The TCM Ten 9/1-9/7 August 31, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films , 3 comments
I’m starting a new weekly heads-up of ten interesting films or specials on my favorite channel, Turner Classic Movies in the U.S. This should remind me what to watch for and hopefully help someone else every now and then as well. I’m neither endorsing nor claiming I’ve seen every selection here, only that there’s something worth exploring further. It may be for a particular director, actor, or anything else. The only criteria will be relative obscurity (don’t expect me to point out the monthly Casablanca showing), which automatically qualifies most any film unreleased on DVD. TCM starts their program day at 6:00 AM EST so I’ll follow their lead there. (i.e. all times EST and a new day starts at 6:00 AM instead of midnight) I’m picking out ten things of interest each week, beginning this Saturday, the 1st of September. Every Friday (in theory) I’ll make a new post summarizing what I picked and why. So, here we go:
Saturday September 1
8:00 AM In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1950) - BW-94 mins. - Certainly not obscure, and out in a fine DVD from Sony/Columbia, but still not as well known as it deserves. My favorite film not immutably perched in the film canon.
4:00 PM One, Two, Three (Wilder, 1961) - BW-109 mins. - Wilder’s zaniest film and my favorite non-gangster Cagney performance. Again, available in a good MGM anamorphic DVD, but undervalued nonetheless.
Sunday September 2
6:00 AM The Kid from Spain (McCarey, 1932) - BW-96 mins. - This is the musical comedy Leo McCarey made just before Duck Soup (and right after Indiscreet starring Gloria Swanson). It stars Eddie Cantor as an expelled college student who somehow ends up as the getaway driver following a robbery (I think). His plan to evade the police is simple enough: go to Mexico and pretend to be a famous bullfighter. Things get hairy when the cop following him from the states gets tickets for Cantor’s bullfight. That’s about all I know as I’ve never seen it, but McCarey is one of the more neglected early comedy directors (and this was his prime era) so it’s probably worth a watch. A couple of alternatives to waking up early Sunday morning might be a scandalous Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy at 2:15 AM, followed by Robert Aldrich’s Too Late the Hero.
Monday September 3
8:30 AM Directed by John Ford (Bogdanovich, 2006) - C-111 mins. - The TCM guide sums it up better than I could: “Newly updated and re-edited version of the 1971 documentary chronicling the career of maverick director John Ford. Narrated by Orson Welles.” Not yet available on DVD.
10:30 AM Raw Deal (Mann, 1948) - BW-79 mins. - Along with the previous year’s T-Men, this film noir established Mann as a great B-movie auteur prior to his tackling of, first, the western, and, then, the epic. Available in numerous cheap and terrible digital incarnations. None, I believe, are any better than what TCM shows.
2:00 AM The Wind (Sjöström, 1928) - BW-82 mins. - I’m fairly sure this is the last silent film directed by Sjöström, who perhaps has become just as well known for starring in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. It’s not been released on DVD to my knowledge, with Warner Bros. owning the R1 rights. Starring Lillian Gish, it’s a film I haven’t yet seen, but with a reputation that precedes it a mile, The Wind on television gives me no excuse to avoid the film any longer.
3:30 AM Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Meyer, 1965) - BW-84 mins. - Here’s a perfect example of why I love TCM so much. They follow up The Wind with this, a film where “three go-go dancers resort to murder in search of a family’s hidden treasure.” Probably exploitation king Russ Meyer’s most famous movie, it’s been shown a few times before on TCM, mostly during their Friday night “Underground” series. Another one I’ve not had the pleasure of watching. It seems that both the R1 and R2 DVD releases are no longer in print.
Tuesday September 4
12:15 PM The Sniper (Dmytryk, 1952) - BW-88 mins. - Smack dab in the middle of a nine film Edward Dmytryk marathon to start the day, this is probably the film I’d pick as the most essential (though the Connery-Bardot teaming of Shalako is hard to pass up). Adolphe Menjou and Marie Windsor, of The Killing and The Narrow Margin fame, star in the disturbing story of a man who begins shooting seemingly random people with an assault rifle. A Stanley Kramer production, the film was made by Columbia and remains unreleased on DVD. With Sony’s dismal track record of late, I wouldn’t expect that to change anytime soon.
Wednesday September 5
2:00 PM A Child Is Waiting (Cassavetes, 1963) - BW-105 mins. - Another film produced by Stanley Kramer for Columbia, about a teacher (Judy Garland) who takes an interest in an autistic boy whose parents have left the child at an institute for the mentally impaired and not visited him during his stay. Burt Lancaster also stars as a child psychologist. Kramer apparently took the reins away from Cassavetes in the editing stage so his “authorship” is somewhat questionable, but I know many regard the film fairly well, especially for its handling of mental retardation. No R1 DVD, though there is an out of print French release.
Friday September 7
12:30 PM It Happened in Brooklyn (Whorf, 1947) - BW-103 mins. - An early Frank Sinatra movie, also starring Peter Lawford and Jimmy Durante. A musical love letter to Brooklyn, the place Frank’s character has been dreaming about returning to since serving in WWII. Young and blonde Gloria Grahame the same year she was Oscar-nominated for Crossfire. Not available on DVD, but made by MGM so a Warner Bros. property and thus likely for release at some point.
The Bourne Allegory: Matt Damon as the American Public August 21, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Modern Films, 2000s , 6 comments
Note: This discussion will contain spoilers for the films featuring Matt Damon as amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne, specifically the most recent installment The Bourne Ultimatum.
