Blu-ray – Page 3 – R. Emmet Sweeney

A MAN AND A MAID: MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937)

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May 19, 2015

In 1936 Leo McCarey drank some expired milk. It was part of an ill-advised publicity stunt that had the crew of the Harold Lloyd comedy The Milky Way (1936) imbibe daily amounts of dairy. One of those fateful sips incapacitated McCarey with undulant fever, after which he went to Palm Springs to get healthy. As part of his unique recovery process he visited a casino, which is where he met playwright Viña Delmar, who would go on to write the screenplays for both Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) and The Awful Truth (1937). So we have food poisoning to thank for two of McCarey’s, and thus Hollywood’s, greatest films. They are both acutely observed movies about marriage that deal with the sacrifices required to maintain that union, with Make Way taking a tragic viewpoint from that of old age, and Awful Truth a comic one from youth. It was the latter, of course, with its joyous happy ending, that won the Oscar and the accolades, while the devastating Make Way was also a critical favorite but a popular failure. But when a film is released on the Criterion Collection, it can no longer be called under-appreciated. Make Way For Tomorrow was released earlier this month on Blu-ray from Criterion, in a crisp transfer that faithfully renders the thick grain of William C. Mellor’s naturalistic photography.

Make Way for Tomorrow was a very personal project for McCarey. While recovering from the milk-induced fever, his father passed away, and he was too ill to attend the funeral. McCarey told Peter Bogdanovich he got the idea for the film because, “I had just lost my father and we were real good friends; I admired him so much.” He settled on the Josephine Lawrence novel Years Are so Long (’34) as the basis of the story, which contained the basic outline of a group of siblings struggling to take care of their aged parents. While in Palm Springs, McCarey recalled, he went to a gambling joint, and:

there I saw a most attractive girl; I tried to start a conversation with her, and she snubbed me. Now, my wife had given me this very good Cosmopolitan story to read: it was about old folks, and because I’d just lost my father, my wife had said to read it. It was by a gal called Viña Delmar, and I called the studio and told them I’d like an appointment with her for an interview; they called back and said she’s in Palm Springs. And I said, ‘Well, run her down in Palm Springs — that’s where I am.’ So another exchange of phone calls and they said she’d be over to my hotel at such and such at time. The desk announced that “Miss Delmar is here” to see me, and you can imagine both our surprise when it turned out to be the girl I’d tried to get to know at the gambling place.

They “found a mutual wavelength” and worked together on the screenplay. Their meet-cute sounds like something out of a McCarey screwball comedy, but whatever motivated their collaboration it created uniquely complicated characters – all of them have mixed, believable motivations. The children are selfish as all children are selfish, and the parents are invasive, judgmental and crotchety. The story concerns Barkley (Victor Moore) and Lucy Cooper (Beulah Bondi), a kind-hearted, if absent-minded, old married couple whose house is slated to repossessed by the bank. They gather their five children in the hopes of coming to a long-term solution. But instead the parents are separated and passed from child-to-child like a game of filial hot potato. Lucy is ensconced with her son George (Thomas Mitchell), his wife Anita (Fay Bainter) and their daughter Rhoda (Barbara Read). A perennial fourth wheel, she ambles into Anita’s bridge lessons and interrupts Rhoda’s dates. She feels unwanted, while her son feels under siege.

Barkley is living with his daughter Cora (Elisabeth Risdon) and her family. Cora is an overworked housewife who grows to resent the added burden of her father’s presence, treating him more like a tenant than a personal guest. There are idle plans to reunite Bark and Lucy, but the children can never come to an agreement, and the film ends with one final separation, but not before a dreamlike revivification of their love, a sequence of miraculous power that affirms their bond just before it is severed for good.

McCarey had little support at Paramount to film such a grim tale. He could only make the picture by tearing up his contract and working at a flat rate. Publicity was hard to come by because, according to a 1936 New York Times article, “the 250 correspondents and fan-magazine writers…shunned the sets during filming” due to a lack of star power. Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore didn’t move tabloids, but they give remarkable performances of a couple that live through and for each other. McCarey was a master of reaction shots since the slapstick days, from Charley Chase through Laurel & Hardy, and he could use the same technique for drama. Bondi and Moore’s looks are not deadpan reactions at a world collapsing around them, like Chase, but ones that build a life, moment to moment.

Then there were poorly received test screenings. Again in the Times:

When the picture was completed it was taken 500 miles to Oakland for a sneak preview. There McCarey found he had been too faithful, that he had invested his story with too much reality. He had presented the problems without a suggestion of veneer and the audience resented it. “The children of the film reacted to situations just as the majority of children react, but the public isn’t ready for an excess of honesty yet.

He reshot entire scenes and “lightened the whole materially.” It is hard to conceive that Make Way for Tomorrow could be any more honest than it is now, but there is one scene of the children admitting their guilt that could be a sop to the masses. As their parents are taking one last cab ride together before their separation, the film awkwardly cuts to a nondescript living room, where daughter Nellie says, “If we don’t go to the station they’ll think we’re terrible.” George responds, “Aren’t we?”

Before Bark catches a train to California for a rest cure recommended by his doctor, and Lucy moves into a separate old folk’s home, they meet for one last time in New York City, where they retrace their honeymoon steps from decades before. The city opens up to them as if in a dream, as they are given a ride from a car salesman, free drinks from the hotel manager, and a waltz from the conductor. They drink, get a little tipsy, and are merry. Lucy recites an old anonymous poem about marriage, “A Man and a Maid” that closes: “My dear, she said/the die is cast/the vows have been spoken/the rice has been thrown/into the future we will travel alone/With you, said the maid/I am not afraid.” Bark and Lucy use art and drink to delay reality, the excess of reality that so turned off viewers. But it seeps in anyway. Bark gets on a train, Lucy waves goodbye, with nothing left to sustain them but the memory of a transcendent love. The question is whether that is enough.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON: 42ND STREET (1933)

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May 12, 2015

When sound came to cinema, the musical came along with it. The tremendous box office returns of The Jazz Singer (1927) had producers reeling, and the market was soon flooded with song and dance. But the Depression-era audiences began tuning them out, preferring the patter of William Powell to the tapping of another chorine. By 1931 the studios had slashed musicals from their slates and were brainstorming what went wrong. In the May 1931 issue of the Motion Picture Herald, Paramount’s Jesse Lasky was optimistic about the future of the genre:

A gradual but inevitable return of music to the screen is predicted by Lasky. He believes the future will bring a sprinkling of operettas, a reasonable number of musical comedies, dramatic pictures with backgrounds of symphony orchestras. Citing the public’s attitude toward musical comedies, he contends that picture audiences were given something before they were prepared for it. “There is merely a need of a little more skillful technique and a better understanding on the part of the public”, explained Lasky. “The public was not prepared for the license of the musical comedy. For years we had trained the public to realism. The stage naturally had a dramatic license which was impossible in pictures. Audiences could not get used to music coming from nowhere on the screen. Nevertheless, musical comedies will come back and the public will become accustomed to that form of entertainment. In the next two or three years they will have forgotten that there ever was any question about musical comedies.”

