Gigi (1958): A Defense

Kate Aurthur’s ranking of Best Picture winners is not the worst film list the Siren has ever seen, nor even the worst list she’s seen on Buzzfeed. Several movies the Siren reveres did pretty well with Ms Aurthur. Rebecca sits at No. 20, The Best Years of Our Lives is No. 16, It Happened One Night cracks the top 10 at No. 8 and at No. 1 is All About Eve. Any group this large must elicit a correspondingly large amount of disagreement; that is why lists are such reliable traffic-bait.

But the Siren almost didn’t make it through, because the very first item, Ms Aurthur’s choice for the worst Best Picture winner of all time, slapped her across the face like Joan Crawford on a rampage.

Yes, the creepiest, most pedophiliac movie ever to win Best Picture is this list’s worst. How to define “worst” in this context, especially when judging Gigi — a movie musical some people love now, and certainly many people loved in 1958 — against films that were barely movies as we currently recognize them? [NB: I know, I know, forge ahead, please.] This list is, of course, totally subjective: I factored in my personal feelings about each movie, along with how well it has held up, how influential it is, and what it was up against. And then there’s the ineffability of common wisdom, which I also have taken into account. No matter how I feel about Annie Hall or about Schindler’s List, for example, I know I’m in a minority view in my dislike — and that matters. Not with Gigi, though, in which Leslie Caron plays a Parisian girl being trained to be a courtesan who ends up in a push-and-pull relationship with the much older Gaston (Louis Jordan) [sic]. This is the movie that gave us that disturbing cultural artifact, the song “Thank Heaven For Little Girls.” If you want disturbing psychosexual movies from 1958, let’s agree that Vertigo, which was nominated only for Best Art Direction and Best Sound, is preferable. To reiterate: Gigi is the worst.

Pitting Vertigo against Gigi underlines the reason George C. Scott refused to pick up his Oscars: In addition to calling the ceremony “a meat parade,” he considered the idea of artists competing against one another to be absurd. He was not wrong. “Best” means something different for an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and a musical comedy from Vincente Minnelli and Lerner and Loewe. Then again, in cracking a joke, the author has accidentally made a point.

Vertigo, winner of the Sight and Sound “Greatest Film of All Time So Take That, Citizen Kane Award,” concerns a troubled ex-policeman who falls in love with the gorgeous and possibly insane woman he is hired to tail. When he attempts to save her from her demons, she winds up dead, or so he thinks. Then the ex-cop spots his lost love’s doppelganger on the street, and works to turn her into the image of that dead woman — dye job, new wardrobe, new makeup. The audience soon finds out it’s the same woman, and she’s sane, although the ex-cop is plainly not. Our two-timing woman loves this man, and tries frantically to please him, but in the end, she falls off a bell tower.

Now turn to Gigi, from Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay, based on Colette’s story of a Parisian girl who’s descended from a line of courtesans and is being taught to take over the family business. But Gigi’s a lousy pupil, so far from considering a man’s happiness that she does not hesitate to clean his clock when they’re playing cards. The man in this instance is Gaston, a wealthy friend of the family who’s always had mistresses and enjoys Gigi’s company for the relief it brings from their demands, and from society’s. One day Gaston realizes that Gigi is no longer a little girl, and that he’s in love with her. He proposes to make her his latest mistress, although Gigi has spotted the flaw in this arrangement: It makes her disposable, and she’s in love with Gaston, and doesn’t want to be thrown away. Gaston in turn realizes that he loves Gigi too, and he doesn’t want to force her into a life that is utterly wrong for her. And so he marries her instead.

As Cosmopolitan might say, two makeovers, two very different results.

And one question: Why is Gigi, which ends with its vivacious heroine happily married to a rich man who loves her the way she is, a sick-sick-sick movie; while Vertigo, in which the lovelorn female lead tries to turn herself into a fictional character and winds up stone dead, is a “preferable” depiction of male-female relations?

Let’s see, which Oscar winners displayed sufficient rectitude to wind up near the top? Oh look, there’s Silence of the Lambs at No. 5, now there’s a movie that knows how to treat a lady. In The Godfather Part II, we have Kay Corleone getting the door slammed in her face as she tries to embrace her children; there’s The Godfather, where Talia Shire’s husband beats the living hell out of her; and let’s not mention (because Ms Aurthur doesn’t) the marital rape in Gone With the Wind (No. 11) and the speech in All About Eve about how a career means nothing for a woman if you turn over in bed and your man’s not there.

Fine movies, sure, but you see the point: Why pick on Gigi? If it were just Buzzfeed, the Siren might have shrugged and called for madder music and stronger wine. But alas, the woods are full of people saying Gigi is terrifying, the worst, chauvinist and hateful (et tu, Vadim?).

This wounds the Siren to her feminist core. She loves Gigi.

Yes, Gigi, played by 27-year-old Leslie Caron, is very young. Louis Jourdan, who plays Gaston, was 37. In the original Colette novella, Gigi is 16 and Gaston is 33, and in 2014, that is, as Ms Aurthur states, considered creepy.

Gigi, however, is set in 1900 in Paris. In that time and world, it was not unheard-of for a 16-year-old to get married, much less was it considered too young to embark on a career as a courtesan. Scowling at the sexual morals of an earlier time is fun and all, but it’s not an especially rewarding critical approach.

Let’s look at “Thank Heaven For Little Girls,” the song that freaks out Buzzfeed. These are not complicated lyrics, but the Siren’s emphasizing some salient lines anyway:

Thank heaven for little girls
For little girls get bigger every day. 

Thank heaven for little girls
They grow up in the most delightful way.

Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
One day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling.
Thank heaven for little girls
Thank heaven for them all,
No matter where no matter who
Without them, what would little boys do?
Thank heaven . . . thank heaven . . .
Thank heaven for little girls!

Maybe you don’t want Maurice Chevalier, who turned 70 during filming, singing about little girls, period. But he isn’t saying, “Thank heaven for little girls because I want to have sex with them,” which would of course be “pedophiliac” and horrifying in many eras besides our own. The lyrics say “I like little girls because they grow up into beautiful women.” In other words this song, a frequent target of the irretrievably literal-minded, is the senior citizen who coos at your cute kid, “That one’s gonna be a heartbreaker.” If the correct response to such a sally is to smash the old buzzard over the head with your handbag and shriek “Get away from my child, you psychopath!!” then the Siren freely admits she’s been doing it wrong.

Furthermore (and the Siren can’t believe she has to point this out) there is not a single act of rape, whether statutory or not, in this film. No character shows a sexual interest in girls under 16, and that includes Chevalier as Honore Lachaille. It’s the opposite of pedophilia: People wait until they’re old enough by the Parisian standards of the time, and that’s that.

Up until the point where Gaston takes a look at Gigi in a grown-up dress and realizes she’s a young woman, he has no romantic or sexual interest in her. She’s a chum. She’s fun. And when she does show up in the dress, happy and proud as all teenagers are when they put on the trappings of an adult, Gaston’s reaction isn’t “hubba-hubba.” He yells at Gigi that she looks “like an organ-grinder’s monkey.” If a 16-year-old and a 33-year-old in love is disturbing, hey, here you go — Gaston is disturbed when confronted with a playmate who’s suddenly attractive. They have a blistering row and he stomps off, only to realize that as Gigi has grown up, so have his feelings.

