Category Archives: Movies

THE WARNER ARCHIVE

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Warner Home Video has just announced what I think may be the most important development in home video since the introduction of the DVD — The Warner Archive.  It is making available, online and for U. S. customers only, selected titles that Warner doesn't plan to release widely but that will be manufactured on demand for customers who order them, at $19.99 each.

The DVDs will be burned, rather than pressed, with no extras, but Warner promises professional-quality transfers, with 16×9 enhancement for the widescreen films.  The site provides sample clips from most of the films offered and the quality is indeed impressive.

Many films that would otherwise fall between the cracks will see the light of day, opening up, I suspect, a whole new customer-driven market, much as Netflix did.  Netflix made certain assumptions about what kinds of films their customers would want to see (i. e. mostly new ones) which turned out to be totally wrong (people wanted to see mostly older films), but they had a system in place which allowed the market to define itself.

Warner is also co-opting the black market for films unreleased on DVD, which can almost always be found somehow online, usually in barely watchable versions burned from tapes of old TV broadcasts.  With luck, the Warner model will find its way into the world of public film archives, encouraging them to make their holdings available cheaply to a wider public than the occasional theatrical screening could ever reach.

I placed an order on the Warner site the first time I visited it and can't wait to see the two Garbo silents in that order — Love (above) and Wild Orchids — and a talkie, Westbound, the only Scott-Boetticher Western still unavailable on DVD.  I'm sure you'll find something among the first 155 films offered that will tempt you, too — and Warner is encouraging people to submit their own requests for future offerings, which will be announced at the rate of about 20 new titles each month.

Early reports indicate that the site has been flooded with orders in its first hours of operation, in numbers far greater than Warner anticipated, all but overwhelming its system.  George Feltenstein, the Warner Home Video executive responsible for the project, is said to be thrilled by this response — and so am I.

Let's hope that Feltenstein's little experiment earns him a place alongside Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, and Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, of Netflix — visionaries whose willingness to listen to consumers, rather than dictate to them, created new markets and made their companies tons of dough.

In any case, we're clearly looking into the future here.  How close that future is rests entirely in the hands of consumers.  So order something from The Warner Archive today and speed the plough.

JERRY LEWIS, FRANK TASHLIN AND GOD (OH, MY!)

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Religiosity in 20th-Century art has been a problematic subject for mainstream intellectual critics, unless it could be given a negative twist, treated as a form of neurosis — Hitchcock's “Catholic guilt” being a prime example.  This leaves many aspects of many artists' work unexamined. 

mardecortesbaja welcomes ventures into problematic subjects and therefore presents without further ado a post about explicit religiosity in the films of Jerry Lewis, written by my friend and fellow film buff P. F. M. Zahl:

Jerry Lewis is often accused of sentimentality, of embarrassing sentimentality, in relation to the films he made in his classic period.

The sentimentality is in massive evidence within The Family Jewels (1965), in which a poor little rich girl who has been orphaned is required to choose her new 'father' from among her eccentric uncles.  Lewis plays them all, or over-plays them all.  Yet I defy you to not wipe away a tear at the conclusion of the movie, when the nature of her chosen 'father's' sacrificial love comes out.  I defy you not to be moved.  Even after you have winced through two hours of hammering slapstick.
 
The God question in Lewis is even more fraught than the question of his sentimentality.  I'm not sure that even the French can handle this one.


 
I am thinking of two of the main Jerry Lewis movies that were written and directed by Frank Tashlin.  Tashlin, or “Tash”, as Lewis called him, taught his more famous student 'everything I ever learned' about movie-making, and then Jerry took it from there.  But to much contemporary sensibility — today, that is — the God factor in two films, The Disorderly Orderly (above, 1964) and The Geisha Boy (1958) is just too hot to handle.  And I am not even going to mention Who's Minding the Store? (1963), with its “We're Sorry” denouement written touchingly on the placards that all the lead characters wear as they plead for Jerry to forgive them.  Nor will I mention Rock a Bye Baby (1958), with its soaring Grace on the part of the devastatingly unselfish TV repairman (Lewis) who brings up someone else's baby triplets alone.
 
In The Disorderly Orderly Jerry prays fervently for an old girlfriend, who did once spurn him and continues to spurn him, when she is brought into the emergency room after an almost successful attempt at suicide.  Then when she recovers, Jerry prays again — and overdoes it a little — to God, thanking God for answering his prayer.  He then proceeds to basically redeem this selfish but also hurt woman, winning her affection in a most 'Christian' manner, if I could put it that way.  Every time I show The Disorderly Orderly to a group, the whole place dissolves at the end.  And that's almost 50 years after it was made.
 
