Swindler's list

Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942, Leo McCarey) is an insufferable Nazi screwball romance patriotic propaganda piece that asks what if screwball antics were in the service of dealing with WWII? The funniest thing it’s got going for it is the names of the principal characters sounding like the kind of dirty jokes Terry Southern might’ve snuck in: BUTT, TOOL, and LUBE.

     Ginger Rogers is KATHERINE BUTT-SMITH. And her character can be called upon when her country needs her. She sacrifices her diamond bracelet, the man of her dreams, and her own life for the greater good. She even forges her own passport and gives it to a Jewish maid so that the woman and her two children can escape. In this world we’re to accept that sticking the Jewish woman’s photo over her own using chewing gum as adhesive won’t be caught by the Nazis or border checkpoints. 
     Cary Grant is PATRICK O’TOOLE. He seduces Butt-Smith. And there’s a scene early on where he impersonates her tailor and his tape measure springs to attention becoming an unwieldy force of its own. It’s funny to think about whose idea it was to blend harrowing Nazi occupied Europe espionage thriller with lewd screwball farce. Maybe funnier than the finished product. There’s even a scene where the couple are mistaken for Jews (because Katherine still has the maid’s passport) and they end up in a concentration camp. 
     Okay there is a kinda funny bit where O’Toole has to do a radio broadcast out of France telling the USA that Hitler isn’t so bad, where they workshop his script by committee and strongly reject phrases about Hitler using words like “boundaries,” and “will stop at nothing.” Among the plot holes, or at the very least slightly implausible elements, there’s the fact that at no point are the couple cautious about the possibility Von Luber will just kill them until the very last scene where he’s on the same ship attempting to flee as a war criminal to relocate in America. Psyche. Katherine overpowered him and threw him overboard instead.
     And the happy ending is that Von Luber can’t swim. Because we’re all happy he’s dead, as long as there’s a built in disavowal of guilt mechanism. And the message spelled out for us is that the Nazis forbade expressing individual thought, which is unacceptable. And good thing they were defeated. 

That's not my baby

Bachelor Mother (1939, Garson Kanin) is an unwed mother pro-life screwball comedy about child rearing that romanticizes starting a family. Thus far it also might be the screwball with the most instances of misleading appearances leading to false assumptions. 

     The premise is so very screwball. Temp gets let go. Picks up a baby left on a doorstep. Gets hired on fulltime and given a raise because of it. Later there’ll be another time deception gets her her job back. When she fabricates a history of domestic assault pointing to her temple and saying “coffee pot.” What can I say? I love laughing at the darkest things that aren’t funny. I love comedies that can make something not funny funny.

     Another of the elements I define the screwball by is class conflict. It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra) uses its narrative as a platform to exhort us about it. And we get plenty of a variation of class conflict, which is the Cinderella rags to riches fantasy. But for me the one I best relate to is the impossibility of vertical upwards class mobility. Bachelor Mother is set in motion with the understanding that it’s only a matter of time before POLLY PARRISH (Ginger Rogers) and DAVID MERLIN (David Niven) fall in love. (Okay first though let’s not even mention that this is also yet another screwball about a low level employee marrying her boss.) But into the second act at the New Year’s Eve party what does that say about vertical class mobility that David chooses to have Polly pass herself off as someone who can’t speak English (daughter of a Swedish manufacturer) instead of risking her being unable to converse with the party guests. Of course how could she possibly socialize with those above her? She’s merely a peasant. 

     As Bachelor Mother exists in the world of screwball, it’s a wonderful example too of illusion becoming reality. David using Polly to pretend she’s his date turns into them becoming romantically matched after having some chemistry. Plot twist is Polly pretending the baby is hers in turn turns off David. (But only briefly. We know he’s to come back around.) Seriously their first kiss on New Year’s Eve in that huge crowd all singing in New York is such a moving uplifting American sentimental flourish.

     For its time, this movie has a very impressive effective tracking shot of a Donald Duck toy falling down the stairs that tells us David has realized he’s in love with Polly that is quite stunning. This film strikes a balance between clever, compassionate, and ambitious. And it’s summed up best in that last moment David hugs her and when she asks him if she still thinks he’s the mother of the baby and he says “of course,” she slyly delivers that “ha ha” is such a perfect denouement.

intercostal clavicle

Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks) is an exotic wildlife mental illness screwball comedy. It’s about a socialite and an archaeology professor who want a bone. It’s about hunting big game as metaphor for finding true love. And more than any other film, the spirit of Bringing Up Baby best epitomizes the spirit of the screwball comedy. If a man and woman who can make each other laugh is how love was depicted during this period, how do you top that? By depicting it as utter chaos, career-jeopardizing, nervous breakdown-inducing, serious jail time-incurring, life-threatening, non-stop adventure bonding, that’s how.