Minnelli probably would have loved to direct My Fair Lady, but that film couldn’t be made until the record-breaking Broadway run was over. So he took on Gigi, which tracks the other musical so closely that dear old Bosley Crowther suggested Lerner and Loewe might want to sue themselves. (Ms Aurthur has the backlot-bound, slower and stiffer My Fair Lady at no. 15, in evident indifference both to the plot similarities and the fact that Eliza Doolittle is also a teenager, plus Henry Higgins is 20 years older than Eliza and is her teacher to boot.) Minnelli wanted to bring fin de siecle Paris and caricaturist Sem to life. Along with production designer Cecil Beaton (and despite Charles Walters, who had to take charge of some post-production reshoots), Minnelli did the impossible. He made Paris look even more beautiful than it is.

He did the same for every woman in the movie, as Janet Flanner wrote when she reported from the Paris set for The New Yorker that the film was “peopled…with some of the most extraordinary-looking young-and-old beauties that Paris has seen in a while.” Minnelli was lavish, but never vulgar. His camera admires. It does not leer, at Caron or any other woman, no, not even the lushly leer-able Eva Gabor.

But, you protest, this girl is being trained to be a prostitute. How is that acceptable to a feminist? Well, this feminist does not have a problem with consensual sex work. Much less does the Siren have a problem with sex work as a way that two old ladies once used to make a living that probably beat the hell out of taking in laundry or whatever else was open to the average woman in 19th-century France. Tante Alicia (Isabel Jeans) earned enough to live in grand retirement in a mansion with servants. Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold) has a much smaller budget, but she’s still keeping Gigi in basic comfort. She’s also supporting her daughter, Gigi’s mother, who’s rejected “the life” and is heard only from off-camera as she trains to be what sounds like the worst soprano since Susan Alexander stank up the opera house in Citizen Kane.

Alicia and Mamita, as Mme. Alvarez is called, are shrewd women who have made their way through life armed with their wits, and with attractiveness that is as much cultivated as it is natural. They call their own shots. When Eva Gabor’s Liane, Gaston’s mistress (who's pretty clearly older than he is), makes a phony suicide attempt, Tante Alicia waves it off for the dumbshow it is: “The usual way, insufficient poison.” These are not, perhaps, the rules these ladies would prefer to play by. The Siren thinks in our own era, Alicia’s basilisk eyes would be trained on the CAC-40, not the next wealthy protector for her niece. But it is, let’s repeat, 1900. In any era, you play the hand you’re dealt.

Gigi, far from being “creepily” youth-obsessed, has a complex and entrancing view of the stages of life. We see the heroine going from bewilderment at the games “The Parisians” play, to trying to play them herself. Gaston sees middle age edging closer, while he’s using the same kinds of women for the same thing and wondering why “It’s a Bore.” Meanwhile, Chevalier’s big number isn’t “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” It’s “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore.”

On the beach at Trouville, Honore is pursuing a likely (adult, for crying out loud) prospect. But he spies Mamita, with whom he once had an affair, and says, “I must tell you that you upset all my plans for the weekend! I came prepared for battle, and an old wound prevents me from charging.” What follows is the movie’s most tenderly romantic song, performed by two elderly people as the sun sets.



“Am I getting old?” “Oh no, not you.” Excuse the Siren a sec, she’s got something in her eye.

The Production Code Administration, diminished in 1958 but still in there swinging, took a long hard look at Gigi, but the Siren’s sources don’t indicate that what has Ms Aurthur calling Gigi's defenders "criminals" was the obstacle. Instead, what got the PCA riled up was the prostitution angle. After the usual horse-trading over the script, the objections boiled down to a single line: “To 'take care of me beautifully' means I shall go away with you, and that I shall sleep in your bed." Minnelli pleaded to be allowed to film that as written and have the censors make their call after seeing how it played. In the end, he said, Leslie Caron spoke the line so innocently that it passed without a murmur. Bad call for posterity, it seems. If Minnelli had ended on Gigi falling off a bell tower, maybe this thing would have lived up to the moral standards of Buzzfeed.

In Memoriam: Shirley Temple, 1928-2014

It was a day that, due to some long-forgotten domestic dust-up, required distraction, and the Siren sat her boy-girl twins in front of the computer and began to frantically search Youtube for something that would quiet them down. Here’s what she found.



The boy soon wandered off to fetch a toy. The girl sat quietly, so quietly that the Siren figured maybe she was too bored to move. When the video ended, Alida slid forward, pointed to one of the other videos on the sidebar and said, “Her. I want to see more of her.”

We watched about a half-dozen more clips.

My daughter still loves Shirley Temple. When the Siren broke the news that 85-year-old Shirley Temple had died, she cushioned the blow by reminding Alida that we still have Adventure in Baltimore to watch on the DVR, and that surely TCM would be running a tribute day (they are, March 9th). At age 10, she’s seen almost as much Temple as the Siren has.

On that first day surfing Youtube, it swiftly became obvious that Alida liked the dance routines with Bill Robinson best, proving she’s the Siren’s daughter all right. Alida was only four; thus the Siren was spared the need to explain that in the 1930s, the only white partner an adult black man was going to get onscreen was a little girl, and even that caused consternation. Also, since we weren’t watching the whole film, the Siren also didn’t have to explain The Little Colonel’s treatment of its black characters, a task that even now could send the Siren to bed with a sick headache.

All the same, their dancing together was, in its way, revolutionary. When the Siren was a kid, Just Around the Corner was one of her favorites. This number still charms — Bert Lahr stretching his mouth out like an animatronic clown, and Robinson charging down that staircase is thrilling. When Robinson and Temple start to dance, their off-camera regard for each other is apparent. There are all kinds of little ways dancers have of giving each other respect. Look at how, at just before the 1:50 mark, the number’s timing goes just the merest hair off, and they steady each other so fast you could miss it, if you haven’t watched Just Around the Corner three dozen times during your childhood.



Temple represented not only FDR’s remark about a baby who could help Americans forget their troubles, but also the movie studios’ banking on wholesomeness once the Production Code came down. Financially, that was an excellent bet; in the years that Shirley Temple was the world’s biggest movie star, the box office recovered from the slump it had endured in the early 1930s. It was a good bet for Temple, too, money-wise. She’s said to have made about $3 million during her years at the top, although a lavish lifestyle and bad investments depleted that nest egg before she had kids of her own.

Temple’s mother was by all accounts the driving force behind her child’s career. Little Shirley’s first films were Baby Burlesks, the misspelled title conveying the nature of the enterprise. Made at Educational Pictures, where Buster Keaton would wash up a few years later, the shorts are relics of another time when putting kids in adult costumes and scenarios was considered cute. Worse than the Burlesks themselves were the techniques, if you can call them that, used to control the tiny players. The parents weren’t allowed on set, and Temple later recalled that if a child misbehaved, she was shut in a windowless room with nothing to sit on but a block of ice.

Once Temple moved on, her mother was a constant presence; Allan Dwan, who directed Temple in Heidi and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, recalled that Gertrude Temple would run lines with the little girl at night. Shirley was always letter-perfect by the time the cameras rolled, ready to prompt with the right line if an adult actor blew his cue. “We hated her for that,” said Alice Faye, co-star in Poor Little Rich Girl. Adolphe Menjou complained that Shirley, age 6, was upstaging him in Little Miss Marker, and she did, although if you’re gonna steal a scene from somebody, Adolphe’s a fine choice of target.

The Siren’s said this before, but give it a rest, please, with the stuff about sublimated sex in Shirley Temple movies. It makes the Siren want to coo, “My goodness, they just can’t slip any subtext past you, you wised-up sophisticated old thing! Next thing you’ll be telling me that war movies are homoerotic and Busby Berkeley’s chorus lines remind you of fascist rallies!” It’s been done.

And Graham Greene offers nothing to explain to anyone why Shirley Temple still has the ability to stop a crabby little girl in her tracks. Admittedly, it’s not necessarily easy from a distance of 80 years for an adult cinephile to figure out what the big deal was. Her early vehicles make Busby Berkeley look like a model of narrative logic. In something like Bright Eyes or Captain January, all you do is watch everybody defer to Temple. Sometimes the Siren can swear the gnashing of adult actors’ teeth is audible on screen, and not just Adolphe Menjou’s.