To be noted is Frank Tashlin's religion, which he by no means wore on his sleeve and would probably never have referred to.  But we also know that “Tash” wrote and directed a short animated film for the Lutheran Church in 1949 entitled The Way of Peace, which is as explicit a Christian warning concerning nuclear war as ever was filmed during that era in Hollywood.  This religious short subject had disappeared, and I had the privilege two years ago of bringing it back to the surface from the ELCA (i.e., Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) archives.  I believe it can now be YouTubed.  In any case, The Way of Peace is an important clue to Frank Tashlin's religious views.  [Editor's note:  I've written about The Way Of Peace previously, here.]


 
But it is The Geisha Boy where Jerry and God connect at the most length.  Jerry stars as The Great Wooley, a magician on tour with the USO in occupied Japan.  He charms a little boy whose parents are both dead and who has not smiled or laughed for five years.  Jerry and little Mitsuo connect, and Mitsuo tells Jerry that he is the answer to his prayers.  Jerry is moved, comments, and tells Suzanne Pleshette.  Jerry then goes to Korea and performs for the GI's, taking time, in a sustained and extremely pointed scene, to pray before an altar — a sort of makeshift battlefield altar — for the little boy back in Japan.  Prayer is referred to again, and finally The Great Wooley adopts the boy, takes him (together with his Japanese aunt, whom he marries) back to America, and all three become a happy family magic act.  It is not actually all that maudlin.
 
As someone who believes in prayer, and who sure believes in reconciliation between previously estranged people, I find The Geisha Boy moving and also full of love.  Plus, the Technicolor palette is out of sight, from the first shot to the last.

I would even go so far as to 'pair' The Geisha Boy with Kurosawa's Ikiru because they relate to the exact same period in the history of Japan, and in The Geisha Boy the little boy's last name is Watanabe; and as we all know, the hero of Ikiru  is named Watanabe.  In fact, the 'son' character in Ikiru is named Mitsuo Watanabe and the 'son' character in The Geisha Boy is named Mitsuo Watanabl.  You can't convince me that Taslin hadn't seen Ikiru, especially when you hear Kurosawa report that it took them two full weeks to come up with the unusual 'Watanabe' name for the hero of that great classic of world cinema.
 
Jerry Lewis and God.  Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin and God.  Or maybe it was just the Fifties and early Sixties.  But watch for God to appear within the Lewis canon.  I  also think He's still there, in the telethons.  I see God pop up in the telethons all the time.  I also know that Lewis, right in the heart of his heyday, treasured above all awards, above all European honors and medals, an award he received from the State of Israel.  If you don't think God is friends with Jerry Lewis, then look again.  Oh, and note the Buddhist tie-in, too, within The Geisha Boy, in the thumping importance given to the character of Harry the Hare.  I don't think that's a coincidence either.



mardecortesbaja would just like to add that it's common, but hardly quite responsible, intellectually speaking, to admire Tashlin and Lewis for their radical dislocations of cinematic convention and their radical critiques of American society and to ignore the spiritual values (or the spiritual sentimentality, if you prefer) which also informs their work.  You have ask, was the spiritual dimension an embarrassing aberration in that work, or one of the key sources of its radical attitudes?  See my post on The Way Of Peace for further thoughts on this subject, especially as it relates to Tashlin.

THE RIVER (1929)

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Frank Borzage's The River is a turbid erotic fairytale about a boy-man and a “fallen woman” who awakens him sexually and is in turn saved by his innocence.

It's a film uncharacteristic of Hollywood in that its sensuality is both frank and serious — it takes adult sexuality as a given and presents it without the adolescent leer and snicker or the aura of the exotic which usually accompany erotic idylls in American cinema.  In this film, Huck Finn meets Sadie Thompson at a dam construction site and learns about currents more treacherous than the Mississippi's.

The River stars Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan, who would be re-teamed a year later in Murnau's City Girl (above) — a very different kind of film, reviewed earlier here.  Murnau, for all the poetic imagery in City Girl, was trying to create a more naturalistic atmosphere than he had in Sunrise — it was a break from his characteristic expressionism, an attempt to situate the story in a recognizably American context, as opposed to the mythic, vaguely European storybook environment of Sunrise.

