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Image of the Day
Nov. 3rd, 2009 01:41 pm
Screen cap from Murder at the Vanities (1934) via James Lileks' The 30s.
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.
Three Maltese Inflections
Aug. 3rd, 2008 11:33 amIn the wake of the discussion of film noir here last weekend, I decided to watch all three versions of The Maltese Falcon on the special edition DVD that Warner Bros released a couple of years ago. I had seen the 1941 version with Bogart at least a couple of times before, including on the big screen at least once at a repertory theater in the days before home video, but I hadn't seen the other two.
The 1931 version, starring Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, is very similar to the 1941 version scriptwise. Since it's a pre-Code movie, Sam Spade is allowed to be more of a womanizing heel than he is in the later version, and there's a lot more overt sexuality in general. It's closer to the novel in these aspects. All the same, there's a tacked-on ending in which Spade visits Ms. Wonderly in the jail and reveals he's taken a new job that is completely unbelievable and out-of-character for him. The pace of the movie isn't as sharp as the 1941 version, but otherwise it's a very entertaining interpretation in its own right, aside from that ending. Fascinating to see how two very similar scripts can be treated so differently. Also fascinating to see an early film interpretation of the hard-boiled private detective, which hadn't become a convention yet.
The 1936 version is called Satan Met a Lady, and it changes all the names and turns the falcon maguffin into the horn of Roland. The tone of this version is comedic, almost farcical. Unfortunately, the tone is also fairly uneven, as are some of the performances, most importantly that of Warren William as Ted Shayne, the Sam Spade character. Nonetheless, there are some lines of dialogue from this version that were used in the 1941 version too, and despite the numerous changes, many of the same story details surface over the short course (72 minutes) of the film. You also get a bottle-blonde Bette Davis, and a nice mugging performance by Alison Skipworth as a female version of the Casper Gutman character. The quality of the image for this movie is the worst of the three on the DVD, which is a shame, because one of the other things it shares with the 1941 version is cinematography by the great Arthur Edeson.
Coming to the 1941 version after seeing these earlier versions, and several years and hundreds of movies since the last time I saw it, the thing that struck me the most was Edeson's visual style. Edeson, although an American, was one of the figures who developed the German expressionist style into film noir style, via gothic horror. The 1926 old dark house picture, The Bat (an influence on the comicbook Batman), shows him using the expressionist style, which he then took into an almost abstract direction in James Whale's Old Dark House (1932). He also photographed Whale's Frankenstein (1931), which isn't quite as dark but features a lot of low angle shots and low key lighting. By the time he got to The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca (1942), he had created an incredibly sophisticated look -- "painting with light," in John Alton's phrase. One thing I noticed in The Maltese Falcon is that he would take lattices of light produced by venetian blinds and use them as abstract ornaments completely removed from their source, including one that is used to frame Spade's head as he's talking to somebody offscreen with nary a window in sight. In scenes in darkened rooms, Edeson manages to outline figures in different gradations of faint light that allow us to make out where everyone and everything is in relation to each other, while reducing them to dark featureless shapes at the same time.
Many of the shots are looking up, as in the userpic on this post, so that figures are distorted and looming. While the tone of this movie is relatively tame compared to the more psychological noirs, there's an effective undercurrent of tension and uncertainty. I had never liked Mary Astor's performance as the femme fatale before, but now that I've seen some of her other movies (including Preston Sturges' comedy, Palm Beach Story from the same year, in which she plays a completely different character), I saw it with new eyes this time. I think part of what put me off the performance before is simply that she's playing a very unlikeable character (as is everybody else). What's impressive is that she's playing a character so deceptive that she doesn't even know herself. There's no identity there, no core, just a succession of extemporized masks. Astor is playing a chameleon, and she's so good at it that, unlike Bogart's mannered interpretation of Spade (very fitting for this highly stylized movie), you don't notice what she's doing.
This is also the first time I've looked at the story as an artifact of the pulps. The backstory of the falcon as an object of treasure could have come from an Orientalist adventure, perhaps one of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories or a planetary romance by Leigh Brackett, where the falcon would be an ancient superscientific device that legend says allowed personality transfers. The cast of grotesques chasing the falcon are familiar pulp characters too. It was terrific, by the way, to see Dwight Frye's nearly wordless psychotic gunsel, Wilmer, in the 1931 version. I've always been a big fan of Elisha Cook Jr's performance in that role in the 1941 version -- thus the userpic -- but Dwight Frye, who is familiar from Universal horror films such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein, is perfect too. Never imagined that Wilmer had so much in common with Renfield!
The 1931 version, starring Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, is very similar to the 1941 version scriptwise. Since it's a pre-Code movie, Sam Spade is allowed to be more of a womanizing heel than he is in the later version, and there's a lot more overt sexuality in general. It's closer to the novel in these aspects. All the same, there's a tacked-on ending in which Spade visits Ms. Wonderly in the jail and reveals he's taken a new job that is completely unbelievable and out-of-character for him. The pace of the movie isn't as sharp as the 1941 version, but otherwise it's a very entertaining interpretation in its own right, aside from that ending. Fascinating to see how two very similar scripts can be treated so differently. Also fascinating to see an early film interpretation of the hard-boiled private detective, which hadn't become a convention yet.