With the release of The Bourne Ultimatum, it appears that the final chapter in the movie life of Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne has been written. Outstanding box office grosses may prove otherwise, but the protagonist’s quest at least feels complete by the end of Paul Greengrass’s action thriller. The three movies, including The Bourne Identity and its follow-up The Bourne Supremacy, have had an enormous impact on the action genre (witness Casino Royale), the revitalization of Matt Damon’s acting career, and the emergence of Greengrass as a director to pay attention to after he picked up where Doug Liman left off following the first film. They’re all supremely entertaining pictures, as good as any of their ilk this decade, but this last one opened my eyes to a fascinating political undercurrent that may breeze by or simply not interest the popcorn junkies.
The first film, directed by Liman and based on (but not entirely faithful to) the 1980 novel by Robert Ludlum, was released in June of 2002, less than a year after the September 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. At this time, the American people and even the world community were wounded, confused, and angry. An uneasy confidence loomed within the United States. The lingering sense of shock provided constant reminders that we were vulnerable, but our history and perseverance were sources of great, prosperous hope. The persons responsible would pay for what they had done, this horrible, undeserved jolt to the American livelihood.
Similarly, in The Bourne Identity, the character of Jason Bourne, played with stoic efficiency by Matt Damon, is found in Mediterranean waters with two gunshot wounds and unable to remember anything about his past. This is an action hero easy to sympathize with, and, maybe, relate to for the American public. He’s been viciously attacked by persons unknown, but remains resilient and determined to get some answers. It becomes apparent that he’s been trained as a lethal warrior-soldier, fully equipped with the tools necessary to accomplish this new, personal mission. To draw a parallel with the American military, Bourne was no longer fighting someone else’s battle. Just as U.S. troops spent decades intervening in conflicts not their own, Damon’s character had followed orders to kill strangers without asking questions. With these more intimate attacks, the tables had abruptly turned.
By the end of the first film, Bourne has seemingly found peace by moving to a remote area with Marie, a woman who helped him and with whom he’s fallen in love, played by Franka Potente. His temporary happiness distracts Bourne from the bigger picture of his prior life as an assassin for the CIA much the same way the American public were briefly distracted by a “war” with Afghanistan. I’m not intending this as foreign policy debate, but it’s undeniable that whatever the United States did in Afghanistan failed to eliminate our greatest threats. Likewise, Bourne’s attempts at remaining safe, by lying low and ignoring his enemies, proved ineffective in The Bourne Supremacy when Marie is killed by men targeting Bourne.
It’s important to note that The Bourne Supremacy was released in July 2004, roughly 16 months after the United States invaded Iraq and in the midst of a tense presidential election campaign. This was not yet a wholly unpopular war and the American public, despite a significant political divide, retained a faded, yet optimistic hope that the war in Iraq wasn’t completely for naught. The events of September 11 were still very much in people’s minds (as evidenced by much of the campaign rhetoric) and many people believed deposing Saddam Hussein was a step in the right direction for stopping future terrorist attacks. However, the public was increasingly starting to lose patience with the ordeal in Iraq and the slow failure to find Osama bin Laden.
In comparison (and contrast), Bourne in the second entry is devastated and enraged by Marie’s death and begins to remember some of the assignments he had as an assassin. His determination is renewed after two years of peace, knowing the only way to make this end will be to find those responsible and do whatever must be done to stop them. Yet, he’s only so effective in this and barely scratches the surface of the bigger picture. Similar to the pronounced drip of information trickling out to the American public regarding the basis of the war in Iraq and who knew what when, Bourne has repeated flashbacks into his past that slowly give him a better idea of exactly what it was he did prior to his amnesia. In both instances, the revelations are not comforting and show cause for significant regret and governmental distrust.
By the end of The Bourne Supremacy, we’ve learned that our hero has done terrible things in the name of continued “freedom” and suffers guilt and frustration as a result. Parallels can easily be drawn here between what Bourne feels and the contrition experienced by many Americans over shameful incidents at military prison Abu Ghraib involving U.S. soldiers, and, in a broader sense, the utter disruption to the lives of the Iraqi people due to the American invasion. Though this is perhaps a little attenuated of a comparison and will obviously vary based on one’s own personal views, I think it’s still apt. Coincidental or not, Jason Bourne serves as an eerily accurate face of the American public regarding post-9/11 foreign policy, an idea cemented and fully realized in The Bourne Ultimatum.
The third film’s plot picks up where the previous one left off, as Bourne tries to figure out who trained him and for what purpose. His journey leads to London and, finally, back to New York, where he gets tangled up with maniacal CIA man David Straithairn and Joan Allen’s Pamela Landy, returning from the second film. Meanwhile, Bourne is being targeted by CIA-contracted assassins, men doing the same thing he once had done. Essentially, Bourne’s life is threatened by persons acting exactly as he had done prior to the amnesia, similar to how Americans’ safety has been at risk as a result of actions deemed terrorist when committed by our enemies, but acceptable when we’re the ones “protecting our freedoms.”
It’s near the end of The Bourne Ultimatum when everything coalesced for me and I realized Bourne was intended, as opposed to a more coincidental nature in the others, to be seen as a stand-in for the experiences of the American public. He visits Albert Finney’s character Dr. Hirsch at the training facility where everything started for the man then known as David Webb, where he swore his allegiance to the United States of America under the auspices that it was for the greater good. He was a soldier, a patriot willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country by completely transforming himself into a robot waiting for his next mission. Though he was told part of what would be required, Webb was an innocent by virtue of the naive belief that he wouldn’t be misused. Like the American people, his ultimate fault was in placing his complete trust in his nation’s government and not asking questions in the process.