The appeal lies partly in the mystery of star quality, something Sheila O’Malley describes well: "She was a phenomenal performer. It is impossible, still, to watch her movies and not get sucked into who she is being, what she is bringing to the screen." When the Siren was in acting school, the catchphrase was “give it away.” Temple gave — gives — everything in a scene.

Children learn quickly and painfully that the world does not revolve around them. A kid watching a Shirley Temple movie gets a much sweeter version of life: A little girl who stops the show every time she sings or dances, and when the orchestra lays down its instruments, she runs around straightening out the adults. It was enchanting to the Siren, when she encountered Temple on TV; it shouldn’t have been surprising that Alida, and a very young acquaintance of David Cairns, were also ensnared.

As Temple got older, the musical numbers became less frequent and often less elaborate. But the essential elements are still there. There’s always a little girl facing off against people who are not truly evil, they are just in an extremely bad mood. Shirley knows how to fix that, through the all-conquering might of her childhood pizzazz. After singing and tapping her way through the early Fox musicals, Temple was ready to get a paralyzed child walking again in Heidi and to make a dour farm family sparkle in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. In the wonderful Technicolor The Little Princess, Shirley could even call someone back from the afterlife, as her father (emphatically dead in the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel) reappears in a hospital, a mite banged up by the Boer War but otherwise ready for his closeup.

Is it the least bit surprising that in Wee Willie Winkie (still the Siren’s favorite) Shirley handily solves an Indian diplomatic crisis? No wonder the adult Temple could sail through Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution as the American ambassador.

David Cairns also mentions that Mark Cousins, in his Story of Film, alleges (David's paraphrasing) "that Temple is too performative, not natural enough." The Siren doesn’t understand that at all. Critiquing Shirley Temple for being too performative is like yelling at Lassie for shedding. It’s what she does. How long, oh lord, how long must we suffer the notion that the best acting, child or adult, is always “natural” or “realistic”?

Cousins’ point, however, is an explanation sometimes offered for why Shirley didn’t make it as an adult actress, aside from the fact that she grew up. But the Siren disagrees with those who say Shirley grew into a bad actress. She glows in Since You Went Away, playing a 13-year-old with a crush on (of all God’s earthly people) Monty Woolley. John Ford thought well enough of her, years past Wee Willie Winkie, to give Temple a key role in the magnificent Fort Apache. In The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, her comic timing is on a par with that of co-stars Myrna Loy and Cary Grant, and the number of actors who can claim that is vanishingly small.

Temple faced three much bigger factors as she aged (and yes, that’s a mighty strange thing to write about an actress who basically retired when she was 22). The first was poor script quality; Ronald Reagan all but apologized for That Hagen Girl in his autobiography. And that problem probably stemmed from this one: Nobody knew what to do with Temple. She was still lovely, but the movies that made her name were already associated with a vanished time. There was a war on, and then it was over, but people still remembered the Temple of lollipops and animal crackers. Mickey Rooney, one of but a handful of child stars who ever experienced Temple’s level of fame, managed to make some highly credible noirs. When Deanna Durbin tried that in Christmas Holiday, even decent box-office receipts couldn’t persuade anybody that here was her future.

Hence factor number three: On some level Temple, like Durbin, had had enough.

Who can blame her for that? There’s something sad about such professionalism at a young age, the idea of a little girl crying when the director calls “Action,” instead of over spilled ice cream or a playroom squabble. (Dwan said if you wanted Temple to cry, all you had to do was tell her to imagine never seeing her mother again.) But Mrs. Temple, ambitious though she was, somehow kept Shirley grounded. The greatest testimony to that is how the little girl handled adulthood when it finally arrived.

In 1998 Shirley Temple Black, looking gorgeous, was a Kennedy Center honoree. In part one, look at the ovation she gets! The joy, the affection in that audience is glorious. And when every tap-dancing kid in America comes out to perform “The Good Ship Lollipop” in part two, watch for when they cut to her in the balcony — and Shirley Temple Black, almost 70 years old, is singing along and bopping to the music, happy to still be giving happiness. That’s it right there, what made her a star, and why she’ll always be one. Her. I want to see more of her.

King Vidor, The Crowd, and the Dragon

(This is a disgracefully belated entry for the Film History Blogathon. The Siren's post, on 1928, would have been part of the 1927-1938 section, hosted by Ruth at Silver Screenings. For the years 1915-1926, your hostess is Fritzi at Movies, Silently; and 1939-1950 can be found at Aurora's place, Once Upon a Screen. Please click through to those host blogs to find a plethora of wonderful, and prompt, blog entries on many aspects of film history.)

Death is a good career move, goes an old movie joke that the Siren has never found funny. It was never less true than it was for silent film, which died after a brief illness. Probably it was younger than Marilyn Monroe, although like many another cinema great, the birth date’s hard to pin down.

Some early deaths do enshrine a legend; some even elevate a talent that might have burned out. Silent film died and stayed buried. If you were still around, and your name wasn’t Charlie Chaplin, you didn’t get much time to mourn. Pull up your socks and deal, that was the only way to survive. Who knows how many faceless names in the credits were walking around, not with mike fright, but mike shock.

As is common when talking about a life cut off in its prime, the Siren starts with the wake. King Vidor, in his 1953 autobiography A Tree Is a Tree, paints a scene that’s both gallows-funny and tragic.

We had no movieola in the first days of sound, and during the editing of Hallelujah [1929] I saw a cutter literally go beserk at his inability to get the job done properly. The walls of his cutting room were lined with multitudes of shiny film cans containing the mass of sound and picture tracks. Returning from a projection room after many hours of labor he discovered that the scene was still out of synchronization and let fly with a reel against the solid wall of cans. This precipitated an avalanche of thousands of feet of loose film that engulfed the two of us. The hysterical cutter fell on the floor sobbing helplessly. I unwound him from the tangled maze and drove him home to the care of his wife. He remained in bed a week before he could again undertake the task of editing the film.

Vidor was a spiritual, contemplative person, infrequently given to flashes of temperament. But he was also worn out and, probably, worried to death. “I felt that by this mechanical advance the movies were losing a beautiful impressionistic quality that would be hard to replace in the technique of the new medium,” he wrote about having to add dialogue to a craps-game scene in Hallelujah. “In the light of experience,” he adds hastily, “I have since changed my mind, but the forced transition saddened me for quite some time.”

Who can blame him. One year before, even as sound invaded, the silents were still at their peak. That’s a fact endlessly repeated, and yet it’s one of those things that always give the Siren a jolt, like Orson Welles’ age when he made Citizen Kane, or Gone With the Wind’s inflation-adjusted gross. Look at the silents that opened in 1928. Contemplate their technical bravado, their thematic originality, their vivid acting: Street Angel. The Cameraman. The Circus. The Italian Straw Hat. Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Underground. The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Wind.

One of those 1928 films, The Crowd, is not only the Siren’s favorite silent, but one of her favorite films, period. A Tree Is a Tree goes into this film’s conception, the casting, the camerawork. Vidor quotes the rave reviews with poignant pride. The Crowd tells the story of John Sims, who’s raised to believe great things await him, and then they never arrive. John moves to Manhattan (where else for a striver?) but he never strikes it rich, never climbs the ladder at work or anywhere else. He meets a nice girl, they marry and have a family. Their joys become fewer, and the hardships harder, until a blow lands that many couldn’t recover from. John’s one act of heroism is simply deciding to carry on, a moment that only the small boy who shares it with him will ever truly appreciate.

