Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Stars: Moira Shearer, Robert Rounseville and Robert Helpmann
Today there's so much talk about intellectual property that it's easy to get the impression that it's unethical to ever base anything on something that someone else has created. Well, here's great proof that that's complete nonsense. It's a classic of English cinema: written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who were already hugely established as a powerful double act after such classics as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus, among others. It also reunited them with Moira Shearer, who had been so spectacular three years earlier in The Red Shoes.
Yet it's based on a French opera, a classic in its own right, called The Tales of Hoffmann, written by Jacques Offenbach and first performed in Paris in 1881. The opera itself, as the title might suggest, was based on three short stories by the German poet and writer E T A Hoffmann, written between 1814 and 1818: Der Sandmann, Rat Krespel and Das verlorene Spiegelbild. So what we have is a English film based on a French opera based on German short stories with a gap of seventy full years between each version. This is operatic in style and entirely sung but is staged cinematically rather than being merely a filmed record of a stage production, even though the opening credits are accompanied by an orchestra tuning up.
The three stories are separate but linked through interpretation and a framing story featuring the poet himself. Hoffmann is in love with a dancer called Stella, currently appearing in a three act ballet called The Enchanted Dragonfly. She is in love with him also, but he has a rival for her affections in the sinister Lindorf. The actors are capable as actors but are really here for their singing or dancing talents, usually the latter as most of them are dubbed by uncredited others. For instance, Stella is Moira Shearer, a professional dancer returning to the screen for the first time after The Red Shoes, and who performs a striking opening dance with Edmond Audran in amazing costumes tight fitting enough to not leave much to the imagination.
Hoffmann himself is played by the only male actor in the film to actually sing his own part, opera singer Robert Rounseville. Lindorf is Robert Helpmann, a noted stage dancer who gave his name to Australia's annual entertainment awards and who is best known on screen for a couple of memorable roles in children's films: the Mad Hatter in the 1972 English version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Here he looks amazingly like Boris Karloff, though naturally he's a little smaller. Partly it's through the characters he plays but mostly in the way he stands and how his eyes flare. I'm sure this was a deliberate influence.
Hoffmann travels through the stories as himself, telling of the three lost loves of his life. All are personifications of Stella and his love for each is threatened by evil in the form of characters that are personifications of Lindorf. Helpmann appears in each but Shearer only in the first. This one is interesting but a little overlong to someone like me who enjoys some opera and some ballet but is left cold by most of it. She's Olympia, an innocent puppet created by a genius scientist called Spalanzani. Hoffmann falls for Olympia after Coppelius, the evil Lindorf character in this section, sells him magic spectacles that, when worn, make the puppets appear alive. After the glasses break during a dance she is cruelly and spectacularly destroyed.
The second features smouldering and exotic Ludmilla Tchérina as Giulietta who appears to be nothing but a trap for Hoffman set by her satanic master, Dappertutto, a collector of souls. This is the section that features the famous Barcarolle, which is certainly the most striking music in the opera, but apparently not originally composed for it, having been added after his death from one of his earlier and lesser works. Hoffmann loses his shadow and presuably his soul for love hof Giuletta, but through a duel with a previous victim wins his freedom and escapes.
The third, which is officially the second but they apparently get shuffled all the time on stage, takes place on a Greek Island where Hoffman is reunited with Antonia, who he loves. In this segment she's played by Anne Ayars, who like Rounseville sings her own part. She's the daughter of a famous opera singer, now deceased, and she's inherited her mother's talents, though because she's sick her father has forbidden her to sing. Enter Dr Miracle, who promises to heal her but of course merely prods her into singing herself to death.
I'm not sold on the music or the dancing, though they certainly add to the amazing sets and costumes that provide a perfect backdrop for these stories. Most of the credit here presumably belongs to Hein Heckroth, a German designer who had worked to great effect with Powell and Pressburger before, notably in The Red Shoes. He designed the sets here and some of the costumes. To my mind these designs are the biggest triumph of the film, which makes the fact that they comprised both the Oscar nominations the film received hardly surprising. The dark stories of Hoffmann come next and I'll have to seek out them out on Project Gutenberg. The direction is more than capable and the acting really isn't bad, especially given that the cast are comprised of people who are singers and dancers first and actors second.
Technically it's flawed but partly deliberately, I would think. Having seen many of their other films, I'm sure that Powell and Pressburger could have made the effects far more realistic, but they presumably chose not to do so here in favour of more theatrical effects. On that front I think they did a great job, though part of me wishes that I couldn't see through them quite so easily. Less forgiveable is the fact that the voice work is not particularly well synched to the actors. Apparently the whole film was shot without sound, with the soundtrack dubbed in later and with the exception of Anne Ayars, who sang her own part, nobody looks like they're really singing, however great they look otherwise. It isn't just that the voices often don't match the movements of the actors' mouths but more that the obvious power generated is generally utterly unreflected in their body movements.
This would appear to be a better visual experience than an auditory one. I was tempted to turn the sound off and pretend that it was a silent movie. That seems bizarre to say when watching an opera but it's not so far fetched. After all nobody speaks in the film, everything is sung an not necessarily easy to follow even though its done in English translation. The stories are really mostly interpreted though dance and dance is entirely visual. A few sections, notably the ending that unites all four faces of Stella on the same screen through cinematic trickery, are entirely without vocals. It's these such scenes that work best for me. I wonder if that's understandable or whether it's more akin to heresy.
Friday, 6 March 2009
Hallelujah! (1929)
Director: King Vidor
Stars: Daniel L Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney
Here's an oddity. It's a film from MGM, the largest of the studios, from way back in the day (you can tell because Cedric Gibbons is the only credited name as Art Director), directed by no less a name than King Vidor, who received an Oscar nomination for his work. It was his first sound film. Yet it opens with a whole host of black characters actually played by black actors. There's nobody white in sight and nobody in blackface. What's even more bizarre, but very welcome, is that they seem to be treated in a pretty fair light. Sure, these are poor black sharecroppers and there's no attempt made to make them saints, but there isn't a single talented actor pretending to be a lazy and retarded porter and that's always refreshing.
It's a human story, one set in a different world. Sure, we open in a cotton field and the first word spoken is 'Mammy', but these are good people working hard for their living. They're the Johnsons and they're picking the last of the cotton crop for the year, which Zeke takes into Greenville to sell. They're good Christian folk, in fact Pappy Johnson is a parson so he gets to marry a couple who already have eleven kids but thought it was about time they got around to it. They're all also musical,from Mammy singing her little ones to sleep to the kids tap dancing on carts and everyone either singing or playing an instrument.
Unfortunately with a hundred dollars in his pocket, Zeke gets trapped by a hoochie mama dancer who pretends to be his baby while happily suckering him into a crooked game of dice. With all his money gone, which of course isn't his to begin with, Zeke is in big trouble and as he tries to get it back from the hustler, ends up shooting his younger brother. He comes home, full of remorse, and his father helps him to see the light. Eventually he becomes a preacher himself and we find ourselves in the second half of the film for revival meetings and large scale baptisms.
The music is the main reason I fell into this one: it's everywhere and done very nicely indeed. I remember watching the James Whale version of Show Boat and finding that the black singers, Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel, were hugely enjoyable while the white singers were annoying as all get out. There was simply no comparison. Here, we have a whole film full of black singers and musicians but without any of the distracting white folk. This is what thirties musicals should have been full of: I don't even know if this could count as a musical, because of how it's constructed, but it has more music than most musicals I've seen. The instruments come out early: banjo, organ, kazoo, whatever they can find, and there are lots of wonderful voices being used at what seems like every opportune moment.
The downside, of course, is that if you take the music away, there's not a heck of a lot left. The story is a pretty simple one but it develops well and the world it's set in is refreshing to see. There are no white actors in the entire film, so it's a completely self contained world, something reasonably easy to do because of segregation. Zeke's wild ride is a fascinating one to watch, though it's not consistently believable throughout.
These actors, from the leads on down, are far better singers and dancers than they are actors. Daniel Haynes has a great deep voice but he's no great actor. He's better on that front during the second half than the first, but it's not surprising that this film was nominated for King Vidor's direction not for his acting. Better as an actor, though she often overdoes it, is Nina Mae McKinney, who plays the hoochie mama, Chick. She's better in the second half too, but she moves really well in the first as the enticing temptress. She continues that tempting through the film too, in different ways, and she's good at it.
