"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
“Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast.” — Scott Joplin, quoted in the epigraph to E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime
Before I say anything about Miloš Forman and Michael Weller’s rather disastrous adaptation of Doctorow’s 1975 masterpiece, a confession: When I first saw it, at 20, without having read the novel, I thought it was marvelous… and then I read Doctorow’s book. Aside from being dazzled by the author’s tightrope act of pastiche, his command of his artistic and historic materials and the panoramic sweep of his narrative, I became instantly aware that this was entirely literary material. It was not meant, and could not be made, to be filmed except perhaps by an imaginative poet of cinema, and where was he to be found? I doubt even Robert Altman, who wanted to make a two-part, six-hour version based on Doctorow’s original and more faithful screenplay, could have managed it. Who has, or had, the wit to film Ragtime as a kaleidoscope? Who possessed the visual and editorial flair to match the novelist’s whimsy? Who had the poetic vision to make a movie equivalent of the immigrant Tateh’s little animated flipbook, something that might capture the contours of the writer’s imaginative leaps yet erupt with its own sense of wonder? I felt much the same way about the far more artistically and financially successful musical theatre version decades later; it’s better than Forman’s movie, but that isn’t saying much, and sometimes it gets the tone exactly wrong, as in the high-spirited baseball game number, so utterly at odds with Doctorow’s somber observations… although at least Stephen Flaherety’s wonderful music is superior generally to Lynn Ahrens’ earthbound lyrics.* In an irony surely lost on no one who saw the movie, the show was staged cinematically, and with infinitely greater imagination, than its predecessor. Still, Ragtime‘s is prose that, like Fitzgerald’s in The Great Gatsby, defies transliteration. Doctorow wrote his doomed, epic screenplay out of a sense of self-preservation but Ragtime was such a phenomenon it was going to be filmed, whether it should or not; it had made too much money for its publisher not to become a movie.
Since I saw Ragtime twice that season, once before reading the novel and a second time after, I was surprised on seeing it again how little of it resonated with me visually or remained, even vaguely, in my memory — especially since the contemporaneous Redsmade so marked an impression on me in every way but especially in Warren Beatty’s extraordinarily accomplished direction. Aside from the occasional comic touch, such as Elizabeth McGovern’s Evelyn Nesbit being caught in flagrante delicto with Brad Dourif’s Younger Brother and playing the rest of the scene in entirely un-shocked immodesty, Forman’s staging is mostly square and unmemorable, matched by Weller’s plodding, literalist adaptation. Nesbit, although surely no intellectual giant, is turned by these two into such a gabbling, whorish moron one half expects her shade to sue for slander, and McGovern’s alternately shrill and slack-jawed performance is no help either. It’s left to the better actors to salvage something from the set of attitudes they’ve been asked to play and, to their credit, many of them (Dourif, Robert Joy as Harry K. Thaw, Howard E. Rollins as Coalhouse Walker, Kenneth McMillan as a bigoted bully, Jeff Daniels as a well-meaning constable, Mary Steenburgen as Mother, James Olson as Father, Moses Gunn as Booker T. Washington and even — surprisingly — the usually insufferable Mandy Patinkin as Tateh) succeed, against the odds. Others, like Jeffrey De Munn as Harry Houdini, have roles that barely register, while Debbie Allen as the mother of Coalhouse’s child, is presented so enigmatically she is less un-worldly and innocent than repellently idiotic. (Of course, the filmmakers are too timid to depict her abandoned newborn infant as buried in the garden, or to show Mother discovering him; it’s left to the family’s maid to stumble across the baby, removing Mother’s initial maternal bond with the boy.)
Mariclare Costello: The Emma Goldman who almost was.
Arguably, the best performance in the movie was one no one outside of its making ever saw: Mariclare Costello’s wonderfully fulsome portrait of Emma Goldman, preserved in the “Paramount Presents” Blu-ray’s workprint edition and as an extra on the first disc. Some contemporary observers, such as a typically ignorant David Thompson in Film Comment, believed the role had been axed due to Beatty’s use of Goldman in Reds, but it seems her scenes were cut at the order of the producer, Dino De Laurentiis, seconded by Doctorow himself. And aside from their crude rendering of Evelyn Nesbit, the screenwriters (Bo Goldman was uncredited) and the director also rob her of her affection for Tateh’s adorable little daughter, and her basic humanity: In the novel, when Goldman singles her out, anonymously, at a rally to which Tateh has taken her, Evelyn is mortified; in the director’s working cut of the movie, she’s publicly called a whore and is too dumb to even be offended. She just stands there grinning. Poor Tateh too is leached of his horrific working-class experiences, including his narrow escape with the Little Girl from the impending violence at Lawrence, Massachusetts which leads him to ride endlessly on trains and trollies until he finds salvation selling novelties in Philadelphia. It’s crucial to understanding how Tateh becomes “Baron Ashkenazy,” the moving-picture director, that his leftist radicalism is worn away by his experiences, to the point where popular art is not merely a personal expression but a means of clawing his way out of the cycles of poverty. Forman & Company show us none of this.
Goldman was at least included in Weller’s script and her sequences filmed. Aside, briefly, from Washington and those in Nesbit’s orbit, few of the other historical figures (Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, Emiliano Zapata) of the novel even make a newsreel appearance. These characters are not mere window-dressing; Doctorow uses them cannily, weaving their public faces into the mosaic and, in the cases of Ford and Morgan, exposing them privately for their sense of noblesse oblige and self-proclaimed godhood while Freud is seen as affronted by America’s noise, wondering when he speaks to Americans if they will even be able to hear him. Their loss (and especially Houdini’s, which seems to me egregious) is, again, due to Forman’s and De Laurentiis’ square picture-making, removing the very thing about a book that makes it unique in order to “streamline” the narrative. It’s all rather typical: You buy the rights to a novel because it’s different, and then do everything you can to flatten it out.
Example: Although the poster art featured a pointed variation on it, the filmmakers didn’t even make use of Charles Dana Gibson’s famous silhouette of Nesbit, “The Eternal Question,” which in the novel Younger Brother hangs on his bedroom wall. Needless to say, there is no screen equivalent of the “great filamented spurts of jism that traced the air like bullets and then settled slowly over Evelyn in her bed like falling ticker tape” as Young Brother tumbles from the closet in Goldman’s room, a passage the librarians in my high school, gigging, passedbetween each other and which online idiots now refer to as a “violent sexual act.” (A violent act of masturbation?) I wouldn’t have wanted to see that particular moment preserved on the screen, mind you. But at least it would have suggested the people who put Ragtime together had some sense of daring or even a bit of healthy vulgarity.
Instead, desperate for a “name” to exploit, Forman brought James Cagney out of retirement to play Rheinlander Waldo, the Police Commissioner who is given a passing mention in the novel. (The figure who oversees Coalhouse Walker’s siege of the Morgan Library in the book is the Manhattan D.A. Charles S. Whitman; both he and Waldo were decades younger than Cagney at the time of the action.) It was amusing to see Cagney on a big screen in 1981, Weller’s dialogue for him so obviously tailored to his brash persona. But he feels like a distraction, his role expanded to justify his appearance. His old co-star and compatriot Pat O’Brien in a way fares better; his face and acting style having been largely forgotten by the movie-going public, he is able to simply (and effectively) play his scenes as one of Thaw’s lawyers without having to stand as a symbol, or an eminence grise. The best things about Ragtime, it seems to me now, are the sets and costumes and Randy Newman’s typically quirky, beautifully crafted score, which respects Scott Joplin without slavishly copying him.
