Blanche Fury (1948)

As the restless ghost of Herbert Kalmus is the Siren's witness, the 1948 Cineguild production of Blanche Fury is one breathtakingly gorgeous Technicolor movie, even streamed on Netflix, which to the Siren's eye usually sands some details off old movies. From the first ground-level shot of horsemen riding hell-for-leather, to the last symbol-freighted moments in the house that functions as a malevolent character of its own, the Siren's eyes were begging for mercy because she didn't want to blink.

According to the not-always-trustworthy IMDB, the exteriors were lensed by Geoffrey Unsworth. The cinematographer for the interiors was Guy Green, a name sacred to all lovers of early David Lean, although the Siren knew Green's work from this period mostly in black and white. Mind you, she also loves The Light in the Piazza, which Green directed later in color; Unsworth was a great cinematographer who cut his teeth as a camera operator for movies like this one. So sure, the Siren knew this film was going to look good. But good lord, not this good. Projected in a good print, Blanche Fury could well be Gone to Earth levels of beautiful, even if the drama doesn't quite measure up to Powell and Pressburger.

And director Marc Allegret is regrettably a blank to the Siren, but based on Blanche Fury, he had formidable talent. Yes, she should have seen Fanny by now, but she hasn't; the Siren has been waiting for a chance to gobble up that trilogy in a format that does it justice. The Siren does have Marie Chapdelaine on her DVR so she's hoping to get on that forthwith.



Longtime patient readers will understand at once why the Siren pounced, as Blanche Fury ticks off all sorts of little pleasure boxes. It's what the Siren calls an Old Dark House movie, and what others have called gaslight noir, with a 19th-century setting in a stunning stately home (this thread at Britmovie offers details on the real-life house). It's based on a novel by Joseph Shearing, pen name of Marjorie Bowen, who also wrote the books behind Moss Rose and the luscious So Evil My Love. Shearing was drawn to Victorian murders, which unsettling obsession the Siren shares.

The Siren doesn't know this real-life case, but it proceeds much as you'd expect. Valerie Hobson plays Blanche, who's fallen on hard times and must make her living as a paid companion to querulous old broads who pay her peanuts and whine if they can't reach the book on their bedside table. Blanche may not be sympathetic to everyone, but the Siren was on the character's side from the moment she tells off her latest employer, Hobson's body remaining in its ramrod servant's posture as she hurls her humiliation back in the old lady's face.

So when Blanche is invited to live with her cousins at Clare House, mere minutes after the movie begins, we already know she's had enough of standing on the edge of wealth and privilege, and we also know her anger could lead her to do all sorts of things. Upon arrival, Blanche meets Philip Thorn (Stewart Granger), the estate manager, a kindred spirit because he's the illegitimate son of the dead owner, forever barred from inheriting the house and land he loves more than anything else. Standing in Philip's way are the Fullers, who've usurped the name of Fury: Walter Fitzgerald as the stiff, unfeeling father, and the late Michael Gough as his weak, cruel son. Rounding out this cozy household is Lavinia (Susanne Gibbs), the sweet-natured child Blanche is supposed to look after.

In The Great Stars, David Shipman rather acidly implies that Hobson's career owed a lot to her being married to Anthony Havelock-Allan, the producer of Blanche Fury. Be that as it may, the Siren thinks Hobson is marvelous here, moving from avarice, to lust, to still more avarice and finally to belated conscience. Shipman points out that Hobson was always the ineffable British lady; well, yes, and in this movie that has to be the case. Otherwise everyone twigs to Blanche from the beginning, instead of just Philip, who smells out the woman for the fellow predator that she is.

The men behind the camera helped give the long bones of Hobson's face a sensuality that mere prettiness can't match. And the Siren took such delight in the progression of Blanche's costumes and makeup, which surely show the care and taste that went into every aspect of this film. Black dresses at first, Blanche evidently in mourning for whoever died and left her penniless; gray half-mourning as she settles in at Clare, makeup a bit more obvious; color blazing out from her gowns and her lips when she succumbs to her lust for Philip. Then black again after the murders, Blanche's guilt turning her face, even her lips, into the marble of a tombstone. When she's in the witness box preparing to send Philip to his doom, the costumer (Sophie Devine) has edged the mourning dress with beading, as if to signal that a deadly Fury still has allure.



The Siren has defended Granger before, and will do so again. Nobody did seething resentment quite like this actor, and all his best roles (Saraband for Dead Lovers, Moonfleet, the fantastic Scaramouche, to name just three of the Siren's favorites) use that ability. He was so handsome, and so fiercely, dangerously sexy on screen, that he could coax a decent love scene of just about anybody. ("I'm a very good actor," he once said, with the sarcasm he often showed when asked about his long string of romantic melodramas. "I played all those love scenes with Phyllis Calvert, and we didn't like each other very much.") Alas, the Siren must place part of the responsibility for the things that don't work in Blanche Fury on Granger's shoulders, along with the screenwriters. Granger is all the Siren desired (and then some) early on, so attractive that he asks for a drink at the pub and you already know he's slept with the barmaid. But a late scene, where Philip's ruthless yen for mastery of Clare Hall has completely taken over his personality, plays as stock villainy of the worst kind, and Hobson's performance becomes cliched too: "Philip…you're mad." Not much better is a scene where we're supposed to question whether Philip is crazy enough to lure poor Lavinia, Bonnie Blue Butler style, to her doom. Granger recovers his savoir-seethe in the courtroom scenes, but the transition remains a bit abrupt.



But--did the Siren mention how incredible-looking this movie is? Let's just tick off a few high points.

1. Opening and closing scenes in Blanche's bedroom, as she drifts in and out of consciousness, including a final shot that was visually and thematically perfect.

2. Blanche's carriage rolling over the snowy road, a composition so stark it resembles black-and-white in color.

3. The firelit interior of the house's parlor, the warmth and luxury seducing Blanche, while the shadows in the room give us a warning she's too greedy to heed.



4. The swell of Blanche's chest under her dramatic, blood-red dress when she lies on the couch in Philip's room.

5. The austere light and atmosphere of courtroom scenes, aided by all that bewigged paraphernalia you get with British trials, the one jolt of color being the judge's red robe.

6. The hulking, dark-hued shots of the house, a motif maintained almost to the end. The details of the exterior are doled out in bits and pieces, and the camera shows you Clare's whole length and breadth only in silhouette. Then you finally get a spectacular long shot of the whole house gleaming in the sun--and you instantly realize that this sinister place is preening for its final triumph.

Blanche Fury can also be watched on Youtube at the moment if you so desire.

(By the way, the great Sheila O'Malley has a doozy of a post on The More the Merrier. You should read it.)

A Conversation with Whit Stillman: "She's Like a Perfume Herself"

For Joan's Digest, the new online feminist film quarterly founded by Miriam Bale, the Siren recently found herself interviewing director Whit Stillman, whose Damsels in Distress opens Friday, April 6. Miriam is known around cinephile circles as a curator and critic for the L Magazine, among many other hats. She knew that the Siren is a longtime Stillman devotee, having fallen in love with Metropolitan at an impressionable age and followed him through Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, and so Miriam arranged this meeting.

About three years ago, Dennis Cozzalio asked his readers which "living film director you most miss seeing on the cultural landscape regularly." Stillman's name was cited by at least a half-dozen of the hardcore cinephiles answering the quiz. Fourteen years have passed since The Last Days of Disco was released and (quite unjustly) failed to make back its money, a hiatus that's always mentioned whenever Stillman's name comes up. The Siren resolutely didn't ask him about that, on the grounds that he's discussed it in many other places, is no doubt heartily tired of the topic and at this point must have little to add to the sum of public knowledge about it.