There's even an actor here that I know, though I don't know her as an actor. Missy Rose, the young lady that has Zeke's heart whenever Chick isn't stealing it away, is played by a young Victoria Spivey. I know her as a blues musician, often singing the sort of blues that are obviously all about sex but don't actually mention it once. She'd already recorded Black Snake Blues by the time she made this film. She's no worse than the rest of the cast as an actor but no better either. It's a shame she didn't get more opportunity to sing.
Stars: Daniel L Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney
Here's an oddity. It's a film from MGM, the largest of the studios, from way back in the day (you can tell because Cedric Gibbons is the only credited name as Art Director), directed by no less a name than King Vidor, who received an Oscar nomination for his work. It was his first sound film. Yet it opens with a whole host of black characters actually played by black actors. There's nobody white in sight and nobody in blackface. What's even more bizarre, but very welcome, is that they seem to be treated in a pretty fair light. Sure, these are poor black sharecroppers and there's no attempt made to make them saints, but there isn't a single talented actor pretending to be a lazy and retarded porter and that's always refreshing.
It's a human story, one set in a different world. Sure, we open in a cotton field and the first word spoken is 'Mammy', but these are good people working hard for their living. They're the Johnsons and they're picking the last of the cotton crop for the year, which Zeke takes into Greenville to sell. They're good Christian folk, in fact Pappy Johnson is a parson so he gets to marry a couple who already have eleven kids but thought it was about time they got around to it. They're all also musical,from Mammy singing her little ones to sleep to the kids tap dancing on carts and everyone either singing or playing an instrument.
Unfortunately with a hundred dollars in his pocket, Zeke gets trapped by a hoochie mama dancer who pretends to be his baby while happily suckering him into a crooked game of dice. With all his money gone, which of course isn't his to begin with, Zeke is in big trouble and as he tries to get it back from the hustler, ends up shooting his younger brother. He comes home, full of remorse, and his father helps him to see the light. Eventually he becomes a preacher himself and we find ourselves in the second half of the film for revival meetings and large scale baptisms.
The music is the main reason I fell into this one: it's everywhere and done very nicely indeed. I remember watching the James Whale version of Show Boat and finding that the black singers, Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel, were hugely enjoyable while the white singers were annoying as all get out. There was simply no comparison. Here, we have a whole film full of black singers and musicians but without any of the distracting white folk. This is what thirties musicals should have been full of: I don't even know if this could count as a musical, because of how it's constructed, but it has more music than most musicals I've seen. The instruments come out early: banjo, organ, kazoo, whatever they can find, and there are lots of wonderful voices being used at what seems like every opportune moment.
The downside, of course, is that if you take the music away, there's not a heck of a lot left. The story is a pretty simple one but it develops well and the world it's set in is refreshing to see. There are no white actors in the entire film, so it's a completely self contained world, something reasonably easy to do because of segregation. Zeke's wild ride is a fascinating one to watch, though it's not consistently believable throughout.
These actors, from the leads on down, are far better singers and dancers than they are actors. Daniel Haynes has a great deep voice but he's no great actor. He's better on that front during the second half than the first, but it's not surprising that this film was nominated for King Vidor's direction not for his acting. Better as an actor, though she often overdoes it, is Nina Mae McKinney, who plays the hoochie mama, Chick. She's better in the second half too, but she moves really well in the first as the enticing temptress. She continues that tempting through the film too, in different ways, and she's good at it.
There's even an actor here that I know, though I don't know her as an actor. Missy Rose, the young lady that has Zeke's heart whenever Chick isn't stealing it away, is played by a young Victoria Spivey. I know her as a blues musician, often singing the sort of blues that are obviously all about sex but don't actually mention it once. She'd already recorded Black Snake Blues by the time she made this film. She's no worse than the rest of the cast as an actor but no better either. It's a shame she didn't get more opportunity to sing.
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)
Director: W S Van Dyke
Stars: Monte Blue and Raquel Torres
Sounding like a pulp adventure, this is really an indictment of western exploitation of the natives in the South Seas, wrapped up in a highly melodramatic storyline. It's a film from the end of the silent era that won an Oscar in 1928 for cinematography, and which unlike some of its competitors (such as F W Murnau's 4 Devils) has fortunately survived to this day. Based on a novel by Frederick O'Brien, it claims to be filmed in 'the natural locations', the coral atolls of Polynesia, but was really shot in Tahiti. It has a couple of firsts to its name though: it's the first MGM film to be introduced by a roaring lion and it counts as MGM's first sound picture, though it's really a silent. Douglas Shearer synchronised music and sound effects. I didn't catch any speech though.
Our lead is Monte Blue, a leading man in the silents whose long career continued into the serials and westerns of the forties and fifties. He's Dr Matthew Lloyd and when we first meet him he seems to be a bitter drunk willing to stoop as low as a bad joke to get a free drink, but that's only partly true. He still cares enough to leap out of the bar when one of the local pearl divers is brought to shore with a collapsed lung and spend all night trying to save the man. He's certainly bitter and cynical, but it would seem with good reason: the local trader, named Sebastian, is exploiting these locals to a large degree: he has them diving too often and pays for their pearls with trinkets.
We're shown the dangers of pearl diving: not just the obvious perils of the deep like sharks, octopi and razor sharp clams, but the unseen ones too, the burst veins and collapsed lungs caused by the frequent dives and great and sudden changes in pressure. We soon see plenty of other dangers, because Sebastian has it in for Dr Lloyd, especially after he belts him one and knocks him into the sea. Soon a boat arrives, all its men dead of the bubonic plague and Sebastian has him lashed to the wheel and set adrift. He frees himself but only once out at sea and one typhoon later he's shipwrecked on the island of the Mehevi tribe who have never seen a white man before.
Of course they see him as a god and celebrate his arrival with a great feast. Here's where we get to see some footage more akin to a documentary, which is shot very effectively indeed. We see the natives walking or leaping up palm trees to harvest coconuts, catching giant turtles and octopi from the sea and putting the feast together. There's some clever use of editing to speed up time, used to great effect when the natives generate fire or peel breadfruit. We even see a little native dancing, which isn't plentiful but lively, especially in the form of Kekelafaufaupaopao, which apparently translates as 'Man with legs like exploding eggs'. Is this 1928 humour or a real translation? Who knows.
With the Mehevi tribe, Dr Lloyd finds himself again, which is hardly surprising given that it's an island paradise and the natives think he's a god, though he almost loses himself to greed when he realises the cheap and plentiful supply of pearls. Of course he falls for one of the beautiful dancers, Fayaway, who is naturally the daughter of the chief and while she's initially tapau, or a virgin bride of the temple, Lloyd saves the life of her little brother, and is allowed to look upon her with love. In the bizarre logic of early Hollywood, she's also beautiful but not Polynesian in the slightest. She's Raquel Torres, born in Sonora, Mexico, and this was the first film in a brief but successful career. I've seen her before in the early Boris Karloff film, The Sea Bat, and with the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.
The South Seas were notably exotic in 1928 and so the setting for no end of pulp adventure stories. Hollywood paid attention and so early American cinema is full of such films. It was a time when any story could be believable if it was set in such a location, up to and including King Kong. This isn't quite as fantastic but it's certainly outrageous melodrama. It looks great and it plays out nicely to anyone of a pulp mindset, with Blue and Torres fine in their roles and with a very neat villainous performance in the silent style by Robert Anderson as the trader Sebastian.
Stars: Monte Blue and Raquel Torres
Sounding like a pulp adventure, this is really an indictment of western exploitation of the natives in the South Seas, wrapped up in a highly melodramatic storyline. It's a film from the end of the silent era that won an Oscar in 1928 for cinematography, and which unlike some of its competitors (such as F W Murnau's 4 Devils) has fortunately survived to this day. Based on a novel by Frederick O'Brien, it claims to be filmed in 'the natural locations', the coral atolls of Polynesia, but was really shot in Tahiti. It has a couple of firsts to its name though: it's the first MGM film to be introduced by a roaring lion and it counts as MGM's first sound picture, though it's really a silent. Douglas Shearer synchronised music and sound effects. I didn't catch any speech though.
