Author Archives: Lloydville

A QUOTE FOR TODAY FROM PHILIPPE SOLLERS

Posted on by

Une femme qui tolère votre sommeil fait plus que vous aimer, elle vous pardonne d'exister.

(A woman who tolerates your sleeping does more than love you — she pardons you for existing.)

                                                                              — Philippe Sollers

[With thanks to Femme Femme Femme for the quote — image by Cabanel, a Victorian painter famous for his historical and mythological works, which tended to be florid and a bit silly, but whose portraits could be very fine, indeed.]

AN IMAGE FOR TODAY: LUNA PARK

Posted on by

The above is a lovely image I found on a wonderful web site, Vitaphone Varieties, which summons back the early days of talking pictures, when some of the last of the great vaudevillians were recorded for posterity on film.  The site is a treasure house of photographs, posters, film clips, recordings and newspaper articles relating to the world of show business in the early 20th Century.

Check it out.

The image shows the entrance to Luna Park at Coney Island around 1912.

JOHN EDWARDS: CREEP

Posted on by

Back at the beginning of this year's Presidential campaign I was talking to some friends who were John Edwards supporters.  I told them that while I liked all the issues Edwards was talking about I just couldn't get past his “someone-is-tickling-my-ass-with-a-feather” smile.  I said it reminded me of the smiles you see on the faces of crooked used-car dealers.

Bingo.


LARRY MCMURTRY ON COMIC BOOK MOVIES

Posted on by

An industry that seems to have concluded that its best hope is to
dramatize the comic-strip literature of an earlier and more vigorous
era is one whose fevers have finally destroyed its nerve. With rare
exceptions the pictures coming out of Hollywood today are the last
resorts of the gutless.

              — Larry McMurtry, foreward to Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood (Simon and Schuster)

This quote is from 1987.

[With thanks to More Than Meets the Mogwai]

VICTORIAN SENTIMENTALITY AND THE CINEMA

Posted on by

The popular audience of the 20th Century never lost its appetite for the straightforward, heartfelt sentimentality of the Victorian era.  This was so much the case that all art forms which eschewed such sentimentality — painting, sculpture, concert music, opera, poetry and, for the most part, fiction — ceased to be popular arts at all.  Serious new works in all these forms were addressed to smaller and smaller elites.

20th-Century intellectuals, especially those associated with the academy, rejected frank sentimentality as a kind of outdated perversion, as something as unhealthy in its way as the supposed repression of sexuality in the Victorian era.  To be labeled a sentimental artist was as incompatible with intellectual prestige as being labeled a prude.

In the arts where “serious” intellectuals and the academy had no particular authority, such as movies and popular music, frank sentimentality continued on its merry way, commercial success with large audiences being considered sufficient compensation for intellectual disrepute.

When highbrow intellectual critics began to take movies seriously, they naturally tended to favor those films which relied least on sentimentality, or which rejected it to one degree or another.  This has resulted in a canon which reflects a skewed picture of popular movies.

It's all very silly, of course, and will someday be seen as one of the charming but lunatic quirks of 20th-Century intellectual fashion.  Meanwhile, however, it's interesting to imagine how the field of 20th-Century popular movies will look to future generations, who will have moved on to some other form of cultural myopia.

It may be, for example, that True Heart Susie will one day be considered as fine a film as Pandora's Box.  That Meet Me In St. Louis will be considered as fine a film as The Magnificent Ambersons.  That The Ghost and Mrs. Muir will be considered as fine a film as Vertigo.  That Titanic will be considered as fine as film as The Godfather, Part II.  There may even come a day when the Hollywood musical will be considered as cool as film noir.

The good news is that you don't need to wait for this shift in cultural prejudices to work itself out.  You can go right ahead and appreciate great films of frank sentiment for the masterpieces they are.  You can enjoy them emotionally and intellectually to your heart's content.  The 20th Century is over, after all — and good riddance to it!

