Blah Indeed November 30, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : General Film , 2 commentsOne of the tiniest of upsides in all this financial crisis mess is the comparative resurgence of the U.S. dollar against several other currencies, including the British pound. Those on the other end obviously see it differently, but the favorable exchange rate has finally allowed for some good deals when importing UK discs. I’ve tended to have good luck especially with Amazon UK, which somehow often gets my orders across the Atlantic faster than its American counterpart even when the latter generally ships from a warehouse either in my own state or just one over.
Back in mid-October I ran across some fantastic prices at another British site, Blah DVD, on titles from Second Run. The small Second Run DVD company generally puts out esoteric films in affordable editions that still have some humble bonus features. I’ve reviewed five of the SR releases for DVD Times, but there are only a handful of others I’ve seen so it seemed like the perfect time to delve deeper. After going through the sale listings, I chose a few that I’d wanted to have for awhile now, $12 apiece after the exchange rate. A reasonable deal by anyone’s standards.
The bargain unfortunately becomes less attractive when you don’t actually receive the items purchased. Blah’s dispatch email stated that I should contact the site if the order wasn’t received within 28 days of shipment. Fair enough. I did that and was patted on the head with a response saying the discs were mailed via Swiss Post and I’d have to wait 6 weeks before anything could be done. I was assured, however, that while most orders arrived within 4 to 8 working days, it can sometimes take longer. Nothing to do but wait then.
After the 6 weeks were up this past Wednesday, I pecked out another email, hopeful now that my DVDs would again be on their way soon enough. The first reply was to confirm my mailing address and Blah also asked if I had received either shipment since apparently my order of just 4 discs was split into a pair of concurrent shipments. I had not received either and I confidently let them know this. I expected to then receive dispatch confirmation, but instead Blah responded by suspending my account and informing me an investigation would now be conducted. Why? Because I’m now a repeat offender with two packages lost - the two packages from my one and only order that were apparently sent on the same day and probably rubberbanded together in some U.S. or Swiss mail center’s lost and found. I can’t even access my account to check my order history now.
A follow-up email confirming that Blah wasn’t pulling a prank on me resulted in little more than nonsense that could’ve been explained better by a monkey. A refund has been promised, most likely placing me as the loser of a few dollars since the exchange rate is even lower now than it was when I was originally billed. My Second Run discs are nowhere to be found and replacements aren’t planned. Placing another order with Blah is out of the question. I think I’ll stick to Amazon UK from now on.
Wilder Times & Dangerous Noir November 16, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, Billy Wilder, Nicholas Ray , 3 commentsI’ve given the day to Billy Wilder at DVD Times. A privilege, I’m sure. Sabrina isn’t one of my most preferred Wilder films, but I do find it supremely entertaining. Hopefully I’ve conveyed that appreciation sufficiently. Sunset Blvd., on the other hand, is most likely my second favorite of his pictures (and it’s my 100th review for the site). The film is incredibly nasty without being obviously so porcupine-y. In that spirit, I think my review may be somewhat bristling to the reader who isn’t a Wilder fanatic. It wasn’t intentional, but it is perhaps a happy coincidence. Nothing personal, I assure you. I’ll acknowledge that both reviews are as imperfect as always, but they’re sincere and, I hope, passionate.
I’ve now been able to review four Wilder films at DVD Times and a few more here. If I ever find the time, I want to put together a comprehensive listing of his work and the DVD status of everything. For now, I’m as surprised as anyone that there have been those four new re-issues this year in R1 alone, plus R2 got a standalone release of A Foreign Affair, which I recently picked up. Only Five Graves to Cairo (available in Australia), Fedora (available in Spain) and Buddy, Buddy remain without an edition either here or in the UK. His very first effort behind the camera, Mauvaise Graine, is also due at some point from Criterion. I’m still anxiously awaiting a few of his films where he served as screenwriter, including Hold Back the Dawn and Arise, My Love, which I’ve not seen.
The other filmmaker who gets me through the night is Nicholas Ray and I’m very proud of a piece I did about his On Dangerous Ground for the wonderfully dark and gloomy site Noir of the Week. I had written about it before, but I’ve become less and less pleased with that and a few other reviews here. It’s a constant learning process.
Intentions of Murder August 12, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1960s, Shohei Imamura , add a commentForever transforming intricate layers of sleaze into something profound, Shohei Imamura continued on the same path he’d journeyed in 1963’s The Insect Woman with its follow-up, Intentions of Murder. The 1964 film approaches many of Imamura’s favorite subjects, notably an unremarkable and unhappy woman dragged through conflict and emerging with complicated victory. The women in his films tend to be forgotten and ignored. If they had any discernible positives, you could also add underappreciated. Their greatest strength is often mere survival, and in the case of this particular heroine, Sadako, it’s achieved accidentally. Through her repeated displays of common, unrefined mediocrity, she transcends the nature of ordinary and demands interest, even sympathy. Sadako’s suffering becomes a theme of sorts, encompassing more than just herself, and her reactions, while appearing perverse at times, remain steadfastly human.
The lived-in commonness Imamura gives Sadako, a young, but frumpy common-law wife and mother, is consistent with the director’s interest in the lower middle class of postwar Japan. His films resonate through an artificial universality, as the audience may not truly share the heroine’s situational concerns, but Imamura’s jaundiced eye makes us feel like we do. There’s a griminess to witnessing Sadako’s invasion, of home, privacy and self. A man, later identified as failing musician Hiraoko, wields a knife as means to take only a few dollars, but becomes inspired in the process to force himself on Sadako. It’s a repulsive act given full horror by Imamura. What’s unexpected, leaving the viewer further disoriented, is the single tear that falls down Hiraoko’s face when he rolls off of Sadako. Aside from bringing to mind questions of character and motive, the tear humanizes, for better or worse, the rapist and presents him not as a crazed monster, but a multi-dimensional person whose actions disgust even himself.