Plus, to be honest, after seeing Damsels in Distress, the Siren had what she considered much better things to ask him about--like perfume, like Fred Astaire, like musicals. Damsels evokes all sorts of classic-film tropes, while maintaining its own surreal form of modernity.

The Siren thinks Stillman will strike most of her patient readers as a man after their own hearts, and as evidence she offers the following snippet from their conversation. For the rest of Stillman's musings on topics including who was Fred Astaire's best director and how Jean Brodie was ill-used, as well as why Stillman mimed putting a gun to his head when the Siren brought up A Damsel in Distress, you must click through to the article at Joan's.

Whit Stillman: ...The other thing I really love is from the Gold Diggers of 1935, and it's the original version of “Lullaby of Broadway.” It's just mind-boggling. And one of the things I'd like to do is The Gold Diggers of 2015. A Warner Brothers musical review set in the present day.

Joan's Digest: Oh yeah? Would you do wisecracking showgirls?

Whit Stillman: Of course, of course. You don't want any modern. There will be no punk rock.

JD: Wisecracking showgirls are one of my favorite things.

Whit Stillman: Well, I remember when we were getting a lot of grief for our talky films not being cinematic. And I remember favorite films, like Stage Door. And Stage Door is wall-to-wall dialogue.

JD: A lot of 30s movies are. So we have Sandrich, La Cava with Stage Door, probably My Man Godfrey too? Are there any other touchstones you go back to?

Whit Stillman: My Man Godfrey is actually not one of my favorites.

JD: Oh my god really? I love it. I'm so sorry.

Whit Stillman: No, I love the actors. I think they are better than the material. The material is a little subpar compared to other things. I wrote something in the Times in November about favorite holiday films, and I wrote about The Shop Around the Corner. I adore Margaret Sullavan, I like The Good Fairy also. There's so many films, even Three Comrades.

JD: Oh yeah. Margaret Sullavan is very big with the commenters on my blog.

Whit Stillman: Oh my gosh, she's so lovely. She's like a perfume herself.

JD: That voice.

Whit Stillman: Oh, the voice.

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

For the quite marvelous film site MUBI, home of my friend David Cairns' fabulous column The Forgotten, the Siren has written up the far-from-forgotten Ruggles of Red Gap. Because it's starting a one-week run at Manhattan's Film Forum, and because she loves it dearly. An excerpt:

The film assembles the kind of sterling character actors that we cinecrophiles grieve over on long winter evenings. McCarey, directing the legendarily difficult [Charles] Laughton, doesn't stint on the supporting players to favor his star; the film includes a lot of master shots that keep everybody in frame and in mind. Roland Young, so starchy at first that his shirts could walk off under their own power, may take the prize, as he learns the joys of egalitarianism via luscious blonde Leila Hyams. Mary Boland's Effie Floud, while clearly a climber, can still make you sympathize with what she has to cope with, such as an argument over her husband's hideous taste that ends with her calling him a "striped bass." And Charles Ruggles has some of his best moments gussied up in a morning coat and trying to get his valet drunk: "Come on over here, I want ya to meet somebody," he bellows down a Paris sidewalk, oblivious to snooty French stares and the fact that his own servant is trying to pretend he doesn't know him.

Ah yes, that Laughton drunk scene. Here's a foolproof way to judge an actor's fundamental competence: If he emphasizes the drunkenness, he's hopeless. A person who's truly lit, no matter whether the scene is tragic or comic, is fighting his state every step of the way. Laughton, of course, was far more than competent, and what makes his drunk act paralyzingly funny is that Ruggles isn't even admitting to himself that he's plastered. As he refuses to precede Floud into a carriage, Ruggles has the same old ramrod stance—but the face shows a hint of toddler-like glee, perhaps some inner mockery he could never show when sober. Yet the valet still tries to bring some dignity to each stage of the binge, finally posing on a carousel horse like an overdressed Cupid.

Read the whole thing here.

The Dark Knight (2008)

Last week, while rewatching The Third Man, the Siren was immediately struck by the thematic and visual consonance between Carol Reed's masterpiece and this great neo-noir.



Specifically, the use of the urban environment in the cinematography, with modern-day Gotham City hearkening back to the ruins of post-war Vienna, and the magnetic Joker as the doppelganger for the amoral but not uncharming Harry Lime.







Oh god. Just kidding.

The Siren couldn't keep that up if she tried.

Real post tomorrow.

This Happy Breed (1944), at the Criterion Collection

The Siren's essay, "Home Truths," about David Lean's film of the Noel Coward play This Happy Breed, is up now at the Criterion Collection. A brief excerpt is below. You can read the whole thing at the Criterion site; the Siren strongly encourages you to comment over there. And, should the spirit move you, please also click the "like" button at the bottom.

David Lean is a giant, and the Siren is still in (pleasant) shock that when she got a chance to write something for Criterion, it was about one of his movies. She's also developing a greatly expanded appreciation of the breadth and depth of Noel Coward. The piece is part of the booklet to the four-disc boxed set, David Lean Directs Noel Coward. Entirely aside from her participation the Siren tells you, in all honesty, that the set is a honey.

The film opens with the camera gliding across a panoramic view of London, followed by a dissolve to a street of houses. Then we pan again and descend toward the houses’ gardens, continue moving to an open second-story window, and finally dissolve inside to the bathroom. The camera moves past that filthy bathtub, down stairs so ramshackle you feel you can already hear them creak, and finally arrives at the front door just as Frank Gibbons does. This beginning, moving from the epic to the personal with exquisite precision, sets the film’s entire vocabulary. A large-scale interlude establishes the time period—whether it’s the strike or Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich—then there’s a dissolve back to the Gibbonses, and as the family’s scene closes, Lean’s camera pulls away.

Celia Johnson: Acting in a Little Cut-Off Bit of Light

Next week, on March 27, the Criterion Collection releases David Lean Directs Noël Coward, one of their lavish boxed sets. It includes In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, Brief Encounter and Blithe Spirit. And the Siren is most pleased to announce that it will include an essay from her about This Happy Breed, the second film that Lean and Coward did together, and Lean's first in color. Brief Encounter is the acknowledged jewel of the set, but after watching, rewatching, living and breathing This Happy Breed for the weeks it took her to write the essay, the Siren stoutly maintains it's a close second. Restored to its full glory by the British Film Institute, the movie is simply dazzling. On the release date, the Siren's essay will go live on the Criterion site, and she'll post a small excerpt and link then, and explain why she thinks This Happy Breed deserves a much higher reputation.

For her research the Siren bought a biography of This Happy Breed's female lead Celia Johnson, written by Johnson's daughter, Kate Fleming. Johnson was married to Peter Fleming, an explorer and writer who was also the brother of Ian Fleming. Their marriage lasted from 1936 to 1971, when Fleming died of a heart attack while on a hunting trip to Scotland. Together they had three children, and the book chronicles Johnson's professional life as well as her efforts to maintain a household with a husband who was frequently absent. (The Siren doesn't know whether it was ever even published here--she had to order hers from a bookstore in the U.K. via ABEbooks, where it can be had quite cheaply.)

The biography has sneakily become one of the Siren's favorites. There's Fleming's attitude toward her mother: love and gratitude. That's it. No grim secrets. No "how I overcame the staggering burden of having a star for a mother." Johnson certainly doesn't come across as a saint, but Fleming believes her mother was a remarkable woman. Fancy that.

The larger reason is that the Siren grew to love Johnson. Fleming quotes her mother's witty, intelligent, loving letters throughout, many of them written to Peter as he journeyed anywhere, everywhere. She tells Peter she wants to get on a boat and cross the seas to get to him: "There I would say 'Where please is Peter Fleming?' They would tell me without hesitation and I should walk rapidly inland avoiding all bandits and fall into your arms."

