John DiLeo's Blog, page 6

Oscar Unchained, Part Two

I recently watched a copy of the entire 1955 Oscar telecast (honoring movies from 1954).  I couldn’t help but notice the vast changes in televised award shows in the last sixty years.  Basically, the 1955 show plays like a breezy, comfy Bob Hope special with a most astonishing array of guest stars.  Have so many legends ever graced one stage before, from Brando to Crosby to Bogart to Davis?  But more than the superstar power, more than the essential simplicity of the show, the thing that stands out is the brevity of the acceptance speeches.  Rarely does anyone say anthing more than “Thank you,” and, if they do, maybe they offer one humorous comment, or one person to single out for thanks.  For those of us used to long speeches that often include the names of producers, agents, managers and so on, this is a revelation.  It appears that 1955 was still a time when people seemed slightly embarrassed by this kind of public adulation, or at least felt it was their job to pretend they were embarrassed.  No one seizes their Oscar victory or acknowledges the mountaintop they’ve scaled.  Instead, they accept with a blushing graciousness and with as much humility as possible.  Someone should do a study of when all this changed in our culture.  The last 50s-style Oscar speech I can recall was Joe Pesci’s startlingly brief acceptance of his Goodfellas Oscar in 1991.  Watching Marlon Brando and Grace Kelly receive their 1954 Oscars, vanishing from the stage before you know it, is a refreshing sight, so much more pleasing than listening to recent stars race through their laundry-list of names before the band plays them off.

Which brings me to this year’s Oscars, already at a disadvantage after the best Golden Globes broadcast ever.  Hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, both at the top of their game, that January event had some of the fast pace and unpretentious no-frills quality of the 1955 Oscar show, making you feel that you were attending a great party.  The Globe broadcasts used to be jokes, yet now I am hoping that the Oscar show will have some of the Globes’ clever silliness and, dare I say it, entertainment value.  Can the Academy lure away Fey and Poehler for next year’s Oscars?  Hardly.  I’m sure they’re already booked for next year’s Globes.

Before February 24 arrives, here are a few more random thoughts to go with last week’s Oscar post.

Come on Oscar, give the cinematography award to Roger Deakins for Skyfall.  It’s his 10th nomination since 1995, and he’s never won before.  He was especially deserving the last time for True Grit, and his work on Skyfall was my favorite thing about the movie, particularly that silhoutted fistfight in the skyscraper.

I know that the Best Actor category was overcrowded with candidates this year, but I wish that, instead of Hugh Jackman and Bradley Cooper, the final two slots had gone to John Hawkes (The Sessions) and Jack Black (Bernie).  Yes, Jack Black!

How nice to see Robert De Niro acting again.  He comes through with a nice piece of work in Silver Linings Playbook.  The role isn’t much of a stretch for him, but De Niro connects with his character intimately enough to remind us why we used to regard him so highly.  I admit I’ve missed many of the supposedly rotten movies he’s made in the last decade or so.  The last time I remember him being first-rate was in Heat (1995).  Welcome back, Bobby.

I’m sorry that Looper was ignored in the nominations.  It was far and away my favorite adventure blockbuster of the year, an action movie in which you could actually follow the action scenes (something shockingly rare today).  Yes, like most time-travel movies it doesn’t make any sense, but I loved going on its imaginative, emotional, and often very beautiful ride.

Quvenzhane Wallis is a remarkable little girl, but why not give her a special junior-sized Oscar like they used to do in the old days?  Why have a child compete with adults, and presumably lose, when they can give her an actual prize?  This would also have freed up the fifth slot for an all-grown-up actress.  Wallis should take home an Oscar, just one about half the size of a regular golden guy.

I have a similar gripe with regard to nominating foreign-language films in the Best Picture category.  Love Amour all you want, and vote for it as Best Foreign-Language Film, which is why they invented that category to begin with.

I’ll be very pleased if Argo takes home Best Picture.  I found it to be the most satisfying of the nine films nominated.  It’s a movie in the old tradition of Best Picture winners, meaning it’s an adult movie that is also a commercial entertainment, joining winners like The Best Years of Our Lives, From Here to Eternity, and The Apartment.  It’s no surprise that George Clooney is one of Argo‘s producers, since Clooney is one of the few people responsible for these kinds of films over the last decade, movies like Michael Clayton, Up in the Air, and The Descendants.  They’re not masterpieces but they are smart, compelling, and entertaining motion pictures.  And Argo managed to do the unthinkable, melding historical drama, nail-biting thrills, and Hollywood satire into a seamless entertainment.  The only real flaw in Argo is director Ben Affleck’s own dull performance.  He almost seems deliberately lackluster, as if not wanting to be too much of a show-off by matching his impressive direction with a knockout performance.

In a way, Zero Dark Thirty is the anti-Argo.  Both films deal with a daring, dangerous, secret true-life mission, but their moviemaking styles are very different.  Whereas Argo goes for an audience-friendly approach, making the plot as funny and suspenseful and enjoyable as possible, Zero Dark Thirty provides a documentary-like procedural effect.  One style isn’t necessarily better than the other, but I did prefer Argo simply because it absorbed me more completely and made me feel closer to its characters.   

Life of Pi is beautiful but didn’t add up to anything, scaled for a profundity that never arrived.  I liked Django Unchained but felt it was too long by at least a half hour.

