Somewhere It's Not Summer Anymore



Summer technically isn't over for another few weeks, but anyone who's experienced thirteen years in the American school system knows that summer is over as soon as the bell rings and August switches over to September. Today is also the last day for Summer Under the Stars, though of course not for me, because I've only watched about half the films I picked at the beginning of the month and have written reviews for even less (I'm hoping to get Days 11-13 written by tomorrow evening). What I need is a few solid days of nothing but movie watching, but barring a bad case of food poisoning, I'm not betting on the likeliness of that happening.

Let's just call it an Indian Summer and leave it at that.

Same Name, Different Face: Vans Edition

A couple years ago, before I really started watching a lot of classic films, I bought a book entitled The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger that explained how the studio system during the thirties, forties, and fifties designed movie star personas to such an extent that every aspect of a star's life, from their hair color to the people they dated, and certainly the roles they played, had to first be approved by studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner. In general, the book was very straight-forward and easy to understand, but I would occasionally find myself confused when Basinger would mention an actor named Robert Montgomery on one page, and then twenty pages later mention someone named Robert Taylor, and then twenty pages after that mention Robert Young, and I didn't know who any of them were, much less how to differentiate them by their last names alone. It wasn't until I started my big movie project last year that I learned to match actors' names to their faces and differentiate between them based on their careers and respective roles, so that if somebody mentioned Robert Young, I'd have some idea of who he was separate from all the other Roberts who were famous eighty years ago.

Most people don't have the time (or the inclination) to watch 125 old movies a year, though, so that's why I'm starting a new feature here on Cicada City Lights to help the roughly twelve people who read this blog learn the difference between some lesser known actors of yore: SAME NAME, DIFFERENT FACE. (Drum roll, please.) Every so often I'll pick two or more actors with similar names and do a little write-up for each of them, pinpointing the parts of their lives and careers that make them unique. Though most of the people I'll feature were quite famous in their own time, I'm going to focus on actors who are lesser known, and therefore more apt to be confused with one another, today -- in other words, I'm assuming that most people know the difference between Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn, and that if you don't, it'll be easy enough for you to figure it out.

My first selection, then, is the duo of Van Johnson and Van Heflin, who have been confusing people pretty much since Heflin's death in the early seventies, and maybe even before that. Johnson was definitely the bigger star, but neither was exactly a household name past the 1960s, and I'm guessing the average person today has never heard of either of them. Hence the need for SAME NAME, DIFFERENT FACE!

Buy This Album

The War on Drugs, Slave Ambient

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Ten Review: Irma La Douce

I'm sure a lot of people think of "old movie" as a synonym for "long movie," thanks to the enduring popularity of films like Gone With the Wind and The Sound of Music, but the truth is that the average length of any given film hasn't changed much in the past eighty years -- if anything, films have actually gotten longer as time has gone by, not shorter. Films released prior to 1935 regularly clock in at just over one hour, whereas today, studios rarely greenlight anything shorter than an hour and a half, unless the brevity of the running time is part of the film's gimmick (Cloverfield). One of my chief complaints about films released before 1950 is that they're often too short, that they'll take their time building an interesting story, and then as soon as the story reaches its resolution, BOOM!, they're done, without giving you any time to process what just happened; contrast this with a contemporary film like The Return of the King, which reaches a nice, slow, easy conclusion...and then another conclusion...and then another conclusion before the credits finally roll.

I mention all of this so that when I say that Irma La Douce is too long, people won't think that statement is a given just because it came out forty-eight years ago. Irma La Douce is too long simply because it's too damn long, and because what starts out as an enjoyable if silly movie devolves into utter ridiculousness by the time its two and a half hours are up. Released in 1963, it is director Billy Wilder's adaptation of a musical play by Alexandre Breffort, and part of the problem is that it maintains the musical's fantastic aspects without maintaining any of the actual, you know, music. This is charming at first, presenting a candy-colored but not necessarily unrealistic vision of Paris in the middle of the twentieth century, full of loud hookers and bumbling police and winky barmen who believe in living life to its fullest, but it wears thin as soon as an actual story starts to cohere and the natural tension between fantasy and reality explodes all over the screen. The thing about writing fantasy is that you can do just about anything you want, from talking animals to talking planets, so long as you abide by the rules you establish at the story's outset; as soon as you break those rules, you're done; you've lost credibility. A story doesn't have to have any basis in reality, but it has to make its own kind of sense.

Say, for example, that your story is about a good-hearted, no-nonsense prostitute who looks at sleeping with men for money as a vocation, same as any other, and suffers no ill effects from her promiscuity, except maybe that she's become cynical toward the notion of domesticity. Fine. Not every story about a prostitute has to be a gritty melodrama. And let's say the prostitute falls in love with a goody-two-shoes former policeman and makes him her new pimp, but doesn't understand why he's bothered by her lifestyle. And let's also say that, in order to stop her from sleeping around, the cop impersonates a wealthy British john who eliminates her need for any other customers, and that the cop has to work multiple jobs in secret in order to pay her the money that she'll in turn give right back to him. Alright. Seems unlikely, but it could happen. The story is far-fetched, even whimsical, but not impossible: those are the perimeters it sets up for itself, and for roughly the first two hours, those are the perimeters that the story -- also known as Irma La Douce -- follows.

