Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Come On, You Cowards

The Black Pirate (1926)
directed by Albert Parker
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Fairbanks is able to sustain the same casualness, the same sense of heroic, effortless execution, clear through lovestruck salutes and mizzen-mast dismounts, then every cruelty and meanness his antagonist can muster. I mean Fairbanks the showman, who must have planned each one of these scenes, more than Fairbanks the lead. Smaller in scale and ambition than The Thief of Bagdad (that sea-level cave of buried treasure is too mysterious for a wedding boon), but no less contemplative, as even the lieutenant usurper stares thoughtfully out to sea from the windows of a captain's grand cabin: a pirate watching the moon. A squadron of soldiers alighting on a Spanish galleon from beneath the water gives a better sensation of flight - like birds - than breaststroke proficiency, and it's silly and beautiful all at once. The cruelty comes when the pirate king orders a ring cut from the guts of a prisoner who swallowed his betrothed's last keepsake. We see only the henchman's insouciant and bloody hand, staggering but sweetly part of the same grand and far-removed ordeal. There's no difference at all between two-strip Technicolor and the parents of Pickfair in a black-and-white Mexico, or any of it.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Honey-Baked, Spiral-Sliced

49th Parallel (1941)
directed by Michael Powell
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

After 49th Parallel, the falsest statement in movies is that Laurence Olivier was a great movie actor. To be sure, he belonged to an older generation (when "stagy" didn't mean what it does now), and he was first and foremost a theater man. Perhaps Olivier preferred the theater, but he enjoyed movies enough to make them throughout his life, and the movie-going public rewarded him: nominations, awards, box office success. Johnnie the Trapper is possibly the hammiest performance I have seen on film, not boisterous (a "vigorous, honest plainness" is how the character was probably imagined) but embarrassing. No Orson Welles pay-for-play cameo ever touched it.



Michael Powell, on the other hand, brings even to this paycheck propaganda the humanity and wonder that defined his best collaborations with Emeric Pressburger. The northern wind is always present here, avatar of thoughtful solitudes. It begins outside - the evergreen gales - but the camera waits indoors. First, an old man whistles as he walks through his cabin. The whistle inside matches the wind. Later, at night - wind still blowing - a clock chimes warmly, and a soldier begins to snore. In both instances, protagonists draw out the loneliest aspects of nature and wilderness and welcome them like a friend or a hot fire. No experience is separate from the space where it occurs; all you need to make it better is the right sort of man.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Thank Heaven for an Age of Consent

Gigi (1958)
directed by Vincente Minnelli
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at ELO's

The dark side of Hollywood was never closer to the surface than in this Technicolor homage to the paintings of Renoir and the sexual predilections of the Black Dahlia murderer. An eleventh-hour marriage proposal, intended to placate anyone in the audience less distracted by the bright clothes than the trafficking of adolescent flesh, is actually drowned out by the last refrain of "Thank Heaven for Little Girls." Drinking each time the protagonist breaks the law would get you drunk enough to join him in jail, and while Chevalier is no doubt more congenial with each shot, this is about as perverse as family entertainment gets.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Driving Miss Daisy Crazy

Daisy Kenyon (1947)
directed by Otto Preminger
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Preminger lights Joan Crawford the way my headlamp lights the tent at night on a camping trip, and that's the best comparison I've got for this all-too-typical, all-too-dated stab at adulthood by way of too much tumid repetition. I like the rumor that Otto Preminger had "no memory" of making this movie when a reporter asked him about it later on, because it's just the sort of film you get a little caught up in - because Dana Andrews is in it, because Henry Fonda plays a creepy alcoholic, and because the rain reminds you of Fallen Angel - and then have a hard time recapping on your blog. When the staff at Variety writes that Crawford "really makes the most" of a "thesping plum" of a role, you've got all you really need to know. Alfred Hitchcock probably hated Daisy Kenyon, because Alfie knew just where all this acting-driven nonsense belongs.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Liberté, Égalité, & the Hometown Frat



I don't get cable (or enough reception from the antenna to watch network television), so I listened to the Giants last night on AM radio. My version of the big game took place all over Oxford - in the truck on my way to Kroger and back, the rhythmic static louder beneath the Highway 7 overpass and the bottom of University Avenue; sitting in my reading chair with Boone unsure of the enthusiastic timbre on the stereo.

Because I go to bed early, I walked Boone during the crucial fourth quarter. The weather in Oxford was balmy and wet, still in the sixties hours after nightfall, and on each block we saw cars gathered outside homes where people congregated to root for the home team. Streets were quiet enough, except for the sound of cars and the light rain, to hear cheers all over Oxford each time the Giants defense stopped the Patriots. The big chorus that followed New York's last great drive was so overwhelming that it gave me a better sense of the city's geography and size than a drive through town on a game weekend ever could.