EXOTICA: THE ENCHANTED SEA

Posted on by

It's hard to explain why I love lounge music so much — it's very silly music played by very professional musicians, background sounds for a vanished world, offering clues to a certain attitude about coolness that seems unrecoverable except in dreams.

Martin Denny more or less invented the Exotica (or Tiki) brand of lounge music in the Fifties.  He lived in Hawaii and played this music in a lounge there.  It must have made Hawaii seem like a movie set — or more like a movie set.  When he recorded the music, his albums swept the nation, making everyone feel as though they were on a Hawaiian movie set.

It's early evening, in 1959 — there's a breeze off the ocean, coming in with the sound of the waves.  You're in an open-air bar drinking something made with coconut milk and rum, remembering what it felt like, back during “the big one”, to get a little shore leave in Waikiki on your way to the bloody islands further west, in the general direction of Tokyo.  Who knew then it would be so bad, requiring something like a miracle just to survive it all in one piece?

A girl is about to walk up to the bar from the beach, wearing a brightly-colored cotton dress, with an orchid in her hair.  She's going to be trouble, big trouble — but you can handle it.

FORCE OF EVIL

Posted on by

This
extraordinary film is, generically, a late-cycle crime melodrama, but
it's quirky and original enough to transcend the genre pretty
thoroughly.  John Garfield plays a crooked Wall Street lawyer who
crosses the line between representing organized crime figures and
collaborating with them.  Like the great Warner Brothers gangsters
of the 30s, he's a tough guy on the make who chooses a life of crime,
but he thinks it's going to be “respectable”, white-collar crime — until he's dragged
into the violence and thuggery that underpins the rackets he believes he
can manipulate.

This distinguishes him from the gangsters of the 30s, gives him a kind
of innocence, though it's innocence of a curious sort.  He and a number of
the film's characters make a distinction in their minds between
“honest”, harmless criminality, mere corruption, and the “evil”
criminality of men who resort to violence.  This takes us very
close to the territory of the true film noir, where all of society has lost its moral bearings, where the lines between right and wrong have been hopelessly obscured.

Abraham Polonsky, who directed and co-wrote the film, is not quite venturing into that territory, however.  His outlook is more political — less concerned with moral bewilderment and confusion than with the wholesale structural corruption
of American society. 
The lines between good and bad are ultimately very clear in Polonsky's universe,
and he posits off-screen forces that are gathering to fight the
corruption of the system, forces which Garfield's character will eventually decide to join.

The protagonist of a true film noir
never has this route out of his predicament.  His plight has more to do with
existential uncertainty than with political or social problems in
need of practical reform.  At the same time, though, Force Of Evil is
suffused with the atmosphere of a true noir,
since the forces of good are never personified dramatically — the
crusading special prosecutor Garfield finally turns to never appears on
screen.

Force Of Evil points the way to Coppola's Godfather films, which, like this one, are in the gangster tradition but with a crucial twist — they concentrate not on the
battle between good guys and bad guys but on the creeping moral decay of the bad
guys, seen from their point of view.

We don't revel in the
transgressive behavior of Garfield's character, or of Michael Corleone
in the Godfather films, as we
reveled in the transgressive behavior of Cagney's bad guys, in
confident expectation that they will be brought to justice in the end.  Garfield's character in Force Of Evil,
like Michael Corleone, is punished by forces within himself and close
to home.  Far from going down in a blaze of outlaw glory, he rots
from the inside, slowly.  Polonsky offers Garfield's character a
way out, through social action and personal reform — Coppola, less
political, less didactic, less optimistic perhaps about American society, offers Michael Corleone nothing.

SLEAZOID

Posted on by

Over on Illusion Travels By Streetcar, Tom Sutpen has posted a poetic tribute to the book Sleazoid Express, which summons back the long-gone days of pre-Disney 42nd Street in Manhattan, when former legit theaters which had become grind movie houses showed exploitation films to the hustlers and grifters who called that part of town home.