Then, suddenly, in the film's last act, not only do the wheels come off, they give way to jet packs powered by unicorn farts that rocket the story straight to the moon. Suddenly the cop can bend steel bars; suddenly he can hold his breath under water indefinitely; suddenly the police can't recognize the man they're looking for because he's wearing one of their uniforms. Suddenly we're watching a full-out farce instead of a light comedy. The end of Irma La Douce is an absolute mess, and not even a funny mess; the comedy that buoys the rest of the film gives way to an off-putting strangeness that can only hope to make you laugh because it makes so little sense. Irma is pregnant! She's having the baby at the altar! The police force wants the cop back because...because! The whole progression is a non sequitur, like if I suddenly ended this review on a positive note!

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine both give great performances, that's for sure.

Grade: C+

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Nine Review: Three On a Match

I first became interested in classic films after taking an early film history class during my freshman year in college, and one of the things we spent a lot of time talking about in that class was the difference between Pre-Code and Post-Code films, "Code" referring to the Hays Code, which put heavy censorship guidelines on all Hollywood films released between 1934 and (roughly) 1960. Prior to 1934, the rules governing what was and was not acceptable to show onscreen were much looser, and decisions regarding racier subjects like sex and drug use were often left to the discretion of the individual studios. I don't mean to suggest that Pre-Code films were as graphic as films today, but they were closer than many people think, and in some ways are more shocking, because they manage to be blunt without being crude, as in Golddiggers of 1933, which includes a dance number featuring naked women in silhouette and one woman encased in metal, while a man leers at her and approaches her with a gigantic can opener.

Some of my favorite Pre-Code films are the aforementioned Golddiggers; the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins; and Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living, with March, Hopkins, and Gary Cooper as a trio who devise a ménage à trois arrangement so that each man can be with Hopkins' character without ruining their relationship with one another. (The film never directly addresses the homosexual aspect of the arrangement, but Cooper and March do a lot of very close talking throughout, and both of their characters are artists, and they're frickin Gary Cooper and Fredric March, so I think we can all read between the lines.)



Ann Dvorak

Three On a Match, released in 1932 and directed by Mervyn LeRoy, looks at life from a decidedly more somber point of view than Design for Living, but is no more reserved in the way it addresses taboo subject matter. The title of the film refers to the belief that lighting three cigarettes off the same match is unlucky, and that the lighter of the third cigarette will be the first to die -- in this case, the "three" refers to three childhood acquaintances played by Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, and Bette Davis, whose lives intertwine again as adults. I chose the film for Dvorak, who is technically the "star" of the film, with Blondell a close second; Davis, in one of her earliest screen roles, is given little to do as the brainy, reserved member of the trio. Dvorak is largely unknown to audiences today (possibly because there seems to be some confusion over how to say her name; I've only ever heard it pronounced "D-vorak," but her wikipedia page claims it's pronounced "Vor-shak," which seems a little like me deciding I'm going to pronounce my name "L'bersham"), but she was a popular star for a time in the early thirties, and she makes the most of her part in Three On a Match, playing the role of good-girl-gone-bad Vivian with an honesty that manages never to cross into the grotesque.

  

Unlike Design for Living, the nature of the story in Three On a Match isn't exactly racy; rather, it's the way the story plays out on screen. When Dvorak's Vivian becomes bored with her privileged life, she goes on a bender to end all benders, shacking up in a hotel with a gambler, becoming addicted to alcohol and cocaine, and neglecting to feed or bathe her young son, whom she's dragged along for the ride. We don't see much of the sexual relationship between Vivian and the gambler, but we do see her passed out on a bed with drug paraphernalia scattered all around her, and later shuffling around in a cocaine-induced haze, continuously rubbing at her nose -- none of which would have made it onscreen a few years later. The fact that Blondell's former wild child Mary becomes the hero of the film also likely wouldn't have flown with the censors, because part of what the Hays Code did, much more than censoring objectionable images, was to censor objectionable ideas, like that a bad girl could end up happy and a "good" girl could end up imprisoned in a drug den with her child, her boyfriend, and a bunch of gangsters.

Parts of Three On a Match are rather silly, especially the ending, although it doesn't play quite as silly as it would sound if I wrote it out here. Overall, it's a quick, entertaining movie, and worth watching not only to see three actresses at different stages of their respective careers, but also to look at life in the early thirties without the soft-focus lens of the Hays Code. I have a feeling that, had the film been shot just two years later, the outcome would have been very different.

Grade: B+

Quotable

Whenever I see this commercial, I end up thinking of this:

"Somethin's killin all the birds in my neighborhood..."

30 Rock is back...well, I don't really know when it's back, but I'd assume it's within the next two months.

Rig the Poster: Deceitful Nazi Edition

I spent most of last year doing exactly what I'm doing this month with Summer Under the Stars, only on much larger scale: I picked 125 actors from between the period 1930 and 1960 and watched one movie for each of them, for a total of 125 movies between the months of February and December (plus whatever other movies I happened to watch along the way). It helped that I was unemployed for the first three months of this endeavor, and that I didn't yet have a dog, and that I have a very understanding boyfriend; when I tried to repeat the project this year...things didn't go so well. Who knew that a labrador puppy wouldn't care that my DVR was full of unwatched movies?

