stumbling virtue

Watch This

 
An unwitting travelling balladeer sings his song about "the dirty coward Robert Ford" to Ford himself (John Ireland) in "I Shot Jesse James."

I've seen a number of movies since I last checked in--I didn't keep track of all of them, and don't remember them all, but it stands to reason that the ones I remember are the best.

A friend lent me a set of just released on video noirs, and I recommend them all:

The Long Night (1947) - Henry Fonda at his complicated best in a story of a man unjustly accused.  A remake of a French movie starring Jean Gabin, it has a complex structure that must have stood out at the time. Also starring Ann Dvorak, Vincent Price, and Barbara Bel Geddes.

Sudden Fear (1950) - Joan Crawford is a successful playwright/heiress who gets involved with Jack Palance, a handsome younger actor. Unfortunately, the saying, "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is" applies here. Great final shot of Crawford. The always entertaining Gloria Grahame also stars.

Railroaded (1947)  - Another tale of the unjustly accused, in a stripped down to nothing Anthony Mann movie. Hugh Beaumont is fine as the good guy cop, but John Ireland knocked me out as the bad guy gangster.

Behind Locked Doors (1948) - A noir that not only features a hardboiled detective and an icy dame (Lucille Bremer, trying to escape her previous title as one of Fred Astaire's worst dance partners), but also the world of psychiatry and mental institutions, a topic of endless fascination to Hollywood in the 1940s. Really fun. A Budd Boetticher movie.

Hangmen Also Die (1943) - Fritz Lang directed this wartime drama set in occupied Prague. Based on a true story, the brave Czechs fight back against the evil Nazis. The bad guys get what's coming to them in immensely satisfying ways. For once, Brian Donlevy plays a good guy. Also featuring Anna Lee and Walter Brennan.

I liked John Ireland so much in Railroaded that I decided to look up some of his other movies (seemingly not many, or least not available on Netflix). I found I Shot Jesse James, Samuel Fuller's first directorial effort, and fell hard for it. In this version of the story, Robert Ford shoots Jesse James for the reward money and governmental pardon for his past crimes so he can buy a farm, marry the girl he loves, and settle down with a clean name. Instead he finds himself the object of scorn, disdained as a traitor by everyone from his brother to the girl who he did it all for. Some haunting scenes, such as the one with the traveling singer pictured above, and the part where Ford, needing money, takes a job in a show where he re-enacts the murder of Jesse James for audiences who boo him. Frank James passes on the opportunity to kill him and avenge his brother because he says that Ford is dead already. Indeed he is. You can die inside long before your body is killed.

At the Movies

 
The French Revolution, noir style.

A few quick movie notes:

Reign of Terror (1949) On Bastille Day this year, I noticed that Turner Classic had an "all French Revolution" lineup of movies, so I noted the names and put a few on my Netflix queue. I don't always remember to arrange my queue before movies go out to me, though, so when "Reign of Terror" arrived, I was disappointed; I was in no mood to watch some overstuffed, big technicolor costume drama that was too heavy on romance and too light on history. Imagine my surprise, then, when the movie started, and I found myself watching what seemed like a film noir in every way--pacing, dialogue, lighting, tightly shot and oddly composed scenes--except for the French Revolution era costumes. The film was so dark that I thought they must either have not had the budget for lights or didn't have money for sets and were trying to hide that. All of the above turned out to be true: the movie is an early film by director Anthony Mann, and it was filmed on a minimal budget--so minimal that they used leftover sets from the recently filmed Ingrid Bergman version of "Joan of Arc." With so little to work with, Mann made what's got to be the only period film noir, emulating the style of the film noirs turned out by the small "Poverty Row" studios (it is one of the great jokes of film history that many of the low-budget "B" or "C" pictures of Hollywood's Golden Age are considered classics while the big, glossy "A" pictures are the one forgotten). "Reign," also known as "The Black Book" is lean, suspenseful, and worth your time.

