Category Archives: Movies

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO

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I must interrupt my series of scintillating posts on adventures in Wyoming for an alert — David Zahl, over at the ever-intriguing Mockingbird Blog, recently published an interview he did with Whit Stillman, the elusive director of Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco, which has just come out on DVD in an extras-laden Criterion edition.

Check out the interview here.

I loved Metropolitan, but only loved parts of Stillman's two subsequent films — I think it may be time to give them a second look, because Stillman is such an eccentric and interesting artist.

Stillman is no longer willing to work within the conventional industry precincts, even the conventional independent precincts, or what's left of them — which suggest to me that he may be one of the directors who will help lead us out of the current cinematic wilderness.

The new rules for filmmakers should be:

Never work on anything that's been done better before.

Never work on anything that isn't meant to change people's lives.

Never work on anything that won't leave some kind of mark on the history of cinema.

The Era of Regurgitation in movies should be declared officially over.

SEAHORSE

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My friend Jae Song, a director and cinematographer, recently designed and shot an amazing music video for a friend's band.  A combination of stop-motion and puppetry, it reminds me of a Victorian toy theatre operating in overdrive.

It's incredibly cool and incredibly beautiful, and he did it in a weekend.  Check it out here.

L'INCONNUE DE LA SEINE

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Do you know about her?

The story goes like this . . .


In the 1880s the corpse of a young girl was found floating in the
Seine.  The body showed no marks of violence, so it was assumed the
girl committed suicide.  She was never identified.

Apparently
a doctor working in the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he
made a death mask of her face.  Somehow copies of the death mask
started circulating — Romantic artists in particular fell in love with
it and hung it on the walls of their studios.  When people couldn't get
copies of the cast they settled for photographs of it, and some artists
even made new sculptures based on the photographs.  It became a cult
object.  L'Inconnue de la Seine — the Unknown Girl of the Seine, as she
came to be called — was mentioned in a number of works of 20th Century
literature.

However . . .

. . . modern experts say
that the original cast could not possibly be a death mask, especially
one taken from a corpse which had spent any time in water, because it's
too detailed and the skin is too firm and full over the skull.  They
say it was made from a living model, probably around sixteen years of
age.

The true model, like the original corpse, has never been identified.



André
Bazin said that a film image has the same relationship to the reality
it records that a death mask has to the face of the corpse it's taken
from — a kind of shared “identity” based on a strict point to point
correspondence.  Glamorizing a dead girl by worshiping a cast of her
face may seem like a Victorian eccentricity — but in our time we
worship the images of long-dead movie stars in just the same way.  The
photographic “casts” of their faces and forms, in motion no less, still
have glamor . . . and it's partly the glamor of loss, of death.



The “death mask” of L'Inconnue de la Seine had a certain false piquance
supplied by the fact that it was, in fact, a life mask.  (“So alive — even in death!”)  It's a
different kind of object in our time, because the living girl whose
face it reproduced has long since died.  But she was a star in her time
— and remains one, like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe . . . and, in her own more sublime and serious way, Neda.

A MEXICAN LOBBY CARD FOR TODAY

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Mexican lobby cards have a wonderful sort of honesty.  The colorful illustration promises magic, the photographic insert confesses to the kind of banality one will likely find in the film itself.

It hardly matters, since the rumba in question will undoubtedly be caliente.

STELLA MARIS

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Mary Pickford's Stella Maris, from 1918, is a genuinely strange film, not by any
means, I think, the conventional melodrama it pretends to be. Pickford plays two roles in it — the pampered, protected,
ethereal Stella Maris and the homely, hard-luck Unity Blake, a
characterization bordering on the grotesque. On paper, the title role
ought to be the star part, and in a way it is — Stella gets the good
lighting, the pretty clothes and the guy. But Unity steals the show,
blowing all the other actors off the screen — including Pickford as
Stella in the double exposures.