Is it just me, or did anyone else get a gay vibe from one particular scene in Lincoln?  Maybe Tony Kushner included the moment in his screenplay simply to acknowledge the recent rumors surrounding the possibility of Lincoln’s gayness.  It happens when Daniel Day-Lewis visits his two young male secretaries in their bedroom, with both men in their beds.  After good-naturedly patting the thigh of one of the boys a few times, Lincoln is asked by the boy if he’d like some “company” tonight.  The president declines the offer.  The scene is played matter-of-factly, as if it’s not uncommon for Lincoln to request some late-night male “company” after a long day of changing history.  It’s a lovely, subtle, sweet moment, whether meant as an offer of sharing cocoa or cuddling in bed.

Oscar Unchained, Part One

Well, I guess it’s about time to weigh in on this year’s Oscars, or at least start weighing in.  All the major pre-Oscar awards have been handed out, and so there’s nothing else to consider when trying to get a sense of how the Academy may be swaying.  With the surprise of Ben Affleck’s omission from the Best Director slate, the race has found an unexpected jolt of suspense.  If Affleck had simply been nominated by the Academy’s branch of directors, then the race would now look as though the outcome was a foregone conclusion, with Ben and his Argo taking home the top two prizes.  After all, Argo won Best Drama and Best Director at the Golden Globes, then the SAG ensemble prize, the PGA’s Best Picture, and, most significant of all, the DGA’s Best Director award.  The million-dollar question is whether or not the Academy will vote for Argo as Best Picture even without a corresponding nomination for Affleck’s direction.  It does look a little silly to announce that a picture is the year’s best but that its director’s work didn’t quite rank among the top five directorial achievements this year.  But, if they bypass Argo, don’t they then look like they were forced into voting for their second choice?  If Argo does in fact win Best Picture, it will make the winner of the Best Director Oscar look as though he were holding a consolation prize and not an Oscar as shiny as the others given out that night.  When Steven Spielberg (Lincoln), or maybe David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook), wins Best Director, won’t he feel Affleck breathing down his neck?  Anyway, it will be kind of fun to watch the Oscars without any clear idea of what will win Best Picture or who will win Best Director.   

One thing seems certain:  Daniel Day-Lewis will become the first three-time winner of the Best Actor Oscar.  His portrait of Lincoln is extraordinary.  End of story.  I do wish that John Hawkes was in the running for his outstanding work in The Sessions.  His absence is unforgivable, especially when voters found room for Hugh Jackman’s empty, lifeless performance in Les Miz. 

The Best Actress race has been talked about as a stand-off between two relative newcomers:  Jessica Chastain for Zero Dark Thirty and Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook.  There’s no question who has the more “Oscar” role.  That would be Lawrence, and so I predict that she’ll take home the award.  Chastain has the handicap of playing someone whose character is her job, who doesn’t really get to show a personality separate from her work.  And so we don’t get to know her, aside from the conviction and smarts with which she pursues her investigation.  As for Lawrence, well, she has a role that was built to allow a talented young actress to shine.  As a bruised girl with a hard shell and an aching vulnerability (that she tries to conceal), Lawrence reminded me a bit of Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment.  She becomes the emotional center of Silver Linings even though the movie is about Bradley Cooper’s character.  (Similarly, The Apartment is about Jack Lemmon, but MacLaine, without effort, deepens our investment and sympathy and, therefore, breaks our heart.)  And the climax of Silver Linings belongs to Lawrence.  It’s her happiness, more than the so-called star’s, that we’re rooting for.  She has what might be called a ferocious poignancy.

Wide open is the Best Supporting Actor race, in which all five contenders have a shot.  It seems to me that Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master) played leading roles, but all five men, cast to their strengths, did exemplary work.  If pushed, I’d guess that Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln) will be the victor.  I also must admit that my top choice in this category didn’t make the cut.  That would be Samuel L. Jackson (Django Unchained), in what may be the year’s riskiest performance.  Playing a character who’s most uncomfortable and troubling to encounter—a villainous, surprisingly powerful and power-abusing slave—Jackson channels every black stereotype of Hollywood movies of the 1930s and ’40s and transforms his character into a funny, terrifying, and unforgettable creation.

If Sally Field wins Best Supporting Actress for her Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln, she will become, with only three nominations, what it took Meryl Streep 17 nominations to become:  a winner of three Oscars, two for Best Actress and one for Best Supporting Actress.  I’m going to guess that Streep isn’t voting for Field, but I’d vote for Field because she deserves it.

One more thing about Argo.  Last year, much was made about The Artist being the first Best Picture actually about Hollywood.  Well, here we are, just one year later, with Argo, a movie that makes Hollywood a hero in a true life-or-death political thriller, quite conceivably on its way to becoming the second Best Picture about the movie industry.   

Hitchcock, the Man and the Movie

One year after My Week with Marilyn, which covers the making of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), we now have Hitchcock, supposedly all about the making of Psycho (1960).  (One can only wonder what might come next in this sub-genre of movies about the makings of famous movies.)  Whether or not any of the behind-the-scenes incidents depicted actually happened, how do you make the audience believe that they did?  I haven’t read the book upon which the Hitchcock screenplay is based, and maybe everything presented onscreen did happen in real life, but why didn’t I find a single moment of it plausible?

Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, writer Alma Reville, were personal and professional collaborators, presumably quite gratified:  doing what they loved; appreciated for it; being of such valued use to each other in their work.  Sometimes credited and sometimes not, Reville was certainly Hitchcock’s chief sounding board and his most trusted advisor.  To portray their marriage, in the years of 1959 and 1960, as a soap opera of mid-life crises seems a disrespectful bore, strenuously projecting a modern sensibility onto their era.  It all reeks of self-help books and talk-show psychology, with everything spelled out in tired, simplistic terms.  Though she’s frustrated here, maybe Alma was quite thrilled to be the woman behind the great man, uninterested in being a celebrity, merely loving her work and enjoying her low profile.  And if their union was sorely tested during the period covered in this movie, was it really about possible flirtations with others?  They had been married since 1926, so if Hitchcock had a thing for his leading ladies, wouldn’t Alma have adjusted to this fact after 35 years?  Wouldn’t their marriage and their professional partnership have both been well-oiled machines by now?

The dirty-old-man scenario for Hitch—his lust for his luscious blond leading ladies—may or may not be true, but it certainly doesn’t ring true in Hitchcock.  Doesn’t it make more psychological sense to surmise that he put all that desire and repression and fantasy into his films, while protecting his safe, fairly ordinary private existence?  Would he have been able to fetishize Kim Novak so hauntingly in Vertigo if he had spent the filming trying to bed her?  Aren’t many of his films great because he poured all that lustful yearning and fearful excitement, and those violent urges, into his work and nowhere else, all the stuff that terrified him in real life?  He was able to deal with the best and worst of his imaginative stirrings in the controlled atmosphere of his creative life.

Anthony Hopkins does the best he can with the script’s superficial conception of Hitchcock, meaning that he can’t get beyond imitation.  As Alma, Helen Mirren looks far too attractive.  (Someone who looks less like a “star,” such as Imelda Staunton, would have made a better choice.)  Mirren is fine, utterly untaxed as an actress, while her flirtation with a writer (Danny Huston) is a real snore.  Despite her low, husky voice, Scarlett Johansson makes a bright and likable Janet Leigh, while a convincingly cast James D’Arcy is seen all too briefly as Anthony Perkins.  Then there’s the ruinous choice to have Hitch and the “real” Norman Bates (Michael Wincott) share fantasy conversations.

As for the actual making of Psycho, we do get a recreation of the shower scene, but with the addition of some stupid, all-too-literal commentary from the script:  as Hopkins demonstrates how to stab Johansson, we suddenly get a montage of all those that Hitch would like to be stabbing.  And it’s hard to swallow that Psycho was saved in the editing room when Hitch famously edited his movies in his head, before he even started filming them.  This just feels like trumped-up suspense for the movie’s climax.  Again, even if everything portrayed here actually happened, director Sachi Gervasi is unable to make any of it convincing.

It’s also truly hard to accept that Hitch thought he could turn the ordinary Vera Miles into a major star.  (Even though she was supposedly his first choice for the film, Vertigo would not be Vertigo if Miles had played the Novak role.)  Jessica Biel is odd casting as Miles, mostly because Biel is someone you can actually believe could become a director’s obsession.  And I took offense at a throwaway line uttered by agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlbarg).  He tells Hitch that he made a million dollars for Jimmy Stewart on a “dog” of a picture called Winchester ’73.  Excuse me, but that western is quite a fine motion picture, directed by the great Anthony Mann.  There’s no satisfactory explanation for why Wasserman, who should know better, would call it a “dog.”  As for Hitchcock?  Can’t you hear it barking?

More Than Just Samson and Demetrius

He’s probably best remembered for getting the screen’s most famous haircut, when Hedy Lamarr’s Delilah figured out how to sap his strength.  He, of course, is the Samson of tall, dark, and handsome Victor Mature, the movie star who died at 86 in 1999 and would have turned 100 this January 29th.  The film, Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), is the memorably klutzy piece of camp that started a new craze for Bible-themed movies, with Mature back for another biggie, as the Greek slave Demetrius in Henry Koster’s The Robe (1953), meaning that Mature pleased audiences in both the Old and New Testaments.  These films are colorful, dramatically cardboard, lavish yet cheap-looking, and defiantly mediocre.  Mature is actually seen at his worst, performing in what I’ve called his “side-of-beef acting style.”  He’s too big to ignore, but within his weighty presence lies a dull and lethargic actor.  He’s little more than a mannequin with an especially wide chest, and I guess little more was required in your basic Bible blockbuster.  (Back to Ms. Lamarr, I’ve always felt that she cuts Mature’s hair when she realizes that they essentially have the same hairdo, something she rightly finds unacceptable.)

Mature made a fine Doc Holliday in his best film, the great My Darling Clementine (1946) from John Ford, and he also starred in an exceptional yet neglected film noir Cry of the City (1948), directed by Robert Siodmak.  Mature also managed to appear opposite Betty Grable four times, which proves that he certainly wasn’t limited in terms of genres.  But there can be no doubt as to which film contains his finest screen acting:  Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947).  It’s Grade-A crime drama, a good mix of New York locations and noir-ish style, very well crafted and handsomely photographed.  Mature plays Nick Bianco, a crook/ex-con sent to prison again for a jewel robbery (the excellent opening sequence).  But where Mature really comes through as an actor is in his quietly emotional scenes, the ones with his two little daughters in which he reveals his loving and gentle sides, elements that are also tenderly exposed opposite Coleen Gray (who becomes his second wife).  Despite his past, Mature becomes the film’s sympathetic center.