In 1933 all questions were dropped after the massive success of WB’s 42nd Street, a snappy, streetwise backstage musical that introduced the world to the symmetrical spectacles of Busby Berkeley’s dance choreography. Now out on a sparkling Blu-ray from the Warner Archive, it’s clearer than ever why this was the film that brought the musical back into the spotlight.

Warner Brothers hitched itself to to the coattails of FDR, and in the publicity for 42nd Street declared the film “A New Deal in Entertainment!”. The studio pitched their films at the working class, with James Cagney their pugnacious stand-in (he would star in WB’s next musical, Footlight Parade (’33)). These films depicted musicals as acts of labor, as groups of dancers, actors, singers, stagehands and directors worked together to make the show sing. Every character in the movie is looking for work, even the show’s star Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) who remarks early on how the Depression has ruined her career. On the opposite end of the class spectrum is “Anytime Annie” (Ginger Rogers), who dresses up as an upper class twit, monocle and all, in order to fool the casting directors into hiring her (they see through her ruse – but cast her anyway).

Darryl Zanuck was the man who set it in motion. Studio head Harry Warner was still opposed to the musical genre after a series of flops, but Zanuck convinced him to take a chance, and assigned Rian James and James Seymour to adapt Bradford Ropes’ unpublished novel into a screenplay. Daniel Eagan suggests, in America’s Film Legacy, that Zanuck may have “fooled Harry and his other brothers into thinking the film would be a drama without songs and dances.” Whatever his rhetorical tricks, he was able to get the project greenlit. The story was about a director who risks his health to mount an expensive Broadway production. For the role of the hard-driving director Julian Marsh, Zanuck borrowed Warner Baxter from Fox, who had won the Best Actor Oscar in 1930 for In Old Arizona. The rest of the cast was filled out by WB contractees. Marsh’s leading lady Dorothy Brock was played by Bebe Daniels, who grew up on the stage, while the young ingenue role of Peggy Sawyer was given to Ruby Keeler, who was then married to talkie pioneer Al Jolson. Keeler had been offered the lead alongside Jolson in Fox’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, but turned it down because Jolson, according to Keeler, “would be worrying about my part as well as his own.” There was no such concern with 42nd Street, which made her a short-term star. Familiar, welcome faces like Guy Kibbee, George Brent and Dick Powell lent their inimitable support.

Julian Marsh is a sick man, but powers through a fraught rehearsal period to get the musical revue “Pretty Lady” into shape for the opening. But when star Dorothy Brock gets into a spat with the producer and source of cash, the whole production grinds to a halt. It’s up to fresh-faced newbie Peggy to step into the leading role, and it’s up to her whether “Pretty Lady” ever gets beyond previews.

The director was originally intended to be Mervyn LeRoy, but he got ill like Julian Marsh, after exhausting himself on the set of I Am a Fugitive on a Chain Gang (1932). Lloyd Bacon sat in the director’s chair instead. One of Zanuck’s cost-cutting maneuvers was to split up production – Bacon would handle all the dialogue scenes, while Busby Berkeley would get his own production unit for the musical sequences that would close the film. They worked different days on different stages, but both shared DP Sol Polito. Berkeley was coming off a trio of films choreographing dance numbers for Samuel Goldwyn, but it was at Warner that Berkeley would develop his soon-to-be famous style of overhead shots of abstracted gams moving in patterned unison. His routines in 42nd Street are fairly tame compared to what came later in his career, staying tethered to stage musical reality. Though he and Polito manage to wend a camera through the legs of a throng of lined up models, and in the final “42nd Street” number recreates the fabled NYC block with a cutout skyline and a remarkably realistic apartment block, complete with stabbings.

The movie was a huge hit, and though it is filled with enthusiasm and sunny can-do spirit, there is an undertone of resignation veined throughout, present in the character of Julian Marsh. In one of the biggest downers in backstage musical history, instead of wrapping up with the triumphant opening night performance, it ends with a slumped over Marsh, sitting half dead on the back stairs, listening as the theater goers praise Peggy and demean him, crediting her with the show’s success. Future entries in the backstage cycle always sync the culmination of backstage romance with the on-stage performance, with both narrative strands uniting in a super-happy climax. But in 42nd Street there’s a disorienting disjunct between on and off stage, admitting that during the Depression hard work might not get you anything.

UNINVITED GUEST: STRANGER AT MY DOOR (1956)

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

“For me salvation is a clean pistol and a good horse.” – Clay Anderson (Skip Homeier) in Stranger at my Door

William Witney directed over ninety serials and feature films in his career, and he considered Stranger at my Door (1956) to be his favorite. One of the great unsung action directors of the American cinema, Witney virtually invented the job of stunt choreographer. In the mid-1930s he was inspired by watching Busby Berkeley rehearse one high leg kick until “you could have shot a bullet down the line and not hit anyone.” From then on he worked out each shot of a fight sequence with his stuntmen, making sure each movement would match the next, creating an unbroken ribbon of action. He was able to hone his craft for decades at Republic Pictures, starting on adventure serials with friend and co-director John English (Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939) is the prime cut from this period), and transitioning to Roy Rogers Westerns after serving five years in a Marine Corps combat camera crew during WWII.

Stranger at my Door was a fifteen-day Western quickie produced at the end of his 20-year run at Republic, as the studio would cease active production in 1958. Made outside of the bankable series Witney usually worked in, it is a psychologically intense feature about preacher Hollis Jarret (MacDonald Carey), who believes he can save the soul of wanted bank robber Clay Anderson (Skip Homeier), putting his wife Peg (Patricia Medina) and son Dodie (Stephen Wootton) in mortal danger in the process. The self-sacrifice inherent in proper Christian practice is pushed to uncomfortable extremes as Hollis privileges Clay’s soul over the lives of his family. The fulcrum of the story is a terrifying sequence in which Rex the Wonder Horse goes feral, trying to stamp out the eyes of the preacher’s cute kid. Witney and horse trainer Glenn H. Randall Sr. worked with Rex every morning of that fifteen day shoot until they captured the authentic animal fury they were seeking. No director exhibited bodies in peril with more visceral impact than Witney, and Stranger at my Door pairs that talent with the finest script he was ever assigned (by Barry Shipman), which ponders what happens when a man of the cloth puts God before his family. Stranger at my Door comes out on DVD and Blu-ray next week from Olive Films, which will hopefully introduce Witney’s work to a wider audience.