The setting of The River isn't quite European but it's fantastic — the construction camp, with its tiers of workers' cabin jacked up on stilts on the side of a mountain, looks like something from Middle Earth.  The narrative has a feverish, dreamlike tone which accords with its odd setting.  One might link it to the home-grown American expressionism of Hawthorne and Poe, minus the high-Gothic spookiness.

Mary Duncan gives an extraordinary performance, as she does in City Girl — perfectly conveying a raunchy kind of lust mixed with cynicism mixed with a longing for something she can believe in.  She's very sexy and very touching at the same time, much as Swanson was in Sadie Thompson.  Farrell's mixture of naivete and virility is almost as impressive.

The plot of The River gets wildly melodramatic but the movie doesn't feel exactly like a melodrama — everything reads as metaphor, never to be taken quite literally.  Farrell chopping down tall lumber to relieve his sexual frustration, nearly freezing to death in a snowstorm before Duncan's body heat restores him to life — it's all about sex and not much else.

Only one print of the film has survived and it's incomplete, missing a few early scenes and the whole last reel.  The version on the recent Murnau, Borzage and Fox box set is a reconstruction using production stills and intertitles derived from the script to fill in the gaps.  The loss of the last reel is very frustrating — one is desperate to know if Borzage was able to give the final action sequence the climactic excitement and release the tale demands.

We are left with a fragment (about half) of a minor masterpiece of the silent screen and one of the most original erotic reveries in all of cinema.

EARLY MURNAU

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This month, Kino is releasing two early Murnau films that haven't been available on DVD before in this country — The Haunted Castle (from 1921) and The Finances Of the Grand Duke (from 1924).  Here are reviews of both films:

THE HAUNTED CASTLE

Murnau made radically diverse kinds of films in the early Twenties — still feeling his way as filmmaker.  In The Haunted Castle we see him at his most conventional — and least interesting. The film is
a cheesy melodrama based on a magazine story. It is exceptionally
well-designed and carefully photographed, in something resembling a
“studio style” — handsome, elegant, tasteful, uninspired.


On its face the tale is a kind of simple-minded Agatha Christie-type
murder mystery in which a gang of aristocrats assembles at a country
estate for a hunting weekend and dire secrets are exposed. There's a
monk among the party, whose tragically unconvincing tonsure appliance
immediately gives away the climactic gag involving assumed identity.


On the other hand, the impeccable interior sets, the graceful if
unimaginative mise-en-scène, the generally excellent acting and the
occasional flights of visual fancy give the production a weight which
the story can't begin to support. The mood and pace of the film evoke The Rules Of the Game even as the narrative evokes The Old Dark
House. Ultimately it has the feel of an assignment — or a
demonstration piece in which Murnau proved he could deliver a classy, conventional,
“well-made” commercial product.


As usual when Murnau moves outdoors, there are beautiful images of the
countryside — always involving a dynamic spatial dimension . . . not
just pretty pictures of pretty places but images of a geography
penetrated and revealed by carefully choreographed movement though its space. There are some sweet and
lyrical and memorable images illustrating a flashback to the halcyon
days of a marriage that went very wrong.


And there is one goofy interpolation which alone feels like Murnau being
Murnau. A kitchen assistant gets hold of a bag of whipped cream and
violates it with antic lust — thrusting two fingers deep into the bag
and then thrusting the fingers deep into his mouth. Later, the boy
dreams of having another crack at the cream, this time with the monk
standing over him approvingly and sanctioning his delight as the boy
takes a slurp of cream and then slaps the head cook who scolded him for
stealing it in real life. There's a gleeful homoerotic aspect to the
gag and a tone which violates the grave hokum of the rest of the film.

THE FINANCES OF THE GRAND DUKE


In The Finances Of the Grand Duke, a much
more confident Murnau expands on the juvenile glee of the whipped cream
gag and makes a whole fluffy dessert out of it. A tiny island Duchy is
about to go bankrupt — the carefree Grand Duke has a hard time taking
the crisis seriously. He prefers throwing the last coins remaining from
his fortune into the ocean for a group of half-naked boys to dive
after.

Salvation appears in the form of a speculator who wants to buy
part of the island in order to exploit the sulfur deposits there. The
Grand Duke imagines his subjects fainting from the fumes — but really
what disturbs him, we know, is the sheer bad taste of the thing . . .
the simply awful smell. A rich Russian Grand Duchess, who doesn't
actually know the Grand Duke but has heard good things about him,
offers salvation of a different kind, if only she can escape her
brother, trying to track her down before she can offer herself in marriage to the penniless
sovereign.