Our lead is Monte Blue, a leading man in the silents whose long career continued into the serials and westerns of the forties and fifties. He's Dr Matthew Lloyd and when we first meet him he seems to be a bitter drunk willing to stoop as low as a bad joke to get a free drink, but that's only partly true. He still cares enough to leap out of the bar when one of the local pearl divers is brought to shore with a collapsed lung and spend all night trying to save the man. He's certainly bitter and cynical, but it would seem with good reason: the local trader, named Sebastian, is exploiting these locals to a large degree: he has them diving too often and pays for their pearls with trinkets.
We're shown the dangers of pearl diving: not just the obvious perils of the deep like sharks, octopi and razor sharp clams, but the unseen ones too, the burst veins and collapsed lungs caused by the frequent dives and great and sudden changes in pressure. We soon see plenty of other dangers, because Sebastian has it in for Dr Lloyd, especially after he belts him one and knocks him into the sea. Soon a boat arrives, all its men dead of the bubonic plague and Sebastian has him lashed to the wheel and set adrift. He frees himself but only once out at sea and one typhoon later he's shipwrecked on the island of the Mehevi tribe who have never seen a white man before.
Of course they see him as a god and celebrate his arrival with a great feast. Here's where we get to see some footage more akin to a documentary, which is shot very effectively indeed. We see the natives walking or leaping up palm trees to harvest coconuts, catching giant turtles and octopi from the sea and putting the feast together. There's some clever use of editing to speed up time, used to great effect when the natives generate fire or peel breadfruit. We even see a little native dancing, which isn't plentiful but lively, especially in the form of Kekelafaufaupaopao, which apparently translates as 'Man with legs like exploding eggs'. Is this 1928 humour or a real translation? Who knows.
With the Mehevi tribe, Dr Lloyd finds himself again, which is hardly surprising given that it's an island paradise and the natives think he's a god, though he almost loses himself to greed when he realises the cheap and plentiful supply of pearls. Of course he falls for one of the beautiful dancers, Fayaway, who is naturally the daughter of the chief and while she's initially tapau, or a virgin bride of the temple, Lloyd saves the life of her little brother, and is allowed to look upon her with love. In the bizarre logic of early Hollywood, she's also beautiful but not Polynesian in the slightest. She's Raquel Torres, born in Sonora, Mexico, and this was the first film in a brief but successful career. I've seen her before in the early Boris Karloff film, The Sea Bat, and with the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.
The South Seas were notably exotic in 1928 and so the setting for no end of pulp adventure stories. Hollywood paid attention and so early American cinema is full of such films. It was a time when any story could be believable if it was set in such a location, up to and including King Kong. This isn't quite as fantastic but it's certainly outrageous melodrama. It looks great and it plays out nicely to anyone of a pulp mindset, with Blue and Torres fine in their roles and with a very neat villainous performance in the silent style by Robert Anderson as the trader Sebastian.
Monday, 2 March 2009
The Cooler (2003)
Director: Wayne Kramer
Star: William H Macy
I was a William H Macy fan long before I ever saw Fargo or Mystery Men: they just cemented my opinion of how great an actor he is. Then I saw Edmond and was stunned. He isn't just a great actor, he's one of the best we have today. Now every time I see one of his films I record it and find another side to his versatility. He doesn't look like a star in the slightest but he seems to be able to carry the lead, whatever it might happen to be. I wonder a lot whether these films were specifically written for him or not. He has a habit of making us think that.
Here he's Bernie Lootz, the cooler of the title. He works at the Golden Shangri La, a Las Vegas casino run by Shelly Kaplow, turning winners into losers, and he's very good at what he does. He does that simply by being himself, a jinx who brings bad luck to himself and everyone around him. In fact, the reason he works there is because he's into Kaplow for $100,000 of gambling debts and he's now five days away from his five year stint of jinxing the customers. That's what's left of his debt recovery plan after Kaplow takes a baseball bat to his right leg. Unfortunately he falls in love and his powers as a jinx vanish.
Macy is excellent as Bernie, because he can play the various levels of this part. He begins as a man who knows that he brings everything down and is fully resigned to living in that world. He doesn't know what good luck is because it disappears the moment he appears. Yet the good luck finally finds its way to him in the form of Natalie Belisario, a waitress at the Shangri La and it rocks his safe little world of loss. He begins to believe that there's something in his future except being a cooler, he begins to believe that he can win at something. There's a light that literally grows in his eyes as he finds that belief.
Yet there's another level. Bernie, on the way up from way down, runs into his son in a diner. His son is a conman and an ass, together with a pregnant girlfriend who isn't pregnant, and through his inadvised con tricks proceeds to knock Bernie back down again. Worse still, Kaplow isn't going to let his prize cooler get switched around just because he's fallen in love. He's old school in every way. After all, he believes in luck which is why he hires coolers. At heart this film is all about luck and Bernie is its personification. Lady Luck and whatever her opposite is called are characters in this film, whether we see them or not. So Bernie is forever down yet going up but going down while he's going up: he's like a whole batch of sine waves running in tandem.
It's another amazing Macy performance, but he's not the only one here to watch. I'm no hugeAdam Alec Baldwin fan but he's spot on as the tough and sleazy Shelly Kaplow, who does what he does because it's how his philosophy tells him it has to be done, even though he doesn't always feel great doing it. He has plenty of scruples but he ignores them absolutely. I didn't know Maria Bello at all before this film, as she's best known for a recurring role on TV's ER, but she pulls off a difficult role as the woman who turns Bernie around. She's luminous here and would be an illumination in anyone's life. She could be a huge star and I'd be surprised to find that the coming years don't make that happen.
Star: William H Macy
I was a William H Macy fan long before I ever saw Fargo or Mystery Men: they just cemented my opinion of how great an actor he is. Then I saw Edmond and was stunned. He isn't just a great actor, he's one of the best we have today. Now every time I see one of his films I record it and find another side to his versatility. He doesn't look like a star in the slightest but he seems to be able to carry the lead, whatever it might happen to be. I wonder a lot whether these films were specifically written for him or not. He has a habit of making us think that.
Here he's Bernie Lootz, the cooler of the title. He works at the Golden Shangri La, a Las Vegas casino run by Shelly Kaplow, turning winners into losers, and he's very good at what he does. He does that simply by being himself, a jinx who brings bad luck to himself and everyone around him. In fact, the reason he works there is because he's into Kaplow for $100,000 of gambling debts and he's now five days away from his five year stint of jinxing the customers. That's what's left of his debt recovery plan after Kaplow takes a baseball bat to his right leg. Unfortunately he falls in love and his powers as a jinx vanish.
Macy is excellent as Bernie, because he can play the various levels of this part. He begins as a man who knows that he brings everything down and is fully resigned to living in that world. He doesn't know what good luck is because it disappears the moment he appears. Yet the good luck finally finds its way to him in the form of Natalie Belisario, a waitress at the Shangri La and it rocks his safe little world of loss. He begins to believe that there's something in his future except being a cooler, he begins to believe that he can win at something. There's a light that literally grows in his eyes as he finds that belief.
Yet there's another level. Bernie, on the way up from way down, runs into his son in a diner. His son is a conman and an ass, together with a pregnant girlfriend who isn't pregnant, and through his inadvised con tricks proceeds to knock Bernie back down again. Worse still, Kaplow isn't going to let his prize cooler get switched around just because he's fallen in love. He's old school in every way. After all, he believes in luck which is why he hires coolers. At heart this film is all about luck and Bernie is its personification. Lady Luck and whatever her opposite is called are characters in this film, whether we see them or not. So Bernie is forever down yet going up but going down while he's going up: he's like a whole batch of sine waves running in tandem.
It's another amazing Macy performance, but he's not the only one here to watch. I'm no huge
The Rains Came (1939)
Director: Clarence Brown
Stars: Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power and George Brent
And still the films from 1939 keep coming and this one's yet another Oscar winner too. Sometimes it seems that every film released in 1939 either won an Oscar, was only nominated for Oscar or was absolutely cheated out of both nomination and win because it was Hollywood's greatest year, yaddah yaddah yaddah. This fits the first two categories: it garnered one win and five nominations, but none of them were in the major categories. It won for special effects and was nominated for art direction, editing, cinematography, music and sound. That would appear to be surprising, given the cast involved here.