The film opens with a close-up of a bank window getting smashed. Clay Anderson and his gang knock over the establishment, and instead of a clean getaway, try to burn the whole town down, dragging a flaming tumbleweed behind them. During his escape Clay’s horse twists an ankle. He wanders onto Hollis Jarret’s farm, greeted by a church under construction, Jarret’s young second wife Peg slicing watermelon, and freckle-faced kid Dodie gabbing nonstop about horses. It is Americana kitsch, which soon proves to be nothing more than a veneer which Clay begins to pick away at. Pretending to be a friendly traveler, Peg agrees to house him in their barn until his horse gets well. Clay begins needling her, asking if she was the preacher’s daughter, and upon finding her true role, advances upon her with a leer. He insists that she doesn’t belong on this isolated spread, alone, rotting on the vine. You can see the flickerings of doubt on Patricia Medina’s face. She is revolted by Clay’s aggression, but the truth of his statements are as plain as day. She is too young, Hollis is too old. She is not a devout believer, while Hollis practices a severe, self-abnegating Christianity. Clay’s poison begins its work. The Anderson character was originally intended to be Jesse James, but was changed, according to Richard Maurice Hurst in Republic Studios, due to “legal complications”. Skip Homeier was a child actor (billed as “Skippy”), and he still looks like he is outgrowing his adolescence here, now a gawky 26-year-old trying to appear menacing.

It is this youthfulness that attracts Hollis. When the preacher returns home from a trip to town and sees Clay out by the barn, he immediately knows this is a lost soul from the robbery. Instead of turning him in or urging Clay to leave, he insists that he stay. Hollis has taken a passage from St. Luke’s to heart: “There shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.” Hollis accepts Clay’s appearance as a challenge from God – to lead this lost lamb back to the flock, regardless of the consequences. The longer Clay stays, the more aggressive his pursuit of Peg becomes, and his paranoia at being caught has him pulling his pistol on every random visitor. It is as if Hollis has invited Death himself into his home. Peg becomes disgusted with all of them – at Clay’s boorishness and Hollis’ self-destructiveness, pushing herself towards the edges of the frame. But the men proceed onward to the inevitable violent endpoint.

Clay deflects all of Hollis’ attempts at preaching, treating his elder with contemptuous scorn. After another entreaty to turn to Christ, Clay ripostes, “”For me salvation is a clean pistol and a good horse.” Hollis, unperturbed, sees this as instruction. He purchases an unruly wild horse from a reluctant Slim Pickens, and believes that if this horse can be broken, so can Clay. Hollis names the horse “Lucifer” (played by Rex the Wonder Horse), and the beast lives up to the appellation. Dodie sneaks into the stable in an attempt to calm Lucifer himself, but instead the animal goes wild, bucking and attacking with the single-minded bloodthirstiness of a slasher movie monster. When Dodie slides underneath a cart, Lucifer goes down on his knees and tries to attack him with his teeth. It is the most terrifying equine performance in cinema history. Witney recalls the performance in a video from the 1994 Knoxville Film Festival:

“Rex, King of the Wild Horses. This was one of the most animated, wildest horse you’ve ever seen. He had come out of a boys’ school in Flagstaff, Arizona. The trainer discovered that this horse would charge him when he cracked a whip. And I mean charge him. And you got out of the way. They were crying on the set, “Rex is loose!” I saw him chase a little actor under a car, get down on his knees and try to get to him with his teeth [laughter]. It wasn’t funny. Being a horseman myself I really appreciated this horse. There will never be another horse with the animation of this big bay, a thoroughbred Morgan horse, strangely enough.

Witney spent many of his early years at Fort Sam Houston with his uncle, which is where he learned to ride and jump horses, a passion and a skill he would carry with him the rest of his life. This led him to become friends with many of the stunt riders he worked with over the years, including the legendary Yakima Canutt. But for Witney, “the finest horseman ever to step on a horse bar none” was Joe Yrigoyen, who came up making pennies in Mascot Pictures serials, stayed on when the studio merged into Republic Pictures, and continued taking celluloid tumbles into the late 1970s, in Blazing Saddles and The Prisoner of Zenda. He was the stuntman for Clay Anderson in Stranger at my Door, given the task of calming down Rex during the freak-out sequence. In an effort to distract the horse from Dodie, Clay leaps onto Rex’s neck and wrestles him to the ground. It is a supremely athletic and dangerous feat, as Rex swings Joe around on his neck like a reverse rodeo rider.

The white-knuckle sequence proves Clay’s humanity, as he leaps in to protect Dodie. So Hollis’ plan is a success, though only after Dodie and Peg were almost stomped to death. For Peg this proves to be the end of her last frayed nerve. With the entirety of the film taking place on the Jarret farm set, there are a limited number of setups that Witney can use to generate tension. So instead of repeating another image of the stable, he flicks off the studio lights. While the rest of the family is asleep, Peg snags a shotgun and stalks towards the stable. She levels the sights onto Lucifer, ready to blast it into Kingdom Come, and her relationship with Hollis along with it. Poised there in low light, the gun raised, and the industrial fans tousling her hair, she is the closest thing the film has to an action hero. But she doesn’t have the nerve to take a life, and there is a storm brewing. The local sheriff stumbles into view, and the final shootout occurs in flames, the farm now an adjunct of hell. In the light of day the family is reconstituted, and Clay has discovered a measure of peace. But the question of whether all of the blood and thunder has been worth it is a question between Hollis and his God.

For a cheap programmer, the film was enthusiastically received, with Variety calling it an “exceptionally well-done family trade offering”, and The Hollywood Reporter praising it as containing “a theme that lifts it well out of the ordinary class and into a niche where it deserves to be considered with very special interest.” Witney always remembered it fondly, probably because of the positive critical response, not something he was used to in that period in his career. Though he always had a high reputation among serial aficionados and Western obsessives, his reputation never grew beyond these cliques. His most famous fan is Quentin Tarantino, who waxed poetic about him in a 2000 New York Times article (I made my much lower profile case at Moving Image Source a few years back). Stranger at my Door is the first of Witney’s films to be released on Blu-ray, and it might be the last. But even if he never garners a retrospective or a door-stopping biography, his influence reverberates whenever a horse bucks a rider or a punch is thrown on screen.

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT: THE BAND WAGON (1953)

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

March 3, 2015

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Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse stroll through Central Park together without saying a word. Their silence continues past a bustling outdoor dance floor, but their steps begin to sync in rhythm. Then there is an orchestral swell on the soundtrack, and they twirl individually. It is test of compatibility, a flirtatious movement to see if their bodies can work in unison. Astaire scratches his lip, gauging their chances. Once the melody of “Dancing in the Dark” eases onto the score, though, they move as one organism in a dance of light, joyful communion. It is an expression of love by other means, and, as choreographed by Michael Kidd, is one of the glories of the Hollywood musical. The Band Wagon (1953) is an overwhelming sensorium of movement and color, and one of the more convincing arguments in justifying Hollywood’s existence. It is finally out on Blu-ray today from Warner Brothers (bundled with KISS ME KATE 3D, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN and CALAMITY JANE in a desert island Blu-ray “Musicals Collection”) and the result is a near-flawless transfer of the three-strip Technicolor.

