Ana Beatriz Barros is a Brazilian Supermodel. Check out her Spring/Summer scans.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Room at the Top: The Story of a Working Class Antihero
There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
—John Lennon, "Working Class Hero"
The democratization of the British armed forces during World War II, coupled with the class-leveling necessities of fighting Nazi Germany, was the beginning of the end of the deeply ingrained class system in Britain. This process was hastened by the election in 1945 of the first Labour government in years and the radical social policies that followed, including creation of the National Health Service, nationalization of major industries, and heavy taxation of the rich. During the late 1950's and early 60's, an attitude of anti-establishment contempt was expressed in literature by the Angry Young Man writers like John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe, whose bitter young male protagonists rebelled against the twin constraints of conformity and the remnants of the class system.
In John Braine's 1957 Angry Young Man novel Room at the Top, the main character doesn't so much rebel as attempt to crash the socioeconomic and class barriers in an effort to make it to the Top. The movie version of the novel, released in 1959, is really a hybrid of grim social realism and tragic love story. It's a bit like the Paul Newman movies of the time, The Young Philadelphians (1959) and From the Terrace (1960), but substitutes harshly realistic working-class settings for the slickly photogenic surfaces of the Newman movies. In the American movies Newman is able through his talent and persistence to crash the barriers to success—the personification of the Great American Myth that with hard work anyone can succeed. Not so in the British version; here the young man must claw his way to success.
The young man is Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey), an accountant who works for the local government in Warnley, a grim industrial town in the English Midlands, a few years after the end of the war. Early in the movie, when Joe stands at the window of his dreary bed-sitting room looking up at the hilltop neighborhood where the richest people in town live and tells a colleague from work that he will live there one day, he knows it will take more than hard work to get there. Ruthlessness and manipulation of others are the only means of self-advancement in this world of expectations limited by class identity.
From the moment he first sees Susan Brown (Heather Sears), the virginal young daughter of the most powerful man in town, Joe is convinced that she is the way out of the dead-end, working-class life that seems to be his destiny. The difference in class between the two, however, seems to be a nearly insurmountable obstacle to Joe's aspirations. Susan's family are appalled at his pursuit of her, especially her snobbish mother. Susan's boyfriend, an ex-officer, seems to turn up every time Joe tries to get Susan alone, constantly taunting Joe's working-class background by calling him "Sergeant" and ribbing him for having been a prisoner of war. Even Joe's friends warn him off his plans by repeating the message of "stick to your own kind."
One sequence that graphically underscores the way class prejudice stands between Joe and Susan takes place at a formal banquet that Joe attends, even though he knows he will be out of place there. He boldly walks up to the table where Susan, her boy friend, her parents, and some of their powerful friends are sitting and introduces himself. Here he is treated with cold formality and condescension. As soon as he speaks, the jarring contrast between his working-class regional accent and the educated, received speech of those seated at the table is apparent. They don't invite him to sit but keep him standing as they interrogate him about his connections to the upper-class residents of the town where he grew up. As they are well aware, he knows none of these people. The intent of their conversation is to politely humiliate Joe by reminding him of his position on the social scale.
In another powerful sequence, Joe travels to the town where he grew up when he unexpectedly receives a job offer from the owner of the factory where his father worked, and we get a vivid picture of Joe's origins. There he stays with the aunt and uncle he lived with after his parents were killed in an air raid. These are resolutely working-class people who unquestioningly accept their social position and urge Joe not to set his sights too high. Their small terraced house is a depressing place, with its drab, stained walls and few pieces of cheap furniture. The town itself is another gloomy landscape of factories and mills. When Joe finds that the job offer is the result of Susan's father using his connections to try to separate Joe and his daughter—another example of the power of the Old Boy Network—he turns down the job and returns to Warnley.
One of the places Joe pursues Susan to is the local amateur dramatic society, where he believes he stands a good chance of getting her alone. It is at a rehearsal there that he meets an unhappily married older woman, Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret), and before long begins an affair with her. Alice and Joe slowly develop the kind of intimate emotional connection he could never have with the sweet but immature and inexperienced Susan. Alice becomes Joe's confidante and soon becomes aware of his nearly obsessive ambition and his desire to use Susan as the means of fulfilling it. She recognizes that the source of his obsession is class insecurity and advises him several times just to "be yourself."The movie's attitude towards sex is surprisingly adult for the time and made the movie a subject of controversy when it was released. Joe and Alice regularly meet in her friend's flat for trysts. And Joe finally manages to seduce Susan in a memorably staged and filmed sequence at a boathouse by the river, after which Susan is all girlish enthusiasm while Joe seems to experience a major letdown after finally getting what he has been after for so long. Joe's emotions are now in turmoil. Both Susan and Alice are in love with him, but the fact that he is more drawn to Alice's maturity and her understanding of his emotional needs makes it look for a while as though he will abandon his scheme to marry Susan.