Yesterday's Movies

I'm just catching up on DVD all the movies I missed in the theaters last year. So here are a few super quick reviews.

"District 9" - Excellent. I know, after the good reviews and box office, that should be fairly evident. I still was surprised, though--I had expected to admire this film, but didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did (you can, after all, admire something, but not like it).

"Moon" - A tiny, claustrophobic, very effective thriller, with Sam Rockwell carrying the whole movie in an almost-solo performance. See it.

"(500) Days of Summer" - I honestly could write thousands of words about how much I loathed this movie, but that would just make me seem angry, I guess. So suffice to say I hated this one and give it the 2009 Most Overrated Movie of the Year Award.

Those are super quick reviews, aren't they? Practically a miracle from typically wordy me. So therefore I can't resist adding some things from the classics category (sorry, 2009):

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945) - Hurd Hatfield was made for the title role and George Sanders is his always wonderful self. The first glimpse of the corrupted portrait will give you nightmares. I'm not kidding. No other version of this story has ever been so effective or so clearly captured the tone of the book.

"Shockproof" - A noir, from of all people, Douglas Sirk. Great crime drama, though the happy ending feels tacked on, and probably was by a nervous studio.

 

"The Picture of Dorian Gray," with Hurd Hatfield and Angela Lansbury.
  

My Own Very Favorite Movies of the 2000s (Because I Know You Care)

 

Many people are making end of decade lists, so I thought why shouldn't I as well? I know! I'm glad you agree.

I'm calling this list "favorite movies" because I am not claiming that they are the best of each year, just that they are the ones I liked. Of course all of this comes with a warning: there are an astonishing number of movies that I should have seen that I haven't yet, and looking at each year's lists of films released made me feel enormously guilty (shouldn't I have found time by now to see "Gosford Park?" or "28 Weeks Later?" or "Hellboy 2?"). So if you notice a year that has only one or two titles listed, that doesn't necessarily mean it was an awful year for movies--it might just mean I missed pretty much everything that year. But if a title that you would think should be on anyone's best of list is missing, that also doesn't necessarily mean that I didn't see it--I might just not have liked it that much (sorry, "Dark Knight).

So here is my collection of decade favorites, organized by year, and at the end there is my best of the best list. Questions? Problems? Disagreements? Disparaging remarks about my taste in movies? Please let me know.

In Praise of Swing Time

 
Fred and Ginger, "Never Gonna Dance." Lucky for us they didn't take the song title seriously.

Turner Classic ran Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies all day today, which meant that I had the chance to watch my favorite, Swing Time, again. I probably was about nine when I first saw it, and no matter how many times I've seen it, I never pass up a chance to watch again.

There are so many things that are great about this movie--the dancing, the high Art Deco sets, the lovely Jerome Kern score. Let me tell you my three favorite parts:

The first is the scene where Astaire and Rogers meet not so cute. He's on the run from a wedding gone bad, so he's dressed in a morning coat and top hat, accompanied by his weird friend Eric Blore. She's a girl on her way to work. After they bump into each other, Penny (Ginger) thinks that Lucky (Fred) stole a quarter from her purse and asks a nearby cop to help her out. He takes one look at Fred dressed for high society and immediately dismisses Ginger's claim. When she persists, the cop threatens to arrest her for disturbing the piece. It's just a little piece of class-consciousness and Depression life that always caught my attention (and yes,was a major part of a paper I wrote in film school).