For the populace at large, that trust was betrayed by years of covert tactics handpicking leaders to overthrow unfriendly foreign governments, many of whom unsurprisingly turned on the United States and became our enemies. Just as Bourne comes to realize that his experimental training had been used to assassinate those inconvenient to U.S. foreign policy, the people of the United States have discovered for themselves that they were tricked into supporting a false war using rationales from 9/11 to WMD’s to rosy portraits of freeing little Arab children. The debate over what’s necessary in foreign policy isn’t what matters here, it’s the idea that both Bourne and the America he represents in these films have been trained to accept lies and false mandates and both must deal with the consequences.
The epiphany-rendering scene near the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, when Damon’s increasingly weary character struggles with flashbacks to assassination assignments, reminded me very much of the myriad opportunities my country has had to viciously kill despot after despot. This painful legacy is in full focus here, regardless of the box office grosses and franchise popularity. I’m not complaining one iota. It’s an extremely brave move for the Bourne principals to insert such a subversive, politically charged point in a film destined for millions of Americans to fork over ten bucks worth of admission on any given August night. Jason Bourne expresses his guilt like his fellow Americans: silently and ineffectively. The Bourne character and the American public negligently turned a blind eye to repeated foreign policy improprieties and our punishment is to experience the aftermath. Twin amnesiacs doomed to the nightmares of our sins.
If the entire Bourne franchise is really about mistrust and betrayal at the hands of the presumed good guys, then what does the ending suggest when we’re made to believe justice is served and the malfeasance wasn’t widespread? It suggests a Hollywood movie, I think. That’s what happens in big-budget, studio-financed films. It always has. The fun is in looking between the lines for less obvious, but no less important, themes. I find it highly unlikely that director Paul Greengrass and the rest of the Bourne team didn’t intentionally position their film as a direct shot at the hearts and minds of American moviegoers. It’s subtle enough so that most people won’t leave the theater disturbed and angered at America’s foreign policy sins (which is good, I suppose, so as not to awaken the shiny happy public), but still manages to make its point loud and clear if you’re paying attention.
The poster adds mysterious fuel to the fire, placing Bourne right in the middle of the New York skyline once anchored in part by the World Trade Center towers. It’s an obvious reference to 9/11, but what exactly does it mean? I can only speculate like anyone else, but my interpretation is that Bourne symbolizes the innocence lost by the American public on that tragic day. We’re no longer able to carelessly follow our leaders’ foreign policy actions without realizing the possible long-term ramifications that could indeed be hazardous to our livelihoods. Granted that’s giving the designer a ton of credit possibly undeserved, but I like the idea that the poster would tie up the entire franchise so neatly, coincidence or not.
The Cobweb August 20, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s, Gloria Grahame , 3 comments
I have seen the Technicolor light and it is good. The Cobweb, not so much. Let’s say it’s a bad film, a ridiculous film, even a hideously dangerous film. It’s still kind of fun and it still has an auburn-haired Gloria Grahame in a low-cut glamour dress, a darkly lit nightgown and a shoulder-baring shower scene. So it can’t be all bad, right? The only way to really get through Vincente Minnelli’s CinemaScope melodrama is to realize it’s a trashy mess. The film’s plot centers around drapes in a mental institution’s library, for goodness sake. Over two hours about drapes! Would a jab about The Drapes of Wrath be too much? For this film, I think not!
So The Drapes-, er The Cobweb concerns a mental institution filled with patients waiting to be “healed” and a staff as ineptly nutso as the people being treated. Richard Widmark stars as the head doctor, Gloria Grahame is his wife, Charles Boyer is the faded shell of a once-great psychiatrist, Lauren Bacall plays a new employee getting over the death of her husband and child in an auto accident, and silent film great Lillian Gish is the bitter old woman who’s the clinic administrator. The eccentric cast is rounded out by Oscar Levant as a patient who gets to say some of the best lines in the movie, newcomer John Kerr as a troubled artist (in a role originally set for James Dean until MGM was unable to strike a deal with Warner Bros.), Susan Strasberg as the “phobic” girl Kerr falls for in the institution, Tommy Rettig as Widmark and Grahame’s son and the most sane person in the film, Paul Stewart as another of the clinic’s doctors, and, finally, Fay Wray as Boyer’s wife. Whew, an exhaustingly great cast Minnelli had to work with and at least they’re not the ones who let the audience down.
I can’t say the same for the ridiculous plot and screenplay. Based on a novel by William Gibson, who’s credited with “additional dialogue” in a screenplay written by John Paxton, the film actually tells the story of the trouble surrounding new curtains in the institution library. The competing potential designs are Grahame’s expensive flower pattern, Gish’s economy cotton, and a patient-designed choice based on Kerr’s artwork resembling elementary school fingerpaint drawings. The remaining difficulties in our characters’ lives comprise the meat of the story, but they’re basically ridiculous too. Widmark and Grahame are having (intimate) marital problems, she goes out with Boyer for four hours worth of cocktails to discuss the drapes (!), and when he drops by and makes a move on her the next day she is awestruck at such nerve from Boyer, who delivers an incredulously sincere response when accused of impropriety that must be heard to be believed.
Meanwhile, Widmark closes in on the widow Bacall, who ultimately puts a stop to their short-lived liaison, but not until Grahame has discovered her husband’s impropriety. Remarkably, Widmark and Grahame end the film as a happy couple and we’re left with the words “the trouble was over,” to bookmark the opening “the trouble began” seen at the beginning of the film. This is an absurd conclusion though, as ridiculous as the film’s repeated idea that a little analysis and time at the clinic will cure the patients and make them just like new again. The couple have been in icy turmoil the entire film, one’s had an affair while the other declined her own, and nothing has made the audience see why these two would have patched things up. Widmark especially comes off like a jerk for returning to Grahame only after Bacall declined to continue their affair.