     First of all make no mistake, this entire movie is about the sex impulse. We got DAVID HUXLEY with this cold fish fiancée who’s introduced clearly announcing that because of their shared career objectives they won’t have time for children, or a honeymoon, or any type of domestic distractions. And her name is MISS SWALLOW; don’t think about that name too much, it’ll only get you in trouble.
     Okay it’s time here I go reaching for metaphorical implications trying too hard to read something into a film that’s probably not there, but. Huxley’s fiancée works with fossils because that’s how she is in bed. But SUSAN has a leopard in her bedroom as to indicate some kind of ferocious voracious sexual appetite. Baby’s tame though, you say? Domesticated? Jump to the end of the film. Who but Susan is able to single handedly capture the killer leopard? This is psychoanalytic creative freedom at its boldest.
     Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn with their star personae affected way of speaking are my favorite Hollywood comedic performers of this era, and together they are why Bringing Up Baby has gotta be my all-time favorite comedy. And Grant with those glasses only enhances the contrast between their caricatures. 
 
The force of Susan and the way in which she crashes into David’s life is the stuff of nature encoding in us an overwhelming physical attraction to someone. At the golf course she overtakes his life. He can’t reason with her—just as you can’t reason with lust, nor love. And when he literally falls head over heels in that restaurant inexplicably running into her again, do you believe he wants nothing to do with her as he appears to act like? Well, he rips the back of her dress apart in this scene too though, which is pretty hot.
     That moment when David’s reached his limit and sends Susan home the ultimate male romantic fantasy of her becomes fully apparent. She sobs out of desperation. She fell out of the sky and instantly in love with this boring academic. She’d do anything for him. She never wants to leave him. And when Hepburn is crying I’ve fallen in love with this role she’s created. Susan’s this rich, crazy, impossible, reckless, beautiful young woman who’s always so much fun and so unpredictable. This is the potential of what a movie can do. The grand finale with Susan next to the broncosaurus skeleton atop that ladder rocking defying the laws of physics is the most satisfying ending of any romantic comedy we'll ever see.

One should always listen to someone when they say goodbye because sometimes they're really saying farewell

Stage Door (1937, Gregory La Cava) is an ebullient woman’s picture comedy-melodrama tearjerker that conceals its darker subject matter which it gradually reveals as an indictment of systemic abuse by the combine of the theatrical scene in New York threshing away the many hopeful innocents that seek success in its blades. It’s also got a boarder who wears a cat drooped down her neck like a shawl. 

     Wake up. Finally a real star. Kate Hepburn kills. She’s got the force of a man but she’s not masculine like a say, Rosalind Russell. Hepburn plays TERRY RANDALL, new girl moving into the Footlights Club, a theatrical boarding house for broke aspiring actresses, and it’s full of ‘em. A young Ann Miller is so cute in this prototypical Mulholland Drive. Plucky Ginger Rogers holds her own as Hepburn’s nemesis. My empathy pours out for Lucille Ball as the girl who has to go on dates with some lumber men from Seattle who knew her from her childhood whose company she suffers because she needs the dinners they pay for. 
     The volley of dialogue fired off in this place is pandemonium and you think you’re in for a treat. But no. It turns into something else entirely.
 