Anyway, part of what I did during those halcyon days of 2010 was to save the original theatrical poster for each film on my list, so that by the end of the year I had a visual representation of all the different types of films I had watched. I quickly learned two things from searching for those posters: 1) Between theatrical re-releases, VHS covers, DVD covers, and other promotional material, it can be hard to determine which poster, if any, is the original; and 2) A classic film poster doesn't necessarily have to reflect the film's actual content, so long as the poster does its real job of bringing in a larger audience. In other words, film studios have never been above bending the truth if it's going to make them extra money.

The most common example of this, or at least the one I most often ran into, was using a poster to turn a regular film into a so-called "Women's film," the name broadly given to movies released during the thirties, forties, and fifties that were marketed to women, starred women, and dealt almost exclusively with women's problems. Some, like The Old Maid and Stella Dallas, were genuinely good pictures, but to think of them as black-and-white Lifetime movies is probably an apt comparison; almost all women's films from this period presented men as either lovers or adversaries, and quite a few involved the tried and true premise of a poor girl giving up her baby so that the child might have a better life, only to have the child resent her when she gets older. TRAGIC.

Obviously, not all films released during the thirties and forties were women's films, but women did consistently make up the majority of the theater-going public, so it would have benefited any studio to cater to women when designing their posters. Thus, the transformation of a regular movie into a women's film through clever marketing: if you could draw women into the theatre through a romantic embrace or feminine tagline, what did it really matter if the film in question was actually a noir in which the only women present were either scheming harlots or dead within the first thirty minutes?

The most recent example of this I've come across involves the movie I just reviewed for Summer Under the Stars, Orson Welles' The Stranger. The poster I used for my review de-emphasized the tagline, but in a variant version of the poster, the tagline is front and center:

"The most deceitful man a woman ever loved!"

Alright. Well. That's technically true, isn't it? A former Nazi war criminal who (in the movie) is credited with devising the methods of genocide in the German concentration camps would be the most deceitful man a woman ever loved, wouldn't he? I guess I owe the RKO marketing department in 1946 an apology.

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Eight Review: The Stranger

Sometimes the hardest reviews to write are for the movies I like the most, because how many ways are there to say "I liked it"? When I dislike a movie, I usually feel compelled to explain why I dislike it, and to offer suggestions on how it could have been better -- which in turn gives me more to write about. There are thousands of different reasons to dislike a movie -- or even part of a movie -- but liking a movie usually boils down to nothing more than, "The acting was good. The story was good. The whole thing was good. The End."

With a movie like Orson Welles' 1946 noir The Stranger, writing a review is doubly hard, because not only did I like it (a lot), I also can't delve too deeply into the plot without spoiling the story for people who haven't seen it. The Stranger isn't a mystery, but it often plays like one, employing a detective as one of its main characters and using various well-timed revelations to build suspense and deepen our interest. There's no twist ending, no surprising climax, but to speak too freely about what happens along the way would lessen the impact of watching those events unfold against Welles' crisp autumn backdrop.

The little I can say about the plot is evident within a few minutes of starting the film: Following the end of the Second World War, the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice unwittingly marries a Nazi who has gone into hiding as a prep school teacher in a small town in Connecticut. The woman (Loretta Young) knows nothing of her husband's former life, but quickly becomes suspicious after a goverment detective, played by Edward G. Robinson, shows up and starts asking questions. Welles himself plays the Nazi, in a role he intended to demonstrate his belief that the end of the war in Europe did not necessarily mean the end of the Nazi mindset, and that the remaining members of the Nazi party were still a very real threat, with or without a unified Germany. (This viewpoint may seem slightly paranoid now, sixty-five years after the fact, but in 1946, many of the people who lived through World War II, including Welles, had also already lived through the first war with Germany twenty years earlier, and had no reason to believe there wouldn't be a third war twenty years later.)

As I said, The Stranger is not a mystery, and the purpose of Robinson's detective is not to prove to us that Welles' characer is a Nazi, but rather to prove that fact to the rest of the town, and to his wife, so that Robinson can finally bring him to justice. The strength of the film is not so much the way the story develops but the way Welles, as the director, places the story in the context of a bucolic New England setting. Postwar movies about Nazis tend to be stark, gritty affairs, set in half-destroyed European cities or dark urban landscapes; in The Stranger, Welles' Nazi covers up dead bodies with fallen autumn leaves and spends his free time working on a beautiful old clock tower in the center of town, which somehow makes the things he says and does all the more chilling. The Stranger was one of the first (if not the first) Hollywood productions to use actual footage of Nazi concentration camps, creating a sharp contrast between Young's character's pristine world and the horrors the detective plays for her on a projection screen.

Welles, Young and Robinson all do solid work in their roles, with my only quibble being that Robinson's character is nearly identical to the one he plays in Double Indemnity. Welles' skill as a director outshines them here, especially because he takes the one part with some meat to it and plays it himself, but the cast really doesn't have a squeaky wheel, nor does it have anyone who chews the scenery out from under everyone else. The tone of The Stranger is one of understatement, which may reduce the pleasure of watching it a second or third time, but also greatly enhances the story of an evil man trying to conceal himself within a world he doesn't understand. To find fault with the lack of a Bette-Davis-sized performance is to miss the point of the film entirely.

