Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Men swarm around me like moths to a flame and if their wings get singed, I can't be blamed
By Edward Copeland
It has been a long journey for me to be able to watch and write about Josef von Sternberg's 1930 classic The Blue Angel, and I refer to the version made in German, not in English. I had tried to rent it several times on DVD through different services but the region-free disc always flaked out at the same spot. I finally watched it on Netflix streaming (as I was ending that option before I switched to DVD only and Netflix customers know that happened in September) and was able to see the entire film. Then it was just a matter of finding the time to write about it, but other projects kept getting in the way and The Blue Angel deserves more than a quickie. It's sat around about half done for months, but with a new year, I thought I should get this out of the way, especially when I noticed that the English version got wide release in the U.S. 81 years ago today. Figured that had to be a sign.
My journey to see The Blue Angel proved difficult, but it actually ended up being a breeze compared to what happened to both versions of the landmark film over the many decades since both premiered in 1930, albeit in separate parts of the world.
Why The Blue Angel gained its status as a pivotal point in film history can be attributed to several reasons, such as:
The differences in the two versions of The Blue Angel extend beyond just the language the actors in which the actors speak. When it premiered in Germany on the night of March 31, 1930, it ran 106 minutes. The raves (in addition to being able to see the as-yet-unreleased English-language version) prompted the U.S. studio Paramount to lure both von Sternberg and Dietrich, who by then were lovers, to the U.S. They made and released Morocco, which earned Dietrich the only Oscar nomination of her career for best actress, before The Blue Angel had its U.S. debut. When the English version was released in December 1930, it only ran 99 minutes, as filmed. The German version didn't play in the U.S. until 1947 and to emphasize Dietrich at the expense of Jannings' lead character (and the story itself), the film was cut to 90 minutes. It wasn't until 2001 that a new German language print, made from original negative material, restored it to 106 minutes and was re-released. Ironically, for many decades, the English-language version became considered lost until a print was discovered in a German film archive, restored and shown in 2009.
With that brief primer on the movie's history out of the way, now I can dive in to talking about the film itself which I'm glad to say stands up very well given that it's nearly 82 years old. Granted, The Blue Angel definitely shows signs of belonging to that awkward phase where silent filmmakers and performers adjusted techniques to the new sound era, but for the most part the movie and its cast clears that hurdle rather easily. Jannings stars as Professor Immanuel Rath, a strict disciplinarian as an English teacher at a boarding school in his small German town. His students mock him mercilessly (a favorite nickname is Professor Unrath, ratshit in English) but he holds a stellar reputation in the port city. (I love how in foreign
language films, even from way back, when they update the translations of the subtitles, they put in the profanities.) He doesn't earn much respect from his live-in maid either, who offers little sympathy when Rath awakes one morning to discover his lone companion, a pet bird, dead in its cage. "It pretty much stopped singing," the housekeeper (Ilse Fürstenberg) tells the professor. Though Rath maintains the community's regard, sometimes it's easy to see how he becomes an object of ridicule for his classless pupils or others, such as when he blows his nose and emits a comically absurd honking sound. Still, he tries to teach these callow lads, on one day specifically about Shakespeare's Hamlet. The students ignore him most days, but on this day, he discovers their fascination with postcards which he confiscates bearing photos of Lola Lola (Dietrich), the bawdy performer at the German version of a speakeasy which gives the film its title, The Blue Angel. Lola's images transfix Rath. He even blows on one of the cards and imagines that the feathers on her dress move. After interrogating one of his students, Angst (Rolf Müller) — whom the other students routinely harass because he doesn't frequent the club — Rath learns of the club's location and decides to venture to it himself since The Blue Angel and its performers such as Lola Lola debase the morals of his pupils.
Backstage at The Blue Angel that night, several of Rath's pupils flirt hopelessly with Lola Lola, who plays with them until her turn comes to perform. She immediately commands the stage as well as the establishment, singing to the enthralled, lascivious men in the audience, "Guys, tonight I'm going to pick someone/I'm fed up with the young ones." As Rath stumbles his way inside The Blue Angel, he's so nervous that he gets himself caught in the mesh curtains that separate the main room of the club from its entrance. Rath might have convinced himself that he came to lecture her on moral failings, but it's Lola herself that's enticed Rath on this journey, and as she struts around the stage in stockings and garters, that isn't what's on Rath's mind. He remains enraptured as she croons "Naughty Lola," with lyrics such as "If any of you guys get too near/I'll kick you in the ribs/And punch you in the ear." The students spot their professor and flee backstage, but not before Rath spots one of them. Rath begins searching the rooms backstage trying to find the pupils, encountering a
sad and disturbing-looking clown (Reinhold Bernt) who will be a recurring figure throughout the film. He ends up in the dressing room as Lola enters wondering why a man is in there. Rath tells her that she and this club are "corrupting my pupils." Lola brushes this off and begins to undress before Rath, leading him to begin to stumble toward the doorway, being an impediment to those trying to come in and out. Lola sees he's shy and climbs a staircase and Rath stands there, uncertain of what to do next when suddenly panties land in his hands from above. As Rath stands hapless, Kiepert (Kurt Gerron), a magician and manager of the troupe of performers appearing at The Blue Angel, enters yelling at the female performers, though he's protective of Lola until he learns who Rath is and tries to show him that he's important. He sends Lola back out on stage as Kiepert pastes on a mustache to prepare for his magic act. Rath lays into him for letting his pupils attend performances at the club. Before Kiepert can even deny such a thing, Rath spots one of this students and chases him out of the club. Things don't go so well later for the pupil Angst. (Could he be named any more appropriately?) As he sleeps in his bed, shadows approach on his bedroom wall, shapes somewhat reminiscent of Murnau's Nosferatu. Some of the other students start slapping and beating him repeatedly for telling Rath about The Blue Angel.