Johnson never considered herself a beauty of any sort (although the photo above, taken in 1933, offers its own disagreement) and one small subtheme of the letters concerns how lousy she always thinks she looks on camera. She moans over that, but her household burdens merit less complaint. And Johnson had plenty to complain about, had she chosen to do so. She and Fleming bought a house well outside London that required much more commuting time and upkeep than was strictly practical for a working actress. During World War II, including during the filming of This Happy Breed, the Fleming menage swelled to include her widowed sister, her sister-in-law and a total of seven small children, hers and theirs, the men all off at war. The Siren read accounts of Johnson's determination to make her train home without fail, gas for a car being out of the question--and doesn't blame her a bit.

She was a marvelous actress, of course, and that's enough. But how wonderful to open this book and find out, shoot, the woman was a riot. Here she is on holiday in Majorca, mentioning to an American tourist that she had just been working in New York. The American remarks:

'Oh I saw [Raymond] Massey's Hamlet on the first night and couldn't stand the Ophelia--who was that?' In a still small voice I said 'Well that was me'--and [he] spent the rest of lunch apologising and explaining it away, and me by saying how right he was about it over and over again. He has avoided me frantically ever since, smiling nervously when he sees me and immediately starting to talk very hard to someone else.

Johnson's filmography is short, shorter than it could have been, though it includes the indelible Brief Encounter and fine late-career work in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the television drama Staying On. And while she was primarily a theater actress, her list of credits there isn't large, either. She simply didn't pursue or accept roles that would interfere too much with her family. Like most great talents, though, the acting still mattered. It mattered a lot. So the Siren closes with this from Johnson, a piece called "Film Star Manqué" that she wrote in the 1950s and sent to a literary agent, but never published. Johnson's mind never switched off; she saw a great deal more on a set than her own scenes. She starts with a hilarious story about a director who introduces her at a film festival, and she wonders why his speech (in German) is taking so long, until she floats onstage, he thrusts some flowers at her and whispers, "That was a near thing…I had to spin out my speech for ages because I simply couldn't think of your name."

The passage that follows will remain one of the loveliest things the Siren has ever read about film acting.

…Sometimes I get a sort of nostalgia for the actual work of filming. I miss the strange, unmistakeable smell of size and paint that you find on all film sets and the hot powdery smell of the makeup rooms. I miss the curious sort of camera worship that goes on. It has its own devoted band of acolytes who feed it and polish it and push it gently about and shield it from harsh lights. They even fling blondes in front of it like tributes to a savage god. There is an an organised confusion on a film set when nothing seems to happen for hours and then everything goes quiet for a seconds, and in those few seconds you have to try and fit something consistent and true on to something that you probably did days before or have not yet done. There is a challenge in trying to act in a little cut-off bit of light, with no audience but the technicians and a fastidious director. Those technicians not concerned with the take are probably filling in their football pools and if you can make them look up and watch to the end of your shot you have probably achieved something.

I like the dedication that great directors have, when nothing matters except the film they are making and they cannot think that anything matters to anyone else either. I like being measured for focus by a tape from the end of one's nose to the camera and measured for light by the camera-man with his meter and I like to watch the skill of the technicians and I forget all the things I don't like. There were many. Mainly the waiting about, particularly on those depressing days when one had an early call, and that means dawn rising, and then, because of some hold-up, not be needed on the set until dusk. Rushes I never liked. That is when you see the shots of the day before and are horrified at your lack of subtlety or the size of your nose.

I used to be annoyed by what I thought was the waste, but at the same time impressed by the lordly way in which anything--however peculiar, rare or costly--could be produced at a moment's notice. I liked the machine that can make cobwebs, delicate threads of a rubbery solution shot from a spray in a twinkling and the detailed observation shown by the continuity girls, who can tell you the length of ash on your cigarette necessary to match for a close-up. I have always liked professionals and to watch professional film-making from the inside is a pleasure, though not, I think, from the outside, and I am glad that for a while I was able to do this. I never felt anything but surprise at being there, but I also think and hope that I became a professional at it on the set, though never on parade.

I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951)

The Siren's mentioned the previous life she spent behind a jewelry counter. She recalls one slow morning spent poring over a society column about a New York designer and his haute summer doings in the Hamptons, and her coworker's loud snort: "Sweetie, don't let the yacht fool you. He started out pushing racks around the garment district. He's tougher than you and me will ever think about being."

This nostalgic vignette came to mind when the Siren spent a sick day watching I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the 1951 Twentieth-Century Fox melodrama about the Seventh Avenue rag trade here in Little Old New York. Fashion has doubled, maybe even quintupled its everyday presence since the 50s. Now we play "who wore it best?" for all the world as though anyone strolling the local mall knows exactly how the latest Alber Elbaz should be draped. But the Siren strongly suspects the industry has stayed as tough as ever. She only wishes this movie, so brilliant through a good stretch of its running time, had done the same.

Filmed on location, I Can Get It for You Wholesale has any number of things going for it, but two stand out. First there's the street photography, night and day, crowds and traffic and windows from Seventh Avenue to Central Park. Director Michael Gordon was, on the evidence of this movie as well as Pillow Talk and Portrait in Black, good, if not quite great; we'll always have a hard time knowing how much Gordon really had, because his career is bisected by the blacklist. Gordon has a flair for amusing shots, like an errand boy with his hand cradling a dress dummy's boob, and the camera tracking around a grand dinner-dance to reveal the main characters stuck out behind a pillar. He could keep the action flowing. And the New York street scenes, via DP Milton Krasner — trust the Siren, you will plotz.

The second, and primary, thing: Abraham Polonsky's script (from Vera Caspary's adaptation), which will put the true lover of New Yorkese into a euphoric trance. Leads and character actors such as Marvin Kaplan and Charles Lane reel out line after glittering line, from the poignant

If I had money, could you learn to love me for my money?

to the flowery

Miss Boyd, you have the simple and astonishing beauty of an old-fashioned straight razor.

to the existentially profound

A young man needs a bankruptcy. It helps him to mature.

to the profoundly vaudeville.

—Haven't we treated you right?
—You want more money?
—We'll give you a raise.
—You wanna take your wife to Jones Beach? I'll lend you my Buick.
—Take my Cadillac.
—Take my wife!

My beloved auteurist friends, this is why the Siren has been known to roll her eyes when told a great director could direct the phone book or whatever platitude you will. In this case, it's the reverse. You'd have to work at messing up that dialogue. The script sings. At times Gordon is just getting the hell out of the way.

Harriet Boyd (Susan Hayward) is a model on Seventh Avenue, back when the profession was a lot more B-girl than Bundchen. She's had it up to her cute little keister with pawing buyers and slick salesmen, and she's ready to use her design talent. Harriet lures Sam Cooper (Sam Jaffe), the "inside man" who can run the dressmaking end, and salesman Teddy Sherman (Dan Dailey, as good as you'll ever see him), with the promise of their own firm, selling frocks at $10.95 in wholesale 1951 dollars. To get what she wants, Harriet will be every bit as tough as that Hamptons-swanning designer. She needs the life-insurance money her mother is hoarding, but Ma wants younger sister Marge to have it so she can start a cozy washer-dryer-baby household, despite Harriet's solid objections:

Harriet: With money she can marry anyone she wants.
Ma: A nice outlook on life.
Harriet: It's the outlook men taught me.