“Daring” means a number of different things these days. Sometimes it’s used as a synonym for “impenetrable,” but in American film it’s often something to do with taste. Is it cynical, is it dark, will it make Grandma stomp out to ask the theater manager if his mother knows he’s showing this filth.

The Crowd is its own kind of daring, due mostly to King Vidor, but in some measure also to Irving Thalberg. Some people say Thalberg was only and always a middlebrow purveyor of quality Oscar-bait. Vidor — who can’t be said to have idealized his producer — would not have agreed.

His movie The Big Parade was still packing cinemas, and one day the director found himself buttonholed by Thalberg and asked what his next project would be.

I really hadn’t an idea ready, but one came to me in the emergency. “Well, I suppose the average fellow walks through life and see quite a lot of drama taking place around him. Objectively life is like a battle, isn’t it?” While I groped, Thalberg was smiling.

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” he asked.

“Never thought of it before,” I confessed.

“Have you got a title.”

“Perhaps One of the Mob.”

Thalberg showed immediate enthusiasm. “That a wonderful title, One of the Mob. How long will it take you to write it?”

“Two or three days.”

“If you need any help, let me know.”

“Thanks,” I said, and we parted.

Now this is the way I believe a film should begin.

“MGM,” Thalberg once told Vidor about an idea that wasn't The Crowd, “can certainly afford a few experimental projects,” although as Erich von Stroheim would have pointed out, Thalberg’s indulgence of artists did have its limits. Accordingly Thalberg soon rejected the title One of the Mob as too suggestive of a proletarian tract, and The Crowd emerged. Vidor and Thalberg wanted a “documentary flavor,” and an unknown actor as John seemed the ideal way to get it. The search was fruitless until one day a man brushed by Vidor, a man with a face that looked familiar not because the director had seen it before, but because it was a face you could never pick out of a crowd, or a mob, or (in this case) a lot full of extras. Vidor gave the man his card and told him to call for a chance at a part. The man never called, and Vidor couldn’t remember the name. Finally the director went to the rosters of extras and lit on the words that wouldn’t stick in his brain: James Murray. The extra hadn’t called Vidor because he thought the director wasn’t serious about the job.

Vidor cast Eleanor Boardman, his wife at the time, as Mary Sims, and put her in plain clothes and minimal makeup that diminished her considerable beauty. Murray turned out to be a difficult person, fated to meet a bad end due to alcoholism and sheer cussedness. The cinematographer was Henry Sharp, who also did Duck Soup, It’s a Gift and was active through the 1930s; but this was his peak.

Fired up by what he called “directors of vision” from Europe — he names Murnau, du Pont, Lang, and Lubitsch — Vidor put everything into filming. He describes the movie’s most famous shot, where the camera scales a vast office building, sweeps through a window, and swoops over hundreds of desks, until at last it discovers John Sims, bored out of his mind.

A scene was made in New York City at the entrance of the Equitable Life Insurance building at lunch hour. The camera started its upward swing and when the screen was filled with nothing but windows, we managed an imperceptible dissolve to a scale model in the studio. The miniature was placed flat on the floor with the camera rolling horizontally over it. In the selected window was placed an enlargement of a single frame of the previously photographed interior view. As the camera moved close to the window another smooth dissolve was made to the interior scene of the immense office. The desks occupied a complete, bare stage and the illusion was accomplished by using the stage walls and floor, without constructing a special set. To move the camera down to Murray, an overhead wire trolley was rigged with a moving camera platform slung beneath it. The counterbalanced camera crane or boom had not yet been designed and built, but the results we achieved were identical with those of today.

So breathtaking is this scene that 13 years later, when Orson Welles and Gregg Toland moved a camera up a building, seemingly passed it through a skylight, and then sank it down to Dorothy Comingore drunk in a deserted club, the effect was still thrilling. It was thrilling almost 20 years after that, when Billy Wilder’s camera in The Apartment crawled up another tower to find Jack Lemmon at his desk at Consolidated Life of New York. Wilder never hesitated to credit Vidor.

Vidor, in 1953, still loved to talk about the technique behind The Crowd.

In a scene where the nervous husband paces the floor of the hospital corridor during the delivery of his first child, we wanted to give the impression that many husbands were also going through the same suspense and agony. We wanted a tremendously long hospital corridor stretching, as it seemed, to infinity. Cedric Gibbons, head of the art department at MGM, designed and constructed a corridor in forced perspective, with each receding door becoming smaller and smaller. We even considered putting midget husbands outside these miniature doors, finally decided to keep the mob of anxious husbands in the foreground of the shot.

“Midget husbands.” That’s ridiculous, but it’s also symbolic, isn’t it, of how passionate these artists were about getting every part of the movie right.

For scenes of the sidewalks of New York, we designed a pushcart perambulator carrying what appeared to be inoffensive packing boxes. Inside the hollowed-out boxes there was room for one small sized cameraman and one silent camera. We pushed this contraption from the Bowery to Times Square and no one ever detected our subterfuge.

This was precisely the kind of shot that would suddenly become problematic a short time later. The obstacles of shooting with sound were swiftly dealt with, but imagine going from a camera in a glorified baby carriage, to a camera enclosed in a soundproof booth.

John and Mary take a first date to Coney Island, that Cote d’Azur for the working stiff, happily mingling with the teeming, entertain-me masses. (Whatever happened to that spinning-plate thing, where people sit, link arms and try not to get hurled off? The world lost a great metaphor when that ride went away.) Later, when his daughter is critically injured, John stumbles out of his apartment building and into the street, pleading with the masses not to make so much noise. As the people keep streaming past him, John is admonished by a cop, in an intertitle of perfect callousness and truth: “Get inside! The world can’t stop because your baby is sick!”

But much of the film takes place in their small apartment, through the frustrations of daily life. John plays his ukelele and dreams up slogans; it is evident early on that he’s a dreamer, not an achiever. He buys his wife an umbrella (an umbrella!) as a token of affection, then can’t seem to keep himself from yelling at her when she opens it in the house. Everything in the apartment breaks, and there’s a squabble to go with each mishap. Boardman’s best moment is when she’s staring at the door after her heedless, cranky husband has slammed out, and she remembers (with zero intertitles) that she had, somehow, forgotten to tell him she’s pregnant.

And there’s the end, the unforgettable end, where John goes with his family to see a clown in a theater, and as Vidor says, “the camera moved back and up to lose him in the crowd as it had found him. In the course of the narrative he had not made a million dollars, nor committed a heinous crime, but he had managed to find joy in the face of adversity.”

King Vidor made two other films in 1928, The Patsy and the dazzling Show People, both with Marion Davies. Once Show People was done he decided that since he’d made three films set in France (The Big Parade, Bardelys the Magnificent, and La Boheme) it was time to see the country in real life. He and Eleanor Boardman met F. Scott Fitzgerald on the boat going over, and in Paris they all hung out at Fitzgerald’s apartment, watching Zelda demonstrate the steps she was learning in ballet class. Vidor met James Joyce, who refused to make eye contact in order to conceal his failing vision, and Ernest Hemingway, as that writer strode out of a bookstore with his baby son tucked under one arm.

Then, abruptly, it was time to come home.

One day as I sat alone near the Place de L’Opera, a copy of Variety arrested my attention. Emblazoned across the front page in bold type was the headline: PIX INDUSTRY GOES 100% FOR SOUND. I had been away for only two months, but during that brief period a major transition had taken place in the motion-picture industry...I knew I could no longer sit complacently at sidewalk cafes. The dragon of sound must be met head-on, and conquered.