While it's easy to see the allure of Dietrich and how her star was born out of this film, Jannings proved he could be just as powerful with words as he was in his silent classics, even if some of his emoting continued to play as large as it did in those days when they
didn't have dialogue. Rath, a character created in the novel Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann, manages to be a sympathetic creation in Jannings' hands even though he doesn't take any paths to make the professor that way. He's overly proud and expects too much of others. A plaque in his apartment reads DO RIGHT AND FEAR NO MAN. He isn't above being physical with his pupils, slapping cigarettes out of their mouths. When the school's director (Eduard V. Winterstein) warns him that he "risks his future on that kind of woman," Rath ignores him, telling him, "She is my future wife." Of course, when Rath actually proposes to Lola, she laughs at him, though she ends up marrying him anyway. Watching Jannings' degradation as he goes from esteemed professor to a man making money selling those postcards of Lola Lola, now his wife, to eventually becoming a clown in Kiepert's act and a cuckold as Lola seeks affection elsewhere telling him sometimes, "What choice do I have? That's the way I was made." 
The lowest point comes when after five years on the road, all of them get booked to play The Blue Angel again, which to Rath's objection, they promote as the professor's return to the town. Not surprisingly, it attracts a sellout crowd. Rath barely seems human anymore. The professor who once taught Shakespeare, now is just a fool, and not even Lear's. When he takes the stage with the magician, he gets hung up in curtains, mirroring his initial entrance to The Blue Angel. When he tries to speak, intelligible words no longer come out. Kiepert makes a mockery of Rath on stage until a group of men, including Lola's lover, rescue him. Later, Kiepert promises that he will make it up to him. It leads to a quiet and sad dénouement. The influence of the German expressionists shine throughout von Sternberg's direction, though he makes great use of the addition of sound as well. For instance, when Rath makes his return down the alley to the club, he adds the unmistakable sound of a cat in heat. While Dietrich definitely makes a magnetic debut (even if it came out second), Jannings brings the heart and magic to The Blue Angel (at least the German version).
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Labels: 30s, Emil Jannings, Foreign, Marlene, Murnau, Netflix, Oscars, Ray Top 100, Shakespeare, von Sternberg
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Monday, August 15, 2011
An American Masterpiece
“A Place in the Sun was done right before I met George. It hadn’t come out yet, when I came to Paramount, but it had been finished. I remember seeing that film and being devastated by it. It was different in many ways than any film I had seen before coming out of Hollywood — including the style of other films by George Stevens. The use of close-ups in that film, the use of that liquid dissolve on top of dissolve in the love scenes between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor is the quintessential height of romantic filmmaking. And the scenes with Elizabeth Taylor are done with these extraordinary close-ups. The love scenes — I don’t think there are better kiss scenes in the history of film. It’s hard to do a kissing scene. It’s hard to do a love scene. First of all, kisses — especially in those days in Hollywood — when you could show nothing else, were supposed to indicate every kind of orgasmic pleasure, every kind of romantic fulfillment — and if lovers start to kiss too intensely on the screen, it can become embarrassing for the audience. What George did was that the camera came in and did a lot of the work. The camera came so close, dealing with two of the most beautiful faces in the world. I think the camera treasured those faces, and made them almost become one.” — director Alan J. Pakula
By John Cochrane
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the release of George Stevens’ 1951 film A Place in the Sun, a tragic romance that is one of the best motion pictures ever to come out of the Hollywood studio system. An updated abridgement of Theodore Dreiser’s epic novel An American Tragedy (1925) and its stage adaptation by Patrick Kearney, A Place in the Sun stars Montgomery Clift as George Eastman — a drifting, but earnest war veteran who seeks employment at his rich uncle’s clothing factory. George dreams of leaving his poor, staunchly religious upbringing behind and escaping into the privileged world of his relatives. Instead, he is ensnared in an ill-fated love triangle, and eventually accused of drowning of Alice Tripp — a plain co-worker that he once secretly dated and impregnated — so that he can be with Angela Vickers, a young and beautiful socialite with whom he has fallen deeply in love.
Based on the real life trial and execution of Chester Gillette in 1906, An American Tragedy is considered a classic of American fiction — its plot seemingly straight out of the murder ballads of American folk music. But its sprawling story already had been filmed by Josef von Sternberg in 1931, and Paramount was not eager to make the picture again. Using his already sizable talent and industry experience, producer/director George Stevens changed the characters names, recast the story after World War II, and cut the first third of the book — which depicts more of the protagonist’s youth and family life and his involvement as a passenger in a fatal car accident. Stevens also shifted the tone away from a more sympathetic tone for Alice and toward the blossoming relationship between George and Angela — capitalizing on the good looks and strong on-screen rapport of Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, in her first adult role. This change in audience identification becomes pivotal in the scene on the lake between George and Alice, where it becomes clear that although George has lured his ex-girlfriend to her demise, he does not have the heart to follow through with it.
Working with cinematographer William C. Mellor, Stevens avoids flashy photography, instead employing understated master shots — creating the feeling of an impartial observer who is watching fate play itself out. Only when George and Angela’s love affair takes off toward the middle of the film, do we really start to see
intimate close-ups — including tight over-the-shoulder shots, which draw the audience into their doomed courtship. Stevens and his editor William Hornbeck also are very effective in their use of montages, dissolves and wipes to condense the story’s plot to its simple essence. Throughout the movie, we see images superimposed on top of one another, indicating what or who a character is thinking about, or what is going on simultaneously in the story. This creates a number of unforgettable images — including a repeated motif showing George as a trapped outsider, and a distant shot of Angela in her room after George has been put on trial for murder — his newspaper picture burning up in a fireplace in the foreground. Believing that preparation and editing are the key ingredients in creating an effective motion picture, Stevens shot a lot of footage to cover himself in post-production. The result paid off in one of the best looking, effortlessly paced films ever made in Hollywood. Beyond the technical aspects, much of the success of A Place in the Sun comes from its cast. Montgomery Clift plays George Eastman with the perfect amount of dread and vulnerability — damned by forces that are beyond his control, and in some cases by his own poor decisions that have come back to haunt him. In his book Who The Hell’s In It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors, director, film historian and critic Peter Bogdanovich calls Clift, “the purest, least mannered of the method actors; perhaps the most sensitive, certainly the most poetic.” In addition to impossibly good looks, Montgomery Clift’s eyes are among the most tragic and unforgettable in the history of cinema. George truly sees himself as a victim of circumstance, but you can’t help but identify or feel sorry for his character. During the closing scenes in court and jail, as he comes to terms with his guilty conscience and accepts his fate, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else but Montgomery Clift in the part.