Stella is sweet, but she delivers little more than poise on screen,
while Unity has energy, quirkiness, self-perception and soul. The
performance by Pickford in the role is sublime — she never strikes a
false note, never steps beyond the twisted, battered persona of the
orphan Unity . . . and yet in her moments of despair, yearning,
resolution, she achieves the kind of transcendent beauty we often see
shining out from behind the many grotesque masks of Lon Chaney. Stella,
by contrast, seems like something seen in a shop window.




It's hard not to believe that there was something deliberate in this,
however unconscious. Perhaps it could be explained by the fact that
Pickford simply got carried away, inspired beyond reason, by the role
of Unity. But why pull back so far in the other role? Stella has little
to do beyond smile or sigh at the wickedness of the world. Stella is a
doll-woman, Unity is a force of nature, and the contrast is
illuminating.


It's finally very difficult to come up with a reason for the hero to fall in
love with Stella — the love scenes between them are oddly bloodless
and perfunctory. There are a lot of reasons for him to fall in love
with Unity, who loves him hopelessly. The two times he and Unity
embrace in the film are electrifying and very moving. There's something
close to bitterness in the choices Pickford makes in the two
characterizations and it sets the melodrama of the story on its ear.




I think it's fair to see in the dual role some kind of metaphor for
female duality — not the duality of woman as a man might conceive it,
between angel and whore, but as a woman might, as Pickford might,
between ugly-ducking and swan. Pickford was hardly a “normal” woman of
the early 20th Century — but she played one on stage and on screen.
The contrast between the normal life she incarnated dramatically and
the actual life she led must have weighed on her psyche. She was not a
conventional beauty, yet her attractiveness put bread on her family's
table — the judgment of others, of men, often meant the difference
between success and failure. Is it too fanciful to imagine that she
sometimes, in the tough times, looked at herself in the mirror — as
Unity does in this film — and despaired of her assets, feeling doomed?


Certainly Pickford's heart is with Unity in this film — and so is the
viewer's. The performance is one of the greatest achievements of silent
cinema. It defines the film in a way that would not have been possible
in the sound era, when the literary text set such a limit on what a
film could be, could mean. A transcendent performance that violated the
text, as Pickford's performance as Unity violates the text of Stella
Maris, would have resulted at best in an interesting failure in a
sound film. Here it results in an improbable, breathtaking, emotionally
disconcerting masterpiece.

THE LIFE OF THE MIND: CEILING ZERO

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Check out Tom Sutpen's Illusion Travels By Streetcar for a brilliant, though ultimately depressing, parody of academic film writing.  Sutpen channels the voice of Prof. Thomas Marlowe, “chair of Film and Media Studies at Tait College
in Culver City, CA, and author of the groundbreaking 2003 study If I
Were King: Identity Politics, American Cinema and the Emerging
Framework of Global Patriarchy, Ur-Fascism and the Foundations of
Radical Monetarism and Ideological Order in the Era of the Hollywood
Studio System: 1935-1937 (published by Produit d'appel Press).”

The professor offers some comments on Howard Hawks's Ceiling Zero.

Sutpen's parody is depressing because it's harrowingly close to actual academic film writing.  Prof. Marlowe's work could get published by any number of academic presses today, who would not read it, of course, because like much academic prose it is unreadable — some editor would simply note the phrase “Global Patriarchy” and think, “This Prof. Marlowe is one of us”.

The blogosphere is creating its own style of bloviation about film — a combination of Augustine's Confessions and the Cahiers du Cinéma style at its most antic — but one can still detect a human presence behind most of it.  The academic style could be created with a not-very-sophisticated computer program, one that generated ideological catchphrases and embedded them in barely grammatical English sentences unconnected to each other by either logic or common sense.  Prof. Marlowe has got the method down pat:

For any transformative reading of Hawks that is sufficiently
diversified in application to be of critical interest in the context of
Ceiling Zero, his systemic use of patriarchal symbology can be defined
by film theorists in such a way as to oppose the capacity of any
underlying conclusion. I suggested in my book that these results would
naturally follow from an assumption that the descriptive power of
images is, apparently, determined by a system of neural sensation
exclusive to genres. One consequence of this approach, which I
outlined, is that a critical intuition is necessary to impose an
interpretation on seemingly irrelevant contexts. Comparing the
theoretical usefulness of Ceiling Zero in comparison to Red Line 7000
and The Crowd Roars, we see that the critical foundations developed
earlier suffice to account for that conclusion as it applies to any
rational understanding of cinema.