Meanwhile the speculator has concocted a rebellion among the
subjects of the island, with the aid of four scoundrels, one of whom is
played by Max Schreck. Without the Nosferatu make-up and with a full
head of hair, and with a charming dumb smile, he looks quite human and
harmless — a burlesque version of Max Von Sydow.


The silliness multiplies exponentially and all comes right in the end,
of course, and the result is a real little jewel of a movie, with a
very distinctive tone — juvenile in spirit but visually elegant,
feckless but good-hearted, frothy but really funny, too. (It played
wonderfully in the crowded theater where I first saw it, with genuine happy laughter — as
opposed to “knowing” film-buff chortles — throughout.)


Here is Richard Ellman on Oscar Wilde, from his magisterial biography
of the writer: “As for his wit, its balance was more hazardously
maintained than is realized. Although it lays claim to arrogance, it
seeks to please us. Of all writers, Wilde was perhaps the best company.
Always endangered, he laughs at his plight, and on his way to the loss
of everything he jollies society for being so much harsher than he is,
so much less graceful, so much less attractive.”


One can't help seeing Murnau in the Grand Duke of this film — the
director bedeviled by the money men, the homosexual threatened by
exposure, by the loss of everything, yet so sure of himself, of his
genius, so exhilarated by life and the energy of creation that he just
can't take the grim side of things too seriously.


The sheer joy that radiates throughout this movie — the joy in
filmmaking, the joy in beautiful places (like the gorgeous Dalmation
coast locations where the film was shot), the joy of watching people
and ships and waves inhabit and transform space — is finally very
moving. We rarely get to share this aspect of genius, which is usually
engaged in weightier endeavors. This movie is weightless — like a
helium balloon — and it's marvelous to watch it rise up and disappear
into nothingness.

The films will be available separately from Kino or as part of a box set with a new edition of Faust and previously released versions of Nosferatu, The Last Laugh and Tartuffe.  I haven't seen the Kino versions of the new titles but I'm looking forward to checking them out and you should be, too.  I mean, it's Murnau.

THE FUTURE OF MOVIES

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Here's Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing, on the future of movies, from a recent article at the Internet Evolution web site — an article which deals with the future of traditional media in general:

The specific, rarefied animal that is the gigantic film spectacle demands a technological reality that has ceased to exist– just enough technology to distribute the films everywhere, but not so much technology that the audience gets to overrule your distribution decisions.

So, we may be at the end of the period in cinematic history where we can convince investors to pony up $300 million to make a sequel to a sequel to a remake of a movie adapted from a 50-year-old comic book. Which isn't to say that no one will make these things henceforth — give it a decade or two and there may well be rich weirdos who fund these productions the same way there are lovely old codgers who can be coaxed into putting up the dough to mount 15-hour, all-singing, all-dancing Wagner operas. Not a mass medium, nowhere near as culturally relevant as BBMs are today, but still a going concern as a vanity/prestige form.

Doctorow is right on target here.  Traditional films have taken their shape and much of their content from the nature of the way they're distributed.  Movies in the corporate era have never reflected “what the public wants”, because those who control distribution can in many ways decide what people want — or rather what they will accept in the absence of  an alternative.  The end of Hollywood's domination of distribution portends a drastic and irreversible change in the shape and content of movies.

So what will that change be like?  Doctorow imagines a fragmented audience for YouTube-type videos consumed on computers, most of which will be aimed at very small niche markets, some of which might be popular enough to attract advertising dollars.

I see something else quite different happening — as a result of the confluence of the digital distribution of films to theaters and the desire, which is never going to going away, to experience dramatic works in a public setting, in the physical presence of other people, of strangers.

When all films are sent to theaters digitally, extraordinary possibilities will open up.  The low cost of such distribution will, like the Internet, make it feasible for theaters, just like YouTube, to serve niche markets — at off-peak times, for example.  Today, theaters make most of their money from concessions — they exist primarily to sell popcorn and candy and soft drinks.  Any film that moves people past the concession stand can be profitable, as long as renting it is logistically simple and relatively inexpensive and as long as there is a way to advertise it cheaply.