As the glamorous and energetic Angela Vickers, two-time Academy Award-winner Elizabeth Taylor — already considered one of the most beautiful women in the world at 17 — moves beyond the family films of her childhood to match Clift’s intensity and intuitive acting. Together, they create heart-rending scenes of initial hope and happiness, and then despair. Lines that might sound corny or false coming from others such as “It always seems like we spend the best part of our time saying goodbye” and “Love me for as long as I live, then forget me” ring true. You can feel the passion radiating from the screen. In an industry where genuine romantic chemistry is sought often and extremely hard to come by, they had it.
The third part of the triangle, Shelley Winters began her career as a blonde bombshell. She fought to be cast in the film against type — even going as far to attend a meeting with Stevens in drab disguise in order to get a screen test. She plays Alice as clingy, insecure and increasingly desperate — but not unreasonable or unsympathetic. Winters was so believable in the part that she would go onto play more vulnerable, doomed women who are manipulated by the men they love in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), eventually winning two supporting actress Oscars — including one for George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). Rounding out the cast is a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr as the aggressive prosecutor Mr. Marlowe — in a righteously determined supporting role that would foreshadow his future career.
Despite the 12-year-age difference, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor would remain great friends for life until Clift’s tragically early death in 1966. They would work together in two more pictures — once again as star-crossed lovers in Raintree County (1956) — a Gone With the Wind (1939) knock-off during which Taylor helped save a badly injured Clift’s life in a real-life car accident, and as a doctor and troubled patient in Suddenly Last Summer (1959) — a psychodrama based on the Tennessee Williams play. But neither film would approach the beauty of A Place in the Sun — which won six well-deserved Oscars at the Academy Awards for 1951, for directing, black & white cinematography, film editing, music score of a dramatic or comedy picture, black & white costume design, and writing (screenplay). Its only losses were actor (Clift) to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, actress (Winters) to Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, and picture to Vincente Minnelli’s musical An American in Paris.
George Stevens (1904-1975) is a figure whose name is not mentioned in film circles nowadays as often as it should be — probably because like other great directors such as Sidney Lumet and Louis Malle, he made terrific films in a number of different styles and genres, rather than developing an immediately identifiable brand — such as a John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock. Cutting his teeth as a cinematographer and gag writer for many of the Laurel & Hardy shorts, Stevens would go on to film such enduring pictures as the adventure movie Gunga
Din (1939), staring Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the classic Western Shane (1953), and Swing Time (1936) — considered by many of be the best of the Astaire and Rogers musicals. After volunteering and serving as a major in World War II, where he filmed vital, historic footage at Normandy and Dachau, his films show an increased depth and seriousness about the human condition. Nominated five times for best director, he won a second directing Oscar for Giant (1956), an epic soap opera with buried anti-racism themes which turned out to be James Dean's third and final film. It plays in many ways like a forerunner of such television shows as Dallas and Dynasty. In 1966, Stevens sued NBC Television and Paramount Pictures in an effort to prevent showing A Place in the Sun on television with commercials inserted — a battle that he would eventually lose, but that showed his commitment to the art of cinema — a gesture that was not lost on the other Hollywood filmmakers who had held him in high regard for years. Driving his family home from the Academy Awards — his best director Oscar for A Place in the Sun sitting between them — Stevens smiled at his over-excited son, George Jr., saying “We’ll have a better idea of what kind of picture this is, in about 25 years.” But the verdict on this timeless and distinctly American classic has never been in question. Tweet
Labels: 50s, Astaire, Bogart, Bogdanovich, Cary, Clift, G. Stevens, Ginger Rogers, Hitchcock, James Dean, John Ford, Kubrick, Laughton, Liz, Movie Tributes, Shelley Winters, Tennessee Williams, V. Leigh, von Sternberg
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Sunday, August 07, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Nicholas Ray, Part 1
"My heroes are no more neurotic than the audience. Unless you can feel that a hero is just as fucked up as you are, that you would make the same mistakes that he would make, you can have no satisfaction when he does commit a heroic act. Because then you can say, ‘Hell, I could have done that too.’ And that’s the obligation of the filmmaker — of the theater-worker — to give a heightened sense of experience to the people who pay to come see his work."
By Kevin J. Olson
When I think of consistency in the cinema, Nicholas Ray is a name that always comes to mind. In fact, I struggle greatly finding a film of his that I really, truly dislike. Some of his later films were flawed, sure, but I've never had an unpleasant experience watching one of his movies. What I think of more than the man’s consistency, is how Ray always was a director ahead of his time creating the type of characters described in the quote above — characters that were flawed, misunderstood outcasts. It’s because of this that I’ve always been drawn to Ray’s films and continue to revisit them.
