Monthly Report: April 2024

As ever, click on the highlighted links for longer reviews &cet.

Aliens (1986) The Alien franchise is so well-established now and its horrific contours so much a part of the popular culture after nearly 45 years, it may be difficult to explain to younger people how striking Alien was to moviegoers in 1979. (When that thing burst out of John Hurt’s chest I had an attack of hyperventilation in the theater.) As much as one hates, and hated even then, to praise that appalling egotist and self-confessed plagiarist James Cameron,* his 1986 sequel had nearly as great an impact as Alien, at least on me. Cameron hasn’t anything like Ridley Scott’s contemplative qualities, nor his deliberate sense of pace; he grabs you by the throat early on and shakes you repeatedly, at strategically-placed intervals, making Alien look almost like an art-film by contrast. Of course, Cameron had the advantage over Scott in that he didn’t have to take time setting up the alien xenomorph or its violent, parasitic reproductive biology, and it cannot be denied that his action-movie approach is remarkably effective; I’ve seen Aliens on, first, video-tape and later, DVD and Blu-ray, more times than I can count since 1986 — I’m one of those suckers who can usually be counted on to purchase the new editions of certain favorite movies as they are released, even as I grumble about paying more than once for essentially the same item — and the picture gets to me every time, and in such a visceral manner my temperature rises before the encounter at the power station and remains elevated until after the end credits.

***^{“Uh oh. I made a clean spot here. Now I’ve done it. Guess I’ll have to do the whole thing.”}***

The new 4K UHD edition looks spectacular and is not, as I had feared (and as is sometimes the case with 4K transfers) murkier than the original.

***^{Poster art with a period flavor by Richard Amsel.}***

Little Miss Marker (1980) The fourth screen adaptation of the Damon Runyon story; it was filmed in 1934 with Adolphe Menjou and Shirley Temple, in 1949 as Sorrowful Jones starring Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, and in 1962 as 40 Pounds of Trouble with Tony Curtis, none of which I have seen. (My tolerance for both Temple and Menjou is nearly as low as Joe Biden’s for the First Amendment.) Engagingly written and cleverly directed by the formerly Blacklisted Walter Bernstein, the 1980 edition has a sunny quality that goes down like a glass of Cocomalt, with approximately as much nutritional value. Jennings Lang, who produced the picture with his star Walter Matthau, was a longtime producer at Universal and may have thought he had a Sting-like entertainment on his hands, with a cast of lovable 1930s rogues and the ante upped to include an adorable child. Matthau, I assume, as a degenerate gambler could not resist a comedy in which he plays a bookie and the backdrop is an illicit casino.

Runyon’s original is a curious little tale, bordered on the one side by comedy and on the other by a bathos that quickly drops into rank, manipulative sentimentality. Centered on the bookie Sorrowful Jones and the three or four-year-old girl left at his joint as a marker it’s essentially comic but takes a catastrophic turn at the end — the little girl dies — and none of the previous versions, as nearly as I can determine, has gone anywhere near Runyan’s deadly climax. (Two of them apparently end with either miraculous cures for the child or anyway the strong suggestion she will survive.) Bernstein, happily, avoids this complication, which in the story is unbearably maudlin, entirely. Where Runyan merely tells his readers that the girl’s presence in his single life alters the gruff, unlovable Sorrowful Jones to a more kindly, loving figure the writer-director shows us Jones thawing, slowly and not at all unbelievably, as he assumes responsibility for the child’s welfare and slowly stops seeing her as an impediment to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. What makes this work is not merely Matthau’s peerless hangdog persona and his gift for subtle change but the girl herself; Sarah Stimson, whose only acting job this picture was, brings a calming presence to the situation. She isn’t precocious, or cutesy and there’s nothing calculating about either her performance or Bernstein’s conception of the character. She has a grave, polite mien, accepting what’s happening to her, never questioning her faith that her father (Andrew Rubin) will come back for her and unintimidated by Jones’ perennial irascibility.

Bernstein adds plot wrinkles in the persona (not in the story) of the dumber-than-he-thinks-he-is gangster played by Tony Curtis and the woman (Julie Andrews) whose ancestral home he is turning into his casino and who, it will hardly surprise you to learn, attaches herself to “The Kid” and to Jones. Bernstein also turns Regret, a minor character in the Runyon story, into Sorrowful Jones’ bookie-joint manager who, in the single bit of miscasting in the movie, is played by Bob Newhart. Newhart’s essential character, the stammering low-key voice of, if not reason, at least stability, is all wrong for Runyon. Curtis and Matthau are much better suited to his style, as are Brian Dennehy as Curtis’ chief goon and, in smaller roles, Tom Pedi, Joshua Shelley and Kenneth McMillan as that perpetual oxymoron, a decent cop, albeit one who, if he succeeds in his aim of protecting the little girl, will ensure her misery by having her placed in an orphan asylum. Where Bernstein goes slightly awry, as far as stylistic integrity is concerned, is in the women’s roles, which seem to have drifted in from the work of another author. Andrews is appealing as she nearly always is, and Lee Grant gives a good reading of the gently exasperated judge at the climax but neither feels to me like an organic Runyon character.

Philip H. Lathrop’s photography is colorful and clear, Henry Mancini score consists largely of lively pastiches of 1930s music and Wayne Fitzgerald and David Oliver Pfeil designed the charming main title sequence featuring period wheeled children’s toys including, in a winking cameo, Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley.

***^{Early Al Hirschfeld poster art, in which Ollie resembles a fat Clark Gable.}***

Pardon Us (1931) Laurel and Hardy’s first feature, a spoof of the early talkie The Big House, was intended as a short subject and it feels padded out, with long, dry and mostly unfunny stretches and one appalling sequence in which the boys, after escaping from prison, hide out in a black sharecroppers’ enclave. The black performers surrounding Stan and Ollie are neither more nor less stereotyped than in other movies of the time (although as usual they are happy laborers, singing spirituals during work and more secular fare after); what’s really insulting is that we’re asked to believe they’re so simple they can’t spot in their midst two white men in obvious minstrel-show blackface complete with exaggerated lips. The casual racism is even more of a shame because it detracts from our enjoying Hardy’s beautiful tenor in the communal sequence. (Speaking of music: When a prison quintet played by The Avalon Boys sings in the exercise yard, their a cappella number is an uncredited “I Want To Go Back To Michigan,” the 1914 ballad by Irving Berlin later memorably performed by Judy Garland in Easter Parade.)

The occasional funny bits involve Stan’s speech impediment, caused by a dental problem, which makes it sound as if he’s blowing raspberries at tough cons like Walter Long and Wilfred Lucas’ psychotic Warden, the schoolroom sequence featuring James Finlayson as a lunatic pedagogue and a scene in the prison dental clinic where (naturally) it’s Ollie’s healthy tooth that gets pulled. The dialogue is credited to L & H’s usual scenarist of the period H.M. Walker, the team’s frequent shorts director James Parrott staged it (often poorly and in so enervated a manner than its 55-minute running-time feels like two hours) and the uncredited gag-men include Parrot, Charley Rogers and, as usual, Stan. Those who grew up on Our Gang comedies (called The Little Rascals on television) will recognize the music in the score, comprised of stock-music composed by Leroy Shield used by Hal Roach in both L & H and Our Gang short subjects.

Those Calloways (1964) If Paul Annixter’s 1950 coming-of-age novel Swiftwater did not exist, this Disney conservationist epic might suffice, but the adaptation by Louis Pelletier softens, complicates or reverses nearly everything that made Annisxter’s beautifully written book enthralling, and refreshingly candid.

Blind Date (1987) The screenwriter Dale Launer’s 1980s specialty was a certain witty nastiness with a marshmallow center: Ruthless People, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and this exercise in comedic mayhem, directed by Blake Edwards and featuring the first starring movie performance by Bruce Willis. The way to enjoy the picture is to accept that nothing about it is related in any way to reality; once you realize that it takes place in an invented comic universe where a young woman can get insanely drunk and destructive on a single half-glass of champagne, a maniac lawyer can smash up several businesses without charge and, later, represent a client in front of a judge who it turns out is his father you may relax and perhaps, as I did, get a lot of laughs from it. Although Edwards was not, at least officially, the writer, Blind Date feels like a Blake Edwards picture, especially in the elaborate last third, and there are wonderful surprises for those paying attention, as when during a wedding ceremony the judge played with dyspeptic irritation by William Daniels snarls at his butler to shoot his incessantly barking Doberman and, a couple of minutes later, we hear a distant gunshot, which goes unnoticed by the guests, and uncommented on. The surprise of the delayed effect is as large as our hilarity at the filmmakers’ audacity.

King of Hearts (Le Roi de cœur) (1966) The captivating Philippe de Broca war-fable starring Alan Bates, given a glorious restoration in 2018 by Cohen Media Group.

***^{Jean Seberg looks spooked, perhaps understandably.}***

Paint Your Wagon (1969) There was probably no way, at the time of its release, for this Lerner and Loewe musical about the 1849 California gold rush to get a fair evaluation because everyone knew how much was spent on it; budgeted at $10 million it eventually cost the struggling Paramount Pictures twice that, at a time when a million dollars was actual money. The critics were aware of the cost overruns, and of the protracted Oregon shooting schedule — of the general spectacle of American movie studios hurling good money after bad, in obscene amounts, for ever more bloated musicals, few of which made a profit and even fewer of which (Oliver!, Funny Girl, Darling Lili, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Sweet Charity) were any good. In the case of Paint Your Wagon, the manic-depressive Joshua Logan was stuck for months in the literal wilderness, with a cast of hundreds and a makeshift Western town he first had to build, then destroy in a spectacular fashion. He was also saddled with a producer who was not only the show’s lyricist and author of the Broadway book but the man with whom he had made another disastrous adaptation (Camelot) two years earlier and who, after entrusting Paddy Chayefsky to put together a new, hipper, screenplay, one involving a (heterosexual) ménage à trois, which he then (out of jealousy? insecurity? sheer perversity?) rewrote himself, to its diminution. Both Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood signed up on the basis of the Chayefsky screenplay and both were astounded to find much of what they had loved removed by Lerner’s fine Italian hand. (Chayefsky retained an “adaptation” credit but the screenplay itself is credited solely to Lerner.) Marvin gave up The Wild Bunch for this, so one can only imagine his reaction to the new lines that were filmed, although I hasten to add that you can detect Chayefsky’s unique way with a monologue, especially a rhetorical one, in several of the speeches that remain in the movie: Jean Seberg’s wedding-night monologue is one, and Marvin’s “let’s all be married” speech at the end of the first act is another.

Those names are worth pondering: Lee Marvin. Clint Eastwood. Jean Seberg. Stars who didn’t sing, in a big-budget musical. That was the madness abroad in the land in those days, when the likes of Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave were routinely called upon to carry a musical. Eastwood, at least, could more or less carry a tune, and had an appealing, unemphatic, slightly jazz-flavored way with a lyric. Marvin got, of all things, a Top 10 European hit out his melancholy, whiskey-laced rendition of “Wand’rin’ Star.” Eastwood had to strain too much in the higher registers for his “I Talk to the Trees” to land as sweetly as it should have, but he did rather well by “I Still See Elisa” and, especially, “Gold Fever,” one of several new songs on which Lerner collaborated with André Previn, whom he did his best to drive insane. (Speaking of not knowing when to quit: Previn then allowed himself to be driven even madder writing songs with Lerner for the Broadway musical Coco starring yet another non-singer, Katharine Hepburn. What an era. No wonder Hair seemed so fresh to people then.) Seberg was dubbed, by Anita Gordon, on her single number, the evocative, Previn-composed “A Million Miles Away Behind the Door” which contains one of my two favorite song lyrics: There’s so much space between the waiting heart and whispered word/It’s never heard.† Harve Presnell is, thankfully, on hand to sing a hair-raising version of “They Call the Wind Maria” (Pauline Kael: “Where did he come from?”) and I have always like Nelson Riddle’s orchestrations of the songs, except for the one we hear when Marvin sings “The First Thing You Know” and which feels like a last-minute demand from someone to “make it sound more like a musical-comedy song!” The banjo-and-harmonica arrangement on the soundtrack album is much simpler, and more relaxed. I assume Riddle preferred it.

***^{An unlikely pop hit, at least in Europe. Marvin never tired of twitting his teenage son that it was he who knocked the Beatles out of the top spot on the charts.}***

Lerner can, I suppose, be excused to a degree on the grounds that he was being given daily injections of “vitamins” by the notorious Max Jacobson, put up in Oregon at Paramount expense, and was probably not in complete possession of his mind. Logan later revealed the extent of his own manic-depression, and, again, one supposes he couldn’t help making a mess of things. But where was everyone else? The wonder is that anything entertaining came out of it, yet the movie is much more enjoyable than it had a right to be, Ray Walton’s appalling performance notwithstanding. William A. Fraker’s cinematography was roundly condemned at the time of the picture’s release for being as muddy as the streets of “No-Name City,” but on the recent Kino Blu-ray, looks awfully good. (The 4K disc emphasizes the mud. Why is it so hard to get these color balances correct?) Superfluous side-note: I’ve always been amused that someone — Chayefsky, possibly — plunked Horace Tabor down in No-Name City, in the person of William O’Connell, complete with prince-nez and fastidious Boston Brahman accent. Tabor, the noted Leadville, Colorado silver miner and magnate, became one of the three principals in another musical piece, the Douglas Moore/John LaTouche opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, but wasn’t in the West in 1849, and if he had been, would have been all of 18 or 19.

I used to refer to Paint Your Wagon as a guilty-pleasure. I no longer do. The phrase is not in my personal vocabulary now. If a picture provides enough basic entertainment, relatively brightly, with some talent expressed behind the camera and in front of it, and doesn’t embarrass you or insult your intelligence while you’re watching, it isn’t “guilty” anything; God knows there are enough truly shitty movies out there that don’t even give you the modicum amount of those criteria, and they routinely make millions.

Stranger at My Door (1956) An interesting little B-Western with pretentions that, despite the way it pushes its conventional Christian piety, has the virtues of an intelligent script, vivid acting, accomplished direction and photography, and brevity; at 85 minutes, it is no shorter nor longer than it should be. A bank-robber on the run from the law (Skip Homeier) hides out with the family of a frontier minister (Macdonald Carey) who sees in him a project for redemption. The preacher has a young son (Stephen Wootton) and a newish wife (Patricia Medina) the outlaw tries to get around by claiming she isn’t cut out to be a minister’s spouse, and he reads her rather well at that: Medina seems more dance-hall floozie than pious churchwoman, and the camera is as fascinated with her bust as Homeier’s outlaw is.‡ Although Barry Shipman’s dialogue is occasionally a bit on the nose, it’s often remarkably honest even while pushing that Judeo-Christian through-line rather insistently. William Witney’s direction, like Bud Thackery’s black-and-white cinematography, is sharp and clean, and the cast seizes its opportunities without recourse to overdoing things. There are, however, some moments of bad back-projection that betray the picture’s budget limitations, and when the little boy’s dog is injured, the child pretty obviously rescues a stuffed animal, and a stiff one at that.

A secondary redemption narrative involves the seemingly mad horse sold to the minister by Slim Pickens (that’ll teach him) and it’s here that the picture soars off into realms of surrealist imagery as the horse fixes its ire first on one character (or animal; the dog also comes in for some menacing) and then another. How this horse was trained to perform as it does, and as convincingly, is one of the great mysteries of the Hollywood past, but you’ll seldom see a more terrifying specter in a Western than this violently-inclined equine maniac.

Gambit (1966) Beginning with the unexpected success of the blacklisted American writer-director Jules Dassin’s Rififi and 1955, and accelerating steadily after the Peter Stone/Stanley Donen Charade in 1963, there was an explosion of caper-thrillers and comedies, many but by no means all composed of a single intriguing word (the original French title for Rififi was Du rififi chez les hommes): Everything from, on the higher end, The Pink Panther, Arabesque, Mirage, How to Steal a Million, Who’s Minding the Mint? and Hot Millions to Topkapi and Ocean’s Eleven in the middle, to, in the dregs, Assault on a Queen, The Italian Job and Caprice. Gambit placed near the end of the original cycle and while it was modestly budgeted — except for a few fleeting glimpses of Hong Kong, most of it was shot at Universal Studios (or, in one hilarious case, Santa Barbara subbing for the Riviera) — didn’t make much money anyway. Too bad, because the picture, charmingly written by Jack Davies and (of all people) Alvin Sargent, expertly directed by Ronald Neame and winningly played out by Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine and Herbert Lom, is consistently appealing. The posters suggested to contemporary ticket-buyers that it was okay to give away the ending, but not the beginning, and it’s in that 26-minute stretch that I most detect the hand of the story’s originator, Sidney Carroll, author of, in the comic Western A Big Hand for the Little Lady, perhaps the most satisfying surprise ending I’ve ever seen.

The then-98 year old Neame in his commentary on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray says it was MacLaine who suggested her character remain silent throughout the extended phony-opening, which is in keeping with what one hears about her instincts and intelligence as an actress, although as she plays an Amerasian dance-hall girl, the entire enterprise would doubtless be considered intolerably racist today, as would the casting of Lom as a Middle Eastern millionaire, although for my part I don’t think I’ve never seen this wonderful character actor look more strikingly handsome than he does here. Speaking of commentaries: Avoid the second set on the Kino disc, by three nonentities who show off their collective ignorance by repeatedly confusing Sargent with Arthur Laurents, alleging first that he wrote the Gambit script for MacLaine, which Neame in no way corroborates and second that Sargent (not Laurents) did the same with The Turning Point… which was not only not written for MacLaine but was also not written by Sargent. Continuing on this weird tract the three movie stooges on the commentary further declare, with the confidence of the ignoramus whose thought process is entirely unclouded by fact, that Sargent also wrote Laurents’ The Way We Were! Needless to say after that, I did not follow these roaring fools any further.

Among the myriad pleasures Gambit offers are the comic interplay between the proletarian MacLaine and the phlegmatic Caine, the surprisingly winning score by the highly variable Maurice Jarre and the expert lighting and widescreen cinematography by Clifford Stine, of which I have appended a representative sample above, a small masterpiece of character contrast.

*For The Terminator, Cameron cynically plagiarized elements (particularly the opening) from Harlan Ellison’s short story “Soldier from Tomorrow” and from Ellison’s own adaptation of it, as “Soldier,” as a 1964 episode of “The Outer Limits.” He even said to a friend of Ellison’s who asked where the plot came from, “Oh, I ripped off a couple of Harlan Ellison stories.”

†My other favorite, from “Skylark,” lyric by Johnny Mercer: Faint as a will-o-the-wisp/Crazy as a loon/Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon... although I suppose we’re not allowed to sing that one any longer.

‡It says something about this performer, formerly a child actor, that when he achieved his majority he had his name legally changed from “Skippy” to “Skip.” That’s progress, I suppose, of a sort.

Through the window: “King of Hearts” (Le Roi de cœur, 1966)

By Scott Ross

As ever, click on the highlighted links for longer reviews &cet.

