much for the sins of the fathers.

The question of infidelity, and where that sin ranks in the hierarchy, is treated so obliquely that not every modern viewer picks up on it. Infidelity, in a Lubitsch movie, barely registers on the sin-o-meter. The worst crime of all is to be a bore. But the sour old souls at the Breen Office would never, but never, have countenanced a movie that says philandering won't get you a permanent berth with His Excellency. So Henry's indiscretions are never spelled out. Lubitsch just implies them all over the place.

When Henry goes to retrieve his wife from her parent's cow-bedecked Kansas mansion, it's clear what he is trying to explain away, and why Martha has tired of his act. "Oh, Henry, I know your every move," she sighs. "I know your outraged indignation. I know the poor weeping little boy. I know the misunderstood, strong, silent man, the worn-out lion who is too proud to explain what happened in the jungle last night." The mere fact that Martha is back home tells you her discontent had been building for a while, since Kansas doesn't even get the respect accorded Hell. "I didn't want to be an old maid, not in Kansas," Tierney had wailed earlier, trying to explain why she'd gotten herself engaged to Albert the stuffed shirt.

Still, it's that same Albert who gets to articulate something pretty close to the movie's core idea: "Marriage isn't a series of thrills. Marriage is a peaceful, well-balanced adjustment of two right-thinking people." Responds Martha, uncharacteristically tart, "I'm afraid that's only too true." Yet she and Henry achieve that balance, by putting off any notion of heavenly perfection in a marriage.

Four From Allan Dwan

The Museum of Modern Art's Allan Dwan series is over, and the Siren managed to see nine films there over the course of little more than a month (and one film on DVD, which she'll explain). Ever since, she's been trying to clear space and time to write about it. The Siren finally decided it was best to do it simply. Those wanting a deep, director-focused look at Dwan, including cogent arguments for his status in film history, should go to the Allan Dwan Dossier so lovingly compiled by Gina Telaroli and David Phelps. Here, the Siren is going to tell you a few things that she noticed, and mostly loved, about Allan Dwan. These are the first four; she'll write up the others later, time and other obsessions permitting as always.

The Restless Breed (1957)

The one and only lemon. It was shot in Technicolor but MOMA screened a black-and-white print, which was evidently what they could get. (Sweethearts on Parade, which Dave Kehr wrote up for the dossier and the Siren didn't see, had the same fate.) There are some well-composed scenes of riders against landscapes, which would probably look even better in Technicolor; and young Anne Bancroft looked great. But it was a strange, strange movie, with a peeping-Tom motif of Scott Marlowe (whom Dwan described as "a very hammy young guy") peering in windows and eavesdropping and putting his eye up to knotholes. These scenes start to feel like half the running time and became indescribably creepy and wearisome to the Siren. Also, there is a reverend character, played by Rhys Williams, who seems upstanding, except that more than once, he's shown with sweat beading his brow as he stares at a ludicrous portrait of a flamenco-dancing Bancroft. (Said flamenco-pin-up is on the poster above, with the blazing heart of Texas flaming right out of it. I rest my case.) In Dwan's must-read interview with Peter Bogdanovich in Who the Devil Made It, Dwan said the girly shots were inserted by the producer over Dwan's loud protests. This was a relief to know, since having the reverend stare at a woman who's got her skirt hiked up to the Oklahoma border and is leaning back in a way that's about to provide an encyclopedia illustration of "roundheel" does rather undermine his other designated script function as the moral center of the movie.