It struck me while watching Ragtime for the first time in decades that there is no way anyone could get away with it today. The depiction by Weller, Forman and McGovern of Nesbit would be not only be decried as sexist (which is certainly what it feels like) but the “woke” mob of know-nothings would demand that she be made a heroine instead of, as Emma Goldman suggests to her, the victim of every man she ever met. Even more unforgivable would be the portrayal of a black man as terrorist, regardless of the events that compelled his terrorism and his own awareness that he has allowed his rage to carry him to extremes. Indeed, were Doctorow alive and publishing Ragtime now, it would almost certainly be removed from bookstores at the screeching demand of young liberals for whom no history or reality is permitted save the one they have convinced themselves is “correct.”
Speaking of such things: One of the usual gang of idiots writing the Wikipedia entry on the novel claims of Doctorow’s patently obvious (and fully acknowledged) use of Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kolhause that “it is a matter of opinion among critics whether this constitutes literary adaptation or plagiarism.” Would a plagiarist attempting to pull the wool over reader’s eyes by “stealing” Michael Kolhause from Kleist give his own character the surname “Coalhouse”?
This is how stupid non-creative types like to imagine their artistic betters are. But then, as with those who wish to erase any history that makes them personally uncomfortable, they cannot themselves create, only tear down.
*Ahrens is that rarity in American musical theatre, at least until the 21st century (alas, it is now becoming the norm): The humorless lyricist. Imagine Betty Comden if all she and Adolph Green had ever written was A Doll’s Life.
Note the First: I do not by any means claim that this list, which I am posting in installments, is either exhaustive or definitive. It’s merely obsessive, and highly personal. This is my list, based on my experience, my likes and prejudices, my self-education and my reading. Your list will differ wildly. I merely mean to celebrate, and to recommend, a few books that influenced me and that you might also enjoy.
Note the Second: Although the numbered list, when it is finished, is meant to add up to 100, I am going to fiddle outrageously with the totals. When within a particular category a writer has a number of titles, or a series of books, or I mention a volume by someone else on the same or a similar topic, I will count them all as one entry.
It’s my party, and I’ll cheat if I want to.
When I first began to get interested in movies as something other than a pleasurable pastime I was fortunate to do so in the midst of a veritable explosion of interest in old pictures (most of which were, I realize with a shudder, far younger then than I am now) and a concomitant plethora of books about these movies as the so-called “film generation” of the late 1960s began to publish. In early adolescence I began to buy some of these books, and many of them are still in my library. As with anything one discovers in youth, I retain an affection for many of the movie books I encountered then. Since they are all what I consider good books, I feel no need to apologize for their inclusion here. Most of the titles below do reflect the period of my autodidactic education in film, and my current preference for movies of the past over the seemingly computer-conceived, written, directed and performed inanities of this so far appalling century. I have lost interest in new movies generally, and not because I’ve become a cranky old man — I’ll have you know I was a cranky young man — but because movies, at least in America, alienated me (and, I suspect, legions of others) by their nearly complete capitulation to sequels, remakes, comic-book adaptations and idiot comedy, as well as their disinterest in anything recognizably human. (I dunno, Marge. He sounds cranky to me.) (Yeah? Well, in your hat, fellah.)
I. Actors
Since, generally speaking, even the most self-excoriating memoirs are suspect if only because it’s given to very few to express complete honesty about themselves, their experiences or their memories, I tend to prefer biographies. There too, of course, we are at the mercy of expectation, and all too often, hackery. Fortunately, there have been a number of excellent titles, in both biography and memoir and, for lack of a better term, celebration.
1. “Don’t Fall Off the Mountain” Shirley MacLaine (1970)
The first of MacLaine’s periodic memoirs was also the freshest; here was a simultaneously sincere and sardonic voice, describing not only her early struggles, her mother-of-all-clichés discovery by Hal Wallis, her important roles (she’s especially piquant concerning her unusual research for Irma La Douce) and her travels, particularly in Africa and Tibet. Among the highlights: The day she slapped the closet-case gossip columnist Mike Connolly.
See also: You Can Get There from Here (1975) in which MacLaine chronicles her trip to China to film the documentary The Other Half of the Sky.
My Lucky Stars (1996) MacLaine’s acute dissection of the people with whom she’s worked, including what at the time was arguably the most incisive depiction extant of the manic-depressive wonder that was Frank Sinatra. That one cost her a decades-long friendship.
2. Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films John Mueller (1985)
Mueller’s is that rare thing: A useful coffee table book. Its author analyses every one of Fred’s dances, whether solo, duet or ensemble, using multiple frames from the pictures for which Astaire created them to illustrate his descriptions. The insights are often superb and if you occasionally disagree with their author (as when he derides both Judy Garland’s affecting emotional reading of Irving Berlin’s “Better Luck Next Time” in Easter Parade, and the song itself) you can still enjoy the pictures, which so lovingly piece together the joys and intricacies of Astaire’s choreography.
A more recent, 25th anniversary edition from Zip Publishing reproduces the frames in far better quality, with those from Astaire’s color pictures now… er… in color.
3. Changing Liv Ullmann (1977)*
A terse, tart, poetic, beautifully written book by a demonstrably great film actress. She is open about her relationship with Ingmar Bergman, revealing about the ways Hollywood attempted to make her a conventional mainstream figure, and amusing about at least one of her co-stars (Charles Bronson). One of the finest such memoirs ever written, in part because for Ullmann, how she tells her story, and what she has to say about it, is as important as the events she recounts from it.
“I have attained one dream – and acquired ten new ones in its place. “I have seen the reverse side of something that glitters.“
4. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book Arlene Croce(1972)
Although Pauline Kael in her New Yorker review quarreled a bit with some of Croce’s observations she also wrote, “I think it’s perfectly safe to say that this is the best book that will ever be written about Astaire and Rogers.” That may or may not be the case, but nothing I have read in the years since Croce’s book was published has even come close. The founder of Ballet Review magazine, Croce was for a quarter of a century the dance critic for the New Yorker, so she knew her apples. She was also a lively stylist; since reading this book 40-plus years ago I have been unable to watch the “Pick Yourself Up” dance in Swing Time without recalling what Croce wrote about the climax of it.
As with Astaire Dancing, Zip has also reissued this book with corrections by Croce and sharper frame reproductions.
5. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo: A Celebration of the Marx Brothers Joe Adamson (1973)
Speaking of published studies that haven’t been bettered, no analysis of the Marx Brothers has approached Adamson’s for breadth, intelligence, erudition or wit… although in 1973 he was pilloried for daring to be funny about the Marxes. This quintessential guide to the greatest of all comedy teams was, with The Marx Brothers Scrapbook (see below) my first exposure to Minnie’s boys, before I ever got to see one of their movies (Animal Crackers, in 1976) and the author’s quotations from the films, especially Groucho’s militantly anti-romantic dialogues with Margaret Dumont, made me weak from laughing. As a result of Adamson’s whetting my appetite for all things Marxist, I couldn’t wait to see the actual pictures, and if that is not the highest benefit of great writing about the movies, I’m not sure what is.
See also: Groucho Hector Arce (1979) The first biography of the Great Grouch, published just two years after his death, is still, somewhat shockingly, pretty much the only one of note. It’s both well researched and richly detailed; the author was an old friend of and ghost writer for Groucho, his book was authorized and he’d been working on it for years when his subject died.
Harpo Speaks! Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber (1961) Although its author makes too many sneering references to “fags” (not bad for someone who counted Alexander Woollcott as one of his best friends) Harpo’s book is for the most part as charming as the whimsical illustrations prepared for it by his beloved wife Susan.
Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends Charlotte Chandler (1978) A pleasant, wide-ranging collection of interviews with and about Groucho.
The Marx Brothers Scrapbook Groucho Marx and Richard J. Anobile(1973) Anobile, whose claim to minor fame was concocting books of frame enlargements with dialogue captions, got Groucho and a number of his friends to sit down for interviews, broken up with photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings and programs from the Marx Brothers’ stage shows and movies. The result was so interesting Groucho sued to stop publication, mostly over his own occasionally blue observations. Best example: The photo caption, for a group portrait of the cast of the Broadway Cocoanuts with a conspicuously empty chair at the center for Chico, who according to Groucho “was too busy fucking or playing pool.”
Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho’s House Steve Stoliar (1996) Vincent Canby described The Marx Brothers Scrapbook in his review of it as “funny, sad and revealing.” Stoliar’s memoir is all that and more. The young man who as a college student in the 1970s spearheaded the movement to get Universal to restore and reissue Animal Crackers came to work for Groucho as an archivist and stayed long enough to witness Marx’s companion Erin Fleming’s descent into narcissistic abuse, and Groucho’s own concomitant physical decline, undoubtedly hasted by Fleming’s increasing madness. He was still occasionally as sharp as ever: Toward the end when a nurse said she needed to see whether he had a temperature Groucho replied, “Don’t be silly. Everybody has a temperature.” I hear a movie is to be made of this book, with Geoffrey Rush as Groucho. (Hello, Academy nomination!) I’m sure the sale helped Stoliar’s bank account, but I hope the picture never happens. Why must we be confronted so frequently, not with great movie stars, but with facsimiles?
6. I.E., An Autobiography Mickey Rooney (1965)
I first got wind of this one in an admiring “movie book roundup” article in the late 1970s in the West Coast Review of Books and was surprised by how revealing it sounded of an actor I had scant knowledge of or opinion about beyond having moaned at his staggeringly insensitive caricature of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and enjoyed his “Let’s put on a show!” montage with Judy Garland in That’s Entertainment! So when a mass-market paperback met my eye in a second-hand book shop not long after, I snapped it up. There is something to be said for writing a memoir when you’re on your uppers; probably Rooney thought he had little to lose in letting down his hair, and although it’s been over four decades since I opened my copy there are a number of passages in it I recall without effort, such as Rooney’s comment on marriage to Ava Gardner (“The quality of [her] womanhood… had pinned me wriggling to a wall”) and L.B. Mayer’s throwing the studio’s one-time box-office savior bodily off the MGM lot for good. Years after reading his book I was unpleasantly surprised by the Rooney interviews in the Turner MGM documentary When the Lion Roared; I had been anticipating his reiterating his litany of complaints about the studio generally (and Mayer specifically) and was nonplussed by his mealy-mouthed, butter-wouldn’t-melt turnabout. Suddenly MGM was a wonderful place, no one at the studio ever hurt Judy Garland, and how dare anyone criticize it, or Mayer? I shouldn’t have been shocked, although I think I was right to be disgusted: This was the ageing Rooney speaking, the rediscovered Rooney, the post-Sugar Babies Rooney — the Rooney who was no longer a has-been but who had become an institution; naturally he had to defend his fellow institutions. While no one else can defend Rooney himself for Mr. Yunioshi, or indeed the young Mickey when he’s behaving almost like a feral Jerry Lewis prototype avant la lettre, like the little girl of fame, when he is good in a movie he is very good indeed. So is his book.
7. John Wayne’s America Garry Wills (1997)
I won’t say Wills’ magisterial study of the 20th century’s most popular American movie star changed my life. That would be absurd. It is, however, perhaps the most influential book about the movies I’ve ever read. It, and a weekend-long AMC film preservation festival of John Ford pictures about 20 years ago re-formed my ideas about Ford and Wayne, and indeed concerning the entire Western genre, about which I had been an appalling snob. My life has been considerably enriched since I invited these men and their movies into it, and I owe much to Wills’ book for relaxing my rigidity. He not only sees his subject plain, but with a fairness that is not sullied by ideological bent; books on Wayne prior to this one tended to be hagiographic, and written by either hacks or love-it-or-leave-it types, or both. Wayne for Wills is not the monolithic figure of rectitude favored by those who share the late movie star’s politics nor the hateful bugbear of left-liberalism but a man of strong gifts and beliefs, and equally strong contradictions and flaws. Wills brings a thoughtfulness to his subject that verges on, if it does not spill over into, genuine profundity.
8. The Laurel and Hardy Book Leonard Maltin, editor (1973)
This was the earliest movie book I ever purchased, at around age 12, and that copy is still in my collection. (And still in surprisingly good condition, all things considered). A nearly perfect pocket history of L & H, the book provides a complete filmography, including extensive lists of the dozens of shorts Stan and Babe made before their teaming, accounts of the filming of specific titles, and knowledgeable chapters celebrating the recurrent character actors (James Finlayson, Charley Chase. Arthur Housman, Charlie Hall) whose appearances were so indelible a part of Laurel&Hardyland. The Curtis Film Series was one of the happiest paperback events of the early 1970s, with, among other things, several titles written and/or edited by Maltin on child stars and character actors (The Reel Stars) as well as individual volumes on Boris Karloff, Don Siegel and Preston Sturges. About the only complaint one could lodge against the series was that the paper Curtis chose for it rendered the many photographs in each book notably fuzzy. (In the same period Curtis also produced mass market reprints, in conjunction with the Broadway musical olio Lorelei, of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes with, alas, poor facsimiles of Ralph Barton’s wonderful illustrations.) Naturally, the Curtis Film Series was a good thing that couldn’t last long; the publisher closed up shop in 1974.
See also: Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy: An Affectionate Biography of Laurel and Hardy John McCabe, Introduction by Dick Van Dyke (1966) The subtitle says it all. McCabe spent much of a lifetime researching and writing about L & H. He also established the international Sons of the Desert society for L&H aficionados. I don’t know how I neglected this lovely book on the first go-’round, but thanks to Eliot M. Camarena for the reminder!
Stan and Ollie: The Roots Of Comedy – The Double Life of Laurel and HardySimon Louvish (2001), which delves deeply into Stan’s extensive creative input, for better or worse, into the comedies he made with Babe Hardy.
9. Montgomery Clift Patricia Bosworth (1980)
Bosworth — her surname so appropriately close to Boswell — was an incisive, sympathetic biographer, which God knows Clift needed. She presents him in all his contradictory glory and effectively (if depressingly) limns Clift’s precipitous personal decline following his disfiguring 1955 automobile accident. For a man who from adolescence habitually stared at himself in mirrors, not merely in narcissism but apparently out of lust, losing his vaunted looks was a massive blow to Clift’s psyche. (Montgomery Clift makes it clear that, while Monty was bisexual, his chief attraction was to men.) That he was one of the most beautiful men ever to have been photographed by a movie camera is self-evident. That he brought a new style of acting to the screen, before Brando, and a remarkable sensitivity to his performances, has been largely forgotten. Bosworth reminds you why Clift was important.
See also: Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman (2011) Bosworth was a nearly lifelong friend to Fonda, and wrote what is, as far as I am aware, the most unflinching and honest portrait of her. Despite her having given some superb performances including what I maintain is the finest film portrayal of the last 50 years, the woman herself has long seemed to me confused to the point of needing professional help. Who else, in the turbulent 1960s, had to deliberately seek out a cause about which to concern herself (because everyone else had one) when they were practically growing on trees? Further, who, having finally decided on Vietnam as her cause, allowed herself to be manipulated into being photographed, laughing, with anti-aircraft machinery by the nation against which, whatever you think of that stinking conflict, her country was at war? Fonda’s family was practically the textbook example of dysfunctional, yet she has spent much of her life searching for a Daddy surrogate and marrying one after another. And while she considers herself a feminist, moreover, Fonda routinely pays the men who work for her more than the women. She is, in short, and for all her thespic gifts, exceptionally reactionary, even for Hollywood. Bosworth cannot tell you exactly why Fonda behaves as she does, but she gets the details down in all their painful prolificacy. After reading her book I still admire Jane Fonda the screen actress; I’d be a fool not to. But Fonda the woman sends shivers of despair up my spine.