There’s also an internal struggle amongst the administration at the clinic, with Gish, Widmark, and Boyer constantly at each other’s throats, over the drapes and other matters. The patients themselves are portrayed sympathetically, as though they’re rehabilitating broken bones. This dangerously simplistic take on psychological disorder seems common for the time, but no less negligent. Furthermore, the patients appear to have total freedom of their actions. The neurotic narcissist portrayed by Kerr is first seen wading through a field near the clinic and later takes Strasberg to the movies before inciting a panic by disappearing, only to turn up ragged and wet at Widmark’s house. Oscar Levant, who struggled with time in mental hospitals in real life, seems to pop up whenever and wherever a “look how funny the crazy person is” chuckle is required.
Scenes like Levant’s create a too frequent conflict over whether the audience should or shouldn’t be laughing. A significant amount of the film is played so deadly serious (again with the drapes!) that the viewer can’t help but snicker. This is a common problem I have with melodrama of the 1950s, but The Cobweb is almost in a class of its own for such a high-powered cast and director. The score by Leonard Rosenman is a big, overdone part of why the film works better as an unintentional comedy and has the effect of a jackhammer alerting the audience to just how important every little crisis can be. Rosenman also scored Rebel Without a Cause the same year, his first in the movies, and would win back-to-back Academy Awards, for Barry Lyndon and Bound for Glory. His work here in itself isn’t particularly bad, but it really doesn’t belong as a means of simply creating dramatic tension when there should be none. By the end of the film, it already feels like self-parody.
The only bright spots in the film come from its cast of second-tier movie stars. My affection for Gloria Grahame has been well-documented here in the past, and this is one of her better leading roles. Though billed fourth, it’s Grahame’s show and her reunion with Minnelli after taking home an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful three years earlier doesn’t disappoint. I guess I could see where some might find her annoying, and she goes unmistakably over the top, but for such a wacky film it fits. Often relegated to supporting roles, Grahame made the most of her rare star turns and The Cobweb pulsates in a littler higher pitch when she’s on the screen.
It’s also interesting to see Richard Widmark head the cast of a melodrama, in a role more often played by someone like Rock Hudson or even William Holden. I like Widmark, but Minnelli’s film (and the inane script) bring out his weaknesses more than his strengths. Bacall doesn’t bring a whole lot to her role either, and, like Boyer, isn’t in the film as much you’d think from the billing, while Lillian Gish’s character has a personality switch stuck on “angry old bitch.” It’s John Kerr, though, who overacts his way into bad film infamy as a troubled youth caricature. Seeing Kerr is enough to remind the viewer just how compelling James Dean was. Everything Kerr does plays like fake histrionics, bypassing any real emotion, whereas Dean commanded the screen with disillusioned anxiety like you were seeing a young man disintegrate before your very eyes. Don’t blame Dean for Kerr’s style either; East of Eden was released in March, The Cobweb followed in July, and Rebel hit screens in October of 1955.
The Cobweb was made for MGM and its home video rights are controlled by Warner Bros. Never released on VHS or DVD, there was a laserdisc MGM put out prior to losing control of the title. As terrible as the film often is, I would still like to have it on DVD (along with another unreleased Minnelli title Some Came Running) if the color and sharpness are up to snuff. It’s certainly worth seeing if you like Gloria Grahame or, I guess, Vincente Minnelli and if you enjoy melodramas that take themselves way, way too seriously then you might like it outright. Or, you could do like almost every character in the film and soothe your problems with a nip of alcohol. I’d think that would greatly enhance the film and you can smile along to the happy ending as Hollywood tells us everything is just fine. There’s no need to worry because the trouble is now over.
They Live by Night August 13, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1940s, Nicholas Ray , 8 comments
“This boy…and this girl…were never properly introduced to the world we live in…”
Two weeks ago, the director Nicholas Ray had a very good couple of days on DVD. July 30 saw one of his finest films, Bigger Than Life, released in the UK by the BFI, a superb edition highlighted by Ed Buscombe’s commentary and a conversation between film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and director Jim Jarmusch, who served as Ray’s teaching assistant in Jarmusch’s last year at NYU. The following day, July 31, Ray’s debut feature They Live by Night hit the market as part of Warner Bros.’ fourth Film Noir collection in R1. It also featured a commentary, this time by film noir aficionado Eddie Muller and star Farley Granger. It’s been a long time coming for Ray, the most under appreciated of the great American auteurs, and, make no mistake, Ray is indeed a great director in the pantheon of the best English language filmmakers despite remaining woefully underrepresented on DVD in the United States. (ahem, I know you’ll never read this, but that’s directed at you Mr. Rosenbaum) Still waiting for a release in R1: Bigger Than Life, The Lusty Men, Party Girl, The Savage Innocents, Born to Be Bad, A Woman’s Secret, Hot Blood, Wind Across the Everglades, Knock on Any Door, Run for Cover, 55 Days at Peking, and, most frustratingly, Johnny Guitar.
Ray’s tenure making pictures for Hollywood was fairly short-lived, from They Live by Night until Samuel Bronston’s 55 Days at Peking in 1962, during which Ray collapsed with a stress-induced heart attack, was replaced, and ultimately barred from the set. Despite being “interrupted,” as he would later classify his stint directing film, Nicholas Ray made several essential pictures of the 1950s, as well as one each from the preceding and following decades. Lost promises and squandered talent are unimportant when a filmography manages to still include legacy-defining movies like In a Lonely Place and Johnny Guitar. There’s never quite been a director like Nick Ray and his legacy is all the better for it. By my count, Ray made five borderline masterpieces and four nearly great films in a period of only twelve years. I’m not sure any other American director can claim such lofty accomplishments.