This possibly makes it easier to accept, though not necessarily understand, Sadako’s behavior in the remainder of the film. Her rapist transitions into a stalker, an admirer, and, finally, a lover. When she has the chance to end the arrangement, Sadako summons up the nature of her own humanity by saving Hiraoko’s life. True to the film’s title, her intentions eventually do include murder, but Imamura warns that this is no answer for a much more complicated problem. Metaphor is tucked away inside Sadako’s actions. For such a seemingly simple woman, her strength in feeling and action lends itself to gloriously complex readings. Imamura’s films, especially of this period, are obsessed with showing that those treated as not mattering by more forward-thinking society people are usually the ones who best represent the hope within humankind. Sadako’s basic good, in the face of mistreatment and shunning to the point of not even being acknowledged as the mother of her own son, doesn’t triumph in a soul-stirring moment, but it does more realistically permeate her every action when those around her often deserve much harsher treatment.
Playfully, Imamura gives just such a fate to a particularly loathsome character, the long-time mistress of Sadako’s librarian husband. The director’s dark humor is almost always sprinkled unexpectedly throughout his films, and the shocking, morbidly funny dismissal of the bespectacled would-be spy is deeply satisfying, perhaps even too much so. One gets the feeling that Imamura especially detests the character and those like her who are so hypocritical as to be humorous. Hypocrisy was always a favorite target for the director, and in the case of Intentions of Murder, the heroine’s world crumbles partially due to the Japanese customs that stray far from consistent or fair. Sadako’s rape, of which she was entirely a victim, would have disgraced her entire family had it become known, yet her husband’s affair raises little concern. She develops, in her own primitive way, a plan to deal with the shame, but her ineptitude also becomes a savior.
Imamura may be too clinical to allow a reading of Sadako’s failed suicide as anything other than narratively pleasing. It’s simply one step, the lowest before reversing course, in the continued process of her experiencing life through tragedy. Some viewers have found Imamura cold in his depictions of those barely above the fray, but it’s really more of a chilly empathy, designed as objective though not always staying there. His endings, unlike many of his contemporaries in the Japanese New Wave, tend towards hopeful, perhaps not in a traditional sense, but nonetheless with some degree of optimism. Part of the merit in Imamura’s work is that he doesn’t simply draw attention to a problem and artfully snicker. Intentions of Murder and many of his other films offer subtle reminders that dealing with the issue can be a solution in itself.
Sadako begins the film without claim to her son or husband, not respected by her mother-in-law, and potentially in danger of losing everything. It takes harrowing circumstances to correct these problems, but she emerges, despite the psychological scars, with a more stable situation, and one far better than if she had ignored the rape. If you’re inclined to dig for broad metaphors. Sadako is Japan and her rape is the country’s defeat in World War II, including the twin atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Keeping that analogy, Sadako’s despair was only solved after she came to terms with the attack and its aftermath. Facing it head-on, regardless of intention, became the necessary option.
Though knowledge of Imamura’s films obviously helps put Intentions of Murder in context, it plays quite well even on its own, non-metaphorical terms. The black and white Scope photography is frequently beautiful and framed with great care. A shot of Sadako at the far right of the frame waiting for a train reminds us why 42″plasma televisions should never be the ideal point of reference. The snow storm that hits the Tokyo area near the film’s end cleanses some of the muck, adding purity in mind if not in truth. Visually, scenes like these give the film a richness that begs to be experienced more than simply watched. Another sequence, on a train, is quite commanding, as well. At one point during that particular section, the viewer can see shadows of the camera and its operator in the window. Usually the assumption would be that this was an unintentional error, but given some of the ideas explored in Imamura’s own A Man Vanishes, the director may have at least left it in on purpose. Probably not, but who knows for sure.
Likely to be entirely intentional, and a noted signature in many of Imamura’s films, is the presence of insects or other lowly creatures. Anthropological wonders crawl around the wide black and white frame in obvious parallel to the director’s tread-upon characters. Intentions of Murder has a flashback to a silkworm making its way along Sadako’s thigh before disaster strikes. The worms appear again late in the film and it’s difficult to forget the oozing insides crushed out of one particularly unlucky fellow. There’s also a pair of white mice, pets of Sadako’s young son, featured prominently by Imamura. Though the action isn’t shown, one literally eats through his companion. The image of a dead mouse with a hole through its midsection is another that’s hard to shake after seeing. These apparent interludes are done in such a matter-of-fact style as to be fascinating. I think of the ill-fated worm and mouse and then I think about how Intentions of Murder makes the viewer feel. It doesn’t seem entirely different. Imamura gnaws your insides when he’s not squeezing the life out of you and it’s oddly thrilling.
Tuesday with Shirley July 23, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, Billy Wilder , add a commentHow does one approach Shirley MacLaine? With respect? Surely. With admiration? Maybe. With awe? Possibly. If The Apartment is as close as any to being your favorite film, you probably do so equipped with something related to that movie, book-wise. Arm twisted for no apparent reason, I’d probably choose The Apartment, along with It’s a Wonderful Life and Rear Window, as personal top of the heap. I love most everything about Billy Wilder’s cinematic instruction manual for life, including MacLaine’s performance as elevator operator Fran Kubelik. Miss Kubelik is a bit of a dour character who could so easily be tilted too far one direction or the other, but Ms. MacLaine delivers the sadness, the pixielike allure, the imperfect heroine with a warmth and subtlety that win me over every time. I hope there’s nothing improper about having a crush on a 48-year-old movie character. (Don’t tell me even if there is.)
