February 2020 – Page 15 – R. Emmet Sweeney

COMEDY OF REMARRIAGE: THE MOON’S OUR HOME (1936)

February 25, 2020February 25, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

January 20, 2015

Struggling stage actors Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan were married on December 25, 1931. They divorced two months later. In 1936, Fonda and Sullavan were both burgeoning movie stars, and appeared together in the romantic comedy The Moon’s Our Home, whose story of whirlwind romance and hurricane breakup recalled their brief fling. Recently released on DVD from the Universal Vault, the studio’s burn-on-demand service, the film is an aggressive farce that gained added oomph from Fonda and Sullavan’s fraught, passionate relationship (the transfer looks soft and interlaced, but it’s watchable). Director William A. Seiter was a sensitive shaper of star personas, having helped mold the Dadaist antics of Wheeler and Woolsey and the blossoming sass of Ginger Rogers. The Moon’s Our Home, with the aid of some acidic dialogue contributed by Dorothy Parker, is a bumptious battle of the sexes, with Sullavan a bite-sized Napoleon and Fonda her arrogant outdoorsman opponent. Their fights are shockingly violent, and the film ends with one of them in a straightjacket.

The Moon’s Our Home was adapted from a serialized novel by Faith Baldwin first published in Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan magazine. Walter Wanger Productions optioned the film rights, and included it in their distribution deal with Paramount. Wanger had also produced The Trail of the Lonesome Pine earlier in 1936, a Technicolor Western directed by Henry Hathaway that began the process of etching Henry Fonda into American history. Wanger brought Fonda back for The Moon’s Our Home, here playing an urbane travel writer with the pen name Anthony Amberton (real name John Smith), something of a hippie free spirit who’d rather commune with nature than with his growing legion of fans. But he is forced into city life to promote his new book (the macho “Astride the Himalayas”), and ends up on the same train as “Cherry Chester”, real name Sarah Brown (Sullavan), the young Hollywood ingenue of the moment. She is on her way to visit her supposedly sick grandmother back East in New York City, and is about to be roped into a relationship with her mewling cousin Horace (Charles Butterworth). The two celebrities never meet, but imagine the other to be a pompous airhead. Seiter splits the screen open diorama style and shows them in their adjacent rooms, their nighttime rituals choreographed as a dance. From brushing teeth to that last cigarette, every motion of theirs is in sync. It is a lyrical, economical way to convey that these two are made for each other, though they are a long way from realizing it. In his room, Amberton disgustedly states that “marshmallow-faced movie stars make me sick.”

During a book signing in NYC, Amberton gets woozy from perfume that makes him nauseous, evades his marauding admirers, escapes the department store and jumps into a horse-and-carriage, one which Cherry happens to be riding in. She is running away from her grandmother’s matchmaking mania. Neither recognizes the other, and so they flirt. Amberton says, “You’re rather attractive in an elementary sort of way”, in between complaints about city life and dreams of wooded isolation. Amberton/Smith drops off the business card of the secluded New Hampshire guest home he is staying at, and Chester/Brown cannot resist the impulse to disappear. She runs away from her grandmother and Horace, her vanishing causing headline news. The couple falls in love through their disasters: ski crashes, wild horses and the tensed up paranoia of the guest house manager, the Wicked Witch herself Margaret Hamilton. They get married (by a deaf Walter Brennan), without knowing the other’s true identity. After another waft of perfume, the truth begins to leak out, they break up, and the hard work of re-building their marriage has to begin.

Prone to vase-smashing tantrums back home, Sarah seeks the easing of pressure that comes with anonymity. Sullavan, who Fonda described as “cream and sugar on a plate of hot ashes”, flashes all of her cuteness, innocence and wrath. Early on, a telegram from her grandmother has her tossing dishes at her servants, while the conclusion of the sequence finds her wrapped in white furs, her voice softened to a purr, as she delicately speaks to a reporter about love. She has the ability to fold up her body like an accordion when she wants to disarm you, shrinking herself into a dot that contains only her heart-shaped face. Once you are in her thrall she can expand into her knife-sharp, almost stabbing, form. It was this aggressiveness that initially attracted Fonda to her.

Devin McKinney describes their first encounter in his beautifully written biography of Fonda, The Man Who Saw a Ghost: “Henry meets Margaret Sullavan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 1929, when they both appear in a musical comedy revue and she, as part of a synchronized production number, slaps him silly. ‘She intrigued me,’ he [Fonda] says.” The tabloids pegged their breakup to Sullavan’s rapid ascent and Fonda’s concurrent struggles. In 1936 Screenland phrased it as, “The old story of the rich, successful wife and the poor, unappreciated husband, and of course two such screwy people didn’t wait long to get a divorce.”

The Moon’s Our Home is a knowing re-enactment of their relationship, this time tagged with a “happy” ending. They get back together, but in a particularly cruel way, perhaps befitting their tumultuously brief time together. McKinney quotes a witness to one of their married bouts, who said, “They fought so terribly that you’d have to get out of the room.” From the courting to the break-up to their reunion, everything is borne out of violence and humiliation. Brown agrees to marry Amberton only after losing a bet – that she wouldn’t be able to stand up after crashing on her skis. During a grueling and very funny few minutes of screen time, Sullavan splays and slips and folds in half, but can never get upright. The marriage ceremony itself is an argument — Walter Brennan mishears their tiff “-Do you want to call the whole thing off? -I certainly do” as a confirmation of their vows. It ends in a brutal fashion. Sullavan is attempting to fly back to Hollywood to continue her career. Instead Fonda tracks her down, throws her into a straitjacket, and drives back into the city. It is a sequence of brutal patriarchal privilege, as Molly Haskell pointed out in From Reverence to Rape, but it is impossible to imagine Sullavan being kept tied up for long. As McKinney wrote, “Soon the jacket will come off, and this twister will fly again.”

When production began Sullavan was married to William Wyler, who directed her in The Good Fairy (1935). They were divorced in March of 1936, a few months after The Moon’s Our Home opened to middling box office. There was talk that Fonda and Sullavan were getting back together, but it never happened, it was probably just publicist fodder to drum up interest in the film. But the movie is enough to make you believe. That same Screenland article paints an irresistible portrait of the old couple settling into their old wedded roles, two beautiful, prickly pranksters who know who to get on every last nerve:

The director and people on the set tell me that for the first few days of production Margaret and Henry never spoke to each other but at the end of each “take” would go to opposite corners of the stage like a couple of wrestlers when the gong rings. …The first day on location in the snow Henry persuaded the sound technician to let him handle the “mike” boom for one scene in which Margaret was supposed to rant all over the place. And he purposely did such a bad job of handling it that the scene had to be taken over three times. By the third “take” Margaret was really ranting and Henry made a dirty crack to the effect that it sounded just like Old Home week. Late that afternoon Margaret got even with him. She was on top of a small slippery incline and extended a helping hand to Henry as he scrambled up. Just as he reached the top she pushed his face down in the snow and then sat on him. Well, you can’t be aloof to a man after you’ve sat on him, now can you?

“FIRST LOOK” AT THE MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

February 25, 2020February 25, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

Movies are hard to see. That statement feels false, what with films all around you, available to stream at a keystroke. But distribution is a weird, half-hazard thing, a pseudo-science that pretends to know which products will sell and which not, a presumptive mind-reading of an imaginary audience that doesn’t get to choose for themselves. So many of the most challenging and strange films get left behind, mere rumors in festival reports and critic bull sessions. This is why festivals like the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look series are so essential. I don’t have the time or the expense account to travel to far-flung locales and sample the outer edges of film festival programs. This is what we pay programmers (not much) for! Now in its fourth year, First Look provides a necessary catch-up for the most challenging work from the previous year, stuff too bold or bizarre to reach screens otherwise. Chief curator David Schwarz and assistant film curator Aliza Ma teamed up with FIDMarseilles, a similarly provocative French festival, and organized a wide-ranging program of too-hot-for distributor films. There’s a vital verite document of the Syrian civil war (Our Terrible Country), a lyrical portrait of rural Brazil (August Winds), and a Persian language lesson that opens up a swathe of Iranian history (I For Iran).