One of those nearly great pictures was his debut feature They Live by Night, starring Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell as doomed lovers unable to combat their production code destinies. When filming ended in October 1947, Ray called the movie Your Red Wagon, from the performance of a song by that name in the picture, but as RKO struggled and Howard Hughes took the reins, the film was rechristened They Live by Night and entered theaters in the fall of 1949 with little fanfare. Initially perceived as another run-of-the-mill gangster movie, critics and audiences alike apparently shared a collective shrug of the shoulders. The often-maligned New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther derided the film for its “sympathies for a youthful crook,” though he still seemed to like it well enough and praised Ray’s “eye for action details” and Granger’s “genuine sense of nervous strain.” Even the critics in France, who would later, through the writings of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, come to appreciate Ray much more than those in his native country, seemed unimpressed.
I suppose this shouldn’t be entirely surprising, what with Ray’s lack of any real notoriety or Hollywood experience. They Live by Night was actually released after both A Woman’s Secret and the Bogart-starrer Knock on Any Door played in U.S. theaters, a couple of films which do little to establish much of a reputation. There’s also the fairly pedestrian plot, something which Ray clearly saw past enough to transform into one of his signature works. The film begins with Granger as one of three men who break out of prison, an event not seen, but the aftermath of which is shown in exhilarating detail via helicopter camera shots of the getaway car, and almost immediately plot to rob a bank. His character, Bowie, had served seven years in the joint for murder, since he was only sixteen, and seems content to follow around his escape buddies. When he meets O’Donnell’s Keechie, Bowie is immediately interested despite her somewhat plain looks and lack of romantic experience. As we see during the course of They Live by Night, these are two lonely creatures in the midst of trying to figure out the vast expanse of life and adulthood, with the additional element of one being a fugitive and criminal.
Though Ray’s film is frequently classified as a film noir, it’s really more of a love story set against the backdrop of a life of crime. Bowie and Keechie find each other after short lives without emotional affection. Ray crafts a beautifully moving romance between his two lost souls, as he would frequently do throughout his career, even if the viewer knows things will end tragically. They marry on a whim, during a bus stop at a place that both rents ($1) and sells ($5) wedding rings, and forge a bond of defiant loneliness, the first love of each. It’s really quite impressive how Ray and his actors manage to forge such a sympathetic relationship between a violent criminal and his accomplice. Just look at the many, many other examples of this kind of lovers on the run type of film to see how difficult it can be to establish a fully fleshed out romance between two lawless characters.
These type of films would become quite popular over the thirty or so years following They Live by Night (itself made a decade after the similarly themed Fritz Lang film You Only Live Once). Ray’s film was based on the novel Thieves Like Us, written by Edward Anderson and made again by Robert Altman in 1974 using the book’s title, an apparent invitation or glamorization of crime and deemed inappropriate by the strict production code in effect for the earlier version. In the interim, films like Gun Crazy, Badlands, The Honeymoon Killers, and, most famously, Bonnie and Clyde would repeat the same formula but never with as much soul and heart as Ray’s tragic love story. Ultimately, the audience cannot empathize with cold-blooded murderers unless we’re given some kind of common denominator in which we can relate. First love, perhaps the most emotional period of anyone’s life, is the perfect equalizer and Ray tapped into that here without flaw.
The director, also the sole credited screenwriter of the film, emphasized with notes in his final draft that the movie would be “tender, not cynical; tragic, not brutal” and a “Love Story,” comparing Bowie and Keechie’s plight and short time together to that experienced by Romeo and Juliet. Producer and future Oscar winner/nightmare of prospective law students John Houseman was under non-exclusive contract at RKO, the studio where he had worked at as an assistant on Citizen Kane, and his confidence in the first-time filmmaker can only be described as remarkable. Like his fellow Wisconsin native Orson Welles, Ray would struggle with artistic interference throughout his run in Hollywood, but he would never have as much creative freedom as he did while making his debut feature.
The characters portrayed by Granger and O’Donnell are unique even among Ray’s motley assortment of loners and misunderstood protagonists in that they are truly criminals, evading the law. Granger’s Bowie killed a man seven years previous, escaped from prison and then participated in a bank robbery. O’Donnell’s character is upset with Bowie when his criminal ways continue, but, realistically, what could she have expected? Bowie is certainly not portrayed as a bad man or someone unduly violent, but he nevertheless can’t exactly seek honest employment and make a good life for his new bride and unborn child. His and the film’s end are inevitable, the only way someone on the wrong side of the law can have their fate unfold in the cinema.
As Bowie, Granger is naively sympathetic, giving maybe his best performance on film. The actor would star in two of Hitchcock’s better films, Rope and Strangers on a Train, as well as re-teaming with Cathy O’Donnell for Anthony Mann’s Side Street (included on the WB disc with They Live by Night) before later appearing in Luchino Visconti’s Senso. Granger is not an especially versatile performer, but Ray really worked to his strengths with this role, allowing the actor to show his natural innocence and vulnerability as a young victim of circumstance lost in the frightening reality of the world. Granger recently published his autobiography and, while promoting the book, cited Ray as his personal favorite among directors he worked with, unsurprising praise when you look at the brilliant performances the director continually elicited from his actors. The freedom he gave stars like Bogart, Mitchum, Robert Ryan, and James Mason, among others, shines through in their acting, all arguably never better than when working with Ray.