Vidor went on to make many more good movies, some of them great. Memoirs are tricky as memories are tricky. The Siren believes the anecdote she started with, the one about trying to synchronize the sound for Hallelujah. And she has zero factual backup for what’s she about to say, so take this as the fantasy it almost certainly is. But every time she reads that story, the Siren wonders if perhaps — just perhaps — the nameless cutter was a polite fiction, and the man who threw that reel against a wall of film was King Vidor himself.

In Memoriam: Juanita Moore, 1914-2014

The clip above is from a so-called soundie, made in 1943 to promote The Mills Brothers’ hit “Paper Doll.” The woman in the lap of the Mills Brother on the far left, best visible at about the one-minute mark, is Juanita Moore. She was 29 years old, and this was the first piece of film that ever captured her. She died Jan. 31, 2014, age 99.

With the exception of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, Moore’s obituaries have been a bit light on biographical material, focusing on her Best Supporting Actress nomination for Douglas Sirk's 1959 Imitation of Life. It's the story of two single mothers, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) and Annie Johnson (Moore) and their daughters. Lora becomes a successful actress as her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) becomes increasingly lonely. Annie's light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane is determined to "pass" for white; Sarah Jane is played by Susan Kohner, who is now the only one of the film’s central quartet still living. The AP, which has offended in the past, added another to the files with the words chosen to describe this women's picture, widely considered a landmark in the treatment of race on the American screen. “Weeper” — “tearjerker” — the Siren will believe that these descriptions are not evidence of condescending sexism when they are commonly applied to something like Spartacus or The Shawshank Redemption, and not until.

So with facts gleaned primarily from Sam Staggs’ Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life, the Siren would like to fill you in on some of Moore’s life outside her one Oscar-nominated triumph. Anyone who reveres Moore, or this film, needs Staggs' book, which is a monument to loving, obsessive completism. It encompasses everything, from costumer Jean Louis to a detailed view of John Stahl’s 1934 version of Fannie Hurst’s novel, even an interview with the anonymous ghostwriter of Lana Turner’s autobiography. Staggs apparently knew Moore well, and she told him a lot about her background, her friends, her times.

Moore was born in Mississippi, the youngest in a family of seven girls and one boy. Her parents moved when she was a toddler to South Central Los Angeles, where they were able to make a good middle-class living from, among other things, running a laundry. At age 15 Moore came down with polio, and she said later that the doctors of the time were not much interested in treating a black girl. Her mother and sisters massaged her legs with olive oil, and she slowly recovered.

She could sing, and she could dance, and at least one teacher planted the idea that Juanita could grow into an entertainer. She attended performances by the Lafayette Players, a pioneering black theatre ensemble, thrilling to shows such as Madame X and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was foreshadowing; throughout her life, with one exception, Moore got stronger, bigger roles with African American theater groups than she ever did in Hollywood.

Moore’s parents were religious, and afraid of the lowdown influences of a life in the theater. She ditched a short stint at college and made her way to Harlem, where she wouldn’t have to worry that Mr. and Mrs. Moore were worrying. Soon Moore was in the chorus line at Small’s Paradise, a “black and tan” Harlem club, meaning that while the audience was mostly white, blacks attended and mingled freely.

Moore married dancer Ananias “Nyas” Berry of the Berry brothers, an act that was one of the few rivals to Harold and Fayard Nicholas in terms of grace and acrobatics. (Here they perform “You’ll Never Know” in Lady Be Good; here they introduce Eleanor Powell in Fascinating Rhythm; Nyas is profiled here, and his own story is quite a saga.)

Ella Fitzgerald became a friend, and Moore had run-ins with Ethel Waters. Juanita Moore was notably polite about almost anyone she ever worked with, but Waters she invariably described as “the bitch of all time” — a phrase she once used, Staggs says, in front of a preacher, who spent the rest of the evening snickering about it.

Moore danced at the Zanzibar, atop the Winter Garden on Broadway. The Berry Brothers performed at the West 48th St. location of the segregated Cotton Club. At first the owners would not let Moore sit in the audience and watch her husband dance. Eventually they consented to let her sit at a remote table, by herself. In Imitation of Life, Juanita Moore’s Annie trawls nightclubs in search of her daughter Sarah Jane. In every place, Annie is seated in Siberia, lest she contaminate the white patrons' tables. As Staggs notes, Moore needed no advice on how to play the way that felt.

As the craze for nightclub entertainment waned, Moore went back to Los Angeles and began to get parts in movies. Small parts. Maid parts. She had a relatively substantial part in Affair in Trinidad, and spoke kindly about Glenn Ford and how hard he worked to make her feel comfortable in that Rita Hayworth vehicle. Director Vincent Sherman, in his autobiography, reminisced about “Juanita Hall” — another black actress, most famous for playing Bloody Mary in South Pacific.

Moore was cast in Band of Angels as a slave owner’s mistress; while Yvonne De Carlo played a plantation owner's daughter who’s sold into slavery after his death, because her mother was a black slave. Despite Raoul Walsh at the helm it’s a tedious picture. Moore had to sashay into one scene wearing a Creole getup, and Walsh told her to whisper bawdy stories in De Carlo’s ear. The result was one moment in the film that doesn't feel strained or silly.

Meanwhile, Moore also became involved with the Ebony Showcase Theatre. It was founded by actor Nick Stewart, who took his profits from playing Lightnin’ on the Amos ‘n Andy show, and used them to build his dream of a dedicated, artistic black acting troupe. For the Ebony, Moore played Ines in Sartre’s No Exit, and other roles over the years. Later she became a founding member of the Cambridge Players.

Her marriage to Berry had ended with his death in 1951. One day Moore was crossing the street, and a bus nearly hit her. The bus driver poked his head out to yell, “You better watch your step, young lady!,” and Moore yelled back at him, “You crazy-ass bus driver, what are you trying to do, kill me?”

They were married the next year and stayed together until Charles Burris died in 2001.

Moore took a job as a waitress at a chicken restaurant to make ends meet. One of her regulars was Marlon Brando; he accompanied her to classes at the Actors Laboratory Theatre, where after an all-night shift she once fell asleep and snored so loudly than Elia Kazan yelled “What the hell is that?” Kazan already knew her, from the part she had played in 1949’s Pinky, a story where yet another white actress — Jeanne Crain — played a tragic mulatto. It was something of a motif in Juanita Moore’s career, white actresses playing mixed-race parts, and Moore making a bit role memorable, this time as a nurse.



If you want to hear Juanita Moore sing, watch the clip above, from Women’s Prison in 1955, in which she sounds wonderful while she’s down on her knees, scrubbing the prison floor.

If you want to see Juanita Moore dance, watch Frank Tashlin’s 1956 The Girl Can’t Help It, here, bookmarked just past the 53-minute mark, when she, Tom Ewell and Jayne Mansfield are watching Eddie Cochran on TV. Moore starts dancing, and it’s delightful, and over way too soon, because the film was about Ewell and Mansfield. Moore was playing the maid. (The adorable screen cap above is from Peter Nelhaus' post about the film, which the Tashlin-skeptical Siren admits is quite a bit better than she remembered.)

The Siren well remembers Moore’s bit in Something of Value, a 1957 film about the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya, where Moore plays a woman who’s beaten until she admits helping the rebels. She was not, on this occasion, anybody’s maid.

Moore was about 45 when Imitation of Life was released (her birth date is a bit fuzzy) and given Hollywood’s unforgiving attitude about women who dare to get older, the film was unlikely to bring her over-the-title stardom in any case. But for a white actor, a performance such as that would surely have brought steady, substantive character work. It worked that way for Thelma Ritter, 45 years old, after one scene in Miracle on 34th Street. It didn’t happen for Moore. Her movie roles after her Oscar nomination were mostly minor, although they did include what’s reportedly a good turn in The Singing Nun (the Siren has never made it through that one). In the theater, she played A Raisin in the Sun in London, and Sister Boxer in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner on Broadway in 1965. In 1970, Moore played an Annie-esque part in the Mexican production Angelitos Negros, based on a film that may or may not have been a direct spin on the original 1934 Imitation of Life (it's complicated). She spoke the lines in Spanish as much as possible, even though she knew she'd be dubbed.