What this will require, then, is some sort of interface between peer-to-peer-based Internet advertising and theater scheduling.  Theater programming could be bottom-up — a local group with shared interests could “order up” a film screening by offering to fill a certain number of seats for it, perhaps reserved (provisionally) in advance by a click on a PayPal button.  Another click on a computer-screen button in a theater manager's office could speed the film, whatever it happened to be, to the theater's digital projector at the appointed time.

The movie theater of the future could be simultaneously a venue for the latest Hollywood blockbuster, an art house, a local filmmakers festival, a clubhouse for hobbyists who like movies featuring trains, a Sunday-school classroom for people who want to see movies with religious themes.  There's no way of predicting what audiences might really want to see.  When Netflix started up, its directors assumed that most people would only want to see new movies — in fact, the vast majority of its rentals are for older films.  Netflix created a bottom-up market which allowed consumers to express a preference no one could have anticipated.

A bottom-up market for theatrical films would allow new local communities to form, as they do virtually in cyberspace.  A critical element in such a process would be a physical space within or near a theater where audiences for particular films or types of films could meet up before and after screenings.  Such communities would grow exponentially and unpredictably, as they do in cyberspace.

It has often been suggested that virtual communities are filling a vacuum created by the disappearance of more traditional real-life community hubs — the neighborhood tavern (banished from suburban housing developments), the soda fountain, the diner, the church social.  Virtual community can never truly replace such things, however — people are still hungry for the sort of “action” that only comes from physical proximity to fellow members of their species.  This is one reason that teenagers still hang out in the soulless spaces of the mall, that people still want to go to the movies, even if there's nothing playing at the local multiplex that they really want to see.

The next step is only logical — apply the paradigm and the technology of virtual communities to create new real-life communities.  Can it work?  Ask Barack Obama.

I started my connection to the Obama campaign virtually, by sending in a small contribution online.  I ended up on election day driving strangers from my neighborhood to the polls — one of the great experiences of my life.  The transition was organic and easy — because it made sense, practically and emotionally.

The movie theater of the future will evolve in the same organic way and in retrospect will seem inevitable, as Obama's victory is already starting to seem inevitable.  Meanwhile we just have to wait for the entertainment entrepreneur who can see now, as Obama saw in the political realm, which way the twig is bent.

HONOLULU

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Jack Cummings was MGM's third-string producer of musicals from the late Thirties to the mid Fifties (after Arthur Freed and Joe Pasternak.)  He was unimaginative but reliable, able to churn out respectable product with occasional passages of sublime magic.  One such bit of product from 1939 was Honolulu, an Eleanor Powell vehicle.

The film has an amiable but uninspired sit-com plot, centering on a Hawaiian pineapple grower and a big movie star who look exactly alike and decide, for various preposterous reasons, to switch places for a few weeks.  Robert Young plays the dual role.  As the movie star seeking a respite from hysterical fans he falls in love with Powell, a dancer with a gig at a Honolulu night spot.

In the dialogue scenes, Powell is every bit as bland and pleasant as Young — they're acceptable company for a bit of romantic comedy fluff.  So far so good.  When the Hawaiian drums start to throb, however, and Powell starts dancing, she sizzles with an intense sexuality that leaves Young wailing on the margin of non-entity, both dramatically and as a cinematic presence.  After Powell's first big number, the film no longer makes any sense as a love story.

Powell's three big numbers in the film, all solos, two with a corps of other dancers behind her, are stunning, though — they make the film worth watching, and revisiting.  In the first, she partners with a jump-rope, and makes it look sexier than Young.  In the last she does a fierce hula in a grass skirt, first barefoot then in tap shoes.  It has to be seen to be believed — her hip movements are simply indecent.

Another of the film's delights is Gracie Allen, who plays Powell's partner in her nightclub act.  She flits in and out of the plot delivering some first-rate vaudeville gags with her usual brilliance.  If you think of Honolulu as a program of vaudeville turns, rather than as a book musical, it's much easier to enjoy.  Powell, like Allen, was a product of the variety stage, so it's really not that much of a leap.  (George Burns is also in the film, but has no scenes with Allen, and flounders a bit with the less-than-amusing material he has to work with here.)

The film has some problematic racial stereotypes.  Eddie Anderson is made to do a gibbering “I'se just seen a ghost!” turn, which is doubly offensive because it clashes so markedly with Anderson's wry and skeptical comic persona, which Jack Benny exploited so well in his radio and TV shows.  Using Anderson as he's used in Honolulu is just an example of the mindless demeaning of blacks.  Willie Fung does a more amusing stock Chinaman turn, in which he gets to engage in a bit of one-upsmanship over his patronizing boss.

