Some Came Running

"Tomorrow," and "Tomorrow," and "Tomorrow"

Partaking in the grand tradition of internet oversharing, I reveal why My Lovely Wife cannot be persuaded to ever sit through the great Make Way For Tomorrow, not even in its spiffy new 1080p Blu-ray edition. I intend to make a fresh appeal when my in-laws come to visit for Christmas—trauma for the whole family! My Foreign Blu-ray Disc Report is at The Daily Notebook. 

Hell yeah

I don't know what the heck everybody's so upset about. I happen to think that it's a great, innovative and long overdue idea to have Jess Franco host the Oscars. Can't wait.

Irvin Kershner, 1923-2010

A difficult director to "place," as it were; the early work is replete with well-observed detail and nuance, as in, say, 1964's The Luck of Ginger Coffey, which I took a look at here. I think his 1971 Loving is galvanic and very nearly prophetic, among other things; others will tell you it's more Strained Seriousness than Expressive Esoterica. He is, of course, best known for having brought a sense of gravitas to the Star Wars franchise, directing the best and the "darkest" of the films in that series, 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. Which made him "bankable" in a way he had not been before; but subsequent franchise or pseudo-franchise efforts—the half-blood Bond Never Say Never Again and the almost proudly pointless RoboCop 2—betrayed a certain, shall we say, disengagement from the material at hand. Indeed, RoboCop 2 is as close to a genuine, out-and-out fascist motion picture than anything Hollywood has ever produced. But Kershner was of course no fascist himself. (The quality under consideration here was the byproduct of a script written in part by Frank Miller.) The one time I interviewed the late Kershner, he struck me as an urbane and compassionate fellow of substantial wit and irony. The shot above is of Kershner in the role of Zebedee in Scorsese's underappreciated 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ. Kershner's website is here. 

So long, Shirley

WIth Julie Hagerty and Robert Hays in Airplane!, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, 1980.

To me the funniest thing about Leslie Nielsen's career was that even after definitively sending up his stolid screen persona in the above, and ostensibly ensuring that he'd never be taken seriously as a straight thespian again, he was nevertheless cast as the psycho john who gets offed by La Streisand in the risible Nuts, and apparently played the role with such conviction that he managed to genuinely scare the crap out of the leading lady on set. Weird.

It is this blog's bailiwick to unearth the cult-appeal nerve centers of many cinematic career, but in this case to cite Nielsen's portrayal of the world's squarest, most stolid space captain in the groundbreaking Forbidden Planet would be too...obvious. No, for a certain stripe of weirdo Nielsen's most iconic portrayal such as it was, was of Colonel Francis Marion, The Swamp Fox, in the eponymous Disney television adventure mini-series. Much like the Patrick McGoohan-starring Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, the episodes of this piece are remembered almost as movies, not least because they had a genuine cinematic "scope" and feel, at least to growing lads of the day. 

As the pose above implies, Nielsen did not exactly bring a whole lot of variety to his portrayal of noble stalwarts, which was one major reason he worked so well in the sendups from Airplane! onward. I don't intend an insult when I say that he made the easy look easy. And while the makers of Airplane! frequently said in interviews that Nielsen and the other old-timers whose images and styles were used for parody in such films didn't quite "get" what was going on around them, I rather doubt that Nielsen was any kind of Margaret Dumont. He certainly proved quite adept (not to say relentless—I had the misfortune of having had to sit through Repossessed) at re-commodifying himself after that film gave a new lease to his career's life. He will be missed.

Literary interlude

In speaking of Kipling's politics, Mr. Eliot contents himself with denying that Kipling was a fascist; a tory, he says, is a very different thing, a tory considers fascism the last debasement of democracy. But this, I think, is not quite ingenuous of Mr. Eliot. A tory, to be sure, is not a fascist, and Kipling is not properly to be called a fascist, but neither is his political temperament to be adequately described merely by reference to a tradition which is honored by Dr. Johnson, Burke, and Walter Scott. Kipling is not like these men; he is not generous, and, although he makes much to-do about manliness, he is not manly; and he has none of the mind of the few great tories. His toryism often had in it a lower-middle-class snarl of defeated gentility, and it is this, rather than his love of authority and force, that might suggest an affinity with fascism. His imperialism is reprehensible not because it is imperialism but because it is a puny and mindless imperialism. In short, Kipling is unloved and unlovable not by reason of his beliefs but by reason of the temperament that gave them literary expression.