In the 1970s she made movies like Jules Dassin’s Uptight, and The Mack with Richard Pryor. Still later, a generation that had grown up with Sirk’s movie on TV cast Moore in other roles in films and on TV. She told Staggs of how, on the first day of shooting Paternity, Burt Reynolds took her around the set pointedly introducing her as “Miss Moore. Miss Juanita Moore.” In other words, this is a legend, mind your manners. Moore was deeply touched.

Black folks - like other folks who have felt ignored, underrepresented or stereotyped - have always rooted for the blacks we could find in celluloid. I remember how a showing on TV in the mid-'60s of that 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life ripped like a tornado through our emotions in Conyers, Ga. I couldn't have been older than 12. This melodrama, starring Lana Turner to some but Juanita Moore to us, was about a saintly black woman who worked herself to death for a daughter who chose to pass for white.
-E.R. Shipp, Daily News, 2002

When Richard Pryor was in the army in Germany, according to a 1999 New Yorker profile, he went to a screening of Imitation of Life, and a white soldier laughed loudly at the Annie and Sarah Jane scenes. Pryor and some other black soldiers beat him up. The incident landed Pryor in jail.

It is that kind of movie. Once seen under the right circumstances, it inspires a devotion that will brook no argument. We may disagree about certain elements, about whether the term “camp” applies to elements of the “blonde” storyline, for example. Staggs says yes; the Siren says no, and has written before about the importance of Lana Turner and Sandra Dee’s work. But no fan of this film has any reservations about Moore.

When the Siren first saw Imitation of Life, sometime in her early teens, she was swept away by the unutterable sadness of Annie Johnson, who begins as Lora Meredith’s compatriot in single motherdom, and ends as Lora’s maid. A beloved and respected maid, but a maid nonetheless. All the while Annie adores and tries to protect Sarah Jane, who yearns to escape what she sees as a prison of blackness, and is willing to deny her mother repeatedly to do it. When Sarah Jane is still a little girl played by Karin Dicker, she is caught for the first time passing for white at school. When they return to the apartment, the little girl storms off saying no one is her friend. Lora says, “Don’t worry Annie. I’m sure you’ll be able to explain things to her.” Annie responds, “I don’t know. How do you explain to your child, she was born to be hurt?”

Down the years you develop a relationship with a film you love, and so it has been with the Siren. That line of Moore’s is a killer even on first viewing. But the last time she saw the movie, the Siren was also struck by Moore’s delivery, as she stares after her daughter and seems to speak almost without thinking. There’s an undertone of resignation, a sense that Annie knows she’s telling the truth to someone who does not and can not understand what she means.

Moore’s performance has layers upon layers, right from the great opening, when Sarah Jane and Lora’s daughter Susie are playing on the beach, Lora mistakes Sarah Jane for Annie’s charge, and Annie corrects her: “Yes, ma'am. It surprises most people. Sarah Jane favors her daddy. He was practically white. He left before she was born.” Again, watch Moore’s face as she says that. Annie’s deeply religious, but in the sly light in her eyes is the idea that Sarah Jane’s father was a handsome man, that this was a torrid relationship and Annie remembers that pleasure even now that he’s left her. This is a vibrant, fully sexual woman, though we never see anyone in the picture treat her that way. The closest anyone comes is when Sandra Dee’s Susie asks Annie about “boys. What do you think about kissing, Annie?” Annie responds with “Well, there’s kissing, and there’s kissing,” and again we see the remembrance of love move across her features.

There are many instances where Sirk’s camera, and Moore’s performance, clue us in to the fact that Annie has large parts of her existence that are out of camera range, and thus well away from the white characters and us, the audience. She tries to convince Sarah Jane to go to a church social, telling her that there are plenty of nice boys there, and Sarah Jane snaps back, “Busboys, cooks, chaffeurs.” Annie's hurt tells you that her daughter is rejecting the place that her life revolves around; a black church, full of people she loves, where Annie is herself in a way that she isn’t in the Meredith house.

The final proof of that comes in Annie’s deathbed scene. A heartbroken Lora says to the woman who’s shared her life, “It never occurred to me that you had friends.” And Annie responds, without a trace of rancor, “You never asked.” In that single line reside generations of “the help” who kept their most important selves apart from their employers.

Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, and his other great movies, tell us that when people are forced, against their character and inclination, into prefab roles that society has made for them, the result is agony. Juanita Moore’s career was shaped by forces that had nothing to do with her talent. She had a personality that struck people as nothing much like Annie’s. Staggs says Moore was “a real live wire,” with flashes of anger as well as salty humor. Moore told Staggs she had based Annie on one of her sisters, a devout woman who was the embodiment of Christian goodness.

Yet Annie, despite her suffering, is not passive; warmth and kindness are active choices, all the more so when made under harsh circumstances. Juanita Moore, who left behind friends, family, and millions of admirers, had more of Annie in her than she acknowledged.

(Corrected 3/25/14 for date of death and an error regarding whether Moore had children; she did not.)

Happy New Year!

The Siren usually keeps her contemporary reviewing duties off-blog, but to clue in her patient readers on what she's been watching this year in her capacity as a freelance critic for the New York Post, she offers her list of the best of 2013.


Blancanieves

Nebraska

Before Midnight

American Hustle

Caesar Must Die

A Hijacking

Blue Is the Warmest Color

The Act of Killing

Wadjda

The Past

Bonus 10: More Than Honey; Post Tenebras Lux; You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet; Passion; Gravity; All Is Lost; The Butler; The Wolf of Wall Street; What Richard Did; Gimme the Loot.

The Worst:
Many of the films the Siren sees for the Post are independents or foreign art films made on small budgets, and after kicking the bad ones in print, it feels unsporting to indulge in a late hit. But there are four that the Siren feels obligated to mention, so that none of you will be ever be able to say she didn’t warn you.

No One Lives
Molly’s Theory of Relativity
Eden
Clip

In Memoriam: Joan Fontaine, 1917-2013

Being a woman, I have found the road rougher than had I been born a man. Different defenses, different codes of ethics, different approaches to problems and personalities are a woman's lot. I have preferred to shun what is known as feminine wiles, the subterfuge of subtlety, reliance on tears and coquetry to shape my way. I am forthright, often blunt. I have learned to be a realist despite my romantic, emotional nature. I have no illusions that age, the rigors of my profession, disappointments, and unfulfilled dreams have not left their mark.

I am proud that I have carved my path on earth almost entirely by my own efforts, proud that I have compromised in my career only when I had no other recourse, when financial or contractual commitments dictated. Proud that I have never been involved in a physical liaison unless I was deeply attracted or in love. Proud that, whatever my worldly goods may be, they have been achieved by my own labors.

Joan Fontaine, No Bed of Roses

I have written many times about Joan Fontaine, but at the moment I’m sad about the movies I never wrote about while she was still with us. Such as The Constant Nymph, in which Fontaine plays a teenage girl, Tessa, who is deeply in love with the adult composer played by Charles Boyer. Fontaine’s performance walks a delicate line. Tessa’s feelings have all the force of an adult woman’s, perhaps even more because first love is always such a cataclysmic thing. At the same time, Tessa is only 14 when the action begins, and Fontaine (25 at the time) plays her innocence in a way that makes it natural that Boyer wouldn’t realize what is going on until quite late in the game. Without Fontaine’s acting, the entire movie loses its romantic glow.

