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Dorothy Parker and Cecil B. De Mille
Sep. 4th, 2009 11:36 amWho knew? Dorothy Parker wrote lyrics for a song in De Mille's first sound film, Dynamite (1929):
The movie's theme song, "How am I to Know?" had lyrics supplied by, of all people, Dorothy Parker. As Richard Barrios remarks in A Song in the Dark, "A more inappropriate collision of talents and personalities cannot be imagined, and it was not observed that Parker took to her job with undue gravity." The humorless De Mille rejected her first two song suggestions, "Dynamite, I Love You" and "Dynamite, Blow My Sweetie Back to Me."
-- Movie Diva on Dynamite
The movie's theme song, "How am I to Know?" had lyrics supplied by, of all people, Dorothy Parker. As Richard Barrios remarks in A Song in the Dark, "A more inappropriate collision of talents and personalities cannot be imagined, and it was not observed that Parker took to her job with undue gravity." The humorless De Mille rejected her first two song suggestions, "Dynamite, I Love You" and "Dynamite, Blow My Sweetie Back to Me."
-- Movie Diva on Dynamite
A bronze man still can
Jul. 27th, 2009 08:48 amYesterday's highlight was a late breakfast with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
e_compass_rosa and her sister at Roxy's. After that I worked in the garden a bit, mostly watering to counteract the heat wave. Supposed to get up into the mid-90s this week, which is freaking hot for Seattle. I did a little bit of writing, and went down to the Pacific Inn to watch the Mariners get shelled (for the third time in a row!) by Cleveland. (Hey, E., the Pacific Inn is still kind of a dive bar. Oh well, too late now.) Chatted with Nate the bartender about his upcoming trip to Brussels, Amsterdam, and London, and mine to Montreal. Five days to lift off.
I watched a bunch of movies on DVD this weekend, including two silents by Cecil B. DeMille. Carmen (1915) is an adaptation of the Prosper Mérimée novel that Bizet's opera is also based on. DeMille's film is wonderful piece of romantic-tragic exotica. It was apparently a star vehicle for Geraldine Farrar, who was a famous opera singer of the day, and she's very good in the femme fatale title role, as is Wallace Reid as her victim, Don Jose. Wonderfully over-the-top ending, beautifully shot. The whole film is a visual delight, in fact. The DVD also included Charlie Chaplin's spoof of the film, Burlesque on Carmen, which he made for Essanay. Chaplin's character is called Darn Hosiery. Great physical humor, although at times it seemed like less a spoof than a re-enactment. I need to catch up with Chaplin's work from this era, which is when he made his name, but before he congealed into a Genius.
The other DeMille movie on the disk was The Cheat, also from 1915. This is a bizarre morality tale about a spendthrift upper class woman (Fannie Ward) who gets into debt to a suave and secretly sadistic Burmese ivory mogul (Sessue Hayakawa), who literally puts his brand upon her breast. The lurid branding scene shows that DeMille was already playing with exploitation elements at this early stage of his career, and the climax of the film is notable for something of a race riot in a courtroom, vividly constructed and executed. I followed this one up with the 1931 talkie remake, filmed by George Abbott with Tallulah Bankhead as the high society tramp and Irving Pichel in the Hayakawa role, which has been transformed into that of a white adventurer returning from the jungle. This version is kind of a dud compared to the DeMille, although the morality being promulgated here is bizarre either way. It hinges around the husband being a saint and the idiot wife being transformed by his kindness and self-sacrifice. It's a bit masochistic all the way around.
Still, I continue to be impressed by the DeMille of the Teens. I'm not sure what all still survives, although because he was such a big name, more of his films have survived than some of the others of the era. Much like Chaplin, I suppose.
e_compass_rosa and her sister at Roxy's. After that I worked in the garden a bit, mostly watering to counteract the heat wave. Supposed to get up into the mid-90s this week, which is freaking hot for Seattle. I did a little bit of writing, and went down to the Pacific Inn to watch the Mariners get shelled (for the third time in a row!) by Cleveland. (Hey, E., the Pacific Inn is still kind of a dive bar. Oh well, too late now.) Chatted with Nate the bartender about his upcoming trip to Brussels, Amsterdam, and London, and mine to Montreal. Five days to lift off.I watched a bunch of movies on DVD this weekend, including two silents by Cecil B. DeMille. Carmen (1915) is an adaptation of the Prosper Mérimée novel that Bizet's opera is also based on. DeMille's film is wonderful piece of romantic-tragic exotica. It was apparently a star vehicle for Geraldine Farrar, who was a famous opera singer of the day, and she's very good in the femme fatale title role, as is Wallace Reid as her victim, Don Jose. Wonderfully over-the-top ending, beautifully shot. The whole film is a visual delight, in fact. The DVD also included Charlie Chaplin's spoof of the film, Burlesque on Carmen, which he made for Essanay. Chaplin's character is called Darn Hosiery. Great physical humor, although at times it seemed like less a spoof than a re-enactment. I need to catch up with Chaplin's work from this era, which is when he made his name, but before he congealed into a Genius.