What I remember most from his films was his propensity for making films about solitary social misfits. Whether it was Joan Crawford’s saloon owner in the brilliant Johnny Guitar (the film that acted as the catalyst for Godard’s remark that, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.”), James Dean’s angsty teenage outsider in Rebel Without a Cause, or Bogey’s screenwriter from In a Lonely Place, Ray loved the theme of solitude and was better at it than perhaps any of his contemporaries. Like the quote above, Ray wasn’t interested in the status quo; he was a filmmaker who enjoyed existing in the margins, who wanted to push the viewer out of their comfort zone as it pertained to how they understood the role of the hero in film. He did the same for the actors with whom he worked. In almost all of his masterpieces (which pretty much encapsulates every film he made between 1949– 1958), Ray was able to exorcise whatever bad habits hammy actors had a tendency for in that era (just look at the differences between Dean’s performance in East of Eden versus Rebel) and elicited genuinely strong and poignant performances out of the most unlikely of actors; he definitely pulled what are arguably the best performances out of such screen icons as Humphrey Bogart (In a Lonely Place) and Robert Mitchum (The Lusty Men). It’s not just his themes or the fact that he could get a great performance from unexpected sources, but it was in the way that from that golden age of his career, he so rarely erred.
An antagonist by nature, I can’t think of another filmmaker who has had that kind of run in Hollywood while simultaneously feeling so un-Hollywood; Ray was an iconoclast. He often used his films to explicate the kind of themes that not only interested him but were the kind of themes that allowed him to try and make sense of the chaos and isolation he felt in his own life as he often made films filled with themes and motifs that mirrored his bisexuality, marginalization, and increasing impatience from Hollywood producers. It is why, I think, he was able to elicit such great performances from his young actors — he connected with them. But Ray’s legacy rises above all of that to leave a lasting mark on cinema. I can think of only a handful of directors (Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder to name a few) that, for me, define the 1950s American cinema more than Nicholas Ray.
John Houseman financed Ray’s first picture (after giving Ray a copy of the source material to read; the two fell in love with it) for RKO in 1947, They Live by Night, which wouldn’t be released until 1949. The story is as simple and cut-and-dried as a noir can be, and I mean that as a compliment. Ray, for a first time filmmaker, has incredible control of the film from beginning to end (he had complete creative control of the film). They Live by Night is an excellent precursor to Bonnie and Clyde — the kind of doomed-love-affair/bank heist picture that Arthur Penn popularized. From the opening tracking shot (shot from a helicopter) to the immediacy of a POV from inside a getaway car, Ray’s aesthetic for his debut film fits the noir genre perfectly. However, as is the case with most of Ray’s films, They Live by Night is not your usual noir crime story.
At its heart is a story we would see fleshed out with Ray’s subsequent projects. The mismatched, doomed lovers who just don’t seem to fit in a way that society says two people in love should fit is nothing new to the genre; however, the film is filled with great, quiet moments (music and sound are used brilliantly throughout)
between its two leads Farley Granger (Bowie, a bank robber who has just escaped from prison) and Catherine O’Donnell (Keechie, a gas station owner’s daughter) who give the film’s central (doomed) love story an added weight that a lot of noirs don’t slow down for. There’s a beautiful moment on their honeymoon (look and admire the way Ray lights the scene, incredible for a first time filmmaker) that showcases the deftness in which Ray handles young, idealized (and, again, doomed) love. The scene is when Keechie and Bowie are in a cabin talking about what they want to do in the future; it has a nice tinge of tragic irony as they try to fashion out a little domestic life for themselves on the run (they even go and get married on the cheap at a small chapel). Bowie has yet to see how the real world works as he’s still convinced that he and Keechie can escape and live happily ever after just as long as he can get enough money to get a lawyer to get him off the hook for a murder. What makes the scene so great is that it isn’t just the big dreams (Bowie wanting to escape the life to have a legitimate marriage) that they have or the brooding nature of the romance (before it became cliché, mind you, as Ray had a great sense of what makes brooding young people tick), it’s in the small, little things, like going to a movie and holding hands in the theater, they know they can’t do because he’s being pursued by the law. It’s in moments like this that make They Live by Night one of my favorite of Ray's early films; he would only expand on these themes in subsequent films, making them more tragic.
After seeing and being impressed with They Live by Night, Humphrey Bogart called up Ray to see if he wanted to direct him in his next project (and first for the actor’s Santana production company), the 1949 courtroom noir, Knock on Any Door. The film would be remembered as yet another example of Ray tapping into the disenfranchised youth with lines such as, “live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” which, of course, would be a similar credo for a generation that identified with his most popular “teenage outsider” film, Rebel Without a Cause. This isn’t one of Ray’s best efforts (it’s too heavy-handed), but it’s an interesting addition and memorable because of how it acts as a sort of precursor to Rebel as well as further establishing the themes and character types that drew Ray's empathy.
After a so-so noir starring Maureen O’Hara (A Woman’s Secret) and a failed attempt to save a sinking-ship of a film (Roseanna McCoy), Ray returned with what is arguably his best film (it’s at least an easy candidate for top three). In a Lonely Place is the story of out-of-control, cynical screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart, who draws from his own feelings of loneliness to create his greatest performance) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame, Ray’s ex-wife, although people on the set were unaware of their separation) and their doomed love affair that exists in the cruel world of showbiz that would be more popularized in two films released the same year, Sunset Blvd. and All About Eve. Even though those other two films are rightfully hailed and firmly entrenched as two of the best films ever about the entertainment industry, In a Lonely Place more than holds its own.
