Hank Quinlan (Welles) dispatches Sgt. Menzies (Joseph Calleia) |
Movie Kinks
My scattershot views of a pop art—its twists, curves, and sensual appeal
Thursday, April 4, 2024
The Evil That Welles Did
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Succubus
A Fool There Was (1915) is one of the few Fox Studios silent pictures to have survived the 1937 Fort Lee, New Jersey, fire, and one of only a handful of surviving movies starring Theda Bara. This Edwardian melodrama, adapted from a play by Porter Emerson Browne, which was itself based on a Kipling poem, portrays Good just about how you’d expect, but the entire movie is energized by the kohl-eyed, fleshy Bara, who is listed in the credits as “The Vampire.” She’s extraordinary — a femme fatale viper who gloms on to men — hapless fools — and drags them away from the light of society and family down into her lair, draining them of their fortunes, jobs, and willpower. The vamp destroys them and their wives and children. The movie’s perspective — that these men are to blame for their own destruction — is encapsulated in numerous intertitles that quote from the poem (“The Vampire”). Evil isn’t specifically blamed, let alone punished. In retrospect, the movie feels like a firebrand’s response to male domination and misogyny.
Countess Dracula |
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
Boring Your Enemies to Death
in Jules and Jim and
Back in black. Moreau and Brialy |
Monday, May 22, 2023
Miss Show Business
By the time Presenting Lily Mars was filmed in 1943, the twenty-year-old Judy Garland had already mastered the clowning, fumbling earnestness in her character’s single-minded pursuit of stardom and, for the first time on film, was displaying some of the world-weary show-biz brass that would point the way to her concert triumphs in middle age — that voice like a Big Band trumpet with a mute on it, moaning low or careening into the stratosphere. Chronologically, the Andy Hardy bloom was just barely off her, but she had come into her own mature talent, inexorably and rapidly. She had made an excellent picture the year before (For Me and My Gal, with Judy and Gene Kelly doing their “Ballin’ the Jack” routine) and had even separated from her first husband by then (having had an affair with Johnny Mercer in the interim). The character Garland plays in Lily Mars is a typical Booth Tarkington teenager, a homely duckling with a pie-in-the-sky dream and the gumption to chase it no matter how many obstacles she smacks into. There’s a lot of Alice Adams in Lily, but it isn’t high society Lily craves — it’s the energy that stage performers lap up from audiences (Garland took that energy and apotheosized it in 1961 at her famed Carnegie Hall concert).
A star is born. Judy Garland, Faye Bainter |
Despite the family-market machinery and misconceptions, Garland swings through and maps out a route forward for her career in Lily Mars, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it at the time. Her triumph in Lily Mars was a blueprint for Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968), which re-created several gags from it in the “Lovely Bride” and roller-skating numbers. By 1943, Garland, who would make Meet Me in St. Louis the following year and dispense with the last of her childhood pudge, was paving her own yellow brick road.
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Moldy Camp
Death warmed over. Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz |
The jocularity is so broad and cringe that twenty minutes of it puts you in a sour mood. At over two hours and five minutes of frenetic stupidity, you might come out of it convinced that movies have never provided charm or magic.
Another unintended bit of residue of The Mummy is that it makes you hate the affable Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, Industrial Light and Magic, CGI, Egypt, and even bandages. How can it be ethical — or even legal — to treat the Bronze Age this way?
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
East and West
Toshiro Mifune and Keiko Awaji |
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Bloodless
Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) is a saccharine atrocity. Virtually all the characters are back from the final TV season, but they’ve had the blood squeezed out of them. The script leaves no one any dignity; the actors aren’t just actors anymore — they’re cardboard symbols of the resilient English spirit, diamonds of the Empire with stiff upper lips. This lame, pointless rip-off of Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is presented earnestly, as if nobody had ever heard of the silent-to-sound transition, and despite the fact that the film studio in the current story is the London-based producer of “quota quickies,” British Lion, all the characters keep mysteriously referring to their surroundings as “Hollywood.” What can you say about the writing in a movie that shamelessly treats all these dowagers, lords, ladies, and lackeys as wooden tokens of British class divisions and old-movie stereotypes (This Happy Breed [1944], Mrs. Miniver [1942], The White Cliffs of Dover [1944], and so on, where the only humor in the dialogue is inadvertent), or that relies on piled-up happy outcomes? I don’t remember a single moment in the two-hours-plus romance that was sexy or passionate, and when a baby is carried in at the end, I was baffled as to how it got there. At a time of our current upswing in erotic dramas in streaming programs, Downton Abbey: A New Era is presented as a chaste throwback to the sexless “family” entertainment of Joe Pasternak and Henry Koster. It’s a shame there isn’t a singing nun in it somewhere.