Kiss of Death is best remembered for Richard Widmark’s strong, Oscar-nominated screen debut as Tommy Udo, a scary, psychotic hoodlum.  It’s an extremely showy part, and Widmark devours it whole.  He’s really not in the movie all that much, but his presence looms.  His acting can be forced—that maniacal laugh is less than “organic”—but Widmark was probably never this good again.  He unforgettably kills poor, defenseless Mildred Dunnock, a woman in a wheelchair!  He brutally flings her down a flight of stairs, wheelchair and all, in a sequence that is still pretty shocking.  After that scene, we know he’s capable of anything and react accordingly to his every entrance.

When the film becomes a battle between Mature and Widmark, the suspense is terrific.  What might Widmark do to Mature’s family?  There’s a satisfyingly exciting climax, followed by a too-happy ending.  It’s a flawed film, but it’s a winner nonetheless, pitting Mature’s deeply human protagonist against Widmark’s crazed villain.  Mature wins the drama’s battle, but he also wins the acting honors:  his depth of feeling trumps Widmark’s flash.  People may think of Victor Mature as a he-man usually running around in a toga-like garment, but he seemed to lose his acting ability whenever he bared too much flesh, sort of like the way he lost his strength when Ms. Lamarr gave him a trim.  The sensitivity he displayed as Nick Bianco is rare in the Mature filmography, making Kiss of Death the film to watch this January 29th.

Belle Starr (1941)

It can’t be a surprise to anyone that a blatantly derivative movie like 20th Century-Fox’s Belle Starr (subtitled “The Bandit Queen”) tried its damnedest to rip off David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939).  The first time I saw Belle Starr I was expecting an all-out western, with its title-role star, Gene Tierney, decked out in stylish cowboy hats and tight-fitting jeans.  But for most of the picture the lovely young Tierney, a one-year novice in movies, is seen in long dresses with cinched waists.  As Belle Shirley, a Missouri Southerner and every inch a Southern belle, Tierney was given the impossible task of trying to live up to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara and make us forget her.  The deck was stacked against Tierney because everything about her film triggers shameless and unfortunate reminders of GWTW, Leigh, Hattie McDaniel, you name it.  Tierney was a beautiful young woman (with a famous overbite) whose dark hair and fair complexion were quite similar to Leigh’s.  The hairdressers took this further, giving Tierney one of Leigh’s Scarlett hairdos, thus making the comparison even more unavoidable.

Belle is a devout Confederate who, like Scarlett, has held on to her plantation throughout the war’s duration, seemingly through sheer force of will.  As the film begins, the war is over, but not the bitterness or the resentments of true believers like Belle.  As for her acting, Tierney, who went on to do good work in films like Laura (1944) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), is in way over her head.  She’s an overanimated imitation of Leigh, with a touch much too heavy to be considered charming.  She really pounds her Southern accent and gives overly deliberate line readings, often leading to shrill overacting.  There’s plenty of wide-eyed pouting, “vixen” behavior, and eyebrow-raising, but without the sly wit to make it humorous, interesting, or, well, irresistible.  Then you’ve got Louise Beavers on hand to recreate McDaniel’s Mammy, here cunningly differentiated with the name “Mammy Lou.”  She even gets a crying scene like McDaniel’s.  Of course, Belle shouts ”Fiddlesticks!” to Mammy Lou (who tells her that she’s “so full of the devil”).  Like Scarlett, Belle often does things that a “lady” shouldn’t.  When Sam Starr (Randolph Scott) is shot in the behind, Belle insists on tending to the wound, despite the protestations of everyone, including Scott himself.  It takes nothing less than the arrival of Union soldiers to stop her from pulling down his pants.  When the soldiers enter the house, we get another GWTW reminder:  Belle, on a staircase, pulling a gun on a Yankee.

The failure is not all Tierney’s fault.  Despite the fast pace and the colorful (some would say “garish”) production, it’s a defiantly mediocre and hollow movie, almost never convincing.  The direction of Irving Cummings is content to remain squarely on the surface of things.  Top-billed Scott performs as if he hasn’t read the script, merely showing up to give his usual performance, his easygoing, sort-of charming hunk-of-man shtick.  Did no one tell him that he’s essentially playing the bad guy?  Perhaps not, because Scott seems stuck in his gentlemanly mode, even as his character continues to fight the war, more recklessly as the movie proceeds, eventually becoming an out-and-out criminal.  It might have been an interesting role—the “patriot” whose convictions have inadvertently veered off course—but Scott isn’t capable of ambiguity.  After Sam and Belle wed, she becomes disenchanted with his lack of honor.  But there’s never any threat or danger in Scott, who’s simply not up to the task of revealing Sam’s disintegrating morals.  (This was a long time before his best work, in Budd Boetticher westerns and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country.)

The best performance comes from Shepperd Strudwick (then known as John Shepperd) as Tierney’s sensitive, gentle, very honorable brother.  He’s a Southern gentleman in the Ashley Wilkes mold, yet another very definite reminder of GWTW.  A mustachioed Dana Andrews plays a Union major smitten with Belle (though he does burn her mansion to the ground, providing the film with its big fire sequence, the closest it comes to GWTW‘s burning of Atlanta.)  Tierney and Andrews were three years away from being dynamite together in Laura. 