It’s that willingness on Ray’s part to allow his actors to express themselves without fear of embarrassment or Kazan-like belligerence, as well as the director’s unique penchant for disaffected characters at a time when cookie-cutter conformance was de rigueur in Hollywood movies, that make his films seem so fresh and removed from the standard melodramas and overblown exercises in method acting of the 1950s. Watching They Live by Night, I was reminded of the music of Bruce Springsteen and, specifically, the song “Atlantic City” off his Nebraska album. Both artists were able to locate the pulse of the outsider, someone not particularly special in any way but undeniably American in spirit and attitude. The idea of bettering one’s self and family, even if it means turning to crime or working outside the margins, is a recurring theme in both men’s work. Of course, Ray put his finger on this pursuit some twenty and thirty years before Springsteen.
The newly released DVD of They Live by Night is quite outstanding in picture quality, especially for an RKO film, and it looks noticeably better than Warner’s release of On Dangerous Ground just last year. The more I delve into the Film Noir V.4 set, the more I think it’s truly one of the best DVD releases we’ve had. The special features are a little on the superficial side, with each film sporting a highly condensed short featurette running about five minutes and consisting of talking heads saying little of interest, as well as a commentary. These ridiculously truncated programs seem edited within a millimeter of their lives and leave this viewer wondering how knowledgeable persons like Molly Haskell, Oliver Stone, Alain Silver, and James Ursini could be restricted to such a short amount of time to speak about one of the truly great debut features of the 1940s. The bonus disc included in the Vol. 3 collection was much more interesting and meaty than these little trifles Warner Bros. has given us here. That’s a minor complaint though, and absolutely not intended to dissuade anyone remotely interested in film noir from paying roughly $4 per film for this wonderful set.
Film Noir x 4 August 8, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1940s, 1950s , 4 comments
Four viewings of movies designated as film noir in a 24-hour period and the only side effects I seem to have are the almost uncontrollable desires to rob a bank and get mixed up with a woman who’s no good for me. It’ll pass, I’m sure. The new Warner Bros. Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4 has been my most anticipated in the series yet, mostly because we get ten films instead of the usual five. Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night is the best of the lot, but I was most anxious to first sit down with the disc containing both Andre De Toth’s Crime Wave and the rarely seen Decoy, directed by Jack Bernhard. In between the two, I shuttled off to New York City’s Film Forum to take in a double feature of The Window (directed by Ted Tetzlaff, cinematographer of the Hitchcock masterpiece Notorious, as well as the squishily feelgood Stanwyck-MacMurray Christmas movie Remember the Night) and the absurdly-named Deadline at Dawn, in their NYC Noir series.
Let’s start with Crime Wave. Has there been a more stylish noir ever? The only candidate I can think of from memory is Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, but De Toth probably outdoes even that excellent film here. Sterling Hayden (currently staring in disbelief at the top of my film journal here) plays an aggressively tough homicide detective who’s trying to find the perp responsible for a gas station shooting of a cop. The film’s real focus is on Gene Nelson’s Steve Lacey, an ex-con who’s been straight since leaving prison before he gets roped up with some former associates responsible for the cop killing. Nelson is very good here and it’s a shame he never had much of an acting career. He did go on to direct numerous television shows, everything from “The Andy Griffith Show” to “Starsky and Hutch,” as well as a couple of Elvis Presley movies.
I still miss Hayden when he’s not on the screen though, which is far too often. As far as 1950s unsung actors go, Sterling Hayden is right there at the top of the list. His more famous roles, like in The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, are as crooks, but he’s effectively authoritative here in Crime Wave. The low angle shots De Toth and cinematographer Bert Glennon use to showcase Hayden are remarkably modern. His crisp white shirt and mussed blonde hair are used to great effect and the toothpick as cigarette substitute is a nice touch. Really, the entire film sparkles and shines. It’s even better than I imagined and a clear influence, indirect or not, on film and television crime dramas from the last fifty years. Los Angeles gets its own day in the dark to rival the many, many films noir set in New York City.
One such film, arguably a noir but included in the NYC Noir series nonetheless, is The Window, a 1949 RKO picture. It’s about a boy who tends to make up outlandish stories, reminiscent of the Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried “wolf,” featured on the screen in the film’s opening titles. Tommy, played by the tragic child actor Bobby Driscoll whose unidentified 31-year old body was found by two young boys and subsequently buried in potter’s field less than 20 years after this film was made, can’t sleep one sultry summer night and goes out on the fire escape. He climbs up to sleep outside his upstairs neighbors’ window and awakens to see a man stabbed in the back with scissors fall to his death. When he tells his parents, played by Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale (the future Della Street), they don’t believe him and neither do the police when he tries to convince them.
The film is ultimately effective despite basically every adult acting liking an idiot. After Tommy pleads his case to the police and his parents, what do the parents do but leave him alone all night with the sinister neighbors the Kellersons lurking upstairs. The thin plot is stretched out as far as possible, but redeemed by an exciting and suspenseful climax. It’s interesting just how inept the police are portrayed, including a ridiculous sequence where they have Tommy jump from maybe fifty feet or more onto a large round fireman’s net. Throughout, Driscoll does a nice job of being not too annoying to the audience while playing a character who pretty much should be bothersome. It’s a very entertaining, worthwhile picture languishing in the WB vaults probably because they’re not sure exactly how to release it on DVD. I would expect it sooner rather than later though.