The “biggest” titles on display were Aleksei German’s mud-choked sci-fi dirge Hard to be a God (which has distribution from Kino Lorber) and Amour Fou, a studied depiction of Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist’s suicide pact with his beloved Henriette Vogel, which premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. But I go to First Look for the small and impossible to see — and was stunned by Our Terrible Country (screening January 17th at 7pm), a portrait of Syrian dissident Yassin Haj Saleh and his fraught journey into exile. Yassin had been imprisoned from 1980 – 1996 by Hafez al-Assad’s regime for what Yassin described as his membership in a “communist pro-democracy group”. Filmmaker/photographer Ziad Homsi wanted to capture Yassin’s experience in Damascus during the uprising against Hafez’s son Bashar, a rumination from one of the beacons of the revolution. But the film turned into something much darker, as the civil war created a vacuum of power that ISIS came in to fill, dreams of revolution getting snuffed by Islamic extremism. It begins in the liberated city of Douma, some 10km northeast of Damascus’ city center. Yassin and his wife Samira fled there after Damascus became too dangerous.

Douma’s “liberation” is pyrrhic, a crumbling ghost town that threatens to fall to the regime at any moment. Yassin keeps up a good face, organizing street cleaning teams to remove rubble from the streets. But the locals are wary of this community organizing, and one neighbor expresses a demand that the volunteer women should cover their faces. With a divided populace, a dwindling energy supply and no end in sight to the war, Samira expresses an “anger that I could explode the universe with”. Homsi stays close to Yassin who decides to search for a route out of Douma and into Raqqa, his hometown in the north of Syria. As they travel side roads and through deserts, avoiding the blazing sun by laying underneath canvas sheets, Yassin learns that ISIS has taken over his city and kidnapped his brothers. He travels on anyway, knowing his wife is in constant danger in Douma, and knowing ISIS meets him at the end of his journey. Every step seems weighted with doom, and the populace loses hope. The righteous revolution has caused endless bloodshed and created a foothold for ISIS, what Yassin calls “the cancerous growth of the revolution.” The country is tearing itself apart, and it begins to seep into the emotions of its people. The owner of a falafel joint breaks down when Yassin questions the amount he was charged for a hummus plate, taking the question as a grievous insult to his dignity. He yells and wails to all the customers at this indignity, but after he calms down he tells Homsi’s camera that, “Assad is merely an illusion. The disaster is inside us.”

Yassin escapes to Istanbul using his brother-in-law’s passport, ensuring his own safety, but leaving Homsi and his wife behind. There is no safe route outside of Douma anymore – Samira is trapped, her image seen only in the Skype calls Yassin can make before Samira loses the last of her electricity. These sequences are unbearably painful to watch. Soon all hope is lost. Homsi’s father is in prison, but is desperate to spirit his mother out of the country. He simply states, “People who want to live should get out.” He finds his way to Yassin in Istanbul, and they fall apart together. Our Terrible Country is an urgent document of despair from a stalled revolution.

I For Iran (Saturday, January 17th at 4:30) filters the 1979 Iranian revolution through a Persian language workbook. In this deceptively simple essay film, director Sanaz Azari sits in a classroom and has a teacher lecture her in the language on a blackboard. Azari was born in Iran, but raised in Belgium, and hopes to re-connect with her ancestral home through language. The teacher is another Iranian exile, a gray haired performer who shifts between nostalgia and sarcasm regarding their mutual lost home. Through simple language exercises fraught histories peek through, whether it’s the teacher’s cynical digression on the 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani, or the sample sentences used, like “Dad doesn’t give bread, because there is no work.” The images created for post-Revolution children in the workbook become portals through which Azari envisions the country, it’s beauties and repressions both.

August Winds (Sunday, January 18th at 5:00) is another document of a place, though it is physical and tactile where I For Iran is cerebral, constructed in your head. An atmospheric portrait of the Northeastern Brazilian state of Alagoas, it uses narrative as an excuse to portray the lush atmosphere and monotonous day-to-day life of its inhabitants. Director Gabriel Mascaro is a documentarian at heart, though one who is hyper-aware of his privileged role in shaping the depiction of his subjects. In his documentary, Housemaids, he gave cameras to seven teenagers and asked to film their maids – he edited the footage after it was returned to him. In August Wind he takes more compositional control, using fixed camera compositions with narrowing vanishing points, whether it’s stream, lake or hallway. It opens with the camera on the back of a canoe, a bikini-clad local Shirley (Dondara de Morais) splayed out and listening to The Lewd’s punk anthem “Kill Yourself”. In suing Coca-Cola as a suntan lotion and blasting West Coast American punk, Shirley is looking for a way out of the traditional life of Alagoas, which is still dependent on the coconut harvest. She has a Nancy Drew interlude when her boyfriend finds a polished skull, buffed to a shine by the tides, and indicative of the tidal pull this town has on her, circling her and keeping her in place. The one envoy from the outside world, a young meteorologist studying wind patterns, seems to emerge and disappear with the waves, and may have washed up as a corpse. This hypnotic, repetitious work recapitulates many of the strategies of Lisandro Alonso, from its isolated locale, fixed camera set-ups, and slender death-drive narrative.

If you happen to be in the New York City area, you should gaze longingly at First Look, which gives screens to the screenless. And with Our Terrible Country, it is the only place to see one of the finest, and most vital documentaries of the year, poking its head under an ongoing human tragedy that retreats further into the back pages of the newspaper. Here’s hoping a distributor runs the numbers and decides to pick it up anyway.

NIGHT AND THE CITY: BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN (1950)

February 23, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

January 6, 2015

“A brutal policeman is a terrible thing. He has too much power. Too many chances of taking his viciousness out on helpless people.” – Katherine Mallory (Gale Storm) in Between Midnight and Dawn

In the grim police procedural Between Midnight and Dawn, violence is a spigot that cannot be turned off. It begins with a thrill – a tense night time shootout in an auto-body shop with some generic young hoods. But for beat cop prowl car partners Rocky Barnes (Mark Stevens) and Daniel Purvis (Edmond O’Brien), it’s just one of their nightly spasms of gunfire. Rocky is able to retain his humanity, working off his nerves through a constant patter of jokes, but Purvis has worn out his concern for human life. Once it turns dark, all women are tramps, all men are thugs, and Purvis’ misanthropic disgust flows into his trigger finger. The movie strays into unconvincing romance — the brightness looking sallow and jaundiced against the sepulchral evening blacks of DP George Diskant (much shot on location in Los Angeles city streets) — but it retains a bitter aftertaste upon its close. Between Midnight and Dawn is available on the TCM Vault Collection’s “Columbia Film Noir Classics IV” DVD box set.

It was director Gordon Douglas’ second harsh noir of 1950 — he made it immediately following Kiss Me Tomorrow, featuring James Cagney as an abusive, single-minded psychopath. The shadow of Cagney’s character appears in Purvis, peeking out from behind his sober on-duty face whenever he sees any adult carousing after dark. Then he spits out the insults and batters witnesses. He is, according to the film’s rights, and that of the world around him, a “good” cop. He and Barnes are ex-marines and best pals who room together and work together, and their relationship feels like a series of routines worked out over the decades. Purvis is the ungainly sober straight man who reacts to the jackrabbit energy of Barnes and his constant stream of humor. Barnes is always acting, which insulates him from the world outside, while Purvis is an open nerve, instantly pained by everything around him.