Slightly Scarlet (1956)

The Siren was shut out of this screening and was so mad about it that she went home and ordered the DVD forthwith. As it happened, while she liked it was far from the Siren's favorite in the series, mostly due to John Payne's John Payne-ness. He doesn't ruin the film, but he doesn't have that certain oomph a noir (anti)hero needs, that sense of some dirt under the fingernails or an empty bottle of rye under the bed. Lawrence Tierney, Charles McGraw, Richard Conti, take your pick--hell, even Cornel Wilde could have snapped Payne like a piece of dental floss. Rhonda Fleming, on the other hand, had earthy good-egg qualities Dwan understood and exploited well. Like the late Jane Russell, nature gave Fleming bombshell looks so outrageous they somehow bypass "I'm trouble" and wind up as "everyone's pin-up pal." Arlene Dahl was pleasingly tacky in a performance that nicely blurs the distinction between dumb and crazy. The colors, via John Alton, were marvelous, barely on the right side of kitschy, exactly right for a milieu with plenty of dough and no taste. The living room in the bad guy's lodge is so vast it's like watching shootouts staged in a hockey rink (that's a good thing). A lot of Dwan's sets are improbably large, with a big clearing in the middle; it gives his action scenes plenty of room to breathe. 

Bonus: The French title ("Two Redheads in a Fight"). Also, indulging the Siren's passion for movie posters that do not resemble the film in any way.

Trail of the Vigilantes (1940) 
Franchot Tone in a Western sounds like a bad joke, but this is a comedy anyway. He's well suited to his character, an Easterner who, like Destry the year before, is not quite the tenderfoot he seems. Wonderful use of character actors, including Broderick Crawford and Warren William, both of whom sound equally as Eastern as Tone--a choice that makes sense for a plot that is all about appearance vs. reality. The Siren's biggest laugh came with Mischa Auer, playing a carnival performer who's disguised himself as an aristocratic Southern lawyer, announces that he's the representative of "Hayes, Hayes, Hayes and [epic throat-clearing] Hayes." The stunts and the riding are breathtaking, although the telltale signs of tripwires distressed the Siren. Peggy Moran plays the cute-as-a-cap-pistol rancher's daughter, who's identified as being 17 to Franchot Tone's whatever (in 1940 he was 35). Everyone jokes about this, and Moran throws herself at Tone (and I don't mean that metaphorically) but Dwan stages the antics with such a light touch that it doesn't feel sleazy; not much, anyway.

Aside: Moran had a short career, largely because she married director Henry Koster in 1942. The Siren ran across this, from a late-life interview with Moran, and had to include it:

My husband told me that if I quit my 'so-called career,' he would make sure my face was in every one of his future films. I thought that was a pretty good proposition. Except his idea was to have a bust of me [by Yucca Salamunich] which he afterwards placed somewhere in all of his movies. So the next time you watch The Bishop's Wife, Harvey or The Robe, look for my head.

Tennessee's Partner (1955)

Oh looky here, a Western with a very good performance by Ronald Reagan--Peter Bogdanovich calls it Reagan's most likable work. Reagan plays the no-name Cowpoke, a man who's meant to embody simple decency, somebody who does the right thing because the wrong thing never even pops into his brain. The actor was 44, about 20 years older than Cowpoke's supposed to be, but Reagan was so good at playing naive that his casting didn't bother the Siren. The attachment between Cowpoke and Tennessee (John Payne, in a role that suits him much more) feels sincerely romantic. As is often the case in later Dwan movies, the women (especially Rhonda Fleming as "the Duchess") are the ones with their heads screwed on straight. The Siren loved the way Dwan's camera sneaks around the poker games in Fleming's house of ill repute, turning the audience into one of Rhonda Fleming's "girls" trying to have a peek at what the men are, um, holding. The parlor in the place is also huge and sparsely furnished, giving Dwan plenty of room to have a mob storm across it. This movie also indulged the Siren's love for goofy theme songs in non-musicals. The title song's called "Heart of Gold" (hold the Neil Young jokes, please) and it's sung over the opening credits, as well as by Fleming as she takes a bubble bath. Plus Coleen Gray, so sweet and innocent in Nightmare Alley, playing the money-grubbing Goldie. Gray has a marvelous response to the sign on the Duchess' front door: "Marriage Market." The whole movie has a mixture of practicality (isn't that sign truth in advertising?) and idealism (Cowpoke) that feels very Dwan. Bonus: 

The French title ("Marriage Is For Tomorrow") 

and the Belgian title ("City of Pleasures").

Want to See Rediscovered Orson Welles Footage? You Can. Here's How

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Lost footage from Orson Welles has been discovered.