Two circumstances intervene to resolve his conflict. Alice's husband, a philandering businessman, refuses to divorce her (the divorce laws in Britain were at the time quite draconian), threatening to impoverish Alice and ruin Joe's career. Then when it turns out that Susan is pregnant, her father proposes that Joe marry her and accept a sinecure in his company, granting Joe everything he has been scheming for just as he has finally begun questioning whether he really wants it after all. Forced to choose between the two women, he reverts to his original values and makes the practical decision, choosing Susan and sacrificing Alice, with tragic results.
Harvey gives the performance of his career, and Signoret (who won an Oscar, surprisingly, over Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story) is magnificent as the sensitive, disillusioned older woman who still craves love. She is a version of Camille updated to the post-war world of materialism—she must accept rejection by her young lover so that he can chase his dreams of economic betterment—and Signoret's deeply moving balance of hope and resignation gives the movie its emotional center without pushing it into soap territory.
The black-and-white cinematography by Freddie Francis (winner of two Oscars and later director of many cheesy horror movies) is first-rate, capturing in crisp light-and-shadow the bleak factory towns and dingy interiors of the pubs, flats, and houses where much of the movie takes place. Between 1956 and 1999 he photographed some of the best-looking British and American movies of the time, including three for David Lynch. (Remember the black-and-white Gustave Doré-like look of The Elephant Man?). Just check out his credits on IMDb and be amazed at the visually striking movies he photographed. One especially memorable scene in Room at the Top occurs when Joe finally manages to get Susan alone for the first time, and in a very long take the camera follows him as he prowls through the local library pursuing her through and around the stacks.
The elegant direction of Jack Clayton is also first-rate. This was one of his earliest movies, and although his later career was uneven, he did go on to direct some excellent movies, including The Innocents (1961) and The Pumpkin Eater (1964). The performances of Deborah Kerr in the former (my favorite Kerr performance) and Anne Bancroft in the latter, along with Maggie Smith's performances in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1986) and the TV mini-series Memento Mori (1992), and Simone Signoret's in this movie should affirm his reputation as a superior director of actresses. And considering the authors of the source material of his best work—Henry James, Penelope Mortimer, Brian Moore, and Muriel Spark—he should be regarded as a notable literary interpreter. He has been criticized by Andrew Sarris as an impersonal director, but I'm not convinced that a director with a more distinctive style would have been as effective as Clayton with actresses of that caliber or as an adaptor of works by writers of that caliber.
If its style has less innovation and panache than the key films of the British New Wave of the early 1960's, Room at the Top—with its depiction of life in a dismal post-war English industrial town dominated by class divisions and conflicts—clearly presages those films. With its realistic probing of social and sexual issues, and its thoughtful exploration of materialism and status-worship in opposition to more humanistic values, it's an outstanding movie in its own right.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Lubitsch's Ninotchka: Lovers of the World, Unite!
Sometimes it certainly pays to give a movie a second chance. This happened to me with Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), a movie of high repute that I wasn't sure about the first time I saw it, but which I thought was clearly a masterpiece on second viewing. Recently it happened again with Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939). I liked the movie well enough the first time I watched it a few years ago. But I absolutely loved it when I watched it a second time a few weeks ago and could only wonder how the full extent of its charm eluded me the first time around.What had happened in the meantime? Maybe my initial failure to appreciate Ninotchka fully was because it was only the second movie directed by Lubitsch that I had ever seen. In between viewings I'd seen several more movies by Lubitsch, and perhaps it simply took me awhile to become attuned to the Lubitsch touch. Or maybe it was because I was comparing it too much to the antic screwball comedies of the late 1930's and early 1940's that I love so much. A Lubitsch comedy often has definite similarities to a screwball comedy, but ultimately it has a distinctly more ethereal quality than the typical screwball comedy. In a Lubitsch comedy the situations are generally more restrained, the pacing more relaxed, the character relationships more complicated, the contrast between refined leading characters and eccentric supporting characters more subtle, the dialogue more polished.
The Lubitsch touch is an altogether lighter touch than that of, say, Howard Hawks—more cerebral and less visceral. Of Lubitsch's comedies Roger Ebert observes, "Turn up the heat . . . and you'd have screwball comedy." But the thing is that Lubitsch never does turn up the heat. In his comedies Hawks immediately turns the heat up all the way and brings things to a full, rolling boil, which he maintains for the rest of the movie. But the more mellow Lubitsch always keeps things just bubbling merrily along at a gentle simmer.
Another reason the obvious charms of Ninotchka didn't register fully the first time around no doubt had to do with its star, Greta Garbo. This was the first movie I ever saw the legendary Garbo in, and I really didn't know what to expect. In between viewings, though, I had seen her in her some of her most celebrated roles of the 1930's—in Queen Christina, Grand Hotel, Anna Karenina, and Camille—so when I saw Ninotchka again I had other performances to compare this one to.