The 1936 version is called Satan Met a Lady, and it changes all the names and turns the falcon maguffin into the horn of Roland. The tone of this version is comedic, almost farcical. Unfortunately, the tone is also fairly uneven, as are some of the performances, most importantly that of Warren William as Ted Shayne, the Sam Spade character. Nonetheless, there are some lines of dialogue from this version that were used in the 1941 version too, and despite the numerous changes, many of the same story details surface over the short course (72 minutes) of the film. You also get a bottle-blonde Bette Davis, and a nice mugging performance by Alison Skipworth as a female version of the Casper Gutman character. The quality of the image for this movie is the worst of the three on the DVD, which is a shame, because one of the other things it shares with the 1941 version is cinematography by the great Arthur Edeson.
Coming to the 1941 version after seeing these earlier versions, and several years and hundreds of movies since the last time I saw it, the thing that struck me the most was Edeson's visual style. Edeson, although an American, was one of the figures who developed the German expressionist style into film noir style, via gothic horror. The 1926 old dark house picture, The Bat (an influence on the comicbook Batman), shows him using the expressionist style, which he then took into an almost abstract direction in James Whale's Old Dark House (1932). He also photographed Whale's Frankenstein (1931), which isn't quite as dark but features a lot of low angle shots and low key lighting. By the time he got to The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca (1942), he had created an incredibly sophisticated look -- "painting with light," in John Alton's phrase. One thing I noticed in The Maltese Falcon is that he would take lattices of light produced by venetian blinds and use them as abstract ornaments completely removed from their source, including one that is used to frame Spade's head as he's talking to somebody offscreen with nary a window in sight. In scenes in darkened rooms, Edeson manages to outline figures in different gradations of faint light that allow us to make out where everyone and everything is in relation to each other, while reducing them to dark featureless shapes at the same time.
Many of the shots are looking up, as in the userpic on this post, so that figures are distorted and looming. While the tone of this movie is relatively tame compared to the more psychological noirs, there's an effective undercurrent of tension and uncertainty. I had never liked Mary Astor's performance as the femme fatale before, but now that I've seen some of her other movies (including Preston Sturges' comedy, Palm Beach Story from the same year, in which she plays a completely different character), I saw it with new eyes this time. I think part of what put me off the performance before is simply that she's playing a very unlikeable character (as is everybody else). What's impressive is that she's playing a character so deceptive that she doesn't even know herself. There's no identity there, no core, just a succession of extemporized masks. Astor is playing a chameleon, and she's so good at it that, unlike Bogart's mannered interpretation of Spade (very fitting for this highly stylized movie), you don't notice what she's doing.
This is also the first time I've looked at the story as an artifact of the pulps. The backstory of the falcon as an object of treasure could have come from an Orientalist adventure, perhaps one of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories or a planetary romance by Leigh Brackett, where the falcon would be an ancient superscientific device that legend says allowed personality transfers. The cast of grotesques chasing the falcon are familiar pulp characters too. It was terrific, by the way, to see Dwight Frye's nearly wordless psychotic gunsel, Wilmer, in the 1931 version. I've always been a big fan of Elisha Cook Jr's performance in that role in the 1941 version -- thus the userpic -- but Dwight Frye, who is familiar from Universal horror films such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein, is perfect too. Never imagined that Wilmer had so much in common with Renfield!
Turn me on, dead men
May. 27th, 2008 09:44 amSo this seemed like an incredibly productive three-day weekend, despite the usual amount of time spent drinking strong beer and staring at the blurry interior of my skull. Got some writing done, got some weeding done, got some editorial work done, got some convention work done (not actually unlike editorial work), got in a bit of socializing, took care of correspondence.
I also watched three Pre-Code movies. The Divorcee (1930) and Female (1933) were similar in being about women who fuck around in an explicit attempt to take the same liberties as men. In The Divorcee, Norma Shearer fucks around to get revenge on her philandering husband. In Female, Ruth Chatterton runs a large car company and doesn't have time for a relationship, so she just fucks her underlings and flings them aside. In both cases, the women ultimately submit themselves to men in the end. What was controversial about them at the time was that the women are not punished for their slutty behavior -- although some might consider the ultimate submission to men punishment enough!
The third Pre-Code movie I watched was Scarface, which was released in 1932 but was filmed in 1930 and then subjected to a battle with the censors and a lot of re-editing and re-shooting. This was the second time I've watched it. It really is a brutal movie, with lots of killings. It also has the remarkable incestuous implications of the relationship between the brutish Tony Camonte and his sister. It doesn't feel like a Howard Hawks movie. It's much darker than the others of his I've seen, with beautiful shadowy cinematography by the great Lee Garmes. Hawks had worked on the scenario for Josef von Sternberg's 1927 gangster movie, Underworld, and Scarface feels like an extension of that movie, at least visually. (Garmes had also worked with Sternberg.)