The second movie up in the NYC Noir double feature, also an RKO picture, was Deadline at Dawn from 1946, the only film directed by Broadway veteran (and ex-husband of acting guru Stella Adler) Harold Clurman. First and foremost, the main reason to see this movie is the involvement of Clifford Odets as screenwriter, adapting a story by William Irish, pen name of Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote the source material for Rear Window and, coincidentally, The Window. His dialogue sparkles with ludicrous, unnatural humor. “Out of the mouths of actors…” I can only describe the film as terrifically bad. It’s much funnier, as a result of the Odets screenplay, than most any of the traditional comedies of the era. The biggest laugh might be via Joseph Calleia as the gangster brother of the deceased, who comments to a blonde-haired vixen something to the effect that she would look pretty good if someone cut off her head.
The other thing the film has going for it is the presence of the beautiful and talented Susan Hayward. She plays a dancer relegated to long sessions with a creepy guy who wears white gloves to disguise his infectious hands while performing at a night club. There, she meets a sailor who blacked out after going back to another woman’s apartment earlier in the night and found a large sum of money he’d taken from her. Together, they discover the woman’s been murdered and team up with a cabbie (played by Paul Lukas) to try and solve the crime. It’s highly convoluted, but kind of fun anyway. The cops come off as morons in this one too, notably when they encounter a drunken star baseball player. Instead of taking him home or to the station when he wants another bottle of liquor at three or four in the morning, a police officer literally goes up to the dead woman’s apartment in search of more alcohol for the inebriated athlete.
As the innocent sailor, Bill Williams shows you why he never became a star, instead remaining stuck working in television and the odd film like Son of Paleface. The whole of Deadline at Dawn plays like some kind of nutty noir, ridiculously laughable throughout but entertaining nonetheless. Again, Ms. Hayward’s screen presence goes a long way. If she weren’t in the film, it would have become overwhelmingly silly long before the Agatha Christie-lite finale seen from a mile away. The presence of Odets goes to prove the theory that older movies are far more interesting than modern ones. It seems that these smaller, low-budget films could get away with almost anything as long as it wasn’t explicitly in conflict with the production code. I can’t imagine anything like Deadline at Dawn coming out of either the major studios or the independent ones today. Even if it’s not groundbreaking or all that accomplished, it’s still loads of fun.
Finally, I finished up the WB disc of Crime Wave/Decoy with the bizarre noir of the latter. Directed by Jack Bernhard and written for the screen by blacklisted writer and Crime Wave actor Ned Young, Decoy justifiably has taken a place as a hard-to-find gem of 1940s B-movie crime thrillers. The ill-fated British actress Jean Gillie, who strangely seems to have borrowed Joan Fontaine’s cheekbones, plays a gleefully psychotic femme fatale princess unafraid of seductively killing anyone in the path of $400,000 of stolen bank robbery money buried in a hidden location. The film teeters into sci-fi/horror territory with talk of reviving gas chamber victims through the mysterious methylene blue, but it’s still definitely a noir. When Gillie’s Margot Shelby cheers on the film’s Dr. Craig as he digs for the buried loot, her lines and campy delivery echo orgasmic sexual outbursts.
DVD Savant himself and commentator Glenn Erickson likens Decoy to a Quentin Tarantino movie had he been around in the 1940s (though we all know he probably would have been aping German Expressionism so much that he wouldn’t have been able to create something as original and exhilarating as Decoy), I’d argue that it’s really much closer to David Lynch. There’s such an abundance of weird and perverse happenings going on that someone with an odd sensibility like Lynch would fit more neatly in the world created here than Tarantino. There’s also an often inappropriate score, swelling at odd times and including piano playing that doesn’t match up with the hands of the person seen in the film pounding on the keys. It’s a little mixture of corny and avant-garde and fits completely with the weird atmosphere found in Decoy.
Both Crime Wave and Decoy in the Film Noir set look outstanding, especially the crisp transfer of the former. Decoy is apparently slightly incomplete, judging from Savant’s review, but plays just fine nonetheless. The other two movies, The Window and Deadline at Dawn, are not available on DVD, but both were originally released by RKO and thus owned by Warner Bros., so we’re likely to see them at some point. Neither of these two really qualify under a strict film noir definition - no femme fatale, no brooding protagonist, and no real battle with fate or internal demons - but they’re definitely at least as close as films already classified as such like Dillinger and Clash by Night. Each of the unreleased movies deserves at least one viewing, with very little lurking beneath the surface to justify much more than that if you like interesting subtexts and seeing things from different angles, but neither is as impressive as Crime Wave or Decoy, two giants of unheralded film noir.
Husbands August 7, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1970s , add a comment
A one-sentence synopsis of the John Cassavetes film Husbands might read something like: “Three married assholes combat mid-life crises and their own mortality with a booze-filled jaunt to London.” Such a simple dismissal could be appropriate if you’re not familiar with the wrenching, even crippling, films Cassavetes directed, like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, or if you don’t care for his unique and challenging style. As a filmmaker, Cassavetes is a divisive figure. The most apt word I know when describing his films is “raw,” melting away all that is left of the human soul until we’re left with both the painful and the joyous and none of the interstitial irrelevancies. Life and truth and the pretentious arrogance of art all come together for a couple of hours so that viewers can feel more human, and less alone in the world. Understandably, this is not what many people would classify as entertainment, the main thing I’d guess most audience members are looking for when they watch a movie.
Admittedly, his films even divide my own competing needs for substance and satisfaction and their brilliance seems borne out of the same place that causes self-indulgence and bloated running times. A signature Cassavetes film, to me, leaves the viewer in a far worse mood by the end than however he or she felt prior to watching it. His movies are not so much enjoyable experiences as they are necessary ones, substituting a searching numbness for the typical overwrought disposability found elsewhere. Regardless, there’s no sense of regret over the emotional scars we get from Cassavetes’ films when we’re also given such revealing peeks into the human condition. We may be hurt by what he shows us, but we know we’re better off for having seen it. That awkward nerve he’s unafraid of striking over and over is one mostly ignored in mainstream movies.