The Band Wagon was originally a 1931 stage show put on at the New Amsterdam Theater starring Fred Astaire and his sister Adele, with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz. In 1952 MGM was looking for a new project to assign Vincente Minnelli after he had put nearly a year of pre-production into a musical version of Huckleberry Finn that had just fallen apart (it was to star Dean Stockwell, Danny Kaye and Gene Kelly). So they tried to conjure that old Singin’ in the Rain magic by assigning Betty Comden and Adolph Green to whip together another screenplay around a revue. This time, instead of Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, they were to create a narrative around the songs of Schwarz and Dietz. And just as Freed was a producer for MGM while Singin’ in the Rain was made, so Howard Dietz was the studio’s publicity manager when The Band Wagon went into production. They liked to keep things in house.

Comden recalled that the original Band Wagon, “was a revue in the real sense of the word. There was no plot. There were just some wonderful performers and charming numbers, but it was not a musical that had any kind of linear story that you could base anything on. It was just a revue. Needless to say, we had our work cut out for us.” What they did, in collaboration with Minnelli, was to incorporate the real-life personalities behind the scenes into a boilerplate backstage musical. As Minnelli writes in his autobiography, I Remember it Well, he thought “It would be delicious to base the characters on actual people. Why not base his [Astaire’s] part on the Astaire of a few years back, who’d been in voluntary retirement? Why not develop the situation further by suggesting that fame had passed him by?”

Astaire plays Tony Hunter, introduced with his trademark top hat and tails going for pennies on the dollar at an auction house. With his career permanently “between movies”, he takes a train back east to New York to hear a pitch from his old friends Lester and Lily Marton (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray, respectively), who promise him the lead in a light musical comedy on Broadway. The idea is he would play a children’s writer who makes money cranking out Mickey Spillane-esque pulp on the side. Lester and Lily are thinly veiled stand ins for Comden and Green – the only difference being that Comden and Green were never married. But Lester and Lily are seduced by the theatrical wunderkind of the moment, Jeffrey Cordova (British music hall star Jack Buchanan), who instead tries to turn their comedy into a portentous, inflated version of the Faust legend. Minnelli name drops Orson Welles and George S. Kaufman as the model for Cordova, while Comden and Green place him as a Jose Ferrer clone. In any case, this exaggerated amalgam is a pompous whirling dervish with loads of talent but no common sense. Hunter is an old-school entertainer put off by Cordova’s airs, and Hunter is equally intimidated by his co-star, the ballet-trained Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse). He’s scared by her pedigree as well as her height. As a hoofer on the silver screen, Hunter never had the time or interest to court highbrow respectability, but now he’s working for it. But when Cordova’s ambitious gambit goes bust, the whole production crew decides to put on Lester and Lily’s original toe-tappin’ revue, in which the performers don’t have to worry about meaning but can just entertain.

Film theorist Jane Feuer, in her essay “The Self-Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment”, calls this “the myth of spontaneity”. She writes that “the primary positive quality associated with musical performance is its spontaneous emergence out of a joyous and responsive attitude toward life.” In The Band Wagon, the Cordova production is depicted as stiff and overdetermined. If fact, we never see a full number from that show – they are always cut short by mechanical malfunction or actor temper tantrums. High art is restrictive and stifling. It is only when Hunter is alone that he can dance naturally, whether coming off the train (“By Myself”), or exploring a Times Square arcade (“A Shine on Your Shoes”) . And it’s only after the “Faust” Band Wagon flops, and Hunter parties with the young cast and crew afterward in a joyous bacchanal of old popular songs, that the pretentious can be overthrown for what the people really want. Which in this case are the phantasmagoric collection of sets and tunes connected with “Triplets”, “New Sun in the Sky”, “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan”, “Louisiana Hayride” and the angular, knifing Spillane parody “Girl Hunt Ballet.” I don’t know if the people want it, but it’s certainly what I desire. Feuer again: “The myth of spontaneity operates to make musical performance, which is actually part of culture, appear to be part of nature.”

Though Feuer intends this as a critique of the conservatism of the Hollywood musical, this is exactly what I value from these extraordinary films. They make the magical look natural, prying open the possibilities of the visible. What is even more remarkable about The Band Wagon is how troubled the production was, in comparison to the ease and joy on-screen. Minnelli was in the process of divorcing Judy Garland. MGM fired director of photography George Folsey halfway through production because of his slow working speed. Oscar Levant had just been released from a mental hospital. Fred Astaire’s wife Phyllis was dying of cancer. Nanette Fabray remembered, “It was a very cold atmosphere.” Dancer James Mitchell recalled, “It wasn’t a pleasant experience, Minnelli kind of trod on Cyd.” Everyone seemed to be taking their annoyances out on everyone else, and yet the end product is near seamless, in which, as the closing number exclaims, “The world is a stage, the stage is a world of entertainment!” It is a lie, but a lie to aspire to.

HOLLYWOOD JAZZ HISTORY: SYNCOPATION (1942)

February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

February 17. 2015

“The kind of jazz we know is dead. Count me out as a pallbearer.” – Johnny (Jackie Cooper), in Syncopation

Syncopation (1942) tells the history of jazz through the story of two white kids, so its limitations are obvious. But it is a fascinating film for how aware it is of the histories that are being left out. The film acknowledges the music’s roots in black America, and begins with a pocket history that traces its path from Africa through slavery and the development of jazz that began in Congo Square in New Orleans. A Louis Armstrong avatar, here named Rex (Todd Duncan), seems to be a leading character, his friendship with the jazz-mad white girl Kit (Bonita Granville) the early focus of the story. But his character is essentially erased as it moves along, focusing instead on Kit’s relationship with struggling (white) hot jazz trumpeter Johnny (Jackie Cooper). Johnny learns from Rex, co-opts his music, and starts the swing music fad. But Johnny is extremely self-conscious about his artistic debt, worrying that what he is doing inches from influence to theft. The film forgives and endorses his actions, but the fact that this doubt is opened up at all is unusual for such seemingly whitewashed material.

The Cohen Media Collection released Syncopation in a beautiful Blu-ray last week, restored in 2K from an archival fine grain 35mm from the Library of Congress. What makes this an essential purchase for jazz fans are the bonus features – classic shorts previously available in muddy prints on YouTube, here now in HD, including Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan (1929), Bundle of Blues (1933), and Symphony in Black (1935, with an appearance by Billie Holliday), as well as shorts featuring Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Hoagy Carmichael, Jack Teagarden and Artie Shaw.

Director William Dieterle had just completed The Devil and Daniel Webster, which he developed with his own production company, and had distributed by RKO. On Syncopation Dieterle again had a producer credit, indicating some manner of control over the material. A competing project was already underway, with Bing Crosby’s The Birth of the Blues being made at Paramount, directed by former composer Victor Schertzinger. It was a loose biopic of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and was a success after opening in November of 1941, while Syncopation was still shooting. There was a market for pop biopics, it seems, and RKO must have been encouraged by that films returns. Syncopation originated as the story “The Band Played On” by Valentine Davies, who would go on to write and direct The Benny Goodman Story (1956). Dieterle brought on his own people, getting Philip Yordan and Frank Cavett to write the screenplay. Dieterle had seen Yordan’s first play, the off-broadway Any Day Now, and invited him to Hollywood. Yordan would go on to have a remarkable career in Hollywood, writing scripts for The Man From Laramie and The Big Combo, while also agreeing to be a front for many Blacklist-era writers.