The other half of Stage Door emerges when Adolphe Menjou as TONY POWELL turns out to be this predatory casting couch impresario who makes you miss Oscar Jaffe. Great detail in its poignancy is after Ginger Rogers’ character sobs her way out the door when we see Powell immediately begin flipping through his little black book.
     But it’s really this KAY character who overshadows the rest of the picture. Every time I watch this movie, as soon as Kay walks in that door for the first time the way her light is dimming to a flicker weary struggling to stay hopeful, I cry. I also cry when we first meet MISS LUTHER because of her age and how she still hasn’t given up and how she pathetically keeps her rumpled theater notices from some long forgotten distant past. Stage Door is a three hanky picture. Kay floats through in some melancholy fugue as if she belongs in a different movie altogether. It’s so sad that quick line never mentioned again or elaborated on when Kay says “except someone I’ll never go back to” back home traumatic pain. Although Miss Randall steals her part, it’s more complex than that. Because once Kay took a part from some other actress. And Miss Randall didn’t earn her opportunity, it was bought for her through nepotism. Kay and Terry are both such great examples of an active protagonist. In this movie neither of them would mean anything to us without without the other. That’s impressive writing.
     Can’t shake the haunting sequence where Kay walks up that gothic lit staircase hearing voices. Kay’s broken. Her mental illness is pure psychological horror. And the climax is heavy. Devastating. “What’s more important than a career?” says that louse Powell. Stage Door is really about young women’s hopes and dreams. It’s really about our own hopes and dreams. And these are the types of movies that know how to be the most heart wrenching. When Powell says "oh she's still around" about Kay that's such a punch in the gut. It stays with you. Yet again from this period it makes one ask how many of these comedies end right back where they started? We get the message.

Not Every Man Is Sincere

The third film in the Orson Welles retrospective that I've been able to attend was projected in 35mm.

Journey Into Fear (1943, Norman Foster Orson Welles), the third film released by Orson Welles as a Mercury Production--his stock cast and crew from radio and subsequently Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)--and released by RKO Radio Pictures, which was one of the Big Five Hollywood studios then, is a minor work in Welles's oeuvre.

Journey Into Fear is a B movie spy yarn about American engineer Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten) on the run from Nazis in a Turkish port on his way to Georgia. It is a standard genre thriller that follows a linear plot. It also lacks the overarching grand reinventing the wheel style narratives that Welles's previous two films displayed. Welles's name isn't even on this as director. Nor does it at all explore memory, shift time, contrast class and wealth, or combine highs and lows of its central protagonists in sentimental nostalgia.

But the reason it should be attributed to Welles as director is because it is embellished with low-key lighting, cavernous shadowy sets--the first time Graham descends the staircase into the nightclub/underworld--and bizarre canted, wide-angled, low and high perspective angled, and reverse track back leading shots that float on butter.

Welles's turn as debonair hulk Colonel Haki is hammy, but funny. Everett Sloane and Aggy Morehead also provide nothing more than comic relief, in contrast to their earlier roles in Welles's films. But the villain Banat must be the most memorable character in Journey Into Fear with his foreboding overweight physique, nearly silent performance, rumpled hat, spectacles and the menacing scene where he combines corpulence with homicidal mania as he confronts Graham while destroying his crackers into his soup as he slops it up, staring down his target.

The grand finale outside the top of the ledges of the building in the rain storm showdown is an edge of your seat payoff, and the film lacks too much charm to be dismissed.

--Dregs

In Those Days, They Had Time for Everything

The second film screening I have been able to attend from the Orson Welles retrospective was also projected in 35mm.

How fresh the beginning of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles) remains. The quaint homespun narration voiced over by Welles, the digression into the evolution of men's dress during the nineteenth century somewhere back East, and the picturesque bucolic tone of sentiment and genuine fondness for a bygone era are warming and retain an innocence that is untarnished and eloquent.

The Amberson estate is baroque and the more access we gain upon entry, the more we realize the same space never seems to appear twice. The shadows and low key lighting are complemented by a camera that waltzes through the interiors with poised grace.

The dialogue is typically radio Wellesian with its brisk pacing, snappy comedic punctuations, and see saw balance that levels the playing field regardless of sex, income, or intellect.

And there's that staircase. That magnificent staircase. It is a visual key. From the moment George Amberson Minafer begins pursuing Lucy Morgan--an instance of high class courting low class--he guides her. After their back and forth struggle of wills, he is about to lead her up that grand staircase just as she abruptly cuts him off to reveal that Eugene Morgan, "that queer looking duck," is her father. George will never get Lucy up those stairs. A parallel to this motif is after the midpoint when Eugene returns to fight his way back into the mansion for one last attempt to see the dying Isabel, the love of his life. Uncle Jack appears on the upper floor at the railing of the staircase and asks Eugene, who's down at the bottom floor, to please come back later. Of course, Isabel dies and Eugene will never make it up that staircase (or see her again).