It is not, alas, the original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, but it is pretty goshdarned magnificent all the same. As the great Dave Kehr writes in his must-read announcement at the New York Times, this is early Welles, made at age 23 just before Citizen Kane: about 40 minutes of footage that Welles intended to be shown before each act of a Gay Nineties farce called Too Much Johnson.

(Go on, get the giggles out of your system. The Siren will wait patiently. Welles, who had a wicked sense of humor, probably loved the idea of people like the Siren blushing every time they wrote out that ridiculously risque title.)

Now perhaps, like the Siren, you've been reading My Lunches with Orson and feeling sad about the projects he was never able to make. Undoubtedly you feel frustrated about the works like Don Quixote that are out of reach, snatched away from your eager cinephile grasp like a lunchroom bully appropriating your plastic baggy full of cookies. Eagerly you seize upon this news and say "When, o when can I view this? Dave Kehr says that the frames that are online already show evidence of Welles' genius, with 'strong, close-cropped compositions, powerful diagonals and insistent, ironic use of the “heroic angle”!' It stars Joseph Cotten, who also stars in my daydreams!"

Never fear, the National Film Preservation Foundation is here. They too want us all to see this, as they wanted us to see The White Shadow, where so many worked so hard to raise the funds to get that hitherto lost piece of Alfred Hitchcock's filmography online and available for viewing.

Click here for the NFPF site, where they are collecting funds to do the same for Too Much Johnson. Later this year, they want to put this early work, from one of the greatest artists this country ever produced, online for every Tom, Dick and Harriet to view.

It's being shown in October in Pordenone, Italy, as part of a festival called Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, but most of us are nowhere near there. If the local Octoplex were showing this, surely Sirenistas would happily fork over a tenner to see it. So look at this the same way. At the very least, give the NFPF the $10 ($14 in Manhattan) or so you'd have spent on a ticket. Contribute, and help them get this online. The Siren will thank you, everyone will thank you, and you will get a tangible reward: the ability to see an Orson Welles movie that's been hidden for decades.

Please, go, and give generously.

(The still of Joseph Cotten is from Too Much Johnson, and the top photo of breathtaking young Orson Welles was taken on set. More are viewable at the NFPF.)

Wallace Beery and the Persistence of Rumor

The Siren can't tell you exactly when and where she first heard the rumor that Wallace Beery, the great star of such movies as Beggars of Life, Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, Viva Villa! and Treasure Island (to name just a few of her own favorites) was a murderer. She's encountered it more than once. If the Siren dug hard enough she might find that it's popped up in comments here once or twice.

Beery, whose career included many lovable oafs as well as villains, does not appear to have been especially lovable in real life. Gloria Swanson gives horrendous details of her marriage to him in Swanson on Swanson, for starters. Louise Brooks had fond recollections of Beery; Margaret O'Brien did not.

Plus, Beery looks like a brute. Looks matter everywhere, and so does image, but in Hollywood, they are close to everything. So it's not hard to see why a certain allegation, that Beery was one of three men who beat Three Stooges creator Ted Healy outside the Trocadero nightclub in 1937, gained so much traction so rapidly. Supposedly, after Healy died of his injuries, Beery was hastily sent abroad by MGM VP Eddie Mannix, and the whole matter was hushed up because the studios were so powerful.

Still, surely we can agree that no one should be memorialized as a murderer without some damn good evidence. That also goes for Albert R. Broccoli, the latter-day James Bond producer who's also alleged to have been one of Healy's attackers; and it even goes for Pat DiCicco, the third man in this fable, a Hollywood figure who was married to Thelma Todd and whose second wife, Gloria Vanderbilt, says DiCicco abused her.

That is why Larry Harnisch, of the Los Angeles Times and the wonderful blog L.A. Mirror, deserves every last eyeball his series, "The Death of Ted Healy," can get.

