Dry Ice Factory

The milieus of the film, the dingy apartment Petey shares with her family and the beach bar where she meets San contrasting with the flashy nightclub and its patrons, represent the dual impulses of the main character. For Lupino as Petey is the true protagonist of the film and what disturbs her, more than the antipathy between these two environments through which she moves or her tenuous relationship with the impenetrable San, is the sense of imprecise but tangible malaise which those around her both experience and engender. ... The songs which she sings in The Man I Love capture her emotional vacillation from the idealism of the title song and "My Bill" to the hopelessness of "Why Was I Born?"

-- Film Noir, An Encylopedic Reference to the American Style, 3rd Ed.

Wow. This is a very unusual picture. Is that why it's so obscure? Directed by Raoul Walsh, who got his start in the early days of Hollywood (circa 1913) and kept working into the '60s. By 1947 (or 1945, when The Man I Love was actually filmed) he was such a master of Hollywood genre film-making that he could move effortlessly between genres within a single film, as he does here. Crime film, musical, noir, romantic melodrama -- it should be a confusing mishmash, but instead feels incredibly sophisticated. Part of that is down to Ida Lupino in the lead role. She is just magnificent as the sexy, smart, tough, and tender torchsinger, Petey, on the rebound from a failed relationship, playing temporary matriarch for her troubled sisters and brother, making her way through a dark and disillusioned post-war America, fixing the problems she can but still running aground on hidden shoals of the heart.

Even as as a musical, this is quite different from other Hollywood musicals of the era. The songs, by George Gershwin, comment on the feelings of the characters, but it's all within the context of performing musicians. The film captures the feeling of late night jazz jams like nothing else I've seen. You feel like you're hanging out in a bar with a band that's really feeling it. All shot in film noir style, with sharp shadows and lazy lattices of cigarette smoke.

Walsh once again (as in his great Western noir, Pursued) gives a ninety-minute movie a novelistic density. There doesn't seem to be a wasted move, and the storyline is always evolving, even if its less about plot than about character, feeling, and atmosphere. Early on the slimy nightclub owner, Nick, makes a move on Petey's married sister, Sally, who blows him off. He threatens her, reminding her that her brother works for him. A few scenes later, the worthless wannabe-gangster brother brings her a Christmas present, a beautiful gown. It turns out to be a gift from Nick, and she rejects it. Next scene, Petey shows up at Nick's nightclub dressed in the gown. She's going to get him off her sister's back. She auditions for him with a song. He's glued to her thereafter, but she's quite capable of fending him off, still looking for a man she can love, somebody worthy of her.

There are a lot of subtle visual touches. At the beach club, the owner comes up to say hi to Nick and to be introduced to Petey, whose reputation as a singer has spread around town. She pointedly does not offer her hand to him. He puts his own hand on her shoulder, and she gives it a little look of contempt. She doesn't make a scene, but she lets everyone know where they stand with her.

I suppose this is the kind of movie that will never be widely popular. The cast is too obscure (no Bogart, no Bette Davis), the director is too obscure, the genre too mixed, too contradictory, not quite fatal enough for true film noir, yet too downbeat for a musical. Perhaps it's a film for aficionados. Martin Scorsese loves it, and it's one of the "musical noirs" (along with My Dream Is Yours) that he styled his New York, New York after. It really is something. And I haven't even mentioned the bitch-slapping that Lupino gives one of the men who loses his cool over a no-good woman!

By the way, I got this as a download from the Warners Archive. It's ten dollars cheaper than buying one of the archive movies as a DVD-R (once you take shipping into account), yet there are definite disadvantages. It has DRM that supposedly keeps it from being played on any other device than my computer. There are no chapter stops, so you pretty much have to watch the whole movie at one sitting or start over from the beginning. I can't watch it with my normal movie software, so I can't take screen caps. Still, the ten dollars cheaper is significant. I may get more movies this way, perhaps more Raoul Walsh. (I've previously ordered two Jacques Tourneur movies as DVD-Rs.)

Well, I've got the sniffles, and they seem to have started hitting me Hallowe'en night. I didn't have the energy to watch any of the movies I wanted to, and I went to bed early. Appropriately enough, just after midnight I got a call from Sharee, who was a bit drunk. It'd been a couple months since we last talked, and she confirmed that she plans to go to the Montreal Worldcon. Asked me to get her a membership, in fact. Yay! How many sleeps until Montreal? Another nice thing was that when I filled out the membership form yesterday, I discovered that because of the surging US dollar, her membership was 25 USD less than the one I bought for myself just less than a month ago.

Anyway, yesterday I watched one of the movies I had intended to watch on Hallowe'en, Phantom of the Paradise (1974). This was one of my favorite movies when I was in college, and I still think it's great. A mix of Faust, Phantom of the Opera, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a heavy dose of Alice Cooper and KISS thrown in. The last time I watched it on DVD, which was the first time I'd seen it in years, I felt the music didn't hold up well, but last night I decided it mostly works just fine. It actually covers a number of different musical styles, from Philly doo-wop to California beach grooves to campy heavy metal thunder. It's the '70s-style ballads that seem bland to me now, but there's really only a couple of those. The visual style is pretty eclectic, too, with lots of fish-eye distortions and a reference to German expressionism that I hadn't picked out before. Paul Williams is perfect as the mephistophelian Swan, purveyor of Death Records, with its beautiful dead crow logo that crops up everywhere in the design of the movie. The satire on the hit machine music industry is sharp, oh, and Gerrit Graham as the gay (or at least effeminate) heavy metal singer, Beef, is still probably my favorite character in the whole thing. "I know drug real from real real." It struck me last night that this would make a good double feature with The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which has a similar glam musical and genre mash-up sensibility. Speaking of favorite movies in my college days.

