With thanks to Bryan Castañeda . . .
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Category Archives: Movies
VICTOR FLEMING: AN AMERICAN MOVIE MASTER
The director Victor Fleming was what used to be called a man’s man, back when such people existed in Hollywood. A hunter and a fisherman, he loved flying planes, skippering boats and tearing around on motorcycles. Dashing and handsome, outwardly gruff but unabashedly sentimental, too, he was known for exceptional gallantry towards the many women who fell for him and became his lovers, including Clara Bow and Ingrid Bergman.
He wasn’t, however, “a man’s director”, as some have argued. He had great rapport with Douglas Fairbanks and Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, who liked to think of themselves as regular guys, too, but he guided Bow and Judy Garland and Vivian Leigh through some of the best performances by female actors ever recorded on film.
He made first-rate films in many different genres, which has affected his reputation as an auteur, but he was much more than a journeyman. In 1939, he pulled off what may be the most impressive feat of any director in history, “saving” over the course of that one year two of the best movies ever made, both of which were productions in serious trouble when he arrived to take them in hand — The Wizard Of Oz and Gone With the Wind.
Both were unusually collaborative projects, “created” by vast numbers of brilliant people who concocted the ingredients that made their magic possible — but it’s hard to imagine any other director who could have organized those ingredients as Fleming did, infused them with the momentum, complexity and feeling that make them great.
Fleming did it by his combination of strength, sensitivity and mastery of his craft. He brought out the child in Garland, who was anything but a child when she ventured into Oz. He brought out the larger-than-life vulgarity in Leigh, who wanted to play Scarlett as a grand and great lady, a creature of the drawing room rather than the center of a sprawling epic. He got Clark Gable to cry, in violation of Gable’s strongest instincts about how his star persona had to behave on screen.
Fleming imbued both those films with humanity and emotion without any cheap appeals to the heartstrings. He gave them pace and nuance. He made them classics, which play as well today as they ever did.
Michael Sragow’s wonderful new biography of Fleming gives the director his due without romanticizing the man or making greater claims for his artistry than his work can sustain, great as though claims may be.
Almost everyone agrees that The Wizard Of Oz and Gone With the Wind rank among the greatest glories of the Hollywood studio system. Hardly anyone thinks of their director as a major artist. Sragow’s book tries to resolve that paradox.
Ironically, it’s a paradox that probably wouldn’t have bothered Fleming. Being known as a fine and reliable director of commercial fare, having a reputation as a singular artist, were only important to him as levers he could use to get his way as a filmmaker, among the studio brass and on the set, where it mattered. Otherwise, he did his work, then went home and lived his life.
He just happened to do some of the best work ever done in the history of cinema.
CATHY O’DONNELL
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AN LP COVER FOR TODAY
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ON THE SET
. . . of Chimes At Midnight, Orson Welles in costume as Falstaff.
DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS
In this rather lackluster sequel to The Robe Victor Mature reprises his role in the earlier film as the faithful ex-slave who recovers Jesus’s robe from the foot of the cross and carries it to Rome. In this film he’s in love with Lina, a chaste Christian girl, played by Debra Paget, but separated from her when he assaults a Roman soldier in her defense and is sent to gladiator school.
There, because he’s such a super hunk, he catches the eye of the lascivious Messalina, wife of Claudius, the Emperor Caligula’s uncle. She contrives ways to save his life and throws herself at him sexually. Messalina is played by Susan Hayward, and she is smoking hot in the film. In fact, she gives the picture the only juice it has.
The scenes of gladiatorial combat are clumsily staged, the Christian characters are all drips, and Jay Robinson’s Caligula is such a camp caricature of the mad emperor that he can’t be taken seriously as a villain, though the performance is certainly amusing.
Paget’s Lina is so thoroughly insipid that your heart leaps up when Demetrius loses his faith and decides to commit adultery with Messalina, which sort of subverts the film’s nominal allegiance to Christian virtue. By the same token, when Demetrius gets his faith back and stops boffing Messalina, the picture is essentially over.
The film, like The Robe before it, was a smash hit, but it’s hard to imagine why. The novelty of Cinemascope, in 1954, and Hayward’s carnality must have carried the day with audiences of the time.
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A WESTERN MOVIE POSTER FOR TODAY
PERSONA
Being a storyteller at heart I generally don’t like abstract or experimental movies unless, like most of Godard’s films, they’re in the nature of essays about movies, essays about stories.
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is an abstract and experimental movie which I do like, because it’s very playful in its violation of normal narrative expectations, in its exploration of the extreme limits of what movies can do. There is a story at the center of it, like an image in a mirror that Bergman smashes to pieces and reassembles in front of your eyes, not quite the way it was but still recognizable.
As with Godard’s films, the “text”, insofar as it can be read, is less important than the way the text is looked at, assembled and reassembled. The text of Persona, about the instability of the ego, the essential meaninglessness of the ego, is sort of trite. It’s the clever ways Bergman finds to examine the text, using all his considerable resources as a filmmaker, that keeps the film engaging and entertaining.
In general I find Bergman’s gloomy existentialism tiresome but Persona is not tiresome. Its dour text contradicts the exhilarating experience of watching it. Maybe Bergman knew he was creating this paradox, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter.
The film is engaging and entertaining in another aspect as well—the erotic. At its center are two very beautiful and sensual women playing characters who may or may not be falling in love with each other, may or may not be two parts of the same character trying to reconcile with each other. Either way it’s non-stop girl-on-girl action at every level but the physical, and this is erotically intriguing.
Bergman doesn’t try to pretend that the interaction of the two women is not being seen from a male perspective, but the power of the performances by the two female leads subverts the male gaze, gets beyond it and whatever limits it might want to set on the relationship between the characters. This generates a complex tension, which Bergman wisely chose not to resolve.
There is also one quite extraordinary scene in which one of the women recounts to the other, in a extended monologue, an episode of anonymous sex on a beach. The sexual encounter takes place entirely off-screen but becomes one of the most erotic moments in all of cinema. It’s one of those off-screen scenes, like the one conjured up by Mr. Bernstein’s story of the girl on the ferry in Citizen Kane, that are as potent and indelible as any on-screen scene ever created.
ON THE SET
Rope, 1948.
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SHORT TAKE: WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER
A really dumb movie, with an incoherent comedy tone — part slapstick, part satire of movie clichés, part gross-out humor, part character gags — all pulled together by a sweetness and generosity of spirit that are impossible to resist. The jokes tumble out at such a furious pace that you’ll find something to laugh at every few minutes in spite of any resistance you may be inclined to put up.
GRACE AT THE BEACH
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A WESTERN MOVIE POSTER FOR TODAY
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JAMES AGEE
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GIFTS
ANGEL
Thanks to the extraordinary, almost hallucinatory clarity of Twilight Time’s Blu-ray of Leave Her To Heaven, I just noticed, after many viewings of the film, that Mae Marsh has a brief one-line cameo in it, holding a fishing rod on a boat dock in the opening scene.
Marsh was there when the art of movies was born, playing in many films by D. W. Griffith, becoming a major star in the silent era. Later on she had small character roles, often uncredited, in scores of films right up until 1964, a few years before her death. John Ford used her often in small roles, but so did other directors.
She was like a recording angel in those fleeting later appearances, carrying the whole history of American movies in her always expressive eyes — a professional angel collecting small paychecks for doing a job she obviously loved, whatever notice it may or may not have brought her.
She persevered, as angels do.