Some find Garbo's screen personality remote and her acting style overly controlled and dependent on artifice. While I can understand this view, I find that these traits actually make her well-suited to her best roles, and that she succeeds better in those parts than would an actress with a warmer personality and more spontaneous, naturalistic acting style. Her Camille, for example, is essentially a professional performer who is always "on," working hard for her keep by acting the role that her succession of sugar daddies expect. Upon rewatching Ninotchka, I caught on to its deliberately calculated strategy. I realized that the movie was actually designed to showcase these familiar traits in the beginning in order to catch us off guard and surprise us later on by revealing a new and unexpected side of Garbo.
In Ninotchka (co-written by Billy Wilder, Leigh Brackett, and Walter Reisch) Garbo plays a Russian communist functionary who has been sent to Paris to check on the activities of three errant comrades, the comical and bumbling Iranoff, Buljanoff, and Kopalski. The mission of these three is to raise money for the government by selling jewelry confiscated during the Russian Revolution from the family of the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire), herself an émigrée living in Paris and the mistress of Léon (Melvyn Douglas), a French count. The three emissaries have been neglecting their duty and living it up at a ritzy hotel, and Ninotchka has been charged with bringing them back in line.
Ninotchka is a woman whose personality lacks any trace of humor or emotion. With her immobile facial features, stiff, unfeminine martial gait, and asexual, uniform-like clothing, she is all business, almost a secular nun devoted not to religion but to her political beliefs. Upon arriving in Paris she announces to her chastened colleagues, "I want to use my free time to inspect public utilities and make a study of all outstanding technical achievements in the city." The first item on her agenda is to study the engineering details of the Eiffel Tower. It is while asking directions to it that she first encounters Léon, who is instantly smitten with her.
He follows her to the Eiffel Tower, where she proves resistant to all his efforts to romanticize it or the city as viewed from the observation deck. She does, however, permit herself to be enticed to his apartment, where he makes an all-out effort to seduce her. What follows is one of the most memorable scenes in this or any other movie.
In a long, unbroken take Garbo and Douglas are framed in a static two-shot, Douglas feeding her his lengthy patter of seduction while she listens. I have always believed that one of the most difficult things for a movie actor to do is simply to listen while another actor speaks, especially when both are in the frame together. The listener must convince the viewer not only that he or she is actually listening attentively but also that this is the first time he or she has ever heard these lines spoken. This sounds easy but actually must be quite difficult, and I have always considered how well an actor is able to do this a measure of acting ability.
By this measure, Garbo proves herself in this scene to be one of the most gifted performers ever to appear on the screen. My normal reaction to such a scene is instinctively to focus on the speaker and occasionally remind myself to look at the other person too. Here, though, the situation was for me exactly the reverse. My attention was entirely focused on Garbo; I literally could not take my eyes off her. She is costumed and made up to look frumpy. Her blank expression never once changes. Her response to Douglas consists solely of occasionally moving her eyes and slightly adjusting the attitude of her head. Yet she completely dominates the scene; I never once looked at Douglas the entire time. If you have ever wondered what is meant when it is said that the camera "loves" an actor, you need look no further than this scene for a perfect example.
At the end of his speech, the glacial Ninotchka looks at Léon expressionlessly and observes that she is aware he is trying to seduce her, adding dispassionately that his speech was unnecessary because she doesn't believe in the bourgeois concept of love. For her, attraction is a simple matter of mutual biological and chemical reactions, and those reactions are already happening, whereupon she permits him one passionate kiss. Léon has tried his hardest but still hasn't succeeded in breaking through Ninotchka's wall of ice. Ninotchka's message is clear: the physical attraction is there, but she has no intention of acting on it for so frivolous a purpose as personal pleasure. And the strangest thing of all is that Garbo's stiffness and her complete immunity to romanticism is in its rigidity and its ability to frustrate the enamored Léon very, very funny.
For his next approach to Ninotchka, Léon sets his sights considerably lower than immediate seduction. Following her to an unpretentious working man's cafe, he sets out simply to make her laugh. What ensues is another unforgettable classic sequence. Léon seats himself at her table and proceeds to tell her jokes. As he tells joke after joke, the rest of the cafe is in stitches, but Ninotchka simply sits and listens expressionlessly. She does nothing but put food into her mouth and chew. Finally overcome with his own exuberance, Léon gestures wildly, his chair topples backwards, and he falls on the floor. The entire cafe breaks into laughter . . . and so does Ninotchka—helplessly, uncontrollably. (It is a well-known anecdote that Garbo told Lubitsch she could not laugh on cue, so she silently mimicked laughter and the sound was later dubbed in.)
While the verbal strategies of seductive rhetoric and joke-telling have both failed to break through Ninotchka's wall of ideology and absolute self-control, the universal physical comic gesture of the pratfall succeeds. This is the scene that gave the movie its catchphrase and signaled the transformation of Garbo's image. Her first sound film was adverstised with the slogan "Garbo Talks!" Ninotchka was advertised with the slogan "Garbo Laughs!"
