By Scott Ross
Two Mules for Sister Sarah (1970) An entertaining seriocomic Western with what in retrospect seems a very unlikely pair of co-stars: The left-leaning Shirley MacLaine (as a Juarista nun, yet… or is she?) and the rightist Clint Eastwood as Hogan, the mercenary who saves her from gang-rape and reluctantly joins in her quest to destroy a French garrison in Mexico. Sharply re-written by Albert Maltz — his first screen credit since his 1947 blacklisting — from a screenplay by Budd Boetticher, the director of numerous Randolph Scott Westerns (Boetticher despised the eventual movie; he had written the role of Sarah for Deborah Kerr) and directed with economy and intelligence by Don Siegel, the picture is one of the most beautiful of its time thanks to the luminous cinematography Gabriel Figueroa. Figueroa, a master of chiaroscuro, was best known in America for his color photography on The Fugitive, John Ford’s adaptation of The Power and the Glory, and for his shimmering black-and-white work on The Night of the Iguana for John Huston. (He also shot the impressive-looking if morally reprehensible Kelly’s Heroes.) MacLaine and Eastwood are fun to watch, and there are some memorable set-pieces such as Sarah assisting Hogan in cauterizing his arrow-wound, her unsettling climb up a desert railroad trestle to plant dynamite and the final assault on the garrison, unusually brutal for 1970. The stars are virtually the whole show, but Manolo Fábregas and Alberto Morin, as Mexican and French officers respectively, are impressive, and there is a typically flavorsome score by Ennio Morricone featuring recurrent evocations of ecclesiastic choruses contrasted with the musical equivalent of a donkey’s “hee-haw.”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1979) Although by the end of the 1970s there had been a couple of big-screen adaptations of John le Carré’s complex espionage novels (notably The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1965 and The Deadly Affair in 1966) and would be many more in the decades to come, the ideal form for dramatic recreations of his intellectually bracing and richly detailed books was the television “mini-series,” pioneered in Great Britain where novels are and were routinely adapted in varying lengths for the small screen. Given the relative leisure of time, le Carré’s labyrinthine plots have a chance to breathe, and the audience to catch up. Even better, we get to spend more time with his characters, particularly his fascinating spymaster George Smiley and especially as Alec Guinness plays him.
Smiley is le Carré’s great creation, a gentle, warm-hearted, honorable man who knows his business is not merely a dirty one but morally and ethically questionable as well, and Guinness’ astonishing performance takes in every aspect of Smiley’s personality from the unspoken hurt with which he bears his off-stage wife’s serial infidelities and the uneasy solicitude of those around him who are well aware of that open secret to the steely resolve with which he pursues the “mole” within MI5 (called “The Circus” here). It’s a performance he might well have given in a standard two-hour theatrical release, but would have had to sacrifice far too much to a shorter running-time. Arthur Hopcraft’s dramatization is as good, and as taut, as can be imagined and John Irvin’s direction brings patience and intelligence to material that demands it. The superb cast includes Alexander Knox as Control, an old man desperately trying to hold on to his position and knowing that his being right will not be enough when everything blows up in his face; Michael Jayston as Smiley’s aide-de-camp Peter Guillam; Anthony Bate, all false bonhomie and professional cowardice as the Under-Secretary Oliver Lacon; the marvelous Ian Richardson, witty in himself and appreciative of the wit of others as the duplicitous Bill Haydon; Ian Bannen as the betrayed and wounded ex-field agent Jim Prideaux; Hywel Bennett as the unforgettable Ricki Tarr; Beryl Reid (whom le Carré claimed Guinness was terrified of) as the indefatigable researcher Connie Sachs; Joss Ackland as the planted journalist Jerry Westerby; Nigel Stock, gossipy and malicious as Roddy Martindale; Susan Kodicek as the doomed Irina; Michael Aldridge, smooth-tongued and sneeringly pedantic as Percy Alleline; Thorley Walters as the wonderfully-named Tufty Thessinger; a young Patrick Stewart as Smiley’s Soviet nemesis Karla; and Siân Phillips as George’s wayward wife Ann. The only odd note is struck by the filmmakers declining to make Toby Esterhase Hungarian, robbing Bernard Hepton, the actor who plays him, of Toby’s distinctive voice and much of his character.
Watching this splendid series unfold in six “Masterpiece Theatre” installments when I was 19 was one of the great compensations of 1980, the year my country unleashed Ronald Reagan on an unsuspecting world. Despite that unpalatable association it was a pleasure to revisit it over 40 years later and to find it as satisfying now as it was then.