_{“The most beautiful journeys are taken through the window.” — The Duke (Jean-Claude Brialy) to Charles Plumpick (Alan Bates)}

I have a long history with this bittersweet confectioner’s bauble, going back to the United Artists soundtrack LP, “borrowed” from a local library’s “honor system” swap-shelf the spring I was 16 (and, I’m afraid, due to my adolescent penury, never returned.) I had seen the movie advertised in the Raleigh morning paper as a perennial late-show favorite of the art-house theater across from NC State University, and was curious to see, or as was the case with the record, hear, what it was all about. I don’t think at that time I had ever heard a score for a European movie, and Georges Delerue’s music, with its gentle waltz theme and its many lyrical and comic interpolations, absolutely enchanted me. When in the summer of that year I finally got to see King of Hearts, still playing as a late-show, I discovered Delerue’s infectious score was only a seductive foretaste.

***^{The wonderful Georges Delerue soundtrack, recently remastered and reissued in a limited edition of 1,000 copies by Music Box Records. Get it while you can.}***

A financial failure in France on its 1966 release, the picture became an American cult success in the 1970s when it was run with Marv Newland’s hilarious Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) and Jeff Hale’s Lenny Bruce adaptation Thank You Mask Man (1971) under the omnibus title The King of Hearts and His Loyal Short Subjects. The trailer for the 2018 Cohen Media Group 4K restoration and reissue bears a breathless, typically hyperbolic and overstated 21st century tag-line (“The return of the antiwar cult classic that defined a generation”) that is as ludicrous as it is insulting. No: Kent State helped define that generation. Coffins returning with the bodies of youths killed in Vietnam defined it, as did LBJ, the draft, Tet, Hanoi, Saigon, Nixon’s carpet-bombing of Laos and Cambodia, the March on Washington, Freedom Rides, the killings of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, the actions of Governor Wallace, Governor Rhodes and Governor Farbus, fascist cops beating up kids in Daley’s Chicago and Century City, the FBI-enacted murders of Malcolm X, Dr. King and Fred Hampton and the CIA-led killings of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, not some comic-romantic French movie none of these young people saw until 1973. If that generation of American youth was influenced by movies (and it was; it was famously, at the time, referred to as “the film generation,” and the studios chased after its dollars maniacally) it was The Graduate that moved them, and Bonnie and Clyde, and Planet of the Apes, Midnight Cowboy, Romeo and Juliet, Rosemary’s Baby, Woodstock, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, MASH, the reissue of Fantasia with its head-trip-come-on pop poster, maybe Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and even, God help them, Love Story and Easy Rider.

***^{King and Duke: Alan Bates and Jean-Claude Brialy.}***

King of Hearts is a gentle fable set in the waning days of the first world war, in which a Scottish soldier (Alan Bates) in France is tasked with finding a cache of German explosives wired to blow up a medieval-era village, and defusing it. Without his (or the Germans’) being aware of it the inhabitants have fled in a panic, leaving only the inmates of their insane asylum who emerge from their cage and take on the personae of various townspeople and whom (of course) the Scot becomes enchanted by, even after realizing who they really are. That he is paired with the prettiest of the female patients (the entrancing Geneviève Bujold) is certainly a part of his infatuation, but the soldier not only sees the inmates’ essential humanity as worth preserving but comes to view them as saner than the world outside their prison. That of course is the central conceit of Maurice Bessy, who wrote the original story, Daniel Boulanger, the author of the screenplay, and Philippe de Broca, who directed the picture with delicacy, wit and real charm, and the picture’s “sanity of the insane versus the insanity of the sane” analogy was already a fairly worn dramatic trope in 1966, certainly when I saw King of Hearts in 1977 (many of the “film generation” were also avid readers of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and it couldn’t hold up in a realistic story; here, the contrast in behavior between the happy inmates and the Scottish and German officers couldn’t be more pronounced. Yet if an actual asylumful of the insane escaped and descended upon a town, even in France, they would be incapable, as the characters in the movie are, of behaving as though they operate under a shared delusion, with cooperative aspects of madness that complement each other. They certainly wouldn’t be dropping witty aphorisms and lovely little bons mot like the line that appears as the epigraph of this review. Such men and women would be wandering around, each in his or her own private daze, or Hell, spinning in circles, drooling, babbling incoherently, screaming, attacking each other or gazing around in uncomprehending, wide-eyed incredulity. It is, I suppose, a part of the magic spell the best movies weave over their audiences that you can be fully aware of this incongruity and still love King of Hearts.

***^{King and Queen: Bates and Geneviève Bujold.}***

Whatever its defects in advertising, the Cohen company does superb restoration work. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more glorious color job than was done here; when pyrotechnics are set off late in the picture, you may feel as if you’ve never seen fireworks in a movie before. Having only ever endured old, tattered prints of King of Hearts (and that over 40 years ago now) I was unprepared for how painterly Pierre Lhomme’s fine-grained widescreen cinematography is, nor how perfectly balanced it is with Jacques Fonteray’s subtly and mouth-wateringly designed costumes: The purples, blues and reds — and those reds are essential to the story and how it is told — pop off the screen, particularly since they are set off by the comparatively drab gray and white walls of the town. (The images I found online to accompany this review do not begin to approximate how beautiful the movie’s restored version is.) It’s especially gratifying to see de Broca’s main title sequence restored, since it depends so heavily on odd, perfectly-timed clockwork mechanisms and their simulacra, and were always when I was seeing the movie in my teens the worst-worn part of the picture. (Actually, the second-worst: The last scene in the print I saw at 16, with Bates inside the asylum, was missing, like those titles presumably the victim of stressed and torn celluloid.)

***^{The exuberant Micheline Presle in shades of purple.}***

One of the loveliest metaphors in King of Hearts, one not lost on a stage-struck teenager in 1977 who loved the everyday rituals of theatre, is the sense de Broca, his actors and his collaborators have of performance. As the asylum inmates descend on the empty town they seek their own level of fantasy not merely in how they behave but in how they dress and even what sort of hair they decide to sport. A mousy, blonde, haunted-looking woman (Micheline Presle) applies green eye shadow and a lover’s red lips, dons a brunette helmet and a low-cut gown, puffs at a cigarette through a comically long holder, never once looking as if she’s inhaling but simply giving into the image of a soignée smoker and, voila! she becomes not a tatty whore but the glamorous madam of a brothel out of some half-formulated memory of what such a woman was like and how she would behave. (Perhaps she herself worked in a brothel? This is a movie that encourages such possibilities) Michel Serrault puts a pompadour wig on his head and a white suit and trousers on his body and becomes a flamboyant hairdresser. We don’t know if the character, “Monsieur Marcel,” is homosexual, in or out of his hairdresser persona, but after his transformation Serrault plays him that way, as if he thinks that is how such a man would behave or (again) as if he’s recreating someone he once knew or observed on the outside. His performance is, in its smaller scope, almost a rehearsal for his later, even more outrageous, Albin in the 1978 La Cage aux Folles, and although he never does too much, each time he’s on screen he courts your attention, and receives your wholehearted affection. Interestingly, especially from a post-Church-sex-abuse-scandal perspective, Julien Guiomar’s “Monseigneur Marguerite,” expansively enthralled with his robes and appurtenances and priestly gestures, feels like a… I started to write, “sister under the skin”… to Marcel but then I remembered in what century I’m living. Well, let’s just say “social compatriot,” and leave it at that. And no, neither is in the least offensive, unless you’re a professional victim, of which, alas, there are many more now than in 1977, let alone 1966.

Each fresh interpolation of a fantasy by one the inmates brings with it a corresponding whimsical oddity or curlicue to make you smile, as when the young Duke (Jean-Claude Brialy), who wears a smoked monocle and a mourning band on his arm, habitually refers to his ravishing wife (Françoise Christophe) as “an old bag… but I love her,” or Christophe as the Duchess is decked out entirely in white, including her wig, and the couple’s “children” are the two most elderly of the inmates. Général Géranium (Pierre Brasseur) plays chess with a carnival chimpanzee and, to Bates’ dismay, leaves open the door to the lions’ cart because he correctly perceives that the cats have been confined for so long they have grown too afraid of the outside world to leave their cage, a sad observation played lightly, and one that has relevance to the lunatics themselves. At the end of the movie the theatrical rituals are reversed; the inmates drop their external disguises and return to the asylum. For them, the performance is over.

***^{Farewells: Pierre Brasseur, Julien Guiomar, Micheline Presle, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Serrault, Françoise Christophe.}***

My complaints about King of Hearts are practically nonexistent, and centered wholly on a matter of linguistic illogic: Bates’ solider speaks French fluently, but it’s a curious aspect of the filmmakers’ whimsy that, in addition to speaking it to the lunatics, he also speaks it when talking to himself. No one, I don’t think, mutters to himself in someone else’s language.

Ah, wilderness!: “Those Calloways” (1964)

By Scott Ross

As ever, click on the highlighted links for longer reviews &cet.

If Paul Annixter’s 1950 coming-of-age novel Swiftwater did not exist, this Disney conservationist epic might suffice, but the adaptation by Louis Pelletier softens, complicates or reverses nearly everything that made Annisxter’s beautifully written book so engaging, and so refreshingly candid. (Presumably because its central character is a 15-year-old boy, Swiftwater is called, weirdly, a “children’s novel.” My own copy was published by Scholastic Book Services, but even a reasonably literate teenager of the 1950s or ’60s might have found the thick, poetic prose, and the author’s detailed descriptions of northwoods Maine’s natural contours, daunting.) I remember seeing the picture, in three installments, on “The Wonderful World of Color” — at 131 minutes it’s long for a Disney release — in 1969, and I will note that in widescreen format and color the movie’s expansive view of the wilderness (Vermont here rather than Maine) by the cinematographer Edward Colman are a vast improvement on what I saw on our parents’ black-and-white television console. (Except, that is, when the backgrounds are patently phony, obvious studio sets.)

Although the role of the boy Bucky’s uncontrollable father Cam seems perfectly cast in Brian Keith, Brandon deWilde somehow lets his character down; his performance is all surface, with no emotional depths, and the script doesn’t help him. Without the acute sense of Bucky as a youth slowly coming into his manhood through his increasing relationship to the land, which Annixter limns expertly, and which informs his and Cam’s actions, the story becomes a shallow exercise in conventionality. Its wrongheadedness is exemplified by the rhyming fist-fights between the boy and a sneering town youth called Whit Turner, and by Tom Skerritt’s astonishingly bad performance in that role. You’d never know what a fine actor he was if this was all you ever saw of him. Early in the novel, Bucky, offended by Turner’s callous shooting of wild geese returning to the area (Cam, raised by Micmac Indians, believes them to be sacred totems, a sense he has passed on to his son) beats Whit up and only a year later does Turner attempt to enact his vengeance. The movie has Bucky beaten to a pulp at the top of the action and besting Turner at the end, a bit of narrative reversal that smacks wholly and tiresomely of cliché.

In the role of the local sage, Walter Brennan was given a watered-down diminution of the book’s garrulous old man who drives nearly everyone away with his unwanted and argumentative theories, turned here into a loveably twinkling local favorite. Even worse is Ed Wynn’s role, created for the picture, of a deaf old coot, with Wynn interpolating his “perfect fool” persona, complete unto typical Ed Wynn mannerisms. I love Wynn in the right part, but when he’s either misdirected or indulged in his schtick he’s correspondingly more annoying than far lesser talents. The young Linda Evans is lovely as the girl Bucky has known all his life without really understanding and the good supporting cast includes Philip Abbott, Frank de Kova, Paul Hartman, John Qualen and Parley Baer, who gives a vivid account of the venal owner of the land the Calloways occupy and who, when he evicts them for non-payment, looks genuinely shocked when he calls Cam his friend and Calloway ripostes that the man has no friends.

I’ve always felt that Brian Keith had everything an actor needs — good looks, intelligence, wit, range, humor and a commanding and distinctive voice — and he brought all of these to bear, usually in work that was not worthy of his gifts, throughout his career. Keith portrays Cam Calloway in all of his colors, including those, like his tendencies to drink to excess and to abandon his family when his wanderlust takes over. These are not the sorts of human qualities usually on display in heroic characters in the live-action Disney pictures of the period and it’s to both Keith’s credit and the screenwriter’s that they are not elided over here. The movie’s best performance, however, is Vera Miles’ as Cam’s long-suffering wife Liddy. Called “Ma” in the novel, Mrs. Calloway is not a character to whom the reader readily warms; like Ma Joad she’s been downtrodden for so long, and has sacrificed so much for her family, that she has little time for humor, and a smile is as alien to her as a filet mignon. The role was slightly reconceived for the movie, and made warner overall, and Miles gives everything to it. We understand at a glance her tensions, her anxieties and her undemonstrative but overmastering love, and when she weeps happy tears over the wished-for gift Cam and Bucky give her for Christmas, everything about her performance that makes it effective comes together in that moment.

***^{Maybe Tom Skerritt should have aimed that gun at the director, or whoever advised him to give such a rotten performance. No wonder it took him another six years to get cast in a good movie.}***

Between Walt Disney, Louis Pelletier and the director of Those Calloways, Norman Tokar, the movie became overlong and enervated. An example of their profligacy: When after Cam has broken his leg Bucky goes alone into the wilderness to retrieve the animals for which they’ve previously set traps he takes the family dog, which the Bucky of the book eschews, knowing the excitable canine will just muck things up. In the movie, of course, not only does the hound accompany him, but is made to run off in pursuit of an ermine and chase it across the thin ice of a pond. It’s one of those typically “Disney” moments that made people grind their teeth in the ’60s and is as extraneous as Max Steiner’s musical score, composed in a fashion that suggests he didn’t realize it wasn’t still 1944. Even Bucky’s confrontation with the pelt-destroying wolverine* is somehow less terrifying in the picture than in the book, and its ultimate victory for Bucky is lost to the viewer; Annixter tells us that, having vanquished the beast with his knife despite his terror, he’ll never be frightened of an animal again. Pelletier did retain Annixter’s conservationist narrative (I suspect that was half the reason Disney made the picture, even as his company was raping the Florida Everglades to build his east coast theme park; deflection is such a useful tool) but altered the means by which the wild goose refuge is attained. In the novel, a drunken Cam plunges into the misty lake he’s set aside for the geese in a booze-induced attempt to converse with the birds and is shot to death by ravenous hunters. He’s still accidentally shot in the movie, but survives. His act in the book may be foolish, but it’s entirely in character. Not only are Cam’s actions even more foolish in the movie; Disney even robs him of his sacrifice.

*The Calloways are not, whatever the surface-oriented idiots who habitually comment on imdb listings believe, opposed to hunting and thus, hypocrites where it comes to the wild geese. They depend on trapping and hunting generally for their livelihoods. It’s only the migratory geese Cam and Bucky consider sacred, a legacy of the father’s Micmac upbringing.

Perfectly swell romance: The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Pictures (1933 – 1939)

By Scott Ross

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I recently watched, over a period of several months, the nine RKO pictures in the 2007 DVD set Astaire and Rogers: The Complete Film Collection (to me, inexplicably unavailable on Blu-ray).* I’ve seen them all, of course, more than once and, in the cases of the three best pictures in the series (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time) on multiple occasions, but had not until last autumn watched them in sequence. What follows, culled from my monthly video reports, does not aspire to being a definitive overview of the series. If you’re interested in that you can do no better than to get your hands on a copy of Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972; reissued in 2010) which is, as Pauline Kael observed in The New Yorker when it was first published, “the best book that will ever be written about Astaire and Rogers.” At best, these capsule reviews might, I hope, whet your appetite for the finest series of musicals ever made in this country or, if you have also watched and loved them, remind you of the reasons for your love.

Before we go further (and this may stop you cold) understand that I regard Fred Astaire as the single most important figure in the development of the American musical movie and, in Ethan Mordden’s designation, the most wonderful man in musicals. That isn’t to suggest that he had no limitations. He wasn’t much of a listener, for one thing — Rogers had it all over her partner in that respect — and his acting hasn’t the depth she brought to what she did dramatically. I also think she’s funnier than he is; she had a grounding in comedy where his was mostly in dance. And while he was, in his way, a handsome man, he was certainly no romantic paragon. His head was curiously shaped, like a less amusing version of Stan Laurel, with a long chin and a wide head accentuated by his thinning hair and, on film, his high-forehead toupées. His singing may strike you as an acquired taste as well, thin in the higher registers and lacking that conventional power the more obvious talents in musical theatre had, sometimes to their own detriment. (Al Jolson is especially problematic in this respect.) Astaire also had large hands; he reminds me a bit of Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose freakish digital reach influenced the way he composed for the piano, to the despair of later exponents of his music. Astaire dealt with his hands, about which he was understandably self-conscious, by turning his fingers inward. If you watch him closely you’ll notice that while he’s dancing his hands are seldom open or his fingers splayed. Other dancers, with smaller hands, use their finger-widths in more overt ways, as expressive extensions of their exuberance. Astaire tried to make his disappear.

So, what, with all these seeming defects, makes Astaire so marvelous? Gore Vidal once ventured that style was, “knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” Astaire put it more simply: “Do it big, do it right, and do it with style.” But anyone can “do it big.” Bigness is a kind of style, I suppose — no one was bigger as a theatrical singer than Ethel Merman. Yet for Merman, the bigness of her vocalizing was a part of who she was as a performer. Mary Martin, with her entrancing coloratura soprano, could be quite demure. Merman couldn’t be Mary Martin, and didn’t try. Yet when she nailed a note, like that “Ohhhhhhh…” near the climax of “I Got Rhythm,” she was doing more than stopping the show; she was telling the listener that she was so crazy in love she’d become effervescent. That’s character. (The song made her an instant Broadway star in 1930.) Astaire as I’ve said didn’t have that power, and he didn’t have anything like Merman’s range. No popular singer, however, including Bing Crosby, was more sought-after by more great songwriters than Astaire. He understood instinctively the importance of a lyric, and he gave the words the sort of emphasis, without ostentation, that made lyricists like Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin swoon; no one ever made their words sound so inevitable, so surprising or so attractive. Astaire also understood rhythm better than any male singer of his day, again including Crosby. It’s not surprising that, while he could play the piano decently (those large hands must have been an asset), his real instrument was the drum-kit. That Fred Astaire was a great dancer was understood by everyone who’d seen him, but what is less well perceived is how beautifully he moved off the dance floor, a trait he shared with Cary Grant. At the beginning of the middling caper picture The Midas Run, the camera catches the lower half of a man walking jauntily along a London street, and in seconds you know it can’t be anyone but Astaire. The walk is of a piece with his general gracefulness and his unerring sense of style in the clothing he wore, another thing he shared with Grant. He was an enormously appealing man.