As it happens, I was just watching an interview with Michael Eisner about Disney's decision to refurbish the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd street, which had fallen below even grind-house standards.  Its grand interior, which once housed the Ziegfeld Follies, was open to the elements and home only to birds.  Eisner describes telling Rudolph Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, of his fears that family audiences might not feel comfortable visiting that part of town, with its grind houses, sex shops and massage parlors.  “They will be gone,” said Giuliani.

“They can't just 'be gone',” Eisner said.  “I mean, you've got the ACLU, free speech.”  “Look in my eyes,” Giuliani said, and repeated, “they will be gone.”

By the time The Lion King opened in the beautifully restored New Amsterdam, they were gone.  Sleazoid Express is about what was swept away to make room for Simba and company.

Sutpen suggests why we should remember this lost world, which is why we should remember all the “unexamined” aspects of our culture — because they often provide greater insight into who we really are than cultural manifestations which have the full support of city police departments.

Back in 1908, when 42nd Street was an upscale theatrical Mecca, nickelodeons, the grind houses of their day, were showing the first films of D. W. Griffith.  In sleazy dives on the shabbier side streets you could hear “Negro music”, the precursor to jazz.  In other words, there was a time when the two great art forms of the 20th Century were part of America's marginal culture, its unexamined culture.

Whatever the exploitation films of the Sixties and Seventies represented, it was important, and it isn't gone.  By the same token, as Sutpen notes, the Times Square Renaissance, which turned a scary part of town into a family-safe part of town, also began a process by which Manhattan has been transformed into a mall-like environment for tourists, losing its urban juice and spirit.  What began as a rebirth in Times Square inaugurated a kind of lingering death for one of the world's great cities.

Culture, too, has its own circle of life.

AN IMAGE FOR TODAY: TWO COHANS

Posted on by

George M. and his sister Josie, when they were, with their parents, part of The Four Cohans, a family vaudeville act, before George became the King Of Broadway.

Josie later married the silent film director Fred Niblo.  Josie died of heart disease at a relatively young age, in 1916, the year Niblo entered movies as an actor and director.  He's best known for directing the silent version of Ben-Hur, but a film he made a year later with Garbo, The Temptress, is probably his best work.

LUCILLE BREMER IN LA PAZ

Posted on by

She gained movie immortality in her first film, playing Rose Smith, Judy Garland's older sister, in Meet Me In St. Louis.  The next year she danced with Fred Astaire in Yolanda and the Thief, and when that film proved to be a flop, her career took a precipitous downward turn.

She danced with Astaire again in the movie musical revue Ziegfeld Follies, adorned the cover of Life magazine in 1946 and had a supporting role in Till the Clouds Roll By the same year, but MGM gave up on her after that, loaning her out to poverty-row studios for parts in negligible films.

She threw in the towel soon afterward, married the son of a former President of Mexico and went to live with him in La Paz, Baja California, until their divorce in 1963.

Bremer had been a Rockette and a Broadway chorus girl before moving to Los Angeles.  She was spotted by Arthur Freed dancing in a show at the Versailles nightclub, given a screen test and almost immediately cast in Meet Me In St. Louis, which Freed produced.  She is often referred to as a “protégée” of Freed, and one of Judy Garland's biographers says she was sleeping with him, which might account for her meteoric rise at MGM.  I hate to think of her sleeping with Freed, a married man, while they were making Meet Me In St. Louis, that heartfelt paean to family values, but Hollywood is Hollywood.

I don't know what accounted for her meteoric fall.  She was a good actress and a talented dancer, but I wouldn't say she had star quality, and in Till the Clouds Roll By she sometimes looks haggard, worn out at 29.  Of course Garland was burnt out at an even younger age — MGM had that effect on some people.

It's a strange and sad tale, except for the part about La Paz, one of my favorite places on earth.  I like to think of Rose Smith strolling along the malecón there, of an evening, enjoying the breeze off the Mar de Cortes, far from the intrigues of Culver City.

[Image above © 2007 Harry Rossi]

A T. S. ELIOT QUOTE FOR TODAY

Posted on by

. . . damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation — of salvation from
the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to
living.