In other words: The acting was good. The story was good. The whole thing was good. The End.

Grade: A     

All My Days

Alexi Murdoch is going to be in DC on October 18. I may have just found my birthday concert.

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Seven Review: Sidewalks of London

The British film industry prior to World War II doesn't have quite the same clout among international movie fans as does, say, the German or French film industries, which is both an unfair and probably unavoidable result of British cinema being so closely tied to Hollywood and American films. A lot of top-shelf talent came out of Britian during the 1920s and 30s, including the directors David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock, the producer Alexander Korda, and countless numbers of actors, including Charlie Chaplin (pictured), Ronald Colman, Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Unfortunately, most of those actors became stars after they started working with American studios, and while Britain produced many worthy films during the thirties, they also clogged their output with "Quota Quickies" -- cheap, generally poorly-made films designed to combat the influx of American films into the British market. The result was that, while Germany produced such landmark films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Pandora's Box, Britain has fewer truly "important" films to show for itself prior to 1939.

That all changed during the forties, with the emergence of a stronger British film industry and films like The Red Shoes and Brief Encounter, but to completely dismiss the British films of the twenties and thirties is a mistake. A number of excellent films came out of England during those two decades, many of them starring Charles Laughton, TCM's star of the day for the seventh day of August. Laughton never had  leading-man looks, but he became a star nonetheless, thanks to his strong screen presence and ability to slip seamlessly from one character-rich role to the next. During the thirties alone, he played Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, Dr. Moreau in The Island of Lost Souls, and Henry VIII in The Private Lives of Henry VIII. He also excelled in smaller roles, like the murderous bank clerk in Payment Deferred and the alcoholic street busker in the film I chose to watch for Summer Under the Stars, Sidewalks of London.

Released in 1938, Sidewalks of London costars Laughton with Vivien Leigh as a pair of street performers who sing, dance, and recite dramatic monologues as a way to make a living. Laughton and Leigh apparently didn't get along very well in real life, but they have nice chemistry on screen, especially after Leigh's character's career skyrockets, leaving Laughton's character in the dust. Leigh is good, though occasionally overly-dramatic, in her final role before Gone with the Wind, but Laughton is the real star of the film, eliciting both sympathy and laughs as a man whose recitation skills don't quite measure up to his passion for performing.

Sidewalks of London is pretty bare-bones compared to the slick Hollywood productions of the same time period, without much finesse in terms of scene transitions or camera work, but that rough-around-the-edges quality serves the story well, reinforcing the idea of the street performers as raw amatuers, devoid of anything except their talent. It's a nice metaphor for the entire British film industry in 1938: simple and charming, with a great deal of potential simmering just below the surface.

Grade: B

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Six Review: The Long, Long Trailer

People who go into The Long, Long Trailer expecting to find I Love Lucy on wheels should be forewarned: although similarities exist between the two, including Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's characters being named, respectively, "Tacy" and "Nicky" (versus Lucy and Ricky), the overall tone is quite different between the movie and the television show. In fact, that was one of the only things I didn't like about The Long, Long Trailer: Ball and Arnaz seem to be trying so hard not to turn the film into a cinematic version of their seminal television show that neither seems completely comfortable in their own skin. Ball, especially, is the most subdued I've ever seen her, never once letting loose with a Lucy-style wail or facial expression, thereby making some of the slapstick bits in the film -- as when she tries to make dinner in the trailer while it's moving -- seem almost more distressing than funny.

I did like The Long, Long Trailer, though, particularly the extended bit when the trailer gets stuck in the mud during a rainstorm, which culminates with Tacy tumbling out the trailer door and landing in a giant puddle. The atmosphere is what really counts in a movie like this, because a story about a couple who decides to buy a trailer rather than a house after their honeymoon only works if we can see the good as well as the bad sides of living on the road -- the close proximity; the changing scenery; the community of people who also own trailers. Director Vincente Minnelli manages to make the prospect of driving across the country in a trailer look appealing even as we're cringing at the trouble Tacy and Nicky keep running into. The climax of the film, in particular, when the couple tries to steer the gigantic trailer along a narrow mountain road, is a master-class in mixing anxiety with humor, in a way awkward-fests like The Office could only hope to approach.

Grade: A-

Destination: HORROR

The singer Matt Nathanson has never made much of an impression on me one way or the other. Some of his songs, like the radio hit "Come On Get Higher" from a couple years ago, are catchy, and he has a decent cover of the James song "Laid," but at best I'd describe his music as low-impact pop rock, the sort of thing you'd hear in the background of a Kate Hudson movie. He's the modern-day equivalent of James Taylor: not without credibility, but not exactly shaking the world, either. Take a look at him -- doesn't he look like he belongs in the same crowd as Gavin DeGraw and Howie Day?