PENDENNIS

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Arthur Pendennis was the protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel The History Of Pendennis, which appeared in serial parts between 1848 and 1850.  Arthur was a young man of privilege spoiled by an adoring mother who had to learn to make his way in the wider world.  Booth Tarkington gave his name to the Ambersons's carriage horse in his novel The Magnificent Ambersons, and the horse is both shown and mentioned several times in Orson Welles's film of the novel.

Thackeray's Pendennis is obviously related, in terms of character, to Tarkington's George Amberson Minafer, and the horse who bears his name is closely associated with George in several scenes from the novel and the film.  Pendennis is pulling the sleigh carrying George and Lucy Morgan when they pass her father's automobile, stranded on the snowy lane.  “Get a horse!” George shouts just before taking a corner too fast and overturning the sleigh — at which point Pendennis runs off home by himself.

George has already been associated in the film, as a child and young man, with reckless buggy driving, and will become increasingly associated with scorn for the automobile.  The world of the horse and buggy is the world that coddled him and that he doesn't want to end.  He and Pendennis will both be made obsolete by the world the automobile is ushering in.

Pendennis is also featured in the most beautiful shot in Welles's film of The Magnificent Ambersons, one of the most beautiful in the history of movies — the long tracking shot pacing the buggy down the main street of town while its passengers George and Lucy discuss their future, a scene taken from the book.  In both book and film the conversation is one Lucy doesn't want to have, because she can't see a happy outcome to it, and she urges Pendennis to move faster to cut the talk short . . . but Pendennis obeys only George.

Welles moves his camera at Pendennis's speed, for a very long time, drawing us deeper and deeper into the space of the image — into George's world . . . a world that we, like Lucy, already know is doomed.  It's often said that George in Welles's film is too unsympathetic, but the buggy ride that he and Pendennis take Lucy and us on is magical . . . a visceral evocation of a slower and more gracious time.  It's the one scene in the film that I find myself wanting to return to again and again — its beauty is inexhaustible.  While you're on that ride it's impossible not to see things from George's point of view, Pendennis's point of view, to grieve over what's about to be lost, and perhaps even to agree with George that “the automobile had no business to be invented”.

By the same token, when Lucy says, “Get up, Pendennis!” she's talking to George, begging him to get with it, to move with the times — but a horse and buggy, like George, can only move so fast.

[The image at the head of this post is not from The Magnificent Ambersons, but it might well have been — a measure of how effectively the film evoked the world at the turn of the last century.]

HELL’S ANGELS (1930)

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Hell’s Angels
went into production in the silent era.  While it was being filmed
the craze for sound erupted and producer Howard Hughes reshot most of
it as a talkie.  This resulted in a film that cost nearly four
million dollars and took almost three years to complete.

Along the way Hughes lost his first director, Marshall Neilan, and took
the reins himself, bringing in James Whale, fresh from the English
theater, to “stage” the dialogue scenes.

The result is a mess, but also one of the God-damnedest entertainments
ever concocted in Hollywood — an absolutely fascinating folly.

The film is made up of four poorly integrated elements:

1) A creaky melodrama about two brothers involved with the same women
who end up serving together in the Royal Flying Corps in WWI.

2) A showcase for the miraculous cinematic presence of an 18 year-old Jean Harlow.

3) An extended sequence about a Zeppelin raid on London with stunning miniatures and special effects.

4) A twenty-minute episode of ariel combat shot in and from real planes that has to be seen to be believed.