“Smiley’s People” (1982) The second BBC mini-series concerning George Smiley’s pursuit of his Soviet coeval Karla was as a novel actually the final volume of three in the series. In the second, The Honourable Schoolboy, the dissipated reporter Jerry Westerby takes center stage and Connie Sachs is nearly as important a character as he. Presumably because that book placed Smiley on the periphery (where he often is in John le Carré’s novels) and Guinness-as-Smiley had become a worldwide phenomenon, it was elided over in favor of the last in the trilogy. I miss much of the detail the second novel filled in, but if you haven’t read the books you may not notice. I was pleased, however, that, perhaps due to le Carré’s input on the teleplay — he revised the credited scenarist John Hopkins’ original — Toby Esterhase’s accent and speech patterns were returned to him, along with a great deal of his seedy if oddly charming persona. For Smiley aficionados, Smiley’s People is a special treat, as he is the fulcrum about which the lever of the story turns, working outside the Circus, going into the field as his own agent, putting his personal safety on the line for a change and following his nearly unerring instincts. That his quest is to destroy the life of one Russian man and to compromise him to such an extent that he must seek asylum in the West is mitigated only slightly in that the object is Karla (Patrick Stewart again). The whole business carries a stink of horror, which adheres itself to Smiley more than anyone else.
Guinness does not so much deepen his conception of Smiley here as burnish the work he did in “Tinker, Tailor,” so that by the end he is able, finally, to place the perennially unfaithful Ann in the box to which he should have consigned her decades earlier. Beryl Reid, Anthony Bate, Siân Phillips and Bernard Hepton reprise their earlier roles, the latter considerably improved in both conception and performance by Toby’s Hungarian voice being returned to him this go-round. Eileen Atkins gives a beautifully-considered portrayal of the Russian émigré in Paris for whom the promise of an unexpected benison sets the plot in motion; Barry Foster a cold, calculating one as Saul Enderby; Michael Lonsdale a marvelous turn as a Soviet attaché who becomes Smiley’s cats-paw; Bill Paterson is unsettling as the ugly face of official thuggery; Mario Adorf is surprisingly amiable as a flesh-peddler with crucial information; Curd Jürgens is memorable as an ex-Soviet operative; Michael Gough equally so as his compatriot; Rosalie Crutchley delivers a superb vest-pocket portrait of the Mother Superior of a high-class asylum; Tusse Silberg is heartbreakingly mercurial as Atkins’ schizophrenic daughter; and Alan Rickman delicious as an accommodating MI5 factotum. Simon Langton was the director, and expertly handled the intricacies of the narrative and the increasing tension that gradually accrues as the series progresses.
Scrooge (1970) With the 1971 short version animated by Richard Williams, this is one of my two favorite adaptations of A Christmas Carol. As a non-believer I agree with much of Ebeneezer Scrooge’s philosophy, if not the manner in which he expresses it, but in any case Albert Finney’s wide-ranging performance grows each time I see it, and the Leslie Bricusse songs, like Alec Guinness’ creepily-rendered Ghost of Marley and Oswald Morris’ rich, textured cinematography, seem to me just about perfect for a pleasant holiday evening’s entertainment.
Fritz the Cat (1972) R. Crumb hated the writer and director Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of his underground comic so much he killed Fritz off by having one of his girlfriends stab him in the head with an icepick. It didn’t help; the first X-rated cartoon feature, made for a mere $700,000, raked in $90 million at the box-office, all but ensuring a sequel. (The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, which Bakshi had no part in.) Although the picture is dated by its take on college students playing at revolutionary action, it’s a wild, frequently hilarious collection of vignettes, most of them sexual in nature, with many others examining urban racial parameters through a satirical prism. While Crumb may have been disgruntled by the whole of it, Bakshi at least honored the artist’s well-known penchant for big female backsides, making Fritz, I suppose, the Sir Mix-a-Lot of his time. There are subversive touches throughout, as with the New York cops represented by literal pigs and, during a race-riot Fritz self-righteously sets in motion, when the Air Force drops napalm on a black neighborhood, silhouettes representing Mickey Mouse, Daisy Duck and Donald cheer them on. Skip Hinnant, the original Schroeder of the Off-Broadway musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, provides the voice of Fritz (Bakshi chose him for the phoniness he heard in it) and a number of veterans worked on the picture, including Manny Perez, Dick Lundy, Virgil Ross, Norm McCabe and one of Bob Clampett’s key animators, the certifiably insane Rod Scribner, who must have relished the assignment.