The film has all the trappings of noir, but like They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place is more interested in the love story which is deeply existential. Once again, the audience gets to see one of Ray’s favorite themes
at play: Dixon is the troubled soul who often retreats to its dark corners, and Laurel is the woman who thinks she can save him. It won’t be the last time that we see Ray use mismatched characters to showcase doomed love. It borders on cliché — the cynical, down-on-his-luck misfit and the good-hearted woman who thinks she can change him — but Bogart’s performance (drawing from his personal life) and Ray’s direction (not to mention the great cinematography from Burnett Guffey who uses the film’s apartment complex location wonderfully to show the isolation and fragmentation of the characters) keeps it from becoming that. The film’s title more than suggests the existential themes Ray loves to explicate in his films, but it also suggests that even the sexiest of places — 1950s Hollywood — can be a lonely place. The film is an interesting precursor to some of the elements Curtis Hanson would eventually use 40-some years later in his masterpiece L.A. Confidential (Hanson had his actors watch this film to prepare for their roles).In a Lonely Place is filled with beautiful images (I love that moment on the beach between Dixon and Laurel, or the scene where Dixon is describing the murder from his script to his two leads…and the way Bogart is lit as
he goes to that dark place) and some of the trademark moments of isolation that we associate with Ray. Even more interesting is how Ray stayed true to his title of iconoclast by switching the ending at the last second. Displeased with how “neatly” they had wrapped up the story, Ray kicked everyone off set with exception of his two leads and Art Smith. With his urging, he and the actors improvised the ending of the film so that it felt more organic — real to life — which is an attribute of Ray’s films where it is apparent he tried really damn hard to get his vision on the screen. Life, and love, is a damn messy thing for Ray, and he respected the audience enough to show them protagonists who weren’t squeaky clean idealists; rather, they felt like real people doing real things with which the audience could identify. It’s why I lead this piece with that quote; it perfectly describes what it is he’s going for with his films, and I’m not sure he did it any better than In a Lonely Place. After making a successful war picture (The Flying Leathernecks); a so-so melodrama starring Joan Fontaine (Born to be Bad); and attempting to save the botched-adventure film Macao, originally helmed by Josef von Sternberg (Howard Hughes fired von Sternberg and hired Ray to finish the movie), Ray went back to his roots with one of my favorite film noirs, On Dangerous Ground. One of Ray’s final films for RKO, this is a great cop flick that shows the energy Ray instilled in his films. David Denby, in his retrospective piece for The New Yorker, offers up a great quote from Jacques Rivette (Ray was a favorite of the New-Wavers) on Ray’s style, and then goes on to say this about Ray’s aesthetic and this film:
As early as 1953, Jacques Rivette identified in Ray a “taste for paroxysm, which imparts something of the feverish and impermanent to the most tranquil of moments.” On Dangerous Ground (1951), a high point of neurosis in film noir, stars Robert Ryan as a cop so tautened by his calling that the simplest act turns savage; in his apartment, he washes and dries his hands as if wringing the neck of an invisible suspect.
That is a great quote from Rivette and a great moment described by Denby, and it’s probably the one I would select as my favorite of the film. I think Rivette’s quote works best for Ray’s later films (specifically Johnny Guitar), but it works, too, on this great little noir, especially in the way Ray innovatively used hand-held camera to capture the immediacy of being a cop (he would again use hand-held in The Lusty Men), specifically in the way he films yet another violent protagonist. I can see why Ray had such an influence on Scorsese. Film noir was always an arena for filmmakers to be more experimental — it’s what made the genre so great — and Ray uses some great expressionistic camera movements in the film as well having his characters go to literal dark places rather than existential ones.
If Curtis Hanson used In a Lonely Place to educate his actors on the correct tone for when they filmed L.A. Confidential, then On Dangerous Ground is definitely the film he showed Russell Crowe for him to get into his character, Bud, for that film. Robert Ryan’s portrayal of Jim Wilson is scary in how quickly he can become unhinged; he has no problems roughing people up in order to get what he wants; however, there’s also
something else lurking beneath the rough exterior (as is the case with most Ray protagonists), and in one scene (a really well done, hand-held chase in an alley) Wilson is accosted by his partner for, again, roughing up a suspect. His reply to his partner’s cries for some decorum is simply, “OK, so I get kicked off the force…what kind of a job is this anyway? Garbage, that’s all we handle, garbage!” It’s this mix of unpredictability and surprising introspection from his misunderstood, violent-tempered protagonist that Ray loved to invert about half-way through his films by introducing a love interest. As has been stated already, most of these romances are doomed from the start, but there’s always a speck of idealized romance that exists in these characters (again, you see this influence in L.A. Confidential where Bud is seemingly one-dimensional, but is looking for something beyond his profession, which he's become disillusioned with despite doing it well). Ray gives Wilson a happy ending at the end of On Dangerous Ground as Wilson has his thoughts played out in voice over acting as the catalyst for taking him back to the cabin where Ida Lupino lives. They embrace and kiss, and it actually feels kind of weird for Ray to give his character such an optimistic ending (he would give a similarly toned happy ending to his similarly dark Bigger Than Life).The immediacy and the down-and-dirty tone of On Dangerous Ground is definitely less subtle than In a Lonely Place, but that’s part of its charms; it’s a great noir film and a natural fit for Ray, who again furthers the themes he was drawn to by making a film where his misfit characters (violent and disturbed and outcasts) seem right at home in the world of film noir. It’s one of my favorites.
I’ve heard (I can’t remember where, but I’m definitely not taking credit for this) somewhere that Nicholas Ray may have been the first existential action filmmaker. I’m assuming wherever I read and whoever said it was referring to The Lusty Men. A Western/rodeo picture on its exterior, it’s in the quiet, contemplative moments where the film has a headlong energy that we just know — knowing what we know about Ray’s tragic heroes — is going to end tragically. That much talked about, great opening shot of Mitchum’s bull-rider solitarily limping out of the emptied rodeo arena is the quintessential Ray shot: encapsulating in one, brief moment everything that characterizes Ray’s heroes and everything that represents the characters found in The Lusty Men who exist in a fast-paced world that chews them up and spits them out (I love the final shot: despite a man’s death, the show must go on) with little regard for their well-being.
Anyone who has seen Ray’s films knows him as the iconoclast that he is; however, when one thinks of such a term to ascribe the auteur, I’m sure their mind does not go towards this small western. Ray, though, loved this film and it shows. It’s one of his most keenly observant psychological profiles, and despite the film’s horrendous title, it’s one of those movies that sneaks up on you with its power.