The inadequacy of element 1) is what makes the film a bit of a chore to
sit through, though the other three elements make the effort intensely
rewarding at times.

Harlow doesn’t have much of a role and
doesn’t really act it — but she’s such a natural screen performer that
you simply don’t care.  Watching her have her being in front of a
camera is as thrilling as watching the mind-boggling stunts of the
flyers at the end of the film.

The Zeppelin raid seems to belong to another film entirely — it has a
spooky, morbid tone and an expressionistic visual style that hark back
to the great UFA films of the 1920s.  It’s extremely beautiful and
haunting but has no organic connection to the film’s narrative.

The twenty-minutes of ariel combat must rank among the highest
achievements in all of cinema.  The lead actors in the film appear
in actual planes that are actually flying.  Flyers in other planes
act out moments of the airborne drama.  A complex ariel battle
unfolds lyrically and logically before our eyes — almost all of it
done for real.

Three flyers were killed during the production — only one of them,
though, during actual shooting, in a stunt gone wrong.  The
dangers all the flyers risked is there on the screen at every moment,
however, and the result is truly breathtaking.

It’s sad that these twenty minutes of cinematic bravura don’t provide
the climax to a great film, or even a very good film, but they will
always constitute one of the great legacies of the movies . . . and of
a sort we will probably never see again.  Martin Scorsese
recreated the filming of Hell’s Angels in his biopic of Hughes, The Aviator, using CGI.  Compared to Hughes’s folly Scorsese’s homage is a big yawn.

JACK CARDIFF

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The cinematographer and sometime director Jack Cardiff has died.  He helped create some of the most sublime images in the history of movies.  Above, one of those images — from The Red Shoes.

A CURRIER & IVES PRINT FOR TODAY

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The temperatures are inching up into the 90s out here in the Mojave Desert, a harbinger of the furnace-like heat that's on its way . . . making it a good time to pause and contemplate a Currier & Ives winter scene.

Orson Welles was clearly trying to evoke Victorian prints like this in the sleigh-versus-automobile episode in The Magnificent Ambersons.  He may even have had this particular print in mind, with its rider tumbling from the overturned sleigh and the snowy road winding off into the distance under the bare tree branches.

THE ATTACK ON THE SETTLER’S CABIN

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Recently, watching an excellent documentary about Buffalo Bill Cody, from the PBS American Experience series, an image jumped out at me.  It was part of the relatively rare surviving film depicting Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in performance.  It depicted one of the show’s most popular episodes — “The Attack On the Settler’s Cabin”.  A fairly small, square replica of a cabin was set up in the middle of the arena.  Performers portraying a pioneer family would defend this from an attack by mounted Indians until Buffalo Bill and his trusty cowboy compadres rode in to rescue them.  (The photograph of the cabin above gives a sense of its stage-set quality but not of its isolation in the emptied arena, conveyed in the documentary film footage.)

The precise iconography of the image, and not just the dramatic situation, seemed oddly familiar, and I quickly realized where I had seen it before — in the films of D. W. Griffith.  Several times — in The Battle At Elderbush Gulch and in The Birth Of A Nation, for example — Griffith had staged an attack on an isolated cabin that evoked the staging in Buffalo Bill’s arena.  Griffith would start with a long shot of a small, square cabin in a valley that had the theatrical quality of an arena.  He would cut back repeatedly to this long shot during the course of the attack.

Of course, an attack on an isolated cabin would become a staple of Western films, as would most of the episodes of  Buffalo Bill’s show — the attack on the wagon train, the ambush of the Deadwood Stage, the heroics of the Pony Express Rider, the buffalo hunt, Custer’s (or some other cavalry leader’s) last stand against swarming Indians — but Griffith’s iconography was very distinctive and rarely reproduced, the cabin looking too small to hold the defenders later revealed to be inside it, set in the middle of a topographical amphitheater, seen from above, as though from some ideal vantage in the bleachers.