Static pose. Maggie Smith |
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
Propaganda
Before he directed and starred in his marvelous Henry V in 1944, Laurence Olivier made several propaganda films for the war effort: That Hamilton Woman (1941) with his wife Vivien Leigh, in which Napoleon is a clear stand-in for Hitler, The Invaders (1941, 49th Parallel in the UK), with actual Nazis as Nazis, various Ministry of Information shorts, and The Demi-Paradise (1943). The latter, directed by Anthony Asquith, was intended to rouse British support for the Soviets in the wake of the 1941 German invasion, which abruptly terminated the German–Soviet non-aggression pact. (The title is from John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech in Act II of Richard II.) Olivier plays an Englishman’s idea of a Russian: officious and overwhelmingly critical of British reserve and “cruelty.” The screenplay (by Anatole de Grunwald) turns the proletariat Soviet engineer into a bourgeois provincialist — what has always been said about Englishmen — but Olivier is strangely listless. He overlooks the comic potential of the character, which is odd, considering Olivier’s triumphs in so many comic roles in the theater, from Sir Toby Belch to Sergius (Arms and the Man) to Justice Shallow. The artist who so successfully tapped the wit in a madman like Richard Gloucester should have, one would think, been inclined to play up the humor in Ivan Kouznetsoff. Olivier’s halting, overstudied delivery is perhaps a miscalculation. The effect on his characterization turns an engineer into an artistic temperament and gives the impression that Olivier has forgotten his lines. This may have been Olivier’s idea of Slavic dispiritedness.
Laurence Olivier |
Despite its occasional warm charm, including a lovely performance by Penelope Dudley-Ward and a brief bit by Leslie Henson in a music-hall number, the movie is prosaic and at least thirty minutes too long. A year later, Olivier’s heroic phase reached its artistic and commercial apex with Henry V, Shakespeare’s emblematic patriotic achievement and the British film industry’s glorious tribute to English empire.
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
Robert Altman’s Flying Machine
Brewster McCloud (1970), Robert Altman’s second feature film, is wildly fluid. Even fans of M*A*S*H (1969) might not be completely tuned in to this movie’s disjointed counterculture lightness. Scenes of episodic, oddball humor, visual shocks and sexual arousal (the movie was originally called Brewster McCloud’s Sexy Flying Machine) butt up against each other like pinballs, and Altman, who heavily rewrote the Doran William Cannon screenplay, is tilting the machine.
In M*A*S*H, the satire was equally manic but a lot clearer; scenes were constructed to puncture bureaucracy and skewer the military officers and aides who peddled it to the American troops. We know what’s going on in Brewster McCloud and we can catch all the often very funny movie references and in-jokes, but we don’t often know what those references are doing there or why a disparate group of Houstonians are being strangled. The movie doesn’t ever tell us why these particular victims were targeted or even who the killer is. It could be the sensual but mothering older woman (Sally Kellerman), the dimwit tour guide (Shelley Duvall, whose eyelashes are painted in Raggedy Ann spikes), or the taciturn Brewster himself (Bud Cort, who played several of his movie roles as if they were on the spectrum). Are the victims Brewster’s persecutors, establishment materialists threatening to derail his desire to fly, or are they only in the wrong place at the wrong time? The victims are all found contorted in grotesque shapes, with bird droppings on their bodies or faces, but if Altman is attempting to make a deeper satirical point and not just a scatological one, that point is lost. The comic visual scatology is everywhere, in fact: bird shit is constantly being dropped (by unseen birds) on important papers, wallets, badges, and windshields. The movie is practically awash in it. The freedom that Altman gives his cast to improvise dialogue saves a lot of the non sequiturs in the script — for example, while the suave detective (Michael Murphy) is examining one of the victims at a zoo, an enormous tortoise lumbers into the frame, nudging the detective’s right elbow, and Murphy, without losing character, says, “Somebody get this turtle out of here.” Moments like that reinforce the improvisational personality without adding to the confusion.
Weirdos. Shelley Duvall, Bud Cort |
This Is War, Not a Garden Party
Father-daughter time. Vivien Leigh, Thomas Mitchell |