At least, that's how he used to look, before the release of his most recent album, Modern Love. I can't speak of the quality of the music on the album because I haven't heard it, but I can speak of the album's cover art, in which Nathanson announces to the world that he's apparently decided to become the world's least-convincing Springsteen impersonator:

Wispy facial hair? Check. Greasy sideburns? Double check. General appearance of a New Jersey street rat? Check check check. I'm all for people dressing how they want to dress, but I'm also wary of artists in any genre of music whose appearances undergo an about-face (so to speak) from one album to the next. Growing a beard is one thing, but most people don't completely alter their dress sense from one year to the next after the age of eighteen -- unless they have something to sell.

To fully appreciate what Nathanson has done to himself, take a look at the video for his single "Faster." The video is generally horrible, but the real issue is Nathanson himself, who spends the duration of the clip shimmying and making cutesy faces at the camera like a girl in a Clearisil ad. Men who try to look sexy, whether it's sexy in a musclely sort of way or sexy in a slouchy, just-rolled-out-of-bed sort of way, invariably end up looking like fools, especially when they're shoving their mustaches into a camera lens. And that's not even adressing the real elephant in the room, shiny and gold and affixed to Nathanson's left nostril. Is it...? Yes. It is. It's a nose ring. Like he's Lenny Kravitz.



Destination: HORROR.  

(Springsteen pic via here)

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Five Review: The Breaking Point

When it comes to choosing which classic movies to watch, I often pick based on actors, first and foremost, and then on reputation; choosing films based on genre doesn't work for me. I may enjoy a screwball comedy like On Our Merry Way, but there are many screwball comedies I don't enjoy, even high-profile ones like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. The reverse is also true: I generally don't like musicals, but if I avoided them entirely, I would miss out on great films like Swing Time and Singin' in the Rain. There are a lot of factors that go into whether or not I end up liking a movie, but the genre of the movie is rarely, if ever, one of them.

I tried to keep this in mind when choosing a film for the fifth day of Summer Under the Stars, dedicated to John Garfield. I initially planned to pick the 1938 Michael-Curtiz-helmed Four Daughters, in which Garfield acts as the primary romantic interest in a story about four sisters, but changed my mind when I considered that he's hardly the main actor in Four Daughters, and that the reason I was favoring it over some of his bigger movies was because I didn't think of those movies as being my "type." I ended up picking The Breaking Point instead. Released in 1950, The Breaking Point was Garfield's second-to-last film (he died from chronic heart problems in 1952, at the age of 39), and the story, adapted from the Ernest Hemingway novel To Have and Have Not, follows a poor fishing captain who starts renting out his boat for criminal activities in order to make money to support his wife and daughter. Patricia Neal plays the woman who almost tempts the captain into having an affair, and Juano Hernandez, in a role very similar to the one he plays in Young Man with a Horn, is the captain's loyal best friend.

The Breaking Point is actually the second adaptation of To Have and Have Not; the first, released in 1944, stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and only very loosely follows the plot of the novel. Hemingway himself preferred The Breaking Point and thought it was the best film adaptation of any of his works, but I'm not so sure I agree. The Breaking Point is a perfectly adequate film, well-acted and well-directed, but when it's all said and done and the credits roll, the final effect is less "Wow!" than "And...?" Something is missing, something almost intangible -- a certain uniquely cinematic rise and fall that, in great films, leaves you feeling like you just experienced something. Books can afford to slowly carry disparate plot points to a singular conclusion because our mind processes them differently than it does movies; what works on the page does not always work on the screen. The Breaking Point is a good film, but it's not a particularly memorable film, either.

As for Garfield, part of me wishes I had stuck with my initial choice of Four Daughters, not because I regret watching The Breaking Point or have any real reason to believe I would have enjoyed Four Daughters more, but because it would have afforded me a chance to see him play something other than a stoic tough guy. I like Garfield, but he's yet to really come alive for me because I've yet to see him use the charm and charisma that occasionally peeks out from his roles in movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice or Pride of the Marines. That may not be a fair expectation, but the truth is, though I've recognized the folly in choosing films based on "type," I'm just as guilty as everyone else of preferring actors who play characters I find personally appealing, and of searching for my type of people on screen as well as in real life.

Grade: B

(pic via here)

That's more like it, Johnny!

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Four Review: Raffles

Raffles is an old movie. That may seem obvious, considering that most of the movies I’m watching for Summer Under the Stars were released prior to 1960, but when I say “old movie,” I don’t necessarily mean it in the way I think many people who use that phrase mean it. Casablanca is an old movie, but then again so is Jaws; what makes them different isn’t so much that the former is older than the latter, but rather that, when we look at Casablanca today, we see less of ourselves in it. Maybe the characters in Jaws have dated hairstyles, and maybe we can see the hinges in the shark’s mouth when it finally tries to attack the boat, but those are minor quibbles when compared to the differences we see when we look at a movie about star-crossed lovers during the Second World War. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman don’t just dress differently; they speak differently; they relate differently; they live differently, and under vastly different circumstances, than do most people today. The war movies of the forties, just like the gangster movies of the thirties or the domestic dramas of the fifties, are always readily identifiable as “old movies” because they show a specific time – and often place -- in American history. Watching them is almost like catching a glimpse into another world.