I realize that Technicolor is one of the main offerings of this kind of movie.  All I’ll say about that is this:  Tierney certainly packed a lot of bright red lipstick for her renegade life with Scott.  Does anyone need to look that glamorous when hiding out in the hills?

Farmer’s Daughter, Bishop’s Wife

She was a movie star in her teens, an A-list leading lady in her twenties, an Oscar winner in her thirties, and a queen of television in her forties.  Who else but Loretta Young?  With her extraordinary beauty, boundless charm, and well-honed acting skills, it’s no wonder that she was a star for so many decades and for so many generations of fans.  Young, who died at 87 in 2000, would have turned 100 on January 6, 2013.

My favorite Young movie, Rachel and the Stranger (1948), was released during the peak years of her movie career (1947-49), in which she also made the likable light comedy The Farmer’s Daughter (1947), which garnered her an unexpected Oscar, and Come to the Stable (1949), another pleasing and featherweight comedy (for which she received her other Oscar nomination).  I devoted a chapter to Rachel and the Stranger in my book Screen Savers, calling it “one of the more satisfying—both funny and sexy—love triangles of the screen,” with Young fought over by William Holden and Robert Mitchum.  Of Young’s performance, I said, “She is confidently understated here and fully in control of her ability to communicate with the camera lens.”  It’s a wonderful movie that is still virtually unknown, nowhere near as popular as yet another Young winner from this period, The Bishop’s Wife (1947), which also had her being paid enviable attention by two attractive leading men, Cary Grant and David Niven.  You never question why any of these men—Holden, Mitchum, Grant, Niven—would fall under her undeniably intoxicating spell.

There are other joys to be found in Young’s filmography, several of them from the 1930s, some of which I’ve written about in my book Screen Savers II—Man’s Castle (1933) with Spencer Tracy and Cafe Metropole (1937) with Tyrone Power—and another, Employees’ Entrance (1933), praised more recently by me on this blog.  So, what other Young movies are out there waiting to be savored?

Platinum Blonde (1931) – It’s a charming, easygoing comedy that’s fascinating for several reasons.  As a Frank Capra movie, it’s an obvious warm-up for his classics to come, a kind of early draft for his basic “poor people have marvelous taken-for-granted qualities while the rich are essentially useless” theme.  It features a romance between a reporter and an heiress (a set-up later used in It Happened One Night), a scene of a newly rich guy and his servants echoing their voices in a large front hall (later used in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) and a main character named Mr. Smith!  (Credit must be shared with Capra’s longtime screenwriter, Robert Riskin, who was more than a little responsible for the Capra touch.)  Platinum Blonde is slight but buoyed by Capra’s fresh direction, the lovely black and white, the gorgeous clothes and production values (especially for a small comedy).  Young’s co-stars, Robert Williams and Jean Harlow, would both soon be dead (Williams later that year, Harlow in 1937), adding an undertow of melancholy for contemporary audiences.  Williams, a gifted comic actor and a prototype for the Capra male, looks a bit like Bing Crosby, a bit like Robert Mitchum.  Because Young and Harlow were not yet fully formed as star personalities, they seem miscast here, with Young as the working girl and Harlow as the heiress.  Young’s character, a female reporter, appears to be an outline for the Jean Arthur role in Mr. Deeds.  Both Young and Harlow perform rather well, with Young particularly radiant and vulnerable.  And, despite the title tilting Harlow’s way, it is Young who is top-billed.

Zoo in Budapest (1933) – Spend an enchanting day and night in a Central European zoo.  It’s a dreamy little movie, with Young as an escaped orphan on the run from the authorities.  Directed by Rowland V. Lee, this sleeper owes much of its magic to the fluid, shimmeringly pretty black-and-white photography of Lee Garmes.  The romance between Young and Gene Raymond (who lives inside the zoo) is sweet and gentle, though their relationship could use more time to develop.  Young is very blond here, looking every inch the storybook ingenue.  Good for kids, it’s a live-action fairy tale, a minor gem with an air of wonder.

The Accused (1949) – Forty years before there was a Jodie Foster movie with the same title, Young starred in this intriguing film noir, another worthy entry from those peak years of hers.  She plays a repressed college psychology professor who, in self-defense during an attempted rape, murders a handsome male student played by the uncomfortably named Douglas Dick.  (With the issue of rape at its core, the film actually does share some similar ground with Foster’s movie.)  Young conceals her crime, allowing director William Dieterle to show his flair for suspense.  As a thriller, it’s neatly done, but it’s severely marred by the dated and self-important psychobabble which can be downright laughable.  But Young has a field day, moving from spinster-ish plainness to Edith Head glamour as she tries to distance herself from her initial persona.  She does a nice job, but the movie is stolen by Wendell Corey (how often can one say that?) as a homicide detective.  His laid-back cool masks his smarts, and he’s also refreshingly sleazy, hitting on Loretta even after he arrests her.  Robert Cummings is miscast as Loretta’s guy and the victim’s guardian, too much of a lightweight.  As for Mr. Dick, if you’ll pardon the expression, he’s just right.  The attempted rape is especially provocative for its time because he’s wearing only a bathing suit.