The film was made for Columbia Pictures, and shot from February – March of 1950. It has the looks of a cheap production, using a few office sets and the rest shot on location in Los Angeles. Mark Stevens was positioned as a star for 20th Century Fox for a few years in the late ’40s (The Dark Corner, The Snake Pit), but he was released from his contract in 1950. Between Midnight and Dawn was his second film as a free agent, after he made the romantic comedy Please Believe Me for MGM. It is striking to compare his relative youthfulness in Between Midnight to the films he would write and direct a few years later (Cry Vengeance (’54) and Timetable (56)). In those latter, despairing noirs Stevens looks emaciated and burnt-out, the movies a monument to his disillusionment with the industry. In Between Midnight and Dawn he still has pep and vigor, and earned top billing over Edmond O’Brien.

The screenplay by Eugene Ling (adapted from a story by Leo Katcher and Gerald Drayson Adams) nails together a hodgepodge of genres, though it would be called noir today. It is framed as a procedural, opening with a voice of God about the little guys who arrive on the scene before the more famous FBI attention hoggers show up – the radio patrolmen (the original title was Prowl Car). Barnes and Purvis then nab the young hoodlums in the auto-body shop after a low-light gunfight. There are other slices-of-life attempts at realism here, from breaking up a couple of brawling pre-teens to dealing with a stink bombed Italian grocers. But then it shifts into gangster movie mode, as the tough who is collared for the stink bomb turns out to be one of the heavies for local mob kingpin Ritchie Garris (a babyfaced Donald Buka). The routine gives way to their pursuit of the Garris gang, who get drawn into a mob war with a cross-town rival. While all this is going on, the movie manages to squeeze in some light rom-comedy, as both Barnes and Purvis become enamored with the young secretary to their lieutenant, Katherine Mallory (Gale Storm). They have an awkward three-person date, and then the two cops move in next door to her, for some strained farce.

It’s one movie too many, but it’s held together by Douglas’ cold impassive tone and Diskant’s resourceful cinematography. As Sean Axmaker noted in his article on the official TCM site, Diskant uses” chiaroscuro lighting of shadows and slashes of illumination in studio-set scenes, as in a shootout in a garage early in the film, [while] his location footage is defined by hard, single-source lighting, which gives the scenes a down-and-dirty immediacy.” There is an extraordinary car chase that zips through the Los Angeles bus depot and careens into a rural stretch of wood, the criminal jamming his rifle barrel through the back windshield, spraying death behind him. It is this chase that spells Barnes and Purvis’ doom. Their high-speed heroics initiate a whole cycle of vengeance that nearly immolates them all. And Purvis invites it. The quote at the top of the page, which seems painfully relevant in the light of recent events in Ferguson and NYC, is said by Katherine after Purvis slaps around an innocent nightclub singer. Desperate for a lead, Purvis finally crosses the line from silent to active hatred. There is an unconvincingly redemptive ending in which he makes peace with his demons by shooting them. Purvis walks out of the carnage smiling, flashbulbs popping. He is less an LAPD hero than a Travis Bickle in waiting.

AGAINST TYPE: HI, NELLIE (1934)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 30, 2014

Paul Muni snarled to prominence as the amoral gangster kingpin Scarface (1932), and followed it up with an expose of the prison system, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1933). He had already received an Oscar nomination for his debut performance in The Valiant (1929), so by 1934 he was a star, and a serious-minded one. Born to a Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian empire, he came up through the Yiddish theater, made it to Broadway, and eventually earned unprecedented freedom in choosing the parts he wanted to play in Hollywood. So when histories of Muni’s career are written, few mention his little newspaper comedy from 1934, Hi, Nellie. A standard Warner Brothers quickie, it packs in screwball, romance, mystery and gangster movies into one 75 minute package. Muni clearly revels in trying out comedy, channeling his wiry energy into the clipped, slangy dialogue of a Hecht/MacArthur knockoff. And the rest of the cast is up to his challenge, with acidic performances from Glenda Farrell and Ned Sparks. Hi, Nellie is now available on DVD as part of the Warner Archive’s Forbidden Hollywood Volume 8 set of pre-codes (also including Blonde Crazy, Strangers May Kiss, and Dark Hazard).

“Either a comedy, something light and frivolous, or the story of a Slovak coal miner.” This was reportedly Muni’s response to Jack Warner about what he would like to make after the multi-generational drama The World Changes (1933). Muni was fascinated by the coal miner’s fight for unionization and better work conditions. While acting in a touring company of Counsellor At Law, Muni stopped off in a Pennsylvania mining town to interview the local workers. All of this research would turn into Black Fury (1935). But first, he did something “light and frivolous”.

Hi, Nellie was based on a story by Roy Chanslor, and turned into a script by Abem Finkel and Sidney Sutherland. Finkel was Muni’s brother-in-law, and the scion of a legendary Yiddish theater family. Abem’s father Moishe was a producer in Hungary as well as the States. Great Yiddish star Jacob Adler described Moishe in his memoir: “A tragic figure in our history, Finkel. One of the first pioneers, an excellent artist, a good director, for many years a power in our theater world, until in 1904 he put an end to his career and life with a bullet in his brain.” After Moishe’s second wife, Emma Thomashefsky, left him, he shot her, her lover, and then himself. Emma was partially paralyzed but lived until 1929. Muni’s employment of Abem was not just for nostalgia’s sake. Abem had a long career as a scenarist at WB, with an Oscar nomination for Sergeant York (1941), and credits on Jezebel (1938), Black Legion (1937) and many more.

With Abem along, Muni carried the Yiddish theater with him, and must have seen some analogues to Yiddish comedy in Chanslor story. Muni plays Samuel Bradshaw (nicknamed “Brad”), the tough-talking managing editor of the New York Times Star. The head of the governor’s investigating committee, Frank J. Canfield, has gone missing, along with $60 Million of a prominent bank’s reserves. All the tabloids connect the two stories, that Canfield absconded with the cash, but Brad refuses to publicly indict him on scant evidence. The paper’s owner J.L. Graham (Burton Churchill) is enraged, and demotes Brad down to the paper’s romance column, where he has to take on the pseudonym Nellie Nelson. The current”Heartthrobs” columnist, Brad’s ex-beau Gerry Krale (Glenda Farrell), is thrilled to get back on the city beat.Brad has to endure rounds of “Hi Nellie!” each trip through the office, sinking him into an alcohol-fueled depression – until a break in the Canfield case gets his journalistic juices flowing again. The basic plot was remade several times by Warner Brothers, as Love is On the Air (1937), You Can’t Escape Forever (1942), and The House Across the Street (1949).

Hi, Nellie was Muni’s third straight collaboration with Mervyn LeRoy (after I Was a Fugitive on a Chain Gang and The World Changes), one of WB’s most bankable directors. LeRoy topped Variety’s list of top box office directors of 1933, during which he directed Gold Diggers of 1933 and four more profitable movies. While never a distinctive artist, LeRoy was a reliable craftsman, and ably orchestrates the chaos of the Times Star’s newsroom. He establishes the geography of the office in a high-angle crane shot that scans the anthill industriousness of the constantly moving reporters/editors/newsboys. The majority of the film then uses waist-up medium shots to focus on gesture and dialogue. Muni, with a streak of gray in his hair to indicate the stresses of the job, seems to have studied the speed chatter of Lee Tracy in preparing for this role, all of his wiry strength transferred from his muscles to his words. Brad is an arrogant taskmaster who also happens to be good at his job, so when his power is taken from him, his whole self-image collapses. He ends up in a dive bar apologizing to his whiskey. But with Gerry’s admonitions ringing in his head to stop being a coward (she endured the Heartthrobs gig for much longer, and didn’t crumble), the plot shifts again into investigative mode, and Brad sets his sights on a local gangster.

The film breezes by because of the energy of the performances. Brad and Gerry have a complicated, flirtations relationship that involves a past fling and professional jealousy. Glenda Farrell had experience playing a tough-talking reporter gal from her time in the Torchy Blane series, and her self-confidence emanates off the screen. LeRoy noticed this too, and grants her one of the few tracking shots in the film, pulling back through the office as she is harassed for a date by a mousy reporter (she, as ever, declines). The other unsung hero of the film is Ned Sparks, who has a Droopy Dog face and a voice like a muted trumpet. His deadpan nasal delivery anchors the film as it revs through the too-pat coincidences of the mystery plot. His slow-motion lope and sourpuss sarcasm brings everything back to earth.