10. Who the Hell’s In It: Portraits and Conversations Peter Bogdanovich (2004)
Forty years’ worth of appreciations of and interviews with several of the most durable of film stars, conducted by a man besotted by the movies. Although Bogdanovich could be repetitious (take a drink each time he writes that some couple or other “fell in love”) and a bit narrow-minded (no one he admired , even Cary Grant, could ever be anything other than absolutely heterosexual, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary) this is by and large a splendid collection.
See also: Pieces of Time: Peter Bogdanovich on the Movies (1973) A few of the chapters in Who the Hell’s In it appeared first in this smaller volume of Bogdanovich’s magazine writing and which includes a fascinating view of John Ford filming Cheyenne Autumn on location and a memorable interview with James Stewart in which the man I consider the finest of all American movie actors gave his interviewer his book’s title.
II. Animation
For nearly as long as I can remember, I have been under the spell of animated cartoons. As a child I was mad about them, more so than about any other form of filmed (or broadcast) entertainment, and much more so than anyone else I knew of my own age and weight. This extended to the comic books I also came under the thrall of even before I began to read on my own. I was an inveterate “funny animal” reader; Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny reprints, the Paul Murray Mickey Mouse and Goofy adventures and the Carl Barks duck stories were my meat, and the only humans who entered my comics universe were Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam, a few of the Harvey characters (and most of them were ghosts or imps) and, especially, the miraculous Little Lulu. I had no interest in superheroes then, and have little now.
But I see I’ve strayed from my text. Herewith a few of what I consider the best books on the animated cartoon.
11. The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons Jerry Beck (2010; reprinted 2020)
A terrific little book buttressed by hundreds of cell reproductions. You can argue with the choices, but fortunately the rankings are alphabetical rather than numerical. What’s Opera, Doc? isn’t the greatest cartoon ever made just because people keep saying it is; it’s not even the best Chuck Jones cartoon. But then, Citizen Kane isn’t Orson Welles’ best movie either, let alone the greatest ever made, and that pointless debate has gone on for decades.
My only real quarrel with Beck’s book: Why are the titles of these cartoon shorts listed as “Episodes”? Why don’t words mean what they mean any longer?
12. Bugs Bunny: 50 Years and Only One Grey Hare Joe Adamson (1990)
Adamson, one of the best things to happen to the study of classic movie comedy, turns his attention to the greatest of all cartoon stars. The book is not only beautifully laid out but wonderfully written, from its punning subtitle to the witty captions for the illustrations.
See also:Goofy: The Good Sport Walt Disney Studios (1985) Although this one suffers a bit from the way the studio was pushing “Sport Goofy” as a brand in the mid-’80s, it’s a nice little volume that pays tribute to my favorite animated cartoon character other than Bugs.
I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety Jerry Beck (1991) A nice volume on the adversarial team. Both characters were created, separately, by Bob Clampett, but redefined and put together by Friz Freleng for his peerless series of visual gag shorts.
13. Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist Chuck Jones (1989)
No creative artist has given me more pleasure throughout my life than Charles M. Jones. (Desert island cartoon: The Rabbit of Seville.) His thoughtfulness, erudition, wit and self-reflection made him a uniquely literary figure among animators. They could also overlard his later work with far too much philosophical verbosity. But these attributes were decided assets when he came to write his lavishly illustrated memoirs. Chuck Amuck was my favorite new book of its year, the volume I’d been pining for most of my life without knowing it.
See also: Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings Hugh Kenner (1994) This bright, intelligently written little monograph is a worthy addition to Jonesiana.
Chuck Redux: Drawing from the Fun Side of Life Chuck Jones (1996) Not as great a book as its predecessor, but well worth savoring.
14. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson (1984)
Two of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men” of animation, Thomas and Johnson were also best friends, next-door neighbors, beloved instructors for younger animators and authors of numerous informative books on the craft. This is their finest work, a rich, and richly illustrated, guide to Disney’s achievement. Thomas and Johnson (universally known at Disney as “Frank and Ollie”) were also masters at the art of character, or personality, animation; separately and together they were responsible for some of the loveliest sequences in feature animation: Ollie animated Smee in Peter Pan, the Stepsisters in Cinderella, Icabod Crane in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, King John in Robin Hood and, with Thomas, a great deal of The Jungle Book while Frank animated the dwarves weeping over Snow White’s coffin, Pinocchio’s performance of “No Strings on Me,” Cinderella‘s Stepmother, Captain Hook in Peter Pan, the wizard’s duel in The Sword in the Stone, Mary Poppins‘ dancing penguins, much of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet for the early featurettes and, supremely, the beautiful scene of Lady and Tramp eating spaghetti and exchanging an unexpected kiss. Whether evoking the movement of the natural world is or should be the ultimate goal of animation is highly debatable — Tex Avery’s cartoons don’t give a damn for reality, and there are none funnier — but there is no denying that the Disney artists in their full-length features approximated it better than anyone else. This treasurable volume shows you how.
While DVDs fall outside the purview of this survey, I also recommend the lovely 1999 documentary Frank & Ollie without reservation.
See also: Too Funny for Words: Disney’s Greatest Sight Gags Thomas and Johnson (1987) Thomas once recounted Walt at a story conference complaining, “You guys all think that the world is made up of gags! There isn’t one of you left who could write a lullaby or a love-affair romance in a picture, you all want gags, gags, gags!” Fortunately, most of those gags were good, many were brilliant and quite a few were masterful.
Treasures of Disney Animation Art Walton Rawls, ed. (1982) Not merely a quintessential coffee table book, but practically the size of a piece of furniture.
Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation John Canemaker (2001) A beautiful tribute, by a man who is not only an historian of the subject but an animator himself, of the master animators and animation directors on whom Walt relied, more and more as he became distracted by theme parks and other diversions: Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang (“Woolie”) Reitherman and Frank Thomas.
Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters: An Unauthorized Account of the Early Years at Disney’s Jack Kinney (1988) Kinney worked as an animator at the Walt Disney studios from 1932, eventually becoming the director of the great Goofy shorts (which no less an authority than Roger Rabbit called “genius”) in 1940. His book is a fascinating glimpse of the studio in its heyday, written with what one senses is a well-natured, and well-earned, bitterness: Kinney was offered the spot at MGM which Tex Avery eventually accepted, and was foolish enough to ask Walt’s advice about whether he should take it. Disney never forgave him for thinking about leaving. It took nearly 20 years but he finally edged Kinney out in 1958.
15. The Fleischer Story: A History of the Max Fleischer Cartoon Studio in the Golden Age of Film Animation, 1920-1942 Leslie Cabarga (1976; reissued 1988)
The first study of the Fleischers, by a writer and graphic designer who has become renowned for his own beautifully airbrushed Betty Boop art. From the silent Koko the Klown series Out of the Inkwell (revamped in the early 1960s and familiar to kids of my generation from TV syndication) to Betty to Popeye to the ill-advised feature pictures and Max’s horrific betrayal by Paramount which took everything he’d built up away from him forever. It’s all here, wonderfully illustrated and told with a sense both of excitement and regret.
There have been other overviews of animation, many of them with finer illustrations (see below) but none has had both the grasp of film history and developed sense of aesthetics Barrier displays in this tour de force volume. The author can be prickly, and more than a tick conservative, but this book, his superb critical study of Carl Barks and his marvelous overview Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books constitute a masterwork trilogy of rigorously intelligent popular history.
See also: Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation Charles Solomon (1989; Revised and Updated in 1994) A glorious brick of a book surveying the entirety of animation history to the early ’90s and bursting with beautiful illustrations, many in color.
Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation Reid Mitenbuler (2020) There’s very little that is either new or revelatory in this breezy chronicle, but it’s a very enjoyable (and, rara avis these days, well-written) concise history of the genre.
17. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons Leonard Maltin (Revised and Updated, 1980)
As a movie critic Maltin has been negligible. His taste tends to the middle-brow and, like a good liberal, he was slow to accept the emergence of serious movies by and about gay men and Lesbians. It is as a movie historian, therefore, that he has been of value, and this book is one of his finest, perhaps because (as with Joe Adamson) animation is clearly an abiding passion of its author. You’ll find here a survey of all the important animation studios and practitioners, from Winsor McKay to Ralph Bakshi, with complete filmographies for each, delicious illustrations, amusing captions and trenchant observations. This is one volume that belongs in every library of worthwhile movie books; when the revised edition appeared in 1980 I felt as if I’d been waiting for it my whole life.
See also: The Disney Films Leonard Maltin (1973; updated numerous times to 2000) A lively, well-illustrated critical guide, written with an historian’s knowledge and an enthusiast’s delight.
18. Pinocchio (Disney Editions Deluxe) Pierre Lambert (1997)
A dazzling visual portrait of my favorite animated movie. If I were forced, in some nightmare scenario, to keep only a single book on animation it would be this one. 236 glorious pages of backgrounds, sketches and finished cels. I hate even to acknowledge the existence of that degraded rag Entertainment Weekly (or, as it is known in my home, “EW!”) but this excerpt from the magazine’s review, posted on Amazon, sums the book up well: “[Lambert’s] exegesis of which artists did what… and of how their individual strengths were matched to particular characters and scenes… is invaluable. So is the fact that this book enshrines the fullest flowering of a medium increasingly overtaken by marketing concerns.”
See also: Pinocchio: The Making of the Disney Epic J.B. Kaufman (2015) More prosaic, and less lush, than Lambert’s book, but a thorough and respectable recounting of the making of a genuine animated masterpiece.
19. Tex Avery: King of Cartoons Joe Adamson (1975)
I owe my veneration of Tex Avery’s peerless MGM cartoons to a friend who videotaped and shared them with me in the early 1980s; due to the vagaries of syndication (and our family’s not having cable television after 1971) I had never seen them. I’m not sure I’d even heard Avery’s name at the time. Only animators, and hardcore animation fans, seemed to know who he was when Adamson wrote his, so far unequalled, appreciation. How he had time to interview Avery (and his best writer, Heck Allen — Mike Maltese to Avery’s Chuck Jones), see all the shorts, select his frame blow-ups and write this treasurable volume only two brief years after publishing Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, I can’t imagine. I will, however, be eternally grateful he did.
See also:“I Say, I Say… Son!”: A Tribute to the Legendary Animators Bob, Chuck and Tom McKimson Robert McKimson, Jr. (2012) A pleasant illustrated group biography on the least interesting of the six great Warner Bros. directors (the others were Avery, Freleng, Bob Clampett, Jones and, all too briefly, Arthur Davis) but one of its finest animators (Robert) as well as his gifted draftsman brothers (Chuck and Tom). Bob McKimson was often inspired, especially in his distinctive style, as an animator, of gesture. If his shorts as a director are less brilliant than those by Jones, Freleng and Clampett, he developed Foghorn Leghorn and Sylvester, Jr. (“Oh, father! How can I ever face the fellowth in Troop 12?”) and created Jack Warner’s favorite, the Tasmanian Devil. Doesn’t that just figure?
Now, can we please have a moratorium on the word “legendary” unless the subject under discussion is Mt. Olympus, the Nibelungenlied or King Arthur’s knights?
Animation: The Art of Friz Freleng — Volume OneFriz Freleng and David Weber (1994) I have never understood why Freleng, whom Chuck Jones considered one of the two certified geniuses with whom he had worked (the other was Avery) is not spoken of with the same reverence as that which now routinely greets the name of Bob Clampett. I suspect on one level it’s because his work was considered conventional; Freleng was less concerned with exploring great graphic design or cinematic technique than he was in creating strong characters and explicating physical gags. Freleng’s comedic gags are of a consistently high order, even in his lesser cartoons, and his best work makes me laugh harder than almost anything other than Jones’ and Avery’s masterpieces. This two-volume, numbered and slip-cased set, signed by Freleng, includes an audio and a video cassette and is heaven for the Freleng fanatic. What makes Freleng so treasurable, as I see it, is his relentless logic. When he sets up an elaborate gag sequence, the payoff is both inevitable and surreal. One example of many, from the brilliant Bad Ol’ Puddy Tat: After being ingested by Sylvester, Tweety takes over his body, turning him into a train and, with perfect cartoon logic, crashes the cat straight into a brick wall.
Tex Avery: The MGM Years, 1942-1955 John Canemaker (1996) If Adamson’s Avery book has a liability it’s that none of his illustrations is in color. Canemaker’s lovely celebration redresses the balance.
While we’re on the subject, why is there only one great book on Avery and not a single title for Clampett? With our luck, when we finally get one it’ll be by John Kricfalusi.
20. That’s All, Folks!: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation Steve Schneider (1988)
The first important book on what are now collectively referred to as Looney Tunes, a beautifully illustrated and reasonably thorough tribute to some of the best, and funniest, cartoons ever made.
See also:Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald (1989) Although the entries are largely given over to recapping the plots of the hundreds of cartoons contained within, this is the only book of its kind to incorporate the totality of Warner cartoons. The titles are arranged chronologically and separate cross-referencing lists in the index group them according to characters. Bonus: The many vintage lobby cards reproduced as illustrations.
Warner Bros. Animation Art Will Friedwald and Jerry Beck (1997) A gorgeous coffee-table book compiled by two of the most reliable and intelligent chroniclers of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.
*Below, the state, both of capsule literary criticism in 2022 and of the damaged brains of 21st century readers. Alert the presses! A book published in 1977 is old. And not just old but “so so old.” Oh. Well, to Hell with it, then. And while we’re at it, the Hell with Liv Ullmann. How must the little nit who wrote this inane drivel react when confronted with a Dickens novel or a play by Euripides or a Bach cantata or the goddamned Venus de Milo?
I’m not sure which depresses me more: The “review,” or that two other Amazon customers actually found it “helpful.”
You people are really not giving me reasons enough to keep living.
Charade (1963) Peter Stone’s deliciously intricate (and wholly improbable) comic/romantic thriller paired the two most charming actors in American movies for a romp that turned out to be one of the best entertainments of its age and which remains completely entrancing today. Audrey Hepburn is the bright, and resolutely un-hysterical, damsel in distress and Cary Grant is her knight and protector… or is he? Although the May-September pairing here replicates the perennial problem Hepburn had in being so poised and mature in her person that only older men seemed right for her, she and Grant were the reigning charmers of their time, so their meeting on the screen was probably inevitable. Fortunately that event was cocooned in a witty script by Stone, stylish direction by Stanley Donen, a prototypically snazzy Henry Mancini score with dark undertones and a plangent theme song containing a set of lyrics by Johnny Mercer which reflect his increasingly searching outlook during the period; all of his and Mancini’s important songs — “Moon River,”“Days of Wine and Roses,” “Charade,” “Whistling in the Dark” — convey a misty philosophical yearning, wedded to exquisite metaphor. Although the violence (and when not seen, its aftermath) is occasionally grisly, especially for the early ’60s, it’s offset by the taut thriller elements, like the nerve-wracking climax at the Paris Opéra. There’s also a superbly staged, photographed and edited fight on a slanted Parisian rooftop between Grant and a one-armed, lethal hook-wielding George Kennedy as the most frightening of the men seeking a stolen treasure. (The others are James Coburn, Ned Glass and, if you’ll forgive me giving a bit of the game away, Walter Matthau.)
Although Charade premiered just four years after North by Northwest, Cary Grant had aged perceptively in the interim: The distinctive jawline isn’t quite as firmly sculpted, and the hair is noticeably grayer. Despite the encroachments of the years, however, he remained the finest light comedian American movies ever produced, and one of its sexiest men. His lithe, feline physicality would be the envy of many males half his age, and his pleasing screen persona was entirely undiminished. When Hepburn asks, “Do you know what’s wrong with you?” and, smiling, answers her own question with a breathless, “Nothing,” it’s almost impossible to disagree.