Ma, whose maternal warmth recalls an Easter Island statue, refuses to fork over, so Harriet manipulates sis into giving her the dough anyway, in a set-up worthy of Scarlett O'Hara. (That's a part for which Hayward was a contender, by the by, and here you can tell why that's not so far-fetched.) Afterward sister, Ma and brother-in-law, none of whom are the slightest bit interesting, obligingly take a powder. The partners conquer Seventh Avenue, but Teddy has a yen for Harriet, and there lies both Harriet and the movie's undoing.




The Siren has written before of her soft spot for Hayward, who isn't often trotted out these days when people discuss Great Stars of the Past. Hayward was born Edythe Marrener in Flatbush, and no matter what the role, Brooklyn swung in her stride and sanded the edges of her husky voice. She got her start as a teenaged New York model, which probably gives extra brush to the brush-offs Hayward delivers in the film, but she was no high-flown Method actress. Hayward was one rock-hard cookie.

But the Siren says when the part fit her, Hayward could play the hell out of it. TV Guide has one of the few I Can Get It for You Wholesale reviews on the Web, and it cluck-clucks through a story about Hayward's movie-star airs. Hey, the Siren loves the stars who love their status, whether it's Hayward signing a gazillion autographs, Bette Davis showing up on 1970s talk shows to blow smoke and imitate her imitators, or Gloria Swanson playing herself in Airport 1975 and ruining the suspense because face it, nothing and nobody's gonna kill Gloria Swanson. What's the appeal of someone who approaches stardom like this gal? Brother, says the Siren, in her best Brooklyn, you can have that.

Harriet in all her gimme-gimme glory is Hayward at her best. She moves like she knows she's beautiful, she smiles like she knows what she's gonna get, she snaps her lines like she knows what's working against her.

"Didn't you hear me? I'm proposing to you," says a flummoxed Teddy. "What do you expect me to do, throw my arms around you?" is Harriet's tender response.

One more thing: this is a George Sanders movie, too. He shows up about a half-hour in, at a Dressmakers and Buyers' Ball, where he's seated at the dais. Of course. Did any man in Hollywood history, or indeed the history of anywhere, ever look so completely right seated at a dais? Sanders plays J.F. Noble, the Bergdorf-type magnate who wants Harriet to design evening gowns and who also wants Harriet for himself, a promising development both ways. You don't know how it pains the Siren to reveal that Sanders' appearance signals that we have about 30 minutes of great left. After that, it's comeuppance time for Harriet. Oh, you still get good stuff and standout Sanders, such as, "It seems to me that you could resign yourself a little more gracefully to being rich and famous." And Sanders also manages to turn "Good evening, Mr. Sherman" into one of his funniest lines.

But — and it's so obvious this is where we're headed, the Siren isn't even going to call it a spoiler — it's time for Harriet to Learn a Few Things About Love.

I Can Get for You Wholesale is based on Jerome Weidman's Depression-era novel about a man named Harry who, so Wikipedia tells us, gets what's coming to him and learns to appreciate love. (Later, the story morphed into the Broadway musical debut of Barbra Streisand, which interesting tale can be read here.)

It's a truth universally acknowledged in Hollywood that a single woman in possession of excess ambition must be in want of a man. That she'll die without a man, nothing matters without a man, she might as well call in Mario Buatta and have her uterus turned into a breakfast nook without a man. Still, it would be a mistake to say this applies only to women; many's the manly magnate presumed to need love more than money, too. After all, it is love, or his version of it, that proves the undoing of Charles Foster Kane, and we all know how the Siren feels about that one. And it's a mistake to chalk things up to the era, when here's winsome Anne Hathaway in 2006's The Devil Wears Prada doing the exact same thing.

Over at Senses of Cinema, Andrew Marsden says Polonsky changed the novel's "anti-Semitism arising from its treatment of Jewish businessmen into a story about the oppression of women in the world of business," and adds that Fox "softened" the dialogue. The Siren doesn't know if that softening extended to Harriet's fate, but it should be said that Teddy wants her to have a career, just a career on his salesman-of-the-people terms.

Sweet shade of Fannie Hurst, it's frustrating, though. It isn't that the romantic choice boils down to George Sanders versus Dan Dailey, which is…the Siren doesn't even have an actor-to-actor metaphor for that one. It's more like choosing between a movie star and a windup tin mouse. It isn't even that Harriet's going all mushy is about as believable as when William Makepeace Thackeray tries to convince you that his fabulous Becky Sharp is (dramatic pause) a murderess.

No, the rub is that the trick Teddy and Sam pull on Harriet, an S.O.B. move if ever there was one, is for her own good. Done out of love, you see, which makes it so much more pure than Harriet's own scheming.

Despite her dislike of the denouement the Siren highly recommends the film, which you can see at MUBI. It's one of Hollywood's nasty ironies that the lavishly talented Polonsky, himself no bed of roses, also was defanged by external forces. The Siren likes to believe that Polonsky looked back at Harriet Boyd from time to time and thought she got a raw deal, too.

The Woman in the Window (1944)

(Some people find spoiler warnings to be an affected annoyance, but the Siren doesn't write this stuff to lessen anyone's pleasure. And so she warns you that this post concerns the ending of The Woman in the Window. See Lang's great movie before you read this, is the Siren's advice.)

In the comments thread to the Siren's post on You and Me, Kevin Deany told a charming story about Fritz Lang's defensive reaction when asked why his films didn't include humor; and this led to some cracks about the term "German humor," to which sallies the Siren nonetheless has a two-word response. The Siren has written before that she finds Lang's films quite sexy (another quality he's occasionally said to lack) and adds that You and Me is very funny.

Plus, the Siren has her own example of an underrated Lang joke, and it's The Woman in the Window, a film she likes very much indeed.

Edward G. Robinson plays a contented professor of criminal psychology, Richard Wanley, who's adrift in Manhattan on a sultry July evening after he's seen his wife and children off to the country. At his club (do men still have those?), Wanley knocks back a couple with old friends, and on his way home he stops to admire a portrait of a beautiful woman in a gallery window. Suddenly, the portrait's subject is standing beside him, as if conjured by the heat cooking his subconscious. The woman, Alice, is Joan Bennett in her most seductive Hedy Lamarr-lookalike phase, and Wanley needs little persuasion to buy her a drink. They repair to Alice's apartment for champagne, and nothing more than that is happening when Alice's lover bursts in and, without much in the way of preamble, starts to throttle Wanley.

Wanley stabs his attacker dead with a pair of scissors. Flush with the classic film-noir determination to make a bad situation worse, he and Alice decide to cover up the crime. Alas, Dan Duryea arrives, puts two and two together and blackmails them. Alice and Wanley decide to bump off Duryea (also the time-honored choice), but Alice botches the poisoning attempt. With Duryea more disgustingly alive than ever, and demanding even more money, Wanley commits suicide. And then, o then...

We see that Wanley has been having a nap in his cozy club chair. Yes, friends, it was all a dream. Still a little freaked out, he exits the club, walks to the gallery window and looks at the portrait, when who should show up? And Wanley takes off in terror, leaving the puzzled beauty on the sidewalk.

What with sample reactions like "copout," "spuriously happy," "it seemed to be tacked on," and "the ending annoyed me so much that it compelled me to re-watch Scarlet Street"--hm, the Siren detects a certain resistance to accepting "it's all a dream" as any kind of a self-respecting film noir ending. There's a few defenders; Brian Kellow allowed as how it "beautifully underlines the inexorable, dreamlike pull of the story." And this gentleman, who helped restore Woman in the Window (without a negative, no less), hated the ending but thought

the technique used in the transitional shot is amazing...Edward G. is sitting in a big overstuffed chair in an apartment, the camera tracks in to a tight close up of his face, then it tracks back revealling him in an entirely different location. There’s no dissolve so you know the crew was flying walls in and out, changing furniture, replacing props, all in a few seconds. Really a great effect.