We meet George Brent first. He's a painter called Tom Ransome, though a languid one who's spent seven years sitting on his porch in the Indian state of Ranchipur instead of finishing his painting of the Maharajah he's been commissioned to complete. He's a real person though, grounded and decent, however much his reputation talks of women and drink. He's also the link between the many other people that we meet in the story. He knows everyone, it seems, even those who arrive as guests.
We meet a whole host of characters, of the varied sort you might expect to meet in 1938 India if you keep away from most of the locals, which is what most foreigners somehow managed to do. A young Tyrone Power is an Sikh major and dedicated surgeon called Rama Safti. Marjorie Rambeau plays an inveterate snob of a missionary trying to hang out with the important people, utterly ignore the lesser people and palm her daughter off on Ransome. Brenda Joyce is that minx of a daughter, who just wants out to see the world and falls for him, possibly just to achieve that end. To Henry Travers and Jane Darwell are a down to earth priest and his wife who run the missionary school.
Before long we end up at the Sish Mahal palace which some of these characters would die to get into and to which others just get invited. However those wannabees would be shocked at how free of snobbery the place is. Here's where we (and Tom Ransome) meet Lord and Lady Esketh, a fascinating pairing of Myrna Loy with Nigel Bruce. Lord Esketh is an unpleasant coward and his Lady is happy to sleep with anyone she can find as long as it isn't him. Best of all are the Maharajah and Maharani, who are joyous characters, as you might expect given the actors playing them: H B Warner and Maria Ouspenskaya. Her potent Russian accent is utterly out of place in an Indian palace but other than that she's a joy.
And around these characters weaves a melodramatic story that isn't worth a heck of a lot. While Fern Simon throws herself at Tom Ransome, his old flame, now Lady Esketh, throws herself at Major Safti. His Lordship is ill, but still keeping a track of who she may be sleeping with. And none of this matters at all. Luckily there's that Oscar win for special effects, which we wonder about for a while and then realise it was utterly earned. We don't just have plenty of rain, once it arrives, but an earthquake to boot, one that takes out the dam that sits conveniently just above the town, thus causing a major flood. Plague isn't far behind and fire too. The destruction is massive and the loss of life great and Mother Nature quickly and ably shows us how small all the people are in this film. The question of course is whether those small people realise it too, which generally they do.
The story isn't far off being a waste of time but somehow it draws us in. Mostly I think it's because the acting is solid if not spectacular. After all the spectacle here belongs to the work of Nature and the special effects team and there's not much room left for scene stealing. Myrna Loy is the biggest name and she does an excellent job in a role that is notably unlike her usual parts. She's a good person, but one who doesn't find her true self until circumstances force her into it. This is my fiftieth Myrna Loy and I don't recall ever seeing her act with her body as much as she does here.
Tyrone Power is a decent Rama Safti but he fades into the background a little too easily. George Brent, as the glue between everything here, is superb. He was always great at flouting convention without offering disrespect and that's a fine line to walk. He walks it well throughout this film. Brenda Joyce is as doe eyed as she's supposed to be and it's the character that's frequently annoying rather than the actress. Nigel Bruce could always bluster with the best of them but does so with a notably nasty streak here. I think it's Maria Ouspenkaya who will stay with me most though, even though her accent is utterly wrong. She plays an intelligent and principled woman with power, concern and decency. She wields her authority wonderfully.
Stars: Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power and George Brent
And still the films from 1939 keep coming and this one's yet another Oscar winner too. Sometimes it seems that every film released in 1939 either won an Oscar, was only nominated for Oscar or was absolutely cheated out of both nomination and win because it was Hollywood's greatest year, yaddah yaddah yaddah. This fits the first two categories: it garnered one win and five nominations, but none of them were in the major categories. It won for special effects and was nominated for art direction, editing, cinematography, music and sound. That would appear to be surprising, given the cast involved here.
We meet George Brent first. He's a painter called Tom Ransome, though a languid one who's spent seven years sitting on his porch in the Indian state of Ranchipur instead of finishing his painting of the Maharajah he's been commissioned to complete. He's a real person though, grounded and decent, however much his reputation talks of women and drink. He's also the link between the many other people that we meet in the story. He knows everyone, it seems, even those who arrive as guests.
We meet a whole host of characters, of the varied sort you might expect to meet in 1938 India if you keep away from most of the locals, which is what most foreigners somehow managed to do. A young Tyrone Power is an Sikh major and dedicated surgeon called Rama Safti. Marjorie Rambeau plays an inveterate snob of a missionary trying to hang out with the important people, utterly ignore the lesser people and palm her daughter off on Ransome. Brenda Joyce is that minx of a daughter, who just wants out to see the world and falls for him, possibly just to achieve that end. To Henry Travers and Jane Darwell are a down to earth priest and his wife who run the missionary school.
Before long we end up at the Sish Mahal palace which some of these characters would die to get into and to which others just get invited. However those wannabees would be shocked at how free of snobbery the place is. Here's where we (and Tom Ransome) meet Lord and Lady Esketh, a fascinating pairing of Myrna Loy with Nigel Bruce. Lord Esketh is an unpleasant coward and his Lady is happy to sleep with anyone she can find as long as it isn't him. Best of all are the Maharajah and Maharani, who are joyous characters, as you might expect given the actors playing them: H B Warner and Maria Ouspenskaya. Her potent Russian accent is utterly out of place in an Indian palace but other than that she's a joy.
And around these characters weaves a melodramatic story that isn't worth a heck of a lot. While Fern Simon throws herself at Tom Ransome, his old flame, now Lady Esketh, throws herself at Major Safti. His Lordship is ill, but still keeping a track of who she may be sleeping with. And none of this matters at all. Luckily there's that Oscar win for special effects, which we wonder about for a while and then realise it was utterly earned. We don't just have plenty of rain, once it arrives, but an earthquake to boot, one that takes out the dam that sits conveniently just above the town, thus causing a major flood. Plague isn't far behind and fire too. The destruction is massive and the loss of life great and Mother Nature quickly and ably shows us how small all the people are in this film. The question of course is whether those small people realise it too, which generally they do.
The story isn't far off being a waste of time but somehow it draws us in. Mostly I think it's because the acting is solid if not spectacular. After all the spectacle here belongs to the work of Nature and the special effects team and there's not much room left for scene stealing. Myrna Loy is the biggest name and she does an excellent job in a role that is notably unlike her usual parts. She's a good person, but one who doesn't find her true self until circumstances force her into it. This is my fiftieth Myrna Loy and I don't recall ever seeing her act with her body as much as she does here.
Tyrone Power is a decent Rama Safti but he fades into the background a little too easily. George Brent, as the glue between everything here, is superb. He was always great at flouting convention without offering disrespect and that's a fine line to walk. He walks it well throughout this film. Brenda Joyce is as doe eyed as she's supposed to be and it's the character that's frequently annoying rather than the actress. Nigel Bruce could always bluster with the best of them but does so with a notably nasty streak here. I think it's Maria Ouspenkaya who will stay with me most though, even though her accent is utterly wrong. She plays an intelligent and principled woman with power, concern and decency. She wields her authority wonderfully.
Dangerous (1935)
Director: Alfred E Green
Stars: Bette Davis and Franchot Tone
Here's one that's eluded me for a long time. Before Bette Davis had her famous five year run of Oscar nominations (1939-1943), she found recognition twice: as a write in candidate in 1935 for Of Human Bondage and as an official nomination in 1936 for Dangerous, which brought her the first of two wins. She was a blistering presence on the screen in the thirties, because she was trying to prove that she was a real actress worth more than the gun moll and cheap floozy roles that Warner Brothers kept casting her in.
She's playing a real actress too, however fictional. She's Joyce Heath, apparently one of the great stage actresses of the day but one who has sunk to the point where she's not even employable because she's seen in the industry as a jinx. We first meet her in the street, where she even denies who she really is to someone who recognises her. Talking about her with his group of friends, we hear all sorts of glowing reviews. She's 'vitally tempestuous.' She's 'too brilliant, too startling for a star.' She's also the reason why one of them, Don Bellows, gave up on his future career on Wall Street and became an architect. Merely watching her on stage, from the back of the theatre, imbued him with the urge to create.