Astaire was also, in addition to his dancing (and although it’s not generally discussed or understood) a great choreographer for the screen. He worked out his own routines, with his friend and collaborator Hermes Pan, who doubled for Fred’s female partners as they created the dances. It was Fred Astaire more than anyone else who set the best style for shooting dance for the screen, keeping the full figures of the dancers in the frame and, whenever possible, filming in long, unbroken medium takes that captured the excitement of performance, both for the audience and for the dancers. There are not, I don’t think, any more exuberant, joyous dance duets in movies than “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?” in Top Hat, “Let Yourself Go” in Follow the Fleet and “Pick Yourself Up” in Swing Time, and no more devastating emotional dances than “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” in Fleet and “Never Gonna Dance,” again in Swing Time, and much of the thrill, and the pleasure, those numbers convey is due to how they were filmed. Astaire was as well a modern in his aversion to what he called “mushy stuff,” a disdain he shared with the best lyricists of the time. The love songs he sang came at romance, as Emily Dickinson would say, “slant,” and there’s no on-screen kissing in the Astaire-Rogers pictures until Carefree. Perhaps it came in part from his being yoked to his sister Adele all those years in vaudeville, in London and on Broadway, but the breeziness of Astaire’s attitude, refreshing in the 1930s, still comes across as a tonic.

^{This is what most people, including their admirers, think of when they hear the names Astaire and Rogers: The “Cheek to Cheek” ballroom dance in Top Hat. But there was far more to the team, and their romantic dances aren’t necessarily what is best or even most interesting about them. (Photo by John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images)}

Astaire isn’t everything, of course, in the Astaire and Rogers movies. Ginger holds half the appeal, and what he wasn’t, she was (and vice-versa.) She wasn’t a terribly good singer, which accounts for most of the songs in their pictures being sung by Fred, but she had a gift for high comic invention Astaire hadn’t, and despite a certain coarseness in her looks and personality she was often adorable. Not the natural dancer he was, she had to work harder at it. Sometimes the work shows, but what we remember most about her dancing is how much fun she seems to be having even when, as the records show, she may have been in physical agony. Rogers’ challenge dances with Fred are the one of the things I most look forward to when I sit down to watch an Astaire-Rogers picture, along with anticipating the display of his seemingly bottomless charm and the superb music America’s best composers of popular songs turned out when they knew they were writing for him.

Flying Down to Rio (1933) Remembered chiefly as the first picture in which Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers. This happens in a silly but infectious number called the “Carioca,” which among other things involves the partners pressing their foreheads together. Somehow Fred and Ginger carried off that indignity with enough panache that movie audiences of 1933 demanded more of them, and you can see why; their joy in performing together was obvious. (Of course, having spent his entire performing life partnered with his sister Adele, recently retired to England, Fred was most definitely not in the mood to be yoked again to another dancer. After The Gay Divorcee in 1934 became one of the biggest hits of its year, however, the matter was effectively out of his hands.)

While the plot, based on an unpublished comedy by the playwright and lyricist Anne Caldwell,† is perfunctory, the leads, Dolores del Río and Gene Raymond, are engaging, and the picture has a nifty gimmick: Scenes of Brazilian life that, through the creative use of the optical printer, become living picture-postcards, each flipping past to reveal the next. There is also, in Fred’s enthusiastic title number, a shocking moment (presumably the work of the movie’s producer, Merian C. Cooper, the begettor of King Kong) when during an aerial routine a young woman falls screaming from a trapeze below a biplane. She’s rescued, of course, but it’s an electrifying bit, and I wonder if George Roy Hill and William Goldman had it in mind when they made The Great Waldo Pepper 40 years later. As Arlene Croce wrote in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, “Merian C. Cooper brought terror to the movie musical.”

The songs, which include a very likeable solo number for Ginger called “Music Makes Me,” were by Vincent Youmans, with spritely lyrics by Gus Kahn and Edward Eliscu. Flying Down to Rio is also notable for pairing two incomparable comic sissies, Franklin Pangborn and Eric Blore, as a hotel manager and his simpering assistant. Blore would come into full flower, as it were, in his later Astaire & Rogers appearances.

The Gay Divorcee (1935) After their brief duet on “The Carioca” in Flying Down to Rio set up a public clamor for more, a re-teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers by RKO was inevitable. Their first starring vehicle was an adaptation of Astaire’s last Broadway success (The Gay Divorce, a title apparently taboo under the Production Code) and in the blinkered tradition of Hollywood studio lunacy the entire Cole Porter stage score was tossed with the exception of “Night and Day,” its biggest hit. Although the movie isn’t as buoyant as the team’s best work it’s a lively picture, funny, absurd and engaging. It also sets the template for the Astaire-Rogers series: Initial dislike of Fred by Ginger (or like followed by misunderstanding leading to dislike, or some other variation on the theme), cast of wacky supporting actors (such as Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes, the wisecracking Helen Broderick or, here, the charming Alice Brady), screwball complications, a romantic dance and, if we’re lucky, a challenge. I’m one of those oddballs — Pauline Kael was another — who prefer the non-romantic Fred & Ginger routines to their more celebrated ballroom turns, except (as in Follow the Fleet and Swing Time) when the duets are dramatic. Many think the essence of Astaire and Rogers are items like “Cheek to Cheek” and, here, “Night and Day,” and they’re marvelous expressions of romance but they don’t, at least for me, carry the absolute joy of “I’ll Be Hard to Handle,” “Let Yourself Go” and “Pick Yourself Up”… the latter pair of which, juxtaposed that way, sound like an answer in one of those ironic double-feature puzzles. Dances like those sum up the appeal of Astaire and Rogers as a team far more than the formal love-duets; although they, like the ballroom dances, were thoroughly worked out, they feel spontaneous in a way the romantic dances never can. You get a sense, despite the sweat, of the joy of performance in “Isn’t it a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain?),” for example, and despite Astaire’s displeasure at being part of a team again after his sister Adele broke up the act, of the pleasure each performer took in the other.

The Gay Divorcee was directed by Mark Sandrich, who guided Astaire and Rogers in more pictures than anyone else, and his crisp style is as much a part of the team’s work as those white Art Deco sets and the loopy plots, usually cobbled by Allan Scott or Dwight Taylor. (This one was written by by George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost and Edward Kaufman, but the original stage book was by Taylor.) David Abel’s beautiful cinematography, evident here, was on display in five of the nine pictures Astaire and Rogers made together at RKO as well as Holiday Inn, also directed by Sandrich. In this initial offering, the producers (or producer, since Pardo S. Berman was credited) hadn’t yet grasped that Astaire and Rogers were what people wanted to see, not elaborate musical numbers with a cast of thousands, so we get “The Continental” for 17 exhausting minutes, only a few of which are given over to Ginger and Fred. Worse, the creators assigned an entirely extraneous number to Edward Everett Horton(!) and a young Betty Grable, “Let’s K-nock K-nees,” which when I see it always makes me think of Arlene Croce’s riposte in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book: “Must we?” The “Night and Day” dance, on the other hand, based on the stage version choreographed by Fred, is one of the duets people who love the team remember best, and it’s beautifully worked out. The picture ends with another of Fred’s cleverly conceived dances from the stage show, in which he and Rogers sail over the sofas and chairs of his hotel suite, and it’s so casually charming it makes you grin in deep appreciation.

A personal note: I first saw The Gay Divocee at a summer afternoon library screening about 40 years ago. Seated behind my friend and me were a pair of elderly Jewish women, complete with Molly Picon immigrant accents. When the picture began with nightclub patrons, including Fred, playing with little legless dolls through which their forefingers were inserted to make them “dance,” one of the women cooed happily to her companion, “Cute!… is that cute?”

I can never see this movie without recalling the pleasure my friend and I got from that, at that moment and for years afterward in the remembering.

Roberta (1935) Such were the vagaries of the 1930s Hollywood studio system that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, fresh from their triumph in The Gay Divorcee, were cast as supporting characters in this adaptation of the Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach stage musical. One doesn’t mind so much that their over-the-title co-star is the charming Irene Dunne; that Randolph Scott is given equal weight is practically an offense against God and Mammon. His performance in this, and in the subsequent Follow the Fleet (see below) leave one to marvel that he ever had an important career, or that he may have been the love of Cary Grant’s young life. I hope at least he was good in bed, because he certainly stinks up this movie.

When Fred and Ginger are on screen, or Helen Westley as Dunne’s eponymous dress-designing aunt, or Dunne herself is singing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Roberta is first-rate entertainment. So let’s concentrate on those strengths, shall we, and forget if we can Scott’s performance and the number of times he says something is “swell”? Fred plays a bandleader, and gets a lively number (“Let’s Begin”) with his musicians, notably Candy Candido, with whom he does a kind of genderfuck bit avant la lettre. Ginger is Fred’s American former girlfriend, passing herself off as a Polish countess (I’m not kidding) in Paris. Although Astaire and Rogers do one of their ballroom specialties, to “Lovely to Look At” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” their two other numbers are a lot more fun: The satirical “I Won’t Dance” and “I’ll Be Hard to Handle,” one of those joyous episodes of thoroughly worked-out yet seemingly impromptu hoofing that were, even more than their signature romantic duets, their peculiar specialty. On the debit side, Dunne has to perform “Yesterdays,” featuring one of Harbach’s worst sets of lyrics. No singer, not even one as lyrical as Irene Dunne, can be expected to triumph with lyrics like,

Yesterdays
Days I knew as happy sweet
Sequestered days […]
Then gay youth was mine
And truth was mine
Joyous free and flaming life
Forsooth was mine

Who in the 1930s talked like that, let alone sang? That last bit is so convoluted and linguistically passé it occasioned one of Billie Holiday’s few recorded lyric flubs.

William A. Seiter, most of whose pictures were mediocrities, directed with intelligence and a certain gracefulness of style that does what it can to make the material seem more interesting than it is. Alan Scott was one of the three credited screenwriters, and the author of the movie’s “additional dialogue” was the same Glenn Tryon who starred in the 1926 silent comedy 45 Minutes from Hollywood, with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in brief cameos, and who would go on to star in two movies (Lonesome and Broadway) for the expressionistic Hungarian director Paul Fejos before drifting into screenwriting and direction.

Top Hat (1935) No one should be forced to choose a single Astaire-Rogers musical, and I am always torn between this one and Swing Time. Top Hat is probably the better movie: it’s swifter, more sparkling, lays some nice emphasis on those two incomparable sissies Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton, and boasts a perfect Irving Berlin score including a title song that elegantly sums up the appeal of Fred Astaire, whom Graham Greene once called the human equivalent of Mickey Mouse. That isn’t the insult it seems; in the early ‘30s Mickey was not yet the figure of dull respectability he became; he was rambunctious, elastic, mischievous, even slightly cruel — just like Fred.

Perhaps inspired by their “Let Yourself Go” duet in Follow the Fleet Astaire and Rogers also get a challenge-dance here to “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to be Caught in the Rain?)” that is not only among their half-dozen or so best routines, it’s also a rapturous expression of the sheer joy of performance. If these two didn’t fall in love after a number like that, one of them would have to be frigid and the other gay. After the requisite complications, masquerades and misunderstandings, the pair performs Berlin’s lilting, sensuous “Cheek to Cheek” in a Venice ballroom and featuring Ginger’s feathered dress which, although it drove her partner to distraction, proved that she understood what looked best on her when she danced with him; and another of those new dance sensations, “The Piccolino,” led off by Ginger’s charming verse and chorus. This brings me to a side-note: However wonderful a performer Fred Astaire was — and aside from his status as the finest dancer the movies have ever known he was also one of the American songbook’s great stylists — compare the way he listens to Ginger singing with the way in which she takes in his vocalizations: He smiles a lot but looks faintly glazed; she hangs on every word whether she’s facing him or not, and always seems to be hearing them for the first time. She not only (in the cartoonist Bob Thaves’ memorable phrase) “did everything Fred did, backwards and in heels”; at times she also acted him off the screen.

All of the members of the RKO Astaire-Rogers machine were involved here: The producer Pando S. Berman; the director Mark Sandrich (he made five of their pictures, and his style is modest but elegant and his pacing is nearly always perfect); the screenwriters Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor; the cinematographer David Abel, whose polished black-and-white photography is what we think of when we remember the Astaire-Rogers pictures, along with those gloriously anachronistic all-white Art Deco sets designed by Carroll Clark but erroneously attributed to the wonderfully-named Van Nest Polglase (Venice never looked so clean); the choreography was by Fred with Hermes Pan; the musical direction and orchestrations were by Hal Bourne; and the cast includes Erik Rhodes as a silly, English-mangling Italian co-respondent, Horton as Fred’s manager, the vermouth-dry Helen Broderick as his wife and Blore as his butler Bates, who feuds with him throughout and whose machinations resolve the plot. The main titles, incidentally, are fairly unique for their time, with first Fred’s feet and legs dancing into the frame and appearing above his name, and then Ginger’s. It’s a marvelously stylish gesture, almost a shorthand, one that hints at the spirited revelry to come.

Produced on a relatively lavish Depression-era budget of $609,000, Top Hat brought in $3.2 million at the box-office, and became the most profitable RKO release of the decade.

Follow the Fleet (1936) Adhering to the pattern set by Roberta in 1935 (and why would you want to?) RKO once again made Astaire and Rogers more or less subservient to Randolph Scott. As if that wasn’t bad enough the men play sailors, and Astaire’s idea of expressing his working-class bona fides is to constantly be chewing gum.

Well, at least Irving Berlin wrote the songs. Ginger gets the sexy “Let Yourself Go,” which she and Fred then dance to, in an “impromptu” ballroom contest exhibition. It’s one of their most joyous numbers, performed by both of them with a rubber-legged, loose-limbed panache that makes you smile broadly throughout. Most of Fred’s numbers are done with his Navy band (“We Saw The Sea,” “I’d Rather Lead A Band,” “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket”) but Harriet Hilliard, the future Mrs. Ozzie Nelson (and mother of Ricky) has a splendid solo in “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan.” I know I’m in the minority in believing this to be one of Berlin’s finest ballads, but it is in any case beautifully framed by the director Mark Sandrich and his cinematographer David Abel, and at least partially redeems the horrible “Why, without your glasses you’re beautiful!” old-maid cliché Hilliard is forced to endure before she sings. (Berlin originally wrote the song, interestingly, for Rogers to perform in Top Hat. Obviously, he thought well of it.) What makes Follow the Fleet special, however, and secures it a place in movie musical history (or at least, in Astaire-Rogers iconography) is the “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” number. It was the most dramatic entry in the series until “Never Gonna Dance” in Swing Time displaced it a year later, and its seriousness of intent — it begins with Fred and Ginger in a gambling den, separately losing their bankrolls and contemplating suicide — is almost shocking in the context of so light an entertainment, and the dance between them is so charged with unstated emotionalism it’s hair-raising.

The screenplay was credited to Allan and Scott Dwight Taylor with “Additional Dialogue,” as they used to say, by Lew Lipton. At least in this one Randolph Scott doesn’t say “Swell!” every other line. Sharp eyes will spot Betty Grable as a trio singer, Lucille Ball in a small role and Humphrey Bogart as a sailor. The Hubert Osbourne 1922 play Shore Leave, on which Follow the Fleet was based, incidentally, had a long afterlife: It was also the source for the 1927 Vincent Youmans musical Hit the Deck, itself filmed by MGM in 1955.

Swing Time (1936) With the 1935 Top Hat one of the two best Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, containing a pair of the team’s most exhilarating dances and, in Jerome Kern’s music and Dorothy Fields’ lyrics, just about the greatest score of its kind ever written for a movie musical. Despite its occasional longueurs (and a truly silly finale) the picture inspired Astaire to one of his supreme achievements as a choreographer: The dance with Rogers to “Never Gonna Dance.” This breathless medley not only dramatically recaps the romance of the characters in this movie but almost everything for which we love these two. The final portion, shot in a single fluid take, required 46 re-takes and somewhere in the middle of it all Rogers’ feet started to bleed.

The Howard Lindsay/Allan Scott screenplay is a bit overstuffed, or maybe it only feels that way because it was directed by George Stevens, seldom remembered for concision. It has the same clean, Art Deco look as its predecessors, thanks in part to David Abel’s gorgeous cinematography, and there’s a good supporting cast which includes Victor Moore as Astaire’s card-sharp sidekick, the always witty Helen Broderick as Moore’s eventual inamorata and, as a dyspeptic dance-school manager, the peerless Eric Blore. Kern, who more than any figure until Richard Rodgers had the most profound influence on the Broadway musical, composed a score so rich in melodic invention it dwarfs the work of almost everyone else in movies, and Fields matches him in words. Her lyrics always sparkled, but she was also a musical dramatist, beautifully evidenced in the witty “A Fine Romance”: It’s hard to imagine any male lyricist of the time other than perhaps Cole Porter writing a couplet like, “I never mussed the crease in your blue serge pants/I never get the chance,” and I am always moved by the way she constructed the lyrics for “Never Gonna Dance.” First, there is the repeated Depression-era invocation of the wolf at the door; second, the unspoken metaphor of the movies’ greatest male dancer seeming to put up his dancing shoes (“on beautiful trees”) as renunciation of an unrequited romance; third, her sharp sense of rhythmic and dramatic ascension. Ginger’s character is called Penny here, and from Fred’s repetition of the phrase, “‘Though I’m left without a penny…” Fields builds to, “So, I’m left without my Penny…” [Emphasis mine.] That’s as good in its way as Stephen Sondheim in A Little Night Music‘s “The Miller’s Son” repeating, “We’ll go dancing” and finally resolving the image as, “We’ll have dancing.”

***^{Kern and Fields at the piano. The composer is probably updating his ASCAP listings.}***

Kern was uncomfortable with swing, so the rapturous “Waltz in Swing Time” was cobbled together by the orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett from themes the composer provided. Of the lyrical ballad “The Way You Look Tonight” Fields said, “The first time Jerry played that melody for me I went out and started to cry. The release absolutely killed me. I couldn’t stop, it was so beautiful.” (The song is also, at 68 bars, more than twice the length of the 32-bar standard.) The single number in Swing Time that raises eyebrows today is Fred’s “Bojangles of Harlem”; although Astaire is wearing tan make-up on his head and neck, it’s not “blackface,” which is exaggerated and used to demean and ridicule (even when black performers did it themselves) — here it’s the dancing equivalent of an actor playing Othello. Oddly, however, although Fields’ lyric certainly evokes Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the dancer whose moves Astaire imitates in his solo is John W. Bubbles, from whom he took tap lessons, and he’s dressed in a manner similar to Bubbles’ starring role as Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess. If there is shame to be apportioned to the number it may lie in the music sheets bearing a notation on a certain passage as corresponding to Fred’s “jig dance,” in acknowledgment of an old child’s toy, which often (but not always) depicted a stereotyped black man. Jig (or “jigger”) dance toys do not, however, automatically represent a racist viewpoint, so one could argue about this matter endlessly instead of enjoying Astaire’s performance, especially when he’s dancing in front of, and competing with, three gigantic, identically-dressed silhouettes.‡

In Swing Time Fred’s a dancer (although he makes his living as a gambler… I said the finale was silly, and it is, but not any sillier than that plot-point) but when he meets Ginger, a dance instructor, pretends he isn’t so she’ll be forced to teach him. This leads to what seems to me the most joyous dance in the series, “Pick Yourself Up,” wherein when Astaire is forced to show off to save Rogers’ job they, in Arlene Croce‘s memorable phrase, “leave the place in flames.” With “Never Gonna Dance,” Astaire’s and Rogers’ characters bid heartbreaking adieu to each other in dance, and it’s arguably the most dramatic dance number the movies had ever seen to that time. Nothing the pair did before or after comes close… which of course means no one else could either.