This is how a master frames a grouping: All five of the principal actors in the scene are visible, yet there is nothing stagey about the composition.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Although at 68 he was still in full command of his material, John Ford faced studio cost-cutting on this picture which forced him to shoot on Paramount backlots, and in black-and-white. These limitations, added to his stars (John Wayne and James Stewart) being decades too old for their roles, impose an artificiality that this otherwise great, sad autumnal work has to struggle mightily to overcome. (Lee Van Cleef, who appears as one of Lee Marvin’s minions, claims that Paramount also imposed Wayne on Ford as box-office insurance, and that, probably as a result, Ford was even more cruel than usual toward his favorite star. Well, Stewart was still too old.) That it succeeds so well in spite of these compromises says something about Ford, about those two actors, and about the durability of the narrative. Based by the screenwriters James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck on Dorothy M. Johnson’s terse, downbeat short story, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is very much a John Ford movie, concerned this time with truth vs illusion and meditating on the wounds of impossible love. It’s a beautifully observed picture, wonderfully acted and if we ache to see what Ford and his gifted director of photography William H. Clothier might have achieved in real locations, its themes are perfectly plain. Anyone who thinks Ford is endorsing the “Print the legend” philosophy spoken by the Western editor at the end misses the point: Stewart comes clean about his own (in the literal sense) legendary past, and people would rather believe the lie than accept the heartbreakingly ironic truth. You’ve only to open a newspaper today to see how much Americans still need to believe in mythology.
Despite his superannuated appearance, Stewart gives his customary rich performance, and Vera Miles, as the young woman of interest to both men, is exquisite. She was obviously growing as an actress; why the hell did her subsequent career not reflect how good she’d become? It’s bracing to see the usually triumphant John Wayne playing, not a loser exactly but a man who loses what he loves through an act designed to bring happiness to the object of his desire, and he does it with an almost shocking bitterness. Lee Marvin, as Valance, unleashes a psychotic energy that, when it breaks, is terrifying. Edmund O’Brien, as the newspaper publisher Peabody, is delicious, and that genial tub of guts Andy Devine provides comic relief as a cowardly schnorrer of a marshal. Among the generally splendid cast are the almost impossibly pulchritudinous Woody Strode, Jeanette Nolan, John Qualen, John Carradine, Carleton Young and Denver Pyle. The only jarring notes come from the usually reliable Strother Martin, who giggles with insane (and patently forced) glee every time Liberty Valance turns his violence on another innocent. Since Valance himself is a psychopath, why did either he or the movie require another sadistic wacko as a useless hanger-on? Cyril Mockridge’s score is effective, although it’s undercut by Ford’s use of Alfred Newman’s plangent theme for Ann Rutlege from Young Mr. Lincoln. Although I normally deplore interpolations of music from one picture to another, that theme is so moving it transcends its source and proves quietly, devastatingly right here. Its very rightness, and beauty, however, obliterate the more prosaic themes Mockridge came up with.
Ride the Pink Horse (1947) As with the half-baked In a Lonely Place of 1951, this is yet another cinematic adaptation of a superb Dorothy B. Hughes novel that flattens the source. Although it’s more faithful generally than the Nicholas Ray picture, it suffers from either Production Code interference or the timidity of the people involved (who include, as scenarists, the redoubtable Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) in pushing the story to what should have been its grim conclusion. The studio-bound look of it doesn’t help much either; what should be by turns oppressive and banal becomes merely a prettified simulacrum of Hughes’ nightmare fiesta world. Even the motivations of the would-be blackmailer played by the director, Robert Montgomery, have been sweetened: Instead of intending to bleed a Senator who’s killed his wife — a woman, moreover, with whom the blackmailer was involved — Montgomery’s character is avenging a dead friend. To make us like him? Similarly, the children’s carousel run by the expansive Mexican who befriends the blackmailer has been altered; instead of being run entirely on the man’s physical labor, it’s mechanized. There’s a metaphor in that.
The maddening thing about all this is that Hughes’ specialized gift for depicting rot in the everyday should have been a perfect match for the makers of what would later be called film noir. Yet they kept softening her stories, or twisting them out of recognizable shape. Ride the Pink Horse is one of those pictures, like L.A. Confidential, that only those who have never read their source novels can love. What’s best about the movie is its supporting cast: Fred Clark as the mercurial, half-deaf Senator; Art Smith as a tough, weary and wonderfully expressive FBI agent; Wanda Hendrix as the solemn young Mexican girl who attaches herself to Montgomery; and Thomas Gomez as the loyal, utterly unimpeachable carousel operator. Gomez’s performance dances on the knife-edge of ethnic parody (it’s the same in the book.) Yet the character is so richly portrayed, and so ingratiating, that even as you may be thinking it’s too much you’re overwhelmed with affection for the man, and for the actor playing him.
Holiday (1938) The wonderful adaptation of Philip Barry’s comedy, beautifully directed by George Cukor and acted with feeling and aplomb by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Lew Ayres.
Click on the link above for a fuller review.
The Quiet Man(1952) John Ford’s rhapsodic comedy; his most mature depiction of romantic love, and his sexiest work.
Click on the link above for a fuller review.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon(1949) The second of John Ford’s post-war “Cavalry Trilogy,” and in many ways the best although it’s marred by some heavy-handed comedy relief.
Click on the link above for a fuller review.
February 2022
An American in Paris (1951) While flawed, this movie musical not only continues to look good; it looks better with every passing year.
Click on the link above for a fuller review.
Harold & Maude (1971) On the commentary for the Paramount Blu-ray of Colin Higgins’… is “offbeat” the word I am seeking?… comic romance the writer-director Cameron Crowe, who was in early adolescence when the picture was released, says he felt on seeing it that the movie was like a society he had not been asked to join. Even on multiple viewings, it’s still possible to feel that way about Harold & Maude, even as you’re enjoying the performances in it and the contours of Hal Ashby’s nearly perfect direction and editing of it. The picture can be a test of your tolerance for Ruth Gordon, who, like Maude herself, frequently teeters on the precipice of the deeply precious and some of the humor is strained — Harold’s one-armed military uncle comes to mind as an example of that — but much of the movie is winning, especially Cat Stevens’ songs and Harold’s hilarious fake suicides.
Although neither Harold nor Maude is fully explicable, Bud Cort as Harold acts as if they were. (He’s said to have announced to Ashby during his audition that he was Harold.) Cort was hard to place an actor; typecast as social misfits he seemed ephemeral, and at times looked like an owl that had been starved and stretched on a rack. There are however moments in Harold & Maude when he seems ethereally beautiful and suggests, as the movie itself does, that there may be more here than meets the eye. (Then again, there may not.) Higgins initially wrote the screenplay as his master’s thesis; it’s probably the most famous post-graduate work in modern American movies, and has a grad student’s stretching for profundity that never quite makes it. Ashby’s direction is droll, and somewhat distanced, but you feel his heart was with the picture’s leads. This was one of the key cult movies of my youth, and it has a timelessness that is quite remarkable, especially in John Alonzo’s marvelous photography.
Vivian Pickles gives a superbly tailored comic performance as Harold’s unflappable mother; G. Wood and Eric Christmas provide perfect gems as, respectively, his psychiatrist (note the way when they are together Harold is always dressed identically to his doctor) and his priest; Ellen Geer, Judy Engles and Shari Summers are splendid as the computer dates Mother arranges for Harold; and Tom Skerritt (appearing as “M. Borman”) gives a very funny account of a frustrated martinet of a CHiPS officer.