During the scriptwriting process, the German Dieterle would send his scripts for notes to his friend Max Horkheimer, the famed philosopher and sociologist of the Frankfurt School. According to David Jenemann’s Adorno in America, Dieterle sent an early draft of the Syncopation script to Horkheimer, who then passed it along to their mutual friend (and fellow member of the Frankfurt School) Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s comments on the Syncopation script survive, and Jaenemann reports that he wrote, “My private opinion that it will be a flop again because of lack of clarity of music issue. Praise basic idea of advocating jazz in its boldest form.” He argued for further prominence of the Rex character, and that he should win the jazz contest that closes the script (not in the finished film). Adorno was antagonistic to jazz in his published writings, but here pushes the improvisational approach represented by Rex.

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The movie begins with Rex, a poor black trumpet prodigy in New Orleans sick of learning Bach in school, so runs off with juke joint elder King Jeffries (Rex Stewart, a cornetist for Duke Ellington) instead. While he hits the steamboat circuit, his jazz-mad white friend Kit (Bonita Granville, the first screen Nancy Drew) moves to Chicago, where she is set to marry Paul, the son a family friend. She finds a local white juke joint with the help of struggling musician Johnny (Jackie Cooper), where she introduces them to the New Orleans style of swing. She hooks Johnny up with Rex, who teaches him how to play hot. At this point Rex disappears from the plot, cut out by the antsy RKO editors. It’s clear that Johnny’s anxiety of influence should build to a battle of the bands between Rex and Johnny, one that legitimizes Johnny’s talent — but it never happens. Instead WWI comes and robs Kit of her fiance, and she takes up with Johnny, and they bite and claw their way through the white jazz establishment, battling against the “sweet”, popular stylings of “Ted Browning’s Symphony of Jazz”, a clear swipe at the Paul Whitemans and Guy Lombardos who tried to give jazz classical airs to make it palatable to middle class white America. The film has something to say about passionate, talented white musicians earning their way into the black jazz community, but it’s all left on the editing room floor. The film doesn’t build to anything so much as smash cut to an all-star jazz band chosen by the Saturday Evening Post, said to represent the future of jazz. They are the very talented and very white group of Charlie Barnet, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Jack Jenny, Gene Krupa, Alvino Rey and Joe Venuti.

There is a distinct possibility that a much more interesting movie was left in the editing room. Early reviews cite the appearance of Robert Benchley as a kind of narrator (absent from the final cut), and early drafts of the script posit Rex as a competitor to Johnny through the final scene. An early assembly of the film was 146 minutes, and the one released by RKO was 88. This was an A-picture chopped down to programmer status, costing over half a million, but released on a double bill and buried, taking a loss of $87,000. Critics were understandably unkind. At the New York Times Bosley Crowther called it “shoddy, stylized pretense….A bang-up film about early jazz has yet to be made.” While Billboard magazine’s Dick Carter said “it fizzled like a soggy firecracker”, and the stinging closer, “Birth of the Blues was better.” Syncopation was released into theaters on May 22nd, 1942. That month Dizzy Gillespie recorded a solo with Les Hite’s band that did not follow chord changes. At the same time Charlie Parker was playing with Jay McShann’s band, after inventing bebop at after hours clubs across New York City. The music was changing yet again, and Hollywood would have even less of a clue of what to do with it.

COWGIRL DIPLOMACY: WOMAN THEY ALMOST LYNCHED (1953)

February 25, 2020February 25, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

January 27, 2015

Woman They Almost Lynched is a funhouse Western, exaggerating and undermining the genre’s familiar tropes. Its Civil War border town is named Border City, with the line between North and South cut down the middle of the town bar. Every male character is an outsized historical personage (Jesse James, Paul Quantrill and Cole Younger all make appearances), but the plot shunts them aside to focus on the women – who shoot straighter and punch stiffer than their male counterparts. Even the iron-fisted mayor is a woman. The film inhabits its inverted world so convincingly that by the end it seems normal, almost sincere, and its broad, swaggering characters gain some measure of pathos. It is the only Hollywood film I can think of that builds a sympathetic portrait of a matriarchal society (at least until John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars). Only Allan Dwan could have made it. A prolific worker since the silent era, Dwan had fun where he could, and playfully subverted all manner of genres. He had already taken the Western down a peg in in his 1916 parody Manhattan Madness , made with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Woman They Almost Lynched further displays his natural inclination towards play, and it is now available on Blu-ray from Olive Films, so future generations can now puzzle over its beautiful excesses for decades to come.

Allan Dwan signed with Republic Pictures in 1945, “set to receive $1,000 a week for 52 weeks per year, plus five percent of the net profits of all his pictures” (Frederic Lombardi, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios). In 1935 Herbert Yates merged six Poverty Row studios under the umbrella of Republic Pictures, who quickly became known for their adventure serials and B-Westerns starring John Wayne. They were built for quick turnarounds and quicker profits. Though their bread was buttered in programmers, they had four categories of productions, as described in Republic Studios: Between Poverty Row and the Majors: Jubilee (“Westerns with a seven day schedule and $30,000 budget (later $50,000)”), Anniversary (“Westerns, action/adventure and musicals with a two-week schedule and budgets up to $120,000 (later $200,000)”), Deluxe (varied subjects with 22 day schedules and $300,000 budgets (later 500,000)), and Premiere (one month shooting schedules and million-dollar budgets). Dwan worked in all of these categories, in every genre. His first project for Republic was the wartime screwball comedy Rendezvous with Annie (1945), and went on to do musicals (Calendar Girl), “frontier operettas” (Northwest Outpost), lyrical children’s films (Driftwood), and Depression-era comic fables (The Inside Story). His received his largest budget for the “Premiere” production of Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), but would never get that level of investment again.

Woman They Almost Lynched was probably an “Anniversary” production, clocking in at 90 minutes though having few sets – the whole film takes place on one Western backlot street. The film was based on a short story of the same name by Michael Fessier, first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1951. Steve Fisher adapted the story into a screenplay, though Dwan didn’t remember him fondly. When Peter Bogdanovich asked Dwan if the writer understood that the film would be played as a parody, he responded, “I don’t think he’d know now that it wasn’t serious. If the actors said the words, it was OK with him.” The words tell the story of Border City, which straddles the Missouri-Arkansas border during the Civil War. Mayor Delilah Courtney (Nina Varela) has declared that the town is neutral, and executes by hanging anyone that stirred up Union or Confederate sentiment. When the mercenary band of Quantrill’s Raiders roll into town, the Mayor puts them on notice that they have to leave in 24 hours. Arriving at the same time as William Quantrill (Brian Donlevy) is Sally Maris (Joan Leslie), a city girl traveling to meet her saloon owner brother. When her brother gets shot and killed, Sally is burdened by his debts, and has to run the saloon herself instead of being thrown into debtors’ prison. Sally falls for a dashing Confederate spy named Lance Horton (John Lund), who wants to keep the renegade Quantrill from accessing the town’s lead mines. All the while Quantrill’s cantankerous wife Kate (Audrey Totter) has an obsession with knocking off Sally. Kate was once the fiance to Sally’s brother, and Kate now wishes to wipe that history off the face of the Earth. Dwan deftly balances these overlapping narratives in a film that hurtles along with no wasted motions. 2117193ejzrm4v46ptdn.th