Shall We Dance (1937) The financial returns on this, the seventh teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, were less than half those of its predecessor, which suggested to some that the partnership was slipping with the public but there’s little reason, it seems to me, to suppose that. Rather, it was the way the team was being treated by their studio that pushed the audience away. It certainly didn’t help that they were expected to accept Fred as a Russian ballet star, a thing I’m surprised Astaire didn’t quash in the writing; he had no sympathy with the ballet and certainly little aptitude for it, and the central complication (are the pair married or aren’t they?) is at best mildly diverting and at worst annoying. It’s telling that, in addition to the credited scenarists Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano, Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman got story credit, P.J. Wolfson adaptation credit and at least three uncredited writers (Anne Morrison Chapin, James Gow and Edmund H. North) either worked on the treatment or the final script. The whole thing has a feeling of polished desperation about it, and that many writers on as slight a story as this surely indicates something.

George Gershwin, whose last full score this was, complained bitterly that the filmmakers did not exploit his and his brother Ira’s songs sufficiently, and he had a point. Fred sings a brief “(I’ve Got) Beginner’s Luck” to Ginger but there is no dance to go with the vocal, for example, and where a dance of loss seems absolutely required after he sings “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” to her, they’re on a fog-bound ferry so there’s no place for them to dance. Astaire has a great routine with a luxury liner’s engine room crew to “Slap That Bass,” one of his engaging specialties, but I don’t see how the song could have become a hit. “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” did eventually find its way into the American song book, despite rather than due to Fred and Ginger’s Central Park roller skating routine to it as did “They All Laughed,” which Rogers sings wearing a wonderfully designed flowered skirt that shows off her remarkably slender waist and which she and Astaire perform in one of their charming challenge dances. But the title number had no real chance to catch on, not only because the dance to it is based on a gimmick (a chorus of dancers wearing Ginger masks and which Rogers joins to Fred’s consternation) but largely because it is introduced by the gruesome contortions of the alleged prima ballerina Harriet Hoctor, the worst routine in the Astaire-Rogers filmography. And to think they offered her the lead in this picture!

***^{Come on, shake your de-pression/And let’s have a yam session…}***

Carefree (1938) The seventh teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is the slightest of their RKO musicals, the first to lose money, and the one with the least dancing. Another of those pictures whose complicated screenwriting credits betray a certain amount of panic (the script was by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano from an “original idea” by Marian Ainslee and Guy Endore, its “story and adaptation” by the redoubtable Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, credited that same year with Bringing Up Baby) the picture casts Astaire as a dancing psychoanalyst trying to break through Rogers’ resistance to marrying Ralph Bellamy (it takes a shrink to figure that out?) and in the process falling for her himself. There are some good lines and funny situations, as when Ginger, a radio singer, wrecks her own live show under hypnosis, but there are also items that make you squirm, such as the way, again having been hypnotized, she hunts Astaire down with a shotgun, repeatedly proclaiming that “men like him should be shot down like dogs.” Fun-nee!

Adding to the troubles are an ill-conceived dream sequence set to one of Irving Berlin’s less interesting tunes, which by its conception demanded to be filmed in color but which RKO refused to do, making a hash of a song Berlin pointedly called “I Used to Be Color Blind.” (It also contains a slow-motion dance, a device I resist on principle, and a prolonged kiss between Fred and Ginger, which is just plain objectionable.) There’s an extended New Dance Sensation called “The Yam,” whose melody Berlin later adapted for his war-time anthem “Any Bonds Today?” and which illustrates that a certain degree of democratization in the Astaire and Rogers universe is unwelcome; instead of those gleaming, absurd but oddly endearing white Art Deco sets complete with extras in evening dress that were the series’ mainstay from Flying Down to Rio through Swing Time we’re in a woodsy country club with patrons joining in the dance, and who wants that? Fortunately, Fred and Ginger get a good Berlin ballad (“Change Partners”) and subsequent dance routine in which he uses his big, expressive hands in an attempt to re-hypnotize her. Even better, Astaire has a jaw-dropping bit, set to a wordless tune (“Since They Turned ‘Loch Lomond’ into Swing”) in which he rhythmically hits one golf ball after another, sending every one of them soaring in perfect arcs, the entire routine performed in long, sustained camera shots. Was there nothing the man couldn’t do?

The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ last RKO picture is also their most unusual: A “biopic” celebrating the first great, and most influential, ballroom dance team in America. Astaire’s approach to the dancing was so scrupulous (Vernon Castle was one of his youthful idols) that aficionados of Astaire and Rogers may be disappointed because they are dancing in character, and keeping to the style that made the Castles household names in the period between 1912 and 1918, especially their wildly popular “Castle Walk.” Astaire and Rogers were far better-looking than the Castles, and their teaming, still fresh on this, their ninth collaboration, makes their Vernon and Irene the most romantic pair imaginable. The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is not, thankfully, a musical biography — no phony, Cole Porter-being-inspired-to-compose-“Night and Day”-by-raindrops moments here. The music is made up almost entirely of period instrumentals that accompany the Castles as they dance. There is only one original song (“Only When You’re in My Arms” by Con Conrad, Herman Ruby and Bert Kalmar), and it’s used as a diegetic source, Vernon singing the lyric as he works up the nerve to propose to Irene Foote. I’m always a little annoyed when I see the picture that the Foote’s family retainer was changed to a white man and played by Walter Brennan, although given the prevailing tendency in Hollywood to depict black men and women as “coons” for comic relief, it’s probably just as well that Walter Ash was written white.

*^{Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images}*

This is the only RKO “Fred & Ginger” in which the pair portray a married couple (they’re also married in The Barkleys of Broadway, but that was 10 years later, at MGM) and while there is some tension between Vernon and Irene early on in their story, the typical screwball courting elements are, obviously, absent. Similarly, although the Castles’ eventual agent is played by the wry, eccentric Edna May Oliver and she becomes a genial confidante to the pair, she isn’t a full-blown zany like Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick or Alice Brady in the earlier Astaire-Rogers pictures. She’s only mildly zany. (Speaking of zanies: You may recognize Leonid Kinskey as the artist in Paris whom Oliver patronizes from his appearance as the bartender Sasha in Casablanca, ardent for Madeline Lebeau.) The movie is pleasantly directed by H. C. Potter, Robert de Grasse provided rich, warm photography, and there are some striking visual effects by Vernon L. Walker, particularly the sequence where the couple dances across a map of the United States. However, the affecting grief of the scene in which Walter breaks the news of Vernon’s shocking death to Irene, and Rogers’ fine acting of it, is almost canceled out by the terrible dialogue Brennan is given to speak. Astaire is engaging, as he nearly always is, yet in some ways Vernon and Irene Castle is a showcase for Rogers, from her hilariously overblown rendition of “The Yama-Yama Man” to the moment, late in the picture, when Irene unexpectedly meets Vernon, an RAF volunteer, in a nightclub and as he embraces her she whispers, “Oh, Vernon” in a way that in its emotion and anxiety seems to anticipate her husband’s later needless death. Rogers gives a beautiful performance in what Arlene Croce in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book rightly calls “a very dear film.”

For the record, the screenplay was by Richard Sherman, Oscar Hammerstein II and Dorothy Yost. The movie is often referred to as a flop. It wasn’t — it was popular with the public — but its budget (approximately $1,196,000) meant that even its high gross ($1,825,000) did not allow it to break even.

*Swing Time has been made available on Blu-ray in the Criterion Collection, presumably because the inveterate auteurists at Criterion regard it as a director’s picture rather than as a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie.

†Caldwell, one of the most prolific librettists of her time, frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern. Together the pair wrote one of the most charming numbers heard in a stage musical (She’s a Good Fellow, 1919) of the early 20th century, “The Bullfrog Patrol.” This delightful harmonized duet, originally performed by the Duncan Sisters, virtually defines what the Germans mean by the term Ohrwurm, which we translate as “earworm.” Caldwell is virtually forgotten today, but my hat is off to a lyricist who could write a line like, “I wish that Bolsheviki froggy-dog would croak!” I realize the song is written (and composed) in a minstrel form, which today puts it, I suppose, automatically beyond the… er… pale… but listening to Jeanne Lehman and Rebecca Luker’s 1992 version of it always gives me enormous pleasure.

‡And no, Virginia, “jig” when applied to dance is not racist terminology, despite the teeth-gnashing of the Woke Ignoratti. (Nor is it, even if Millennials and their Gen-Z successors believe so, interchangeable with the word “gig.”) “Jigger,” it will shock them to learn, is innocent as well. These people are like the old movie censors: By their hysteria they suggest that their own racist impulses are at work in their protestations; by their volubility, they only encourage the rest of us to use the words they object to more often.

Monthly Report: March 2024

By Scott Ross

As ever, click on the highlighted links for complete reviews &cet.

A Star is Born (1937) The first of (so far) four identically-titled variations on the theme of upward/downward pop stardom. The movie seems to get remade every 20 or 30 years, as popular tastes and styles and the modes of stardom change; I suppose the next edition will highlight internet “influencers.”

I missed the Streisand-Kristofferson edition in 1976 and, having no interest in either Bradley Cooper or Lady Gaga, do not expect to see the most recent iteration, but I have seen the picture that predated and seems to have inspired A Star is Born, the 1932 George Cukor-directed What Price Hollywood? in which the doomed romance was between a young starlet (Constance Bennett) and an older, alcoholic director (Lowell Sherman). The most striking aspect of Cukor’s picture is the way, a moment before Sherman pulls the trigger on the gun with which he shoots himself, a remarkable series of flashing images fills the screen — the final, fleeting thoughts of a suicide. (It’s the sort of thing that ought to make the auteurists swoon.) There is nothing as interesting in the 1937 A Star is Born, although admirers of the 1954 Judy Garland musical remake will note that it follows the second half of the original extremely closely, with nearly identical sequences and dialogue, or anyway until James Mason’s swim out to sea and the assault on Garland by her fans at his funeral. The first half is more labored, and dated, not least in Janet Gaynor’s twinkling performance, her tight, marcelled look, the clichéd opening scenes and the ugly early Technicolor process in which the movie was photographed, which likewise contributed to the artistic failure, also in 1937, of Nothing Sacred, like Star is Born directed by William A. Wellman, produced by David O. Selznick and starring Fredric March.

March, one of America’s most interesting actors (if, like Robert Ryan, never quite the popular star he should have been) grounds the role of Norman Maine so thoroughly that his decline, which can seem like a scenarist’s contrivance, becomes devastating; the haunted look he expresses as he embraces Gaynor a final time, is among the most breathtaking human images in American movies. Wellman, who worked on the story with Robert Carson, directed intelligently and with surprising sensitivity, especially in the camper honeymoon scene between March and Gaynor. The screenplay, credited to Carson, Dorothy Parker and Parker’s husband Alan Campbell, gets better as it goes along, although, as with the character in 1954, I don’t buy the studio head Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou) as a gentle, kindly old thing — just try to imagine Samuel Goldwyn or Harry Cohn, purring the way Menjou does. Worse, however, is Lionel Stander’s miscasting as the production chief Matt Libby. In the Garland-Mason version, Jack Carson as Libby expressed as much charm as nastiness, and his readings had an almost Cowardian sophistication; Stander barks and growls like a New Jersey dockworker who has unaccountably found himself employed behind the notions counter at Harrod’s. Aside from March, the best acting is done by May Robson in the impossible role of Gaynor’s no-nonsense grandmother Lettie. Andy Devine, of all people, plays Gaynor’s Hollywood confidante while Peggy Wood, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, Francis Ford, Edgar Kennedy and Clara Blandick, later immortal as Dorothy Gale’s Auntie Em, have small but telling roles. Kenneth Howell, appearing as an injured teenage drunk in the courtroom sequence, looks heartbreakingly young to have smashed up his life so badly, and is movingly grateful for the suspended sentence the judge (Jonathan Hale) bestows on him.

^{Frank McCarthy’s dramatic poster art.}*^{Remember when movie posters actually made you want to see a picture?}*

Hatari! (1962) An overlong but extravagantly entertaining collaboration between John Wayne, Howard Hawks and the scenarist Leigh Brackett about a team of hunters in Africa. The kicker is that they are not shooting the animals but capturing them for zoos, which must have seemed refreshing in 1962, although it’s less reassuring today, when increasing numbers of people see zoos as little more than prisons for exotic beasts, maintained for the public’s dubious (and frankly, repulsive) benefit. We wouldn’t put a human being behind bars for our own edification, so why should a rhinoceros be any different? The means by which Wayne’s team traps the creatures are also antiquated: Running the animals to exhaustion in all-terrain vehicles. (They use tranquilizers now.) Yet the chase sequences, thrillingly filmed by Russell Harlan and kinetically edited by Stuart Gilmore, are among the most exciting Hawks ever directed, with the actors clearly doing the work and putting themselves in danger while doing so. (Although Wayne was reportedly, and quite understandably, terrified sitting in that external seat with nothing to protect him from danger but a seatbelt, he doesn’t show it.) In typical Hawksian manner, into this largely male enclave comes an attractive outsider (Elsa Martinelli) while two of the team (Hardy Krüger and Gérard Blain) battle each other for the affections of a girl (Michèle Girardon) who isn’t interested in either of them. The Girardon subplot is mildly diverting but Martinelli is so obviously out of her element (whatever that might have been) that she becomes a beautiful embarrassment; her character is meant to be appealing but you cringe every time she goes on one of her irrational crying jags. By the end of it, arrived at via an unfunny chase sequence, you long for Wayne to kick her in the seat of her pants, or at least send her back to Italy. Instead, he marries her. Go figure.

Henry Mancini composed a lively score, with a sinuous, percussion-driven main theme and some charming interludes including the famous “Baby Elephant Walk.” Sometime around 1965 I heard Mancini’s infectious recording on the radio and it so delighted me I began walking around hunched over with my arms in front of my face for a trunk and the tips of my fingers brushing the floor, moving joyously in time to the music. I can’t touch the floor that way today, but the piece still makes me smile.

The Killer Elite (1975) A standard ’70s thriller from Sam Peckinpah’s late, booze-and-coke period, elevated by its cast and their director’s self-identification with the material. The script by Marc Norman and Stirling Silliphant follows the basic contours of its source, the pseudonymous novel Monkey in the Middle, in which the espionage agent Mike Locken is not killed but deliberately wounded by an assassin, accepts a new assignment during his physical rehabilitation to smoke out the killer and gradually comes to realize he’s being played by his duplicitous superior. In the book, the figure Locken is assigned to protect and to spirit out of England is a charismatic African leader hopeful of taking advantage of unrest in his (fictional) nation to bring about a democratic change. In the movie it’s a Chinese dissident, although we’re never really sure where he comes from, where he’s hoping to go, what he expects to do or even what he represents to the people of his country. This is seen by Peckinpah’s critics as a sign of his contempt for the material he’s been offered and there may be some truth to that. To Pauline Kael (“Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah,” The New Yorker, 4 January 1976) the attraction to the script for the filmmaker was his identification with the professional at its center, whored out by pimps (i.e., United Artists and Mike Medavoy, who got him the job as a favor) with whom he had to battle, eternally engaging in subterfuge and sly satire of the creeps to whom he owed his livelihood. I suspect that’s closer to the mark, especially considering the paranoia cocaine engenders in its users. Someone — and I have no idea whether it was Norman, Silliphant or Peckinpah — made the wounding assassin Locken’s best friend and colleague, upping the personal ante, and switched the locale to San Francisco and the African leader to a Chinese national. It was Silliphant, however, who insisted his wife Tiana Alexandra be cast as the man’s daughter, and she’s so bad in the picture, and was from what one hears aggressively unpleasant to boot, that her role was reduced in scope and made to look ridiculous, as when she informs James Caan’s Locken, unbidden, that she’s a virgin and is promptly told by him that he doesn’t give a shit.

Given these conditions, and limitations, and Peckinpah’s coke addiction, the wonder is that The Killer Elite is so entertaining. (Watching the picture a second time with the commentary track on, the Brahman snottiness of Paul Seydor, who makes his own contempt for it quite clear from the beginning, made me like the thing even more.)* The picture sometimes looks cheap — considering his filmography, the budget for this one was shockingly low — and is, overall, less violent and bloody than might be expected. (The sequence in which Caan’s wounds are operated on is the most disturbing in the movie.) Yet there are moments in it that resonate, especially the imposing setting for the climax: The U.S. Navy “mothball fleet” off Suisun Bay. Those huge, empty battleships, slowly rotting in the California sun, provide such a ghostly, unnerving backdrop I’m surprised the government permitted Peckinpaw to film there. There is beautifully lucid cinematography by Philip Lathrop and splendid performances by Caan, Robert Duvall as his betrayer, Arthur Hill as their commander, Gig Young as his superior, Mako as the enigmatic Chinese and Bo Hopkins as Locken’s chief gunman. Burt Young gives a Burt Young performance as Locken’s driver, complete with unintentional mispronunciations, and as Caan’s love-interest Kate Heflin has, alas, the same physiognomy as her father Van. The typically dark Jerry Fielding score is one of his finest of the period.

Sons of the Desert (1934) With Way Out West one of Laurel and Hardy’s two best features. The boys want to travel to their lodge’s convention in Chicago, Ollie’s wife won’t let him go, the pair pretend they’re sailing to Honolulu on a rest-cure cruise for Ollie and, once they get back, are horrified to discover that the ship they are supposed to be on has sunk at sea. At an hour and 4 minutes it’s among the most tightly-packed of sound comedies and the comic sequences are beautifully worked-out. (The credited screenwriter was Frank Craven, later the originator of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and the uncredited scenarists included Stan Laurel, Charley Chase, Glenn Tryon, Hal Roach and the director, William A. Seiter.) Chase has a great role as an obnoxious conventioneer, Mae Busch is exceptionally funny as Ollie’s formidable wife, Dorothy Christy is both handsome and commanding as Stan’s gun-toting spouse and the sharp of eye can spot Ellen Corby in the Chicago nightclub to which the boys retire and the young Robert Cummings in the steamship office. The print on the recent Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations Blu-ray is a revelation, making Kenneth Peach’s sharp black-and-white images fairly shimmer.

Sons of the Desert, by the way, later became the name of the International Laurel & Hardy Society, founded by the team’s first important biographer, John McCabe, in 1965. Al Kilgore devised the official escutcheon and Stan himself suggested the motto which translated from the Latin is, appropriately, “Two minds without a single thought.”

Downhill Racer (1969) A curious mix of (then) new-style filmmaking and old-fashioned dramaturgy. Brian Probyn’s widescreen cinematography is, in the skiing sequences, astounding, and must have been a knockout on a big theater screen; the camera gives the viewer so close a view of the experience of racing you feel as if you have become the athlete. I don’t know how this was managed, particularly since Downhill Racer predates by years the development of the Steadicam, but I assume that, somehow, the movie camera was attached to either skis or skier. You may feel, at the end of each sequence, as if you have stopped breathing until the concluding seconds.