Well, the Siren, perverse mortal that she is, likes the ending. She can't claim to have seen it coming, but it made sense. Although it also makes sense that many people would hate it. Laughing Boy Fritz Lang plays a practical joke, and a large segment of the audience reacts the way people do to a practical joke: "That's NOT FUNNY."

But the joke doesn't shimmer in out of nowhere, like Jeeves. Girish Shambu (in a video essay the Siren recommends) says, "I find this film, in its own ironic and grim way, to be quite funny." Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (who admittedly didn't like the end either) wrote some mordantly amusing lines, many delivered by Raymond Massey as Wanley's friend, an assistant district attorney. Massey's fossilized appearance can turn a scene into an instant Charles Addams cartoon anyway, more so when he's patting Wanley's shoulder and saying, "We rarely arrest people just for knowing where the body was." There's also the intrinsically amusing fact that Wanley is a professor of criminal psychology, but for all his ability to plan and execute a crime, he might as well be Father O'Malley in Going My Way.

Fritz Lang spent years telling skeptical interviewers that the Production Code didn't determine the end of The Woman in the Window, he did, and Lang went so far as to tell Peter Bogdanovich that he did it to make the film more plausible. In a way, it does. The film goes from twisted, to bleak, to horrifying, but that's the way a dream often progresses. You're in slumberland, dreaming of, say, a torrid X-rated encounter with Basil Rathbone circa Captain Blood, an example the Siren is pulling out of the purest hypothetical thin air, you understand. And then your creepiest co-worker shows up, and the dream becomes anti-erotic in one quick hurry, and then you hear footsteps on the ceiling and you know the footsteps are after you and when you awake and clutch the sweat-drenched bedclothes, you realize the dream was directed not by Michael Curtiz, but by David Fincher.

Don't lie to the Siren. You've dreamed about sex with a wildly inappropriate partner and found an excuse to skedaddle the very next time you saw the person. Maybe you've even gone to sleep and discovered that your subsconscious has given you permission to go full-dress Raskolnikov on your landlady. Waking up is a release, but there's a catch: Once your mind has revealed all the bits of anxiety playing bumper-cars around your amygdala, you can no longer pretend they aren't there. And Fritz Lang, never one to shy away from bitter truths, says the dream message could be worse.

Wanley says good-bye to his wife, who looks more like his mother than that of his children. And then he goes for a drink and muses that he can't even work up the energy to go see some strippers. And what does his dream bring him? A beautiful woman he never gets to have sex with. A moment of self-defense that he must cover up in the most craven way possible. A co-conspirator who can't manage a poisoning. Consequences he can't evade for acts he didn't even commit. Impotence, in other words, over and over again. Wanley flees from the lady of the evening and his nightmare, but the truth beneath his plumply bourgeois existence is running right with him.

Sure, that's depressing as hell. But it's also pretty funny.

You and Me (1938)

(Another from the late Nomad Wide Screen, posted in full and slightly revised.)

Discovering You and Me, the oddball three-song musical comedy Fritz Lang made in 1938, is like finding out T.S. Eliot loved Groucho Marx (and he did)--where did that come from? The movie is beyond charming, it’s enchanting, all romance and Damon Runyon quips, mixed with left-leaning social realism that goes down easy in part because it’s sung. Oh, Fritz’s preoccupations are there, all right--double lives, pitiless authority, the tyranny of material needs, the criminal underworld--but the touch is light, despite the shadows on screen. The Siren has been a passionate Lang partisan since viewing M in her early teens, and it was exhilarating to sit in the Film Forum last year, when this was shown as part of a “Fritz Lang in Hollywood” retrospective, muttering, “Damn, he could do charm, too.”

The movie opens with a musical number, “You Can’t Get Something For Nothing,” illustrated with a wonderfully abstract set of images of what you can get for something--everything from carrots to one of those terrifying 1930s permanent waves. We move on to the department store where much of the movie is set, and to Sylvia Sidney, who catches a woman shoplifting and eventually refuses to turn her in.



Then comes one of the most purely sexy moments in any film of the era. Handsome sales clerk George Raft is rebuffing the advances of Joyce Compton (the drawling mantrap with a breezy nightclub act in The Awful Truth). As Raft escorts Compton on the down escalator, we discover why--along comes Sidney on the up escalator. Raft and Sidney's hands meet, then slide apart as they pass, in a touch as erotic as a kiss.

They’re in love, and working in retail, but their problems don’t end there--they are both reformed crooks, which explains Sidney’s lenience with the shoplifter. Raft’s parole has just ended, but Sidney’s has two months to go, and there’s the problem: The terms of her parole forbid her to marry. But marry they do, and move into Sidney’s rooms, presided over by the sort of lovable, affectionate, mom-and-pop landlords common to movies but awfully scarce in modern New York. Sidney can’t bring herself to tell Raft that she’s an ex-jailbird. And Raft has been making a big deal out of full disclosure from any woman he loves. That, plus the fact that the department store is staffed entirely with other ex-convicts, many of them from Raft’s old gang, sets up the conflict.



It plays out in expected ways--Sidney tries desperately to keep Raft from discovering her past, and the old gang wants him back--and yet it stays fresh. Raft is often a self-absorbed presence on screen, a big vortex of narcissism sucking the life out of anyone playing against him, but here he achieves chemistry with his fellow actors and most importantly, his leading lady. There’s that escalator, but there’s also a kiss over a spilled suitcase, where Raft’s hat brim just barely clears the edge of Sidney’s as their lips meet. Raft carries Sidney into her darkened apartment on their wedding night, goes keister-over-teakettle as he collides with a lamp, and the actor laughs at himself as I’ve never seen him do in another movie.



Sidney’s allure was peculiar but potent, focused mainly on a wide-eyed stare that she could use to signal hurt, bewilderment, romantic yearning or granite will. Lang gives her every opportunity to turn on the stare in a big way, notably when she emerges from the shower with her hair adorably soaked, her makeup minimal and her eyes agog for Raft. It’s as beautiful as she ever looked in any movie.



Two scenes in You and Me turned the Siren's infatuation with the movie to outright love. One occurs late, when Raft’s old gang has lured him back and they’re preparing to rob the department store where they work. Sidney has gotten wind of the plan, and together with the kindly department store owner (there’s a combination of words one seldom sees) she confronts them. But instead of giving the men a big speech that will shame them straight, she takes a chalkboard and works out, via simple arithmetic, the fact that their individual takes from the heist will be peanuts. The gangsters sit on rocking horses and doll houses in the toy department, taking in this risk-reward lecture from a gorgeous woman, admiring Sidney’s unassailable logic and graceful way with the chalk.

But the best scene occurs about midway, as the gang reassembles and waits for Raft to appear so they can lure him back. And bit by bit, they roll into a percussive number (via the movie’s composer, Kurt Weill) called “Stick to the Mob”--pounding hands, fists, cups, the cutting getting faster and the lyrics darker and wittier, as they recall their days in prison and the morse-code system of taps they used to get news to one another. It should stop the movie cold, and it does, and it’s even more bizarre to consider that this is the last time a musical number pops up. But it’s superb, irrefutable evidence of why Rob Marshall’s dirge-like treatment of the great “Cell Block Tango” in Chicago was such an almighty letdown. “Stick to the Mob” cements You and Me as a movie where all sorts of improbable things might occur--like having your heart warmed by Fritz Lang.



(Many wonderful screen caps, including some that the Siren used here, at MUBI. Also, click here for a few beautiful shots of Lang directing Lorre in M.)