This comes via Tony D'Ambra and his films noir web site.  Its application to film noir is perhaps obvious, but it has a profound relevance to the modern age in general.  Without knowing the quote, I wrote something similar in a previous post on this site, WHORES: A VALENTINE'S DAY MEDITATION, about Baudelaire's obsession with prostitutes.  Eliot's observation comes from an essay on Baudelaire and it sheds a terrifying light on many otherwise baffling phenomena of our time.  It explains why middle-class American teens sometimes go ballistic and murder their schoolmates, then kill themselves.  It explains why hopeless Palestinian kids strap on bombs and martyr themselves in order to kill Israeli civilians.

Our culture values survival and comfort above all other considerations, and denies the horrifying truth that life without meaning, without transcendent purpose, is worse than death.  Anything that promises meaning, even if it's the meaning inherent in damnation, or in a spectacular pursuit of oblivion, is better than a life spent, as Blake puts it, “wailing on the margin of non-entity.”

GIRLS, THE MOON, THE SEA

Posted on by

Tristan, on his blog the emotional blackmailers handbook, recently posted the above painting by Winslow Homer, Summer Night, which I was happy to be reminded of.  There's something mysterious and wonderful about the image — two girls dancing together, by the sea, in the light of the moon.  It's not quite erotic, but there are tidal forces at work here which might easily lure a lost mariner to his doom, if he didn't have all his wits about him, crossing the bar.

Check out Tristan's site, which usually contains photographs of lovely, gracious things in and around London.  It's like a visit to a fine old pub, where you can knock back a pint of Guinness in a corner by yourself and mull over visions like the one above . . . at a safe distance.  In that corner, starting on your second pint, you might call to mind, if you've been wise enough to memorize it, this poem by Tennyson:

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,


But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.


Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;


For though from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crossed the bar.

THE BIG TRAIL

Posted on by

In the whole history of cinema there is no greater feast for the eye than Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, from 1930.  It cost something approaching $100 million in today's dollars — though in truth it probably couldn't be made today, without CGI, for less than $300 million — and Walsh put all of the budget on screen, creating an epic vision of a wagon train's journey from the banks of the Mississippi to the Pacific coast.  It was shot in a standard 35mm format and in a 65mm wide-screen version, which has recently become available on DVD for the first time.

Because so few theaters were willing or able to refit to show the 65mm version, and because the film was not a hit, Hollywood abandoned the wide-screen format until the 1950s, when it was taken up again in response to the threat from television.  So The Big Trail remained a costly experiment gone awry — but it hardly plays as an experimental work today.  Walsh's composition for the wide screen is as elegant and accomplished as any in the later history of the format — it bears favorable comparison with the best wide-screen work of John Ford or David Lean.

As a film shot almost entirely on location, it also bears comparison with Greed and Ford's The Iron Horse for its pictorial realism, which is downright breathtaking.

That's the good news.  The bad news is that the script for this early talkie is marred by stilted dialogue delivered in a stilted style by almost all the actors, including John Wayne in his first starring role.  The location sound is extremely impressive for a film from 1930, but not impressive enough to hold its own with the stunning visuals.

I can say without hesitation, however, that if The Big Trail had been a silent film, it would today be ranked among the greatest movies ever made.  If you can look past its limitations as a talkie, you can see the masterpiece it might have been — the masterpiece that on one level it certainly is.

Ford, who discovered Wayne, is said to have held a grudge against him for making his starring debut in another director's film.  I suspect, however, that this was in part displaced resentment against Walsh for creating such magnificent images of the American West, which rivaled and sometimes surpassed those Ford had created in his own silent Westerns.  It is perhaps no accident that Ford abandoned Westerns entirely during most of the 1930s, returning to the form only in 1939, with Stagecoach . . . and I'm tempted to suggest that Ford spent the rest of his career as a maker of Westerns trying (successfully) to live up to the visual poetry of Walsh's The Big Trail.