Here's what Larry has done:

1. He found the relevant passage about the "Beery beat Healy to death" rumor in several different Wikipedia entries. (Larry does not like Wikipedia. He has excellent reasons. The Siren finds Wikipedia useful as a starting point and not much more; Larry builds such a case for the prosecution that going forward, the Siren may not even use it for that.)

2. Larry went back to the sources cited by Wikipedia.

3. He went back to the sources that were cited in the sources that were cited by Wikipedia.

4. And then, with precision and unflagging zeal, he went to newspapers and other records from the relevant period.

Does it count as a spoiler to say that Larry demolishes this story?

The Siren urges her patient readers, in the strongest possible terms, to read these posts. Follow this link to Larry's wrapup. Then, go and click on the links to all the parts. The Siren read the material in a couple of hours. Larry starts the posts with a disclaimer that his meticulous fact-combing is "tedious." It is not; it's enthralling.

The posts do, however, show that checking up on a good sleazy Hollywood rumor is a damn sight harder than popping by a website to say "I never liked Beery in The Champ and anyway I heard he murdered one of the Three Stooges."  

Facts matter; evidence matters; history matters. But with Hollywood, more than any other topic the Siren can name, rumor and innuendo hold sway. You want to say that General XYZ once shot a lance corporal because he didn't like how the guy was standing? (I made that up, folks.) In short order a military historian will show up to say "Hold the phone, Sunshine. What's your source?" You want to say a famed director was the Black Dahlia killer? Go right ahead. You might even get a book deal. (One of Larry's projects concerns the Black Dahlia case--the facts of the case.)

Everybody loves a bit of gossip; lord knows the Siren does. Used as an aside, and clearly identified as what it is, gossip gives spice to life. But it should never be dressed up to resemble a fact. Nor does wild, unsourced gossip deserve to be the echo you hear every time a star's name is spoken, like the horse-neigh for "Blucher."

Wallace Beery: a louse and a rapist, probably. (The Siren believes Swanson.) A murderer? Not only could you not get that to hold up in a court of law, you couldn't get the attention of a halfway decent shoe-leather reporter. Who's dead drunk. On a slow Tuesday night. At the Trocadero. Sitting under a photo of Ted Healy.

Thank you, Larry.

Sweet November (1968)

So the Siren decided to plant herself in front of TCM and watch whatever was on, within reason, and what was on was the original 1968 Sweet November. Now the Siren had never bothered with this film due to her impression that it was one of those “guess you had to be there” kind of 1960s movies. She was afraid this would be the The Knack or I Love You, Alice B. Toklas. But what the Siren got was a landlocked, mod spin on One Way Passage.

Unsurprisingly, the Siren liked Sweet November a lot.

Sandy Dennis plays Sara, who meets super-cute with Charlie when she's trying to cheat on her written driver's exam. It’s Charlie (Anthony Newley, one year past being one of the only reasons to watch Doctor Doolittle) who gets tossed out. Charlie is a box manufacturer, one of several metaphors that this movie shamelessly belabors. They eat a hot dog together (sexual metaphors too). Sara asks out of nowhere if Charlie has any tattoos: “Eagles sprouting lightning, or snakes, or uh, a battleship?” Charlie responds glumly, “I’m not big enough for a battleship.”

They go to an exhibit about the wonders awaiting everyone in the 1970s (ha) and wind up at her apartment. There, Sara quizzes Charlie about his three-piece woolen personality. “Hurry-hurry, ding-ding,” she summarizes.

We know Sara is no common girl because she wears trapeze dresses and white patent go-go boots. She makes a living subletting apartments. Her own place is a Brooklyn Heights carriage house with a gazillion artsy tchotchkes scattered around and the bed swung up top near a skylight, reachable only by a sort of repurposed fire escape. Other features include an open-plan fireplace and a generous backyard. (It’s like finding a kooky bohemian who got a great rent deal on Castle Howard.)

Charlie doesn’t appreciate that fab layout, of course; he grabs the sides of the catwalk like a passenger on the sloping deck of the Titanic. Sara explains her peculiar lifestyle. She takes up men for one month only, men who seem to need her help finding their true selves. An example being the one who was “quite conservative politically. He didn't believe in foreign aid. Do you know, he wouldn't even spend money in New Jersey.”