Note also (in the frame above from The Battle At Elderbush Gulch) the curious isolation of the cabin, with none of the outbuildings or stock pens one would expect to see surrounding a real pioneer home.  The cabin has something of the feel of a set, or a prop, as did Bill’s cabin.  Contrast this with the remote homestead attacked by Indians in The Searchers, which looks like a working ranch complex.

I’m sure that Griffith was echoing, consciously or unconsciously, something he’d witnessed in a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West — augmenting the theatrical spectacle with the photographic authority of a movie shot on a real location.  The reality of the location was important — it was part of what made all Wild West arena-show recreations seem old-fashioned to the growing audience of 20th-Century moviegoers — but the evocation of Buffalo Bill’s show was also important, because this was where so many moviegoers had gotten their first thrilling glimpse of the mythic West that Bill had done so much to create or consolidate in the world’s imagination.

FIRST AND LAST

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[These thoughts on Murnau's The Last Laugh contain plot spoilers — don't read them unless you've seen the film . . . instead, go see the film, one of the greatest ever made.]

The original German title of Murnau's masterpiece The Last Laugh was Der Letzte Mann, “the last man”.  In English this phrase can have a positive connotation, something like “the last real man”, or “the last man standing”, but in German it only connotes degree or place in a literal sense — something like “the lowest man”, “the least of men”, “the last man in the pecking order”.

In the film, the title is explicitly but somewhat ironically linked to the Biblical phrase “the last shall be first, and the first last“.  This saying of Jesus appears four times in the New Testament but only in the Synoptic Gospels (i. e. not in John) and in a couple of different contexts.  The phrase is often read as simply contrasting the rich and powerful with the poor and oppressed, who will somehow triumph in the fullness of God's justice, but this is a misinterpretation in at least two cases.  In those passages, “the first” Jesus refers to are his own self-righteous followers who feel they have some special connection to him and to God because of an imagined advantage they possess — either from having “seen the light” before others, or having spent more “quality time” with him.

Jesus is making the point in those cases that status in some imaginary “Jesus club” has nothing to do with true righteousness, as judged by God.  He is offering a rebuke not to those with power who oppress believers but to believers who lord it over their fellow believers.  This is obviously not a congenial message to the organizers of religious institutions, for whom sanctioned membership in the official “Jesus club”, with attendant privileges, including eternal salvation unavailable to others, is a prime selling point and recruiting tool.

Jesus's phrase is obviously deeply ironic, and it is introduced ironically in Der Letzte Mann.  It appears in the very odd epilogue to the film — the preposterous reversal of fortune in which the doorman demoted to restroom attendant receives an unexpected inheritance and suddenly becomes a man of wealth and privilege, elevated even above the position whose loss had crushed him earlier.

This epilogue follows the film's only intertitle, which is interjected after the washroom attendant has reached the depths of defeat and despair.  The intertitle is unrelated to the narrative proper and represents the filmmaker addressing the audience directly and commenting on the narrative.  He says that the defeat of the protagonist is how such stories end in real life but that he (the filmmaker) is not content to leave the matter there and will instead, out of love for the protagonist, supply his story with a happy ending.

This is, to put it mildly, disorienting.  We're being told, in effect, that the happy ending we're about to see is a fraud, or a fantasy — and that's exactly how it plays.  The new dream life of the protagonist is exaggerated and surreal, moving beyond the precincts of expressionism into the realm of the purely fantastic.  The protagonist doesn't just enjoy a fancy meal, he stuffs himself from a dessert concoction the size of a small building.  He doesn't just serve caviar to his best friend, he shovels gobs of it from a vast pot onto his friend's plate.  The whole things seems to be an insolent challenge to the audience, asking, “Do you buy this?”, “Is this what you wanted to see?”

The first shot of the epilogue shows a group of silly-looking rich folk reading a newspaper account of the protagonist's reversal of fortune and laughing derisively — as though they know how ridiculous it is.  It's hard not to see these people as Murnau's image of us, of the audience, cynically demanding happy endings for “the least of men” all the while knowing that happy endings are only for the privileged, for the self-styled “first” of men.  Exceptions to this rule are the stuff of comedy, of satire or farce.