I have said that the old antagonism between liberalism and Kipling is now abated by time and events, yet it is still worth saying, and it is not extravagant to say, that Kipling was one of liberalism's major intellectual misfortunes. John Stuart Mill, when he urged all liberals to study the conservative Colderidge, said that we should pray to have enemies who make us worthy of ourselves. Kipling was an enemy who had the opposite effect. He tempted liberals to be content with easy victories of right feeling and with moral self-congratulation. 

—Lionel Trilling, "Kipling," The Liberal Imagination, 1950

Maintenance of tradition department

"We're millionaires, boys! I'll share it with all of you!" Uh-huh.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. More holiday ape stuff here and here. 

Random observation

Breathes there a cinephile with sensibility so tame who never to him or herself hath said, "I like a cheesy sci-fi picture featuring a bunsen-burner rocket ship that has a special reservoir tip at the end?" I would hope not. 

The above is from the 1968 The Green Slime, which I'm getting soon from the Warner Archive and which DVD Beaver reviews here.

The Countess

No offense meant to scream queens—heck, at least one of my favorite people ever falls into that category, and I wholeheartedly admire many other performers who do—but one really could not, can not, use that term with respect to Ingrid Pitt, the Polish-born actress best known for her work in a relative handful of largely Hammer-produced horror films in the early 1970s. For one thing, she didn't do much screaming. There was something rather genuinely regal (if there is such a quality) in the aloofness she brought to the portrayals of her largely amoral characters, as in the titular virgin killer of 1971's Countess Dracula, whence the screen cap above is derived. Said appearance of aloofness, combined with her more...fleshly, erm, attributes, gave young fellows such as myself a very particular and somewhat intimidating impression of, if not Platonic ideal for, European womanhood. 

She died today, aged 73, after having led what reads like a brave, adventurous life. Her screen presence left a mark on the consciousness of all those who were exposed to it, and I believe I speak for each and every one of those souls in saying we're glad of it.

Further forays into the current cinema

I was rather pleasantly surprised by Tangled, which begins with unpleasant intimations of Dreamworks but soon reveals itself as, to adapt a Godardian formulation, un vrai film Disney; the above still is from the film's very big set piece, a floating-lantern extravaganza that ranks as one of the most breathtaking pieces of animation the studio has done, ever. My full review is here, at MSN Movies.

I was somewhat less surprised by Christina Aguilera's big-screen debut (I think), the rather not-good Burlesque, but I see that I do not come down as hard on it as a lot of other critics have, as witness Marshall Fine's review. Why? I dunno; not so much a matter of being bored with shooting fish in a barrel as maybe a disinclination to break a butterfly on a wheel. Particularly when the butterfly is blonde, bats her lashes a lot, and has what Rick Moranis' Merv Griffin would call "fascinating breasts." Call me weak. I don't care. My review of Burlesque (which, incidentally, I will defend to the death as being a ton better than friggin' Crossroads, thanks), also for MSN Movies, is here. 

The current cinema, "it's good to talk" edition

Unlike a goodly number of my esteemed colleagues, I don't have anything special against the "genteel middlebrow entertainment." Or perhaps I should say that I don't believe that railing against genteel middlebrow entertainments is a way to up my thrifty, brave, clean and reverent intellectual cred, or will succeed in ceasing the manufacture of such items. I choose to go with the flow, such as it is, and that's one reason I found Tom Hooper's The King's Speech not just inoffensive but kind of engaging. My review, for MSN Movies, is here. As it happened, in said review I indulged in some minor speculation concerning whether anybody really cares as much about monarchs as they did back in the day, and how this might effect the film's box-office and awards chances; and also as it happens, I wrote and filed this prior to the news of a marital engagement involving one of the British royals, which has indeed gotten certain segments of the population kind of het up, and ought to be making Harvey Weinstein very happy indeed. Interesting how this sort of thing can work. You'd almost think it was all part of some grand scheme!

Also interesting was seeing Helena Bonham Carter go aggressively semi-frump as the future Queen Mother in this, and then seeing her still convince in evil-sorceress bondage gear in the Harry Potter picture less than a week later. Wonder if she gets to keep any of her various costumes.