Homebodies (1974) An enjoyable black-comedy about elderly residents of a condemned urban building who when threatened with eviction take matters into their own hands. It’s amusing, even charming, although it does take a strange, vicious turn in the last third. (For my part, anyone who murders Ruth McDevitt deserves everything she gets, but let that pass.) It’s certainly a unique picture, and fascinating to watch, The macabre screenplay was by Howard Kaminsky, Bennett Sims and Larry Yust, the latter of whom directed with a fine eye for the revealing detail. Aside from McDevitt the wonderful cast of old troupers includes Peter Brocco, Frances Fuller, William Hansen (whom aficionados of the musical 1776 will remember as Caesar Rodney), Ian Wolfe and the amazing Paula Trueman as their unbalanced leader.
Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962) The first animated television special for television which, despite some slight fudging of the order of things (the Christmas Past episode here occurs between Christmases Present and Future) and one extraneous musical number, is as likeable and surprisingly buoyant now as it was when I was a small child. (I first saw it, I think, around 1965, when I was four.) For some weird reason the framing device, involving Magoo opening on Broadway as Ebeneezer Scrooge, has been whittled away over time; I gather there are people who hate it, but I suspect the excisions were made for purely mercenary reasons, to squeeze in a few more commercials. This was the first of a long line of Magoo specials in which the nearsighted codger appeared as literary characters, and it’s the most memorable, although I will always be grateful to the series for introducing me at an early age to that perfect romantic hero, Cyrano de Bergerac.
The Jule Styne/Bob Merrill song score for Magoo’s Christmas Carol is lovely, especially “Winter Was Warm,” the ballad for Belle, the Cratchitt’s holiday anthem “The Lord’s Bright Blessing” with its memorable evocation of razzleberry dressing and the boy Ebeneezer’s haunting lament “Alone in the World,” which Scrooge joins to make a moving duet. The only number I regard as unnecessary is “We’re Despicable,” performed by the ghouls selling off Scrooge’s belongings after his future death. It’s an amusing number but with only 53 minutes in which to tell Dickens’ story feels entirely disposable. Otherwise, Barbara Chain’s script is admirably concise, Abe Levitow’s direction strong and the production design (by, among others, Corny Cole and Lee Mishkin) strongly atmospheric and remarkably detailed. Jim Backus is Magoo, of course, and there is excellent support from Marie Matthews (young Ebenezer), Morey Amsterdam in a pair of comedic roles, Jack Cassidy in splendid voice as Bob Cratchit, Royal Dano as Marley’s Ghost, Joan Gardner as Tiny Tim, the Ghost of Christmas Past, and the Charwoman, Jane Kean as Belle and, in several parts, Paul Frees.
Swing Time (1936) With the 1935 Top Hat one of the two best Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, with 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 away 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 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.
The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971) I vividly recall watching this lovely TV movie at the age of 10, on its first airing, and thinking it was the most remarkable small-screen drama I’d ever seen. A lot of other people must have felt the same way because two years later Earl Hamner, Jr.’s warm and essentially happy Depression-era family (based on his own and called the Spencers in his books) re-emerged on CBS as “The Waltons,” under which rubric they reigned for nine seasons. A few things were gained in the transition: That genial old radical Will Geer replaced Edgar Bergen as the grandfather and the splendid Ralph Waite took over from Andrew Duggan as the patriarch John Walton. (Bergen is fine in the movie, mind you, but Geer was intensely memorable.) One casting change was essentially a draw: Joe Conley replacing Woodrow Parfrey as Ike Godsey. Two others, however, represented if not a loss at least a disappointment: While Helen Kleeb and Mary Jackson as the innocent elderly bootleggers the Baldwin sisters in the series were amusing, Josephine Hutchinson and Dorothy Stickney in the movie provided the story’s modest diadem with two sparkling gems.
All of the movie’s children returned for “The Waltons,” thankfully, including the marvelous Richard Thomas as the eldest, as did Ellen Corby as their flinty grandmother. The single gravest loss between movie and series was in their respective Olivia Waltons. I remember my friend Laura complaining to me at age 12 that Michael Learned was far too beautiful for the role, but beauty isn’t really the issue. A woman can be conventionally pulchritudinous and raise seven children in the mountains of Virginia. It’s the wear that matters. No one would have called Patricia Neal unattractive, but her Olivia looks as if she has lived every year of that experience, and earned every crow’s foot. More important, Neal was a great actress, and Learned merely a good one. The way, when her husband returns after being thought lost, hurt or dead, Neal’s Olivia turns her back to the family and staggers slightly, briefly giving in to the tears she has been holding back all day and night in her vigil, is quietly shattering and I suspect her performance, taken in toto, was the finest American television ever knew.
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 are 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!