I never liked Eli Manning because he acted like a jerk during the draft, but everyone's entitled to a second opinion. Way to go drunky.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

In the Ancient Oak Forest of Rouvray

One Hour With You (1932)
directed by Ernst Lubitsch
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

First Franzi, and now Mitzi, Jeanette MacDonald's old "school chum." What fine, droll names! (Pass me my top hot and martini!) If MacDonald is my favorite discovery of Lubitsch's first steps into song, One Hour With You is unquestionably the sprint to the finish line. It's the most understanding film of the bunch, anyway, forgiving of extra-marital betrayals in the same way The Affairs of Anatol was. Of course, maybe Lubitsch, going through a divorce of his own, was interested in the crumbling edifice more than the ruins; maybe the final stitch of empathy isn't his.

Nor is this some early-thirties myopic endorsement of the average misogynist's marital "rights." Well, not entirely, anyway, although MacDonald's near-assault by Chevalier's best man is framed as an "indiscretion" essentially the equal of Maurice flaunting his infidelity in the cab outside his own apartment. In the beginning and the end, both MacDonald and Chevalier want the marriage to work; the joke is realizing all the ways it can't.

I just watched Daisy Kenyon, and that movie made a similar point (sort of), although except for the moments when Dana Andrews climbed up on his soapbox, I didn't laugh once. One Hour With You begins with the Parisian police rounding up lovers in the Bois de Boulogne, not out of coldness, but because cafés lose too much money in the spring; no one's in them. When the cops find Maurice and Jeanne kissing on a bench, Maurice swears they're legitimate. If that were true, responds the chief, they'd be "the only married couple in the park." Everyone laughs at that, which I like. It reminded me of this exchange, way back from Monte Carlo:

"It's a silly story, only possible with music."

"That's possible even without music. Things like that happen everyday." Movies like these really don't.

Sedition from the Boudoir Brigadiers

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
directed by Ernst Lubitsch
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

My consternation at the senselessness of these musicals' final acts undermines how enjoyably the other eighty minutes conspire. Here Chevalier perfects the art of the eye roll, looks down the front of Claudette Colbert's blouse, and gets himself caught up in maybe the simplest of screwball contradictions: the princess of Flausenthurm mistakes a wink aimed at Claudette for a royal come-on. Against Claudette - never prettier than here - Miriam Hopkins seems like the wrong choice for her beer garden free spirit, and even though that's the point for most of the movie, she's somehow the right choice for Niki in the end. And that's the screenplay's wrong choice, an abdication of heart as fatal as Claudette's Franzi pinning her garter to a note that reads, "It was lovely while it lasted."

Again, Design for Living and Trouble in Paradise work so well because their protagonists fail each other only to realize their mistakes in time to fix them. A movie with enough gravitas to leave Franzi in a roomful of flowers congratulating her lover on his marriage to the princess is a movie that needs to belong to Franzi. Instead, she tells Anna to "jazz up your lingerie" and then walks out of her life forever. Wrong heroine, wrong ending, however gentle the waltz in the empty room, however the camera floats to the stage just the same way your eyes see someone like Claudette Colbert light up the screen.

Friday, February 01, 2008

Burn Me a Thick One, Pete

The Old Dark House (1932)
directed by James Whale
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Now I know the movie that Charles Laughton simmered at low heat for twenty years before he made The Night of the Hunter. Here he plays Sir William Porterhouse, and whenever I eat a porterhouse steak in the future, I will always be reminded of Laughton's overfed indignation at the looks he gets for bringing along a chorus girl. If there is anything more graceful than a beautiful woman in a long satin dress running through the shadows of a lamp-lit hall, then grace would have to have a name, and be someone specific - one movie, a particular face. The moment almost slips through - Whale's camp haunts the film as surely as the rain - but the trim perversity of a few perfect scenes suggests every resonant, timeless apparition since.

Mass of Money, Linen, Silk, and Starch

Monte Carlo (1930)
directed by Ernst Lubitsch
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Famous at the time because Lubitsch synced songs to the motions of a train - a first, apparently, in musicals - although, to my mind, the better legacy is the film's decidedly Western ideal of starting anew by leaving. In 1930, poor Americans were surely attracted to the fantastic unearned opulence of landed royalty much more than the romantic dalliances that buoyed productions like Monte Carlo. Choices are never made between a rich suitor and a penniless one; both prospects come stuffed with money, although Monte Carlo at least allows the heroine to make up her heart before she knows that for sure.

But for all the intentional remove of fake European kingdoms of gentle mile-wide staircases from all-too-real Depression-era hard times (and to some degree, old-world romance was the director's artistic heritage), Lubitsch's use of trains and travel is as much a precursor to Frank Tashlin's blonde-headed highways as it is to Trouble in Paradise. The independent women in these musicals could qualify as Jazz Age Zeldas if they weren't so mercilessly punished for their freedoms (see Prince Otto's "You'll Love Me and Like It"), but the escape clause by which some regeneration transpires is nothing if not a new American day.

Did I forget to mention it's sweet and very funny? Sometimes the insouciance of the pre-Hays era seems a little overrated, but try to get George Clooney to deliver a note like Count Rudolph Falliere's: "Dear Countess, please pardon me for sending these flowers so late, but I had to get the little flower girl out of bed first." As easy as it is to picture the Maurice Chevalier of The Love Parade flaunting a back-handed gift like that, here the Count plays it straight as an arrow.