How the Siren Jinxed the Oscars

Clearly, the Siren needs to get out of the Oscar Wishlist business. Because she could not have jinxed the ceremony more thoroughly if she'd sent Brian Grazer a link to Dan Kois.

The Siren's been watching this hoedown since she was a wisp of a thing, pleading with her sainted mother to let her stay up and watch in case somebody important--meaning someone OLD--showed up. And despite the fact that two nominated films were explicitly about film history, and the additional fact that a silent movie--a silent movie, my friends, has that really sunk in?--won, the Siren has never seen a show less indebted to any true sense of Hollywood history. It bordered on the perverse. No, fuck it; this crossed the border of perverse and entered the Crown Territory of Bloody-Minded on a permanent visa.

Part of the reason the Siren was MIA yesterday was that she had scheduled a physical bright and early, but the main reason was that this show just about broke her heart.

The Siren knew she was in trouble when the first "old movie" montage showed exactly one black-and-white movie--and it was Raging Bull. A fine film. If anybody had bothered to ask Mr. Scorsese, he might have told them about his movie's debt to Body and Soul, to name only one, but evidently film history stretches to Midnight Cowboy and no further. The other bone thrown to anybody who's ever clicked over to TCM was an inexplicable Cirque de Soleil flying-trapeze act, which started with North by Northwest (a film that went unnominated in all major Oscar categories, by the by) and continued with the decision to screen a clip of the most famous Technicolor movie of all time in black and white…because Gone with the Wind is flippin' old, kids. There was some flapper-style hair around, but any silent clips aside from The Artist itself were so brief as to pass the Siren right on by, which in fairness could have happened, as she took some breaks and spent some quality time with her head in her hands.

The fine old Academy tradition of taking the easiest task in the show, which is to put together a montage of the Great Film People Who've Left Us, and royally screwing it up, is in no danger of being violated, it seems. This one was particularly ghastly. Bleached-out stills, because that's what we remember about movie artists, their ability to hold still, and because if you didn't show a literal reminder of the mists of time, people might not realize these folks are dead. And bad music; in this case, "What a Wonderful World," sung by someone who is Not Louis Armstrong.

And look, the Siren realizes it's mandatory to leave someone out. At this point she suspects it's the AMPAS equivalent of Al Hirschfeld's "Nina" or Jack Lemmon muttering "magic time." Snubbing Harry Morgan, who made more than 100 movies including at least a half-dozen permanent classics…that makes me mad. It also made goddess Kim Morgan mad; she took to Facebook to swat away remarks that Morgan was primarily a TV actor with, "Yeah, and so was Fred MacMurray." (Kim is in Paris with husband Guy Maddin, offering her acting presence and invaluable cinematic intelligence as he makes a project about lost films. You can watch the filming progress live, right here, and the Siren recommends doing that with all her heart. Might cheer us all up.)

No Oscar show is ever completely worthless, though. (Yes, the Siren means that.) In this case, the award of the Foreign Film Oscar to Asghar Farhadi's A Separation was the single most moving and wholly, perfectly correct decision of the evening. If you haven't seen this superb piece of filmmaking, get thee to an arthouse on the double. Needless to say the Siren was also pleased with every Oscar that went to Hugo, a movie she's convinced will live a long time, perhaps long enough to be too old to get mentioned on the Oscars.

But say what you will about The Artist (although the Siren is kind of hoping we already took care of that, to be honest), two of its winners showed some class. Michel Hazanavicius thanked Billy Wilder; the Siren wanted King Vidor, as she said, but Wilder will do nicely under the circs.

And Jean Dujardin thanked Douglas Fairbanks. The Siren doesn't care if you thought his performance was Virginia smokehouse on rye. This was a Frenchman in a roomful of Americans, the sole person up there thanking an artist of the old days who directly and substantially contributed to what got him the Oscar.



Small mercies and small mercis. Who knows, maybe next year, Angelina Jolie will remember to thank Joan Crawford, for helping her perfect THIS POSE.

The Ballad of Linda Darnell

(Buffalo Bill reminded the Siren of her soft spot for Linda Darnell. This is a thoroughly revised, full-length version of the Siren’s article that ran in Nomad Wide Screen last year.)

“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” drawled Jessica Rabbit, in an overquoted line the Siren should apologize for using, let alone leading with--except that it applies so perfectly to Linda Darnell. Nature drew her bad, all right, with opulent features and the sort of bombshell body that has almost disappeared from Hollywood. This was a beauty who could look depraved just grocery shopping or writing a thank-you note.

But Darnell was, by most accounts, a good egg, albeit one "with very terrifying personal problems," as Joseph Mankiewicz put it. (And don't we all have those, Joe, don't we all.) This wouldn’t matter much, except that Darnell’s sex appeal tended to land her in movies either as glorified set decoration, such as her teamings with Tyrone Power, or as a femme fatale. The latter was a type of part she did creditably in Douglas Sirk's marvelous Summer Storm and nailed in memorable fashion in Hangover Square and Fallen Angel.





Yet Darnell never did seem bad to the bone, even when the script insisted she was. Her sheer normality breaks through at odd, sometimes inconvenient moments. Trawling through the Net for photos of Darnell is something of a revelation. “You look better without all that gunk on your face” is one of those male observations that a lady can usually file under “yeah right, buddy.” For Darnell, it was true. Half the photos circulating seem to show her in towering hairstyles and bizarre outfits that look like what you’d get if Joseph Breen became CEO of Frederick’s of Hollywood. She was always divine to behold, but the more stripped-down and simple the look, the more Darnell dazzled. As an actress, it often worked the same way; the less you loaded Darnell with costumes and up-dos, the more she could loosen up on camera.

She was born in Dallas, Texas in 1923, and yanked away to Hollywood at the age of 15 by her fearsome mother, Pearl. Mother-driven actresses like Darnell always seem to approach their careers with a mix of yearning and weariness, pursuing better roles one minute, trying to pull out of the Hollywood crush the next. Darnell was adequate to the demands, if you can even call them that, of her parts in films like Blood and Sand and The Mark of Zorro. But for a long while she was stuck in a lower tier of stardom, never landing that huge breakout role. Then she did uncredited work in 1943 as the Virgin Mary in The Song of Bernadette, and to this day people snicker over Twentieth-Century Fox pinning a halo on a pin-up. Still, the Madonna was a good-luck charm; Darnell’s brief period of good parts as bad girls was about to begin.




As in Laura the year before, Darnell’s character of Stella has gone missing at the outset of Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945). Unlike Laura, this beauty doesn’t return to her haunts in innocent wonderment. Darnell lounges in like she’s back from a cigarette break, and she rips into Dana Andrews’ hamburger with a down-home enjoyment that wouldn't be out of place in State Fair. Nor does Stella possess criminal smoothness; she takes money out of the register with the furtive look of a child edging a chair to the shelf that holds the candy jar.




There’s something girlish to the way Darnell played all her bad-dame parts. My Darling Clementine (1946) cast her as lovelorn Chihuahua, who isn’t bad at all, not really even misunderstood. John Ford didn’t want Darnell for the part, but his lingering close-up of her dying face is as tender as anything in the movie. In Summer Storm from 1944, her femme fatale seems consumed by petulant yearning for the shiny toys that Father Christmas never brought her. When, all at once, the character does something unselfish, it seems the sort of whim this childlike temptress might indulge.




Darnell comes as close to pure evil as she ever did in Hangover Square (1945), a movie that would make an interesting double bill with Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Darnell’s venomous Netta up against Joan Bennett as Lazy Legs. Bennett underestimates the danger from men; Darnell looks at Laird Cregar with a nagging suspicion of his madness. On the other hand, in Preston Sturges’ great Unfaithfully Yours (1948), Daphne de Carter is a study in flummoxed, wounded sincerity. Any doubts about Daphne are there only because, well, can a woman who looks like that be trusted to remain faithful, particularly to a conductor who’s an almighty pain in the neck?