 

Yep, It’s Miserable

Chicago (2002) spoiled me.  It made me think that a new era of outstanding movie musicals was suddenly possible.  Well, it has now been a decade since Chicago arrived, and I’m still waiting for that new movie-musical heyday.  No one can say that moviemakers haven’t been trying.  There have even been a couple of uneven but pretty good tries:  Dreamgirls (2006) and Sweeney Todd (2007).  However, most of these attempts have resulted in dreadful movies:  Rent, Phantom of the Opera, The Producers, Nine, Rock of Ages, and, finally, Mamma Mia, a solid candidate for worst movie musical of all time.  All these films were based on tried-and-true Broadway hits, with presumably built-in fan bases yearning to see these works immortalized onscreen.  And now Les Miserables joins the group, already out front with its Golden Globe and SAG nominations, as well as sensational grosses in its first week.  It seems to have everything going for it, except that it’s not very good.

One of the splendors of the screen’s Chicago is how it found ways to make its damn-good source material seem even better, primarily by finding its own identity as a movie (specifically by having all the numbers spring from Roxie Hart’s imagination).  It was a faithful adaptation yet also something brand new, allowing fans of the original show to revel anew in Kander and Ebb’s estimable creation.  The film of Les Miz has the opposite effect, exposing every shortcoming in the material while diminishing its virtues.  I was never a big fan of the show but I do remember being moved by some of the numbers, particularly because of the ways in which they were staged.  A few of those stage images have been seared into my theatregoing brain.  A rouser like “Do You Hear the People Sing?” built excitingly onstage, while in the movie it just seems chaotic, unfocused.  The quiet ”Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” was touching in the theatre because we felt the literal absence of those who had died, no longer in their chairs, but less clarity is given to their physical surroundings in the movie and so the sequence has no visual potency, rendering the song as sad in a more general way.  The movie also reminded me that the score has only about six melodies endlessly recycled for two and a half hours.

Director Tom Hooper has come up with a solution in search of a problem:  no prerecorded vocals for his movie.  The actors sing “live” and perform the songs “in the moment.”  Of course, there is nothing wrong with singing “live” in a movie, but it makes me wonder if Hooper made this decision because he doesn’t like musicals and decided that he was the guy to fix them.  If the results were wonderful, we could all be cheering his guts in breaking with tradition.  Not that there had been a whole lot of complaining about lip-synching all these years.  No one has ever said, “That Singin’ in the Rain is nearly great, except for all that prerecorded singing.”  Or “Isn’t it a shame that Judy Garland couldn’t connect emotionally to her recordings of ‘Over the Rainbow,’ ’Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,’ and ‘The Man That Got Away’ once the cameras were rolling?”  Lip-synching hasn’t been such a bad thing.  It certainly helped singers save their voices when a number had to be shot and reshot 40 times or more.  Barbra Streisand famously goes from “live” singing to lip-synching during “My Man” at the end of Funny Girl, beginning in a talky, weepy manner, then soaring vocally.  It’s a seamless transition.  And Barbra didn’t sacrifice immediacy or truth or feeling.  I don’t mean to be some kind of cheerleader for the cause of lip-synching, but I don’t feel that it has been some kind of problem to overcome.

The main drawback with the “live” singing in Les Miz is that it encourages the singers to go in some misguided directions.  Chief among these is self-indulgence, with the performers feeling compelled to do things other than sing, to strenuously “act,” to cry, to pause, to slow down, to swallow lyrics, all of which ironically get in the way of the songs’ impact.  Everyone here is guilty of this at one time or another, getting in their own way.  You can sing or you can cry, but you can’t really do both.  Don’t tell me that crying makes it more real.  Then why sing at all?  Singing in musicals is a heightened expression of emotion, so you really have to bite the bullet and sing!  Communicate through the singing, not in spite of it.  Allow the emotion to come through the voice, not the tears, not the muffled lyrics.  The results here have a numbing sameness, with plenty of close-up emoting and much unsatisfactory singing.  That lack of variety is one of the reasons this Les Miz feels so long and so dull.  Anne Hathaway and Eddie Redmayne come off best in this movie, the most adept at singing and acting at the same time.  Russell Crowe and Amanda Seyfried are the two most unacceptable cast members, simply unable to meet the score’s basic vocal demands.  (At least Crowe looks great in his uniforms.)  Speaking of Crowe’s Javert, is he the only policeman in France?  He manages to appear in just about every moment (no matter where we are) in which there’s the slightest infraction of the law.

I don’t recall the plot’s coincidences ever seeming this ludicrous in any other screen version of Les Miz.  And I don’t remember finding Victor Hugo’s characters as cardboard as they are here, though I guess the role of Jean Valjean has historically been a movie cipher.  Neither Fredric March (in 1935) nor Michael Rennie (in 1952) could do much with the part, though Liam Neeson was quite fine in 1998.  Hugh Jackman’s acting is intensely committed yet blank and unaffecting, while his singing sounds pinched, worsened by an uncontrolled vibrato.  Things perk up with the arrival of the students, although the romance between Redmayne and Seyfried is one of those love-at-first-sight situations so silly that even Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy might giggle at it.  Worse is the use of the rebel child Gavroche, Les Miz‘s Artful Dodger (but meant to be taken seriously).  All those handsome revolutionaries die because they are egged on—by a pipsqueak!—to continue their hopeless last stand.  Is this infant some kind of expert on Parisian politics?