Then there's Powell's blackface number, in which she dances an imitation of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.  This cannot be simply dismissed, however disturbing the very idea of blackface has become.  There is no trace of condescension in Powell's tribute to Robinson — it's more an act of admiration, even envy.  Powell took lessons from the great black tapper and she imitates him convincingly — though her version of his tapping up and down stairs is just a faint echo of Robinson's signature routine.  She would probably have enjoyed dancing a romantic tapping pas de deux with Robinson — he's one of the few dancers who could have held his own with her, and then some — but that would have been inconceivable in 1939, probably even in 1969 in any mainstream showcase.

So Powell became Robinson for a few minutes.  It's hard to see the impersonation as anything but an act of tenderness and love.

The film was directed by journeyman Edward Buzzell.  Bobby Connelly did the simple but effective choreography — he did the simple but effective choreography for The Wizard Of Oz that same year.  Sadly, Honolulu is not yet available on DVD, though it's shown from time to time on TCM.

A THEATER OF DREAMS

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All films are about the theater, there is no other subject.

                                           — Jacques Rivette

This provocative statement may need some interpretation or qualification, but it is essentially true and crystallizes the secret of cinema.  All great cinema tries to supply what it lacks in relationship to theater — a visceral sense of physical space, the quality of tension in a live performance.  It cannot actually supply these things, of course, but in trying to it stretches its resources to the maximum — in trying to be something it's not, it becomes itself more completely.

André Bazin wrote two brilliant essays on this subject, part of his argument in favor of mise en scêne as opposed to montage as the primal method of cinema.  His insights have still not been wholly absorbed by film critics, but all great film directors have understood them, if only instinctively.

We may still be amazed that certain of the greatest directors have moved from work in the theater to work in film and displayed an instantaneous and absolute mastery of the latter medium.  Orson Welles's first film, for example, Citizen Kane, is still considered one of the finest of all movies, and yet it was done without any significant term of apprenticeship in cinema.  Vincente Minelli's first film, Cabin In the Sky, displays a similar mastery of cinematic form and style.  His third film, Meet Me In St. Louis, is one of the greatest films ever made.  Minnelli, like Welles, moved more or less directly from theater work to movies.

Both Welles and Minnelli wanted to create on film the same excitement they found in theatrical productions, and they both used cinematic techniques in bold and innovative ways to replicate that excitement.  They are recognized as two of the most “cinematic” filmmakers, but that's just a way of saying that they were two of the most theatrical filmmakers.

Cinema can do many non-theatrical or anti-theatrical things — it can create interesting graphic designs, it can bombard us with spatially incoherent images — but no one has managed to create great art out of these techniques, despite the claims of the cinematic avant garde.  It is only when cinema uses its most theatrical techniques that it is capable of genuine aesthetic grandeur.

One can speculate about why this is, but I suspect it has something to do with the primal significance of the theatrical experience, as it relates to ceremony and ritual.  We dream in theatrical terms, creating coherent spaces in the imagination in which incidents unfold in dramatic time — as in dreams of pursuit, for example.  We could dream in flat graphic images, or in a succession of unrelated or abstractly related images, but we don't.  The imaginative rehearsal of emotion seems to require the spatial and chronological coherence of a theatrical environment.

The one exception to this rule among all the other arts is music.  Though it's undoubtedly true that music as an advanced art evolved out of theatrical practice, out of ceremony and ritual, it seems to have an aspect more primal than that, perhaps originating in the rhythmic soothing of an infant.  Throughout all cultural history music has been a vital adjunct to theatrical practice, but it has a hold on us which exists apart from the theatrical realm, strictly considered.

Considering the matter less strictly, though, one could say that all music involves performance of one sort or another, within certain set parameters of time, and so is essentially theatrical in nature — that music always, on some level, creates, signals and consecrates a theatrical moment, a theatrical space.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . .

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Next year most of us will be following the jalapeño crops in Mexico, sleeping rough and singing the songs of the land, so tonight it's only right to party like it's 1929.

Don't bring a frown to old Broadway,
You've got to clown on Broadway . . .

SUNRISE RECONSIDERED

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[Warning:  If you haven't seen Sunrise, don't read this — instead go
see Sunrise immediately.]