The next is the first major dance number, "Pick Yourself Up." Fred has followed Ginger to the dance school where she teaches, and signs up for a lesson. He pretends to be hopelessly clumsy, so bad that she tells him that no one could teach him to dance and he shouldn't waste his money on lessons. Her boss overhears and fires her for dismissing a paying customer, but Fred intervenes and asks to show what she's taught him, and proceeds to dance like, well, Fred Astaire. There's a great shot of Ginger's face reacting in pure delight when she sees what he can do, and then when she joins in, they do one of the blithest, lightest numbers ever put on film. But what makes this performance one of the premiere Astaire performances is that it shows his understanding that tap isn't just about dancing, but is also about being a musician. Astaire wrote songs on the side, played the piano, and the drums, and was one of the most underrated jazz interpreters of the era. He had a thrilling understanding of how to play with the beat and syncopation of a piece of music, which he really shows off in the choreography for "Pick Yourself Up." In it, he and Ginger don't tap along to the music so much as act as a counterpoint, banging out their own rhythm in between the song's own beats. I'm not sure I'm doing a good job describing this, as I have no background in jazz or musicology, or even dance criticism, but trust me--while there may be examples of tap that display more firepower, technique, and trickery, there are few others that show how music and dance can work together as equals, rather than as two separate art forms with one subservient to the other.

And finally, there is "Never Gonna Dance," number, where Fred and Ginger think they're saying goodbye to each other forever. This has the same seamless combination of music and dance as "Pick Yourself Up," but it also adds drama and a story. It's one of the finest dance numbers ever put on film (I also adore Ginger's gown in this one, and you can't ignore the sweeping staircases on the set). I think when people talk about the great dance moments in movies, this sometimes gets a little lost in the shuffle of famous technicolor MGM musicals of the '40s and '50s, but it's as good as anything you'll find in those movies. I love "Singin' in the Rain," but there's no dance number in that movie, nor in the somewhat overrated "An American in Paris," that has the depth of emotion as "Never Gonna Dance" (probably the closest is Fred and Ginger's "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from "Follow the Fleet; in the non-Ginger category it would be Fred and Cyd Charisse's "Dancing in the Dark" in "The Bandwagon," also a somewhat underrated movie).

So I just wanted to say all that. Again, I'm not a dance critic, music critic, or (barely) a film critic, but sometimes things are so wonderful you can't keep them to yourself. 

December Movies 2009

 

It's that time of year when studios bring out all their Oscar bait movies. You know, serious subjects, tour de force (or desperate) performances, grand adaptations of serious novels, biopics, epic romances, plain epics, lush costumes, and period pieces. A few popcorn movies and kids' movies get thrown in to make money as well. So I always like to do a little rundown of what we can look forward to during this "please give us an award" time of year.

By the way, I say December movies, but the Serious Season really starts in November, or even October, so I'll drop in some movies that come before December. We'll need that extra boost of November movies, by the way; there are less films being released this year for a variety of reasons--the last echoes of the writers' strike a few years ago, a slow economy that made studios pull back a bit on buying and distributing festival award winning indies, and an increasing risk aversion with studios so cherry picking the release dates of films that if they even see the slightest bit of competition, they'll pull a movie off a weekend and hold it for a few months or even until the following November/December season, if it has awards promise.

So here we go--selected titles that will be coming soon to a theater near you!

Obnoxious and Disliked

 

1776: They sing! They dance! They debate the merits of independence from England!

There probably is nothing worse than being stuck anywhere near me when the movie of the musical "1776" is on TV, because I sing every word. Every. Single. Word. Here are some things l love about the movie:

• Made in 1972, it's edited in trendy late '60s/early '70s style, with weirdly timed quick cuts and inexplicable ping-ponging close ups. It's looks like it was edited by an earnest teenager who was going for a cross between French New Wave and "The Graduate."
• Even though the costumes and wigs are supposed to be 18th century, they definitely smack of "1770s as reimagined by 1970s." Sometimes it looks like the costume designer studied Paul Revere and the Raiders' onstage getups more than authentic 18th century pieces. It's great.
• You can learn how to make saltpetre if you pay careful attention to the lyrics.
• Benjamin Franklin is played by Howard Da Silva, an actor who was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s.
• The punchline to one joke is, "There must be some mistake. I have an aunt who lives in New Brunswick!"
• Although it compresses the timeline of events and combines some characters, the script does contain many quotes taken from actual letters and primary source accounts, including this favorite of mine from John Adams:
  "Franklin did this, and Franklin did that, and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington - fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the horse, conducted the entire revolution all by themselves." 