Worst of all is the tiresome “comic relief” of Sacha Baron Cohen and Helen Bonham Carter (lazily reprising her Mrs. Lovett).  And they keep coming back, long after you’re sure you’ll never see them again, reliably unfunny each time.

Finally, this is not a spectacle.  It’s a faux spectacle, with a computer-generated Paris.  There’s actually no Paris at all.  Give me the bad old days when a stinker like Hello, Dolly! (1969) could at least give you a shiver of pleasure at seeing a real parade with hundreds of real extras.  Les Miz is dreary serious-minded kitsch.  Even so, I won’t give up on movie musicals, not yet, even though they appear to have given up on me.

Holiday Affair (1949)

Though it’s never been in the top tier of Christmas movies, Holiday Affair, directed by Don Hartman, is what you might call a nice little movie.  It’s actually somewhat ambitious in its willingness to take a look at post-war America, addressing some of the issues facing veterans and war widows, even though it ultimately can’t avoid being rather simplistic and “adorable.”  (After all, it is a Christmas movie.)  A modest romantic comedy, Holiday Affair focuses on a war widow (pretty Janet Leigh) and her resistance to change, her trying to play things safe.  Leigh, the epitome of America’s girl next door, is raising her six-year-old boy (Gordon Gebert) while working as a comparison shopper.  She is also keeping company with Wendell Corey (as a good-guy lawyer).  But along comes Robert Mitchum, which can’t bode well for Corey’s future in Leigh’s life.  Mitchum is a war veteran with big dreams of building boats in California.  (The movie is set in New York City.)  He’s earning money for his trip west, working as a sales clerk.  The movie sides with Mitchum because he is a risk taker, the person unafraid to follow a dream, while Leigh can’t quite let herself go.  Corey is Leigh’s unexciting, practical choice; Mitchum would signify her ability to take a chance.  Corey is unthreatening; Mitchum is sexual.  In terms of Hollywood romance (and getting what you want for Christmas), it’s not much of a contest.

The three stars really put this one over, imbuing it with honesty and intimate feeling.  The result is an often good movie, if you can overlook the requisite cuteness and dime-store psychology.  Despite the initial suggestions that it might dig a little deeper than the usual feel-good romp, Holiday Affair finally can’t rise above its movie-ish obviousness.  And yet it’s nonetheless an absorbing triangle, thanks to the appealing Leigh’s naturalness in facing her dilemma.  (The character seems similar to Maureen O’Hara’s emotionally clenched single-mother in 1947′s Miracle on 34th Street.)  Mitchum is his easygoing self, so relaxed and attractive, while Corey is three-dimensional enough to make you feel bad for him when he inevitably loses Leigh to Mitchum.  Even little Gebert is a surprisingly unspoiled performer.  Director Hartman admirably uses leisurely long takes, giving the film an authentically lived-in atmosphere.  Its plot may be drawn out with a few false endings, but Holiday Affair is a pleasing addition to the crush of holiday movies, something to discover when you can’t quite face another two hours with White Christmas.

Barbarella Turns 75

Two-time Oscar winner Jane Fonda turns 75 this December 21st.  Moviegoers (and beyond) have watched her transitions from Hollywood princess to sex symbol to political activist to First Lady of the Screen to exercise guru to corporate wife to author to Comeback Kid (of the senior variety).  She has reinvented herself more times than Joan Crawford or Madonna.  Now back in the acting game, she seems to be taking on projects with new relish, perhaps hoping someday soon to join the select company of three-time Oscar winners.

Fonda followed her screen debut, in the disposable comedy Tall Story (1960), with two trashy soap spectaculars of 1962:  Walk on the Wild Side and The Chapman Report.  In the former, she works in a New Orleans bordello (for madam Barbara Stanwyck), while in the latter she’s a frigid virgin widow.  These films are great-looking stinkers, with Fonda (sensationally costumed in both), showing more star-sized presence than star-sized talent.  Despite her obvious beauty and magnetism, was she ever going to be anything more than Henry Fonda’s daughter?

It was her fourth film, Period of Adjustment (1962), that proved for ever after that Jane was worthy of the family name, a real actress and, specifically, a terrific comedienne.  (Fonda would, little by little, lose her sense of humor onscreen, never again as expert a comic player as she was in her frivolous ’60s pictures.)  Based on a very minor Tennessee Williams play, with a screenplay by Isobel Lennart, Period of Adjustment didn’t turn Fonda into a big star, as it should have, but those who saw it had to have altered their opinions about this Fonda girl’s future, even though the film is every bit as minor as the play, exceedingly slight as both a Tennessee Williams work and as a comedy.  I wrote about this film in my book Tennessee Williams and Company, only briefly because it was on the periphery of my subject:  the actors who appear in more than one Williams film.  With no such multi-film Williams actors in this movie, I made passing references to it, including one about Fonda’s ”prize comic turn.”