The other DeMille movie on the disk was The Cheat, also from 1915. This is a bizarre morality tale about a spendthrift upper class woman (Fannie Ward) who gets into debt to a suave and secretly sadistic Burmese ivory mogul (Sessue Hayakawa), who literally puts his brand upon her breast. The lurid branding scene shows that DeMille was already playing with exploitation elements at this early stage of his career, and the climax of the film is notable for something of a race riot in a courtroom, vividly constructed and executed. I followed this one up with the 1931 talkie remake, filmed by George Abbott with Tallulah Bankhead as the high society tramp and Irving Pichel in the Hayakawa role, which has been transformed into that of a white adventurer returning from the jungle. This version is kind of a dud compared to the DeMille, although the morality being promulgated here is bizarre either way. It hinges around the husband being a saint and the idiot wife being transformed by his kindness and self-sacrifice. It's a bit masochistic all the way around.
Still, I continue to be impressed by the DeMille of the Teens. I'm not sure what all still survives, although because he was such a big name, more of his films have survived than some of the others of the era. Much like Chaplin, I suppose.
The Godless Girl (1929)
Jun. 23rd, 2009 08:20 amExploitation flicks for high-minded church-goers, that's what Cecil B. DeMille made. Saw this with Scott last night at the Paramount as part of their current Silent Mondays festival. This was the last silent DeMille made, and it was apparently released with some sound footage tacked on at the end. Not a great movie, but very entertaining, as DeMille usually is. It's about the star-crossed love of a Christian class president and the titular teenage head of the local Atheist Society. After an anti-atheist riot in which someone gets killed (an amazing sequence all the way through), the two leads and the humor-relief pal get sent to a reformatory. There they are tortured by a sadistic guard played by Noah Beery. They find common ground in their hatred for their tormenter.
This is pure exploitation film-making we're talking about. There's even an idyllic nude scene along the way, although she's actually wearing a body-stocking. This is the kind of movie where the boy and girl are tortured with electricity as they try to touch each other through a metal fence, and the godless girl gets crosses burned into the palms of her clutching hands. The spectacular finale takes place in a burning building crashing down around our heads while the heroine is hand-cuffed in her cell in the basement. Will no one save her from the hellish flames?
The amount of pious hokum is mind-boggling, but the melodrama is at least sporadically riveting and the big action set pieces are extremely well-constructed. DeMille is one of the more interesting Hollywood film-makers of the teens and early '20s. By this point I think he was getting too big for his own good, but he still had the gloriously over-ripe Sign of the Cross (1932) ahead of him. I want to see more. The mixture of sanctimony and lurid thrills is heady.
On a side note, the regular organist for the Paramount's silent series, Dennis James, was not playing last night. He apparently has been dropped starting with the fall series, and he apparently quit in the middle of this series in protest. The first clue I had was when I saw him across the street from the theater wearing his tux and a piece of black tape across his mouth. People were handing out flyers explaining what was going on. The guy who replaced him at the last minute, whose name escapes me, was actually really good. He's the regular organist at the Paramount in Oakland.
Next Monday is the final film in this series, Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven (1927), which is one of three movies that Janet Gaynor was nominated for Best Actress for in the first Oscars in 1929, and the one for which she won.
This is pure exploitation film-making we're talking about. There's even an idyllic nude scene along the way, although she's actually wearing a body-stocking. This is the kind of movie where the boy and girl are tortured with electricity as they try to touch each other through a metal fence, and the godless girl gets crosses burned into the palms of her clutching hands. The spectacular finale takes place in a burning building crashing down around our heads while the heroine is hand-cuffed in her cell in the basement. Will no one save her from the hellish flames?
The amount of pious hokum is mind-boggling, but the melodrama is at least sporadically riveting and the big action set pieces are extremely well-constructed. DeMille is one of the more interesting Hollywood film-makers of the teens and early '20s. By this point I think he was getting too big for his own good, but he still had the gloriously over-ripe Sign of the Cross (1932) ahead of him. I want to see more. The mixture of sanctimony and lurid thrills is heady.