The Magnificent Ambersons is a tonal study. The luminescent innocence of the film's opening that culminates in the carriage ride through the snow--snow symbolizes the loss of youth in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, as George, Lucy, Isabel, Eugene, Fanny and Jack sing gaily, and significantly trail into the deep background to be irised in on, is eclipsed by the bulk of the latter two thirds of the narrative. Dark tragedy engulfs the film like a cancer. Aunt Fanny's breakdown is bleak and hopeless. And, General Amberson's death scene, with its surreal tone, the frontal framing of his withering visage and rambling pleas accompanied by Welles's eulogizing mournful almost whispering narration, ends as a sublimely melancholy piece of cinema.

Georgy drives the narrative. What a toxic breed he starts out as, a borderline sociopath who views the lower class as riff raff. The coy framing in wide angle of his speech in defense of attacking the other boy with him center weighted and postured level to the camera as he mocks the adult who turned him in as he self-righteously confesses that the man wouldn't be fit to shine the general's shoe is another of Welles's finest achievements.

Georgy is a monster, and that he desires Lucy as his bride dooms him to rejection, but his comeuppance is so much more. This is a film about social tragedy. The Morgans are such good people, and because Isabel Amberson is good-natured and sweet, Eugene is ideally suited for her. The twist that Georgy could actually stop this match is heartbreaking, but wonderfully paints the reality these characters are confronted with.

This proves the fondness and mastery of melancholy and melodrama Welles was apt at executing.

--Dregs

I'll Bet You Five You're Not Alive If You Don't Know His Name

A two month retrospective series of the films of Orson Welles has begun here in Austin.

It is a joy for me to write about the first of these screenings that I attended, which was in a theater downtown and projected in 35mm.

My Declaration of Principles

I.   I will provide the readers of this blog with a review of Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles) that does not in any way mention the context of the film's production, any of Orson Welles's other films, first time innovative techniques, or the basis of its central protagonist on any real people.

II.  I will also provide them with a review that doesn't mention anything about the man Orson Welles, his life, his career, or any of his other personal aspects or characteristics, or the reputation of this, his first film, as being widely considered to be the greatest film of all time.

Citizen Kane focuses on character over plot. What perfunctory plot there is to speak of is nothing more than a journalist trying to track down Charles Foster Kane's last words: "Rosebud." The journalist visits Kane's widow--Susan Alexander, goes to the archives of the late Thatcher--Kane's banker and guardian, then to Bernstein and later Leland--Kane's business colleagues. And finally, the film ends with a reveal that shows Rosebud was Kane's sled he lost as a boy.

The prologue (following the shattered snow globe) is original and riveting in its imaginative execution. The newsreel is constructed as a media decoy that is believable in its authenticity. We are introduced to Kane through a wide array of diverging viewpoints of opinion. Many of them negative, few sympathetic. But we are hooked and want more.

The magic of Citizen Kane arises out of the scenes of memory; melodramatic, and fanciful, the first of which being the boarding house scene, which relies on Kane's until recently destitute mother (Aggy Morehead) morosely ascribing him to the care of Thatcher after she's inherited a goldmine (literally) to get the boy away from what's hinted at to be an abusive domineering father.

Chronologically Kane begins as a sympathetic hero that overcomes tragedy to crusade for the poor masses of Americans. He's not interested in money or power--he wants to make a change. This is the germ for what proves the arching toxic melodrama. Kane works at his career and his marriage because of altruistic principles. Then we see his eventual ugly, inexplicable, saddening decay and departure from everything he once stood for.

For the man who seems on a sure track to the United States presidency, and the sky being the limit, his options diminish rather quickly.

Citizen Kane also shows the intertwining relationship between melodrama and tabloid. The bitter comeuppance Boss Jim Gettes has in store for Kane, the tabloid love nest banner, is the surprisingly sudden final nail in Kane's coffin.

The rise of Kane is full of hope. The depiction of the Inquirer offices, the revelry and celebration that go on there, the snappy witty dialogue all paint the past in a brilliant luster that gives the film its lasting glow. On the contrary, it is Xanadu that crushes all hope with its decadent darkness, oppressive painful remorse and chaotic lack of any principle other than avarice of property--including Susan, who becomes nothing more than one of his statues.

Another trait worthy of admiration in Citizen Kane's structure is the continuous jumping from one location to the next, both geographic and temporal. The film's pace is relentless. And the efforts bestowed upon each of the different locations is evidence of the finest craftsmanship the classic Hollywood Studio System was capable of.

What else is there to say about the lasting draw of this fictitious larger than life, spoiled, impulsive, shallow, hedonist? Other than asking ourselves how far really are our own ambitions and dreams from his?

--Dregs