Even though it’s rather unknown today, Hi, Nellie was well-received at the time. Photoplay lauded its “trip hammer action”, while Motion Picture Daily wrote, “It moves rapidly. It is flavored with the sauce of front page life and salted with humor.” The impressively named Frederic F. Van de Water at The New Movie Magazine ranked it as “outstanding”, and praised LeRoy for having “taken the trouble to learn how a newspaper office looks and sounds.” I’m throwing my lot in with the esteemed Mr. Van de Water. Hi, Nellie is a brisk entertainment, and one which shows off the commitment and range of Paul Muni, who I never expected could have been so funny.

FILM DISCOVERIES OF 2014

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 23, 2014

Let the proliferation of year-end lists wash over you with a resigned calm. And let me add another one to the ocean of opinion. Today I’m presenting my top ten new-to-me movies of 2014. That is, older films that I have seen for the first time. They are the backbone of any movie-going year, whether it’s catching up to acknowledged classics (for me, The Best Years of Our Lives) or going trawling for obscure auteurist gems (Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby, Edward L. Cahn’s Redhead). It’s a way to draw attention to a wider range of filmgoing possibilities, so you don’t have to read about Boyhood for the bazillionth time (though, if you do, my appreciation is over here). All credit goes to prodigious blogger Brian Saur from Rupert Pupkin Speaks, who collects “Favorite Film Discoveries” from writers, programmers and filmmakers every year, and asked me to contribute once upon a time. I found the exercise invigorating, more so than the usual end-of-year recycling, so you have him to thank or blame.

The films are presented in alphabetical order

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, directed by William Wyler)

I had been indoctrinated in aversion to Wyler, from half-remembered slams by Andrew Sarris. This is not Sarris’ fault but my own, as he was a persistent re-evaulator, trying to undermine his own biases. But now that I’m here, my goodness what a movie. Wyler was a serviceman for three years, and knew who these men were and how they lived. The deep focus cinematography by Gregg Toland is justly famous, but it’s the gestures inside of it that make it work so beautifully. The orchestration of glances as the family silently reacts to Homer’s amputation isolates him even as he’s surrounded by well-wishers.

On Blu-ray from Warner Brothers

Broken Lullaby (1932, directed by Ernst Lubtisch)

Lubitsch’s only non-comic sound film is a post-traumatic post-WWI drama about a shellshocked vet who seeks penance for bayoneting a German soldier in the trenches. He travels to atone to his victim’s parents, but when he arrives, he can’t bring himself to admit his guilt. Instead he falls in love with their daughter. Like in many of Lubitsch’s comedies, it’s about a man who fakes his life so beautifully he almost makes it come true. It opens with a blast of dialectical montage, cutting rhythmically between a Paris belfry’s bells and a battlefield cannon, the drums of the soldier’s homecoming parade sliced in with a wounded vet’s screams. It is as potent a three minutes as anything Eisenstein concocted. But then, a stylstic shift into daring long takes and a subdued, declamatory kind of acting. There is an unbroken two-minute take of two mothers grieving over their sons that is devastating in its quietude.

Unavailable on home video or VOD

Carnival of Souls (1962, directed by Herk Harvey)

This miraculous motion picture is a dip into the Midwestern uncanny, ghosts haunting the long flat highways and abandoned amusements. It’s one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen, undoubtedly aided by viewing it on July 4th weekend, where bottle rockets were popping off behind my head every five minutes. I was too gripped to turn around and look at the firecracking kids outside, for fear I would see that face reflected in the window.

On DVD from Criterion (I watched it on Hulu Plus)

The Clockmaker of St. Paul (1974, directed by Bertrand Tavernier)

Tavernier’s debut feature is a subdued adaptation of a Simenon novel about a habit-minded watchmaker whose estranged son is wanted for murder. Shot in Tavernier’s hometown of Lyon, it traces the father’s ritualized walks through his city as he grapples with this rupture in his life. The outdoor photography is hushed and autumnal,the death of summer framing the father’s unspoken struggle over his son’s situation, which rouses the communist factory workers at which his son worked, as well as the accusatory owners. The father’s motivations and inner being are kept opaque, his inner workings as unfathomable as his clocks are understandable. So when his decision arrives, it is with the gathering force of a thunderbolt.

On Region 2 DVD from Optimum

Forgotten Faces (1928, directed by Victor Schertzinger)

The undisputed highlight of this year’s Capitolfest in Rome, NY, this is a visually extravagant crime melodrama. The story is a convoluted stew involving gentlemen thieves, orphaned daughters, scheming mothers, and a devoted sidekick named Froggy (William Powell). Not memorable material, but the clarity and elegance of its late silent film style are often overwhelming. There are elegant tracking shots, provocative use of off-screen space, and complicated spiraling sets that are split in half and filmed in a Wes Anderson-esque dollhouse style. It’s enough to make one shake a fist at the sky and rue the coming of sound.

Unavailable on home video or VOD

Good Sam (1948, directed by Leo McCarey)

I am morally obligated to write about every Leo McCarey movie someday, so this year it was Good Sam, a complicated moral fable about the unintended consequences of doing good. Gary Cooper is Sam, an inveterate do-gooder whose charity consistently leads to troubles, whether its debt, permanent visitors or missing cars. The film’s central theme is the impossibility of saintliness in a consumer society – one in which Sam becomes an object of ridicule (by his boss, his wife and the world at large), rather than lauded for his selflessness. Cooper is appropriately skittish and perpetually aghast, but the real star is Ann Sheridan as his put upon wife. Her acerbic realism cuts the sweetness of Sam’s saintliness, and she provides the greatest laughs in the film – especially when she busts out cackling at Sam as he uncharacteristically runs down a neighbor (who happens to be sitting right behind him).

On Blu-ray and DVD from Olive Films

The Long Day Closes (1992, directed by Terence Davies)

Note perfect reminiscence about growing up lonely and growing up in the movies, usually the same thing.

On DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection

Mongo’s Back in Town (1971, directed by Marvin J. Chomsky)

A relentlessly downbeat telefilm noir starring Joe Don Baker as the titular Mongo. Mongo is a beast intent on destroying his hometown. His milquetoast brother summons him back to San Pedro, CA in order to knock off a local competitor, but instead Mongo brings the whole criminal edifice down around everyone’s heads. Baker is gruff and relentless, an analogue to Lee Marvin’s Walker in Point Blank (1967). Nothing will sway Mongo from his own disgust. The rest of the cast includes Telly Savalas, Martin Sheen and Sally Field, all dumb witnesses to Mongo’s clumsy, bloody vengeance.

On MOD-DVD from CBS Films

Redhead (1941, directed by Edward L. Cahn)

I am contractually obligated to write about 10-12 Edward L. Cahn movies this year, and this one was my favorite (When the Clock Strikes finishing a close second). It’s a downbeat suicide comedy about a pair of mismatched lovers(one rich, one poor) who meet each other both on the precipice of leaping off a cliff. They save each other instead, opening a roadside diner and learning how to live on modest means. It’s death-driven, class-conscious comedy only possible in the dark, delightful world of Cahn.

Available to stream on Amazon Instant Video

A Touch of Zen/The Valiant Ones (1969/1975, both directed by King Hu)

One of the major events in NYC was the BAM Cinematek’s King Hu retrospective. I was only able to make it to these two, but they are jaw dropping spectacles. I preferred the relentless logic of The Valiant Ones, in which the intricately choreographed battles are mapped out on chess boards, and each faction is eliminated with unforgiving procession. The earlier Touch of Zen is more inside the head than the hands, a Buddhist fable of enlightenment in which blood turns into told and only through self-abnegation can come glory.