On a side note, the regular organist for the Paramount's silent series, Dennis James, was not playing last night. He apparently has been dropped starting with the fall series, and he apparently quit in the middle of this series in protest. The first clue I had was when I saw him across the street from the theater wearing his tux and a piece of black tape across his mouth. People were handing out flyers explaining what was going on. The guy who replaced him at the last minute, whose name escapes me, was actually really good. He's the regular organist at the Paramount in Oakland.
Next Monday is the final film in this series, Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven (1927), which is one of three movies that Janet Gaynor was nominated for Best Actress for in the first Oscars in 1929, and the one for which she won.
An evening in old Hollywood
Jan. 18th, 2009 08:30 amI watched three movies last night, spanning thirty years and a nice variety of genres.
First up was A Modern Musketeer (1917). I'm still working my way through the collection of early Douglas Fairbanks films put out by Flicker Alley, and this is the film that gave the set its title. It's based on the story, "D'Artagnan of Kansas," and features Fairbanks as a typical (for this part of his career) rambunctious day-dreamer who was born in a cyclone (a hilarious sequence) to a mother who read Dumas during her pregnancy. He's too restless for the small Kansas town he grew up in and heads west. Wild West adventures around the Grand Canyon ensue. The movie opens with a dream sequence in which Fairbanks plays D'Artagnan, testing out the possibilities of his playing in costume adventures, which would eventually become his forte. This movie still has a lot of comedy in it, and Fairbanks is able to move between slapstick and amazing physical stunts with apparent ease. The director was Allan Dwan, who would direct a couple of his big budget smash hits in the '20s and who said they worked hard to make Fairbanks' stunts look effortless. One of the interesting things about this Flicker Alley set is that you can feel the Hollywood production machine growing in sophistication from movie to movie. It's also interesting that the Fairbanks character is often, as here, kind of an asshole. There's a bit of the ugly American beneath that cheerful, energetic, heroic surface.
Next up was Sign of the Cross (1932). 1932 was the greatest year in movies, and I continue my exploration of the riches. This one's by Cecil B. DeMille, and boy, hm, what can I say? This is a story set in Nero's Rome. Nero's top commander, Marcus Superbus (not to be confused with Atrios' Supertrain) falls in love with a Christian woman while resisting the overtures of the Empress Poppaea. DeMille is famous for making lurid morality tales, and this falls squarely in that contradictory category. 1932 was in the middle of the pre-Code era, so the lurid parts are pretty racy, perhaps most famously Claudette Colbert just barely up to her nipples in donkey milk, although honestly, all of the Roman women might as well be wandering around naked for as little as their clothes cover them. The film's stirring climax is a day at the coliseum in which depraved Romans (cf. the movie audience) avidly watch all manner of horrific killing, including the feeding of Christians to lions. The martyrdom of the Christians is played at the highest melodramatic pitch possible. Their heroism is their willingness to die for their beliefs, only adding to the overall morbidity of the movie. What's interesting is that the Romans get no comeuppance for their depravity, unlike in, say, The Last Days of Pompeii. One wrong note for me was Frederic March as Marcus. He seemed too wimpy for the role, in contrast to his great performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the year before. Charles Laughton chews the scenery as the effete Nero, with a very funny Roman nose glued on. This movie is a hoot, and I kept imagining that the cast of depraved actors and actresses were probably on the side of the Romans throughout.
Finally I watched They Live by Night (1948). This is categorized as a film noir, although except for the fatalism it didn't feel all that noirish to me. It's a story of lovers on the lam, directed by Nicholas Ray. It's visually striking, and there was something about the story that kept triggering unexpected feelings in me. I'm not actually sure what that's about. I guess I have a strong gut feeling that all romance is doomed. Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell play young hicks with no experience of the world (he's been in prison since he was sixteen) who fall in love and try to find a niche where he can go straight. Their naivety is heart-breaking, perhaps a little bit too much so, I dunno. There's definitely a melodramatic feel to it, but also, like the other Nicholas Ray movies from this era, a very personal feel that's strange in a genre movie. It feels both incredibly realistic and incredibly stagy and artificial. It's interesting to compare it to Gun Crazy (1950), which is a very similar story and yet miles different because the woman in the couple is an aggressive femme fatale who takes part in the crimes. I've got to say that on a first viewing, I prefer Gun Crazy to this one, although I also got the feeling that Gun Crazy was riffing off this movie, particularly in some of the shots from the backseat of the car. Anyway, this is another movie that I've wanted to see for years, and I'm glad to have caught up with it. Now could somebody release Ray's The Lusty Men (1952) on DVD? That's one I've wanted to see (without knowing its title at first) since I saw a clip of it in Wim Wenders bizarre memorial to Ray, Lightning Over Water, at the Neptune over twenty years ago.