American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009) The unquestioning adulation, since his obscenely early death, of Bill Hicks has often seemed to me emblematic of how American stand-up comedy has faltered and fizzled out since the 1970s. It isn’t just that almost no one is funny any longer, it’s that the few who are amusing are lionized to such a degree that they become gods, their status untouchable and inviolate. Hicks could occasionally be inspired, and his comic approach was clearly developing as he aged. But nothing either in his recorded work or in this hagiographic documentary persuades me that with his death America lost a comic genius on the order of a Richard Pryor or a George Carlin. (Or even a Bill Cosby who, whatever you think of him as a man, was often screamingly funny as a comedian.) Worse, the movie is put together in the most annoyingly trendy manner possible, with too much money and attention going to cute graphics and pointless animation and not enough to its thesis. We hear, repeatedly, that Bill Hicks was the comedians’ comedian, the ne plus ultra of the stand-up set, yet almost nothing he says or does in the source footage supports the contention. When someone tells me I have to take the genius of another on faith, that is when I politely ask the way to the exit.
Copyright: MaryxEvansxAFxArchive 12028300 editorial use only
A Night at the Opera (1935) Groucho Marx always maintained that this was the best of the Marx Bros. movies. It would be nice to agree with him, but I have long thought his preference was based more on box office returns than creative merit. The Paramount movies are almost infinitely funnier, especially Animal Crackersand Horsefeathers, and in neither of those do we have to put up with the insipid (and un-ignorable, since they sing) lovers Irving Thalberg imposed on Groucho, Harpo and Chico in their MGM pictures and that others at the studio persisted on foisting on them after his death. A Night at the Opera has more laughs in it than Duck Soup, though, and the funny stuff in it is extremely funny: Groucho’s wooing of Margaret Dumont (and his aside to us, “If she figures that out, she’s good!”); the stateroom scene; Groucho and Chico debating the sanity clause; the detective’s search of the hotel suite; Groucho saying, “Boojie boojie boojie”; Harpo’s gookie; and the literal wreck of Il trovatore. I could do without the tenor villain whipping Harpo every chance he gets, but at least Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle don’t sing as often as they threaten to, and when they do, sing well.
Thalberg was right from a money standpoint (although Opera cost so much to produce its take wasn’t what it might have been) but wrong from a comedic. No Marx Bros. fan wants to watch their heroes play Cupid to young lovers, even if they can sing Verdi.
The Moon-Spinners (1964) A pleasant mis-adaptation in the Disney mode of the engaging Mary Stewart novel of intrigue on Crete. Too much of the plot was simplified or changed to make it as good as it might have been, but while her character has no antecedent in the book, the silent star Pola Negri was persuaded to come out of retirement for it by Walt Disney, and she’s fascinating to watch. If the novel has a flaw it’s that it’s told in first-person, so however threatening the clouds we are never really in doubt as to who will be standing after the storm. But since this feminine lead is played by the always-interesting Haley Mills, Joan Greenwood is along as her aunt, Eli Wallach is on board as the chief villain, Peter McEnery makes a dashing young hero and the supporting cast includes John Le Mesurier as a shady diplomat and Sheila Hancock as his dipsomaniac wife, the remarkable Irene Papas and the engaging young Michael Davis, it all goes down as smoothly as Greek yoghurt, if without the nutritional value.
Oliver! (1968) The composer/lyricist/librettist Lionel Bart’s wildly successful West End and Broadway musical adaptation of Dickens’ Oliver Twist was, in the period when American studios were grasping with increasing desperation for a Sound of Music-style hit, probably a natural even if its origins were British. Yet whereas this overblown, over-produced musical or that (Camelot, Doctor Dolittle, Paint Your Wagon, Star!) continued to bomb, Oliver! was a substantial hit: Over $77 million profit on a $10 million layout. (Not that it matters, but Oliver! also won the Best Picture Academy Award that year, which no American musical would until the mangled yet inexplicably popular adaptation of Chicago in 2002.) Perhaps it helped that the movie was directed by a great filmmaker (Carol Reed) with three consecutive masterpieces to his credit,* shot by a genius cinematographer (Oswald Morris), designed and costumed by masters (Jon Box, Terence Marsh, Phyllis Dalton), beautifully cast (Ron Moody as Fagin, Oliver Reed as Sikes, Harry Secombe as the Beadle, Shani Wallis as Nancy, Leonard Rossiter as Sowerberry, Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger, Mark Lester as Oliver), wonderfully scored (Johnny Green) and, with one glaring exception, delightfully choreographed (by Onna White.) That exception is the genuinely stupid “Consider Yourself” production number. Since this is a movie, not a stage show, there is absolutely no reason for anyone other than Oliver and the Dodger to be singing, much less dancing, yet the number goes on and on, taking in everything from surly butchers to boy chimneysweeps with the seats of their pants comically on fire. The situation of children forced to labor cleaning out those dangerous chimneys was hardly something to joke about, but the sheer scale of the damn thing is dumbfounding. (It took three weeks to film.) It could have been elided over without lowering the entertainment value of Oliver! in the slightest; in fact, excising “Consider Yourself” would have improved the entire picture immensely.
I’m not wildly enthusiastic about Bart’s songs for the show generally, although I do admire little Oliver’s song of yearning “Where is Love?” Bart had a tendency toward things like (in Fagin’s “Reviewing the Situation”) anachronistic references to Dale Carnegie, and the show’s big ballad, “As Long as He Needs Me” sits uncomfortably within the tradition of American “He beats me but I love him” numbers. The songs are a bit sunny, considering the time and the setting, but because the movie was made with such obvious love and integrity, the numbers matter less than the songs in more accomplished shows like Fiddler on the Roofdo, and whether they land or not becomes less important than the quality of the performances. Oliver! sinks or swims, not on Fagin, which has since 1960 been considered the star part, but on Oliver Twist, and the movie’s Oliver is its anchor. Young Mark Lester, one of the most attractive children to star in a movie since Jackie Coogan in The Kid, has a sweet smile, limpid, expressive eyes and nothing he says or does is studied, or disingenuous. When he slaps Bill Sikes in frustrated rage it’s as if every insupportable event Oliver been forced to shoulder bursts forth in a single gesture, and it’s as shocking to him as it is to everyone else. I don’t know if that’s writing (it’s been too long since I read the Dickens novel), direction, innate inspiration or a combination of all three, but it’s certainly impressive. In addition, Lester’s singing voice is the furthest thing from that of a trained stage performer pouring out his heart in song to the cheap seats; it’s soft and delicate, seemingly wrapped in fleece — exactly the sort of voice that battered yet hopeful boy should have.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
*Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949). And if there is nothing in Oliver! to match, for sheer terror, the murder of Nancy in the David Lean Oliver Twist (1948) Reed’s picture at least undoes the anti-Semitism of which, typically, everyone involved in the Lean movie expressed surprise that others were offended by. To have rendered Alec Guinness’ Fagin with the single largest “Jew” nose in British cinema history after the revelations of the Holocaust sure spoke to something.
I had a roommate once who loathed Leslie Caron generally, despised this movie in particular, and hated especially the 17-minute ballet to the Gershwin tone-poem at the end. Nothing I could say would budge her an inch from her, to me, somewhat hysterical position. I still don’t understand her objections. I was particularly flummoxed by her rejection of the ballet as a fantasy of the Gene Kelly character’s love of French Impressionism: Since Kelly’s character is a painter, the ballet has a logic that Agnes de Mille might have envied. Despite its numerous flaws — not the ones my friend enumerated — An American in Paris not only continues to look good; it looks better with the passing years. I will admit it doesn’t always sound terrific, mostly during the smart-ass triple narration sequence at the beginning. I don’t mind the thinness of Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay nearly as much as his irritating stabs at boulevard wit, especially for the genuinely witty Oscar Levant. (Although for all I know Levant may have written, or re-written, his own lines.) The only really bad scene in the picture also involves Levant, frantically slurping coffee, gulping down cognac and smoking multiple cigarettes out of nervousness. I realize that this is a 1950s movie musical and therefore unrelated to life on any known planet, but if anyone actually behaved this way in public he’d be either institutionalized, or cast into outer darkness forever. Did anyone ever laugh at this bit?
“Massachusetts.”