Léon's accidental success at loosening up Ninotchka leads to the third great sequence of the movie, when she agrees at last to accompany him to a night club on a date. For the first time Ninotchka abandons her drab hairstyle and clothing and actually begins to look feminine: the ugly duckling is starting to look glamorous. At the night club her reaction to her very first taste of champagne is one of delight, as is her response to the music being played. Ninotchka is susceptible to sensory pleasure after all. But this first tentative appreciation of pleasure is spoiled by the arrival of the jealous Swana (a wonderfully bitchy Ina Claire, the ex-wife of John Gilbert, Garbo's frequent costar in earlier years—a curious piece of casting), who wants her jewelry back. When Swana invites herself to sit at Ninotchka and Léon's table and begins maliciously baiting them, Ninotchka temporarily returns to her old humorless self.
After Swana leaves, Ninotchka reacts by drinking too much champagne and for the first time in her life getting drunk. Léon too gets drunk and together they stagger back to her hotel room, where their repartee playfully lampoons political ideology: "We'll form our own party. . . . Lovers of the world, unite! . . . Our salute will be a kiss." Léon stands Ninotchka against the wall, blindfolds her, and "executes" her with the pop of a champagne cork. "I have paid the penalty," she jokes. "Now let's hear some music." Throughout the movie political ideology has been the brunt of both gentle mockery and pointed barbs, but in this scene it takes its most direct hit from Wilder, Lubitsch et al. as love triumphs over dogma.
Of course, as in all romantic comedies, circumstances—in this case provoked by the conniving Swana—intervene to separate the lovers before they are happily reunited in the end. This last section of the movie is as entertaining and witty as the rest. But the heart of the movie is those three key sequences I discussed above, each one a compact masterpiece of writing, acting, and direction.
Watching Ninotchka is a pure delight, as effortless and effervescent a pleasure as sipping a glass of champagne.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
Brief Reviews
THE SCARLET EMPRESS (1934) ***½
The director Josef von Sternberg was hardly a modest man. In the 1967 BBC documentary The World of Josef von Sternberg, included on the Criterion DVD of The Scarlet Empress, he claimed total creative authorship of his movies—not only writing and direction, but also production, lighting and photography, and editing, whether he was credited with these in the completed film or not. It's little wonder then that the American auteurist Andrew Sarris named von Sternberg one of his "pantheon directors," praising his mastery of visual technique and describing him as "a lyricist of light and shadow." The Scarlet Empress is a mind-bogglingly baroque surfeit of visual detail, by turns ravishingly beautiful, lushly decorative, and hauntingly bizarre. Many scenes contain as much visual embellishment—in set decoration, props, costumes, and human spectacle—as I've ever seen in one movie. And still von Sternberg manages to arrange all these objects (including the actors, whom he refers to in the documentary as "marionettes") in these elaborate settings with clarity and purpose. Of the great directors, perhaps only Eisenstein, Kurosawa, and Orson Welles were as skillful as von Sternberg at organizing objects within the frame to create mood and emphasis.
In The Scarlet Empress, Marlene Dietrich, who made seven movies with von Sternberg, plays the lead role, Catherine the Great of Russia. She is required to transform from a young innocent—engaged through an arranged marriage to the future Tsar Peter III (Sam Jaffe), a childish madman—into a mature woman who uses sexual favors to engineer his assassination and seize the throne. (The historical accuracy of this is debatable.) She is quite convincing as she proceeds from naiveté to a kind of survivalist acceptance of her situation and finally, after a binge of sexual libertinism, to the decision to take control of events. Is she a cunning schemer, or does she truly want to rescue the Russian people from the insane tyranny of her husband? Von Sternberg keeps the answer ambiguous.
Jaffe, with his goofy buck-toothed grin and wide-eyed leer, is appropriately demented. And Louise Dresser turns in a broad semi-comic performance as Peter's dissolute and manipulative aunt, the Empress Elizabeth. Still, the strong impression these performers make pales beside the one von Sternberg makes as the absolute, perfectionist master of his startling cinematic vision.
H. M. PULHAM, ESQ. (1941) ***½
King Vidor directed all or part of 67 pictures between 1913 and 1980, more than half of them silent. Along with some bona fide classics, he also directed two of the worst movies I've ever seen, Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Fountainhead (1949), so I approached this movie with some trepidation. The story of a privileged member of a rich Boston society family from birth to middle age, the movie opens with a striking, nearly silent sequence showing Pulham's (Robert Young) morning routine—from waking up to arriving at his law office at exactly 9:00 a.m.—that within just a few minutes plainly establishes the regimented sterility of his life. The rest of the movie is structured as an alternately serious and whimsical stream-of-consciousness narrative that moves between scenes of the present and the past as Pulham recalls his entire life from birth to the present.