Oh, John. Stop whining and sing.  

Makeovers

 

Lucille Ball in Lured. She's working undercover as a housemaid, while really trying to find a serial killer. No, it's not Fred Mertz. 

I just wanted to mention two movies I've recently seen that I liked quite a bit.

Lured (1947) is a Douglas Sirk movie, set in London and starring Lucille Ball, of all people. She had been a longtime bit player and had rarely had any starring roles, so she may have seemed like an odd choice. But take a closer look and you can see why she was ideal. Lucy plays an American showgirl stranded in London, who's brought in by the police to help track down a serial killer (one of her friends has disappeared and is a probably victim). To trap the killer, who they know lures women through the classifieds, the police have her respond to every ad looking for a single woman--which means she gets to pretend she's a model for a very eccentric Boris Karloff, a housemaid, and a classical music fan for a man who's looking for a date to a concert. Lucy's strong in the parts where she's playing the world-weary showgirl, and the undercover cop whose main job is to play let's pretend. She's weaker in the dramatic romance department, where she ends up with the always unflappable George Sanders, who himself is falsely accused of being the murderer (he manages to raise some mild indignation at the prospect of being hanged for a crime he did not commit, but mostly looks like he thinks it wouldn't be that bad provided he could be sent off after having some fine cognac). It's a fun little movie that isn't particularly well-known, but has a great post-war, lowdown atmosphere to it. The title could just as easily be "Lurid."

Pygmalion (1938) is the Shaw play that's much better known in its musical incarnation, "My Fair Lady," but this film adaptation, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller is great, and in fact, much preferable to the unwieldy 1964 film of "My Fair Lady." It's bright and fast. Howard often was bored by his movie roles, but here seems to be having an enormously good time. Hiller is perfect (a much better Eliza than Audrey Hepburn was)--she speaks the line, "Them that lived with her would have killed her for a hatpin, let alone a hat," with such perfect, schooled diction which is yet so inappropriate for the content, that I can't stop myself from repeating it now. I'd watch this again any time it's on.

Summer in Winter

Thanks to the magic of video, I was able last week to catch up on a few of the big movies I missed last summer. So a few words about them--and first, yes, there is a huge difference between seeing these kind of popcorn action movies in a theater with an audience and by yourself on a tiny screen. But taking that into account, here's what I thought.

Tropic Thunder Lots of clever ideas and funny moments here, but in the end the parts were less than the whole. At one point I paused it and when I saw I still had 45 minutes left I wondered what else they could possibly do in that time? When it got to the end and there was a scene that was meant to be a reference to a scene from the opening, I felt like I had watched the beginning of the movie years ago. Part of the problem, though, was the version Netflix sends out--I didn't listen to the commentary but my roommate did and she said that the one we had was an "extended version" and during it Ben Stiller was talking about why they cut various bits or shortened parts that were part of the extended version. I was like, so wait, a better version went into theaters and the one they put out on video is essentially the one the creative team rejected? How does that make sense? And, oh, Tom Cruise's cameo was one of the most overrated movie moments of the year. He's playing a jerk movie producer. Kids, people have been playing jerk movie producers since the 1930s. I didn't get the big deal.

The Dark Knight The most overrated movie moment this year was, well, this whole movie. Again, I acknowledge that this was really a movie meant to be seen on the big screen, but I don't think that would have changed my opinion that much. I had the same problem with this movie as with Batman Begins, that it's very beautiful looking but it just flatlines. It feels like there is no arc or real drive propelling it. The movie starts off with a big action set piece with lots of things blowing up and the same level just keeps happening at a steady rate throughout the movie. It doesn't feel like there's any difference in anything anywhere. And there's too many villains, this sort of vague mishmash of representational ethnic bad guy gangs of Gotham City with the Joker and with Harvey Dent as well. It's kind of like if Batman is fighting everyone he's fighting no one, just this anonymous mass (by the way, Heath Ledger's performance was the only thing about this movie that wasn't overrated--he was as good as advertised). It felt like there wasn't any personal conflict for Batman, just this generic "I am fighting evil." They could have done a lot more with his relationship with Dent. Plus the level of destruction gets kind of silly--I mean, what's Gotham like at the end of the movie? Berlin in 1945? And the score did nothing for me. It did, though, contain what has to be the year's best unintentionally funny line: "Gotham City deserves a hero with a face."