The heart of the film lies in the relationship that forges between Kate, Sally and the saloon girls (one of whom is played by Ann Savage of Detour, her last screen role for 30+ years). Each has learned how to live in the world of men, adapted to it and suffered for it. In Woman They Almost Lynched, Sally represents the promise of an independent, distinctly feminine future. Both Mayor Courtney and Kate have carved out their islands of independence by acting more masculine, by constantly indulging their capacities for violence. The Mayor lynches people with little provocation, and littler evidence. Coded as a “spinster”, she uses violence as sexual release by other means. Kate is a fount of uncontrollable rage, who gets her joy by rendering William Quantrill powerless. When she starts on one of her hate binges, all Quantrill can do is stand back and shrug his shoulders. In a remarkable transmutation, Kate is even able to turn the nightclub song into an act of violence, attacking Sally’s brothers with one of their old favorite tunes. Audrey Totter is a force of nature, an open nerve ready to lash out at everyone around her. She is explosive, abusive, and hilarious. Joan Leslie said that, “Audrey later told me she played the whole thing for farce, while I was doing it straight.” This dynamic is evident in their famous bar brawl, in which Totter badgers her into a scrap. Leslie is earnest, the fear and regret rippling across her face, while Totter’s expression is locked into a snarl. Leslie again: “I had a terrible time with it. I was supposed to hit Audrey, and I just couldn’t. Not hit her on the face! Director Allan Dwan tried to explain, and Audrey told me to go on and do it. Somehow it did get done, but it was a very difficult thing to do.” This is a perfect pairing for Dwan – Leslie playing it straight and sincere while Totter is the clown, destabilizing things from within.

Jeanine Basinger described their relationship as “fighting over the issue of what it means to be a woman. In fact, the whole movie is structured on this very issue.” After Sally bests Kate in a quickdraw in the middle of the street, she yells, “Why don’t you try acting like a woman? You were born a woman but look at you. A bloodthirsty female. A disgrace to all women.” Instead of being content with being as good as a man, Sally insists on the integrity of being a woman – and urges Kate to live up to that standard. And the feminine code of the film is not one of sensitivity and lace, but of assertiveness and principle. Leslie has the grace and goodness of Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine. In the most moving moment of the film, Kate gives a monologue about her years of violent marriage: “At first I fought him. I tried every way I knew to try and escape. And later on I…I became just like him. Passion for vengeance and hatred. No trust in anybody, suspicious of everything. And all the time, all the time it was Quantrill I really hated for what he had done to me. So I took my rage out on the world. All hail the awakening of the ex-Kitty McCoy, cafe singer. Two years too late. Two centuries and a dead heart too late. Why don’t human beings ever learn?”

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.

BOOB TUBE: UHF (1989)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

November 11, 2014

UHF was released to apoplectic critics and an apathetic public on July 21st, 1989. Its opening weekend box office put it in eleventh place, behind the nearly month-old run of Weekend at Bernie’s. It would disappear from theaters a few weeks later. Today it comes out in a “25th Anniversary Edition” Blu-ray from Shout! Factory, having etched itself into the nostalgia nodes of thirty-something weirdos. I count myself among them. During those awkward pre-teen years (before “tween” made the age period sound appealing) “Weird Al” Yankovic was something of a secular god, his mild pop-culture subversiveness a convenient way to channel my milquetoast angst. In 1979 Yankovic changed The Knack’s “My Sharona” into “My Bologna” and netted a recording contract, those albums introducing the possibility of oppositional thinking into my half-formed brain. Plus he dressed funny and had polka breaks in between tunes. No downside! His crossover moment occurred on the album Even Worse (1988), which spawned the MTV music video staple “Fat”, a nearly shot-for-shot parody of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. With the success of the album (it was his first to reach platinum) and the ubiquitous video, the brave souls at the now-defunct Orion Pictures gave him the chance to make a movie. Yankovic and his manager Jay Levey conceived UHF as a delivery system for parodies, along the lines of Kentucky Fried Movie. It turned out to be something more like a combo of SCTV and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but whatever it was, people hated it. Roger Ebert called it “routine, predictable and dumb — real dumb”, while Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as “awful by any standard”. But though I no longer listen to Yankovic’s albums, I still find UHF to be uproarious.

The movie presents “Weird Al” as a sad sack dreamer named George. He’s introduced with a fantasy of himself as Indiana Jones, stealing an Oscar from a booby-trapped ancient temple. At the end of it he’s flattened by a boulder, and there’s a cut from his rubberized body to a hamburger on a skillet. He’s a fry jockey at Big Edna’s Burger World, a position from which he and his trusted doofus friend Bob (David Bowe) will be fired. He’s doomed to more hot dog-in-a-Twinkie dinners until his degenerate gambler uncle Harvey (Stanley Brock) wins a dilapidated UHF television station in a poker game. Harvey taps George to be station manager, and right before George runs the place further into the ground, their janitor Stanley Spadowski (Michael Richards) becomes a variety show sensation and shoots them to the top of the ratings. This attracts the attention of villainous network affiliate head R.J. Fletcher (a jowl-shaking Kevin McCarthy), who unloads all of his dirty tricks to put George out of business.

The antics to save the station are constantly interrupted by commercials and clips, a series of non sequiturs that are the raison d’etre of the film. These include ads for used car salesman Crazy Ernie (“I’m gonna club a baby seal to make a deal”) and highly specialized department store Spatula City (We sell spatulas/And that’s all!”). These are absurdist miniatures that work as well in isolation as they do in the movie. If released on YouTube today, they would light up aggregators as much as Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks did earlier this week. Each sketch takes a different approach, from the magnificent bad punning of Conan the Librarian (who slices a late book returner in half) to the more direct parody of Geraldo Rivera with George’s apocalyptic Town Talk. Viewing it for the nth time last week, however, I was most amused by the shows that we never see. There is one scene where George is planning the schedule, padding things out around Spadowski’s runaway hit. There are the gross-out moves like “Name That Stain” or “The Wonderful World of Phlegm”, and then the more surreal items like the Friday night quartet of “Druids on Parade”, “The Volcano Worshipers Hour”, “Underwater Bingo for Teens” and “Fun With Dirt”. We don’t see a frame of these shows, but the movie manages to parody the mania for reality television a decade before it happens. Their station’s entire success is based on cheap “reality” programming, whether it’s Spadowski’s in-the-moment spazzing or competitive shows like “Bowling for Burgers” or “Strip Solitaire”.