As I watched, I was amazed at the fluidity of the direction and at how natural Vidor made the rather literary structure of the movie seem. Young, with his subdued and rather bland screen presence, was ideally cast in the title role. The most interesting parts of the movie are those that deal with Pulham's life in New York City immediately after World War I working as a copywriter in an ad agency. In doing this, he is defying his father (Charles Coburn), who wants him to come home and join the family law firm. For a while it appears that Pulham will escape the stultifyingly conformist future that awaits him in Boston, especially after he begins a romance with a fellow copywriter, Marvin Myles Ransome (Hedy Lamarr), an independent-minded woman who encourages him to break away from the stifling traditions of his class and heritage. Lamarr's freethinking character is one of the best things in the movie. She seems surprisingly modern, wanting a career and her own life over marriage and a family, and Lamarr gives an excellent performance. But it is precisely her (for the time) unconventional values, combined with circumstances which force Pulham to return to Boston and his family, that ultimately separate them.
The ending is a bit pat—and with its message that you can't escape your background, a bit disturbing in its complacency—but the rest of the movie is delightful, a felicitous mixture of excellent acting, writing, photography (by Ray June) and editing, with Vidor's assured direction holding it all together.
DOWNSTAIRS (1932) ***½
I must confess to having a fairly low tolerance for movies of the early 1930's. Even the most highly touted of them often disappoint me. Downstairs, though, proved to be a pleasing exception. It stars John Gilbert, who wrote the story himself, and the whole movie is built around his character.
The movie opens at the Mitteleuropean estate of a baron whose head butler Albert (Paul Lukas) is being married to Anna (Virginia Bruce), the personal maid of the baroness. Into the festivities walks Gilbert as Karl Schneider, the new chauffeur. Karl is an unrepentant cad who immediately proceeds to charm, lie, blackmail, and seduce his way into a position of power and influence both upstairs and downstairs, managing to outwit and outmaneuver everyone who tries to expose him. In particular he sets his sights on the luscious but innocent Anna. After the stuffy Albert discovers that Karl has indeed seduced her, Anna looses an astonishingly frank tirade that not only makes clear that Karl's power over women lies in his sexual prowess, but also strongly asserts the desire of women to enjoy sex as much as men do and be treated by men as equal sexual beings.
Besides its surprisingly modern sexual attitudes, Downstairs has several other things going for it: an amusing take on amorality among the rich, its satirical mockery of the class system, and very entertaining supporting performances by Reginald Owen as the "silly ass" baron and Olga Baclanova (Freaks) as the conniving baroness. Monta Bell, who did such a great job on the Norma Shearer silent Lady of the Night (1925), directs with great seriocomic flair and provides some nice auteurish visual touches, including those in the scene where Karl seduces Anna, and later when he dissolves from the sleeping Anna to the next scene with Karl so slowly that for a few moments Karl seems to be a hazy dream image hovering over her bed. This movie and Queen Christina, which Gilbert made the next year with Garbo, should put to rest in any viewer's mind the notion that Gilbert's career ended because he was unsuited to sound films.
TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH (1949) ****
I'm not a big fan of war movies. Nor am I a big fan of Gregory Peck, whose performances often strike me as wooden and unengaging. Yet I found both this movie and Peck's performance in the lead role outstanding. In Twelve O'Clock High the emphasis is not on combat, but on psychology and characterization. In England in 1942, the first American Army Air Force crews have arrived and are starting the first daytime bombing raids over Europe. (The British RAF flew only nighttime raids.) The number of squadrons is small and support is minimal. Although the war planners are convinced that in time this strategy will prove the decisive factor in winning the war in Europe, at the moment the missions are having little real effect. Losses of aircraft and crews are high, understandably leading to great stress and low morale among both men and officers. One bomber squadron, based at Archbury, in particular is experiencing problems, and General Savage (Peck) is assigned to replace his good friend Col. Davenport (Gary Merrill) as commanding officer of the squadron.
In early scenes Savage has been established as a nice guy but a shrewd analyst who believes that the problem with Davenport is that he has grown too close to his men and lost his objectivity. So when Savage arrives at Archbury and immediately begins behaving like a cold martinet, we know that this is a role he is playing, a psychological ploy devised to instill the spirit of selflessness and teamwork among his fliers. "Consider yourselves already dead and you won't have to be afraid of it happening," he tells them at his first briefing. The initial response is not good, especially after his unsympathetic treatment of a popular navigator results in his suicide. But Savage finds one man, the deskbound Maj. Stovall (Dean Jagger, in an Oscar-winning performance), who understands his tactics and is willing to help him. Slowly his efforts pay off and the squadron comes into shape. It is only towards the end of the movie that we actually go on a bombing mission, with Gen. Savage leading the formation, in an exciting and deeply affecting sequence.
The treatment of the characters and situations by director Henry King is refreshingly unsentimental and unjingoistic. One can easily imagine the heavy-handed treatment such a plot would have received in the hands of a less subtle director. Peck too is uncharacteristically subtle. His rather stiff acting style makes his "performance" as a by-the-rules martinet believable, while he also manages to suggest the true, more sensitive feelings of the character that lie beneath the surface. The movie runs a little over 2 hours 15 minutes yet doesn't seem that long. And by not fawning for the viewer's admiration, it earns our sincere respect. Few movies about World War II made so soon after the event have aged as gracefully as Twelve O'Clock High.