Unfortunately, all of this technical virtuosity is wedded to a screenplay by the novelist James Salter (A Sport and a Pastime) that wallows in cliché, fitfully camouflaged with trendy sex, his specialty. Chappellet, the cold, ambitious athlete at its center (the ambitious are always cold in American movies) is a cipher, the worldly European (Camilla Sparv) with whom he has a seemingly passionate affair is a fraud, his coach (Gene Hackman) could have been played by Pat O’Brien in the 1940s and there is little reason, aside from the movie’s undeniable visual excitement, to care whether Chappellet wins his Olympic race or not. The skier, played with a combination of intensity and cool by Robert Redford, regards his fellow Olympic team members as impediments to his own achievement, and even discovering that he came by his taciturn nature honestly — that his farmer father (Walter Stroud) is as closed off and uncommunicative as his son — does little to make us care about the skier. Considering the parade of platitudes he was given to recite, Hackman makes the coach a vivid presence, and the other skiers include Kenneth Kirk, Jerry Deexter and the young Dabney Coleman. Kenyon Hopkins, who did splendid work as the composer for 12 Angry Men, The Hustler and, especially, The Fugitive Kind, wrote a score of crashing badness for Downhill Racer, one that over-emphasizes every action and reaches crescendos of barely-contained hysteria just before the picture’s several skiing accidents. It’s almost shockingly poor music to have come from so gifted a source and one wonders whether the director, Michael Ritchie, trying to salvage his dramatically inert movie, insisted on it.

The Love Parade (1929) One of the very few early talkie musicals that not only still holds up but gives you a real sense of how much the musical could accomplish in the hands of people who knew what they were doing. Maurice Chevalier plays a Graustarkian Count assigned to a diplomatic post in Paris who (we are told) has succumbed so thoroughly to the the charms of the City of Light he’s lost his original accent and gained a thick French one. When he’s recalled to his country as a result of his scandalous behavior, the Queen (Jeanette MacDonald), whose lack of a husband is the primary concern of the entire nation, falls for him. At this point, the logical next step for the people who wrote these sorts of things would have been to have placed impediments between the two that prevented their union. Here they marry, and only then do their problems begin.

This sort of nonsense requires enormous charm from the performers and a corresponding level of wit from the creators to keep you engaged instead of asking niggling logical questions that take your attention away from the people on the screen. The Love Parade had what was needed in all departments: From Maurice Chevalier as the Count, from Guy Bolton’s script, from the Victor Schertzinger-Clifford Grey song score and, especially, from Ernst Lubitsch’s direction. (Even Jeanette MacDonald, by whose looks I am slightly repelled and towards whose Melpomenic extravagances I am at best lukewarm, is rather engaging.) Bolton was an old hand at such things; with P.G. Wodehouse and Jerome Kern he had originated the small, “modern” Broadway musical in the Princess Theatre shows of the 1920s, which eschewed the operetta style, replacing its big choral elements with more intimate numbers and developed in colloquialism an alternative to the fustian pomposity of the Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml school. The Love Parade doesn’t take itself seriously for a moment; it has the witty irrelevancy of a Wodehouse fable, and this extends to the often blissfully silly songs, such as when Chevalier sings “Paris, Stay the Same” and is toasted by the many soignée women with whom he’s been involved. Not only does his valet (Lupino Lane) take up the refrain, echoed by the chambermaids with whom he has been dallying, the valet’s French bulldog and his grieving bitches also join in.

If I have a complaint about the picture it’s due to Lane’s broad, extravagantly loose-limbed style of performance, so beloved of West End theatregoers of the time. I was equally annoyed 35 years ago by the reproduction of that style in the revival of his inexplicably popular musical Me and My Girl whose idiotic book, stunningly to me, Stephen Fry was credited with revising. Lane on screen almost makes me pine for El Brendel; fortunately, he’s paired with the charming Lillian Roth. While the songs are, overall, not as catchy as the numbers Rodgers & Hart wrote three years later for Love Me Tonight, Schertzinger and Grey came up with a charming title song and, in “Dream Lover,” a standard that recurs in orchestral versions in seemingly dozens of later Paramount pictures including Billy Wilder’s American debut as a writer-director, The Major and the Minor. Grey’s lyrics, like Bolton’s dialogue, are dazzlingly brazen sexually, achieving with strong innuendo what rappers would one day spell out explicitly. (Guess whose lyrics are more enchanting?) “Nobody’s Using It Now” could have been written by Cole Porter at his most erotically playful — it reminds me a bit of both “Nobody’s Chasing Me” and “I Sleep Easier Now” from Porter’s later Out of This World — and “My Love Parade” is nearly as intoxicating as the Rodgers & Hart “Lover.” Although The Love Parade was only his third talkie, Lubtisch brought such assurance to the picture you’d think he’d been making musical comedies for years. It contains the qualities we most associate with him: The deliciously louche attitude toward sex, the sunniness of outlook and the astonishingly adult intelligence of the material. This may have been the picture that caused Lubitsch to remark that he’d been to Paris, France and to Paris, Paramount and preferred the latter.

Thief (1981) Michael Mann’s striking debut as a writer-director has the cool, dark, blue-accented cinematography we associate with pictures like Manhunter and Heat, although Mann only worked with the cinematographer Donald E. Thorin this once. James Caan, is the titular figure, and he gives an intense, perfectly-scaled performance of a man who because of his background is incapable of surrendering his independence, an inflexible philosophy that virtually ensures the loss of everything he values. Caan’s Frank (no last name is ever given) is frighteningly, if explicably, mercurial, and at the climax he destroys the entire edifice he has painstakingly built from a prison fantasy of what constitutes a successful life. Thief is rigorously logical, and intelligent. It’s also beautifully cast, with Tuesday Weld as Frank’s tremulous yet forceful wife, Willie Nelson in the small but affecting role of Frank’s prison mentor, Jim (billed as James) Belushi as his closest cohort and, in a quietly terrifying performance, Robert Prosky as the mob boss who slowly insinuates himself into Frank’s life, with cataclysmic results. The movie is impressively shot and put together, and when you see something like the gaudy lights of mercantile Chicago reflected off the hood of Frank’s shiny luxury model car as he makes a fateful night drive the image achieves a kind of metallic poetry and metaphorical potency denied to what my friend Eliot M. Camarena refers to as the “Look-a-me!” gyrations of a Martin Scorsese.

Pack Up Your Troubles (1932) This cleverly conceived Laurel and Hardy feature, written by the old L & H hand H. M. Walker and competently directed by George Marshall and Raymond McCarey (Leo’s brother) is sometimes charming but ultimately a little too sentimental for its own good. It trades on Chaplinesque emotion (specifically from The Kid) and even, in its First World War trench sequence, a bit on Chaplin’s social realism (Shoulder Arms) and you nay wish it was a great deal funnier than it is. There are, however, compensations, as there nearly always are with Stan and Ollie, especially during a sequence in which the pair manage, innocently, to utterly demolish a wedding. While she’s no Jackie Coogan, little Jacquie Lyn is remarkably ingenuous as the orphaned daughter of a dead soldier and the good supporting cast includes Don Dillaway, Mary Carr, James Finlayson, Grady Sutton, C. Montague Shaw, Billy Gilbert, Adele Watson and, in an unsettling scene, Richard Cramer as a wife-beating thug. As usual, Stan did uncredited work on the script, and (also as usual) I presume the more gruesome gags in the picture were his.

American Masters — Mike Nichols (2016) Whenever I see the photo, above, of Nichols as a child with his mother in Germany I am struck by the pensiveness of his expression. Is the future director judging the family sedan critically, with an eye to how he might make it perform better? Whatever else may be said of Nichols’ work, in movies and in the theatre, it was and is seldom less than intelligent; you can no more imagine him directing a slobby, panting sex comedy like Porky’s than you can picture Stephen Sondheim composing “You Light Up My Life,” except perhaps as a parody.† Rediscovering as an adult my early appreciation for Mike Nichols’ often extraordinary achievements caused me to realize that, along with a goodly amount of the usual dross children and the young embrace and which embarrasses them to confront in their later maturity, there was much I rightly appreciated from a young age. Unfortunately, I had then allowed others — usually but not always, critics — to turn me from my early enthusiasms, or in any case to find them suspect. I number among those pleasures, happily regained in adulthood, the work of Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards, William Goldman, Bob Fosse, Peter Bogdanovich and Alfred Hitchcock, the early enthusiasm for which my reading of (among others) Pauline Kael, John Simon, Dwight MacDonald and the forenamed Mr. Goldman, had dampened. (Although they were correct about his ponderous later work.) In the middle of Goldman’s seminal 1968 book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway lies a withering chapter on Nichols’ alleged facile slickness, which I blush to admit caused me, at 16, to look at movies I had previously venerated (The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) with a jaundiced eye. In his splendid biography of Nichols, Mark Harris suggests it might take an entire book to try getting at what Goldman was so outraged about. Was Nichols’ then nearly unbroken string of successes what really chapped Goldman’s ass?

If William Goldman expected Mike Nichols’ piper to be paid eventually, he soon got his wish: The expensive, ill-advised 1970 movie of Catch-22 ended one of the longest winning-streaks in American popular culture, from the early success of Nichols’ partnership with Elaine May to his direction of a string of Neil Simon’s theatrical hits (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite) to the movies that cemented his status as a seemingly unstoppable wunderkind. (Frankly, if there was a facile artist at work here, it was more often Simon than Nichols.) Carnal Knowledge, with Jules Feiffer, was a modest hit, but The Day of the Dolphin and The Fortune bombed, and Nichols returned to the theatre, where he remained for years. We don’t have his theatre work to study, of course, as we do his movies, but despite what his critics saw as shallow facility (shades of the fraternity’s collective attitude towards Fosse… and William Goldman) what Nichols was really up to, and what he understood better than nearly anyone, was human behavior. It’s at the core of his and May’s often wildly funny improvisations; no matter how hard they make us laugh, their routines first cause us to us recognize their characters’ sharply-delineated humanity. That’s what made them so damned funny. When, during a sketch at the 1959 Emmy awards May presented Nichols (as one Lyle Glutz) with a trophy for being “the most total mediocrity in the industry” and his character exulted, “This is the proudest moment of my life!” you just knew that it was.

May includes that moment in the “American Masters” portrait of Nichols, which she put together, and it’s one of the few performance clips in the show. Whatever its lofty intentions, the series has an unfortunate tendency. not just to hagiography (and in that Mike Nichols is no exception) but to formula: Here is the artist, and we will now present countless talking-heads to praise him. Instead, May’s “American Masters” segment relies largely on video footage from a Julien Schlossberg interview with Nichols to tell his story — or rather, to let Nichols tells Nichols’ story. There are few pleasures in contemporary life as complete as watching a Mike Nichols interview, and hearing him reminisce about his life, his aimless (or anyway, formless) early experience with the Compass Players (later the Second City), the years with May and what he thought he was doing in the theatre and in movies, as opposed to what commentators believed he was up to, is as satisfying a way to spend an hour as any divertissements I have enjoyed in years. May’s brief snippets of other interviews add little to our understanding of Nichols, and two of them put me in a minor rage; the only thing more maddening than having to listen to that part-time actor (and, apparently, full-time CIA asset) Tom Hanks blather on about Charlie Wilson, who as much as anyone aside from Zbigniew Brzeziński was responsible for the ongoing disaster of American involvement in the Middle East,‡ is hearing Hanks’ pal Spielberg talk about his teenage auteurism, as if he were the only young person in history to have made an 8-millimeter home movie. Fortunately, there are few such lapses, and they are brief. May honors her old compatriot, one-time lover and lifelong friend in a way I suspect he would have appreciated, or at least not been too embarrassed about.

Brief Encounter (1945) There are few popular movies as thoroughly worked-out as this Noël Coward-David Lean collaboration about a pair of married strangers who meet by chance in a railway refreshment room, fall in love, flirt with a physical dalliance and part in an agonizingly ironic manner. Yet despite its schematic nature, and some embarrassingly over-cooked dialogue, particularly for Trevor Howard as the masculine partner in the love-affair, the picture has a strangely compelling integrity. You care, not only for the guilt-ridden lovers but for the lives they have built with others and which neither is sanguine about upsetting and the end, when it comes, is almost unbearably moving.

Lean, whose directorial career at this point in the 1940s was entirely yoked to Coward’s writing (In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit preceded Brief Encounter) directed as if the script had no theatrical origin. Coward — in association with Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame — adapted it from the one-act Still Life, one of the nine playlets making up his three-part omnibus Tonight at 8:30 in which he’d starred with Gertrude Lawrence, but his director seldom sees a proscenium arch. Only at the climax, when he plays with lighting effects to heighten the anguish Johnson is going through does he betray any overt sense of theatre, and he immediately upends this, almost literally, by tilting the camera to suggest the emotional upheaval the character is going through as she stands unsteadily and hurtles herself at the refreshment room door. Brief Encounter is a picture that, while staged on fabricated sets, feels unbound by conventional settings (much of it was filmed at the Carnforth railway station in Lancashire). It is also unconcerned with prevailing modes of beauty: although Johnson is an attractive woman neither she nor Howard can be said to be a glamour-puss, and when her character is overtaken by a suicidal urge, Lean films her in the aftermath in the most unflattering manner imaginable, her hair flying over her face and forehead, giving the figure a look of utter despair that matches what she is feeling, and what the actress is expressing, at that moment.

Johnson, who in her private journals expressed strong reservations both about the script and her own performance, has exceptional poise and nothing she does strikes the wrong note. In a way her character represents a comforting, repressed portrait of married middle-class British respectability; Laura Jesson is the sort of person I doubt Coward associated with past his adolescence but which he felt compelled, I suppose, to uphold, since her type doubtless represented more than half his core theatrical audience. What’s admirable about her is her resilience, which has strength but not rigidity. She feels guilt over her attraction to Howard’s Alec Harvey, and she only ever permits her feelings to take her so far and no further… but even here I’m not being entirely fair to her, since she would succumb to Alec’s gentle blandishments but for an unfortunate event of mistiming. There is much we project onto Johnson, especially in the beautifully staged sequence on the train where she gazes from her window at the passing scenery and fantasizes a life with Alec. Except for her smile of pleasure toward the end she could be thinking of almost anything and the scene would work. (She, and Trevor Howard, are also blessedly mature, then as now most often an impediment to a financially successful romance.)

Howard is equally impressive, although he has occasionally to struggle with some of the script’s most purple dialogue. (Although billed as “Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter,” there is no screenplay credit in the main titles, and it’s notable that Lean, Havelock-Allan and Neame, not Coward, shared the Academy Award nomination the picture received for its script.) Lean and others later claimed Howard was one of the stupidest men they’d ever known, which I admit shocked me a little as I had always thought he projected rare intelligence. In later years Lean wished he’d cut the scenes between the refreshment room proprietor played by Joyce Carey and Stanley Holloway’s ticket inspector but they give the story a needed levity, providing sharp contrast as well to the clandestine lovers. Robert Krasker’s cinematography is among the best war-time jobs on either side of the Atlantic, crisp yet expansive, and although the use of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 feels a bit overdone, especially now that his sort of heavy romanticism has largely faded from popular consciousness. Still, its yearning qualities are nicely expressed by the pianist Eileen Joyce.

***^{This poster art should give you some idea of the way the people at Disney approached Will Stanton’s wonderful source material.}***

Charley and the Angel (1973) I was taken to see this comic Disney fantasy almost exactly 51 years ago and enjoyed it enough to request that our local library order a copy for me via inter-library loan of the book on which it was based, Will Stanton’s The Golden Evenings of Summer. Stanton’s book is essentially a collection of short stories in which the narrator recalls one Depression summer of his pubescence, but it’s not a children’s novel although a child of 12, as I then was, could certainly read and enjoy it. I read it again when I was in my early 20s, have just re-read it, and it remains one of the funniest books of my experience. Stanton had not merely the imaginative slant on life, even fancifully remembered life, that helps constitute great humorous writing, but a sense of the absurd and of comic rhythms. Like a great comedian he knew how to phrase a joke, how to build a comedic line, and how to explode it at the punch. In a way his novel reminds me of My Life and Hard Times, although I don’t claim Stanton is the equal of James Thurber. His collection of vignettes about life in a small Iowa town in the early 1930s has, however, the same outlandish sense of good humor Thurber imbued to his fictionalized family memoir of an Ohio boyhood.

I don’t know if there was any way to translate Stanton’s literary achievement, minor though it may have been, to a performance medium. Possibly a nice play could be made from the stories in The Golden Evenings of Summer, although it would lose a great deal of physical detail and action, particularly regarding the two brothers, aged 12 and 10, and the broken-down jalopy they buy from a disgruntled farmer for a nickel. Probably the only means of replicating much of what makes the book so treasurable would be to use narration to retain some of Stanton’s more amusing observations and to connect the individual stories, as Woody Allen did with the vignettes in Radio Days. That’s if you want to perform an act of transliteration; if you want instead to make a Christmas Carol-type fantasy in which a cold husband and father becomes, with the threat of an early demise hanging over his head, a better man thanks to the intervention of a heavenly presence, you make Charley and the Angel.

What’s best about the picture from a thematic point of view are the occasional lines and characters the screenwriter, Roswell Roger, took from Stanton’s book, although even there it’s a matter of ellipses, as when George Lindsey’s handyman Pete shows up: His dialogue, and the shape of the character’s outlines, are either from the book or in imitation of its style, but he’s a “funny type” merely. Missing is his entire raison d’etre as a character, and the boys’ relationship to him. Similarly the filmmakers lost the numerous family discussions in the book, which become a dizzying comic motif, Father’s stubborn pragmatism butting up against not only Mother’s no-nonsense stoicism but as well daughter Leonora’s blank self-absorption (a dazed “What?” is how she inevitably answers any direct question put to her) and younger son Rupert’s zany yet somehow unassailable 10-year old’s logic. Where in the book the boys run unwitting errands for bootleggers in that 5-cent jalopy, in the movie the gangsters turn on them, taking the family hostage so that father Charley (Fred MacMurray) can prove his worth by saving them. (Need I add that this is preceded by the then-standard comic chase which seemed to climax every Disney comedy of the era?) The picture is also curiously uncertain about its own time-frame. At the beginning mother Nettie (Cloris Leachman) observes that summer is coming to a close yet later it’s made clear that Father’s Day has not yet arrived.