However they also hear about why she's no longer employed. Apparently a co-star died on stage, then bad things began to happen to everyone else she appeared with: divorces, deaths, injuries, nothing good. So she descended the career ladder from the top to the bottom, finding solace only at the bottom of a bottle. It's at the bottom of a bottle that Don Bellows finds her, after escaping from a dull party and ending up in Jerry's Joint, where Joyce Heath is getting drunk on cheap gin at a table on her own. He takes her home to attempt to sober her up and get her back on her feet, but of course as the title would suggest, that's a dangerous thing to do, especially for someone engaged to be married.
Davis gives a powerful performance, which is as unsurprising as unsurprising can be. Personally I don't think it quite touches her work a year earlier in Of Human Bondage, but it's powerful stuff and the win isn't an unfair one. Bette Davis thought that she won in compensation for not being nominated for Of Human Bondage (she was a write-in candidate) and that Katharine Hepburn should have won for Alice Adams. I watched Alice Adams on Kate's 100th birthday and thought she gave a wonderful performance as a character that wasn't worth a damn in a film I despised. I wouldn't want to be responsible for picking between Hepburn and Davis for that Oscar, but I'd take Dangerous over Alice Adams any day of the week.
Don Bellows is played by Franchot Tone, who received his sole nomination himself in the same year but for Mutiny on the Bounty rather than this film. That's not surprising, not because he's bad because he's far from it, but because the role he has is not a surprising one for him and one that hardly stretches his talents. Mostly he provides the buffer for Bette Davis to act against, and when he's not there Alison Skipworth does the same thing as his housekeeper. The other name here is Margaret Lindsay as Gail Armitage, Bellows's fiancée, and she's fine as always but only there as a plot convenience.
This film has a place in Hollywood legend beyond the acting and the Oscar: it's apparently the real beginning of the legendary Bette Davis/Joan Crawford rivalry that lasted until their deaths and generated such sparks in films like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Apparently Davis fell for Tone while making this film but he was already engaged to Crawford. The rivalry was already there but here is where it became the thing of legend.
Stars: Bette Davis and Franchot Tone
Here's one that's eluded me for a long time. Before Bette Davis had her famous five year run of Oscar nominations (1939-1943), she found recognition twice: as a write in candidate in 1935 for Of Human Bondage and as an official nomination in 1936 for Dangerous, which brought her the first of two wins. She was a blistering presence on the screen in the thirties, because she was trying to prove that she was a real actress worth more than the gun moll and cheap floozy roles that Warner Brothers kept casting her in.
She's playing a real actress too, however fictional. She's Joyce Heath, apparently one of the great stage actresses of the day but one who has sunk to the point where she's not even employable because she's seen in the industry as a jinx. We first meet her in the street, where she even denies who she really is to someone who recognises her. Talking about her with his group of friends, we hear all sorts of glowing reviews. She's 'vitally tempestuous.' She's 'too brilliant, too startling for a star.' She's also the reason why one of them, Don Bellows, gave up on his future career on Wall Street and became an architect. Merely watching her on stage, from the back of the theatre, imbued him with the urge to create.
However they also hear about why she's no longer employed. Apparently a co-star died on stage, then bad things began to happen to everyone else she appeared with: divorces, deaths, injuries, nothing good. So she descended the career ladder from the top to the bottom, finding solace only at the bottom of a bottle. It's at the bottom of a bottle that Don Bellows finds her, after escaping from a dull party and ending up in Jerry's Joint, where Joyce Heath is getting drunk on cheap gin at a table on her own. He takes her home to attempt to sober her up and get her back on her feet, but of course as the title would suggest, that's a dangerous thing to do, especially for someone engaged to be married.
Davis gives a powerful performance, which is as unsurprising as unsurprising can be. Personally I don't think it quite touches her work a year earlier in Of Human Bondage, but it's powerful stuff and the win isn't an unfair one. Bette Davis thought that she won in compensation for not being nominated for Of Human Bondage (she was a write-in candidate) and that Katharine Hepburn should have won for Alice Adams. I watched Alice Adams on Kate's 100th birthday and thought she gave a wonderful performance as a character that wasn't worth a damn in a film I despised. I wouldn't want to be responsible for picking between Hepburn and Davis for that Oscar, but I'd take Dangerous over Alice Adams any day of the week.
Don Bellows is played by Franchot Tone, who received his sole nomination himself in the same year but for Mutiny on the Bounty rather than this film. That's not surprising, not because he's bad because he's far from it, but because the role he has is not a surprising one for him and one that hardly stretches his talents. Mostly he provides the buffer for Bette Davis to act against, and when he's not there Alison Skipworth does the same thing as his housekeeper. The other name here is Margaret Lindsay as Gail Armitage, Bellows's fiancée, and she's fine as always but only there as a plot convenience.
This film has a place in Hollywood legend beyond the acting and the Oscar: it's apparently the real beginning of the legendary Bette Davis/Joan Crawford rivalry that lasted until their deaths and generated such sparks in films like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Apparently Davis fell for Tone while making this film but he was already engaged to Crawford. The rivalry was already there but here is where it became the thing of legend.
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Jesse Stone: Thin Ice (2009)
Director: Robert Harmon
Star: Tom Selleck
I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone, police chief in the town of Paradise. He plays the part very well and very memorably, but in a way utterly different to how he played Magnum, PI. Thin Ice is the fifth Jesse Stone TV movie that CBS have made thus far, and fortunately there's been a notable consistency as the series has progressed. Selleck has played the role all the way through from Stone Cold, the first film in 2005, and he isn't the only recurring actor. Robert Harmon has also directed all of them. Perhaps the most telling comment about the films is that Robert B Parker, the writer of the original Jesse Stone novels, believes that Selleck nailed the part.
This one begins with Stone getting shot. He's sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car, next to his friend, the State Homicide Commander, who is doing something akin to a stakeout without somehow becoming a stakeout. Stone is merely winged, while Capt Healy is hospitalised with serious injuries. The powers that be in Paradise aren't really concerned about his being shot, but want to know why he's moonlighting in Boston. They certainly have it in for him, asking probing questions about how many tickets he's writing and why he doesn't want to hire the town council leader's son-in-law.
While he's dealing with the council's threats and trying to work out why his friend was shot, against his friend's wishes, he gets involved with all sorts of soap opera stuff. All this is brought to screen in the slow and careful way in which these stories unfold: his ongoing battle with alcohol, his troubles with his ex-wife and his new highly inadvised new relationship with the internal affairs investigator, wonderfully named Sidney Greenstreet, looking into how and why he discharged his weapon on the stakeout that wasn't.
He also acquires a new case with very slim prospects: a five year old out-of-state kidnapping of a baby from a hospital. Someone in Paradise sent a letter to Elizabeth Blue to tell her that her son, inevitably named Little Boy Blue, is loved. Of course the town council wouldn't want him to invest time, money and effort into such a longshot, so he has to be very careful about his methods. In fact he has to be very careful about almost everything in this film, which works for me because that's what I love most about this series: how nothing is the stereotypical Hollywood/CSI: Miami style glitz.
Maybe it appeals to me as a writer: it's easy to solve things with explosions and car chases and wild arguments, but it takes a lot more talent to write calm, sparse and thoughtful dialogue. It takes a lot more talent to speak it too. Now this isn't high art but any means it's probably about as close as you're going to get on a TV movie built around commercial breaks. It's very capable television on a network channel that's lasted with consistency for five years with good reason, because it's written well, acted well and built up over time to be a viable series not just a collection of viable films. The question that remains has to do with how memorable it all is.
Star: Tom Selleck
I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone, police chief in the town of Paradise. He plays the part very well and very memorably, but in a way utterly different to how he played Magnum, PI. Thin Ice is the fifth Jesse Stone TV movie that CBS have made thus far, and fortunately there's been a notable consistency as the series has progressed. Selleck has played the role all the way through from Stone Cold, the first film in 2005, and he isn't the only recurring actor. Robert Harmon has also directed all of them. Perhaps the most telling comment about the films is that Robert B Parker, the writer of the original Jesse Stone novels, believes that Selleck nailed the part.
This one begins with Stone getting shot. He's sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car, next to his friend, the State Homicide Commander, who is doing something akin to a stakeout without somehow becoming a stakeout. Stone is merely winged, while Capt Healy is hospitalised with serious injuries. The powers that be in Paradise aren't really concerned about his being shot, but want to know why he's moonlighting in Boston. They certainly have it in for him, asking probing questions about how many tickets he's writing and why he doesn't want to hire the town council leader's son-in-law.