Like most of Ray’s films, The Lusty Men is a narrative with multiple layers. On the surface, the film looks like a movie about the rodeo, when, in reality, The Lusty Men is a film about what it means to go home — both professionally and personally — and make a home, and the complexities that surround such a journey. Ray loved the idea of love triangles, and the pursuit of happiness despite the situations his characters find themselves in — situations that seem to offer no such reprieve from their depressed and banal reality. This motif would pop up again, most famously, in Rebel Without a Cause with the great scene where the trio of characters from that film obtains a glimmer of happiness while playing “house” in an abandon mansion.
The film contains the typical Ray love triangle, but it’s also typical of the way Ray infused real life problems into melodrama (much like another of my favorites from the ‘50s — and this would be even more apparent in Bigger Than Life — Douglas Sirk), and he has his characters act as unpredictably and honestly as they would in
real life. There’s a great scene where Susan Hayward just has an outstanding moment of acting. It’s toward the end when her husband Wes is fully entrenched in the rodeo circuit. She blames herself for their failing marriage and how she’s no fun anymore (“not like the blonde with the skirt down to her knees” is a line that made me chuckle), but she also is fed up with the role of woman when it’s just the man that gets to do what he wants. Her line, “I’m supposed to sit here waiting for him to come staggering through that door, and then I’m supposed to put my arms around him and make him some black coffee and stick an ice bag on his head and take off his boots and wrap him up warm and put him to bed” is a powerful monologue and a perfect example of how Ray was always looking to throw the customs of the time under a critical microscope. It’s an interesting scene in what is maybe one of Ray’s sneakier message pictures. Obviously there’s dual taming going on here — horses and men — but Ray, ever the one to challenge society's mores, is doing something radical for a film that, on its surface, seems like nothing more than an early ‘50s Western: he’s openly talking about the banality of domesticated life, but he’s speaking from the female perspective.Ray would follow The Lusty Men with the three films that cinephiles everywhere point to as the defining run of his career; three films that would cement Ray's legacy as one of the great auteurs of American cinema.
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Labels: Arthur Penn, Bogart, Crawford, Godard, Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, James Dean, Lupino, Mitchum, N. Ray, Robert Ryan, Russell Crowe, Scorsese, von Sternberg, Wilder
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Sunday, August 08, 2010
Centennial Tributes: Sylvia Sidney
By Richard von Busack
There’s a 1998 interview with Sylvia Sidney, born 100 years ago today, that seems a cautionary tale about what can happen when interviewing an aged movie star. Entertainment Weekly reporter Shawna Malcom apparently expected a sweet old duckling when she phone up, and got instead a hard-boiled octogenarian.
The piece is still online. Malcom called Sidney about the revival of TV’s Fantasy Island in 1998. The reporter asked the actress thought of the role. "For Christ's sake, don't call it a role… It's a part…A role is Lady Macbeth. A role is Juliet. A part is a part. It's a job." It went downhill from there, as the reporter was waved off specificities.
"You want me to remember 50 years ago? I was lucky. I worked with a lot of important directors, and I became a very happy actress for a time."
Born Sophia Kosow, she grew up in a divorced home when that still had some stigma. Her mother remarried, and Sylvia grew up in the Bronx. She was urged into acting to conquer her chronic shyness. She was a success on stage from her adolescence on, and the longevity of her career testifies to just how much appeal she had.
You could bracket Sylvia Sidney’s career between suicides: she had the tight nerves and the ethereal face to play women not at home in this world. In the 1932 Madame Butterfly, Sidney is in Asian makeup, with a not-quite-there-yet Cary Grant as her faithless Lt. Pinkerton. Not having the Rossini music to carry the story, Sidney holds the tragedy in the delicacy of her expression, and the Asian makeup doesn’t hold you back. When the end of the game comes, you choke on cue. This film, made just a few years after the advent of sound, still has the freight of silent tragedy.
Fifty-seven years later in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1989) a hipster fritillary at a party (Glenn Shadix) makes a sub-Oscar Wilde joke about how suicides are punished by being made to labor as civil servants for eternity. Later, in the movie’s purgatory, a woman with a face as gnarled as an oak tree upbraids the two foolish new arrivals (Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis) who have just added to her workload. Sidney’s Juno glares at them and expels a cloud of cigarette smoke…some of it seeps from the slash in her self-cut throat. Sidney wasn’t used much for light-heartedness, even though Burton gave her a last screen role as a half-gaga granny in 1996’s Mars Attacks! — the one whose Slim Whitman record saves the world.
In the 1930s, she was one of the most delicate tragediennes on the screen: she worked for Fritz Lang in You Only Live Once, for King Vidor in Street Scene, as the lover of a man (Gary Cooper) marked for death in Mamoulian’s City Streets, for von Sternberg as doomed Roberta Alden in the first version of An American Tragedy — the version joked about by Groucho in Horse Feathers.
She worked for pioneering female director Dorothy Arzner in Merrily We Go To Hell, where Sidney plays a grade-A doormat married to a drunk. It was a cavalcade of lost-women roles that made her say later, “Paramount paid me by the tear.”
Tears weren’t the source for her salt; she had enough strength to demand Fritz Lang as her director in three 1930s pictures. Sidney told Lang’s biographer Patrick McGilligan “I turned down many, many pictures for twice the money because I preferred to do Fury with Spencer Tracy and Fritz Lang…Fritz was one of a kind.” Lang was notorious as a rough man on actors, but Sidney kept his picture on her wall until the end of her life.
The third of their movies, You and Me, is an oddity: a Kurt Weill musical directed by one of the least musical-comedy prone directors in Hollywood. “An out and out stinker,” decides McGilligan, but its very slightness denies it even that kind of stature.
Fury, by contrast, is a masterpiece of raging filmmaking, based on California’s last lynching Nov. 27, 1933, in San Jose. Sidney plays the wife of a wrongly arrested man (Spencer Tracy) who is nearly burned alive in jail. Made at MGM, a studio that specialized in escapism, it’s a dose of old-world haunting the new Depression; it’s obviously the work of the person who made Metropolis and M. No matter how many collaborators Lang had (and hid in later interviews). Sidney is a vision of feminine mercy in a film full of vicious men.