Both are out of print on DVD

Utamaro and his Five Women (1946, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi)

Wherein the life of an artist (here woodblock print portratist Utamaro) is presented as one of continuous battle, in which everyone suffers, his models most of all.

Available on Region 2 DVD from Artificial Eye

FINAL REPOSE: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 16, 2014

Albert Lewin is an elusive figure in the history of Hollywood. He was an educated aesthete with a B.A. from NYU and a M.A. from Harvard who took a job as a script reader at Samuel Goldwyn studios. He swiftly rose through the ranks after Goldwyn was absorbed by MGM, and he was one of the five “Thalberg Men” who facilitated the studios success, overseeing hits like Spawn of the North and Mutiny on the Bounty. When not overseeing super productions, Lewin directed six unusual features, almost all about artistically inclined loners enmeshed in a debilitating obsession. His most famous film is his 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is now available on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive. It is a startlingly controlled production, from Hurd Hatfield’s evocatively blank lead performance to the deep focus photography of DP Harry Stradling, which gives ample space for Gray’s emptiness to expand.

Aside from the addition of a few characters, the film hews closely to Wilde’s story. It regards Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield), a preternaturally handsome young gentleman who becomes horrified at the thought of his aging. While gazing at the portrait of himself that had just been completed, Gray makes a passionate wish for the painting to reflect the aging process, but that his body remain young and unlined. His wish is granted. The painting reflects his true face, while he flesh becomes a mask. When his love of a nightclub singer (Angela Lansbury) encounters tragedy, Gray turns to all varieties of debauchery as a distraction, and the painting’s face becomes more and more grotesque, a rebuke to Gray’s fetishization of youth.

Every element of the movie is thought through and fussed over. The interior of Gray’s apartment is designed to look like a museum, a cold receptacle that does not seem to allow for a human presence. Hurd Hatfield gives a performance of dreamlike roboticism, as if controlled by joystick off-screen, his voice an uninflected monotone. It is incredibly bold to have a void at the center of your movie, but Lewin seems to push Hatfield more and more into nothingness, until all that’s left of him are those improbably high cheekbones. Hatfield’s face is a marvel in itself, with fine feminine features lending his face a striking asexuality. In the original publication of Wilde’s novella, references to homosexuality were removed by the publisher. In the film, Gray’s proclivities are strongly suggested in a scene where a doctor arrives and is blackmailed to aid Gray in a crime. The act for which he is being blackmailed is never stated, which becomes a proof of its own.

The one chance Gray has to escape his narcissism is in his infatuation with Sibyl Vane (Angela Lansbury), the main attraction at the seedy Two Turtles Pub. He first sees Vane on stage as she croons the schmaltzy, affecting “Goodbye Little Yellow Bird” in her singsong voice as the emcee tosses feathers in her wake. Gray sees an unaffected innocence in her performance, and returns repeatedly to bathe in her naturalness. It is in these encounters in which flickers of life still emerge behind Hatfield’s eyes. But instead of following his heart he follows the instructions of the social butterfly/philosopher of pleasure Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders). Gray is a blank slate, and Wotton fills him up with witty, empty words of self-love. And so Gray is put on the path to self-destruction, and the painting seems to rot off the canvas.

The painting in The Picture of Dorian Gray serves a similar purpose as the curse in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Lewin’s 1951 feature adaptation of the seafaring fable. In it, James Mason is the titular Dutchman, doomed to sail the seven seas until he finds a woman who is willing to die for him (in this case, Ava Gardner). Like the portrait, the curse is a supernatural element that isolates the central character. In the film the Dutchman is a portrait artist, using painting as an escape from his endless existence. He is more heroic than Gray, actively seeking a way out of his loneliness, whereas Gray is directed straight to oblivion. But both films are studies of men with artistic temperaments driven to solitude and drawn to madness.

The “after” painting of Gray’s ugly moral state was made by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, who Lewin admired. Albright made exaggeratedly unforgiving self-portraits, emphasizing every flap and fold of his aging face and neck. Who better to paint Gray’s true self than that? Albright’s figures look illuminated from within, and the fantastical nature of his exaggerations often has him grouped with the magic realists. Albright was commissioned to paint both the “before” and “after” portraits of Gray, but his process was so slow-moving and demanding that he only ever completed the “after”. The “before” was ultimately painted by Henrique Medina. Albright’s portrait is one of the great movie paintings, a phantasmagoric rendering of a diseased, pustule-ridden lout, his decaying presence infecting the room around him, everything dissolving back into organic matter.

JUST VISITING: STARMAN and THE TALE OF THE PRINCESS KAGUYA

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 9, 2014

Inside each hand, a miracle. Starman (1984) and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) both envision the ineffable, of presences that transcend our earthly domain. But both also celebrate the joys allowed to those bound in flesh, of Dutch apple pie and a frolic in the woods. Odd things happen when movies are viewed in quick succession. As I watched Starman and Kaguya, their stories seemed to be the same story. Both features follow an alien lifeform adapting to Earth. In Starman it’s a crash-landed alien anthropologist trekking back to his rendezvous point, while in Kaguya it’s a princess who was discovered inside of a bamboo shoot, and presumed to be a gift of the heavens. There are comic fish-out-of-water segments in adapting to their new environments, as well as doomed romances that spark and snuff out due to the whole long-distance relationship problem (it’s tough when you’re in different galaxies). But they are bittersweet films, ones that make the transcendent visible, only for it to disappear in the end.

Starman (1984) was a cursed property at Columbia Pictures. It was the project the studio chose to make instead of E.T. They were developing both, but the head of the studio at the time, Frank Price, prioritized Starman. Spielberg moved E.T. to Universal, where it became the highest grossing film of all time up until that point. Trying to escape the stink of lost money, Columbia shelved Starman for a year, until it was resurrected by John Carpenter, who had just directed the Stephen King killer car adaptation Christine (1983) for Columbia. It was a change of pace for Carpenter, who had not strayed too far from his horror wheelhouse. He was a student of film history though, and admired how the studio directors could have a go at every possible genre, often in the same year. On Starman, Carpenter tried to make his Capra movie. He told New York Magazine that:

Starman meets this widow, played by Karen Allen, and falls in love. But he’s an alien, and she doesn’t know how to react. It’s like Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. I wanted to create that same kind of romantic tension.

Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen) is speechless to discover her dead husband alive in her living room. The “Starman” had crash landed in the field outside her house, and taken on human form by melding itself with her husband’s DNA.When she recovers from the shock, she realizes that this is an impostor. The eyes are glassy and blank, his movements ungainly and staccato, like a baby bird. His English vocabulary was gleaned from the album included in the Voyager satellite, their communication reliant upon body language and intuition. Jenny, still in mourning, is hypnotized by this specter, and reluctantly helps him on his trip from Wisconsin to Arizona — where he will rendezvous with his mother ship and return home. Despite the sci-fi trappings, the bulk of the film is a road trip romantic comedy in the It Happened One Night mold. They are a duo thrown together by circumstance who flirt their way across the U.S., with Jenny initiating him into United States culture. He learns to kiss from studying the late show on TV of From Here to Eternity. Shot on location in Monument Valley and the Meteor Crater in Arizona, along with stops in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, it’s Carpenter’s most American movie. And he doesn’t move the camera too much, keeping things in medium shot and letting the landscapes and actors do the work. And Jeff Bridges, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, is entrancing. He’s an actor that allows you to see him think – which is essential for the part of a quickly adaptive alien being. He’s constantly computing, weighing and evaluating, conveyed in his bird-like head bobs and the gentle querying in his gaze. Karen Allen is quite moving as his straight woman, her arc from exasperation to indulgence to affection demonstrated in her wide-set searching eyes. For a feel-good romance, Starman is awfully downbeat. The government is an exploitative war machine chasing Starman to use him as a lab rat, while the romantic union is an impossibility. They live on separate planes, the gorgeous heartbreaker of an ending closing in on Allen’s face, expressing a terrible kind of wonder and loss.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, the latest and probably final film from anime master Isao Takahata, is another tale of a fantastic visitor who embeds themselves in human concerns. It is based on a tenth century Japanese folktale, one of the oldest narratives in the culture. It concerns a lowly bamboo cutter who finds an infant the size of his thumb inside of a glowing stalk – named Kaguya. He brings her home and raises her as his own. She grows at an exponential rate, so the local children nickname her “Little Bamboo”. The bamboo cutter is convinced the gods desire the child to become a princess, and feel confirmed in that fact when he is gifted with a treasure. He tears his family away from their country home and tries to raise her as a noble, with plucked eyebrows and deference to her elders. Instead, Kaguya would rather be chasing kittens and tending to her garden. She pines for home and her childhood love Sutemaru, until one day she is forced to return to her real home, a place not of earth or of heaven.