Finally, I have to share this photo that my brother took in the cathedral in Mérida, the capitol of Yucatán state. I'm not sure why I find this photo so danged funny, but I do. You probably have to drill all the way down to the largest version to see it properly. This cathedral was built from Mayan temples destroyed by the Spanish for the purpose. My T-shirt -- a gift from Sharee -- reads in full, Dead Men Tell No Tales, but the truncation seems utterly appropriate to the venue.
I also watched three Pre-Code movies. The Divorcee (1930) and Female (1933) were similar in being about women who fuck around in an explicit attempt to take the same liberties as men. In The Divorcee, Norma Shearer fucks around to get revenge on her philandering husband. In Female, Ruth Chatterton runs a large car company and doesn't have time for a relationship, so she just fucks her underlings and flings them aside. In both cases, the women ultimately submit themselves to men in the end. What was controversial about them at the time was that the women are not punished for their slutty behavior -- although some might consider the ultimate submission to men punishment enough!
The third Pre-Code movie I watched was Scarface, which was released in 1932 but was filmed in 1930 and then subjected to a battle with the censors and a lot of re-editing and re-shooting. This was the second time I've watched it. It really is a brutal movie, with lots of killings. It also has the remarkable incestuous implications of the relationship between the brutish Tony Camonte and his sister. It doesn't feel like a Howard Hawks movie. It's much darker than the others of his I've seen, with beautiful shadowy cinematography by the great Lee Garmes. Hawks had worked on the scenario for Josef von Sternberg's 1927 gangster movie, Underworld, and Scarface feels like an extension of that movie, at least visually. (Garmes had also worked with Sternberg.)
Finally, I have to share this photo that my brother took in the cathedral in Mérida, the capitol of Yucatán state. I'm not sure why I find this photo so danged funny, but I do. You probably have to drill all the way down to the largest version to see it properly. This cathedral was built from Mayan temples destroyed by the Spanish for the purpose. My T-shirt -- a gift from Sharee -- reads in full, Dead Men Tell No Tales, but the truncation seems utterly appropriate to the venue.
Faulkner and Film Noir
Nov. 7th, 2006 09:49 pmMeant to blog this last week, but Bright Lights Film Journal has reprinted a fascinating article by Daniel Barth called "Faulkner and Film Noir" about Faulkner's experience as a screenwriter. It's actually about much more than that. Not only does it talk about similarities between Faulkner's fiction and the fatalistic hardboiled writers whose works were adapted as film noir, but it also traces the influence of the French symbolists (and Poe) on Faulkner and in turn his influence on French writers such as Camus and Gide. Faulkner apparently admired the great French director Jean Renoir, and I hadn't realized that one of the scripts he worked on was The Southerner (1945), which Renoir directed in his brief wartime sojourn in Hollywood.
An interesting slice of literary history that draws together names I hadn't seen connected before. I wish he had found a way to work in Leigh Brackett's comments about working with Faulkner on the screenplay of The Big Sleep (1946), but now I can't find them again myself. And it also makes me want to read Sanctuary, which is treated as a minor novel by most literary critics but which Barth describes as very noir. It was filmed at Paramount as The Story of Temple Drake (1933), which is a notorious pre-Code movie that I've been dying to see since I first read about it in Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood -- Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934.
An interesting slice of literary history that draws together names I hadn't seen connected before. I wish he had found a way to work in Leigh Brackett's comments about working with Faulkner on the screenplay of The Big Sleep (1946), but now I can't find them again myself. And it also makes me want to read Sanctuary, which is treated as a minor novel by most literary critics but which Barth describes as very noir. It was filmed at Paramount as The Story of Temple Drake (1933), which is a notorious pre-Code movie that I've been dying to see since I first read about it in Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood -- Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934.
Blonde Venus (1932)
Apr. 8th, 2006 09:22 amOne of the great things about the Sternberg-Dietrich movies is that each is very different from the others. They are all about love, sex, and power, and all involve the humiliation of men in some way or another, but each comes at it with a unique approach, with the key difference being Dietrich's role. The generalization is that she is the femme fatale, the destroyer or humiliater of men, but in four of the seven films she's actually brought down herself, even if men are collateral damage as well. Blonde Venus is one of those, as is Morocco, but the resolutions, while equally absurd (in the aesthetic sense), couldn't be more different.
( It's the Depression, and the women are falling )
( It's the Depression, and the women are falling )
Morocco (1930)
Apr. 6th, 2006 09:10 amHeaven! This week saw the release of Marlene Dietrich: The Glamour Collection, which finally gets three more of Josef von Sternberg's films out on DVD (along with two other films starring Dietrich in which I have approximately zero interest). I've seen all three on VHS and have been waiting impatiently for a higher quality version of these visual extravaganzas. Last night I watched Morocco, and it's definitely a huge improvement over the tape, both visually and sonically. It's also a beautiful piece of romantic perversion. Thus: heaven!
( Exotic and erotic )
( Exotic and erotic )