^{The clever, period-inspired titles by Jack Boyd and John Jensen, with evocative close-harmony girl-trio song by Shane Tatum and Ed Scott.}

So much for what the movie isn’t. For what it is, Harry Morgan provides an amiable blend of amiability and, if this is not an oxymoron, disappointed playfulness as the celestial visitor. MacMurray lends his inimitable voice and fatherly comic mien to Charley, and if he does no more than what he’d done a dozen times before, that was why he was hired. As Nettie, Leachman was a surprising but pleasing choice, although after years of enjoying her as Phyllis Lindstrom, in 1973 I found her dark chestnut hair-job a little disconcerting, and still do. If Leachman was a bottle-blonde she was correct to be so; the honey shade she usually sported softened the sharpness of her features and made her look a bit less hard. As the older and younger brother respectively, Vincent Van Patten and Scott Kolden are likeable, but Kurt Russell is largely wasted as their sister’s beau. The typically strong Disney supporting cast includes, aside from Lindsey, Edward Andrews, Richard Bakalyan (as one of the gangsters, naturally), Mills Watson (as the other one), Barbara Nichols, Liam Dunn, Larry D. Mann, George O’Hanlon, the funny-voiced Susan Tolsky as a young biddy, Ed Begley Jr., Pat Delaney and Bob Hastings, with Harold Peary heard as the unctuous host of a children’s radio show. Charles F. Wheeler’s photography is rather good, as are the special effects. Vincent McEveety’s direction is serviceable, but the art direction (John B. Mansbridge and Al Roelofs), set decoration (Frank R. McKelvy) and costumes (Shelby Tatum) are remarkable. The sets look absolutely lived in, and the period furniture and appliances are first-rate.

Charley and the Angel isn’t a bad picture as these things go, but considering the quality of its source, “not bad” isn’t nearly good enough.

The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) If this dull backstager had been simply one of many lousy musicals produced at MGM in the 1940s and ’50s it would be mildly disappointing and no more. As the final screen teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, however, it is unforgiveable.

Planned as a follow-up to the 1948 Easter Parade and, like it, as a vehicle for Astaire and Judy Garland, the picture involves a married couple of bickering musical-comedy stars and the sudden aspirations of the Missus to become a legitimate actress. The movie’s director, Charles Walters had, quite understandably, no interest in dealing with Garland’s neuroses again after being driven mad by them on the previous picture, and someone had the brilliant notion of casting Rogers in Garland’s stead. While, despite her own dramatic U-turn (Kitty Foyle, in which she played an unwed mother and for which she was given an Academy Award) her delightful way with a comic line remained as undimmed as her protean abilities on the dance floor, the Rogers of 1949 was, inevitably, less lithe than the Ginger of 1939. This is especially noticeable in the “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” dance during a charity show where she’s attired in a low-cut, spaghetti-strap ballroom gown and her big shoulders suddenly overwhelm your vision. Rogers’ shoulders had, through her avidity for tennis, became far larger than Astaire’s and while she’s as graceful in dance as she ever was, with her flowing locks done up in tight braids around her head she looks disturbingly like a rather daring linebacker in drag. Worse, at the climax, when as Sarah Bernhardt she elects to recite the “Marseillaise” for her Paris Conservatory audition (something Bernhardt never did) she is made to look utterly ridiculous, her voice rising hysterically in what she imagines is passionate patriotism. When the sequence begins we expect Rogers to make a shambles of things, the way she demolished a radio broadcast while under hypnosis in Carefree, and when she launches into her absurd dramatic hyperbole we’re dismayed. Yet this is presented as proof of Dinah Barkley’s genius as a Dramatic Actress, and the Broadway audience (including the rightfully skeptical Astaire) goes predictably bananas, shouting “Bravo!” at this junior high school idea of greatness.

Aside from a few sharp lines and the occasional wisecrack assigned to Oscar Levant as Astaire’s musical collaborator, you’d never guess unless you knew that the unimaginative screenplay was the work of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. (Sidney Sheldon made uncredited contributions, but I doubt even he can be entirely blamed for the grinding witlessness of the thing.) Even Harry Warren’s music disappoints; there isn’t a good song in the batch, aside from “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” which anyway was George Gershwin’s, and Ira Gershwin’s lyrics for the picture are on the same dispiriting level as Warren’s wan compositions. This is another of those mid-century musicals set in the theatre in which you can’t make out what sort of show they’re performing: Astaire and Rogers keep discussing plot scenes, but all we ever see are revue-type spots, the nadir of which, “My One and Only Highland Fling,” is the only truly bad musical number Astaire and Rogers ever performed. When Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are in a scene and instead of being focused on the song you’re concentrating on the scrupulousness of Astaire’s sanitary etiquette with a communal dipping spoon, something is terribly wrong. There’s a number staged by Hermes Pan in a theatrical repair shop with articulated shoes that seems to owe something to, on the one hand, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and on the other to The Red Shoes, but which has no real point except to present Astaire dancing with animated footwear. (And anyway, it couldn’t be performed anywhere but a movie set, so why is it allegedly being done on a Broadway stage?) The movie’s big ballad (“You’d Be Hard to Replace”) is drippy and the only number that really cooks is a percussive instrumental, “Bouncing the Blues,” which, all too briefly, returns the viewer to the great RKO days.

I hadn’t meant to go on at such length about as rotten a movie as The Barkleys of Broadway but I guess my devotion to Astaire and Rogers is deeper, and more constant, than that of the people who threw this stinking mélange together. I’m only glad I viewed it at home; if I’d seen it in a theater I’d have been tempted to force my way into the projection booth and put a match to the print.

*That’s not to mention Seydor’s constant, irritating references to Peckinpah as “Sam.” Writing books and producing documentaries on a man’s work long after he’s dead does not entitle you to evoke his forename as if he’d been your great pal.

†Interestingly, Sondheim wrote the songs for a “mini-musical” version of Jules Feiffer’s satirical comic strip fable “Passionella” Nichols staged as part of a Feiffer evening in 1962. They were friends for decades but seldom after, alas, and except for the birdcage for which Sondheim wrote a couple of new songs and placed one old one (“Love is in the Air”), artistic collaborators. When “Passionella” resurfaced as part of Nichols’ 1966 Broadway musical The Apple Tree, the lovely score was by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick.

‡Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) which really was facile, was not a movie Nichols wanted to direct, and he was afterwards sorry he’d made it.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on…

Grateful acknowledgment to the genius of Pete Seeger.

Monthly Report: February 2024

By Scott Ross

As ever, click on the highlighted links for complete reviews &cet.

Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) I was not bored watching the two hours and twenty-five minutes of this historical pageant, but half an hour after it was over I had to concentrate to remember any particular scene or performance in it. Perhaps if I gave more of a damn about the dynastic ruling families of Great Britain the story of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII might have more resonance, but I’m less interested in the private lives of these types than I am in the damage they do to others, and to the world at large. This is especially true of “royal families,” who whatever their current disguises, believe in the absolute, divine right of monarchy: We do as we please because we are ennobled by God. In Henry’s case, this extended to deciding what the official religion of his kingdom was to be, once the previous edition stood in the way of his rutting as he liked. I will grant that, as these things go, he was right to be concerned that, without a male heir, England would likely be plunged into dynastic wars again following his death, but I have no sympathy with the Tudors or the Stuarts or their imperial Hanovarian successors and especially not their rotten descendants, the Saxe-Coburg line that laughingly anglicizes itself as Windsor and thinks the world doesn’t know they’re Germans.

The movie, produced by the venerable Hal Wallis, was based on a play by Maxwell Anderson I have neither read nor seen, but the picture is reasonably literate (the screenplay was by Bridget Boland and John Hale) and handsomely appointed in art direction (Maurice Carter), set decoration (Lionel Couch and Patrick McLoughlin) and, especially, in costume design (Margaret Furse). Still, it’s astounding to reflect that such a middling affair as Anne of the Thousand Days was in its time up for ten Academy Awards, until you discover that Universal followed its screenings for Academy members with champagne and filet mignon dinners. Too bad there wasn’t an award that year for Best Bribe. The movie does boast an impressive cast, headed by Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold, although Burton never really convinces you he’s Henry. He would have made a good Henry V, when he was younger, but he lacks the size and dimension for Henry VIII and the script in any case lets him down, seldom hinting at the king’s dangerous irrationality as Robert Bolt did with his Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons. Bujold, in her first important screen role, is in many ways remarkable but her Anne Boylen becomes a bit of a bore and even a pompous, demanding shrew, because that’s how she’s been written. (I’m curious as to whose bright idea it was for Anne to demand the head of Sir Thomas More, a barbarism for which there is no historical evidence.) Anthony Quayle is far more successful as Cardinal Wolsey, quietly scheming away while protesting that he’s doing no such thing. Indeed, much of the supporting cast is splendid: Irene Papas, hurt yet unyielding as Queen Catherine; John Colicos as a duplicitous Thomas Cromwell, toadying obsequiously yet plotting behind everyone’s back; Michael Hordern as Anne’s timid, avaricious father; and Peter Jeffrey as a nasty, snarling Norfolk. As More, William Squire seems to be imitating Paul Scofield, and it should be noted that, at least as far as his official portraiture is concerned, More most closely resembled neither Squire nor Scofield, but John Colicos.

The most tragic figure in the piece is poor Mark Smeaton, the royal music teacher who was one of many falsely accused of adultery with Boylen and broken by torture, particularly as played by the heartbreaking Gary Bond. His story would almost certainly have made a more involving and emotionally resonant movie than this one.

Rio Bravo (1959) Arguably the single movie directed by Howard Hawks that most neatly encapsulizes his interests as a filmmaker, and the wry humor with which he explicated them. It’s also one of the most engaging of all Hollywood movies. Hawks is one of those figures, like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, who while never taking a writing credit on one of his pictures was their chief animating agent, shaping every scene and even, at times, every line, in a way directors-for-hire never do. The recurrent Hawksian themes are here: Of group endeavors among professionals, anxiety over whether one is “good enough,” romance between laconic men and sharp, funny women and intense masculine friendship bordering on the homoerotic, coupled with teasing humor, periodic bursts of effective violent action and a pace that, while deliberate, seldom drags. (And speaking of the homoerotic, there’s sometimes a very good-looking boy in the Hawksian mix, such as Montgomery Clift in Red River. Here it’s Ricky Martin, unfortunately required to reprise that annoying finger-against-the-nose gesture Clift imitates Wayne doing.) It also has, in Angie Dickinson’s drily passionate “Feathers,” the most perfect example of the idealized Hawksian woman after Lauren Bacall’s Marie in To Have and Have Not. In some ways Feathers is Marie’s superior as a character in that she is warmer and her emotions are closer to the surface, which as she slyly pursues John Wayne’s John T. Chance makes her an even more appealing figure.

The 4K UHD edition burnishes Russell Harlan’s already luscious Eastmancolor images, especially the night exteriors, making it the best-looking of all of Hawks’ color pictures in a home-video format.

“10” (1979) Seeing this Blake Edwards sex-comedy when it was new left me curiously dissatisfied, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Watching it again 44 years later I think I know why my nearly-19-year-old self was discomfited. The picture is bifurcated, in an odd fashion: The hilarious first half doesn’t quite line up with the more reflective second. The characters and the basic situation are the same — the successful middle-aged composer George Webber (Dudley Moore) seeks to relieve his male-menopausal sense of vague dissatisfaction by perusing an idealized woman (Bo Derek) he’s seen for a brief moment while driving — and when George flies off to Mexico after the girl, the tone is largely different… yet somehow it all feels like the same movie. I think too that at 18 I hadn’t anything like the experience of life required to empathize with Moore’s character; he seemed like a stereotype of the middle-aged letch seeking renewal in the arms of a hot young moron. Being older now than George was then, I can see both George and Jenny, Derek’s character, more clearly, and while I still think he’s crazy to risk his relationship with Julie Andrews’ warm and responsive Samantha, I no longer think Jenny is an idiot. She’s shallow, and her values are vastly different from George’s (she’s newly married, yet perfectly happy to jump in the sack with George while her young husband is recuperating in the hospital) but that doesn’t make her stupid, although her insistence on re-starting her record of the Ravel “Bolero” every time she and George are interrupted, to time it so they climax when it does, renders her exasperating. Life isn’t that canned, and certainly sex isn’t; Jenny’s single-mindedness risks turning erotic expression into nothing but an act of deliberate mechanism.

Although its parts vary they don’t cancel each other out, and “10” remains an exceptionally intelligent and entertaining comedy; the physical indignities into which George’s erotic obsessions invariably lead him are cannily conceived by the writer-director, and perfectly executed by him, with that patient, almost Classical, application of the best means of photographing comedy to the most surprising effects of physical humor. When this marriage works, as it does throughout the picture, few things are funnier. Dudley Moore, previously noted as almost purely a sketch comic,* proved a remarkable adept at this, particularly given his physical limitations (he was born with club feet and even after many childhood surgeries one leg remained both twisted and withered) and he plays the more serious second half with sensitivity and real feeling. As his song-writing partner, Robert Webber plays a gay man without the slightest acknowledgement of stereotype save his character keeping a younger man (Walter George Allen) who eventually leaves him; I can’t tell you what a relief that characterization, both as written by Edwards and as played by Webber, was when I was 18. Derek of course was half the reason the picture grossed $107 million and she’s rather good, although I found those cornrows unappealing then, and I still do, whether they’re on a white or a black head; granted I am far from the ideal judge of feminine pulchritude, I don’t enjoy seeing that much exposed scalp on anyone. Dee Wallace has a lovely role as a woman who can’t get a sexual break, Brian Dennehy a beautiful one as a sympathetic bartender, John Hancock is charming as George’s psychiatrist, and Max Showalter has one of the best scenes in the movie, as a minister with a passion for writing terrible songs. Frank Stanley provided superb cinematography, beautifully lit and photographed, especially in the movie’s many nighttime interiors which have a rich, burnished look.

Prime Cut (1972) A tough cult thriller that is almost a parody of pulp sagas, with several nasty contemporary flourishes that must make it a favorite aid to masturbation in the Tarantino household. These include the villain’s preferred method of disposing of would-be assassins, turning them into sausages in his meat-processing plant; his auctioning off drugged, naked girls like cattle; and a clever, frightening encounter by Lee Marvin and Sissy Spacek with a harvesting combiner. (That last item appears to be a nod to the crop-dusting sequence in North by Northwest.) Marvin, in a typically terse performance, plays a mob assassin whose objective is the murder of the cheerfully venal meat-packager “Mary Ann” (Gene Hackman) making Prime Cut the sort of picture in which the hero you root for is a hired killer and which tells you something about how appalling Hackman’s character is. Spacek, in her first credited role, is one of the young sex-slaves, rescued on an outraged whim by Marvin, and she has a remarkable, slightly dazed, mien. Previously an orphan, she doesn’t seem to have any experience of the world that might give her a sense of what is appropriate, as when Marvin buys her a whole new trousseau and she comes down to dinner in their three-star hotel wearing no brassiere. Hackman, coming off The French Connection, plays Mary Ann with a genial coldness that does little to mask his psychopathy, and as his bizarre, dangerous brother “Weenie,” Gregory Walcott is a genuinely unsettling presence, a rich weirdo who lives in a cheap flop-house with flimsy partitions rather than actual rooms. Some have said the odd relationship between the brothers suggests a homosexual liaison, but the behavior of the characters is so bizarre almost any interpretation would do.

Robert Dillon wrote the pitch-black seriocomic script (he was, with his wife, later credited with the story for the underrated French Connection II) and Michael Ritchie directed efficiently. Gene Polito’s widescreen cinematography has exceptional richness, with Calgary exteriors subbing for Kansas City and environs. The atmospheric score is by Lalo Schifrin.

**^{You can’t tell it from this still, but Wayne and Hepburn have a great time together in the movie.}**

Rooster Cogburn (1975) A wholly unnecessary sequel to True Grit done for what I assume were entirely mercenary reasons and with maximal borrowings from elsewhere but which has many compensations, not least of which is the once-surprising teaming of John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.

El Dorado (1966) Leigh Brackett claimed of her screen adaptation of the Harry Brown novel The Stars in Their Courses, placing The Iliad in the old West, that it was the best script she ever wrote. Coming from the woman who also wrote Hatari! and who co-authored The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, Rio Lobo and The Empire Strikes Back, those are words to conjure with. Unfortunately, the tragic nature of the material made Howard Hawks nervous, which I suspect was largely due to his having had two flops in a row and needing a more sure thing. Hence El Dorado, a loose demi-remake of Rio Bravo. The repetition disturbed Brackett: “The more we got into doing Rio Bravo over again,” she noted later, “the sicker I got, because I hate doing things over again. And I kept saying to Howard I did that, and he’d say it was okay, we could do it over again.” Hawks’ lack of compunction about repeating himself is one of his most dismaying flaws as a filmmaker, along with his blindness to the recurring homoeroticism between his male characters and his rich-boy’s indifference to spending other people’s money, which often resulted in his best pictures making less at the box-office than they should have because their negative cost was so great.

If you take in El Dorado without undue expectations you’ll likely find it an engaging, somewhat enervated, comic Western enlivened by its trio of central actors. John Wayne as a gun-for-hire with a conscience does little he hasn’t done before, but as usual with him, it’s the way he does it that registers. Wayne had been in pictures long enough that he knew how little he had to do, how small his gestures needed to be, to make an impact and the pauses he takes between words are always surprising, even if (as one suspects) he often did so because he was groping for the next part of a line. Other actors point at an object; Wayne stabs the air slowly and snaps his hand back in a single, flowing gesture and you’re never in doubt of the importance of what he’s saying, or less than delighted by the economy with which he says it. Robert Mitchum essentially plays the same drunken sheriff role Dean Martin assayed in Rio Bravo, and while I’ve always liked Martin in that picture, Mitchum shows you how much more effecting the part might have been with a real screen actor playing it. When, after enduring the crude insults of the heavies he returns to the jail with a bottle of whiskey, the tears in Mitchum’s eyes as he tells Wayne, “They laughed at me,” and the disbelieving hurt in his voice, make all the difference between a good moment and a great one. As the untested but enthusiastic tryo, the young James Caan brings a welcome freshness to a role that is largely a re-tread of Ricky Nelson’s in Rio Bravo. (He’s even called “Mississippi,” the way Nelson was nicknamed “Colorado.”) Caan is such a pleasant addition he almost gets you past the movie’s worst, and ugliest, moment: When against all likelihood he gets away with a patently phony disguise by pretending to be a gibbering Chinese. This “comic” bit would have fallen flat in 1930; for 1967 it’s practically obscene.

While Arthur Hunnicutt is not as memorable as Walter Brennan in the role that echoes Brennan’s he’s quite amiable, as is Paul Fix as a sympathetic physician and Christopher George as Wayne’s knife-scarred rival. Ed Asner makes a quietly hissable villain, Charlene Holt is very fine in an abbreviated version of “the Hawksian woman,” Johnny Crawford is effecting as a dying boy whose fate, for which he is unavoidably responsible, shakes Wayne’s character to the core and Michele Carey is as sexy a tomboy as you’ll ever see. Nelson Riddle’s music, while not a patch on Dmitri Tiomkin’s for El Dorado‘s predecessor, and much more modern-sounding, is full of good things and may make you wish he’d been offered more movies to score, or in any case had been less busy arranging for Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and thus able to accept more such offers. El Dorado was shot in Utah and at the Old Tucson Studios in Arizona by the veteran cinematographer Harold Rosson whose Technicolor imagery is mouth-watering, especially in his night sequences and the glorious purple sunset farewell between Wayne and Holt.