The animation is drawn in with colored pencil and watercolor, a vibrantly beautiful aesthetic. The lines are loose and flowing, and the delicate, minimalist aesthetic seemingly leaves landscapes half formed, as if developing along with Kaguya. When she dreams of escape from her gilded city cage, the form deteriorates into rough sketches. As she imagines herself running away, bull-headed through the city streets and back to the country, her body is formed by a few strokes, the forest rendered in thick lines of charcoal, the world seemingly convulsing around her. It’s a tour de force sequence, and one that shows Kaguya’s control. Starman is a victim of circumstance, but Kaguya can shape the environments in which she lives. When required to take a husband, she puts them off with impossible tasks, guaranteeing herself a preferred life as a spinster, tending her gardens and living inside her head.

Kaguya’s departure to her home world is remarkably similar to that of Starman. There is an approaching cloud that resolves into an interstellar conveyance, one which elicits awe and dread. This is the final departure, the end of transcendent possibilities. In both we are granted the POV of the humans who are left behind, left with our conflicted emotions and vulnerable bodies. Starman is an essentially optimistic film, Jenny left with a hopeful gaze into the future. The ones Kaguya leaves behind are bereft, left with nothing but memories of their miraculous child, now gone forever. What in Starman is a possibility, in Kaguya is a rebuke.

CAGNEY THE COMEDIAN: BOY MEETS GIRL (1938)

February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 2, 2014

By the end of 1935 James Cagney was irritated. Under his Warner Brothers contract he was assigned four-to-five movies a year, almost all in the pugilist-gangster mold. Cagney was getting burnt out on the repetition, just as he was becoming a top ten box office attraction. Seeking a higher salary as well as greater input into his roles, Cagney walked off the studio lot and sued them for back pay. He had become a bad boy on-screen as well as off. He spent his time separated from WB making a couple of small features for the independent Grand National Pictures (Great Guy (’36) and Something to Sing About (’37)). The suit was settled in 1938, and Cagney was back at work at WB. His return film was the inside-Hollywood farce Boy Meets Girl, which was a recent Broadway hit. A rapid-fire parody of tinseltown excesses — it tracks the rise and fall of a literally newborn superstar — it allowed Cagney to stretch his comic chops. He gets to enact all of his mischievous Hollywood fantasies: mouthing off to the unit production chief (Ralph Bellamy), insulting soft-headed actors and inciting extras to riot. Cagney and Pat O’Brien play exaggerated versions of the famously acerbic screenwriting team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur as they sweet talk their way into the heart of a naive mother whose baby becomes an overnight star. This cockeyed comedy is now available on DVD from the Warner Archive.

The 1935 stage play by Bella and Samuel Spewack must have appealed to Cagney as a change of pace. Instead of intimidating through violence, here it is only his wits alone that will get him out of Hollywood alive, or at least a decent paycheck. The Spewacks wrote the screenplay adaptation, having to sidestep the Production Code requirements that were then already in force. The mother could no longer be unwed, and unknown quantities of double entendres hit the cutting room floor. Bella Spewack was a young leftist who started her writing career as a reporter for the socialist New York Call newspaper. Samuel was a stringer for the New York World, and they spent years together as Moscow correspondents at their mutual publications. They eventually married and transitioned to the theater, gaining a reputation, and sizable hits, for their high-wire farces. Their first success was Clear All Wires (1932), a comedy about their time in Moscow that was turned into a Lee Tracy film the following year. Boy Meets Girl opened on Broadway on November 27, 1935, and ran for 669 performances. It introduced the following exchange into American parlance: “‘Listen’, Benson says. ‘I’ve been writing stories for 11 years. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl.’” They went on to write the book for Kiss Me Kate (1949).

Boy Meets Girl follows the exploits of screenwriters Robert Law (Cagney) and J.C. Benson (Pat O’Brien), who are assigned to write a feature for the slow-witted cowboy star Larry Toms (Dick Foran). None of their vague, half-baked ideas please producer C. Elliott Friday (Ralph Bellamy), until a sweet, naive waitress enters the room to deliver their lunch. Susie (Marie Wilson) faints from the strain of lugging all of their turkey sandwiches, and she reveals her pregnancy. Benson and Law immediately brainstorm a story about Toms raising a baby in the Wild West, and sign Susie’s unborn child to a contract. As the embryo’s godfathers, they claim power of attorney. The baby, branded Happy, becomes a box office sensation, saving the jobs of everyone on the lot. Toms maneuvers to marry Susie in order to wrest control of Happy – but Benson and Law have a few more tricks up their sleeve (disguises, lies, switcheroos) as everyone desperately tries to hold onto their position.

The film adaptation of Boy Meets Girl is dangerously fast. Cagney was concerned audiences wouldn’t be able to follow the action it proceeded as such a pace. In his autobiography, Cagney on Cagney he recalls that, “Pat and I were harassed by the producer’s insistence on more speed.” Director Lloyd Bacon was happy to oblige. Bacon was a reliable company man who had developed a rapport with Cagney and his crew. Though not much of a stylist – Boy Meets Girl is a definitively stagebound production — he allowed for much experimentation from his actors. When Bacon got a job, wrote Cagney, he didn’t ask “‘When? Where? What? How?’ Lloyd would just say, ‘Who?’ ‘Who?’ translates to ‘Who have I got?’ and usually who he got was who he wanted to get — his gang, the stock company: Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh, Cagney, Allen Jenkins, and others of us who worked so well with each other and with him.” This was Cagney’s drinking crew as well, referred to as his “Club” in a 1938 issue of Modern Screen. These were his collaborators and his friends, and the looseness on display is contagious.

In the early sequences O’Brien and Cagney have something a Marx Brothers mind meld going on, moving in sequence, finishing each other’s sentences, and treating Ralph Bellamy as their Margaret Dumont. They set up a vinyl recording of clacking typewriters to mask their escape to on-set hijinks. As the Busby Berkeley-esque director is about to kick them off the set, Cagney shouts, “Do you believe in the dance as an interpretive force? I do.” Then they stalk off in top hats. Later on they try on costumes from a doomed period piece Young England, donning foppish blonde wigs and castle guard garb. As the music department warbles a ballad in the background, Cagney tosses off his hair and does a little soft shoe. Benson and Law will seemingly do anything to avoid doing their jobs. They are supreme artists of the procrastinating arts, and Cagney’s devilish grin and spastic physicality combine to form the perfect expression of goofing off. When Cagney puts on a foppish disguise (squarish glasses, beret, long scarf) and steamrolls past a young radio announcer (a young, nervous-looking Ronald Reagan) and convinces Rodney to pretend to be Happy’s father, the film reaches a Marxian levels of insanity.