For me, it’s The Apartment, but I know it’s Terms of Endearment for others, or maybe The Turning Point or any number of her roles. From starting with Hitchcock in The Trouble with Harry to serving as the Rat Pack mascot and doing Some Came Running alongside Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, she’s nothing short of a legend. After The Apartment, I’ll take Being There as a somewhat distant second favorite, even if her role is overshadowed by Peter Sellers. Wilder’s Irma La Douce isn’t close to fully utilizing either director or actress, but it’s another good turn and one I also enjoy. Plus, you know, she’s a little nutty in real life. Growing up, I associated Shirley MacLaine with her, let’s say, unorthodox views on reincarnation, alien life, and probably half a dozen other interesting topics. It took the discovery of her films from the fifties and sixties to really make me appreciate the acting and star presence.
So what would the demographic of a big city book signing be like for an Academy Award-winning actress, best-selling author, beloved icon of spirituality, and Warren Beatty’s big sister? In short, lots of older people and lots of females. The thing with New York City events like this (meaning, free) is that they always seem to attract a myriad display of eccentrics. A rogues’ gallery of poor hygiene, indescribable fashion, and a complete lack of candor. The most vocal members of this type of crowd have seen it all and left social scars all across the city. People will ask most anything, regardless of coherence or appropriateness. Add in some air conditioning when it’s ninety degrees outside and the fun simply creates itself.
Something I’ve begrudgingly grown to love about book signing lines are the inevitable wait times. If I’d not queued up, as my friends on the other side say, I wouldn’t have seen the absolute disgust repeatedly met by the book store worker’s announcements that Ms. MacLaine would only be signing and not reading, answering questions, or singing (!). The delight here was especially exacerbated when Shirley came out obviously unaware of the store’s warning. She very casually inquired about the plan for the night and asked if anyone had any questions for her. Question #1 - Why is the government covering up the existence of UFO’s? clydefro reaction #1 - Oh boy, this is going to be a hoot. Trust me, this is not the kind of thing you can uncover just everyday, for free nonetheless, even in Manhattan. I had hit upon a goldmine of sociological observation.
There has to be a level of sheer, bewildered admiration in seeing a bona fide film legend like Shirley MacLaine be so brave and honest in her opinions. I truly revere her openness. I think she’s touched, but I still have the utmost respect for her willingness to share. Of course, she has a sense of humor about it all. When someone asked about Frank Sinatra, she briefly pretended to summon him from beyond. It also shouldn’t go unnoticed that people really adore this woman, and, at least in this audience, it doesn’t even seem primarily to be for her film roles. I was thrilled when someone finally asked about making Some Came Running for Vincente Minnelli. Shirley’s reply? Minnelli was a great director of curtains, of furniture, but pretty much left his actors alone. (No wonder Minnelli made an entire film about curtains!)
She also gave her fans ample opportunity to speak. With the Q&A already unannounced and, thus, eating into the allotted signing time, a book store employee attempted to cut things off by proclaiming a particular question as the last one. Having none of it, Shirley immediately negated that and made a definitive motion to continue on, which the session did for another ten or fifteen minutes, thirty in all. This allowed for an Obama question (Shirley’s a fan) and the previously mentioned Sinatra moment. Time a wastin’ already, the signing started soon afterwards, but she again seemed intent on meeting and greeting everyone (not a common reaction by any means). I don’t know if everyone was able to have their book scrawled on, but my wait paid off and I was glad to share how much I love The Apartment with her.
There’s a really attractive Billy Wilder book from Taschen that I received as a birthday gift last year. It has lots of photos and concise text about all of his Hollywood films as writer or director. In the back of the book there’s a nice picture with Wilder and MacLaine, and an unidentified man between the two of them. There’s also some white space at the bottom of the page. Perfect. I felt bad about not purchasing her book so I’m now the semi-proud owner of a paperback copy of Sage-ing While Age-ing. Signings have different degrees of security/pushy big dudes. Thankfully, this was fairly laid back and I was able to present the page of the Wilder book to her, which she signed without hesitation but only after trying to remember if she knew who the guy between her and Billy Wilder was. You can see why people love her so much. She does come across as being out there in another place, but she’s also genuine. That’s not a quality often seen or associated with “movie stars.” I think Shirley probably is more interested in another kind of stars anyway. When someone asked about her astrological sign, she asserted herself as a Taurus, placing her index fingers on either side of her forehead.
Of Lubitsch, Sturges, and Wilder June 12, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1930s, 1940s, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch , 4 commentsThough it initially seemed anticlimactic, the recent fire at Universal Studios in California proved to be more damaging than common sense would have first envisioned. Screening prints of the classic Paramount films of the ’30s and ’40s, owned by Universal and including films by the three directors in the post title as well as several others, were destroyed forever. A programmer for Film Forum in New York told the NY Times that a potential Preston Sturges festival would most likely be scrapped as a result. Bad news all around. The media focused on a comparatively inconsequential King Kong theme park ride while beautiful silver celluloid is transformed into ashes. I can’t hardly classify the loss as tragic, a word which really should be reserved for life and death calamities, but it’s upsetting nonetheless.
These three guys, Lubitsch, Sturges and Wilder, form the backbone of classic Hollywood comedy. Their colleague Leo McCarey was another vital presence who also worked at Paramount and whose key films (including Ruggles of Red Gap) remain largely unreleased, now increasingly difficult to see in repertory screenings, as well. Josef von Sternberg is right there, too. If there’s anything at all worth smiling about, it’s that several films related to this trio have recently surfaced on DVD. Quite a few of their films as writer and director are still without a DVD release, possibly deterred even further by this turn of events, but I wanted to mention the few that have reached the market, which, conveniently, I’ve also reviewed for DVD Times.