There is also exactly one unfortunate musical sequence: The “Embraceable You” introduction of Leslie Caron as, variously, a voluptuary, a studious drone and a party girl. It’s an astonishingly obvious rip-off of the “Miss Turnstiles” number originated by Jerry Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for the Broadway On the Town and repeated two years earlier in the MGM movie of that show, starring and choreographed by one Gene Kelly, otherwise known as the star and choreographer of An American in Paris. Otherwise the songs and dances are marvelously designed, shot and executed, especially the wonderful “I Got Rhythm” number for Kelly and a gaggle of excited French children. It’s the simplest number in the picture, and nothing else in An American in Paris touches it for sheer pleasure. Kelly is clearly having a ball, and the kids are delightful: The young boy in blue who ingenuously says, “Massachusetts” is charming and the little boy in the smock who shouts, “Non!” unselfconsciously adorable. As Gary Giddins notes in the Blu-ray documentary, the Kelly character, whose canvases are imitative of Utrillo, seems to be less an aspiring painter than a hoofer. I would add that Levant, as a pianist/composer, appears capable only of playing and writing George Gershwin’s tunes. It can take a heap o’ tolerance to watch old musicals without constantly rolling one’s eyes.
I sound as if I dislike the picture, and nothing could be further from the truth; when you admire a movie as much as I do this one — when it strives for so much, and calls forth such splendid results from its creators — you want it to be better, and because of that its flaws loom larger. An American in Paris is no Singin’ in the Rain (what is?) but it comes in a thoroughly respectable second. It was put together by people who cared, and who seemed to be trying to push beyond the limits of their own creativity. Vincente Minnelli was occasionally dismissed as a mere colorist, or a designer-director, but his best work is characterized by intelligence and wit, and by a sense of the totality of the picture, not merely its outward design. And when you reflect on the fact that aside from some establishing images of Paris at the beginning the entire movie was shot in the MGM studio and on its back-lots, the fulsomeness of that design is overwhelming. Things like this can look so phony, yet there is nothing in An American in Paris that betrays it as almost entirely set-bound. You believe in it as you believe a melancholic’s reverie can become a colorful ballet performing lively homages to the masters of French Impressionism. The approach to the Gershwin music is intelligent too, and almost too conscientious; Saul Chaplin was so concerned about the changes he had to make to the tone-poem that accompanies the ballet at the end that he was still apologizing to Gershwin’s shade decades later. He needn’t have. Not only is his adaptation a good one, it’s the right one for the movie. The original piece can be, and has been, played and recorded repeatedly, and will continue to be. Chaplin’s 17-minute reduction can be thought of as a variation, done once, for a specific purpose, and done right well.
Rather startlingly, the great ballad “Love is Here to Stay” was not a standard until it was presented here, in one of the most beautifully atmospheric dance numbers in all of American musicals, set on a Left Bank quai (itself of course entirely fabricated) and entrancingly performed by Kelly and Caron. Minnelli has three additional visual tours de force in the picture, and two of them work wonderfully. The first is the “Concerto in F” sequence for Levant, the last the ballet; the one that falls flat is the black and white Beaux-Arts ball that precedes the ballet. White in a color picture has to be handled delicately to register on eyes accustomed to looking at imagery in a fuller spectrum. I can think of very few filmmakers who could carry white off in a color movie that wasn’t an animated cartoon: Huston, twice, with The Kremlin Letter and The Man Who Would Be King; Altman at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller; the Coens with Fargo; and Lean with Doctor Zhivago. And in all these cases the directors were depicting snow as a more or less deadly force of nature. I understand why Minnelli wanted to use black and white as a means of making the sudden explosion of color in the ballet register with even greater force, but with everyone on screen dressed in white with black touches and photographed in front of largely white sets, the concept just doesn’t work. The “Concerto in F” fantasy, however, taking off on Buster Keaton’s multiple roles in The Playhouse, succeeds wonderfully as Levant’s daydream of a concert hall performance with himself not only as pianist but conductor, timpanist, the entire violin section and, at the end, overly enthusiastic spectator. It’s exquisitely lit by the cinematographer Alfred Gilks and just brief enough to work perfectly; the repeated revelations of Levant in this musical role or that becomes increasingly funny rather than, as it might have, obvious and annoying.
Georges Guétary’s big Folies Bergere solo, “Stairway to Paradise,” is likewise wittily designed and executed and there are several other good numbers, chief among them the little known “Tra-La-La” for Kelly and Levant. I am not an inveterate admirer of Ira Gershwin’s lyrics, which often seem to me to drag his brother George’s airborne melodies down to the earthen level of mediocrity, and who needs that? Still, those for “Tra-La-La” are amusing, as are those for the shoehorned-in “By Strauss,” which seems to exist solely to get Kelly, Levant and Guétary together for one number (why is a Folies Bergère performing carping about popular music?) although I’d hate to lose it since the waltz with the old lady is so beguiling.
Foch as Milo. Note the Venus statue design of her frock.
It’s time I acknowledged the single non-musical star of An American in Paris, and sang her praises. Nina Foch, playing Kelly’s gently predatory art patron, gives a performance of such richness and surprise it overcomes her too-good-to-be-true moniker (Milo, “as in Venus de”) and even a formal dress that emulates the statue. Foch’s is one of those jobs of acting that transcends the limitations of the role as written, and breathes animating life into it. Her Milo may be needy, and even desperate, but surely she deserves better than Kelly’s caddish use of her toward the end, and Levant’s oblique telling-off at the ball. This is presumably what people who call Lerner a misogynist have in mind. I wonder. A man who marries as many times as Lerner did, unless he’s gay (like Minnelli) or highly suspect (like Cary Grant), is probably not a misogynist but an overly hopeful romantic, doomed always to disappointment. (Frankly, if his most recent biographer is to be trusted, Grant had more of a claim to misogyny.) Minnelli apparently just wanted someone to see to his needs, and even if he’d been more open about what everyone in Hollywood knew from the day he arrived wearing make-up there aren’t many gay men who will sign on for that. Lerner was simply bad at marriage but kept trying.
Everybody involved with An American in Paris seemed to sense they were working on something special, but for my sake as well as yours I won’t cite all of them. I will single out Gilks, who softened what was often MGM’s garish approach to Technicolor, especially in musicals, with a more muted palette; Bill Alton, who shot the extraordinary-looking ballet; Preston Ames and Cedric Gibbons for their rich set design and Edwin B. Willis for his equally commendable decoration; Orry-Kelly for his apposite “book” scene costumes (well, except for that off-the-shoulder job he designed for Foch); Irene Sharaff for her extravagantly fulsome ballet designs; and, among others, Chaplin, Green, Conrad Salinger, Robert Franklyn, Benny Carter (who appears un-billed in the cabaret sequence) and Skip Martin for their work as orchestrators and arrangers. Their labors coalesce in the ballet, and I concede that if you don’t enjoy that you probably won’t warm to the rest of the picture either. If you’re open to it the ballet is, from the opening (achieved through the use of a photographic mirror) to the end (ditto) in which the moist red rose trembles in Kelly’s hand, an aural, visual and emotional feast in which the styles and canvasses of Dufy, Renoir, Rousseau, Utrillo, Roualt, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Monet are not slavishly copied but imaginatively invoked. All, that is, except for Kelly’s turn as Lautrec’s Chocolat, which is indeed a copy (other than the dancer’s black skin) and which presumably caused many female and some male hearts to palpitate.* But the dance itself is what matters, and like most of the movie that surrounds it, it’s tremendous.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
*Someone in the ’70s — I think it was the playwright Robert Patrick, but don’t hold me to that — penned an ode to Gene Kelly’s ass for After Dark magazine, and this is the picture and the costume (along with the dancer’s short shorts in The Pirate) that inspired it. I doubt that was the sensual effect Kelly was after, so forget I brought it up.
So few critics, so many poets 