In between, in 1947, Darnell played an ersatz Scarlett in Preminger’s Forever Amber, a plum part that turned out to be a withered prune. Should you go to an Oscar party this Sunday, here’s a fun game for your film-nerd friends. If they’ve seen Forever Amber, they make the quarter-finals. If they liked Forever Amber, they make the semis, and anyone arguing for its greatness wins the title of Most Auteuristest of Them All and a prize--say, a copy of Man’s Favorite Sport or Family Plot. Forever Amber is bad, and the Siren says that despite Leon Shamroy and George Sanders' brief-but-fabulous Charles II. On set, Preminger reportedly treated Darnell with the same gallantry that almost drove Jean Seberg to a nervous breakdown on Saint Joan, and it shows; no self-respecting sexpot should look as desperate to please as does Darnell in this movie.




It was 1949’s A Letter to Three Wives that marked Darnell's pinnacle. The character of Lora May Finney fit Darnell like no other, and helped by Mankiewicz’s writing and facility with actors, she was the sharpest, funniest thing in a very funny movie. (She may have had extra help, as she was having an affair with Mankiewicz during and after filming.)

Lora May wants out of the “Finney mansion on the tracks,” but what the character wants even more is respect, and respectability. Porter Hollingsway (Paul Douglas, never better) honks his car horn for her to come out of the house, like he’s delivering Chinese take-out. Darnell stands by the sink without so much as shifting her legs, until he comes to the door to escort her. Porter pulls up the car to the house after their date, and from the passenger seat Darnell casts one micro-glance at the door, her face immaculately cool as she counts out the beats that will force her date to get out and open it for her. Manners count, the formalities count, because a lady gets them from a man without asking. And Lora May will by god get some manners and formality out of this boor--because when she does, that will be the signal she has class.

The letter of the movie’s title is from Addie Ross, the town Circe who writes to tell the women that she’s run away with one of their husbands. For the self-made, proudly vulgar Porter, Addie is class, and he keeps her picture in a silver frame on a grand piano he doesn’t know how to play. To get the right expression from Darnell, Mankiewicz filled that frame with a photo of Preminger in full costume as a Nazi, neatly summarizing the actress’ feelings about her former director. And it worked. Darnell’s face would be aloof and ladylike, if it weren't for the hatred in her eyes and the hostile line of her mouth, as she tells Porter she wants to be in a silver frame on a piano one day, too.

Lora May makes faces at Porter the moment his back is turned, manipulates him, talks to him with offhanded near-contempt after their marriage. “Something tells me I’m gonna have a giant around the house,” is the little woman’s response to Porter’s talk of expanding his business. All that could add up to a gold-digger, but the signal that she isn’t comes during the flashback to their courtship. Lora May has no date for New Year’s Eve, and as Darnell leafs through a magazine and tries to listen to the radio, it’s obvious she fears Porter may never come. When he does, and proposes, it’s in a brutally unromantic fashion, and Darnell’s face as she turns around to look at him mixes triumph and hurt.




After A Letter to Three Wives, Darnell’s filmography flares up briefly with decent roles in No Way Out and The Walls of Jericho, before her sad detour into alcoholism and her grisly death in a housefire, age 41. The Mankiewicz movie shows more clearly than any other what might have been made of her--a woman who looked wanton, but was all the more dangerous because she wasn’t.

(Note: The Mankiewicz quote and information on the filming of A Letter to Three Wives comes from Kenneth L. Geist's excellent biography.)

Buffalo Bill (1944) and The Great Man's Lady (1942) at the Film Forum

The Film Forum in New York City is running a massive William Wellman retrospective, projected in glorious 35-millimeter, through March 1. The Siren's life being what it perpetually is, she hasn't made it there until this week, when she saw a double bill of The Great Man's Lady (1942) and Buffalo Bill (1944).

The Great Man's Lady, in which Barbara Stanwyck ages to over 100, had great merit and some beautiful scenes, including a wedding by a covered-wagon train as a Plains thunderstorm brews; and, later, Stanwyck dragging herself out of a flooded river, looking as beautiful as she ever did. Wellman, who like almost all of her collaborators worshipped Stanwyck, said it was "one of the best performances ever given by anybody." But the Siren isn't going to go into this one, because old friend and brilliant film writer Dan Callahan has a book about Stanwyck just out. It's called Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, and it just got a fine review from Scott Eyman in The Wall Street Journal. The Siren hasn't read it yet, but she's getting a copy this Sunday, Feb. 19, at the Museum of the Moving Image, where Dan will be presenting a double feature of The Lady Eve and Forty Guns. The movies start at 3 p.m., so do go, or just order the thing off Amazon or wherever. If you need proof of what Dan can do (and the Siren's been praising him to the skies for yonks) here's a sample.

Buffalo Bill can't be called top-tier Wellman, not while prints of anything from Wild Boys of the Road to The Story of G.I. Joe still circulate; but it's more worthwhile than the Siren expected. This Technicolor Western was made by Wellman as a sop to Darryl Zanuck, who told the director that the prestige of The Ox-Bow Incident was all very well, but it sure wasn't going to pay anybody's grocery bills. Zanuck said he'd make the downbeat project anyway if Wellman gave him two pictures with a little more commercial pizazz, and that agreement resulted in this gorgeous, thematically screwy Western.

On one level, it's straight-up Great Man mythology of Buffalo Bill Cody, from the Homeric boom of the narrator, to turning a skirmish between a cavalry regiment and about a half-dozen Cheyenne into "the battle of War Bonnet Gorge." This "battle" lives in the annals of Twentieth-Century Fox and not the West, but it offers astonishing images. The two sides are filmed from a long distance, dead-on, so that the hooves of the horses churn up the water across the expanse of the eerily still water, and the sound comes at you like a squall on the horizon.



Meanwhile Bill can shoot the feathers off an Indian-head penny at fifty paces and looks great in (or out of) buckskin because he's played by Joel McCrea. He can woo the luscious, ever-feisty Maureen O'Hara without smudging her Jungle Red lipstick. Bill can relate to the Indians, because he is a man of the West and knows their ways--and hey, some of Bill's best friends are Indians, like Yellow Hand, played by Anthony Quinn in a loincloth that offers flirtatious glimpses of his clingy flesh-toned briefs. Alas for Buffalo Bill, nowadays when a Native American in a Western holds up his hand to say "How," you can practically hear the audience's eyes rolling toward the ceiling.

That isn't the whole movie, though. There are some startlingly on-target attempts to add a taste of the real history of the white man and Native Americans, a bloody saga that even Technicolor couldn't pretty up. The Great White Eastern types are a sorry lot, references to broken treaties abound, and the buffalo hunts that gave Cody his nickname are explicitly depicted as yet another knife in the heart of the Plains nations.

Another jolt is that while the Siren hasn't nailed down a definitively sourced answer, it sure looks as though some of those buffalo were killed on film. Let's put it this way; the Siren has yet to hear of a trained buffalo able to keel over on command during a stampede. (If you know different, please speak up; here's one instance where the Siren wants to be wrong.) Nothing justifies slaughtering an animal for a movie, in the Siren's view and surely everyone else's; that's why the Siren has always had a hard time with King Solomon's Mines. But the scenes do hammer home the script's bald statement that the animals are dying to feed a fad for buffalo rugs back East. Watching the Cheyenne ride through a field of buffalo heads discarded like trash at a county fair, then later through a literal boneyard, speaks louder than anything Cody says in the movie.