In You Only Live Once, Sidney is the hunted one. Facing conviction under the early version of the three-strikes law, the hard-luck-ridden Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is about to marry Sidney, who plays the secretary of his public defender. The two go on honeymoon, but the world won't leave them alone. "The last romantic couple in the world," Jean-Luc Godard called these characters in Pierrot le Fou; Sidney and Fonda are primal version of the doomed lovers fleeing the law in so many movies since.
She worked with the actor Oscar Holmolka in Sabotage, Hitchcock’s version of the Joseph Conrad novel The Secret Agent (1936) is a movie about a London saboteur who bungles his assignments and accidentally becomes a kind of terrorist. Hitchcock later told Francois Truffaut that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with Sidney — that she couldn’t keep things neutral enough for him in the tragedy’s climax: “on the other hand she had nice understatement.” Truffaut then says something insightful about Sidney:
“I think she’s quite beautiful. Still — and it isn’t kind to say this about a woman — she looks a little like Peter Lorre, perhaps because of her eyes.”
To people who think of Lorre as a Famous Monsters of Filmland, a career creep, Truffaut’s comment seems insulting. But to those who remember Lorre before he became typecast in monster movies, this is a keen summing up of Sidney’s talent.
In the 1930s, then-film critic Graham Greene was describing Lorre (as of Mad Love) as the best actor since Chaplin. Like Lorre, Sidney was small and frail, at home in the slums. Like him, she was rooted in the Germanic theater of the teens and 1920s, a theater of moral seriousness and life or death matters. Like Lorre she was at home in the realm of the macabre. Like Lorre she became a type as she grew old. Tough moms of sensitive middle-agers for example, as in her comeback in the long-forgotten, once-prestigious Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1972). Sidney was given a sentimental Oscar nomination for playing the tough old broad mother of a brooding middle-age housewife (Joanne Woodward).
She was beautiful, even exotic, and she could play anyone from east of the Danube. And she was a terror: Elia Kazan claimed he recoiled from her during performances they shared a stage in 1939 because she tried to bite him during love scenes. In private life, Sidney lived cozily in Connecticut; she had a rage for needlepoint, which led her to write two books on sewing. There was hardship in her life; her only child perished at age 40 from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1985, and she was divorced three times.
A hard-working actress, she performed up until the end in 1999, when the cigarettes finally caught up with her. In an industry known for self-delusion, she was nobody’s fool.
Richard von Busack is the longtime film critic for Metro Newspapers. His book The Art of Megamind will be published this October.
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Labels: Alec Baldwin, Cary, Chaplin, Cooper, Godard, H. Fonda, Hitchcock, Kazan, Lang, Lorre, Marx Brothers, Musicals, Sylvia Sidney, Television, Tim Burton, Tracy, Truffaut, von Sternberg
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Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Going Gently (if not very Happily) into That Good Night
By Josh R
When it comes to aging parents and the grown children who have to care for them, whose position is the less enviable? When failing health enters into the equation, there are no easy choices — and even fewer prospects for a happy ending. This would be the case in even the most loving, well-adjusted of families. When the people in question are of the dysfunctional variety — both individually and collectively — it’s not exactly conducive to heroics. Even if the brother-and-sister pair memorably delineated by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney in The Savages weren’t faced with the challenges of dealing with a dying father, they wouldn’t be rolling in clover; since misery loves company, Dad’s infirmities only add to the weight of their already troubled existences. Entering the home stretch is no picnic — and as Tamara Jenkins’ darkly comic film suggests, groping one’s way through middle age isn’t that much better.
The family is, in fact, called the Savages. Even though its junior members belong to the rarefied world of academia and high culture — conversations are peppered with references to Bertholt Brecht and Josef von Sternberg — they’re living up to their name in other ways. The trouble begins — or rather, intensifies — when Wendy, a self-professed playwright who supports herself by doing temp work, gets the distressing news that her estranged father (Philip Bosco) has been acting out by smearing his feces on the walls of his Arizona home. Although her brother John — a sad sack college professor who cries when his girlfriend, a Polish scholar who will be leaving him as soon as her visa expires, fixes him eggs — dryly advises his distraught sibling that they’re “not in a Sam Shepard play,” matters quickly progress from bad to worse; they’re not exactly bound for Shepard country, but for someplace just as difficult to negotiate. Figuring out what to do with Dad — an ornery old cuss rapidly sinking into dementia due to the onslaught of Parkinson’s disease — is a tricky proposition, offering no comfortable solutions. It doesn’t help that as a father, Lenny Savage was neglectful at best and abusive at worst; in addition to the guilt his children feel about being unable and unwilling to care for him properly, neither is insensible to the bitter irony of taking on responsibility for someone who never really took care of them.