Before that I watched Abel Ferrara's adaptation of William Gibson's New Rose Hotel (1998). I had heard such horrible things about this movie when it came out (direct-to-video, as I recall) that I was never interested in giving it a try, but recently on Dave Kehr's blog Brad Stevens made the case for Ferrara and specifically for New Rose Hotel as one of his masterpieces. I don't know if it's a masterpiece, but it was more interesting than I had expected from other reactions I've seen. It doesn't capture the high tech surface of Gibson's story and in fact barely feels like science fiction at all, but it does get the globalism and corporate conspiracy and Japanophilia. This is the story of a couple of conmen who are hired to convince a Japanese scientific genius to defect from the German coporation he works for. Their plan is to hire a hooker to lure him with the promise of love. So it's a very tawdry film in many ways, with more than a hint of exploitation films about it. (E.g., half-naked writhing girls.) It reminded me of Olivier Assayas' demonlover (2002) in that way, and also in the focus on corporate espionage. There were some similarities to Assayas' Boarding Gate (2007) as well, partly because Asia Argento is in both and because of the talkiness. Christopher Walken is great as Fox, the philosophical song and dance con man with the broken back, and Willem Dafoe is pretty good as the henchman who falls in love with Argento's hooker mole. One of the controversial things about the movie is that much of the story is repeated in the second half. The question is whether the repetition actually changes our understanding of what happens, or whether it just hammers the point home ham-handedly. Not sure what I think on that question myself. I will say that I think demonlover is a much, much better movie on pretty much every level. Still, I'll watch it again at some point, because the structure is something that probably requires a second viewing to fully unwind.

Still sniffling today and feeling run down. Maybe I'll watch more movies and dream of Montreal.

So Edward Everett Horton, Eugene Pallette, Benny Goodman, and Carmen Miranda walk into a bar, and Busby Berkeley says, "Is that a banana on your head, or are you just happy to see me?"

I blame Yes, Dear, But Is It Surrealism?: The (Mostly) Cheerful Irrationality of Busby Berkeley’s “The Gang’s All Here.”

Come to think of it, as a piece of propaganda promoting our Good Neighbor Policy during WWII, this one's about as bizarre as North Star from the same year, which features Walter Huston, Dana Andrews, and Anne Baxter as Russian peasants singing happy Russian peasant songs, promoting our new pact with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile in Nazi Germany, Josef von Baky was creating the lush, trippy, melancholy Münchhausen in full Agfacolor to prove that Germany could out-spectacle Hollywood. What a strange year for cinema. (See also Val Lewton's bleak ode to Satanism and suicide, The Seventh Victim, and Universal's Son of Dracula, about a woman who longs to become a vampire.)

So it was a good weekend. The Solstice Parade on Saturday was a blast, with the weird giant babies and the goddess with the fountain breasts a particular highlight, even if it did slow the parade down. Afterwards, I got a cajun salmon burger at Ballard Brothers and visited with Art Widner, holyoutlaw and juliebata for a while. Art confessed that he invented science fiction gaming in 1943 with a board game he called Interplanetary, in which the planets move and you have to calculate a course to land on them. In the evening, Denys and I went next door for a barbecue, and still later, round midnight, the neighbor came in through my window to drink, smoke, and listen to music. Welcome, o Summer!

On Sunday, I watched movies, starting with the Hong Kong musical Perhaps Love (2005), which ended up gutting me like a trout. It was a fitting companion to Choose Me (1984), which I watched for a second time on Friday. Choose Me is, in akirlu's memorable phrase, an odd species of '80s noir, with an overriding mood of romantic melancholy. The title is a plea for love, and the ensemble of well-drawn eccentric characters are all looking for it in the wrong places -- every one of them (except perhaps Genevieve Bujold's delightful Dr. Love) a femme or homme fatale. It's a smoky, jazzy meditation on how love makes fools of us all, with a wonderful, soulful soundtrack by Luther Vandross, mostly sung by Teddy Pendergrass.

So that got me in the mood, and then Perhaps Love delivered the sucker punch. It's a postmodern musical about the filming of a movie. The movie within the movie is about a girl who loses her memory and is taken into the circus by a ringmaster. The boyfriend she has forgotten comes to the circus to try to get her to remember him. As they film this story, we learn that the actress playing the girl was once in love with the actor playing the boy, and that she left him to become a star under the tutelage of the director, who is now her lover. While I found the male ingenue, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, irritatingly mopey and whiny, the story of first love, lost love, and then the attempt to rekindle it, the desperate plea to not be forgotten ... At the emotional climax of the film, I was bawling like a baby, and that ended up pissing me off, because I thought I was well over it, seven months on. But I dreamed about her last week, and she grew colder and more distant in my dream. So maybe I needed another cry to let go a little more, but it pissed me off to need it.

But instead of spinning out, I counterprogrammed by then watching the first part of Louis Feuillade's serial crime thriller Fantomas (1913) -- a movie, or at least character, that got several namechecks in Banlieue 13. Once in the dreamlike world of silent movies, I had to continue with an umpteenth viewing of the old dark house thriller, The Bat (1926), with its wonderful towering gothic sets that must have influenced Gorey as much as the titular character's bat signal influenced Bob Kane. No romantic melancholy here, and it seemed that everything was okay again. Dunno what or if I dreamed after that, but I woke up this morning refreshed. The gutted trout miraculously swims upstream ...