While he's dealing with the council's threats and trying to work out why his friend was shot, against his friend's wishes, he gets involved with all sorts of soap opera stuff. All this is brought to screen in the slow and careful way in which these stories unfold: his ongoing battle with alcohol, his troubles with his ex-wife and his new highly inadvised new relationship with the internal affairs investigator, wonderfully named Sidney Greenstreet, looking into how and why he discharged his weapon on the stakeout that wasn't.
He also acquires a new case with very slim prospects: a five year old out-of-state kidnapping of a baby from a hospital. Someone in Paradise sent a letter to Elizabeth Blue to tell her that her son, inevitably named Little Boy Blue, is loved. Of course the town council wouldn't want him to invest time, money and effort into such a longshot, so he has to be very careful about his methods. In fact he has to be very careful about almost everything in this film, which works for me because that's what I love most about this series: how nothing is the stereotypical Hollywood/CSI: Miami style glitz.
Maybe it appeals to me as a writer: it's easy to solve things with explosions and car chases and wild arguments, but it takes a lot more talent to write calm, sparse and thoughtful dialogue. It takes a lot more talent to speak it too. Now this isn't high art but any means it's probably about as close as you're going to get on a TV movie built around commercial breaks. It's very capable television on a network channel that's lasted with consistency for five years with good reason, because it's written well, acted well and built up over time to be a viable series not just a collection of viable films. The question that remains has to do with how memorable it all is.
The Mighty Peking Man (1977)
Director: Meng Hua Ho
Stars: Danny Lee and Evelyne Kraft
I get a good feeling every time I see the Shaw Brothers opening sequence. I'm not expecting a great movie but I'm expecting something that's a lot of fun. To me Shaw Brothers movies are the Hong Kong equivalent of the old Hollywood serial movies of the thirties and forties. This one dates back to 1977 and has Danny Lee to boot, a decade before he'd face off against Chow Yun Fat in The Killer. As you can imagine from the title, it's a monster movie and it doesn't take long to show us the monster.
We open in a library where a group of men are looking at a photo of a giant footprint on the front page of a Hong Kong paper. This apparently proves outright that the Mighty Peking Man has returned from prehistory to ravage villages in the Himalayas (which makes the European title of Colossus of Congo a little surprising). 'The evidence looks conclusive then,' they say and mount an expedition to make them all rich. To lead the expedition, they call in a drunk who's still whining about losing his girlfriend to a friend. Before we even meet him though we meet the monster, in a flashback while the men talk about the footprint in the paper.
He's huge and pissed off, and happy to break all the models that the production can build. Now, the modelwork is great but the monster outfit sucks and there's some truly awful matching of live action foregrounds with model backgrounds or vice versa. King Kong was about a zillion times better than this and it was over thirty years old at this point. Even the Godzilla sequels which rapidly decreased in quality are all better than this, which doesn't even stand up to the ape in King Kong vs Godzilla fifteen years earlier.
However this film has more to offer than just another giant ape, though at heart it's a blatant King Kong rip off. On the way to find that giant ape, Johnny Fang, Danny Lee's character, has to deal with an elephant stampede, a tiger attack and some huge cliffs for members of the party to fall off. Once they get into the right neighbourhood, he doesn't even to find the ape because the ape finds him. Luckily there's a Russian Sheena equivalent with blonde hair, blue eyes and impeccable makeup, leaping around in her tiny costume from tree to tree. The most fun here is trying to work out when she's going to slip out of it.
Naturally she's befriended all the animals, from leopards to elephants to the Mighty Peking Man itself, so she saves him from imminent death. Just as naturally, after living successfully all these years in the jungle on her own since her parents crash landed in their plane and orphaned her, the moment Johnny shows up she proves to be a weak and feeble woman. She conveniently gets bitten in the crotch by a king cobra so that he has to suck out the venom. By the time he ends up in her pants in her cave, Mighty Peking Man gets plenty jealous, but she calms him and they all head back to Hong Kong together.
Needless to say, Danny Lee isn't called upon to do any great acting here and he went on to many far better parts in the years to come. Incidentally, this was his second cult classic, following his title role in 1975's Infra-Man. The Sheena clone is Evelyne Kraft, who I haven't seen before but who seems to have had an interesting screen career, featuring in many films with multiple titles, always a great pointer to intriguing but probably awful exploitation fare. She started out in The French Sex Murders, which was Italian, then moved on to a couple of Dudu the Superbug films which were German Herbie clones. After The Mighty Peking Man, she made another Hong Kong movie called Deadly Angels, then a German Countess Dracula ripoff called Lady Dracula. Her career wasn't long but it was very varied, both in genre and country of origin.
She brings to this film precisely what's needed. After all, as a King Kong rip off we get everything we could ask for: a giant ape rampaging through Hong Kong, a gorgeous blonde in animal skins, plenty of wild animals to playfully wrestle with in the jungle, along with terrible special effects, awesome models and seemingly no end of rip off material. It's a terrible film but it's pretty good fun. I'd have liked the technical consistency to be much better but I wouldn't give up the bad acting, bad dialogue, bad dubbing, moronic officials and contrived plot twists for the world.
Stars: Danny Lee and Evelyne Kraft
I get a good feeling every time I see the Shaw Brothers opening sequence. I'm not expecting a great movie but I'm expecting something that's a lot of fun. To me Shaw Brothers movies are the Hong Kong equivalent of the old Hollywood serial movies of the thirties and forties. This one dates back to 1977 and has Danny Lee to boot, a decade before he'd face off against Chow Yun Fat in The Killer. As you can imagine from the title, it's a monster movie and it doesn't take long to show us the monster.
We open in a library where a group of men are looking at a photo of a giant footprint on the front page of a Hong Kong paper. This apparently proves outright that the Mighty Peking Man has returned from prehistory to ravage villages in the Himalayas (which makes the European title of Colossus of Congo a little surprising). 'The evidence looks conclusive then,' they say and mount an expedition to make them all rich. To lead the expedition, they call in a drunk who's still whining about losing his girlfriend to a friend. Before we even meet him though we meet the monster, in a flashback while the men talk about the footprint in the paper.
He's huge and pissed off, and happy to break all the models that the production can build. Now, the modelwork is great but the monster outfit sucks and there's some truly awful matching of live action foregrounds with model backgrounds or vice versa. King Kong was about a zillion times better than this and it was over thirty years old at this point. Even the Godzilla sequels which rapidly decreased in quality are all better than this, which doesn't even stand up to the ape in King Kong vs Godzilla fifteen years earlier.
However this film has more to offer than just another giant ape, though at heart it's a blatant King Kong rip off. On the way to find that giant ape, Johnny Fang, Danny Lee's character, has to deal with an elephant stampede, a tiger attack and some huge cliffs for members of the party to fall off. Once they get into the right neighbourhood, he doesn't even to find the ape because the ape finds him. Luckily there's a Russian Sheena equivalent with blonde hair, blue eyes and impeccable makeup, leaping around in her tiny costume from tree to tree. The most fun here is trying to work out when she's going to slip out of it.
Naturally she's befriended all the animals, from leopards to elephants to the Mighty Peking Man itself, so she saves him from imminent death. Just as naturally, after living successfully all these years in the jungle on her own since her parents crash landed in their plane and orphaned her, the moment Johnny shows up she proves to be a weak and feeble woman. She conveniently gets bitten in the crotch by a king cobra so that he has to suck out the venom. By the time he ends up in her pants in her cave, Mighty Peking Man gets plenty jealous, but she calms him and they all head back to Hong Kong together.
Needless to say, Danny Lee isn't called upon to do any great acting here and he went on to many far better parts in the years to come. Incidentally, this was his second cult classic, following his title role in 1975's Infra-Man. The Sheena clone is Evelyne Kraft, who I haven't seen before but who seems to have had an interesting screen career, featuring in many films with multiple titles, always a great pointer to intriguing but probably awful exploitation fare. She started out in The French Sex Murders, which was Italian, then moved on to a couple of Dudu the Superbug films which were German Herbie clones. After The Mighty Peking Man, she made another Hong Kong movie called Deadly Angels, then a German Countess Dracula ripoff called Lady Dracula. Her career wasn't long but it was very varied, both in genre and country of origin.