What cannot be ignored today, though, is its reductive depiction of race. One of George’s neighbors and friends is the martial arts instructor Kuni (Gedde Watanabe), whose humor is supposed to come from his heavily accented English and karate poses. Then there’s “Raul’s Wild Kingdom”, featuring the only Hispanic member of the cast. Speaking like Speedy Gonzalez, he lives in a hovel overrun with animals where he teaches poodles how to fly. It’s, as the kids like to say, problematic. If you can look past it, the film has wonderful performances, and I even found Yankovic to be an appealing presence, though Ebert disagrees:

his physical presence is undermined by bad posture and an indistinct speaking voice. He needs to practice throwing back his shoulders and strutting; he creates a dispirited vacuum at the center of many scenes.

I find this “indistinctness” to be interesting. He is mostly recessive until moments of extreme self-doubt, when he lashes out in violence. He screams at Bob to hit him in the face with a crowbar, and is prone to slamming his head on countertops when depressed. It’s an unstable performance, his slacker schizo something that Adam Sandler might have taken inspiration from for his weirder, more interesting comedies (Zohan, That’s My Boy). Michael Richards exhibits the physical elasticity that made him a star, though he elicits more pity than laughter in this one. His character is something of a tragic one, a lonesome mentally deficient janitor whose best friend is a mop. The true star of the film is Kevin McCarthy, who is clearly having a ball as the red meat villain R.J. Fletcher. He is sexist, sadistic and mean to people from all races and religions. McCarthy works on every variation of scowl, his mouth muscles permanently strained downward. Through all his huffing and puffing and bad mouthing, McCarthy walks away with the movie, his blustering in disbelief that “A UHF station!” beat them in the ratings a line reading whose tenor and bluster is permanently embedded in my synapses.

But then, I cannot be objective about this movie. Some of my fondest memories involve listening to a cassette tape of the UHF soundtrack with my brother. We heard the movie before we saw it, imagining the jokes in our heads. On certain long afternoons in the early 1990s, “Weird Al”‘s twenty second blast of cock rock “Let Me Be Your Hog” was the funniest thing in the world. Divorced of its context (Uncle Harvey listening to it on the radio), it was just a strange man making pig noises and screaming to a soaring guitar riff. It was nonsense, it was bliss.

BOWLING FOR DOLLARS: KINGPIN (1996)

February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 21, 2014

Farrelly Brothers movies are akin to family gatherings. They are filled with extreme neuroses, unexpected violence, and deep undercurrents of affection. Their films are even populated with friends and relatives from their Rhode Island home. Listen to any of their audio commentaries and you’ll find that half the actors are bankers and car salesman who grew up with them back east. Every time I see a Farrelly feature I think of how Manny Farber described Howard Hawks’ “weird mother hen instinct.” The Farrellys have it as well, just weirder. Dumb and Dumber was their directorial debut and an enormous hit, a tale of ignorant male friendship that lowered scatalogical slapstick so far it went below lowbrow and out the other side. It’s also their first attempt at depicting the bonds of brotherhood, in which Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels perform a kind of radical acceptance of each other’s flaws — through complete stupidity, but still (they treated the same theme with greater complexity in Stuck on You, their greatest film and biggest bomb). The long-gestating but certainly not maturing sequel, Dumb and Dumber To, comes out next month.

The Farrellys follow-up to the original Dumb and Dumber, though, will never get a sequel, though it did come out on Blu-ray last week. Kingpin is another tale of success-challenged males learning to live with the other’s failure, this time in the lacquered middle-aged crisis world of bowling. Though where Dumb and Dumber is an abstract performance piece, as Carrey and Daniels could have been performing in front of a blank wall to similar effect, Kingpin tries to embed its outrageous characters into a semblance of the real world. Each bowling alley and auto-body shop is lovingly detailed, and essential to the development of its sad sack characters. The lead failure Roy Munson, Jr. (Woody Harrelson) is from the made-up small town of Ocelot, Iowa, a corroded rust belt city where he was once its proudest son as State Bowling champion, while ending up in a pit-stained flophouse in Scranton, PA dodging his scrofulous landlord’s bill. He sees a way out in the smooth stroke of Amish naif Ishmael (Randy Quaid), who he thinks can win the big bowling competition in Reno, and take down his longtime nemesis Ernie McCracken (Bill Murray).

Kingpin was not an easy project for the Farrelly’s to make. Dumb and Dumber’s massive success was attributed to Jim Carrey, and so the Farrelly’s could not get one of their own projects off the ground. So instead they pursued a script by veteran comedy writers Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan (both of The Golden Girls writing staff). As sports fans they related to the material – they always include bizarre athlete cameos, and the one in Kingpin is something else, Roger Clemens as a raging redneck named “Skidmark”. Since disgraced by Major League Baseball’s Mitchell Report for using anabolic steroids, his short scene as a rageaholic gains retrospective…resonance, let’s say. The lead casting was also problematic, with big stars not wanting to dirty their image with the Farrelly’s outrageous material. Peter Farrelly was roommates with Woody Harrelson during his Cheers days, and had tried to get him to act in Dumb and Dumber, but Harrelson thought the script was “too silly”. So on Kingpin Peter tried again, and finally clinched the deal on a pool hall pit – if Peter sank a complicated bank shot Woody would agree to take the part. Peter nailed it, and Woody did the movie. They had targeted Chris Farley to play Ishmael, but he was tied up in another project, so they went with the more offbeat casting of Randy Quaid, who offered an aw shucks gullibility to the role. Farley would have been outstanding but more aggressive – Quaid’s meek interpretation and ungainly gangliness offered more of a match with Woody’s performance of low-key insecurity.

Perhaps the biggest coup to Quaid’s signing was that he had Bill Murray’s direct number. Usually you have to leave a message at some automated mailbox to which he may or may not respond, but Quaid was able to call Murray and relay the Farrelly’s interest in having him on the film to play the womanizing bowling champ McCracken. In his enigmatic manner he agreed, and then sent no more communication until the day of the shoot, when he arrived in character in that teapot-lid comb-over. His hair is one of the biggest characters in the film, though it just makes fleeting appearances. It is pure stringy, thinning magnificence, and when the comb-over tips off his bald pate, it seems to reach three lanes over. Murray improvised all of his scenes, including the oft-quoted inspirational nonsense: “You’re on a gravy train with biscuit wheels”. The Farrelly’s have famously loose sets, aided by their nepotistic ways as well as their belief that the actors should be allowed the freedom to experiment – and look ridiculous.

While the country was experiencing an economic boom in this period, the focus on the rust belt depicts the areas left behind. When Munson returns to Ocelot, they place an emphasis on the town’s decay, from the shuttered ice cream shop to the corroding gas station of Munson’s long-gone father. Movies of third-tier sports have a tendency to capture America in decline, as in Robert Aldrich’s …All the Marbles, about struggling female pro wrestlers criss-crossing the Midwest. Munson’s home of industrial rot is contrasted with the unreal artificiality of Reno, which is depicted almost entirely inside the neon mall of the National Bowling Stadium. Ernie McCracken is the human avatar of Reno, a slick amoral womanizer who is worshiped for his amorality.