The Journey of Natty Gann (1985) An amiable period road-movie from the era in which Disney was attempting to attract a more adult audience with items like The Black Hole, Never Cry Wolf, and the misbegotten Something Wicked This Way Comes. There is actually little to shield a child from here aside from a few relatively mild oaths (“shit” is the most frequent curse) and one brief, unsettling scene in which the heroine is menaced by a man who gives her a ride in his pickup, predictably foiled by an attack from her pet wolf. That sentence is less risible than it sounds since Natty (Meredith Salenger) frees the wolf from a dog-fighting ring early on and it attaches itself to her as a consequence. It’s a Depression story, in which a widowed father (the excellent Ray Wise) reluctantly leaves his daughter in the care of a Chicago hotlier (Lainie Kazan) when work on the West Coast presents itself. As the girl’s life there becomes more and more insupportable she takes off to follow her father, encountering railroad-riders, a gang of young hoods, an orphanage out of Little Orphan Annie and other travails. The outcome is never really in doubt, although the screenwriter (Jeanne Rosenberg) places obstacles in the paths of both father and daughter that occasionally cause you to wonder, or to try second-guessing. (I was convinced that someone, human or animal, was going to die before the end.) With its indomitable tomboy heroine, it’s a picture young girls ought to love, but that boys would also respond to, especially with that wonderful Canis lupus companion played by Jed, the wolf-Malamute mix who later starred in the 1991 Disney adaptation of Jack London’s White Fang.

James Horner’s score, as was the case so often with him, is so imitative I thought at first I was hearing the work of Georges Delerue, whose music for Something Wicked was tossed out the year before and replaced by a lesser but effective one by Horner. (I had forgotten that Natty Gann‘s original composer, Elmer Bernstein, was, like Delerue, replaced, and some of the music I was hearing and attributing to Horner ripping Bernstein off, was actually his.)† As Natty, Meredith Salenger makes a most appealing champion, personable but determined, and despite her youth, nobody’s fool. Her androgyny and her masculine attire also help her blend in with such wild boys of the road as John Cusack, playing a young homeless man Natty befriends. Cusack is an asset as are, in smaller roles, Scatman Crothers, Barry Miller, Zachary Ainsley, Verna Bloom, John Finnegan, Bruce M. Fischer, Hannah Cutrona and Sheelah Megill. The director, Jeremy Kagan, who had previously made the enormously likeable 1970s private-detective variation The Big Fix, has a nice eye for detail and a fine sense of pace, but the most impressive aspect of The Journey of Natty Gann is its sumptuous photography by Dick Bush. The picture was shot in Vancouver, and the vivid images Bush captured of its lush, verdant wildernesses pop off the screen.

The War Wagon (1967) An enjoyable Western comedy, directed with flair and a quickened pace by the veteran Burt Kennedy and based by Clair Huffaker, who also wrote The Comancheros and 100 Rifles, on his novel Badman. That word is interesting, in that John Wayne plays an ex-con conniving to get his hands on a cache of gold that should have been his. Granted he was innocent and railroaded into prison by the venal mining boss played by Bruce Cabot in a successful attempt to legally steal what belonged to Taw Jackson, Wayne’s character. But if there are Wayne roles, aside from the Ringo Kid in the John Ford Stagecoach and one of the 3 Godfathers, also for Ford, in which he played even an alleged criminal, I’m not aware of them. Not that this is a serious matter; The War Wagon is an escapade, and a largely merry one. Wayne’s antagonist and reluctant partner in his revenge against Cabot is Kirk Douglas, a happy heterosexual but because the actor chose to wear a large ring over one gloved finger, one that made Wayne predictably nervous. (John Wayne was nauseated that Douglas chose to play Van Gogh, so one can well imagine his reaction to that ring.) Along for the ride are a cheerfully cynical Howard Keel as a thoroughly Anglicized Indian, Robert Walker Jr. as a young explosives expert with a drinking problem, Keenan Wynn as a despicable petty thief, Valora Noland as his resigned child-bride, Joanna Barnes as one of Douglas’ playmates, Gene Evans as an excitable deputy sheriff, Marco Antonio as a belligerent chief and, in smaller roles, Bruce Dern and Sheb Wooley. The splendid William H. Clothier provided the excellent widescreen cinematography, and Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, which pretends to take the whole business seriously, is a peach, with a title song whose wonderfully silly Ned Washington lyrics are performed with brio by that other notable Caucasian Indian of the 1960s, Ed Ames.

in any of his other pictures. Not that this is a serious matter; The War Wagon is an escapade, and a largely merry one. Wayne’s antagonist and reluctant partner in his revenge against Cabot is Kirk Douglas, a happy heterosexual but because the actor chose to wear a large ring over one gloved finger, one that made Wayne predictably nervous. (John Wayne was nauseated that Douglas chose to play Van Gogh, so one can well imagine his reaction to that ring.) Along for the ride are a cheerfully cynical Howard Keel as a thoroughly Anglicized Indian, Robert Walker Jr. as a young explosives expert with a drinking problem, Keenan Wynn as a despicable petty thief, Valora Noland as his resigned child-bride, Joanna Barnes as one of Douglas’ playmates, Gene Evans as an excitable deputy sheriff, Marco Antonio as a belligerent chief and, in smaller roles, Bruce Dern and Sheb Wooley. The splendid William H. Clothier provided the excellent widescreen cinematography, and Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, which pretends to take the whole business seriously, is a peach, with a title song whose wonderfully silly Ned Washington lyrics are performed with brio by that other notable Caucasian Indian of the 1960s, Ed Ames.

*With his comedy partner, Peter Cook. Both were alumni, alongside Jonathan Miller and the brilliant future playwright Alan Bennett (and, later, when Miller left, Paxton Whitehead) of the Beyond the Fringe stage show. Cook and Moore also wrote and starred in the amusing, if ultimately labored, Faust variation Bedazzled, cobbled up dozens of brilliant sketches and, in occasionally inebriated ad-lib sessions, recorded the genuinely foul, obscene, and frequently hilarious “Derek and Clive” albums.

†Bernstein’s music for Natty Gann was later part of a boxed set released by Varèse Sarabande and that also included his rejected scores for Gangs of New York and The Scarlet Letter. Parlor game: Name a single movie that was substantially improved by its desperate producers throwing out one score and replacing it with another. This is what people do when they don’t know what else to do.

Ten lustrums on… “Rooster Cogburn” (1975)

By Scott Ross

“Being around you pleases me.” — Rooster Cogburn to Eula Goodnight

A wholly unnecessary sequel to True Grit done for what I assume were entirely mercenary reasons — the producer, Hal Wallis, had made too much money on Grit to leave it alone — and with maximal borrowings from elsewhere but which has many compensations, not least of which is the once-surprising teaming of John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn. It wasn’t the wide divergence of their respective politics that made such a partnership unlikely so much as the public perception of each: The flinty Yankee-patrician feminism of Hepburn vs. the relaxed Western working-class machismo of Wayne, neither of whose core audience would presumably cross over to the other. Yet Rooster Cogburn was a hit, and that implausible pairing provided a great deal of pleasure to a large number of moviegoers. Although the plot involving Hepburn’s character, Eula Goodnight, is a direct steal from The African Queen, even unto a perilous encounter with river rapids and the antagonistic yoking of Goodnight with Cogburn essentially reprises both the Hepburn-Bogart pairing in Queen and the Rooster-Mattie Ross dynamic that fuels True Grit. Indeed, the pursuit of a ruthless killer (played, in this case, by Richard Jordan) is nearly identical in each. Where the fugitive in True Grit has killed Mattie’s rancher father, Jordan here is responsible for the death of Eula’s minister father (as opposed to Hepburn’s minister-brother, essentially killed by the Germans in The African Queen.) The screenplay was largely the work of Wallis’ wife, the actress Martha Hyer, with input first from Wallis, later from Hepburn* and Wayne, and including a polish by Charles Portis, the gifted novelist who had written True Grit, the final script attributed to “Martin Julien,” a nom de plume. The movie often feels cobbled together, and that many screenwriters is seldom a good thing; still, if Rooster Cogburn is a mess, it’s a highly entertaining mess.

First, there is the mouth-watering Technicolor photography by Harry Stradling, Jr. The picture was shot in Oregon in the autumn (and with two 67-year old over-the-title stars acting in those chilly conditions, no less) and while it looks no more like Arkansas than Colorado did in True Grit, the verdant quality of the location scenery, and Stradling’s luminous framing of it, are so beautiful they occasionally overwhelm the senses. Second, there is the intelligence of the crazy-quilt screenplay, and its abundance of humor, particularly between Cogburn and Eula, which fuel one’s enjoyment. Third (or, perhaps, considering their importance, first) there are the performances by Wayne and Hepburn, two old pros lending to this project everything they did well, reveling in each other’s company, and pretty obviously having a wonderful time. Eula isn’t quite as flinty and judgmental as Rose Sayer in The African Queen — just as religious as Rose, she’s less of a genteel termagant, and her sense of humor is more developed. Although this may be a necessity of the speed with which the story unfolds, Eula warms toward and largely accepts Cogburn and his vulgar frailties much more quickly than Rose does with Bogart’s Charlie Allnut, just as Rooster bends faster to Eula’s fearless qualities than he did to Mattie’s. (He doesn’t witness it, but there’s a remarkable sequence in which the villain’s gang tries to terrify Eula by shooting at her feet while she prays and she doesn’t even flinch at the shots that sums up the woman’s personal courage.) While Cogburn is as resistant to Eula’s companionship on his mission to bring in the outlaw Hawk (Jordan) as he was to Mattie’s joining his quest in True Grit, he softens sooner towards her, although he never becomes a softie. (Well, he wouldn’t, would he, even if he wasn’t being played by John Wayne?)

A portion of the strong fellow-feeling these two exhibit toward each other may be chalked up to a shared maturity. Mattie Ross didn’t just irritate Rooster Cogburn; she annoyed every adult she came in contact with. She was the wise child with a backbone of tungsten, which while in many ways admirable can be a trial to an older person. Eula, especially as Hepburn plays her (and despite her religious bent) is womanly in a way Mattie never is, or becomes. Once she’s taken the full measure of her foil, she begins to admire his good qualities and to enjoy his rough company. She’s not flirtatious, but friendly, in a way that could invite some romantic complications if either could see their way to it; when the two part at the end, you feel a pang of genuine regret. Wayne of course had already honed Cogburn, in 1969, and knew what he was doing. He seems pleased to bring the one-eyed old reprobate back for a last hurrah, and his rich humor is in full bloom. At his age, and with his experience in movies, Wayne seldom did too much, pushed too hard or spoke too loudly. He leaves room, not only for Hepburn, but for Eula’s young Native charge Wolf (Richard Romancito), toward whom he behaves in a fatherly way… and both of them wisely give Eula a wide berth.

Stuart Millar, who was better known as a producer, directed crisply, and knew, as the scriptwriters did, when to pause the action to emphasize a human-scale scene between interesting actors. These include, in addition to Wayne and Hepburn, Anthony Zerbe as Breed, a tracker with no loyalties; John McIntire as a frontier judge as exasperated with Cogburn’s methods as he is good-naturedly accepting of his uncouth company; and Strother Martin, who had two of the best (and funniest) scenes in True Grit, as a ferryboatman with the impossible name of Shanghai McCoy. Only the redoubtable Richard Jordan runs aground with his remarkably unsubtle, scenery-ingesting characterization of Hawk; he was on record later as saying he had contempt for the movie, which he thought would be a flop no one but Wayne and Hepburn’s fans would see, but that’s a hell of a reason for an actor that good to give a performance this bad. Laurence Rosenthal’s score, although it both imitates Elmer Bernstein’s True Grit music and invokes Aaron Copland (always a test for composers confronting a Western) is nevertheless pleasing. He wrote a good, if Bernsteinesque, main theme, and his scoring of the massacre at the missionary outpost is hair-raising. At just under 40 minutes, Rosenthal’s score also has the virtue of knowing when to shut up, a part of the craft that has seemingly been lost in the last 30 years of film scoring.

I missed Rooster Cogburn when it was released at Christmastime in 1975 (I was 14, obviously unable to drive yet, and the recipient of a very small weekly allowance) but was given the Signet paperback of the screenplay in my stocking that year, and one of its aspects that amused me was Cogburn discovering the definition of the word “lustrum,” which was also new to me, and the way he repeats this addition to his vocabulary late in the movie. The picture is by no means a classic, of the Western genre or any other, but being around Wayne and Hepburn pleases us; with both of them gone the movie they co-starred in has attained a sort of golden aura, and serves as a reminder of what’s been lost in the headlong rush to replicate last year’s remake of the previous summer’s big hit from an idiot comic book. Nearly ten lustrums on, even Rooster Cogburn‘s many borrowings seem less irksome than mildly regrettable… and with this much on the screen to enjoy, almost negligible.

*Hepburn, who had been slated to star in her old friend and frequent director George Cukor’s movie of the Graham Greene Travels with My Aunt, took such a strong hand in the revision of Jay Presson Allen’s script that both Cukor and Allen afterward said she should have gotten screenwriting credit. Doubtless she deserved a similar nod for Rooster Cogburn, and I wonder how much of the general wit and intelligence of the dialogue is due to her, and to Portis.

Speaking of Cukor, I have to get this off my chest: When the picture was in general release Hepburn wrote an appreciation of Wayne for TV Guide that, considering her long friendships and collaborations with Cukor, and with Garson Kanin, contains one of the most graceless acts of backhanded viciousness I’ve ever read. Describing Wayne’s physique she noted: “No backside — a rarity in these gay times.” Why did she, very likely a closeted Lesbian herself, feel the need to be that catty toward homosexual men in print? And what the hell did she mean by “no backside” anyway? Look at Wayne’s big butt in nearly every picture he was ever in and then tell me he lacked definition in that area. Was Hepburn blind as well as nasty?

Monthly Report: January 2024

By Scott Ross

As ever, click on the highlighted links for complete reviews (&cet.)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) I began the new year on a hopeful note, watching the excellent 4K UHD edition of what in 1977 was the single most entrancing movie I’d ever seen and which still exerts a beautiful spell over me.

I would like to think my other hopes for 2024 will not be betrayed, but short of worldwide revolution I suspect they will. As Tom Woods once noted (Woods’ Law #3): “No matter who you vote for, you always wind up getting John McCain.”

From Here to Eternity (1953) James Jones’ enormous (860 pages) 1951 novel, beautifully adapted by Daniel Taradash and directed with sensitivity and grace by the splendid Fred Zinnemann. Set in and around Pearl Harbor in the months leading up to the Japanese attack and, essentially, ending on it, the picture is (presumably like its source) remarkably and unusually adult in erotic/romantic content* and, to use a word I normally avoid due to its extreme overuse, powerful in its imagery. Example: The famous love scene on the shore between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, kissing passionately as the waves break over them. That Kerr’s character is a married woman and her affair with Lancaster’s career soldier illicit (her husband, his commanding officer, is a serially unfaithful pig) added to the heat the sequence generated, yet few seem to remember how bitterly the scene ends, with Lancaster humiliating Kerr and impugning her virtue.

From Here to Eternity, even more than A Place in the Sun, showcases Montgomery Clift’s gifts as an actor although his character is, at least to me, inexplicable: A young man planning on a career as a soldier who claims to love the Army yet who makes a habit of rebelling against his superior officers. Still, Prewitt is perhaps the Clift character who displays the greatest range of emotions, from the riant to the deeply sorrowful, and I defy you to remain unmoved when, with tears streaming down his cheeks, he plays “Taps” in honor of his murdered friend. As that friend, Private Maggio, Frank Sinatra is superb. Forget the Mario Puzo version of his casting†; Sinatra knew the role reflected his image of himself, and he gave himself over to it entirely, perhaps reminding those who know such things that a great ballad singer is also, perforce, a great actor. Lancaster too gives a fine account of the First Sergeant with no desire for promotion and the central women — Kerr and Donna Reed — are equally fine, Kerr even producing a more than creditable American accent and Reed giving a performance no one expected her capable of, including Zinnemann, who had accepted her casting with reservations.

Although the movie pushed at the edges of the Production Code in regard to sexual relations there was some inevitable bowdlerization: Thus, the brothel Reed’s character works in was changed to a dance-hall, yet I doubt many people who saw the picture in 1953 had any difficulty figuring out that the girl was a whore. In exchange for being permitted to shoot at Schofield Barracks, however, the filmmakers had to compromise on some of Jones’ harsher material, especially in the matter of Maggio’s “treatment” at the hands of the sadistic stockade commander “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine). In the event, Zinnemann’s being made to eschew depicting the violence against Maggio may be in the movie’s favor, since we’re forced to imagine what’s been done to him, making his death scene after he escapes all the more poignant; Fatso’s own violent death is depicted aslant, making us wonder at the outcome of his fight with Prewitt until the latter emerges from the shadows. Taradash’s screenplay is marked by its intelligence, and the black-and-white cinematography, the work of Burnett Guffey, is exemplary. The head of Columbia, the monstrous Harry Cohn, initially insisted on color but Zinnemann prevailed, and the movie benefits from this, the monochrome images shimmering on the screen. (Among other pictures, Guffey, who had been in movies since 1928, later shot Bonnie and Clyde. That should give you an idea of how good he was.) The fine supporting cast includes Philip Ober as Kerr’s philandering martinet of a husband, Mickey Shaughnessy, Jack Warden, Merle Travis as a blues-singing Private, Claude Akins as one of the bullies who tries to break Clift and, in an uncredited role, the future screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who endures a shocking death by Japanese tracer-fire.

There was, by the way, a hilarious spoof of From Here to Eternity on “Your Show of Shows,” in which the Lancaster and Clift characters were more or less combined, as were Kerr’s and Young’s. The beach scene was brilliantly parodied, with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca getting periodically doused with what are pretty obviously buckets of water thrown at them from unseen stagehands. It gets funnier and funnier. It even got to Coca, who seldom cracked on camera but who pretty much loses it here, turning her head and burying her face on Caesar’s shoulder to hide her hysteria from the audience.

***^{Laughter among the ruins: Olivier, Hepburn and Cukor share a moment of levity during the filming.}***

Love Among the Ruins (1975) This charming, witty period comedy by James Costigan, although admired, was, somewhat surprisingly, not a ratings success. (I was watching the filmed version of George Furth’s play Twigs starring Carol Burnett that night, and I remember that deciding which to see between these two nearly engendered the 14-year-old’s equivalent of a nervous breakdown.) Despite its low viewer rating, the picture won multiple Emmys, losing only in the “Outstanding Special” category, to a TV-movie starring Judd Hirsch called “The Law,” which seems to have vanished into obscurity. I don’t know whether its author originally intended it as a play — Costigan proposed it as a 1960s television project for Lunt and Fontanne, who apparently objected to being likened to ruins and withdrew — but it feels like a stage comedy, with few scenes occurring on the London streets and most set in drawing rooms, the Old Bailey or the Inns of Court and the action rising as it might in a boulevard comedy. In any case, the dialogue sparkles with graceful aperçus, in a fashion that recalls the stage plays of Wilde and Coward and S.N. Behrman, and the stars, Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn, parry and thrust with their lines like the expert verbal and dramatic fencers they were.