Murnau shows us the newspaper account the rich folks are laughing at, and it's this account, ironic and unserious, which quotes Jesus's saying, rather frivolously — “It looks as though the old Biblical saying is being fulfilled, that 'the last shall be first'”.  Then we are shown the rich folks laughing even louder.

Murnau was apparently forced to add the happy ending to the film, but he subverts it mercilessly, suggesting that Jesus's observation about the first and last is just a joke to most people, something that only applies to the dreamworld of popular entertainment.  It's hard to imagine Jesus disagreeing with him.

In a film about the making of Der Letzte Mann included on the new Kino DVD edition of the restored film, it is suggested that the story is an anti-militaristic fable — the doorman's obsession with his uniform as a status symbol being a metaphor for German society's obsession with military adventurism.  This of course casts Murnau in the best possible light as a “good German” — going against the grain that led Germany to start the Second World War.  Murnau and his screenwriter Carl Mayer may have had some such criticism of Germany in mind, but it's hardly the heart of the film — which I think is much closer to the Biblical text they reference in their story's title and in the newspaper article their rich folks find so hilarious.

This is not to say that Murnau and Mayer (a Jew) meant their film to be interpreted from a “Christian” perspective, but it seems inescapable to me that they were using a Christian image — die Letzten, as Luther translated the Greek of the New Testament, εσχατοι, “the last men” — to express their deep love of one beaten and defeated man, and their anguish over his oppression by a cynical and arrogant and hypocritical society, a “Christian” society.

Interestingly, and tragically, Carl Mayer died a “last man”.  Like many Jews in the film industry he fled Nazi Germany and ended up in England, where he had trouble finding work.  He developed cancer, which was apparently poorly treated, due to to wartime strains on medical facilities, and died with 23 pounds and two books to his name.  I'd love to know what those two books were.



I must add that the recent restoration on the Kino DVD is miraculous.  The film was shot to produce three negatives, one for German release, one for American release and one for general international release elsewhere.  The footage for the German release is far superior in terms of framing and action and has been reconstructed from a variety of sources for the version found on the new Kino edition.  The quality and beauty of it are really breathtaking.  This is probably the best version of the film ever available to American viewers in any form.

THE SUBTERRANEANS, PART 2

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In my earlier post on the film version of The Subterraneans, I suggested that its producer Arthur Freed was probably attracted to Kerouac's novel because it offered him a chance to do a modern-day version of La Bohème, with modern-day music, specifically the be-bop jazz that so inspired Kerouac and the people he wrote about in the book.  I can't imagine that Freed himself was much inspired by be-bop, but he had a collaborator at MGM who was, in the person of André Previn.  Previn had recently been the musical supervisor on Gigi, Freed's last great conventional musical, but also performed progressive jazz as a pianist with small combos in clubs.  He was someone who could bridge the gap, musically at least, between the Freed unit at MGM and the world of the beats.



On one level it was a canny commercial calculation.  Twenty-eight years later playwright Billy Aronson had the idea of doing a contemporary musical based on La Bohème and began collaborating with composer Jonathan Larson on what became Rent, one of the most successful musicals in Broadway history.

The difference between the The Subterraneans and Rent was that Rent was written, eventually almost entirely by Larson, from inside a modern Bohemia, as Kerouac's novel was.  Larson was employed as a waiter in a diner in downtown Manhattan while he worked on the play and Kerouac was pretty much perennially beat, even when he became famous, mostly due to his heavy drinking.

The film version of The Subterraneans, by contrast, was written from the outside looking in — it simply reeked of inauthenticity.



This is a bit surprising, since the script's credited author was Robert Thom (above), who went on to achieve a kind of immortality as the writer of several cult-movie classics, including Roger Corman's Crazy Mama and Death Race 2000.  He had a wild, transgressive vision, much like Kerouac's, and it's odd that he was so tone-deaf to Kerouac's voice and milieu.