As a student nurse who marries a patient (Jim Hutton), Fonda is instantly lovable, both animated and sweet.  She’s also extremely beautiful, with a knockout figure.  And feisty, both kitten and tiger!  You might call it a broad comic characterization, with a full-blown Southern accent, but Fonda’s work never seems overdone because of her fierce belief in, and commitment to, whatever her character is doing or saying.  Fonda has an actress’ unshakable concentration and a star’s unmistakable glow.  Whenever she is not onscreen, the movie is useless, deflating with her every exit.  The title refers to the early part of any marriage, which is especially pronounced in this case because Fonda and Hutton barely know each other and are suddenly bickering about everything.  After marrying in St. Louis and having a failed honeymoon night at the Old Man River Motel, they stop in Tennessee to visit Tony Franciosa, Hutton’s best pal and fellow Korean War veteran.

Period of Adjustment is essentially a honeymoon comedy, also a Christmas Eve comedy, but it’s only memorable as a showcase for Fonda.  Her male co-stars can’t help but fade.  Hutton is competent in an often unappealing role, while Franciosa gives one of his typically closed-off performances, too clenched and remote and charmless.  (It’s so easy to see why he didn’t become a big star.  Here you can watch his top-billed star status eroding in direct proportion to Fonda’s uninhibited rise.)  The film juxtaposes the newlyweds with Franciosa’s troubled marriage to Lois Nettleton, the “homely” girl he married for her money.  He accuses her of making a “sissy” out of their four-year-old son (who plays with dolls).  Near the end, Nettleton takes a doll away from the boy while he’s sleeping, a choice the film applauds as a new hope for the marriage.  Ouch!  Please let’s get back to Jane!

Fonda is the film’s dependable delight, especially in her big set piece, her phone call to her precious Daddy in Texas, which leads to one of the funnier crying jags in movie history.  Fighting those tears, and hilariously losing the battle, she tries hard to get her words out.  It’s a go-for-broke comic highlight, with her almost over-the-top wailing firmly grounded to her core of childlike honesty and vulnerability.  Throughout the movie, Fonda luxuriates musically in her Deep South inflections, particularly in her frequent calls for her “little blue zipper bag.”

Period of Adjustment was the first feature directed by George Roy Hill (The Sting).  His work here is pedestrian in the manner of a sitcom, both stagy and flat.  This film is rarely, if ever, mentioned as one that contains a top Fonda performance, but that’s exactly what it is.  Make it a double feature with her finest dramatic performance, in Klute (1971), and celebrate the range, intelligence, and guts of Jane Fonda.

Swamp Water (1941)

The first of director Jean Renoir’s five American films made in the 1940s, Swamp Water is, inevitably, quite a step down from his previous movie, the magnificent French classic The Rules of the Game (1939).  However, it is still very much worth a look.  The main problem with this Fox production is that it’s mired in a phony-sounding backwoodsy speech, about as convincing as the hillbilly dialogue in Tobacco Road (1941).  Then there’s the ”folksy” musical score, which is consistently awful, plus the use of “Red River Valley” which evokes unfortunate comparison with the far more authentic-feeling Grapes of Wrath (1940).  And most of the acting can be accused of trying much too hard.

And yet the film is visually exciting in its eerie atmosphere and tangible textures, superbly photographed in black and white by Peverell Marley.  Locations and studio-bound settings are artfully interwoven.  Beyond Renoir’s masterful visual control over this swampy Georgia, the chief reason to catch this movie is to marvel at Walter Brennan’s performance.  He’s top-billed, though his role is a supporting one.  Never better, Brennan is every bit as fine as in his two other great performances of the decade, in The Westerner (1940), for which he received his third supporting-actor Oscar, and in My Darling Clementine (1946).  He’s astonishing here as a man who, wrongly convicted of murder, has escaped his guilty verdict and been hiding out in the Okefenokee Swamp.  For five years he has been living like an animal, a kind of swamp king who has mastered every challenge to his survival.  Young Dana Andrews (in the main role) happens upon him when searching for his “losted” dog.  The men form a bond, becoming partners in an animal-hide racket, with Andrews also keeping an eye on Brennan’s daughter, Anne Baxter, who has been living a pre-ball Cinderella existence as a servant girl.  Walter Huston plays Andrews’ harsh father, while John Carradine desires Huston’s young wife.

Huston and Andrews, two favorites of mine, are both disappointing here, both uncharacteristically prone to overacting.  But Baxter is surprisingly plausible as a country girl, both fresh and feisty, and just one year away from her lovely work in The Magnificent Ambersons.  But the film’s dramatic force comes from Brennan.  It cannot have been easy to be so credible as someone who has been living outside of society for so long.  With an unblinking concentration, this versatile character actor has rarely seemed so strong and fearless, so sly and crafty, and so fueled by a tightly coiled rage.  Is this character even capable of returning to civilization, or is he now unfit for anything but the wild?  His eventual transition out of bitterness and pessimism is touching in its subtlety, especially in a film with so much ”acting” in capital letters.

In spite of the artificial writing and performances, and the melodramatic plot turns, Renoir sustains a strong narrative pull and a perfect pace.  As a Frenchman, he probably couldn’t hear the clunkiness in the dialogue, or the overdone accents, but there’s no mistaking his gifts as a visual artist, immersing us in his mesmerizing swamp world, with its compelling human denizen.  Despite the flaws, you never doubt that you’re in the hands of a master moviemaker.  And then there’s Brennan, usually a lovable old codger but this time scaring you with an unexpected intensity, a fierce and utterly complete absorption, both externally and internally, into a dark world.