She brings to this film precisely what's needed. After all, as a King Kong rip off we get everything we could ask for: a giant ape rampaging through Hong Kong, a gorgeous blonde in animal skins, plenty of wild animals to playfully wrestle with in the jungle, along with terrible special effects, awesome models and seemingly no end of rip off material. It's a terrible film but it's pretty good fun. I'd have liked the technical consistency to be much better but I wouldn't give up the bad acting, bad dialogue, bad dubbing, moronic officials and contrived plot twists for the world.
Pretty Baby (1978)
There came a point in time where I realised that many of the best films in the world are French. There are there in my top ten: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Beauty and the Beast and Amelie; and plenty more acknowledged classics that often ring truer as such when watching them than many of their American equivalents. Put simply, they stun me more often: Pépé le Moko, Grand Illusion, J'Accuse, Rififi, Mr Hulot's Holiday, Les Diaboliques... the list goes all the way back to George Melies and his Trip to the Moon. So when I realised this I started paying more attention to the names that kept cropping up whenever I read about French cinema.
One of those names was Louis Malle, who I've now seen more work by than any other French director. He's not the greatest French name in the book but he's a fascinating director because his output is so utterly varied, both in content and consistency, as well as in location and language. The earliest of his films that I've seen was a wonderful film noir called Elevator to the Gallows, made in 1957, and later classics include Lacombe Lucien in 1974 and 1987's Au Revoir, Les Enfants. Based on the 13 of his films I've caught thus far, which comprise 40% of his directorial output, that suggests a great classic every decade or so, interspersed with excellent movies like Murmur of the Heart or Atlantic City and much lesser work like Place de la république, Black Moon or Crackers.
Pretty Baby is a notable Louis Malle film for a few reasons. It was the first of his various American films, shot in America with American actors, and which paved the way for Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. It's also one of his various controversial films, given that it's set in a New Orleans brothel in 1917 and the central character is played by twelve year old Brooke Shields. Malle was hardly a stranger to controversy, having had his 1958 film, The Lovers, banned in parts of the US for obscenity, and Murmur of the Heart touched on child nudity and incest.
We're in Storyville, New Orleans in 1917 in the whorehouse of Madame Nell. What's very quickly apparent is that this is an honest film that has no bones about showing life precisely as it was like in this place in this time. We get to see plenty but somehow it doesn't play off as excessive or exploitational, merely realistic and apparently it is indeed based on fact, however much it's a conglomeration of stories or hints at stories wrapped together rather than just one true story. It would be a really good starting point for an investigation into the history of one of the most important cities in the States.
We meet a collection of characters and weave intriguingly in and out between them. Madame Nell runs the place: she's an aging lady who has presumably seen and done it all. Now she dresses up to the nines, begins the day with absinthe and progresses through it with opium and cocaine. Most of the time she's like a painted statue but she's definitely someone who would be fascinating to talk to but dangerous to cross. Hattie is a long established prostitute in her establishment, born into the industry and passing it on to the next generation. She keeps talking about leaving and eventually manages it, though it takes the longest time because she tends to hinge her departure on her clients, who tend to be gamblers and drunkards. Mostly the whores here don't have a bad time of it and are hardly trapped in their professions.
Hattie's daughter Violet is the closest thing beyond Storyville itself to being the focus of the story because she's the one that changes through it. She was born in the whorehouse and doesn't even know how old she is. She's certainly underage, though when she's paraded round the table for her cherry to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, Madame Nell is conscious of the law and points out that she's 'just old enough'. She brings $400 which was a heck of a lot of money in 1917 and is a huge comment on life in that era too, especially as the first thing the winner does is to give her a glass of whiskey.
The pianist who plays at the whorehouse is one of the most elegant people in the story, but because he's black is spoken down to, even by the whores. The blacks in 1917 Louisiana are generally cooks and maids and musicians and the only one that commands any actual respect is the voodoo woman. Storyville is where jazz came from and the Professor plays a bunch of standards that I know from artists spanning many decades. Of course if every angle that could come out of this film was fully explored, Pretty Baby would be a week long.
The closest character to a real one is Ernest Bellocq, a photographer who practically moves into the brothel but doesn't share a bed with any of the professional ladies. He's more interested in taking pictures of them, and in fact the entire film is built around the photographs taken by the real Bellocq. He's mostly known for his professional work for local companies but took many pictures of the hidden life of the Big Easy, not just the prostitutes of Storyville but also the opium dens of Chinatown. These were far less well known at the time as they were less widely circulated but were discovered later and have become his true legacy as an artist. This isn't the only thing based on his work.
The story is fascinating but mostly because of how alien it is to us today. This is set less than a hundred years ago but it could easily have been two or three hundred given how far from our own morals these morals are. This is most obvious in our reactions to what we see: watching in 2009, it's shocking to see a twelve year old prostitute shown naked on screen, while in 1917 her virginity was auctioned off to a room of notables, including at least one senator. Of course by the end of the film Madame Nell's brothel is closed down by hymn singing moral crusaders. As much as most of the film is so lost in time, I guess some things never change.
The film is shot beautifully, as would befit a film based on a set of photographs, but not just in the scenes that specifically reenact them. Malle's films are often well shot, because he began as a cameraman, working for Robert Bresson and even Jacques Cousteau, who described him as the best underwater cameraman he ever had. This one could well be the best though, aided as it is by some great sets and even better costumes. Really though, the film relies on one thing above all else: the performance of Brooke Shields, who was justly launched into stardom on the basis of this film. She does an amazing job, effectively giving us both sides of her character: the child and the adult.
The rest of the cast is generally notable too, though they're all walking in the shadow of their twelve year old co-star. Keith Carradine gets top credit as Bellocq, but to my eyes is the weakest link. Susan Sarandon, early in her career, is excellent as Violet's mother Hattie, which prompted a lead role in Malle's next American film, Atlantic City. Frances Faye is highly memorable as Madame Nell. Antonio Fargas is subtly awesome as the Professor, the whorehouse's pianist. He doesn't to say much, being an uppity nigger and all even to the whores, but beyond social convention of the time he's the most elegant person in the place and he says plenty with his eyes that he can't say with his mouth.
All in all, it's a powerful film, definitely up there in the higher end of Malle's output, though perhaps Carradine's performance helps drop it below the best of them.
One of those names was Louis Malle, who I've now seen more work by than any other French director. He's not the greatest French name in the book but he's a fascinating director because his output is so utterly varied, both in content and consistency, as well as in location and language. The earliest of his films that I've seen was a wonderful film noir called Elevator to the Gallows, made in 1957, and later classics include Lacombe Lucien in 1974 and 1987's Au Revoir, Les Enfants. Based on the 13 of his films I've caught thus far, which comprise 40% of his directorial output, that suggests a great classic every decade or so, interspersed with excellent movies like Murmur of the Heart or Atlantic City and much lesser work like Place de la république, Black Moon or Crackers.
Pretty Baby is a notable Louis Malle film for a few reasons. It was the first of his various American films, shot in America with American actors, and which paved the way for Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. It's also one of his various controversial films, given that it's set in a New Orleans brothel in 1917 and the central character is played by twelve year old Brooke Shields. Malle was hardly a stranger to controversy, having had his 1958 film, The Lovers, banned in parts of the US for obscenity, and Murmur of the Heart touched on child nudity and incest.
We're in Storyville, New Orleans in 1917 in the whorehouse of Madame Nell. What's very quickly apparent is that this is an honest film that has no bones about showing life precisely as it was like in this place in this time. We get to see plenty but somehow it doesn't play off as excessive or exploitational, merely realistic and apparently it is indeed based on fact, however much it's a conglomeration of stories or hints at stories wrapped together rather than just one true story. It would be a really good starting point for an investigation into the history of one of the most important cities in the States.
We meet a collection of characters and weave intriguingly in and out between them. Madame Nell runs the place: she's an aging lady who has presumably seen and done it all. Now she dresses up to the nines, begins the day with absinthe and progresses through it with opium and cocaine. Most of the time she's like a painted statue but she's definitely someone who would be fascinating to talk to but dangerous to cross. Hattie is a long established prostitute in her establishment, born into the industry and passing it on to the next generation. She keeps talking about leaving and eventually manages it, though it takes the longest time because she tends to hinge her departure on her clients, who tend to be gamblers and drunkards. Mostly the whores here don't have a bad time of it and are hardly trapped in their professions.