Such is the case with Raffles. Released in 1930 and based on a series of books by E.W. Hornung, it follows the adventures of A.J. Raffles (Ronald Colman), a wealthy Londoner who carries off a series of burglaries under the name “The Amateur Cracksman.” The acting is good; the story is fairly thin, and the conclusion, like the conclusions of many films from the thirties, is rather abrupt; but the real worth of Raffles is the way it acts as an insulated snapshot of a specific era in early twentieth century England. The world we’re allowed to glimpse in Raffles is a world already well on its way to death, the world of the British aristocracy, the world of butlers and chambermaids, of ladies and gentlemen and grand country houses, vestiges of the nineteenth century caught in a slow decline that would become a much swifter decline following World War II. The world we see in Raffles seems so old simply because it doesn’t exist anymore; even the scenes of Raffles and his fiancé Gwen (Kay Francis) dancing in a nightclub take on an old-fashioned sheen in our post-disco reality, where clubs mean dark rooms and thumping stereos, not bright lights and big bands.

The actual age of Raffles is irrelevant, then. It may well be one of the oldest movies I watch this month, but it is the time and place it captured on celluloid that make it seem so old. Compare it to a movie like Pandora’s Box, released one year earlier and without sound, and you’ll probably find Pandora’s Box the more modern of the two by far. The themes in Pandora’s Box—sex; jealousy; destructive personalities—are timeless; the setting is Germany during the Weimer Republic, but the story could take place anywhere, at any time. Raffles isn’t nearly so flexible, but it is still an entertaining look at a part of the past no longer available to us.

Grade: B

Quotable

"You know, that brother Gooper of yours still cherises the illusion he took a great step up the social ladder when he married Mae Flynn of the no-neck Memphis Flynns -- because she was Queen of the Cotton Carnival. I can just see Gooper falling for Her Majesty, sitting on that brass throne, riding in that tacky float down Main Street, smiling and bowing and blowing kisses to all the trash on the street. You know what happened to her? Somebody spat tobacco juice in her face. That's right, some drunk at the Hotel Gayoso leaned out the window and said, 'Hey, hey Queenie, hey there, Queenie!', and sister Mae looked up and smiled and waved, and that drunk shot a squirt of tobacco juice -- pbbtt! -- right in her face! Ha!"



Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Three Review: The Old Maid

No matter how wildly the theme of TCM's Summer Under Stars varies from year to year, one thing remains the same: they will always, without exception, devote a day to at least one of the following five actors: Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, James Stewart, Cary Grant, or Humphrey Bogart. (This year, they're featuring four, with only Hepburn left out.) The reasoning behind this is pretty obvious -- although TCM doesn't depend on advertising dollars to sustain itself, it does, like any television channel, depend on viewers, and the average person is more likely to stop and watch Katharine Hepburn in The Philadephia Story than, say, Maureen O'Sullivan in Anna Karenina, or even Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina. Garbo's name has survived; her visage, less so. In the case of the five actors mentioned above, their names and their faces have persevered, and all of them made films that even the most casual viewer might want to see: Woman of the Year; All About Eve; Vertigo; To Catch a Thief; Casablanca. They also all had personas bigger than themselves, personas that over the years made them into cultural icons, so that even a guy who typically doesn't like "old movies" might see Bogart's face and think, "This is going to be about gangsters. I'll watch it." As nice as it might be to have an entire month dedicated to people like Jean Gabin and Lon Chaney, viewership would almost certainly go down.

Which is not to say I'm disappointed they dedicated the third day of August to Bette Davis. I never mention Davis when asked about my favorite classic actors, but that's only because I assume that liking her is a given. Of course I like Bette Davis. Most people like Bette Davis. (I say "most" because I, for one, would not want to be lumped into the assertion that "everybody" likes Cary Grant, or "everybody" likes Gene Kelly.) I would say that Davis is my favorite of the actors listed above, and when I sit down to watch one of her movies, I feel safe in assuming that she'll be good in it and that, at the very least, I'll be entertained.

The Old Maid does nothing to dispute that assumption. Adapted from a short story by Edith Wharton, it tells the story of two cousins, Charlotte and Delia (Davis and Miriam Hopkins), looking for husbands during the early days of the Civil War. Delia marries for money, setting herself up comfortably for life, but when Charlotte becomes pregnant by one of Delia's former suitors, she finds her own chances for marriage greatly diminished (the former suitor, of course, falls victim to one of the great classic film plot devices and DIES IN THE WAR.) The rest of the story is typical women's film fare: Charlotte attempts to raise her daughter Tina on her own, but knowing she is setting up the child to be shunned by society, she eventually moves in with her cousin and allows Delia to become Tina's mother, relegating herself to the position of the old maid aunt. Commence Charlotte's tableau of self-sacrifice.