Back in February, Criterion’s Eclipse line released Lubitsch’s four Paramount musicals in a nifty, extras-less edition. It’s a must-own for fans of the director. Around the same time, Wilder’s The Apartment got a nice upgrade from MGM. (It was originally released by United Artists.) More recently, the BFI put out Lubitsch’s final completed film, Cluny Brown. Made for Fox in 1946, it’s an appropriate ending to a great career. I had vastly underestimated the film after an initial viewing when I put up a review back early last year on this site. The more pertinent Paramount/Universal titles hit stores in April. I’ve reviewed all these, including Wilder’s first film as director in Hollywood, The Major and the Minor. Also out are a pair of Mitchell Leisen-directed efforts. Easy Living, with screenplay from Sturges, and Midnight, a sparkling film written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, finally received their digital releases, I believe, for the first time anywhere in the world.
This still leaves several Paramount-made, Universal-controlled pictures from the Lubitsch, Sturges, and Wilder cycle unavailable on R1 DVD. Most notably - Angel, directed by Lubitsch and available in a Marlene Dietrich set in R2, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, another Lubitsch picture and written by Brackett and Wilder, Remember the Night, written by Sturges and directed by Leisen but not on DVD anywhere, Hold Back the Dawn, which was directed by Leisen and scripted by Brackett and Wilder, and two early Wilder-directed films, Five Graves to Cairo and A Foreign Affair. Both of those latter movies are available in other regions, but still absent in R1. There are a handful of others, things like Arise My Love which I’ve been anxious to see, but I’m now hesitant as to whether any of these films will make it onto R1 DVD in the near future. Despite business concerns, it would seem appropriate for Universal to reveal exactly what films were lost (surely their bookkeeping contains such records) instead of playing so coy.
Hold Back the Dawn May 26, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1940s, Billy Wilder , add a comment
There are two reasons I’ve been anxious to see Hold Back the Dawn. One is Billy Wilder and the other is a nonexistent cockroach. I’ve brought this up before, but it’s a good enough story that you really can’t tell it too many times. When Wilder was still under contract as a writer for Paramount, he took to writing an adaptation of the not-yet-published book that became Hold Back the Dawn with his usual partner Charles Brackett. The director Mitchell Leisen, who had previously helmed Midnight, also written by Wilder and Brackett, was assigned the picture and Charles Boyer had the starring role. His character is a Romanian dancer/gigolo (no doubt an “occupation” close to Wilder’s heart) named Georges who’s stuck in a Mexican purgatory while he waits for his immigration papers to be approved, estimated to be a few years because of the U.S. quota system in place at the time.
Early on in the film, after a cutesy opening where Boyer, in character, visits the Paramount lot (hello Veronica Lake) in search of a director he’d met in Europe (played by Leisen) to tell his story to in exchange for $500, Georges finds himself unshaven and holed up inside his Mexican hotel room. In Wilder and Brackett’s original script, a cockroach was to walk towards a broken mirror and Boyer’s character, frustrated by not being able to obtain his immigration papers, would interrogate the cockroach about the insect’s visa. As Wilder told it, Boyer nixed the idea as being idiotic and Leisen backed his actor. The writers weren’t even allowed on set to protest and Wilder decided that was the last time he’d write a script he couldn’t direct himself. Thus, out of a missing cockroach scene, Billy Wilder’s career as director was hatched. He’d deliberately pick a commercial project, The Major and the Minor, for his first directing job the following year.
So, after finally seeing Hold Back the Dawn, it’s pretty obvious where the cockroach would have appeared and it’s also pretty obvious that it wouldn’t have changed the existing picture much at all. Surely Wilder was looking to branch out into directing anyway and this little episode could have been a push, real or imagined, into that area. I say it wouldn’t have affected the film because Wilder’s gallows humor is already all over that first portion of the movie and hardly present for the remainder. It’s a very atypical Wilder script, briefly witty in the early goings but mostly a conventional romantic drama told quite well. The story is good, the acting is superb, and the direction by Leisen is unimaginative and adequate. Had the cockroach scene been filmed and put in the movie, the only difference would have been an odd little interlude unessential to the plot or characterizations. Yet, Wilder was notorious for demanding his scripts be adhered to by the actors without changing a word or even an emphasis. One wonders if he’d have been so strict later on had Leisen filmed what was written. (Probably so!)
Some of the most obviously Wilderian touches are, as I alluded to above, in the first act. Not only was Wilder likely able to step into Georges’ dancing and gigolo shoes, as he’d been in the same position while living in Berlin, but the Mexican layover before entering the United States was one Wilder had likewise experienced firsthand. After leaving Germany upon Hitler’s rise to power, he first went to Paris and then tried to come into the U.S. via Mexico. He apparently came across an immigration officer who was a film enthusiast and, after learning of Wilder’s desire to write movies, allowed him in the country with the instruction to “make good ones.” Boyer’s Georges isn’t so lucky. He’s stuck in the Hotel Esperanza when his former dancing partner Anita (Paulette Goddard) happens to show up. She tells him that marrying an American will get him into the country in just four weeks.
Here’s where Wilder’s classic opportunist model comes in, as Georges thinks back to the Californian schoolteacher he encountered earlier. Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland) had a car full of students on a field trip for the Fourth of July when she rear-ended another vehicle. The car must be fixed and Georges just happens to pass by the mechanic shop. She’s anxious to head back home, but Georges, after a brief and failed attempt on another woman, needs just a couple of hours to win her over. It’s loneliness finds loneliness when the two meet. Emmy can’t resist his charms. Georges then conspires with Anita to wait out the four weeks so that he can get a quick divorce and the two dance partners can bring their show to New York. The monkey wrench is Emmy showing up unexpectedly and Georges quickly taking her on an impromptu honeymoon. His feelings begin to change and he realizes he can’t just coldly discard Emmy.