The Siren hasn't read anything on Cody in eons, and her attempts to untangle some of the controversies for this review ended with the realization that she hasn't got all damn year. She can run a blog and a household, or she can figure out what the deal was with Buffalo Bill, she cannot do both. It's somewhat comforting that story writer Frank Winch, screenwriters Aeneas Mackenzie, Clements Ripley and Cecile Kramer, and even Wellman himself, clearly had the same problem. Cody displays heroism in the film's battle, but soon he's condemned to re-enact his glories as a sideshow attraction, cutting down wooden substitutes for the Native Americans we so successfully wiped out. Cody goes on a hunt with a Russian Grand Duke, although we aren't shown that bit o' shootin'. But the movie's other hunts are so canned and merciless that it's clear Cody might as well have taken His Imperial Highness out to a barn and had him pop old Bessie while she was being milked. At the same time--indeed, while he's in the camp with the off-screen Duke--Cody expresses proto-Sierra Club doubts about whether mowing down the buffalo like blades of grass is such a hot idea.

Like so many Westerns, Buffalo Bill wants to have it both ways: sorrow and remorse for the fate of the Native Americans, and valorization of the events that decimated them. One scene gives you Bill tied up in a Cheyenne camp having dirt clumps thrown at him by giggling women in body makeup. Another scene gives you the same Cheyenne, racked by grief, hunger and fear, dancing in preparation for battle, stamping in a circle and wearing the old feathered costumes we've all seen so often. But as filmed by Wellman, from a distance that fills the frame, it's a march to the graveyard, foreboding and tragic.



Linda Darnell has a small role in Buffalo Bill, as a Cheyenne schoolteacher ("Dawn Starlight") who loves Cody from afar. Early in the movie, Darnell sneaks into Maureen O'Hara's bedroom to try on a ruffled dress and what must be about eight or nine petticoats. O'Hara enters and accuses Darnell of being a thief. Darnell flashes back that she wanted to see if she could be as beautiful as a white girl. O'Hara softens and shows the girl the reflection in the mirror--then asks if Darnell has "an Indian brave" who would like to see her in all that finery. Darnell responds with fury at the patronizing reminder, spitting out the word "Indian" and ripping off the dress. The beautiful mirror shots, the dialogue, the mood shattered by the clueless white girl and the pain, frustration and disabling rage of Darnell--it's Imitation of Life, fifteen years before Douglas Sirk filmed it.

Beautiful and schizoid as it is (the cinematographer was Leon Shamroy) the Siren can't imagine someone like Sherman Alexie watching Buffalo Bill and not having a seizure; and there's plenty here that could make others choke on their popcorn as well. As filmmaking, however, it's Wellman. And Wild Bill Wellman always finds a way to lure the Siren.

For the Love of Film III: Last Night I Dreamt I Went to the NFPF Again

The trio of films had been a mixed stew, and Graham Cutts wondered if he had the right crew. His assistant director might have been spreading himself too ambitiously around the production, he complained…[the A.D.] was writing script and title cards, designing the sets, preparing the cast, supervising the costumes and props.

Oh for pity's sake, those assistant directors, always running around making themselves indispensable. Why don't they just go out and direct their own dadgum movies, if they think they're so smart?

In the case of that trio of films mentioned up there, that's exactly what the A.D. in question did.

Hardly anything is known about these films; no prints survive, no press materials or production files. But it is clear that the position and authority of director Graham Cutts was gradually reduced as Alfred Hitchcock moved from job to job, from strength to strength. Ten years later, Cutts would be looking for day work in any studio while HItchcock was in the uncomfortable position of having to give not very significant employment to his former boss.

Aha. Now we're interested, Mr. Spoto. Wouldn't it be nice to see one of these 1923 and '24 efforts, seeing as how this Hitchcock gentleman turned out to be rather a worthwhile filmmaker, in his own small way? "No prints survive"--aw, nuts.

But with Hitchcock, the plot always twists. In this case, we jump-cut to New Zealand more than 80 years later, where a cache of 85 films was discovered, repatriated and preserved by our pals at the National Film Preservation Foundation. Among them were Upstream, a John Ford film previously thought lost, and the two movies our blogathon money helped restore, The Sergeant and The Better Man.

And, when they got to the bottom of the wrapping paper, lo and behold--three reels, or one-half, of The White Shadow, the movie Alfred Hitchcock was so energetically meddling with in 1924. After it was restored in New Zealand, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screened it in Los Angeles last fall, with a new score by composer Michael Mortilla.

What's that? you weren't at the screening? Neither was the Siren, now that you mention it. Heigh-ho, another great filmgoing party that WE MISSED. Let's call Brad and Angelina and see what they're doing Saturday night.

To get serious, one of the recurring motifs here at Self-Styled Siren is access--the continuing quest to see movies that remain frustratingly out of our reach. Our friends at the NFPF know how we feel, truly they do. They have streamed a number of the rescued films on their website, at no charge. It's part of their commitment not only to film history, but to bringing that history to as wide an audience as possible.

Streaming requires some serious lolly, however. In this case, it will take about $15,000 to put The White Shadow online and record the score. So, after asking our readers for their thoughts, the Siren, together with goddess Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and (for the first time this year) her intrepid partner from Down Under, Roderick Heath of This Island Rod, have decided to help the NFPF get The White Shadow out there on the Web, for four months on their site, free, for anyone to see.

There you have it: the mission and fundraising goal of this year's For the Love of Film blogathon, occurring in the merry month of May, from May 13 to May 18, 2012. Let's point out all the angles.

1. This, my friends and patient readers, is a call for participation and posts. The not-so-shocking twist this year is that bloggers are requested to post on any aspect of Hitchcock, which of course suggests topics as diverse as--oh, come on, how hard can that be? Or, as always, posts on all matters film-preservation-related are equally welcome. The Siren's comments section is open for business, as are Marilyn's and Rod's. You don't have to know what you're going to write (you think the Siren knows yet? puh-leez) but do let us know if you're in.

2. We may not be holding the actual hoedown until May, but when it comes to promoting the blogathon to your readers, there is no time like the present. Rod Heath has created some spiffy banners, which will not only dress up a blog no end, but will also get out the good word.

3. David Wells, who keeps the NFPF website humming, will be doing the same for the For the Love of Film Facebook fan page, putting up photos and clips. Just click on that link to become a fan. It will keep you up to date on developments, and even better, becoming a fan helps us raise money. There is also a handy section with a nuts-and-bolts description of just what a blogathon is, should you require that information.

4. Marilyn, whose energy suggests she may have been a military general or perhaps a studio head in a past life, this year has put together a package of sponsor opportunities to businesses who want to help out the NFPF and The White Shadow. There are two levels of sponsorship; both come with benefits that will spread a message to the blogathon's movie-loving base. Anyone interested should email Marilyn at ferdyonfilms(at)comcast(dot)net.

5. Raffle prizes are on offer again this year, courtesy of the NFPF. If you would like to donate a prize yourself, contact Marilyn--that address again is ferdyonfilms(at)comcast(dot)net.

6. Finally, you say you're so excited, you want to donate some money already? Knock yourself out. The NFPF has already set up a donor link, exclusively for the blogathon, right here.

The first year, we helped restore two silent movies. Last year, we raised money for the Film Noir Foundation and their efforts to restore 1950's The Sound of Fury, a key film from the blacklisted director Cy Endfield--and the blogger participation and number of donors rose even higher. This year, we are working to get a piece of film history out there for everyone to see, with a score that's worthy of its importance.

Let's get the word out. Like Jack Favell, we only want to see justice done.