The Old Maid is a good film, but it's not great. Both Davis and Hopkins outshine the material, which seems to spend more time skipping ahead through the decades, turning Charlotte's hair grey and bringing her daughter from pigtails to high heels, than it does showing what happens during the years in between. No really satisfactory explanation is given as to why Charlotte feels she has to go to such an extreme in making herself an old maid, nor does Delia ever truly establish herself as an antagonist -- she's tricky, manipulating Charlotte through ostensibly "kind" acts, but she's an angel in comparison to the selfish characters Hopkins plays in The Heiress and The Children's Hour. The film can't seem to decide whether Delia is the ultimate in passive-aggressive villainy, or simply latching on to chances to help herself at the same time she helps her cousin. In the final scene, when she instructs Tina to save her very last kiss for Charlotte on her wedding day, it's hard to say for sure whether she is being kind or once again manipulating her cousin, knowing that with both of their children married off, they'll only have each other for company for the rest of their lives.

This is where I should probably talk about how Davis and Hopkins hated each other in real life; how Davis slept with Hopkins' husband, the director Anatole Litvak; how Hopkins did everything she could to upstage Davis in their scenes together, down to messing with her makeup so she would appear younger in the scenes where Charlotte and Delia have aged; but the same story comes up every time anyone talks about The Old Maid, and I don't have anything new to add to it. Davis and Hopkins did hate each other, but both Davis and Hopkins hated many of their costars, and both had reputations for being difficult on set. Both were also excellent actresses (even Davis admitted as much), and in the end, The Old Maid probably benefitted from their rivalry, infusing every scene between Charlotte and Delia with an undercurrent of dislike and mistrust.

Grade: A-

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Two Review: Nothing But the Truth

Nothing But the Truth (1941) is one of those films you forget about fifteen minutes after you watch it, but every now and again, isn’t that exactly the kind of film you want to see? The premise is simple: A stockbroker played by Bob Hope makes a bet he can tell the truth for twenty-four hours or else lose the ten thousand dollars given to him by a flighty rich girl (Paulette Goddard). Hilarity ensues, especially after he falls in love with Goddard’s character and has to try and impress her while simultaneously telling her family and friends exactly what he thinks of them. Citizen Kane it ain’t, but it’s a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon.

I chose Nothing But the Truth primarily for Goddard, but make no mistake: it is first and foremost Bob Hope’s film. The story is built around his comedy, and he is in nearly every scene, whereas Goddard drifts in and out, acting sweetly daffy in a part better suited for an actress like Carole Lombard. I love Goddard, but she’s at her best playing a smart woman whose charisma makes up for her tendency to manipulate the people around her, as in The Women and An Ideal Husband. As far as early-40s romantic comedies go, I much preferred her in The Crystal Ball (1943).

Most people today know Paulette Goddard, if they know her at all, as the Gamin in Charlie Chaplin’s gorgeous Modern Times, which is both a buoy and a detriment to her legacy: she is radiant in Modern Times, but she is also a typical Chaplin love interest, pretty and sympathetic and…silent. In real life she was intelligent and quick-witted, traits that attracted Chaplin to her in the first place and resulted in their being married—or maybe married—for roughly six years. (Legend has it that she lost the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind because of her and Chaplin’s ambiguous marital status, but having seen the screen tests for GwtW, I’d say she and every other actress lost the part mainly because Vivien Leigh was so obviously the right choice.) Goddard’s best parts are those in which she gets to demonstrate her flair for snappy delivery and infusing otherwise selfish characters with warmth and humor; I would recommend Dramatic School (1938), which she steals from lead actress Luise Rainer, and So Proudly We Hail! (1943), which features one of the best slap-fights in cinematic history.



Goddard was never given much chance as a dramatic actress, and once her looks started to fade, so did she—she left films in the early fifties and moved to Europe with her fourth husband, the novelist Erich Maria Remarque. She never had to act; thanks to a series of lucrative divorce settlements, she was rich when she entered Hollywood and she was rich when she left (smart woman, like I said). The fact that TCM placed her right beside Bette Davis in their Summer Under the Stars scheduling is an interesting juxtaposition—if Davis was the requisite performer, the actress who wouldn’t leave the screen even after a stroke late in life affected her ability to speak, then Goddard was simply a hard worker who did what she could while she was able and then made a quick retreat. Davis is the icon, but Goddard has an impressive film legacy all her own.

Grade: B

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day One Review: Reflections in a Golden Eye

Right off the bat, I'll say that although Reflections in a Golden Eye is far from being a great film, getting to hear Elizabeth Taylor say the line (and I'm paraphrasing here), "She is crazy. She cut off her nipples with gardening shears. Gardening shears!" made the hour and forty-five minutes I spent watching it completely worth it.

Really, Taylor's entire performance as Leonora is the main reason to watch the film. On the surface, Leonora is similar to another great Taylor role, Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but whereas Maggie's selfishness is countered (in the film version) by her basically good intentions, Leonora is just selfish and stupid, the sort of woman who relishes in telling her mentally-unstable neighbor about the time she went riding and saw a thirteen-year-old girl break her neck. Leonora is Maggie without any trace of a conscience, and Taylor, more voluptuous and relaxed here than when she played Maggie, adds depth and life to a film that is otherwise rather flat. Her recitation of all the foods Leonora plans on serving at her dinner party is fantastic, as is the scene in which she strips naked and threatens to drag Marlon Brando out into the street and beat him.