This second act, where the Boyer character hardly resembles the scoundrel from earlier, plays exactly like a classic Hollywood movie. That is to say that it’s entertaining, but safe and predictable. The third act shakes things up a little by letting Paulette Goddard shine first and de Havilland follow in an Oscar-worthy scene that mauls over the other actors in its force of nature-type glory. The sequence isn’t overdone or played with histrionics, a nice reigning in from Leisen, but it’s powerful all the same. It sounds patently obvious, but de Havilland really was some kind of actress. Watching the movie with the knowledge that Wilder and Brackett were apparently still writing the final portion of the film when they learned Boyer had refused to soliloquy with their cockroach, it’s easy to recognize how they turned the actor from star to third banana.
I’m not going to say the film suffers from this transition in focus because it’s still a good picture, but the first act certainly feels like a Wilder movie whereas the rest just doesn’t. Georges changes, leading to the happy ending audiences expect even now from Hold Back the Dawn, and he’s far less interesting as a result. Again, his reform is one we can actively root for in the context of classic movie happy resolutions, but it somewhat betrays the original character and strips the film of any more of those Wilder touches I love so much. You put the cockroach scene in and we might have altered second and third acts, but, by itself, I don’t think it would have tipped the scales much either way in the version that exists now. My hindsight goggles are content to keep it out of the picture so we can enjoy Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, The Apartment, etc. Seems like a fair trade-off.
(Hold Back the Dawn is not on DVD anywhere in the world to my knowledge and is controlled by Universal.)
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes April 7, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1970s, Billy Wilder , 4 comments
When looking at Billy Wilder’s films as director, there are four that especially stick out in terms of incompatibility with the rest. The Emperor Waltz is a Bing Crosby musical and generally regarded as unsuccessful on most every level. The Spirit of St. Louis, despite being a fine film, puts Wilder in studio-constricted biopic land. Witness for the Prosecution, another excellent movie, has few, if any, of Wilder’s signatures and seems like it could have been made by at least half a dozen other competent directors. Then there’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Wilder’s 1970 needling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s mythic detective. The film exists only in a version that was drastically shortened from the original intentions of Wilder and his longtime screenwriting partner I.A.L. Diamond, but it still manages to feel like a cohesive, brilliantly executed whole.
There are certainly several of Wilder’s fingerprints in the picture, it’s just that the use of such a well-known character and the Scottish locations, among other things, feels like fresh dust. It’s a perfect marriage of classic Hollywood filmmaking with the newfound freedoms that resulted from an especially creative period in American movies. For some people, the problem may be that it’s not entirely either one of those. The pacing is deliberate and relaxed, yet the first half hour has little to do with the remainder of the film. Holmes and the trusty Dr. Watson may be familiar names ingrained in most of our memories, but the portrayals are hardly consistent with interpretations up to that point. Holmes, in particular, is much more ambiguous and complex, with noncommittal sexual preference, questionable decision making, and an unapologetic dependency on cocaine.
These are attributes parsed from the original stories, to be sure, but they still vary significantly from the consensus of Holmes as an infallible master of deduction. Robert Stephens, whose cocktail of whiskey and sleeping pills during the shoot delayed production for weeks, plays Holmes as prim, proper and arrogant, all attempts to mask the character’s sadness. Colin Blakely’s Watson is just the opposite, convivial and slightly bumbling. Both performances are perfectly used by Wilder, regardless of how they fit in with Conan Doyle’s mythology. As we see in the film, Holmes scolds Watson repeatedly about his extreme glamorization of the detective’s work. Considering these are two of the most famous fictional characters in literary history, it’s undeniable that Wilder and Diamond had a difficult task in bringing their skewed version of Holmes and Watson to the screen. The interesting thing is that the film seems destined to disappoint both those looking for a Sherlock Holmes movie and the ones interested in a typical Billy Wilder effort. And yet The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is an exceptional film. No wonder it was a commercial disappointment! Who’s supposed to embrace this thing again?
People who enjoy quality filmmaking, for starters. That initial half hour, when Holmes and Watson are mysteriously summoned to a Russian performance of Swan Lake so that the star can request the detective’s paternal seed, is so good that you wonder why other films don’t frequently employ episodic structures. Of course, that was Wilder’s intention, to present a series of four episodes, all of which were filmed and ready to go. A story about a Belgian woman dropped on the doorstep of Holmes and Watson, leading the trio to Scotland and an apparent encounter with the Loch Ness Monster, comprises the remaining hour and a half while the other two portions were cut. In terms of holy grails of lost footage, as much as I’d like to see Orson Welles’ more complete version of The Magnificent Ambersons, I think I’d be equally anxious to see the full version of Wilder’s film. It’s a huge credit to Wilder’s ability as a director that even with the severe edits he was able to produce something as brilliant as the existing cut is here.
After Gabrielle Valladon (played by the lovely Genevieve Page) is deposited at Holmes’ Baker Street address, Wilder does well to produce a subversion of the famous character’s well-documented skills, veiled in a pretty good mystery. At some point, it seems natural to try and understand why Wilder and Diamond would bother in making a fairly difficult film with Holmes as the center. The best explanation I can come up with would be the desire to portray Holmes as a man wrongly described, whose actual attributes are far more humanlike than what’s shown in the stories. It’s the burden of brilliance, but also the inconvenience of not being as intelligent as your superhuman reputation. There are several chuckles, but the film certainly isn’t a comedy so I don’t think that was ever the aim, to place Holmes in a simple and slightly comic series of situations. It would seem more that the idea was for a repositioning of the Holmes character as a man unable to deal with his basic loneliness and alienation, soothed only by pompous one-upping of his sidekick Watson and frequent drug use.
The Holmes here is ultimately a failure at the hands of technology, bested by his brother Mycroft, who, in turn, suffers a major miscalculation of his own. So is it the dissolving of myths that Wilder is interested in? Is this his Liberty Valance? Yeah, I sort of think so. Though he was only 64 at the film’s release, and would churn out four more pictures afterwards, Wilder created his definitive “old man” movie here. The call-backs to a more classic style even than in his previous few efforts and the patience of experience he displays are both important elements to bridging the old with the new. Even when Wilder was younger, he didn’t normally employ the classical and calculated sense of purpose seen here. The structure is considered and nearly perfect. This is part of why it’s so incredible to think that the film was initially envisioned as much longer. The existing version feels appropriate as it is, only marred, in my opinion, a little by the first part of the Loch Ness Monster bit.