Iron Man I admit that part of the problem I had with The Dark Knight was that I saw it right after this movie, which I thought was fantastic. Now I understand that doing an origin story is much easier than following up because there's a roadmap to follow and the sense of purpose is very obvious. But it was well-paced and specific, with a story that built. The characters were doing things for a reason, the villains had a specific plan, personal moments showed conflict. I really enjoyed it. And the score rocked.

Next thing you know I'll actually get to a movie in a theater.

I Won't Dance

Carole Lombard, thankfully not dancing.

As you can imagine, there was no way I was going to miss seeing at least one film during the Carole Lombard retrospective at Film Forum. The one I knew I couldn't miss was Bolero, a 1934 film starring Lombard and George Raft, in which they play ballroom dancers. I know, it sounds crazy--which of course was why I was interested.

George Raft was best known for his roles in gangster movies (Scarface, where he made a big impression in a supporting role, was made only two years before Bolero) but I had always read that he was supposed to be a great dancer who had gotten his start in New York nightclubs and on Broadway. He hadn't made many movies, though, where he danced, so I was curious to see him in a rare dancing role. Carole Lombard, on the other hand, wasn't really a dancer at all. Most of her dance experience came, well, from being a popular flapper on the Hollywood party circuit during the 1920s. But she was supposed to be a superb athlete who excelled at any sport she tried, so for a studio trying to figure out what to do with her, it probably seemed reasonable to test her out in a musical (it wasn't until later in 1934 that she began to hit her comedy stride with Twentieth Century). The result, as I saw today, was mixed at best.

First, the plot: Raoul de Barre (Raft) is a miner determined to make it as a dancer. With the support of his brother, Mike (played by William Frawley...yes, that William Frawley, of I Love Lucy fame. And he looked exactly the same in 1934 as in 1954) , the vain, egotistical Raoul gets some gigs in small-time New Jersey clubs before moving to Paris. He finds a partner, Leona (the lovely Frances Drake--why wasn't she a bigger star?), who becomes increasingly infuriated with Raoul's policy of not mixing business with pleasure--in other words, she's angry that he's not in love with her and particularly angry that he expends most of his flirtatiousness on the older, well-off ladies who come to the clubs to see them dance. Just as Leona is threatening to quit again, Helen Hathaway (Lombard) shows up and demands a chance to audition to be Raoul's partner. She comes to his hotel room to audition, and in one of those pre-Code moments we love (this was released in 1934, but probably made in 1933), strips down to lingerie to dance, because her dress is too heavy (you can imagine William Frawley's reaction when he walks in on this scene). Anyway, Raoul likes the way she dances, which is good, because someone has to, I suppose. He is even more impressed by her similar strict all business approach; she proposes that he can date all the rich ladies he wants while she tries to catch herself a millionaire (preferably nobility--a joke about her maybe marrying a duke, because "you know it's happened before" has to be a blatant allusion to Adele Astaire leaving the stage--and her brother--to marry an English lord). In agreement that they will never get involved with each other, they head off to London to become stars. Along the way, they perform in the same club with a character played by Sally Rand, who was famous in that time period for her "Fan Dance," which must have looked great back then, but now looks just plain silly. Just as Helen is about to marry her own English lord, though, Raoul entices her to join him back in Paris in the club he plans to open, where they can do the kind of dancing he's always wanted to do--for example, a big number to Ravel's Bolero...okay. While making a side trip to Belgium to visit his parents' grave, the two finally admit their love for each other (it is at this point that we find out that he and Frawley have different mothers, which maybe can explain how those two complete opposites can be related--maybe). But just as their opening the new club in Paris, and performing the big Bolero number, news of war breaks out (World War I, that is). Raoul stops the dance, declares he is joining the Belgian army, and announces that they will not perform their Bolero dance until the war is over. Helen is enthralled by this seemingly heroic announcement, but then repelled when she finds out that Raoul just made it because he thinks it's going to be a great publicity stunt for their act (there's an awful lot of For Me and My Gal in this aspect of the story, although that's a far, far superior movie), and besides, the war's going to last only a week, right? Well, Helen marries her English lord and Raoul comes out of the war with a severely damaged heart that is supposed to keep him from dancing, but he is determined to do so nonetheless. He opens the club again and plans to dance the Bolero with another partner, but when she shows up drunk, Mike persuades Helen, who is in the audience with her husband (played, by the way, by an unrecognizably young Ray Milland), to dance it one last time. Raoul is overjoyed, they dance, they're a smash, and as they go offstage and prepare for an encore, Raoul dies, giving Mike the chance to say what has to be one of the all-time great movie ending lines: "He was always too good for this joint."