Die Hard (1988) Despite the godawful performances of Paul Gleason, William Atherton, Robert Davi, Grand L. Bush and, especially, the appalling Hart Bochner, this exercise in style, smoothly directed by John McTiernan, excitingly filmed by Jan de Bont and wonderfully scored by Michael Kamen, remains one of the few superior “high concept” pictures of its time. The 4K UHD edition looks spectacular, and the witty war of attrition between Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman is evergreen.
Easter Parade (1948) If while watching this Irving Berlin songbook musical you have the sense that Fred Astaire’s character might have been better suited to the more caddish Gene Kelly, it was written for him. When Kelly broke an ankle his role was offered to Astaire, then in semi-retirement and bored. The screenplay, by Sidney Sheldon, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is merely serviceable and of the four major characters one, played by Peter Lawford, floats in and out of the action to no discernable purpose. What matters most in Arthur Freed musicals, however, is the music, and Berlin largely delivers, from Astaire’s cleverly-conceived “Drum Crazy,” performed to distract a child holding the plush bunny Fred wishes to buy, to “We’re a Couple of Swells,” his comic hobo duet with Judy Garland, which became a staple of her stage act for years afterward. I suppose these days hoboes, like hillbillies, are a protected species and can’t be joked about any longer.
Astaire got a good ballad (“It Only Happens When I Dance With You”) but his big specialty number, “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” is one of his very few routines that is more irritating than pleasurable, what with his weird vocal that sounds as if he filled the lower part of his face with air before singing, plus all that slow-motion dancing, which couldn’t happen on a stage anyway, so why was it done? Was Fred just that indifferent to it? (The insert of Garland pantomiming her ecstatic approval while he dances wasn’t fooling anyone; the number is a lox.) Even worse is that lugubrious snooze “The Girl on the Magazine Cover,” crooned by some po-faced vocalist called Richard Beavers whom no one ever heard of again, and Ann Miller’s typically manic tap-routine to “Shakin’ the Blues Away.” Garland, although looking thin and wan and entirely unhealthy, still lands an emotional ballad (“Better Luck Next Time”) which for my money is one of Berlin’s finest. Charles Walters directed efficiently, and the rather good Technicolor cinematography is by Harry Stradling. The orchestrations, however, are for a story set in 1912 as phony and oppressive as Miller’s grin.
The central concern of the movie for Don Hewes, the Astaire figure, is his inability to get over his former dancing partner, played by Ann Miller. But how could anyone become obsessed with Ann Miller?
JFK (1991) The late Richard Belzer liked to remind people that, whatever their feelings about John F. Kennedy, or how and why and by whom he was killed, a man died that day in Dallas — horribly. 60 years on the number of those who remember has dwindled considerably, that of those who know at all has been alarmingly reduced, and those who care constitute an even smaller minority. But it was a coup d’état, and we (and the world) have been increasingly the poorer for it ever since.
Royal Wedding (1951) Alan Jay Lerner wrote the script and lyrics for this often beguiling musical about an American brother-and-sister act re-opening their latest Broadway stage hit in London at the time of Elizabeth’s nuptials. The team played by Fred Astaire and Jane Powell was based by Lerner on Fred and his sister Adele, with whom he enjoyed an extremely popular partnership from their childhood to her own marriage with an English Lord in 1932. The screenplay was originally developed for Fred and June Allyson, who had to back out due to her pregnancy, when it was re-imagined for Judy Garland. She was at her lowest emotional ebb at the time, however, and when she insisted on only working half-days the producer, Arthur Freed, had her replaced with Jane Powell. (Whew!) All of them were too young to be believably Astaire’s sister (he was in his 50s at the time) but Powell, with her diminutive stature and elfin smile, was a good choice; although Adele Astaire was not the singer Powell was, the actress essentially playing her seems to me ideally suited to expressing the irrepressible qualities that made Fred’s sister such a beloved figure, on and off the stage.
Much of Royal Wedding floats on a cloud of charm and its songwriters knew it. After several such numbers Burton Lane, the composer, suggested to Lerner that they come up with something raucous or the movie would charm itself to death. This led to their broad vaudeville turn for Astaire and Powell, “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life,” which a lot of people now assume when they hear of it to have been a county-and-Western song. It’s the sort of thing no one associated with Astaire (or Lerner), brassy and utterly untroubled by subtlety. Powell and Astaire are so well matched in the number, and so funny, you may wish there were more routines in the picture like it. The odd thing about this movie concerning siblings is that in their three on-stage numbers the pair are depicted as lovers, something Fred and Adele avoided in their shows. (The pieces from Astaire and Powell’s show are all also, in typical Freed Unit style, obvious revue numbers at a time when the musical stage revue was dying if not already dead.) Unfortunately, Astaire got paired with Sarah Churchill, the faintly equine offspring of the late Prime Minister, and she doesn’t dance, so he’s left to his own devices. On the other hand, this may have spurred him to work even harder on his solos and so we get the wordless “Sunday Jumps,” where he does a workout in a ship’s gymnasium and makes a coat-rack look elegant, and the invigorating “You’re All the World to Me,” in which he famously dances on the ceiling of his hotel suite, a visual metaphor that summed up Astaire’s appeal.