When Sherlock Holmes fails to really do much of anything right, despite his predictably shortsighted detective work, it’s at the expense of volumes of lionizing literature. The film thus works as a warning against the perils of smug overconfidence. For Holmes, the sticky truth isn’t that he’s a failure (something he seems to be fighting against throughout), but that a promising opportunity for romance has been squandered. It’s a slow realization, but by the end it’s obvious that he’s in movie love with the not-really Belgian Gabrielle/Ilse. The sexuality aspect here is interesting because Wilder and Diamond put it at the forefront for the viewer. Holmes’ reluctance to declare his heterosexuality to Watson early on seems to be due to one of three reasons: 1.) He’s being coy; 2.) He’s unsure himself as to his current feelings; or 3.) He’s so desexualized as to make it seemingly irrelevant. I think any of these three explanations work perfectly fine. With any of them, Holmes makes it obvious that he’s not actively searching for female companionship, making the presence of Gabrielle/Ilse a difficult situation.
The forced push at the end, when Holmes seems to realize his feelings for her just when she’s no longer attainable, serves as another reminder of how empty his life is. Watson and his silly stories are just about all the character has going for him. Then when it looks like the audience will be treated to the usual ending wrapped in sentimentality, Wilder continues the film and, in so doing, removes any trace of happiness. Watson is little more than a hyper-intelligent canine with a medical bag and Holmes the junkie can only shoot up and pass out (off-screen, of course). In essence, this is Wilder’s most daring film since Ace in the Hole, and it appeals to generally no one outside the director’s most devoted followers. He was able to completely demystify a legendary character with a huge following, using a fully sincere approach, while also putting together a deceptive genre story that proves quite entertaining. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is destined to remain largely unappreciated because it has few of the attributes Wilder is most known for, but it’s nevertheless an atypical slice of brilliance from the director.
Wilder himself apparently disagreed. In Cameron Crowe’s book Conversations with Wilder, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is characterized by its creator as basically a great film ruined by later editing after the director went off to another country (shades of Ambersons). Wilder retained final cut in his contract, but a terrible test screening and a supposedly misplaced negative resulted in the trimmed version, topping out at 125 minutes, being what hit theaters. Other reports seem to indicate Wilder was agreeable with the existing edit. Regardless, upon release it promptly sank, just like Ace in the Hole. Wilder had gone four years since the release of his last film, The Fortune Cookie, and it’s not surprising that audiences mostly stayed away from this one. The financially successful films of 1970 were either epic spectacles like Aiport and Patton or then-daring expressions of a new generation like M*A*S*H and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Ironically, despite the freedom afforded Wilder that probably would have been unimaginable a decade or two earlier, his audience was no longer interested.
The saga of the film’s different incarnations is well documented on the R1 DVD, which ported over several of the laserdisc extras. A new 15-minute interview (from 2003) with Christopher Lee, who plays Mycroft Holmes, doesn’t shed a lot of light on the various cuts, but it does give Lee the chance to single out Wilder as the best director he’s ever worked with, and it also lets the actor reminisce on his own turns playing Sherlock Holmes. The film’s editor Ernest Walter, the man referred to by Wilder in Crowe’s book, goes into great detail about what was cut and so forth in a half-hour interview from the mid-nineties that was originally on the laserdisc. Then, you can see for yourself much of what was removed. A prologue with Colin Blakely as Watson’s modern-day grandson would have further set up the idea that these four episodes derived from material deemed too private to be published in Holmes’ lifetime. This particular portion is told on the DVD from still photos and script excerpts, but the viewer definitely gets a good feeling of how it might have turned out.
The crude reconstruction continues with one of the excised sequences, a lengthy story involving an upside down room. It has audio, but only photographs instead of video. I think this would have been an exceptionally strong portion of the film had it remained because it reinforces the idea that Watson cares deeply for Holmes and that the detective is sort of miserably entwined in his own intelligence. The next scene removed was a brief flashback where Holmes and Gabrielle/Ilsa are just about to go to sleep on the train. The scene was intended as a means for explaining some of Holmes’ reluctance to become romantically involved, stemming from an incident with a schoolboy crush who turned out to be a prostitute. This too would have fit perfectly within the film and improved the existing scene without bogging it down.
The final episode not in the finished film exists on the DVD in letterboxed video, but is missing the audio. The dialogue from the script has been inserted as subtitles. The scene is very funny and concerns Watson putting on Holmes’ hat (literally) and trying to solve a murder. In relation to the rest of the film, it seems to fit the least of the cut portions. If the movie had been made today, this little bit could have worked perfectly as a DVD-only extra or even a short intended to run before the film. All total, there’s over an hour of extra material here, all of which was shot and excluded from the final cut. The inclusion of this footage on the DVD is really something to be thankful for, but the hope that somehow Wilder’s full version could be restored still nags.
The Good Die Young March 4, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s, Gloria Grahame , add a comment
(There are a lot of spoilers here, more than I usually include.)
Late in Lewis Gilbert’s The Good Die Young, Miles “Rave” Ravenscourt, expertly played by Laurence Harvey, opines that the men of the film’s title perish in war while the surviving soldiers are, in my words, sort of like sediment shifting to the bottom of a glass. Rave himself is a supposed war hero, having killed six Germans “in the desert.” Two of the other men, both Americans, have military experience as well. Eddie Blaine (John Ireland) is an air force pilot stationed in England, but about to be shipped off to Germany, and Joe Halsey (Richard Basehart) is a Korean War vet whose two years of service are held against him as little more than missed time by his boss. A fourth man, Mike Morgan (Stanley Baker), is a boxer who’s unexpectedly won his final fight and loses the use of a hand in the process.