Sunrise may not be the greatest film ever made — it may not even be
the greatest film of the silent era — but it certainly has passages,
many passages, that rank among the greatest in the history cinema and
still help chart the limits of what the medium can do.


Oddly, though, most of these supremely great passages happen in the
first 45 minutes of the film.  After that, there are many wonderful
moments, much gorgeous lighting and many striking plastic effects, but
none of them are breathtaking in the way the high points of the first
half are.




I think there's a fairly simple explanation for this, and it has to do
with the structure of the story itself.  The film tells the tale of a
simple man living in a rustic farming and fishing village who's seduced
away from his wife by a vamp visiting the village from the city.  He
determines to drown his wife in the course of a boat outing but when he
moves to do so he sees himself, sees what he's become, in her terrified
eyes and draws back from the deed.  She flees him when they get to land
again, jumps on a trolley — he jumps on, too, and they ride into the
city.  There, as he's trying to atone for his awful behavior, they
stumble on a wedding.  The man falls apart, begs for forgiveness, is
forgiven, and they walk out of the church like a newly married couple. 
This is the artistic, emotional and spiritual climax of the film . . .
but the film is only half over.


We then see the couple recover their former lightheartedness at a
fairgrounds.  We cut back to the scheming vamp in the village, and this
sets up an expectation that she will somehow intervene in the couple's
reunion and jeopardize it — but in fact this never happens.  The man
has made his choice — the vamp has no more power over him.


On the boat ride home a storm washes the couple overboard, the man
thinks his wife has drowned, and he's devastated.  There's great irony
in this, of course, but no great dramatic weight, because it doesn't
involve any further development of the characters' inner lives.  The
storm is a mechanical contrivance — an impersonal threat to a marriage
that has already been reborn and renewed.




The man rejects the vamp with physical violence, almost killing her,
before being told that his wife has been found alive — saved by a
bundle of reeds the vamp had gathered as a device for the man to use to save
himself after he'd killed the wife.  Again, there are multiple
ironies in these developments but, again, no real progression in the
inner lives of the characters.  The storm isn't a direct consequence of
the man's past behavior and the reeds don't redeem the vamp — they are
like visual and narrative puns with no fundamental significance for the
basic drama.


The second half of the film does contains things one would miss if Sunrise had ended at the halfway point.  In the fairgrounds
carousing, Janet Gaynor's character gets to reveal herself as a sensual
being, something she isn't really able to do as the long-suffering wife
in the opening sequences, where her astonishingly bad helmet-wig seems
to be giving her a headache — as it gives us one.  The George O'Brien
character is so frankly sensual, even when he's menacing, that there
would be an imbalance without those fairgrounds scenes.  O'Brien's
character also suffers in the second half from the apparent loss of his
wife, a tragedy he almost brought upon himself.  Without seeing that
suffering, we might feel that he'd gotten off too easily for his
despicable behavior.  And of course the vamp gets her comeuppance —
though it's almost more comeuppance than she deserves.




But none of these things transcends the emotional and dramatic climax
of the scene in the church or adds anything of essential significance
to it.  They're like echoes of and reflections on a story that's
already been told.  In the second half, Murnau can't summon up sublime
cinematic expressions for powerful emotional developments — because
those developments simply aren't there.


Pointing out the flaws in the dramatic structure of Sunrise does
nothing, of course,  to diminish its stature as one of the most
important works in the history of cinema.  It was the film that taught
John Ford the secret of movies, and that alone would make it a work of
inestimable value.  It's one of those rare films that one one can watch
again and again with increasing astonishment and enchantment, and it
continues to inspire each new generation of filmmakers, especially
cinematographers, for whom it is a kind of touchstone.  But recognizing
its structural flaws might help explain the vague and perhaps even
guilty feeling of disappointment which steals over one whenever that
“Finis” card comes up on the screen.


The great passages of the film, great as they are, don't add up to a
great whole work.

[Vincente Minnelli's fine film The Clock has a couple of intriguing echoes of Sunrise, which I think are too close to be accidental.  Both films deal with moments of crisis in a marriage that play out in an urban setting.  In both movies, the crisis is at first exacerbated and then transcended by the city environment, which becomes a kind of character in the drama.  In the aftermath of both crises, the married couples try to get back to a state of normality in a restaurant, but the simple act of trying to share a meal only emphasizes the distance between them.  In both restaurant scenes, the women break down.  These scenes are followed by ones in which the couples happen upon a wedding in a church — they enter the church and participate vicariously in the ceremony, which restores their sense of commitment to each other.  In each film, the church scene is the emotional climax of the story.  In The Clock, the rest of the film is coda — in Sunrise the rest of the film is coda, too, but stretched out far too long, and too loaded with incident, to work properly as such.]