Hattie's daughter Violet is the closest thing beyond Storyville itself to being the focus of the story because she's the one that changes through it. She was born in the whorehouse and doesn't even know how old she is. She's certainly underage, though when she's paraded round the table for her cherry to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, Madame Nell is conscious of the law and points out that she's 'just old enough'. She brings $400 which was a heck of a lot of money in 1917 and is a huge comment on life in that era too, especially as the first thing the winner does is to give her a glass of whiskey.
The pianist who plays at the whorehouse is one of the most elegant people in the story, but because he's black is spoken down to, even by the whores. The blacks in 1917 Louisiana are generally cooks and maids and musicians and the only one that commands any actual respect is the voodoo woman. Storyville is where jazz came from and the Professor plays a bunch of standards that I know from artists spanning many decades. Of course if every angle that could come out of this film was fully explored, Pretty Baby would be a week long.
The closest character to a real one is Ernest Bellocq, a photographer who practically moves into the brothel but doesn't share a bed with any of the professional ladies. He's more interested in taking pictures of them, and in fact the entire film is built around the photographs taken by the real Bellocq. He's mostly known for his professional work for local companies but took many pictures of the hidden life of the Big Easy, not just the prostitutes of Storyville but also the opium dens of Chinatown. These were far less well known at the time as they were less widely circulated but were discovered later and have become his true legacy as an artist. This isn't the only thing based on his work.
The story is fascinating but mostly because of how alien it is to us today. This is set less than a hundred years ago but it could easily have been two or three hundred given how far from our own morals these morals are. This is most obvious in our reactions to what we see: watching in 2009, it's shocking to see a twelve year old prostitute shown naked on screen, while in 1917 her virginity was auctioned off to a room of notables, including at least one senator. Of course by the end of the film Madame Nell's brothel is closed down by hymn singing moral crusaders. As much as most of the film is so lost in time, I guess some things never change.
The film is shot beautifully, as would befit a film based on a set of photographs, but not just in the scenes that specifically reenact them. Malle's films are often well shot, because he began as a cameraman, working for Robert Bresson and even Jacques Cousteau, who described him as the best underwater cameraman he ever had. This one could well be the best though, aided as it is by some great sets and even better costumes. Really though, the film relies on one thing above all else: the performance of Brooke Shields, who was justly launched into stardom on the basis of this film. She does an amazing job, effectively giving us both sides of her character: the child and the adult.
The rest of the cast is generally notable too, though they're all walking in the shadow of their twelve year old co-star. Keith Carradine gets top credit as Bellocq, but to my eyes is the weakest link. Susan Sarandon, early in her career, is excellent as Violet's mother Hattie, which prompted a lead role in Malle's next American film, Atlantic City. Frances Faye is highly memorable as Madame Nell. Antonio Fargas is subtly awesome as the Professor, the whorehouse's pianist. He doesn't to say much, being an uppity nigger and all even to the whores, but beyond social convention of the time he's the most elegant person in the place and he says plenty with his eyes that he can't say with his mouth.
All in all, it's a powerful film, definitely up there in the higher end of Malle's output, though perhaps Carradine's performance helps drop it below the best of them.
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Primer (2004)
Director: Shane Carruth
Stars: Shane Carruth and David Sullivan
The film that knocked me out the most over the last year was a science fiction film, but not one you're likely to have heard of. It won't ever get shown on the Sci-Fi Channel because it has no spaceships, no laser beams, no superheroes. It was a film called The Man from Earth and it posed the age old science fiction question of 'what if?' to a group of characters in a room. It was absolutely fascinating and it stunned me. Beyond the questions posed within the film itself, one question followed in its wake: why doesn't anyone else make this sort of film: pure science fiction not space opera? Well, this one has similarities and it's nearly as fascinating.
We're following four friends or colleagues or whatever they call themselves. They're technical folks working in technical jobs, but they dedicate a large amount of their spare time to building contraptions in a garage, with the aim of making money as entrepreneurs who have built something important. The catch, naturally, is that they need to build something important. What they end up with is something that's undoubtably important but also very hard to fathom. It's some sort of time machine, though it isn't immediately apparent exactly what and how and why, but really it's a MacGuffin.
What it is doesn't really matter because it's not really about the machine, it's about what the machine means. If you have a shortcut through the standard progression of life and you can safely and conveniently cheat to get whatever you want, what do you do? How much do you run with the thrill and how much do you fear the unknown danger. How much do you worry about the paradoxes and how deep into the logic maelstrom do you go? What do you do with knowledge you don't necessarily want? Who do you trust with the knowledge you do?
There are many many questions that leap out of the screen here and bludgeon us. I'm not going to pretend that I understood all the permutations, because it's definitely something to watch again and again to work it all out. I had a lot of reactions. Firstly, I was overjoyed to see another pure science fiction film. Secondly, i was confused and fascinated all at once as I tried to fathom the story. Thirdly, I was shocked to find that the film was made for only $7,000 and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Now, I've read a fascinating book by movie critic Joe Queenan called The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card, so I have a healthy doubt in any quoted figures about how much a film cost, but I also know that that book is over a decade old and the world has changed considerably during that time. However much Primer cost, it's undoubtedly cleverly done and it undoubtedly looks a lot more slick than the budget could ever suggest.
The few people who made it juggled roles on screen and off and produced a very realistic set of characters. This is one of the most realistic non-glossy ensemble casts I think I'ver seen: nobody is a Hollywood actor for sure but nobody is a community theatre actor either. They all appear to be what they're supposed to be: professional people with a technical bent who are often both clever and naive. I don't get it all yet but I'm fascinated and intrigued and eager to return to the film again soon.
Stars: Shane Carruth and David Sullivan
The film that knocked me out the most over the last year was a science fiction film, but not one you're likely to have heard of. It won't ever get shown on the Sci-Fi Channel because it has no spaceships, no laser beams, no superheroes. It was a film called The Man from Earth and it posed the age old science fiction question of 'what if?' to a group of characters in a room. It was absolutely fascinating and it stunned me. Beyond the questions posed within the film itself, one question followed in its wake: why doesn't anyone else make this sort of film: pure science fiction not space opera? Well, this one has similarities and it's nearly as fascinating.
We're following four friends or colleagues or whatever they call themselves. They're technical folks working in technical jobs, but they dedicate a large amount of their spare time to building contraptions in a garage, with the aim of making money as entrepreneurs who have built something important. The catch, naturally, is that they need to build something important. What they end up with is something that's undoubtably important but also very hard to fathom. It's some sort of time machine, though it isn't immediately apparent exactly what and how and why, but really it's a MacGuffin.
What it is doesn't really matter because it's not really about the machine, it's about what the machine means. If you have a shortcut through the standard progression of life and you can safely and conveniently cheat to get whatever you want, what do you do? How much do you run with the thrill and how much do you fear the unknown danger. How much do you worry about the paradoxes and how deep into the logic maelstrom do you go? What do you do with knowledge you don't necessarily want? Who do you trust with the knowledge you do?
There are many many questions that leap out of the screen here and bludgeon us. I'm not going to pretend that I understood all the permutations, because it's definitely something to watch again and again to work it all out. I had a lot of reactions. Firstly, I was overjoyed to see another pure science fiction film. Secondly, i was confused and fascinated all at once as I tried to fathom the story. Thirdly, I was shocked to find that the film was made for only $7,000 and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Now, I've read a fascinating book by movie critic Joe Queenan called The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card, so I have a healthy doubt in any quoted figures about how much a film cost, but I also know that that book is over a decade old and the world has changed considerably during that time. However much Primer cost, it's undoubtedly cleverly done and it undoubtedly looks a lot more slick than the budget could ever suggest.
The few people who made it juggled roles on screen and off and produced a very realistic set of characters. This is one of the most realistic non-glossy ensemble casts I think I'ver seen: nobody is a Hollywood actor for sure but nobody is a community theatre actor either. They all appear to be what they're supposed to be: professional people with a technical bent who are often both clever and naive. I don't get it all yet but I'm fascinated and intrigued and eager to return to the film again soon.
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