This movie teeters between enormously bad and ridiculously entertaining. On the plus side, it's fast paced; the stars, even when they're put into ludicrous situations or given bad dialogue, show why they were stars; and the scenes where they're plainly trying not to fall in love with each other work really well. The negatives--okay, let's just get it out of the way. The dancing isn't good. As a ballroom team, they leave a lot to be desired. It's obvious that Carole doesn't really know how to dance, which means most of the choreography is reduced to him walking around her or her walking around him. She certainly can walk and she can strike a pretty pose, but Ginger Rogers never felt threatened. When Raft has a small solo in a swing number, he shows that he actually can dance, but he is definitely more of a hoofer than a ballroom partner; in his solo dance he definitely reminds me more of someone like Ray Bolger than Fred Astaire or even James Cagney (I'm so spoiled--I grew up watching Astaire and Gene Kelly movies, so maybe that makes everyone look like a bad dancer to me). But the limitations of each star aside, the choreography was just bad--Paramount didn't make many dance-oriented movies and whoever did this just didn't seem to have any good ideas; you probably could have given this choreographer (whose name I can't find) Astaire and Rogers and it still wouldn't have looked good. Also, the costumes are painfully off for the time period--there's only a vague attempt in the beginning to put people in period dress, and that becomes a problem because I kept forgetting when the movie was set. Carole was so often dressed in typical 1930s movie star clothes (though with some really bad hairstyles) that I got confused when they began to talk about how everyone was anxious about the coming war. I wondered, what, in 1934 people were talking about an impending war? The Spanish Civil war, maybe? And I was lost when they introduced the detail about Raoul being Belgian--I thought, wow, what a peculiar thing to do, make a character Belgian, why Belgian? Because that was the scene of the start of WW I, of course. Once I remembered that it made sense, but I would have helped if they'd just dressed them correctly. But this was a common crime in movies of that era; the studios just wanted to dress their stars, especially the women, in the most glamorous, fashionable clothes they could.

The best thing about this movie, though, was the chance to see it in a real theater with a real audience, instead of by myself on video. There was a good sized crowd there that was in the mood to laugh at both the intentionally and unintentionally funny parts of this movie, especially two white-haired older women a few rows in front of me who were having an outrageously good time giggling with each other; when I came home I told my best friend that that would be us in forty years, watching a screening of say, LA Confidential or something like that which we saw in the theaters the first time around.

Most of all, seeing a movie like that in a theater like that made me think of my grandmother, who used to tell me how she would go to the movies all day on Saturdays, to see a cartoon, a newsreel, a short, a B picture, and an A picture. She read magazines like Photoplay and Silver Screen and talked about her much more glamorous older sisters and how they would try to dress like the stars they saw in the movies. I like to think that if somehow I had been alive back then with her, we would have spent many long days at the movies together (I doubt either of us would have been able to keep up with the partying and clubbing of her terrifyingly sophisticated older sister Mary). I miss her very much.