The director Josef von Sternberg was hardly a modest man. In the 1967 BBC documentary The World of Josef von Sternberg, included on the Criterion DVD of The Scarlet Empress, he claimed total creative authorship of his movies—not only writing and direction, but also production, lighting and photography, and editing, whether he was credited with these in the completed film or not. It's little wonder then that the American auteurist Andrew Sarris named von Sternberg one of his "pantheon directors," praising his mastery of visual technique and describing him as "a lyricist of light and shadow." The Scarlet Empress is a mind-bogglingly baroque surfeit of visual detail, by turns ravishingly beautiful, lushly decorative, and hauntingly bizarre. Many scenes contain as much visual embellishment—in set decoration, props, costumes, and human spectacle—as I've ever seen in one movie. And still von Sternberg manages to arrange all these objects (including the actors, whom he refers to in the documentary as "marionettes") in these elaborate settings with clarity and purpose. Of the great directors, perhaps only Eisenstein, Kurosawa, and Orson Welles were as skillful as von Sternberg at organizing objects within the frame to create mood and emphasis.
In The Scarlet Empress, Marlene Dietrich, who made seven movies with von Sternberg, plays the lead role, Catherine the Great of Russia. She is required to transform from a young innocent—engaged through an arranged marriage to the future Tsar Peter III (Sam Jaffe), a childish madman—into a mature woman who uses sexual favors to engineer his assassination and seize the throne. (The historical accuracy of this is debatable.) She is quite convincing as she proceeds from naiveté to a kind of survivalist acceptance of her situation and finally, after a binge of sexual libertinism, to the decision to take control of events. Is she a cunning schemer, or does she truly want to rescue the Russian people from the insane tyranny of her husband? Von Sternberg keeps the answer ambiguous.
Jaffe, with his goofy buck-toothed grin and wide-eyed leer, is appropriately demented. And Louise Dresser turns in a broad semi-comic performance as Peter's dissolute and manipulative aunt, the Empress Elizabeth. Still, the strong impression these performers make pales beside the one von Sternberg makes as the absolute, perfectionist master of his startling cinematic vision.
H. M. PULHAM, ESQ. (1941) ***½
King Vidor directed all or part of 67 pictures between 1913 and 1980, more than half of them silent. Along with some bona fide classics, he also directed two of the worst movies I've ever seen, Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Fountainhead (1949), so I approached this movie with some trepidation. The story of a privileged member of a rich Boston society family from birth to middle age, the movie opens with a striking, nearly silent sequence showing Pulham's (Robert Young) morning routine—from waking up to arriving at his law office at exactly 9:00 a.m.—that within just a few minutes plainly establishes the regimented sterility of his life. The rest of the movie is structured as an alternately serious and whimsical stream-of-consciousness narrative that moves between scenes of the present and the past as Pulham recalls his entire life from birth to the present.
As I watched, I was amazed at the fluidity of the direction and at how natural Vidor made the rather literary structure of the movie seem. Young, with his subdued and rather bland screen presence, was ideally cast in the title role. The most interesting parts of the movie are those that deal with Pulham's life in New York City immediately after World War I working as a copywriter in an ad agency. In doing this, he is defying his father (Charles Coburn), who wants him to come home and join the family law firm. For a while it appears that Pulham will escape the stultifyingly conformist future that awaits him in Boston, especially after he begins a romance with a fellow copywriter, Marvin Myles Ransome (Hedy Lamarr), an independent-minded woman who encourages him to break away from the stifling traditions of his class and heritage. Lamarr's freethinking character is one of the best things in the movie. She seems surprisingly modern, wanting a career and her own life over marriage and a family, and Lamarr gives an excellent performance. But it is precisely her (for the time) unconventional values, combined with circumstances which force Pulham to return to Boston and his family, that ultimately separate them.
The ending is a bit pat—and with its message that you can't escape your background, a bit disturbing in its complacency—but the rest of the movie is delightful, a felicitous mixture of excellent acting, writing, photography (by Ray June) and editing, with Vidor's assured direction holding it all together.
DOWNSTAIRS (1932) ***½
I must confess to having a fairly low tolerance for movies of the early 1930's. Even the most highly touted of them often disappoint me. Downstairs, though, proved to be a pleasing exception. It stars John Gilbert, who wrote the story himself, and the whole movie is built around his character.