This doesn’t mean the Farrelly’s stint on their patented body-horror comedy – wringing endless jokes out of Munson’s prosthetic hand, which ends up in as many sticky situations as the Addams Family’s Thing. Their movies are ones of extremity, in which bodies and psyches are broken down. Whether it’s idiots in Dumb and Dumber, disabled drunks in Kingpin, schizophrenics in Me, Myself and Irene or conjoined twins in Stuck on You, the Farrellys are obsessed with both physical and psychical deformity. There is a bit of the freak show in their work, something confrontational in how they present these debilities without a shred of pity or condescension. They are full fledged people with the equal ability to screw up as any of us. One of their favorite character actors was Danny Murphy, a quadriplegic who appears in Kingpin as a smirkingly violent goon who flicks on the bowling ball return that cuts off Munson’s hand. When you watch him in Kingpin, he is not “the guy in a wheelchair”, but “that asshole who chopped of Munson’s hand”. And that’s how he preferred it. Murphy appeared in all of their films from then on in a variety of roles, from sympathetic to villainous, until his death this past August.

The exception in Kingpin’s parade of unusual physical specimens is Claudia (Vanessa Angel), a hard-bitten blonde who escapes her abusive hustler boyfriend to join Roy and Ishmael on their journey to Reno. She is unique because of her supposed physical perfection, which for Claudia ironically also keeps her outside of proper society. She is somehow too beautiful, so that no one can act normally around her. She then naturally uses her looks to manipulate people, since they are already manipulated before even speaking to her. She uses her body as a weapon throughout the film, to distract opposing teams, and then to beat the stuffing out of Roy in one of the film’s slapstick highlights.

Kingpin is a great bowling movie because it is a movie about failure. Neither Roy or Ishmael wins the big match in Reno. All of the training montages and team building exercises were for naught. At least by traditional metrics of success. But in the Farrelly world, the trio has endured each other’s flaws and accepted them, through ritualized exchanges of humiliations, mostly hook hands to the face and kicks to the balls. Translated through Farrelly slapstick-sentiment, it’s something like love.

IN A FRAME: OUT OF THE PAST (1947)

February 20, 2020February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 2, 2014

Jeff Markham knew Kathie would not arrive, but he sat there and drank anyway. He was resigned to his premonitions, seemingly able to tell the future but powerless to stop it. “I think I’m in a frame…I don’t know. All I can see is the frame. I’m going in there now to look at the picture.” The picture remains obscure to Jeff throughout Out of the Past, though the film image itself is luminous in the new Blu-ray from the Warner Archive. Jeff, played by Robert Mitchum as a slow-motion somnambulist, can see the outline of his fate, but not the details. Director Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca previously collaborated on Cat People, and continue their use of low-key lighting to produce dream-like suggestions of violence. All of the deaths in Out of the Past are hidden off-screen, the specifics elided. They simply accrue in the fog of Jeff’s rueful investigation, a case that turns into a series of delaying tactics to stay alive. But he can only pause to smoke so many times before the darkness finally deigns to meet him.

Out of the Past was based on a crime novel by Daniel Mainwaring (under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes) entitled Build My Gallows High. In 1945 RKO outbid Warner Bros. for the rights to the then unpublished book for a reported $20,000. A George Gallup poll revealed the American public’s distaste for the fatalistic title Build My Gallows High, so it was changed to Out of the Past during the pre-production. The novel was Mainwaring’s last – he had already transitioned to the higher pay of motion picture writing. So he was tasked with writing a first draft of the script – which later went through the hands of crime novelist James M. Cain (Double Indemnity)and Frank Fenton, an old RKO hand who had recently worked on the George Raft noir Nocturne, as well as multiple entries in the “Falcon” mystery series. “Homes” received sole credit upon the film’s release, though in his Film Comment article “The Past Rewritten”, Jeff Schwager read through all of the script variations and credits most of the film’s famously allusive dialogue to Fenton. Tourneur undoubtedly took a pass at it himself. As quoted in Chris Fujiwara’s The Cinema of Nightfall, interviewer Jean-Claude Biette claimed that Tourneur had “refused several times to shoot this crime film, whose script he didn’t like, until all the changes he wanted had been accepted.”

The story circles around private detective Jeff Markham (Mitchum), who is hired by gang boss Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to track down the dame who shot him and made off with forty grand. He finds the culprit Kathie (Jane Greer), falls in love with her, and the couple drops out of sight. Their relationship disintegrates from a life on the lam, they split, and Markham goes straight, rebranding himself “Jeff Bailey” and opening a gas station. As the title indicates, Bailey is soon haunted by “Markham”, and pulled back into the poisonous web of Whit and Kathie.

The shape of the project kept shifting. RKO attempted to convince Warners to loan out Bogart, but they claimed he was booked for the next year. Then the director-actor team of Edward Dmytryk and Dick Powell was announced, as they had collaborated on Murder, My Sweet (1944) a few years before. They ultimately settled on their young leading man Robert Mitchum, whose last starring part for RKO was West of the Pecos (1945), and the reliable Tourneur, whom RKO had worked profitably with on the Val Lewton-produced horror movies like Cat People. Each casting decision would change the texture and tenor of the film. As artists both Tourneur and Mitchum were crepuscular creatures, attracted to the dreaming hours (though there are key sun-drenched sequences in Out of the Past). Mitchum, with his hooded eyes and one-beat-too-late delivery, gave off an air of laziness, though he was remarkably present as an actor. Tourneur valued this, saying that Mitchum (and Dana Andrews) “knows how to listen in a scene. There are a large number of players who don’t know how to listen. Mitchum can be silent and listen to a five minute speech. You’ll never lose sight of him and you’ll understand that he takes in what is said to him, even if he doesn’t do anything. That’s how one judges good actors.”

Watching Out of the Past for the first time in years, I started to focus on entrances and exits, and the transitional way Tourneur and Musuruca light them. The most famous example is when Kathie is first introduced, walking into a Mexican cantina. There is a blazing white light outside the door, rendering her almost invisible. Her white dress and sun hat blend into this brightness, so when she walks into the shade of the alcove her silhouette seems to emerge out of nothingness. She is a phantom, or a figment of Jeff’s heat-addled mind. She is a transformative figure throughout the film, given more shadings of character than the usual Madonna-Whore of film noir. She is as secretive and withholding as Jeff, but both find an excuse to playact a love affair in Acapulco. Once back in the states, they can no longer hide their true natures. Kathie has a finely tuned survival instinct that trumps any of her repressed emotions. While Jeff’s seemingly embraces his own doom. Right after he says “I’m in a frame”, he walks right into the setup, hoping to outsmart the trap. But a man with a set of survival skills like Kathie’s would leave the scene, and change into yet another name. Jeff almost seems to savor his entrapment, or has long since been resigned to it. Mitchum responds to each revelation with equanimity, as if he expected it for years. Bodies drop all around him and he is left unperturbed. He is waiting for his own, and he will embrace it when the opportunity arises, fulfilling his anti-hero’s journey.