It’s the appearance of Susie that stirs their dormant creative juices. She is the first real person to appear, who cares not a whit for stories, stars or box office. Marie Wilson uses her saucer eyes and jittering falsetto to create a woman of unflappable sincerity. But she is no simp – she just believes in people over show business. Her pursuit of the struggling English actor Rodney (Bruce Lester) is surprisingly affecting, considering the chaos instigated all around her. She met him briefly, and his unaffected sincerity chimed with her own. Their scene together is one of unforced charm – two working class types somehow shoved together in the executive producer’s office (it’s a long story) and telling each other their dreams of success. Susie’s “secret ambition” is to attend high school, while he tries out his one line from Young England on her. They are the beating heart of a rather savage satire, one in which the entire Hollywood system is revealed to be one long con. Happy the baby is only allowed to be human once his contract runs out.

The film scored with critics but not with audiences, and in 1943 Cagney told Photoplay he wished he had never made it. That stance softened over time, as he had second thoughts while viewing it on television: “It’s the same film, but I sense that the years have done something for it — what, I don’t know.” Whatever it’s doing, the years continue to make Boy Meets Girl look good.

MISSING REELS: A NOVEL OF SILENT MOVIE LOVE

February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

Repertory cinema regulars can be off-putting types. They log their screenings like kids with baseball cards, reducing art to a collectible. This is the stereotype, at least, of shut-in cinephile obsessives. And these people exist – head to any Friday night screening at MoMA, where the rustle of plastic bags replaces human interaction. One might say this is not a promising milieu for a novel, but then they might not have the effervescent prose of Farran Smith Nehme’s Missing Reels. Smith Nehme is better known as the Self-Styled Siren, classic film blogger extraordinaire, undoubtedly familiar to readers of this site. A contagiously enthusiastic writer, she also has the rare talent of focusing in on performances – from the elaboration of star personas down to the minutest detail of their fashion choices. Missing Reels is her first novel, and it faithfully recreates the repertory movie scene in late 1980s NYC, focusing specifically on the silent movie nut crowd. It begins as a bittersweet screwball romance about being young and poor in the city, and develops into a shaggy dog mystery involving a lost silent feature that may yet be found.

Ceinwen (pronounced KINE-wen) is a young escapee from Yazoo City, Mississippi, scraping by as a sales assistant at a vintage clothing store. She is something of a film obsessive, but not so much of the collector kind (always more of a sweaty male pursuit). She embraces it as a lifestyle, trying to model her behavior and fashion off her favorite stars (Jean Harlow, especially) in order to distract herself from the daily grind of her existence. She lives in a flat on Avenue C with two gay roommates (Talmadge and Jim), who tolerate her particular strain of movie madness. Things start percolating when Ceinwen becomes fascinated with her buttoned-up old neighbor Miriam, whom she is convinced has a Hollywood past. Then Matthew enters her clothing store. A British mathematics postdoc at NYU, he ambles in looking for a gift for his Italian girlfriend, and an on-and-off whirlwind romance ensues. Ceinwen pursues both Miriam and Matthew, though when she discovers that Miriam did star in one forgotten silent, The Mysteries of Udolpho (invented for the book), she is hell bent on finding a surviving 35mm print. Both the print and Matthew seem to be equally elusive.

The book’s early stages take time to establish the precariousness of Ceinwen’s existence. She often doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from. Chapter two begins:

It was Wednesday. Payday was Thursday. The rain started soon after Ceinwen arrived, and there were few customers. When Lily told her to go to lunch she laid her assets on the counter and totaled them up. $1.28 in small change and half a pack of Marlboro Lights. As expected, Ceinwen was broke.

Afterward is a precise breakdown of how she can stretch that cash – with a coffee cup and a buttered roll, and the possibility of a handout from Jim. Ceinwen has loving names for all of the elements in her discounted life. There is the “Smelly Deli” (self-explanatory) as well as the “Busted” coffee, a pseudonym for Bustelo, a particularly gritty coffee familiar to underpaid New Yorkers. But though she can barely eat, she is able to maintain a glamorous vintage wardrobe, partly through the help of Talmadge’s light fingers. Nehme is adept at describing the materiality of her clothes, their texture and fit. Here is a descriptive passage of a dress she is to wear with one of her first dates with Matthew:

Sleeveless, dropped waist, obviously from the 1920s. The fabric was silk velvet, a greenish bronze that shimmered even under their dim lights. The neckline was deep and the skirt was gathered a bit in front, the ham cascading down to about mid-calf. No lace, no trimming, just the gleam of the fabric.

The clothes allow Ceinwen to traverse different worlds, to a feel a part of something outside the Smelly Deli, and connect to a lineage that runs through Harlow’s stockings.

Though Ceinwen had watched classic film since she was a child, she is no match for the obsessives she meets in her journeys. The most generous is Matthew’s department head, Harry, who has the enthusiastic generosity of a true believer (and who would make an ideal blogger). Here he is making rapid-fire recommendations for Ceinwen’s viewing schedule:

“There was a French New Wave series at The New Yorker, they needed to see Breathless and The 400 Blows and Le Bonnes Femmes. How about Walsh, how about Wellman, check out Ophuls, how much Lubitsch have you seen, how about this Fritz Lang. See here Matthew, you want macho, I’ll give you macho. Sam Fuller. Anthony Mann. John Huston double feature at Theater 80.”

Nehme lovingly details these real and long-gone rep houses, from the shoddy rear projection at Theater 80 to the wobbly floors at the Thalia. They were landmarks for Nehme’s heroic age of moviegoing, and all had disappeared by the time of my arrival in New York City. I can’t help but feel deprived. The book is as much about the death of a certain kind of moviegoing in NYC as anything else. There are still wonderful rep houses in NYC, but just not nearly as varied or cheap or disreputable.

The central thread of the book deals with Miriam’s secret life in film, and the ultimate fate of her doomed feature The Mysteries of Udolpho, an erotic melodrama directed be self-destructive German by the name of Emil Arnheim (a nod to early film critic Rudolf Arnheim). During the search Ceinwen uncovers an entire production history, the kind of original research necessary for any kind for film history or criticism, or in this case – narrative. Nehme skillfully balances the film plot and the screwball romance one, bouncing them off each other as equally tangled mysteries. Both the existence of a film print and Matthew’s emotions are impossible to gauge. The plot curlicues are never less than crisp and engaging, but I value the book the most for its evocation of a time and place – and the rather understated way in which it states how film history, and especially the effort put into discovering this history, has an intrinsic value. It recaptures a past – one that Miriam may want to forget – but a past that would have disappeared without Ceinwen’s efforts. And now those efforts can be built upon by future fictional scholars, wackos and obsessives, in the novels hopefully in Nehme’s future.

THE PERILS OF COLLEEN: COLLEEN MOORE IN SYNTHETIC SIN AND WHY BE GOOD?

February 22, 2020June 22, 2022 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

November 18, 2014

B2q34l2IUAARa07

Through serendipity, skill and plain dumb luck, the last two silent films featuring comedic firecracker Colleen Moore have been restored through the work of The Vitaphone Project and Warner Brothers. Presumed lost, Synthetic Sin (1929) and Why Be Good? (1929) were sitting in a Bologna archive, waiting for money and TLC to set them free. They received their restoration premieres at Film Forum in NYC, and both are risque flapper comedies in which Mrs. Moore’s high-spirited subversive tests the boundaries of accepted female behavior. Why Be Good? was just released by Warner Archive on DVD with its full Vitaphone audio (which adds synchronized sound effects and a jazzy score). Each was directed by William A. Seiter, an inventive gag man as well as a sensitive shaper of star personas, from the Dadaist antics of Wheeler and Woolsey through the stubborn independence of Ginger Rogers. One of his earlier star-whisperer jobs was for child actor Baby Peggy, in The Family Secret (1924). A preserved Library of Congress print screened at MoMA’s To Save and Project festival of film preservation last month. Though Baby Peggy and Colleen Moore are after different things (chocolate and men, respectively) they each destabilize the society around them by daring to be independent.