The movie opens at the Mitteleuropean estate of a baron whose head butler Albert (Paul Lukas) is being married to Anna (Virginia Bruce), the personal maid of the baroness. Into the festivities walks Gilbert as Karl Schneider, the new chauffeur. Karl is an unrepentant cad who immediately proceeds to charm, lie, blackmail, and seduce his way into a position of power and influence both upstairs and downstairs, managing to outwit and outmaneuver everyone who tries to expose him. In particular he sets his sights on the luscious but innocent Anna. After the stuffy Albert discovers that Karl has indeed seduced her, Anna looses an astonishingly frank tirade that not only makes clear that Karl's power over women lies in his sexual prowess, but also strongly asserts the desire of women to enjoy sex as much as men do and be treated by men as equal sexual beings.
Besides its surprisingly modern sexual attitudes, Downstairs has several other things going for it: an amusing take on amorality among the rich, its satirical mockery of the class system, and very entertaining supporting performances by Reginald Owen as the "silly ass" baron and Olga Baclanova (Freaks) as the conniving baroness. Monta Bell, who did such a great job on the Norma Shearer silent Lady of the Night (1925), directs with great seriocomic flair and provides some nice auteurish visual touches, including those in the scene where Karl seduces Anna, and later when he dissolves from the sleeping Anna to the next scene with Karl so slowly that for a few moments Karl seems to be a hazy dream image hovering over her bed. This movie and Queen Christina, which Gilbert made the next year with Garbo, should put to rest in any viewer's mind the notion that Gilbert's career ended because he was unsuited to sound films.
TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH (1949) ****
I'm not a big fan of war movies. Nor am I a big fan of Gregory Peck, whose performances often strike me as wooden and unengaging. Yet I found both this movie and Peck's performance in the lead role outstanding. In Twelve O'Clock High the emphasis is not on combat, but on psychology and characterization. In England in 1942, the first American Army Air Force crews have arrived and are starting the first daytime bombing raids over Europe. (The British RAF flew only nighttime raids.) The number of squadrons is small and support is minimal. Although the war planners are convinced that in time this strategy will prove the decisive factor in winning the war in Europe, at the moment the missions are having little real effect. Losses of aircraft and crews are high, understandably leading to great stress and low morale among both men and officers. One bomber squadron, based at Archbury, in particular is experiencing problems, and General Savage (Peck) is assigned to replace his good friend Col. Davenport (Gary Merrill) as commanding officer of the squadron.
In early scenes Savage has been established as a nice guy but a shrewd analyst who believes that the problem with Davenport is that he has grown too close to his men and lost his objectivity. So when Savage arrives at Archbury and immediately begins behaving like a cold martinet, we know that this is a role he is playing, a psychological ploy devised to instill the spirit of selflessness and teamwork among his fliers. "Consider yourselves already dead and you won't have to be afraid of it happening," he tells them at his first briefing. The initial response is not good, especially after his unsympathetic treatment of a popular navigator results in his suicide. But Savage finds one man, the deskbound Maj. Stovall (Dean Jagger, in an Oscar-winning performance), who understands his tactics and is willing to help him. Slowly his efforts pay off and the squadron comes into shape. It is only towards the end of the movie that we actually go on a bombing mission, with Gen. Savage leading the formation, in an exciting and deeply affecting sequence.
The treatment of the characters and situations by director Henry King is refreshingly unsentimental and unjingoistic. One can easily imagine the heavy-handed treatment such a plot would have received in the hands of a less subtle director. Peck too is uncharacteristically subtle. His rather stiff acting style makes his "performance" as a by-the-rules martinet believable, while he also manages to suggest the true, more sensitive feelings of the character that lie beneath the surface. The movie runs a little over 2 hours 15 minutes yet doesn't seem that long. And by not fawning for the viewer's admiration, it earns our sincere respect. Few movies about World War II made so soon after the event have aged as gracefully as Twelve O'Clock High.
Point Blank: Film Noir Meets Existentialism
Watching Lee Marvin in Point Blank (1967)—with his granitic facial features, deep voice, and confident, ultra-masculine presence—I couldn't help thinking of Humphrey Bogart. Like Bogart, Marvin was for years typecast as a heavy, usually in supporting roles. He played vicious, sadistic, sometimes psychotic thugs in movies like The Big Heat (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). After winning the Oscar for his atypically comic performance in the Western The Ballad of Cat Ballou (1965), Marvin became a big star playing leads. But like Bogart, even after he was able to choose his roles, Marvin stuck largely to tough-guy parts. The hard edge that made him so effective in those early roles became a major part of his later, more benign screen persona, serving him well in roles like those in The Professionals (1966), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Big Red One (1980).
As Walker, the main character in Point Blank, Marvin plays a man who has been betrayed by a good friend and his own wife. Reluctantly persuaded by the friend to help him steal a mob payoff being delivered to the abandoned Alcatraz penitentiary, Walker is double-crossed, shot, and left for dead in the derelict prison. After somehow miraculously making it to shore, Walker recovers and hooks up with a mysterious stranger (Keenan Wynn) seeking his help in bringing down "the organization." This person's identify and motivation are not revealed at this point, and Walker doesn't ask. He might be a policeman, a member of a rival mob, or even like Walker a victim. Walker has no real interest in the stranger except as a means to enable him to achieve the one thing he lives for—to find his wife and former friend and recover the $93,000 that was his share of the robbery. Like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, he cares less about personal revenge than about his own code of ethics and justice. His sense of fair play is unambiguous, and it is his sense of fair play that guides his actions.