And there’s Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, where Fontaine is a lonely nurse, living by herself in London just after the war's end. And what should climb her through her window one night but godlike masculinity in the form of Burt Lancaster. Fontaine reacts (naturally) with fear, but as she warily eyes this fugitive, there's also a dazed recognition that life has abruptly dropped pure, animal sex appeal right into her bedroom. The film is, despite the pulpy title, a noir love story more than anything. Fontaine has a later scene where she’s set to meet Lancaster, and she looks in the mirror, debating with herself over whether her hat is too dowdy. Played without a word, this little scene tells you all you need to know about her character’s desires, and her inner conflict about whether or not to indulge them.

“If Joan Fontaine does not presently attain real stardom, this is because she looks, behaves and dresses like that extraordinarily unfashionable thing, a lady. And by that I mean the properly nurtured daughter of gentlefolk,” wrote James Agate, in a review of Suspicion. This exceedingly British observation has truth: Indeed, Fontaine was nearly always ladylike, even when she was, say, poisoning her bothersome husband in Ivy. But that didn’t mean she was sexless — far from it. Not in life, and certainly not on screen. The desire that a proper lady feels for an improper man is just as strong as the lust of a temptress.

And it takes perhaps more courage for a lady to speak up for herself, to reach out for what she wants. Think of Fontaine’s character in Rebecca, stepping forward to call Maxim de Winter back from the cliff. Think of her standing up to Mrs. Van Hopper, and later even to Mrs. Danvers: “I am Mrs. de Winter now.” Joan Fontaine made you cheer for such small triumphs.

She had courage and intelligence in her own life. I would like people to remember, when paying tribute to Letter From an Unknown Woman, that we have that great movie because Joan Fontaine put its elements together. She chose the Stefan Zweig story because, she said, she wanted something that would appeal to women. It was produced by her joint venture, Rampart Productions, which she ran with her husband at the time, William Dozier, and released through Universal. She was instrumental in getting Max Ophuls to direct.

The Internet is speckled with people who find it ridiculous to grieve at the death of a 96-year-old movie star. That’s a good run, they say. For goodness sakes, did you expect her to live forever? And besides, did you know her?

No, I didn’t know her. But when I watched Rebecca, Suspicion, Ivy, The Constant Nymph, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, Jane Eyre, A Damsel in Distress, Born to Be Bad, Something to Live For, Gunga Din, The Women, September Affair, Island in the Sun, Frenchman’s Creek, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Ivanhoe, Darling How Could You?, Until They Sail, and Letter From an Unknown Woman, I felt a little flame of happiness that Joan Fontaine was still alive somewhere. I feel colder without it.

Here are a few of the things I have written over the years about Joan Fontaine.

A birthday post from 2007 that includes the one personal story I have to tell about her.

Joan's autobiography, No Bed of Roses, and some early films, including Blond Cheat.


Rebecca and Suspicion, and a bit about her small role in The Women

Born to Be Bad

Something to Live For

A personal favorite: the little-known, wonderful Ivy

Frenchman's Creek

This one has a brief, but delightful, anecdote about why dating Adlai Stevenson didn't work out.

There's a bit about her marriage to Brian Aherne in an essay about his autobiography, A Proper Job.

Letter From an Unknown Woman

(The banner, courtesy of Zach Campbell, is the hat scene from Kiss the Blood Off My Hands.)

In Memoriam: Peter O'Toole, 1932-2013

He suffered from his eyes; he had eight operations on his left eye alone. He also suffered from intestinal trouble and relieved the pain by drinking. He adopted the persona of the professional Irishman, and became noted for such eccentricities as never going out with his front door keys. “I just hope some bastard’s in,” he said.
— Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography

The most important influence in my life has been David Lean. I graduated in Lean, took my BA in Lean, working with him virtually day and night for two years. I learned about the camera and the lens and the lights, and now I know more than some directors do.
— Peter O’Toole, quoted in Brownlow.

…"I forget the sequence, but Peter pulled out his bag of tricks and absolutely stunned Willy. Really stunned him. Willy said, ‘Cut. Take. One protection shot.’ Then he burst out laughing and went over to him. ‘Pete,’ he said, ‘you did it to me.’ They really got along.”
— Jules Buck, O’Toole’s friend and business partner, talks about the making of How to Steal a Million, directed by William Wyler; quoted in Jan Herman’s A Talent for Trouble. [NB: This, and not Lawrence of Arabia, was the Siren’s introduction to O’Toole. And if you have no love for this caper, that’s all right, because the Siren has enough to compensate.]

He's read books, you know, it's amazing. He's drunk and wenched his way through London but he's thinking all the time.
— O’Toole as Henry II in Becket

I've snapped and plotted all my life. There's no other way to be alive, king, and fifty all at once.
— O’Toole as Henry II in The Lion in Winter

He can do anything. A bit cuckoo, but sweet and terribly funny.
— Katharine Hepburn, 1981

…”Your pal O’Toole,” he said, "has been murdered by the English critics.” “For what?” asked I. "For Macbeth,” said he. I phoned Peter that night as soon as the hours were right and managed to catch him before he’d left the Old Vic. I said, “a couple of boys from the BBC were over today to record my voice and they told me you’ve had a bit of stick from the critics.” “Yes.” “How are the houses?” I asked. “Packed.” “Then remember this my boy,” I said (he is 4 years younger), “you are the most original actor to come out of Britain since the war and fuck the critics.”
— The Richard Burton Diaries, Sept. 23, 1980

You constantly amaze me. You don't go to movies. What are you, a communist?
—O’Toole as Eli Cross in The Stunt Man (a performance he based on David Lean)

Since Masada and The Stunt Man, I’ve become madly partial to Peter O’Toole. I don’t know if he’s the best actor in the world, but I think he’s the most lordly, the most generous and pleasure-giving. When My Favorite Year ends with a shot of Alan Swann saluting the studio aduience by waving his sword in the air, the slow regal sweep of that wave itself seems like a bestowal of greatness. Without Peter O’Toole, My Favorite Year would have been an unassuming little item, but with him it tosses gleams with Shakespearean pluck and vigor, looses stray shafts of daring and mischief. The moist, hard-won gratitude in O’Toole’s eyes at the end of the movie becomes an emblem of happiness, his, and ours. Never say that the struggle naught availeth.
— James Wolcott, “Your Flick of Flicks,” in Critical Mass

“You know…” [Harris] scruffled his beard. ‘He told me— Peter O’Toole told me— last week, it was. Well...I t-t-hink it was.” He reflected a moment. “Isn’t that great, to be alive while everyone else thinks you’ve clogged it?”
— Richard Harris, 1999; quoted in Blow-Up and Other Exaggerations by David Hemmings

Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive

Wednesday morning, the Library of Congress released a report by David Pierce, representing five years of research and writing, on the state of American studio silent-film preservation. Abridged version: It ain’t good.

The Siren, whose love for melodrama does occasionally spill over into real life, wrote a 500-word jeremiad on this topic, complete with quotes from Louise Brooks, Kevin Brownlow, William K. Everson, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard and (no kidding) King Lear, plus a pungent aside about an actress who recently thought it was cute to boast about how she’s not going to watch a “black-and-white, freaking boring fucking silent movie.”

But the Siren realized that she was repeating herself, and like the outlets that reported on this study, the Siren was partially burying the lead. We already knew that a lot has been lost, and Pierce has done a heroic job of mapping precise figures.

But Pierce's report concludes with a plan for the future: an all-out trawl through the world’s archives for what’s left. (Please do read the entire thing here.)

Isn’t that goal better, and more productive, than drawing the shades, putting an ice pack on your forehead, and wondering if the afterlife will have a screening of Four Devils and The Queen of Sheba?