Perhaps Thom was heavily rewritten, but in any case the result was dreadful.  Kerouac's (and Puccini's) tragedy was given a happy ending, and Kerouac's interracial couple was transformed into an international couple, the Mardou Fox of the novel, half black and half American-Indian, becoming the exotically French Leslie Caron.

Those changes alone wouldn't have been necessarily fatal — the real disgrace was that the actors were given preposterous cornball pseudo-beat poetic lines to spout — lines that would have made Kerouac gag, and that branded the film as irredeemably square . . . irredeemable even by the music, which is quite wonderful.

Sarah Vaugn and Gerry Mulligan and Previn himself appear as performers on-screen, and Previn's underscoring has a plausible jazz feel, fresh and original.  (A soundtrack album, below, was released on LP and is now available, with additional material, on CD.)

The rest of the film is just an embarrassing reminder of what might have been.

You have to give Freed some credit, though, for ambition and intuition, if nothing else.  He knew a good idea when he saw it — a radical one for its time — even if, in this case, he didn't quite know how to pull it off.

THE SUBTERRANEANS, PART 1

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As a producer, Arthur Freed worked to strike a balance between old-fashioned show-business values, which he revered, and formal innovations which would keep those values alive and accessible to contemporary audiences.  When he swung too far towards innovation he produced what might be called “interesting failures” — like Yolanda and the Thief, for example.

One of his most interesting, and most reviled, failures was The Subterraneans, from 1960 — the first Hollywood film ever made from a Jack Kerouac novel.

Kerouac wrote the novel in three days in the early Fifties and couldn't get it published for several years.  It eventually emerged above-ground as a 35-cent Avon paperback original.  It got a drubbing from critics but apparently sold well enough.   We think of Kerouac as an avant-garde artist today, forgetting that On the Road was a national best-seller.  In the Fifties he wasn't necessarily thought of as an “uncommercial” artist.

Still, it's easy to see why The Subterraneans scared off publishers and annoyed critics — it reads like a novel written in three days, which has its advantages and disadvantages.  On the one hand it has the hurtling energy of a great jazz improvisation.  On the other hand it's messy, uneven and often self-indulgent.  Even Charlie Parker never tried to improvise a solo for three days running.

You might well ask what Freed, a producer of MGM musicals, the creator of Meet Me In St. Louis, saw in this material, but the answers are actually fairly obvious.  For one thing, he saw La Bohème.  The story and setting of Kerouac's novel, consciously or unconsciously, mirror the story and setting of Puccini's opera, a show-biz perennial.  Kerouac wrote an obliquely romantic tale of doomed loved among modern Bohemians — the “subterraneans” of Frisco in the Fifties, a particular clique of beats.

For another thing, Kerouac's book, like the subterraneans he wrote about, was obsessed with be-bop jazz, which suggested musical possibilities for the film.  It was never planned as a musical, per se, but it featured on-screen performances by some high-powered West-Coast jazz musicians and a jazz-inflected score by André Previn.

A genuine wunderkind, Previn was part of the Freed unit at MGM.  He could do conventional arranging and composing for musicals in the MGM house style, but was also attracted to contemporary jazz.  As a pianist he performed progressive jazz himself, quite respectably, in club settings very like the ones depicted in The Subterraneans.  (Previn actually appears in the film leading a jazz trio.)

A contemporary La Bohème with contemporary music was clearly what Freed was after, and it wasn't a bad or uncommercial idea at all, as Rent was to prove several decades later — even if Freed failed to pull it off in the case of The Subterraneans.

In an upcoming post I'll discuss what went wrong, so dreadfully, dreadfully wrong, with the film, and why it didn't become the Rent of its day.  In that post you'll meet, perhaps for the first time, Robert Thom, who wrote the very bad script for The Subterraneans but later went on to a kind of immortality as the author of several cult-movie classics, including Roger Corman's Crazy Mama and Death Race 2000.