Some of the comedy is a bit wan, as when we’re supposed to believe that the identical twins played by Keenan Wynn could speak in different accents, American and British, or stomach a subplot involving Albert Sharpe and his estranged wife, but overall the picture is a treat, especially in an approved DVD; Royal Wedding went out of copyright several decades ago and until recently the only way to see it was in a washed-out video copy that robbed Robert Planck’s color photography of nearly all its values. Stanley Donen provided the crisp direction, Nick Castle (with Astaire) the spritely choreography, and the ballads by Lane and Lerner are gorgeous, especially when sung by Jane Powell. Although her “Open Your Eyes,” danced with Astaire, is deliberately sabotaged for comic effect, “Too Late Now” is as supple and lovely a number as can be imagined and “The Happiest Day of My Life” a romantic dream. The picture finishes up, musically anyway, with “I Left My Hat in Haiti,” a number so sensuous and colorful you may be forgiven for not noticing that all of the Haitians in it are, er, Caucasian.
Lonesome (1928) An imaginative dramatic comedy directed by the Hungarian stylist Paul Fejös which tries perhaps a bit too hard to be different but which is filled with fascinating compensations. There are those who place the picture on the same shelf as Murnau’s Sunrise; I certainly wouldn’t go that far, but this slightly wan fable about two lonely, unattached working-class New Yorkers meeting by chance at Coney Island on the Fourth of July is often beautifully observed (the screenplay was by Tom Reed and Edward T. Lowe, Jr. from a story by Mann Page) when it isn’t banging around, pushing your face in frenetic whimsy and throttling you with its cinematic cleverness. It’s obvious that Fejös (born Pál Fejős), working with the cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton and the editor Frank Atkinson, saw in the material a chance to experiment, although his previous work The Last Moment, depicting the final thoughts of a suicide, was described by a contemporary reviewer as being filled with “dizzying wipes, multiple superimpositions and vertiginous camera movements,” which Lonesome is as well, somewhat to its detriment.
What’s best about the picture is what’s simplest: The tremulous love story between Barbara Kent and Glenn Tryon, devastatingly threatened when they are separated through an accident and neither knows the other’s surname. (The resolution is impossible but it works emotionally, so its lack of logic in a sense doesn’t matter.) There are also some lovely effects, such as when hand-tinted color turns a tawdry amusement park into a place of magic, and the rollercoaster sequence, presumably filmed using the hand-held Imo camera, puts you in the front car (and at night!) decades before Mike Todd captured the experience for moviegoers in This is Cinerama. Unfortunately, Universal added dialogue scenes without Fejös’ input, and although Tryon plays them well enough they’re stilted and weirdly isolated, as if a spotlight has been turned on the actors and everything around them elided out. Kent is rather obvious in her pantomime but Tryon is oddly engaging and even when his character is being a braggart to impress the girl you empathize with him instead of finding him off-putting. That’s a lot more interesting than a bunch of vertiginous camera movements.
Christmas in July (1940) Preston Sturges’ second picture as a writer-director is a fast (67 minutes), funny satire on American commercialism and acquisitiveness that is also its maker’s sweetest comedy. Dick Powell plays an office drudge with dreams of winning the grand prize in a jingle contest for coffee with his punning entry — “If you can’t sleep at night it’s not the coffee, it’s the bunk,” a line that gets funnier the more it’s invoked, although I wonder how many people now understand what it means — and Ellen Drew is his girl. It’s full of Sturges’ trademark pithy observations and marvelously skewed dialogue and, of course, his unofficial stock company including Raymond Walburn, William Demerest, Ernest Truex, Harry Rosenthal and Franklin Pangborn. Just when the outcome is tightening your belly, Sturges rescues his hapless protagonists with a deus ex machina that sends you out on a high. (And yes, that cat is grinning. The effect was achieved with a slightly terrifying bit of animation.)
Casablanca (1942) It’s rather sobering to watch this perennial favorite now, when the America to which the refugees of 1942 wished to escape from the Nazis in Europe has become a nation that officially supports neo-Nazis in Ukraine and Jewish proto-Nazis in Israel/Gaza.
Oh, well. The 4K UHD edition looks lovely.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
*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.
So few critics, so many poets 