To that end, and because it’s early December still, the Siren requests with all the sweetness at her disposal that you consider putting Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive on your holiday-shopping list. Better yet, get a free copy by making a tax-deductible donation of $200 more to the NFPF.

What are Mr. Pierce and his colleagues hoping to find when they encourage archives and collectors to examine their film holdings? THIS kind of stuff.

Back in 2010 we heard about the cache of silent films discovered in New Zealand. Our film-preservation blogathon raised money to restore The Better Man and The Sergeant. The third blogathon we did raised money both to stream online and record the music for The White Shadow, the British silent that had Alfred Hitchcock as its assistant director and general meddler-in-chief. Three reels of this previously long-lost film were in the New Zealand stash that has been repatriated.

There were, in the final analysis, 176 films recovered through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s collaboration with the New Zealand Film Archive. Of those, 70% had been previously thought lost forever. The NFPF's Treasures series has focused on putting previously not-on-home-video films before the public.

This approximately three-hour DVD ups the ante; it offers films that until four years ago were thought to be gone for good. It’s a lovely thing, with a long and detailed booklet that includes essays on the historical context and background of each film, as well suggestions for further viewing. They are also presented with new music by Michael Mortilla and Donald Sosa. Let’s take a look at what’s there.

The White Shadow (1924; director Graham Cutts; Assistant Director/Screenwriter/Editor/Set Designer: Alfred Hitchcock) This turns out to be, at least in the three reels we have, a melodrama involving the good twin/bad twin dichotomy that movies have always gotten so much mileage out of. Nancy Brent (Betty Compson) returns from abroad to her family home, after winning the heart of Robin (Clive Brook) who’s also on the ship. Nancy’s sweet twin Georgina (also Compson) is waiting at the family manse, along with their alcoholic martinet of a father. Nancy runs away out of what’s billed in the intertitles as boredom and poor impulse control, although dear old Dad is no one the Siren would stick around with, either. Georgina pursues her sister. In Paris, Georgina encounters Robin and pretends to be Nancy, thus instantly becoming more interesting, and she falls in love with Robin. The film ends as Nancy appears in a Paris club (called The Cat Who Laughs) where Georgina and Robin are having a drink. The surviving notes indicate that the plot, which was none too lucid already, veers into what Marilyn of Ferdy on Films calls “Victorian mysticism with the supernatural restoration of Nancy’s soul.” The Siren though Nancy already had plenty of soul, and surely Hitchcock must have favored the bad twin too, whatever the plot conventions he was observing. Best scene: the club, definitely, from the close-up of that cat statue to the wide-spaced tables, all of them full of people sipping questionable drinks and eyeing unsuitable partners. It’s a wonderful peek at Graham Cutts, an important figure in the early British film world, and of course, it’s a vital bit of Hitchcock juvenilia, allowing us to see how he was learning on the job.

Upstream (1927, director John Ford)
This was, even more than The White Shadow, the discovery that had filmdom buzzing--a lost film from John Ford, with only a bit of footage missing. It has no real stars and is not part of Ford’s pantheon, but it’s a lovely film all the same, a gentle study of the community found in a theatrical boarding house. The group’s ties to one another transcend all sorts of artificial barriers; for example, the vaudeville duo of Callahan and Callahan is very obviously made up of one Irishman and one Jew. In the end, the good people of the boarding house even overcome their greatest barrier: The actor’s natural antipathy toward other actors.

Lyman H. Howe’s Famous Ride on a Runaway Train (1921)
Can the Siren confess that this is her personal favorite? Howe would tour with this and screen it like an amusement-park ride. The Siren isn’t comparing this short to John Ford, but goodness it’s fun, six minutes of a train ride up and down mountains and over tall impressive bridges. The beginning is leisurely, then a card announces that the train is “RUNNING AWAY” and everything speeds up to a pitch so intense you need Bernard Herrmann to score it. One of the first title cards accompanies a little boy and it reads, “My daddy is the engineer.” If Daddy is the engineer, then Daddy needs to be fired, assuming he’s not dead. This short subject’s discovery meant it could be shown with its soundtrack disc, which was already in the Library of Congress.

Happy-Go-Luckies (1923; animator Paul Terry, and according to the DVD notes, “with Frank M. Grosser, Hugh M. “Jerry” Shields, and probably Milt Gross, all uncredited”)
The animated tale of a dog and a cat, homeless and riding the rails, who enter a snooty dog show for the prize money. Describing animation is not the Siren’s forte, but this one’s adorable, and of the shorts, her fondness for it is second only to the certifiably crazy Runaway Train.

Birth of a Hat (ca. 1920)
An industrial film from the Stetson company, this opens with the history of hats and moves on to the initial stages of making a fur-felt hat at its enormous factory in Philadelphia. Hint: there are no pelts at all used in a fedora. Probably not a great choice for the animal-lovers, but readers who love fashion history, or fedoras, will be agog.

The Love Charm (1928, director Howard Mitchell)
All of us can name an actor we secretly know can’t act worth a hoot, but is so damn beautiful we not-so-secretly don’t care. This color one-reeler is exactly like that for the Siren. It’s utter tosh about the South Sea Islands (and the Siren has written before about being allergic to island idylls) complete with a remarkably silly tacked-on racist bit of exposition about how it’s OK for the Great White Captain to fall in love with the maiden because she’s half-white. But the Siren would watch again in a heartbeat, because the color is beyond breathtaking, and the state of the recovered footage must have been near-pristine. You never saw such lovely Technicolor tosh in your life.

Andy’s Stump Speech (1924, director Norman Taurog)
Yes, that Norman Taurog, who moved on to an Oscar and movies like Boys Town with Spencer Tracy in the 1930s, to Martin and Lewis in the 1950s, to Elvis Presley in the 1960s. The Siren had never seen Joe Murphy, the utterly chinless, rail-thin actor playing Andy Gump, but he’s a fine physical comedian, never more so than when he wins a dance contest due to bumblebees in his underwear. Other highlights include a really surreal shot of Andy, suddenly giant and striding across buildings.

Won in a Cupboard (1914, director Mabel Normand)
Another important find in the New Zealand stash: this, the earliest surviving film written and directed by Mabel Normand. It is typical Keystone fare, the story of a rural lass whose courtship with a local milksop is interrupted first by bullies, and then by the fact that their parents get stuck together in a closet. No, the Siren can’t explain that second bit much better than that. It’s very simply shot, mostly focused on keeping all parts of a gag in frame, but there is (out of nowhere, and it’s never repeated) a sudden shot of the lovers walking toward one another in split-screen, until they meet in the middle. Normand was 21 when this was made. If the world were kinder to women artists, it’s easy to imagine that she might have moved behind the camera when scandal limited her value in front of it.

The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies: Episode 5, "The Chinese Fan" (1914, director Walter Edwin)
Speaking of women and their careers, this is an episode of a serial about an intrepid girl reporter. Dolly is played by the highly appealing Mary Fuller, who looks like an everyday sort of woman until she starts busting up white-slavery rings. What’s particularly fun about this from a feminist point of view is that it’s Dolly who performs all the derring-do. The guys just follow her around and congratulate her for saving the day.

There are also a number of newsreels and previews, including one for Strong Boy, a Ford silent that remains lost. Of the newsreels, the Siren was bowled over by the two-minute fragment Virginia Types: Blue Ridge Mountaineers, a hand-tinted glimpsed of a long-gone rural community.

Buying this DVD for yourself or the film-history connoisseur on your list naturally also supports the National Film Preservation Foundation. And supporting good causes is a good feeling, at this or any other time of year.

(The photo up top is a still from Ladies of the Mob (1928) with Clara Bow and Richard Arlen. None of the four movies made by Bow in 1928 are known to survive.)