If the film sounds lugubrious to an extreme, writer-director Jenkins provides enough flashes of sharp gallows humor to keep the proceedings from becoming unrelentingly bleak. Not that the approach is always entirely successful. There are times when The Savages’ systemic morbidity makes for a rather plodding affair — even though Jenkins is able to bring out the humor in pathos in unexpected ways (and vice versa), the film as a whole could have used more in the way of variety. It also smacks of some of the pretensions that are particular to the world of independent filmmaking; while a fine example of the genre, there is a sense of ennui that comes with witnessing the trials and tribulations of yet another batch of quirky dysfunctionals muddling their way through life in dysfunctionally quirky fashion. The plonkety-plonking score, which suggests both a sad brand of whimsy and a crestfallen synthesizer comparing notes with a clinically depressed xylophone, seems to have been a feature of every indie-family-drama of the past ten years; it’s practically a prerequisite. Those reservations aside, the film is well-written and ultimately very moving — it grows on one as the action progresses, handling its sensitive subject matter in a way that is never less than believable. Whatever minor flaws the film has are compensated for by the performances of the principals, who are uniformly excellent. With his rumpled, hangdog look and bone-dry delivery, Hoffman subtly suggests the deep-seated anger and inability to forgive that informs his character’s seeming passivity; while I sometimes find his whiny monotone and consistent underplaying a bit too method-actorish for my taste, in this, as in Owning Mahowny, the approach pays off. Laura Linney’s triumphs usually come in twos — in 2004 she scored twin knockouts with Kinsey and P.S., and in 2007, she repeats the feat. Jindabyne, a little-seen film which can (and should) be seen in its recent DVD release, cast her in a more darkly dramatic mode, while The Savages allows her to display a brittle, defensive humor that makes her character’s neuroticism all the more compelling. In both films, the bracing intelligence which has distinguished her best work is present and accounted for (and when you factor in her well-received supporting turns in Breach and The Nanny Diaries, she’s probably broken some record of Julianne Moore’s). Bosco, a veteran stage actor, is pitch-perfect as the regressed tyrant who, through the fog of his hazy confusion, can glean just enough of his offspring’s unspoken recrimination to understand just how friendless his predicament is. When Dylan Thomas famously urged his ailing father “Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” he wasn’t speaking of a parent who was made acutely aware of the extent to which he’d failed in respect to those duties. Sometimes, the light provides the only comfort that there is — in The Savages, the departure from the world of the living is ultimately a gentle one, if inescapably colored by bitter shades of regret.
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When it comes to aging parents and the grown children who have to care for them, whose position is the less enviable? When failing health enters into the equation, there are no easy choices — and even fewer prospects for a happy ending. This would be the case in even the most loving, well-adjusted of families. When the people in question are of the dysfunctional variety — both individually and collectively — it’s not exactly conducive to heroics. Even if the brother-and-sister pair memorably delineated by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney in The Savages weren’t faced with the challenges of dealing with a dying father, they wouldn’t be rolling in clover; since misery loves company, Dad’s infirmities only add to the weight of their already troubled existences. Entering the home stretch is no picnic — and as Tamara Jenkins’ darkly comic film suggests, groping one’s way through middle age isn’t that much better.
The family is, in fact, called the Savages. Even though its junior members belong to the rarefied world of academia and high culture — conversations are peppered with references to Bertholt Brecht and Josef von Sternberg — they’re living up to their name in other ways. The trouble begins — or rather, intensifies — when Wendy, a self-professed playwright who supports herself by doing temp work, gets the distressing news that her estranged father (Philip Bosco) has been acting out by smearing his feces on the walls of his Arizona home. Although her brother John — a sad sack college professor who cries when his girlfriend, a Polish scholar who will be leaving him as soon as her visa expires, fixes him eggs — dryly advises his distraught sibling that they’re “not in a Sam Shepard play,” matters quickly progress from bad to worse; they’re not exactly bound for Shepard country, but for someplace just as difficult to negotiate. Figuring out what to do with Dad — an ornery old cuss rapidly sinking into dementia due to the onslaught of Parkinson’s disease — is a tricky proposition, offering no comfortable solutions. It doesn’t help that as a father, Lenny Savage was neglectful at best and abusive at worst; in addition to the guilt his children feel about being unable and unwilling to care for him properly, neither is insensible to the bitter irony of taking on responsibility for someone who never really took care of them.
If the film sounds lugubrious to an extreme, writer-director Jenkins provides enough flashes of sharp gallows humor to keep the proceedings from becoming unrelentingly bleak. Not that the approach is always entirely successful. There are times when The Savages’ systemic morbidity makes for a rather plodding affair — even though Jenkins is able to bring out the humor in pathos in unexpected ways (and vice versa), the film as a whole could have used more in the way of variety. It also smacks of some of the pretensions that are particular to the world of independent filmmaking; while a fine example of the genre, there is a sense of ennui that comes with witnessing the trials and tribulations of yet another batch of quirky dysfunctionals muddling their way through life in dysfunctionally quirky fashion. The plonkety-plonking score, which suggests both a sad brand of whimsy and a crestfallen synthesizer comparing notes with a clinically depressed xylophone, seems to have been a feature of every indie-family-drama of the past ten years; it’s practically a prerequisite. Those reservations aside, the film is well-written and ultimately very moving — it grows on one as the action progresses, handling its sensitive subject matter in a way that is never less than believable. Whatever minor flaws the film has are compensated for by the performances of the principals, who are uniformly excellent. With his rumpled, hangdog look and bone-dry delivery, Hoffman subtly suggests the deep-seated anger and inability to forgive that informs his character’s seeming passivity; while I sometimes find his whiny monotone and consistent underplaying a bit too method-actorish for my taste, in this, as in Owning Mahowny, the approach pays off. Laura Linney’s triumphs usually come in twos — in 2004 she scored twin knockouts with Kinsey and P.S., and in 2007, she repeats the feat. Jindabyne, a little-seen film which can (and should) be seen in its recent DVD release, cast her in a more darkly dramatic mode, while The Savages allows her to display a brittle, defensive humor that makes her character’s neuroticism all the more compelling. In both films, the bracing intelligence which has distinguished her best work is present and accounted for (and when you factor in her well-received supporting turns in Breach and The Nanny Diaries, she’s probably broken some record of Julianne Moore’s). Bosco, a veteran stage actor, is pitch-perfect as the regressed tyrant who, through the fog of his hazy confusion, can glean just enough of his offspring’s unspoken recrimination to understand just how friendless his predicament is. When Dylan Thomas famously urged his ailing father “Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” he wasn’t speaking of a parent who was made acutely aware of the extent to which he’d failed in respect to those duties. Sometimes, the light provides the only comfort that there is — in The Savages, the departure from the world of the living is ultimately a gentle one, if inescapably colored by bitter shades of regret.
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Labels: 00s, Julianne Moore, Laura Linney, P.S. Hoffman, Shepard, von Sternberg
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