In short order Walker is on his way to Los Angeles in search of the treacherous wife and former friend. He is either by nature or as a result of the Alcatraz experience a habitual survivalist—a wary, vigilant loner who trusts no one. In view of the events that follow, it's a good thing. In Los Angeles Walker finds himself in a Machiavellian situation where everyone seems to be playing everyone else, and his attempts to fulfill his mission become a life-and-death game of strategy against ruthless and unscrupulous opponents. Duplicity is pervasive. Nobody can be trusted, and nothing can be taken at face value; to do so could be fatal. Walker's attitude to this is stoic and dispassionate. As in everything else, he is unsentimental, his emotions always tightly under control.
He is a superior observer and strategist who predicts in advance what moves the other players will make and is able not only to forestall them but to manipulate them in subtle ways that serve his own ends. The source of his power seems to be that, unlike everyone else in the move, he has no interest in power itself. This detachment from the allure of power allows him to play the game on a meta-level. Driven by his single-minded focus on his own relatively limited and straightforward goals, he is a still point of steadfast purpose in the midst of corruption and deceit. When it is revealed at the end that Walker is himself being used by Wynn as a pawn in his own scheme, Walker seems unsurprised and unfazed. As always, he simply adapts to the new circumstances.
If Point Blank sounds a lot like a modernized film noir, it's because that's exactly what it is, with all the updated stylistic trappings of the late 1960's provided by director John Boorman. These trappings include dazzling color photography by Philip Lathrop, casual sex, and a fair amount of matter-of-fact violence.
The storytelling is frequently elliptical. We have no idea how Marvin managed to make it from Alcatraz to San Francisco. In one scene he is struggling into the waters of the bay; in the next he is riding with Wynn in a boat taking a tour of the bay while a guide explains over a loudspeaker that no one ever successfully escaped from Alcatraz. In one scene he is in his wife's apartment discovering her in the bedroom, a suicide dead from a drug overdose; in the next he is sitting in the same apartment, now completely stripped of all its furnishings. We don't know how much time has elapsed or what has happened to the dead wife (although he does later visit her grave). In one scene Walker learns from his dead wife's sister (Angie Dickinson), with whom he has begun a desultory affair, that the building across the street from the mob's stronghold is an apartment building. In the next scene he is sitting in an apartment in the building with two men (are they gay?), who are willingly complying with his instructions to tie themselves up and call the police to say they have been robbed. There seems to be no coercion involved. How did he get into the apartment? How did he get them to cooperate?
Boorman is masterful in his use of setting to convey a strong sense of place. The abandoned prison buildings and cells at Alcatraz, the seedy club where Walker goes looking for the friend who betrayed him, the bleakly modernistic apartments, penthouses, offices, the soulless showplace of a house where the head of the mob (the pre-Archie Bunker Carroll O'Connor) lives, the concrete canyon of the Los Angeles River—all these locations greatly intensify the alienated and unsettling effect of the movie. Boorman has just as vivid a sense of setting as Antonioni; the difference is that with Boorman these are clearly backgrounds to the action, not ends in themselves. Boorman even uses setting as a structural device, bringing the movie full circle by opening and closing it on Alcatraz.
The editing of Point Blank is also noteworthy, at times fracturing the linear chronology of the movie not as a flashy gimmick but for legitimate narrative purposes. The opening sequence is particularly brilliant, with Walker regaining consciousness in the derelict prison cell and struggling to remember how he got there. For its first several minutes the movie shows us the fragmented jumble of memories and images that flood his mind as he attempts to piece together the explanation. That Boorman manages to use this process as a means of covertly providing exposition without confusing the viewer is proof of his economy and skill as a storyteller.
At certain points later on, Walker flashes back for a moment to something else that has happened in the movie, and again Boorman makes these momentary flashbacks seem the entirely natural result of the movie slipping briefly into Walker's point of view. These stream-of-consciousness memories that replay themselves in his mind are never gratuitous, but rather are echoes triggered by something that reminds Walker of an event that happened earlier in the film at a moment of heightened awareness and that continues to haunt him: another time he opened a curtain, another time he walked into a bedroom, another time he was attacked and beaten.
Apart from these references to earlier events in the movie, Walker seems to exist in a vacuum. At one point, when asked his first name he replies, "I never use it." We know nothing of his background, of his profession, of his interests. He seems to inhabit an eternal present with the only fixed points of reference the events of the movie itself. He is, in short, an exemplary existential hero, a solitary man moving through a dangerous, unstable, and unpredictable world in which the only way to survive is to react to each new situation with a new response. In Point Blank, film noir attitude meets existential philosophy. Even the title sounds like a pun that suggests the ultimate meaninglessness of existence.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
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