The way Cassavetes tends to accomplish this is by creating flawed, real people with natural problems and experiences. It’s not exactly true to everyone’s life, but it still resonates as far closer to reality than more conventional movies. Pain and sadness aren’t accentuated by pop songs or a swelling orchestra. There’s no requirement for redemption or absolute coherence. As in Husbands, most, maybe all, of the main characters in Cassavetes’ films are, indeed, easily and accurately described as assholes, often selfish, insensitive and/or puzzled at where it all went wrong. The striking exception is Gena Rowlands’ Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence, and her reward is debilitating mental illness.
With Husbands, we have three such protagonists, Gus (played by Cassavetes), Harry (Ben Gazzara), and Archie (Peter Falk). The opening credits describe the picture as “a comedy about life death and freedom, ” but it’s mighty difficult to leave these guys with a smile on your face. The film opens with a photo montage of the men horsing around with their families and a fourth friend, whose funeral is the first thing we see taking place. It ends with Gus returning to his family and a black screen. No “The End” because there is no end, perhaps. In between, we see the fragile lives of the three men come full circle over only a few days. We learn Harry’s wife doesn’t love him and Archie has a happy marriage despite feeling his wife is an inadequate lover. All three are weak, arrogant, and childish, skirting responsibilities in favor of drunken all-nighters and a spontaneous trip to London. They’re also charming, likeable, and funny, and, for much of the film, the viewer may see them as sympathetic. These are men we’ve known at some point in our lives, maybe as friends or maybe even a little too much like ourselves.
Following the funeral, Harry, Gus and Archie go out for drinks and end up amidst a group of individuals taking turns singing a song of their choice. It’s a great scene, embodying much of what makes Husbands so compelling and frustrating. The three men are jovial and completely believable as long-time pals. Gazzara is hilarious as he berates the lack of passion in the lady sitting next to him. Falk has an inspired moment where he strips naked and Cassavetes is basically holding court throughout, directing even while playing his role. Again, they’re assholes, but you enjoy watching them. At the same time, it’s remarkable how long Cassavetes the director stays with the scene, allowing song after song with little concern for advancing the “plot.” This indifference to cinematic norms is striking and effectively gives us more than simply a snapshot of the three men at the center of the film.
By devoting so much time to an otherwise ordinary event in these people’s lives, Cassavetes let’s us get to know the characters with little dialogue or action. Falk’s Archie is the most submissive - still volatile, but easily swayed by the other two. (His lack of suavity is later on full display when the men visit a gambling hall in London and Archie has a couple of priceless encounters with women of a certain age.) Both Harry and Gus appear more confident and gregarious, traits later confirmed as the film progresses. They’re also incredibly selfish individuals and not really very good friends to one another. When a sick Archie begs to be alone in the bathroom, Gus laughs at him and refuses to leave the stall while an unsympathetic Harry is in and out of the room clutching his beer. It’s not that they don’t like each other or regret being friends. No, these men, as we see them, are incapable of being good friends or good husbands to anyone, and the short time we spend with Harry and his wife only furthers the idea that these men are basically pathetic creatures unable to cope with the responsibilities of aging.
With the death of their fourth wheel and disintegration of Harry’s marriage, the solution becomes a journey for alcohol, gambling, and women in London. We see each character’s attempts to charm members of the opposite sex and various stages of their clumsy seductions. It’s almost impossible, I’d think, to watch Husbands with an audience and not feel uncomfortable twinges at the purposefully overlong sequence of ambiguous and violent foreplay between Cassavetes’ Gus and his English one-night stand Mary, played by Jenny Runacre. “When is this going to end and how far is Cassavetes (whether as actor or director) going to take it,” I thought to myself. But it’s exactly this type of interactive dialogue between what’s on the screen and the viewer that makes his films so exhilarating decades after they were made. The contrast between what Gus wanted from Mary and Archie’s completely different needs from the woman he’s brought back to the hotel is played absolutely brilliantly. Violent, chaotic camera movements in the former transition to a still, almost frozen framing by the camera on the latter.
A common reaction, knowing that Cassavetes, Gazzara, and Falk were very close in real life, especially after filming Husbands, might be to wonder just how much the film mirrors the actual relationships and personalities of the three stars. It’s likely that much of the dialogue was improvised, either while filming or during rehearsal, but it’s not very helpful to speculate beyond the idea that each actor was playing a character they helped shape while performing alongside two men they socialized with and knew away from the camera. From reading several articles and watching the many interviews with the director on Criterion’s essential John Cassavetes - Five Films
As with other Cassavetes films, like Shadows, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and, to a lesser extent, Love Streams, there are multiple versions of Husbands. The original cut debuted at the San Francisco Film Festival at 154 minutes and was reportedly met with many audience members walking out before it was over. Apparently a portion of the material that was cut prior to the film’s general release consisted of added vomiting footage when Falk feels sick in the bar bathroom. The running time on IMDB has 138 minutes for the original release and 131 minutes for a television version. Columbia did release the film on VHS (though I’ve not seen it) and listed 140 minutes as the running time.
The print I recently saw projected theatrically at the Museum of the Moving Image was advertised to be 154 minutes, but actually ran closer to the 131 minutes IMDB lists for the television version. Cassavetes’ widow, Gena Rowlands, has apparently made sure that only the shorter cut be in circulation. Currently, there isn’t an official DVD release on the horizon for any version anywhere the world, with Sony controlling the rights in R1. It goes without saying that such an omission is extremely disappointing, but also unsurprising given Sony’s lackadaisical treatment of back catalog titles on DVD.