William A. Seiter was born in New York City in 1890, the oldest son of a prominent family who were co-owners of Higgins & Seiter, purveyors of fine china and rich cut glass. He ran away from a steady paycheck to Hollywood in 1912. He made ends meet as one of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops and as a Western stuntman. He got his first featured part in the 1931 biblical short The Three Wise Men (1913). According to his daughter Jessica Seiter Niblo’s memoir Movietown Baby Grows Up, her father thought he was “so bad I just quit acting.” So instead he would crash movie sets with his friend (and future director) Sidney Franklin, pretending to be assistant directors. They faked it until they made it, and Seiter started directing comedy shorts in 1915. His first great success came with a series of comedies he directed for star Reginald Denny between 1924 and 1928. Dave Kehr described Seiter’s style in the Denny films as “a kind of domestic naturalism, with lightly comic sketches of middle-class young marrieds that anticipate the situation comedies of the Fifties.” Having learned every side of the business, he was an actor’s director. One of his actors Neil Hamilton would give Seiter the most practical of praise in Photoplay: “I cannot forget the treatment accorded me by Mr. Seiter. He is that rare personality in the business who does not believe in working after four thirty. Having been an actor himself once, he realizes that a day spent in front of the cameras, with one’s vitality being slowly consumed by the terrific heat of the lights, is no easy task.”

The Family Secret (1924) is an odd amalgam of Victorian melodrama and sitcom slapstick. It was a vehicle for Baby Peggy (real name Diana Serra Cary), who had become a superstar at age five after making over 150 shorts for Century Studios between 1921 and 1923. Universal signed her to make features, and they chose to adapt the Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Little Princess, The Secret Garden) novel Editha’s Burglar, a Story for Children. Margaret Selfridge (Gladys Hulette) secretly marries Garry Holmes (Edward Earle) against the wishes of her father Sim (Frank Currier). Sim bans Garry from his home, and then has him arrested for burglary when Garry tries to see his wife and newborn baby (Cary). All of the creaky melodramatics halt when the story shifts from the parents to the child, and you can almost sense the entire cast relaxing. The movie then settles into a string of comic set pieces as Baby Peggy undermines any attempt at a functional household. She skips a reading lesson from her nanny and hides in the flour bin; brings home a stray dog whose fleas infest the spinsters at a tea party; wanders onto the streets and bonds with the lower classes, learning how to steal fruit from street urchins and rib the cops. It is that last section that is especially affecting. Peggy has no conception of money’s use value since she lives with it as a given. So on the outside she trades her dress for a banana. Seiter builds scenarios around Peggy’s natural mischievous innocence, and shapes a rickety melodrama into something improbably affecting.

Colleen Moore also exudes a mischievous innocence, but one that perpetually bumps up against the double standards that confront women. Moore’s freedom from restraint is alluring, but it is always in danger of becoming too alluring, in which case the movies pull back and reveal her to be a good girl after all. Moore had long dreamed of becoming a movie star, and kept a scrapbook of her favorite performers – aspirationally leaving the last page blank for herself. She lived a few blocks away from Essanay studios in Chicago, and she appeared for them as a background extra. Her uncle Walter Howey, the managing editor for the Chicago Examiner, got her a screen test with D.W. Griffith, since Howey had helped Griffith get Birth of a Nation and Intolerance past the censorship board. The Colleen Moore persona is synonymous with that of the “flapper”, post-WWI women who flouted conventional gender roles by smoking, drinking and sleeping with whomever they wanted. This image was popularized in the 1923 Colleen Moore film Flaming Youth, in which Moore dallies with her mother’s ex-lover. Of that movie, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked, “I was the spark that lit up flaming youth, and Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.” With her razor-sharp bob, bamboo-thin body and bowtie lips, she became the physical embodiment of the flapper ethos. Seemingly all elbows and knees, she was the ideal angular construction to dance the Charleston, and had the impish personality to give all that movement an air of subversiveness. Moore married producer John McCormick during the production of Flaming Youth, and together they would define what flappers looked and acted like to the majority of Americans.

By 1929 the flapper character was business as usual, but Moore was still packing them into theaters. Synthetic Sin is based on a 1927 play by Frederick and Fanny Hatton, produced by McCormick, and concerns a small town girl from “Magnolia Gap” who has dreams of becoming a legendary stage tragedienne. Though the feature looks fantastic (it was projected on DCP), it is missing most of the Vitaphone “soundtrack”, which added sound effects and popular songs of the period over the silent feature. Only the last reel of this audio remains.

When hometown hero playwright Donald Anthony (Antonio Moreno) returns home to premiere a new work, every high school drama queen clamors to play the lead. Betty (Colleen Moore) and her sister Margery (Kathryn McGuire) are the most insistent. Betty is spazzy and unsophisticated, her audition more akin to a Saturday Night Live cast hopeful. It involves a “mad Ophelia” scene of flailing limbs and swinging wig pigtails that nearly choke her out. The showstopper, for me anyway, is Moore’s impression of classical pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski. She dons an Einstein fright wig, applies a bushy moustache, and slams the keys like a proto-headbanger. Seiter is always interested in the clash between high and low – as in Peggy’s trip around the working class in The Family Secret. One of his 1930s comedies, If You Could Only Cook, has an out-of work Jean Arthur convince car company president Hubert Marshall to pretend to be her husband so she can get a job as a maid.

Betty continues to travesty the high arts in Synthetic Sin by interrupting her sister’s flouncy “Grecian dance” with a gruesome blackface shuck and jive routine that might keep this movie from ever getting released on home video. Donald is convinced just enough to give Betty the part in the play – but she flops, getting laughs instead of tears. Thinking she has not suffered enough in life to become a true tragic actor, Betty travels to NYC to get a taste of the fast life. Betty is something like the first method actor. So she checks into a fleabag motel and invites every hard-looking, gun-toting gangster into her apartment for carousing. In one impressive dolly shot, Moore walks down a busy street towards a retreating camera while trying on different expressions and poses, from haughty to flirtatious, hand implanted on hip. Her attempts at vamping are hilarious – she runs her hand through her mark’s hair, staring exaggeratedly into his eyes, before getting hair gel all over her fingers and disgustedly wiping them on his lapel. Betty doesn’t belong as a criminal or a super serious artiste. She was built to be funny, though instead of getting a farce all of her own, the movie ends depressingly with Betty declaring that the only career she wants is to be Donald’s wife.

Why Be Good? proposes a different kind of conundrum. In this one Colleen Moore is well versed in the games of seduction, though deep down, the film promises us, what she really wants is marriage. Though the studio and screenwriters are still a little too wary of having a truly independent woman who can sleep with whom she wants, one look at Colleen Moore’s Charleston tells a completely different story. Moore plays the aptly named Pert Kelly, “an effervescent American girl” who is introduced winning a dance competition and then shutting everyone down with, “I’m naturally too hot for this old folks’ home.” Luckily all of the Vitaphone audio is present here to accompany her hot steppin’, and the track also has some pretty clever inventions, including a drunken rendition of “Sweet Adeline” interpreted by two muted, whining trumpets.

Though Pert is a queen by night at elaborate nightclubs like “The Boiler”, which blows steam over its already hot dancers, by day she’s a department store clerk who pines for the personnel manager Peabody Jr. (Neil Hamilton). In an inspired bit of pantomime, she rests her head on his shadow behind an office window, and then draws his face on in lipstick. He is literally a marked man, and she will get him one way or another. The conventional ending of Why Be Good? is earned — she follows her desires and ends up with what she wants, and escapes the drudgery of department store work in the process. Of course her family just can’t understand her partying ways and interest in Peabody Jr. , but in an inspiring moment of flapper cinema, she explains to her father the whole point of this proto-feminist movement:

Pop, listen to me! This is 1929 — not 1899 — I contribute as much money to this house as you do — and as long as I think it is harmless, I’m going to wear what I like, and do what I like! …I want to go out, and dance, and have fun, as long as I can, as much as I can!

The fun ended for Moore with the coming of talkies. She divorced McCormick, her first sound films flopped, and she made her last film in 1934.