Unfortunately, the rest of Reflections in a Golden Eye lacks the vivacity that she brings to the screen. Based on a 1941 novel by Carson McCullers, the film tells the story of a closeted army captain (Brando) who falls for the private assigned to care for his horses, not knowing that the private, he of the titular "golden eye," is obsessed with the captain's wife (Taylor). The cast is strong, with Brian Keith and Julie Harris doing good work in supporting roles, but the film is so preoccupied with showing the more sensational aspects of its story -- Leonora walking through the house nude; the private (Robert Forster) riding horses "barebacked and bare-assed;" the captain stroking a phallic-shaped candy bar wrapper -- that it never bothers to let us really get to know the characters, or to give us insight into why they act the way that they do.

Brando, meanwhile, despite exhibiting a few moments of brilliance, as in the scene where the captain inspects himself in the mirror, mumbles his way through most of the film, uttering his lines in such a thick Southern accent that the majority of what he says is unintelligible. The two scenes in which he's teaching a class of young soldiers are particularly mystifying; I assume these scenes were meant to give us glimpses into the inner life of his character, but for all I could tell, he was standing in front of the chalkboard giving an off-key reading of Othello.

I chose Reflections in a Golden Eye for Brando because I wanted to see something from the period in between Mutiny on the Bounty and The Godfather, when his career was in flux and many of his contemporaries were either dead (Dean and Clift) or fashioning new personas for themselves (Newman). I ended up feeling like I was watching an Elizabeth Taylor vehicle with a few guest appearances by the actor formally known as Marlon Brando. He isn't bad in his role; he just rarely seems like he's all there, even in the last scene, which is one of the most ridiculous examples of overacting I've ever seen, on his and Taylor's part.

Grade: C+ 

Teen People Meets West Side Story

By all accounts, the recently-released video for Best Coast's song "Our Deal" should be right up my alley. I like Best Coast. I like "Our Deal," not just because it's a good song but also because the band takes their usual beachy-fun sound and slows it down a bit, leaving us with something more akin to walking on the boardwalk at night, watching the lights on a merry-go-round and eating hot dogs in a post-sunstroke daze. And, as the existence of this blog attests, I'm a sucker for anything having to do with mid-twentieth century American culture, especially the SoCal culture that Best Coast likes to evoke.

The problem with the video for "Our Deal" is that, rather than taking the song's laid back sound and creating a visual representation to flow along with it, the video's director, Drew Barrymore, instead lays the song over top of a tired West Side Story/Rebel Without a Cause mishmash populated by actors too young to remember the early 90s, much less the 50s. I have no beef with Drew Barrymore, and I'm probably one of the few people who liked Whip It!, but the same anachronism that plagued that film also drags down "Our Deal." When is the video set, exactly? The main characters are straight out of Grease, but everyone else is running around tagging walls like it's 1982 and dressing like they're either rejects from a John Singleton film or part of a roving pack of digruntled GAP employees who quit in the middle of the spring denim sale. I'm assuming, based on its designation as a "Supervideo," that MTV had a hand in producing the video, and their imprint is all over it -- no matter how hard they try to be "indie" (or quirky, or urban, or anything other than Teen-People-white), their product still comes out with a glossy sheen, like you're looking into a bubble where everyone is perpetually pretty and well-lit.

It's a shame, too, because when they're left to their own devices, Best Coast is perfectly capable of translating their sound into a visual medium. Their video for "Boyfriend" is everything "Our Deal" isn't. It's genuine, it's interesting, and it brings to life an aspect of SoCal culture -- a Latina girl's Quinceañera -- that you don't often see represented on film, rather than cobbling together a story that people have been telling since before Romeo and Juliet.

Let the Star-Gazing Commence

My picks for Summer Under the Stars 2011:

August 1: Marlon Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
August 2: Paulette Goddard in Nothing but the Truth (1941)
August 3: Bette Davis in The Old Maid (1939)
August 4: Ronald Colman in Raffles (1930)
August 5: John Garfield in The Breaking Point (1950)
August 6: Lucille Ball in The Long, Long Trailer (1954)
August 7: Charles Laughton in Sidewalks of London (1938)
August 8: Orson Welles in The Stranger (1946)
August 9: Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match (1932)
August 10: Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce (1963)
August 11: Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show (1971)
August 12: Claudette Colbert in Midnight (1939)
August 13: James Stewart in The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
August 14: Ralph Bellamy in The Wolf Man (1941)
August 15: Lon Chaney in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928)
August 16: Joanne Woodward in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972)
August 17: Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil (1953)
August 18: Jean Gabin in Grand Illusion (1937)
August 19: Debbie Reynolds in Divorce, American Style (1967)
August 20: Montgomery Clift in The Misfits (1961)
August 21: Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife (1940)
August 22: Joan Crawford in Sadie McKee (1934)
August 23: Conrad Veidt in The Thief of Baghdad (1940)
August 24: Joan Blondell in Cry 'Havoc' (1943)
August 25: Burt Lancaster in The Leopard (1963)
August 26: Peter Lawford in Royal Wedding (1951)
August 27: Linda Darnell in Fallen Angel (1945)
August 28: Carole Lombard in Vigil in the Night (1940)
August 29: Anne Francis in Forbidden Planet (1956)
August 30: Howard Keel in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
August 31: Marlene Dietrich in Stage Fright (1950)

Here we go...