For varying reasons, all four are placed in desperate situations and consumed by the struggle of retaining the women they love or once loved. Rave is a careless, jobless professional gentleman with a wealthy wife who’s tired of his sponging and a wealthier father who tells him in no uncertain terms that he’d rather see Rave dead and buried than live for his share of an inheritance. A £1,000 check for losses incurred while gambling is set to bounce unless Rave can talk his way into the money. Failure to do so and the lure of financial freedom (at least for awhile) causes Rave to eye the bank notes at a nearby post office, £90,000 worth. The idea is for Rave and his three new bar buddies to catch the money as it’s being transported. And, of course, no one gets hurt.
Rave is the catalyst and each man, reluctantly, has to be convinced. Mike’s the classic boxer type you frequently see in older movies. He’s made a little from fighting, but not equal to the sacrifices of partial hearing and vision loss. The money he saved up gets wasted in lost bail money for his useless brother-in-law. Mike takes his anger out on his wife, not surprising since boxers are used to unleashing their aggression on whatever’s within arm’s reach. Eddie and Joe both have marital problems of their own. When the movie begins, Eddie’s on 48-hours leave and his wife Denise (Gloria Grahame) couldn’t care less. She’s sort of an actress, sort of a tramp, but Eddie’s all of a cuckold.
There’s a funny scene the first time we see Denise, when she’s coming home with her co-star, and a group of young girls swarm around the leading man for an autograph. He urges the girls to have Denise sign something, too. After she signs for the one fan with any interest, Denise adjusts herself and announces they have to be going now, barely fooling anyone. I love how Grahame makes the character so unapologetically bitchy and completely without sympathy. She’s a wolf fully dressed in wolf’s clothing. The last scene she has is my favorite in the film, when Eddie literally kicks the actor boyfriend in his backside and quits being so submissive. Denise likes this side of her husband and we see her warm up to him for the first time - only to have Eddie throw her into a bathtub full of water.
It’s not another man that stands between Joe and his wife Mary (Joan Collins), but another woman. Mary’s mother has been sick and so she flew to England from the U.S. to be with her, but, after a few weeks, Joe’s getting antsy. He flies over himself and learns the delay was because Mary’s pregnant. But when Joe’s ready to take Mary home, her mother fakes a suicide attempt. The flight money for tickets back to New York dries up quickly and Joe’s daily trips to a bar lead him to meeting Mike first, his old pal Eddie next, and, finally, the slithering Rave. The coincidence of film manifests itself into four guys, each with a lot to lose and all close to wit’s end. Rave is opportunistic and, as we find out, full of greed and evil.
The film’s final twenty minutes or so, post-heist, are cold-hearted and fascinating, played out on grimy and uninviting London streets. The Good Die Young isn’t really a heist thriller at all. It’s a fairly dark character study about these four men, their desperation and the reasoning for their involvement in a predictably ill-fated robbery. You could make comparisons to The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, but, aside from this being inferior and missing Sterling Hayden, I think Gilbert’s film exists in a different, more noirlike area. It’s a very good picture and fits nicely in what I’d consider to be the style of film noir. Death, desperation, darkness - what more could you ask for?
Controlled, I believe, by MGM, there’s not yet a DVD for The Good Die Young in R1. The unfortunately named Wienerworld Ltd is listed as distributor for this in R2. Horrible cover art, and I can’t speak to the quality. The broadcast version I watched from a TCM recording looked a little weak, if acceptable, but the sound had a persistent hiss.
A Little Purge January 9, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : General Film , add a commentIt was going to be “The Big Purge” but I got cold feet. Recently, some complaints have come up over the quality of the writing here. Even if I can’t say that I necessarily respect the source of the snideness, it does hit on two things that have been on my mind.
Firstly, some of the older posts on here are not as thorough or, even, readable as what I feel like I’m capable of writing now. I’ve deleted those and hesitantly allowed some to remain when I’m happy with a sentence or two, despite not being content with the overall effort. It bugs me to have these older entries on here because I don’t think they’re good samples of my writing any longer, which still remains decidedly amateur but nonetheless improved. Many of these films I discussed were watched and written about well before I knew anyone else would read it and never with the intent of being held up to any standard except my own. Now, that standard has heightened so bye-bye to (some of) the crap.
This brings me to my other point - my current difficulty in devoting the time necessary to meet anyone’s standard of interesting writing. The DVD Times reviews take up a lot of my time, especially when there are literally hours and hours of material to watch for each one, so I’m left to play here only when there’s nothing else to write about there or if I’ve seen something that compelled me to jot down a few things outside of those other responsibilities. Either way, I think I’ll hold off posting something here unless I feel it’s of a certain quality so as to not give people the wrong idea. If there’s a hiatus or extreme lull between posts, that’ll be the reason.
I tend to hesitate littering up the site with my TCM picks when I haven’t posted anything of more substance so I’ll try to find a way around that and maybe set up a page for them. I don’t plan on doing selections in February because the schedule is full of things already on DVD in celebration of the Oscars. Otherwise, they’ll hopefully continue.
I also want to find a way to highlight my favorite things I’ve written so that they’ll be easier to find than rummaging through an index or going into the archives month-by-month. I have well over 100 posts here and I’m much happier with a few specific entries than others. All this should tidy things up a bit and hopefully I won’t have to defend or justify myself in the foreseeable future.