Sara asks Charlie to be “my November”: For one month, he’ll stay with her and learn to live, live, live. Charlie will shop for mod clothes, he’ll write poetry that rhymes (Sara's hippie-ish ethos doesn't extend to free verse) and he’ll mingle with Alonzo the vegetarian sign-painter (played by Theodore Bikel, who has a special place in the Siren's heart for starring in her favorite Columbo episode).

But there’s a complication, one you can see coming. While Charlie is learning to live, he discovers that Sara is dying. He doesn’t care, he loves her — he's even learned to navigate the stairs — and he wants to stay. The scene that truly kicked the Siren in the solar plexus was when Charlie brings a huge stack of calendars, all turned to the page for November, and tells Sara it will be November for as long as they are together.

The love story is wholeheartedly sincere, which helps explain why the Siren found Sweet November so much lovelier than the frequently sour, po-faced Love Story of 1970. If you are going to make a tearjerking romance, however much comedy you put in the mix, the only way to do it is full-out. You can't play the cynic for the first reels, then hand out handkerchiefs for the remainder. One Way Passage understands this, Love Affair understands it, Dark Victory understands it, hell, even Alexandre Dumas fils understood it. This movie isn’t in that league, but it’s trying. It doesn't condescend.

Sandy Dennis, she of the one-word-forward, two-words-back vocal delivery, makes Sara's impulsiveness authentic, her implausible decisions plausible. Newley belongs to a class of actor the Siren groups under “the Pizzazz People”: performers like Mickey Rooney or Sammy Davis Jr., who have so much show-biz in them that the heart is not on the sleeve, it's planted in the middle of the forehead like a third eye. Somehow putting the pizzazz-y Newley next to the fluttery Dennis results in chemistry — the Siren truly believed this terminal girl and her box manufacturer were having a good time when the camera cut away from her bed.

Michel Legrand composed the score; in a better world, he’d do the background music for everyone's wistful love affairs. The theme song was written by Newley and his longtime song partner Leslie Bricusse, and the Siren adores every string-saturated note of it. It was shot in Technicolor by Daniel L. Fapp. No matter what you think of the movie, anyone who loves New York would have to get some pleasure out of the utterly gorgeous exteriors, so many of them long gone. This is a magical New York, like the one in Barefoot in the Park and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the streets are clean and the characters are straight out of characterville. And the movie gets another thing right. November may be gray and dull in other places, but in New York it’s dramatic rain alternating with the purest of blue skies, cool weather turning colder, but gradually. Forget spring, no New York month is more romantic than November.

There isn’t a lot of Sweet November writing out there, although the IMDB page reveals a devoted cult; one commenter recalls seeing the movie with her man just before he shipped out to Vietnam. The Siren liked Leslie Dunlap’s tribute to the original, in the course of explaining why she found the remake so dire: “I love Sweet November... I love its quirky optimism, its metaphors for sex, its trippy intimations, its flirtation with adolescent narcissism, its ending. In 1968, Sandy Dennis captured a fragile, experimental feminist moment in which heroines picked up men without a hint of fear. In the blink of an eye, that moment was over.”

Maybe the Siren wouldn't have dug Sweet November when it was released. It's such a time capsule, destined to be retro as hell from the day the cameras started rolling. 1968! they made this a year after Bonnie and Clyde, and the same year as Faces and If... and Rosemarys Baby. Sweet November is as defiantly old-school as 1968's Oliver! and The Lion in Winter (both of which, for the record, the Siren also loves). Unlike those last two, Sweet November wants to be down with the kids. It isn't — even the Jerry Wald-esque font of the credits gives the game away — but then again, as Dunlap says, it is.

The Siren has never seen the version of Sweet November from 2001, but one look at the original will tell you a remake was more doomed than Sara herself. This movie should have been left as it was, filed next to the portable 45-record player and the lace-trimmed Peacock Revolution shirt: perfectly imperfect, hopelessly old-fashioned, and utterly of its time.

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.)