UNNERVING

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Matt Barry over at The Art and Culture Of Movies has recently posted an insightful short review of Orson Welles's Touch Of Evil.  He calls it an unnerving film, which it certainly is, but points out that one of its most unnerving aspects is the way Welles goofs on our expectations of what a gritty little film noir should be.

The film's extreme stylization both seduces us into its nightmare world and distances us from it as an aesthetic creation, all at the same time.  Touch Of Evil was not quite the last classic noir — I think you'd have to give that distinction to Odds Against Tomorrow, which came out a bit later — but its self-consciousness about the form was a sure signal that the tradition had all but played itself out.  One definition of a neo-noir is that it's at least as concerned with commenting on the form as with working inside it.  In some ways, Touch Of Evil was the first of the neo-noirs.

THE END OF ENGLIGH

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Dr. Drew Casper is the Alfred and Alma Hitchcock Professor Of American Film at the University of Southern California.  He is a published author on film.  I assume that the “Dr.” in front of his name means that he has a PhD.  Casper shows up often delivering “expert commentary” on DVDs.  I assume that he speaks English as a first language but somehow in his journey through academia he has not managed to master the rudiments of his native tongue.

His style of speaking involves a lot of rephrasing, designed, I suppose, to suggest the addition of nuance to the points he's making but adding up only to redundancy.  In his commentary on the recent DVD release of Notorious, for example, he says that Alicia “is out of control — she has lost control.”  These two phrases mean exactly the same thing — one or the other would have served perfectly well.  He refers to the famous key in the film as “a prop — an object, if you want.”  Yes, I will accept that a prop is an object, since a prop is always an object.  It's sort of like saying, “a person — a human being, if you want.”  This is a form of pretentious bloviation.

Casper misspeaks constantly in his commentary.  He says that Alex's mother “yields a lot of power” in Alex's home, when he means that she wields a lot of power.  Of a traveling shot close on Alicia and Devlin, Casper says it suggests that they are “floating on air, existing gravity.”  I'm not even sure what he actually meant to say there — “resisting gravity”?  Who knows?

Casper introduces the subject of Russian Constructivism and then goes on to refer to it more than once as Roman Contructivism, whatever that might be.  Casper also misuses language freely.  He says that German filmmakers “triumphed” the use of lighting as an expressive tool.  He doesn't seem to know or care that “triumph” is an intransitive and never a transitive verb.

The professor is promiscuously careless about details as well.  He refers to the German director “D. W. Pabst”.  He says at one point that Alex is taller than Alicia, when he's just been talking about the significance of him being shorter.  He says that in Hitchcock's films special effects are always in the service of technique, when he means always in the service of story or character.

Is there no editor or director present when Casper records his commentaries?  Doesn't Casper, or someone, listen to them after they're recorded to catch mistakes and suggest retakes?  Or is it the case that any old nonsense from the mouth of a man with a PhD is assumed to be authoritative?

Casper is not an idiot — he has many interesting things to say about the themes and strategies of Notorious — but he seems to feel no obligation whatsoever to present his analysis with even a modicum of intellectual rigor or discipline.  If Hitchcock had had the same attitude about filmmaking that Casper has about film criticism, we wouldn't be watching Hitchcock's films today.  Bloviating about them in such a scatter-brained way is a kind of insult to Hitchcock's professionalism.

Casper's poor language skills offer a terrifying insight into the modern academy, and modern academic standards in the area of film studies.  Presumably Casper doesn't fear that his students will note, much less correct, his mangling of English, though some of them would undoubtedly be capable of doing so.  They want good grades from him, after all.  Presumably, as the occupant of an endowed chair at his university, probably a tenured position, he doesn't fear the criticism of his fellow professors or supervisors, who would have a very hard time removing him from his job.  Perhaps they feel that since film is a visual medium, there's no need to speak about it in precise and correct language.

It's all very depressing.  When a professor at a major American university can get away with such shoddy speech, it's no wonder that American institutions of higher learning are turning out graduates who are semi-literate, who not only speak but think sloppily about film, among other things.