“My Favorite” Strife December 28, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, General Film, Fritz Lang , 2 commentsEveryone knows that the end of the calendar year has become a time to blink and reflect at the past twelve months, tidily summed up in list format despite the undeniably ridiculous and simplistic process of choosing an arbitrary number of “important” candidates. I’m not complaining though. I actually like these little exercises, whether it’s just a top 10 or even if it involves a full-blown trophy ceremony. I recognize the absurdity and I revel just the same. When the staff at DVD Times put together separate lists for top 10 films and DVDs of the year, I carefully considered my choices and picked what I felt were deserving selections among everything I’ve seen, even if, regrettably, I know there are some things I didn’t manage to view that would probably nudge ahead of things I did include.
Around the same time, I supported the idea that the reviewers at DVD Times should put together individual top 10’s of their all-time favorite films. My thinking was twofold. First, it lets readers associate the reviewer with certain films that mean a lot to that writer. It’s not a situation where noses should be upturned because this person really loves any particular film so much as an opportunity for likeminded readers to possibly give more weight to a review (and therefore seek out or avoid the DVD) based on what specific films the reviewer holds near and dear. Second, it will hopefully serve as an alternative to an upcoming feature on the site. This feature isn’t really a secret, I don’t think, but I probably should refrain from discussing it all the same.
So this left me with the task of compiling a top 10 list. I quickly settled on 8 films. Here’s where the arbitrariness of the number 10 comes in to play. It seems, after considerable thought, that I really have a bedrock list of 8 films that stand head and shoulders above the rest, not 10. Still, I needed 2 more, if for no other reason than to appease the unnamed goddess of neat and tidy listmaking. For better or worse, there are probably half a dozen films or more that could vie for those last couple of slots. I’m reminded of why people claim to hate top 10 lists. In some way, I’m going to be defined by what’s included and what’s omitted (just as I am on the Top 50’s by decade here). Too obscure, too popular, too old, too new. It’s silly, but I don’t like any of those labels. That somehow turns the 10 films into avatars of something more. If you’re only including 1 film per director then automatically that establishes said film as your pick for that filmmaker’s best.
I had a variation of that problem with Martin Scorsese. He’s one of my favorite directors by a wide margin, but I can’t say there’s any one film I think is most deserving. Raging Bull may very well be his best, but it’s not my favorite for many reasons. Goodfellas is another one right up there, and I enjoy it immensely every time I give it a watch, but it’s not top 10 material for me. Neither is Taxi Driver or the less lauded but equally enthralling After Hours. In many ways, Mean Streets is my favorite Scorsese (to be reflected by my 1970s list in a few months), though I hesitate to move it up above some more deserving films. In the end, I can’t put any of these on my list despite my affection for Scorsese. Similar issues arise with Robert Altman and Ernst Lubitsch, two more directors I adore but can’t single out just one of their films as obviously superior. There’s Nashville, but my home state allegiance prevents me from fully loving Altman’s epic. Is Trouble in Paradise better than Design for Living or The Shop Around the Corner ? I don’t know and I really don’t want to decide.
I think I’ve settled on a 9th film and now I’m left scrambling for the final selection. Some of the ones in the mix are The Godfather (too popular and overanalyzed?), In the Mood for Love (too recent and in need of another viewing?), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (damn near perfect, but I put it below several others in my 1940s list and maybe it’s not hardly at this level), The Palm Beach Story (represents Sturges, but possibly a little out of its league in this range also) and Fritz Lang’s M. Leaning in favor of M, I decided to give it a fresh watch.
M was Lang’s penultimate film in Germany, sandwiched between Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and his first experiment with sound. He’d flee for America three years later, in 1934. Watching M with a reasonably extensive knowledge of Lang’s career before and after, the film seems like a culmination of the themes explored over and over in the director’s filmography. Guilt, paranoia, hypocrisy, the criminal process, social change, and the evolution of a turbulent society. Those things are all here, well explored and without easy answers. A master filmmaker like Lang was able to repeatedly turn to these issues, either individually or collectively, with enormous success and without becoming dull or repetitive. It’s easy to see everything from Spione and Fury to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and The Big Heat in M, but it’s the 1931 film that brings it all together and mesmerizes you in the process.
Lang uses technical tricks, including but not limited to some of the best utilization of sound in film history, and a great performance from Peter Lorre to tell the story of a compulsive child murderer unable to stop or be caught while committing heinous and disgusting acts of violence. Lang doesn’t want his audience to merely focus on Lorre’s pedophile though. The investigation process, told mostly through Otto Wernicke’s Det. Karl Lohmann, is the backbone of the picture. Lang seemed fascinated by procedural sagas and here he uses Lohmann as a fat cat alternative to Lorre’s Beckert even though the murderer is identified and caught by more sinister forces. Those forces have lynch mob written across their angry faces and his first American film, Fury, seems to clarify how Lang felt about those out of control vigilantes.
But here, in M, the private citizens are the ones who almost bring Beckert to “justice” and give the film’s final 20 minutes an incredibly foreboding energy that nearly sputters out in the last few frames. I think the ending asks the audience an uncomfortable question of what exactly we want to happen to Beckert. Are we rooting for the mob to take justice into their own hands and completely subvert due process, or are we hoping for the eventual police intervention? Do viewers require resolution, regardless of how lawless, or can we accept that the legal system will distribute justice? Michael Haneke would be proud.
Ultimately, the power of Lang’s film won me over and cemented its position. I’m not sure it’s really one of my favorite top 10 films ever made, but it’s a nearly flawless movie and Lang is one my very favorite directors. I love The Big Heat and Scarlet Street, but M seems somehow more perfect and absolutely essential. It’s a remarkably modern film that has aged as well as anything put on celluloid and it laid a significant portion of the foundation for the crime film, my favorite genre. I’d never assign importance of a movie based solely on its influence and I think M probably works as well now as it did decades ago. In deciding my list, it comes down to the thought of hating the idea that someone could only watch one Fritz Lang film, but knowing that M would be the choice in such an unlikely and unfortunate situation.