Olivier was so often touted, in those years, as The World’s Greatest Actor, and accepted in that designation by people who had never seen him, that it was perhaps easy to forget what a superb comedian he was (although his performance opposite Michael Caine in the 1972 two-hander Sleuth should have reminded audiences of that). He’s especially funny in outrage, to which Hepburn’s maddening character repeatedly drives him; when he opens his eyes wide or screws up his face in disbelief as his voice rises to a sort of half-strangled masculine screech and his word pile up in a heated rush, he’s one of the premiere screen comedians of his age and weight. Hepburn’s role is perhaps less showy, but because we know what she refuses to reveal, until the climax anyway, her characterization becomes fascinating, an onion that resolutely refuses to be peeled. There are two wonderful supporting turns, by Colin Blakely as Olivier’s courtroom rival and Richard Pearson as Hepburn’s solicitor, and the director, Hepburn’s old friend and crony George Cukor, keeps the pace and the performances clicking along brightly. Douglas Slocombe’s photography, like John Barry’s delightful score, is exactly what is required, although you will undoubtedly notice how assiduously he protected the aging Hepburn, who seems shot not just through gauze but gauze, Vaseline and perhaps lace curtains as well.

Missing (1982) The exceptional adaptation by Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart of Thomas Hauser’s book on the political arrest, torture and murder of a young American in Chile for the crime of told told too much, superbly acted by Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. The talented cast also includes Melanie Mayron, John Shea (as Charles “Charlie” Horman, the murdered man), Charles Cioffi as a creepy Naval Captain, David Clennon, Richard Venture (as the thinly-disguised Ambassador Nathanial Davis), Joe Regalbuto (as another murdered American), Keith Szarabajka and Janice Rule, as a reporter helpful to both the victim and his survivors… imagine.

The Cameraman (1928) A very funny Buster Keaton feature, his last under a new contract with MGM in which he had any level of autonomy. Although the picture was popular, the studio was determined to clamp down on Keaton’s independence; he later called his signing with Metro “the worst mistake of my life.” Buster, who also produced, stars as a New York City tintype portrait photographer who realizes (in 1928!) that the motion-picture camera is making his profession obsolete. Some of the movie’s brightest moments have little or nothing to do with the plot, such as Keaton’s impromptu pantomime of a baseball game, his riding on the outside of an omnibus and his experience at a communal swimming pool, although I don’t find the sequence in which he has to share a tiny dressing space with an overbearing Edward Brophy funny because I am constitutionally incapable of laughing at bullies, or at the trouble they cause their victims. (Maybe that’s why I’ve always been uneasy about Donald Duck?) Edward Sedgwick was the director, and the story is credited to Clyde Bruckman and Lew Lipton, but on a Keaton picture that doesn’t mean much. (The story was his and, I assume, most of the gags.) Marceline Day is charming as Buster’s inamorata, and the simian “Josephine” is wonderful as the monkey he inadvertently picks up while filming a violent tong war in an otherwise remarkably non-stereotyped Chinatown.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) A nearly perfect Disney feature, at the time the most modern full-length cartoon the studio had ever released and among the six or seven best hand-drawn movies Walt’s animators produced in his lifetime.

The Third Man (1949) In the interviews that make up their book This is Orson Welles, Welles defined Harry Lime as a great “star part,” comparing it to a 1913 stage play called Mr. Wu in which Wu (whom Welles claimed he once played in the theatre) is discussed by the other characters for an entire act. Just before intermission a figure enters and intones, “I am Mr. Wu…”, leading the audience, buzzing between the acts, to marvel at that wonderful actor who plays Mr. Wu! Harry is discussed by everyone in The Third Man for over 50 minutes before Welles’ famous entrance in the dark of the Vienna night, supposedly revealed by a single light from a window across the street — it must have been the Luxor Lamp of post-war lightbulbs — during which he smiles wryly at getting caught, seemingly abashed by his own irresistible theatricality. Graham Greene’s divided-city mystery/thriller, his most famous “entertainment,” was wonderfully (if somewhat floridly) directed by Carol Reed and contained more memorable moments in its 104 minutes than any comparable popular movie since Casablanca, another romantic melodrama set in a turbulent time and place.

How to Murder Your Wife (1965) George Axelrod’s black comedy of misogyny divided a lot of opinion in 1965 and it’s impossible to imagine anyone making it today, or even thinking about doing so, even if it does wind up by endorsing marriage and women equally. Jack Lemmon plays the confirmed bachelor unexpectedly wed, after a drunken debauch, to the former inhabitant of a bachelor-party cake (Virna Lisi) who cannot speak a word of English. Although Lemmon responds all too enthusiastically to the more sybaritic aspects of marital life, the whole business quickly palls and he begins to fantasize a way out, at least for his successful spy comic-strip star Brash Brannigan, whom he has also married off. The picture is broad and, when Lemmon is put on trial for murder at the climax, just plain silly (no one thinks to look for Lisi’s body?) It’s also, despite the odds, very funny. Richard Quine directed with good pace, Harry Stradling’s color cinematography is mouth-watering, and in his infectious musical score Neal Hefti develops at least six distinct, complete melodies. Eddie Mayehoff gives his standard hilarious characterization as Lemmon’s lawyer, Claire Trevor is surprisingly arch as his wife, and Terry-Thomas is a wonder as Lemmon’s butler. Among the rich supporting cast: Sidney Blackmer, Jack Albertson (“Brrrrtt! Right up the wall!”), Max Showalter, Alan Hewitt, Mary Wickes, Howard Wendell and Khigh Dhiegh. Actually, I don’t think the movie is misogynist as much as it is anti-marriage, or at any rate, anti-wife. Does that make it any less offensive to women? Probably not, but it still makes me laugh.

The Yakuza (1974) An interesting exercise in East-West tensions refracted through the traditional Japanese yakuza gangland thriller. The picture suffers from too much exposition, badly handled both by the writers (Paul Schrader and Robert Towne,‡ from a story by Leonard Schrader) and the director (Sydney Pollack), and Pollack’s refusal to use English subtitles renders long dialogue sequences featuring Ken Takakura utterly incomprehensible to a non-Japanese speaker. (To see what you’re missing, turn on the Blu-ray’s subtitle feature.) Yet it’s fascinating to watch, particularly with Robert Mitchum in the American lead. Mitchum plays a man in love with Japan, whose post-war experience during the American occupation — which of course has never ended — left him bereft of the love of his life when he crossed her brother (Takakura). It’s a stylish movie, beautifully shot in widescreen by Kozo Okazaki, which despite my reservations about Pollack as a filmmaker I must admit he was highly skilled in framing.§ Dave Grusin provided a fine, atmospheric musical score and the cast contains riches: Takakura, at once stoic and almost shockingly adept with a sword; Herb Edelman as Mitchum’s old pal, an American who put down roots in Tokyo; Keiko Kishi as Mitchum’s great love; and Brian Keith as his employer, who is not as trustworthy a crook as he wishes his compatriots to believe. As Mitchum’s bodyguard, Richard Jordan gives the sort of total performance that causes you to wonder how a young man that handsome, and that accomplished, never became an important actor in American movies. James Shigeta, who improved every picture he was in just by showing up, plays Takakura’s sage, and quietly dangerous, older brother. What stays with you about The Yakuza is its expression of psychic pain; nearly every character in it is in some kind of agony, and they keep visiting it on each other without meaning to, which in turn makes that pain equally unbearable to the one who causes it.

The Dark Horse (1932) A very amusing political satire, something American movies used to turn out on a regular basis but which the toxic partisanship of modern life has rendered entirely off-limits. (You can still write a satire, but if it doesn’t target Republicans, leftists or the non-aligned, good luck getting it produced.) Warren William plays what we would now call a political consultant, a fast-talking con artist who is let loose on a corrupt gubernatorial campaign and catapults a complete nonentity into the governor’s mansion. My revealing the ending will in no way mitigate your enjoyment of this sharp, cynical exercise which features the young Bette Davis as Williams’ inamorata, Vivienne Osborne as an ex-wife with the soul of an adding machine, Frank McHugh as an eager political operative and the genial Guy Kibbee as the unlikely candidate, of whom William memorably observes, “He’s the dumbest human being I ever saw. Every time he opens his mouth he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.”

That line sounds like the work of Wilson Mizner, who wrote the screenplay with Joseph Jackson. Wilson and his brother Addison were the subject of an aborted Irving Berlin musical in the 1950s and, many decades later, emerged on the stage in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s later project, which went under several titles over a number of years (Wise Guys, Gold!, Bounce and, finally, Road Show). The director of The Dark Horse, Alfred E. Green, began in pictures in 1916, eventually guiding Colleen Moore in eight of her vehicles including Sally (1925), Irene and Ella Cinders (both 1926). He also made three with George Arliss including Disraeli (1929) and The Green Goddess (1930); the somewhat notorious Baby Face (1933) starring Barbara Stanwyck; Dangerous (1935), which won Davis an apology Oscar; the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937); and The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939), a Philo Vance vehicle also starring Warren William. His work on The Dark Horse is fast and clean, and the sharp black-and-white cinematography was by Sam Polito. For those interested in trivia, the Blackfoot Chief who gives Kibbee a ceremonial headdress is played by Jim Thorpe.

Thanks once again to my perspicacious friend Eliot M. Camarena for the recommendation!

*I understand that Jones’ editors or publisher demanded he remove some homosexual content from the original manuscript of his novel, which his heirs returned to a recent edition. Not having read the novel I have no idea what this may entail, although the author was allegedly (i.e., according to a Wikipedia entry) open about his own sexual experiences in that area.

†The truth of Sinatra’s casting was less dramatic, but nearly as grubby: he was pestering his wife Ava Gardner on the African location of John Ford’s Mogambo, and to get him out of her hair (and to allow her to philander in peace) she allegedly insisted that Cohn use him as Maggio.

‡If Towne is present, can Edward Taylor be far behind?

§On the Yakuza commentary Pollack says he gave up shooting in widescreen, which he loved, once he realized how badly his pictures were being cropped, and panned-and-scanned, for home video. He wasn’t alone.

The dogs move on: “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (1961)

By Scott Ross

“Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.” — Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians

A nearly perfect Disney feature, released in the year of my birth, One Hundred and One Dalmatians was at the time the most modern full-length cartoon the studio had ever released and remains among the six or seven best hand-drawn movies Walt’s animators produced in his lifetime.* It was based on the beguiling 1956 novel by Dodie Smith and while hipper and less cozily “English” in tone, the movie respects the book, hewing more closely to the author’s plot and characters than any other Disney adaptation; P.L. Travers, who loathed the movie Disney made of Mary Poppins, would have envied Bill Peet’s fealty to Smith’s book. Smith was so delighted with Peet’s work she felt his story was an improvement on hers and his sketches of her characters superior to Janet and Anne Grahame-Johnstone’s original illustrations. I think she was being over-generous on that score, as the Grahame-Johnstone pen-and-ink drawings are inextricably linked to my love for that book, a favorite since I first read it after the movie was reissued when I was eight.†

Reading Smith’s novel (called The Hundred and One Dalmatians) again recently, many decades on from my first exposure to it, I was struck by how wittily she limns her balanced canine/human world, each with its own (and to the inhabitants of the other, at least somewhat incomprehensible) language and practices, much of which Peet managed to slip into his screenplay without ostentation. Smith’s most ingenious device — the Twilight Barking — is wonderfully replicated in the movie, as are most of her splendid characters. Peet combined Pongo’s slightly dim but courageous spouse Missis and the fortuitous wet-nurse for their 15 puppies, Perdita, into a single figure; renamed the Dalmatians’ human pets Mr. and Mrs. Dearly as Roger and Anita Radcliffe and changed Saul Baddun to Horace; rechristened the litter’s runt Cadpig as “Lucky” (an existing pup in Smith’s literary litter); brought the amusingly masculine/feminine servant “couple” Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler together into a single Nanny; and altered the sex of the female tabby cat Tibs, who became the take-charge, male Sergeant Tibbs in the picture. Aside from compressing some of its events, Peet left the narrative largely alone, although Smith’s dread collector of furs Cruella DeVil is in the movie both more comic (she sometimes seems like a caricature of Tallulah Bankhead) and at times more terrifying. In the novel there is a strong hint that Cruella has actual devils in her family tree, and Peet eliminated the dinner party scene in which every victual on the DeVil menu somehow tastes of pepper including the ice-cream, how she habitually overheats her home and the way, while searching for the Dalmatians in the English countryside she stops to warm herself at a building fire. (He also eliminated the timid furrier Mr. DeVil, who is no great loss, and the couple’s perpetually abused Persian cat, who is… although I can understand why she was dropped, if only for the purposes of streamlining the story; a 79-minute movie is not a 200-page novel, after all.) There is as well more slapstick-type humor in the movie, of a kind we now associate with Disney features but which up to 1961 was prevalent mostly in the studio’s cartoon shorts. A couple of Smith’s wittiest lines made it into the picture, however, and I was surprised on reading it again to discover that the “What’s My Crime?” television quiz program, which feels amusingly exaggerated and thus original to the movie, was hers as well. (A wonderful line that didn’t make it into the movie: When a group of gypsies attempts to trap the dogs and their 96 pups on the trek back to London and one of its caravan horses thwarts the move as the gypsies’ dogs, penned up in the wagons, raise a ruckus, Pongo sagely observes, “The caravans bark but the dogs move on.” I suppose my old-fashioned delight at the way Smith turned that maxim on its head, accompanied as it is by her, and my, citing of the “racist” word gypsy, puts me beyond the pale.) My favorite chapter in the book, in which before a warming fireside Pongo and Missis appear to an elderly country gentleman as the ghosts of his beloved past pets, has a wistfulness and a gentle, sad sweetness whose tone would be all wrong for a comic animated feature of the early ’60s; like the moment in The Wind in the Willows when Mole, after his and Rat’s long travels, smells his home, it’s unforgettable for a sensitive child (or at least it was for this sensitive former child) but its mood is perhaps too contemplative for fast-paced, fantastic moviemaking, and ultimately too literary.

**^{That’s the director Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman pushing a mock-up of Cruella’s car through prop-snow.}**

One Hundred and One Dalmatians was made possible by Ub Iwerks’ experiments with Xerox photography (all those spots to draw, ink and paint…) He was able to transfer the animators’ drawings directly to cels, which not only eliminated the inking process but retained the quality of the original penciled art. The animators were delighted; they’d long felt a lot of soul was lost between their drawings and the finished, painted cels. Others were less enchanted. Walt Disney for one disliked the look of the picture, although it’s notable that he didn’t put a stop to the process; anything that saved animation money was difficult to dismiss. As a child I was struck by the look of Cruella’s red roadster, particularly when the driver ran into a snowbank and backed out to extricate herself and the dirty snow seemed to move and drift in a way that didn’t look to me like hand-drawn animation. Only decades later did I discover that, to save costs, the DeVil car was constructed out of cardboard and filmed separately before being added to the drawings, another innovation the Xerox process made possible. (As I write these words I hear the shade of Richard Williams growling, “If you want to save work, what on earth are you doing in animation?” Ah, but, Richard: I said “costs,” not “work.”) While Peet sketched out the characters, it was Ken Anderson, taking inspiration from the cartoonist Ronald Searle, who designed the look of the picture, in particular its strikingly modern, UPA-esque backgrounds, so at odds with traditional Disney layouts that Walt despaired of them, fearing the “fantasy element” of his movies was being lost. He had a point, although Anderson’s work perfectly matches the “unfinished” Xerox quality of the drawings.

Speaking of those drawings: Marc Davis was solely responsible for Cruella, taking great inspiration from her voice, that of the marvelous Betty Lou Gerson. (He also used Gerson’s cheekbones.) Davis later said Gerson’s voice “was the greatest thing I’ve ever had a chance to work with. A voice like Betty Lou’s gives you something to do. You get a performance going there, and if you don’t take advantage of it, you’re off your rocker.” No one could say Davis didn’t take that advantage; with her voice like a diamond cutting glass and her outré movements and mannerisms (Mary Wickes was her live-action model) Cruella was arguably the most memorable Disney villain since Lady Tremaine in Cinderella. Children could laugh at her even while enjoying the chill that ran down their backs at the ghastly close-up of her maddened skull during the climactic chase. Rod Taylor was an appropriately loveable and stalwart Pongo; Ben Wright (26 years later the voice of Grimsby in The Little Mermaid) was his pet Roger, a struggling songwriter here instead of Smith’s accounting wizard; J. Pat O’Malley gave voice to both Jaspar Badun and Colonel, the charmingly Blimp-y old sheepdog; George Worlock was the dim-witted Horace; and Martha Wentworth the cuddlesome Nanny (she was later, in a complete contrast, Mad Madam Mim in The Sword and the Stone). Other voices included Dave Frankham (Tibbs and the Skye terrier), Tom Conway (the Collie, who looks just like him), George Pelling (Danny, the Great Dane at Hampstead), and Thurl Ravenscroft (as Captain, the horse who gives the Badduns a memorable exit from his barn.) Bill Lee, who would later vocalize for Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music, gave Roger his singing voice.

Eight of the Nine Old Men worked on the picture, whose direction was credited to Wolfgang Reitherman, Hamilton Luske and Clyde Geronimi. (Only Ward Kimball was absent, presumably at work on his ill-advised live-action Babes in Toyland.) Eric Larson directed the animation on Tibbs, John Lounsbery did the Badduns, Ollie Johnson animated Perdita and Frank Thomas, perhaps the most gifted of the Nine, was responsible for Pongo, that most appealing of all Disney heroes. (At eight I already knew that real Dalmatians aren’t as handsome as he was.) This is one of those rare pictures in which everything works, from the charmingly designed, witty main titles to the smile-inducing finale. George Bruns provided the apposite, and surprisingly plangent, score largely based around Mel Levin’s spritely melody for the un-used “Playful Melody,” and Levin wrote the movie’s occasional songs, including of course that perennial favorite “Cruella DeVil.” Trivia note: The first time I heard Charles Strouse’s melody for the Annie song “A New Deal for Christmas” I was struck by how closely it resembled Levin’s “Dalmatian Plantation.” One of those curious mysteries of compositional coincidence, like the relationship of Henry Mancini’s “Charade” to “Silent Night,” or Sondheim’s “No One is Alone” in Into the Woods to, of all things, Leslie Bricusse’s “The Candy Man” in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Speaking of dogs, the alert viewer will note incongruous but enjoyable cameos in One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Jock, Peg, Bull and the silhouettes of Tramp and Lady from that other Disney picture centered around canines.

*The others, in the order of my preference: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp and The Jungle Book. Although it has never been a favorite, in look, if not in total achievement, I should also add Bambi.

†I also loved, when I discovered it a few years later, Smith’s sequel. The wholly fantastic The Starlight Barking introduced me, at 12, to the concept of metaphysics.

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So few critics, so many poets

"If you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets." – Pauline Kael

Monthly Report: April 2024

Through the window: “King of Hearts” (Le Roi de cœur, 1966)

Ah, wilderness!: “Those Calloways” (1964)

Perfectly swell romance: The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Pictures (1933 – 1939)

Monthly Report: March 2024

Waist deep in the Big Muddy

Monthly Report: February 2024

Ten lustrums on… “Rooster Cogburn” (1975)

Monthly Report: January 2024

The dogs move on: “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (1961)