First up was A Modern Musketeer (1917). I'm still working my way through the collection of early Douglas Fairbanks films put out by Flicker Alley, and this is the film that gave the set its title. It's based on the story, "D'Artagnan of Kansas," and features Fairbanks as a typical (for this part of his career) rambunctious day-dreamer who was born in a cyclone (a hilarious sequence) to a mother who read Dumas during her pregnancy. He's too restless for the small Kansas town he grew up in and heads west. Wild West adventures around the Grand Canyon ensue. The movie opens with a dream sequence in which Fairbanks plays D'Artagnan, testing out the possibilities of his playing in costume adventures, which would eventually become his forte. This movie still has a lot of comedy in it, and Fairbanks is able to move between slapstick and amazing physical stunts with apparent ease. The director was Allan Dwan, who would direct a couple of his big budget smash hits in the '20s and who said they worked hard to make Fairbanks' stunts look effortless. One of the interesting things about this Flicker Alley set is that you can feel the Hollywood production machine growing in sophistication from movie to movie. It's also interesting that the Fairbanks character is often, as here, kind of an asshole. There's a bit of the ugly American beneath that cheerful, energetic, heroic surface.
Next up was Sign of the Cross (1932). 1932 was the greatest year in movies, and I continue my exploration of the riches. This one's by Cecil B. DeMille, and boy, hm, what can I say? This is a story set in Nero's Rome. Nero's top commander, Marcus Superbus (not to be confused with Atrios' Supertrain) falls in love with a Christian woman while resisting the overtures of the Empress Poppaea. DeMille is famous for making lurid morality tales, and this falls squarely in that contradictory category. 1932 was in the middle of the pre-Code era, so the lurid parts are pretty racy, perhaps most famously Claudette Colbert just barely up to her nipples in donkey milk, although honestly, all of the Roman women might as well be wandering around naked for as little as their clothes cover them. The film's stirring climax is a day at the coliseum in which depraved Romans (cf. the movie audience) avidly watch all manner of horrific killing, including the feeding of Christians to lions. The martyrdom of the Christians is played at the highest melodramatic pitch possible. Their heroism is their willingness to die for their beliefs, only adding to the overall morbidity of the movie. What's interesting is that the Romans get no comeuppance for their depravity, unlike in, say, The Last Days of Pompeii. One wrong note for me was Frederic March as Marcus. He seemed too wimpy for the role, in contrast to his great performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the year before. Charles Laughton chews the scenery as the effete Nero, with a very funny Roman nose glued on. This movie is a hoot, and I kept imagining that the cast of depraved actors and actresses were probably on the side of the Romans throughout.
Finally I watched They Live by Night (1948). This is categorized as a film noir, although except for the fatalism it didn't feel all that noirish to me. It's a story of lovers on the lam, directed by Nicholas Ray. It's visually striking, and there was something about the story that kept triggering unexpected feelings in me. I'm not actually sure what that's about. I guess I have a strong gut feeling that all romance is doomed. Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell play young hicks with no experience of the world (he's been in prison since he was sixteen) who fall in love and try to find a niche where he can go straight. Their naivety is heart-breaking, perhaps a little bit too much so, I dunno. There's definitely a melodramatic feel to it, but also, like the other Nicholas Ray movies from this era, a very personal feel that's strange in a genre movie. It feels both incredibly realistic and incredibly stagy and artificial. It's interesting to compare it to Gun Crazy (1950), which is a very similar story and yet miles different because the woman in the couple is an aggressive femme fatale who takes part in the crimes. I've got to say that on a first viewing, I prefer Gun Crazy to this one, although I also got the feeling that Gun Crazy was riffing off this movie, particularly in some of the shots from the backseat of the car. Anyway, this is another movie that I've wanted to see for years, and I'm glad to have caught up with it. Now could somebody release Ray's The Lusty Men (1952) on DVD? That's one I've wanted to see (without knowing its title at first) since I saw a clip of it in Wim Wenders bizarre memorial to Ray, Lightning Over Water, at the Neptune over twenty years ago.
