...when he tells ye he didn't do it! Ya just gotta! Because this time—for maybe the first time in his career as an unctuous movie villain—he's actually telling the truth! He didn't do it! The real culprit is...
Well, I don't wanna spoil it if you haven't seen the picture yet. The tale of a relentless search for the best DVD of Fritz Lang's immortal 1945 Scarlet Street comprises this week's Foreign Region DVD Report, at The Auteurs'.
The final leg of my assessment of the lesser Polanskis (and "leg" seems apt, as we were only assessing two) is up at The Auteurs'. It's the Foreign Region DVD Report on '86s Pirates, which, while not exactly good, is not quite as bad as I recalled.
Hey, anybody know the identity of the cigar-smoking geezer on the right? Hint: there's a biopic of him coming out early next year.
After a one-week engagement at The Auteurs', this soon-to-be-concluded feature returns to its home. (Now's as good a time as any to beg, once again, any readers with a line on Appointment To Danger to help me out if they can.)
Farber: "A lightweight, O'Henry-type story about a cop who hoists himself on his own petard; heavyweight acting by Lee J. Cobb and Jane Wyatt; as a consequence, the only film this year to take a moderate, morally fair stand on moderately suave and immoral Americans, aged about forty. An effortlessly paced story, impressionistically coated with San Francisco's oatmeal-gray atmosphere; at the end, it wanders into an abandoned fort or prison and shows Hitchcock and Carol Reed how to sidestep hokum in a corny architectural monstrosity. Cobb packs more psychological truths about joyless American promiscuity into one ironic stare, one drag on a cigarette, or one uninterested kiss more than all the Mankiewicz heroes put together."
Mankiewicz had by this time made enough pictures to have forged a particular signature, and the prior year saw his first real masterwork, All About Eve. While Eve's not usually noted for its male characters just a year before, and while the movie wasn't unusually notable for its male characters, there is some interesting contrast to be seen between, say, Cobb's reaction to being made putty in the hands of Wyatt's not-quite-femme-fatale, and Gary Merrill's self-loathing resignation at Bette Davis' machinations in Eve. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I know, I know; it appears that SCR is devolving—some would call it evolving, actually—into a kind of tony cheesecake site, but I assure you, it's all just a coincidence and the next image to post on this blog is sure to be something with less potential prurient interest. But in case you were wondering (and I have to say I really think you were), yes, that is young Helen Mirren above, younger even than in Powell's Age of Consent, doing a bit of faux-burlesque in the extraordinary object known as Herostratus, the subject of today's Foreign Region DVD Report, at The Auteurs'.
Twelve years after his groundbreaking Apollo performance, 10 years after the TAMI Show, the Godfather of Soul continues to do it to death in 1974, headlining the Zaire '74 Music Festival, conceived as an adjunct to the "Rumble In The Jungle" Ali-Foreman rematch in that country. The fight had to wait several weeks because Foreman got a cut above his eye while sparring, but the concert couldn't wait. Its story is told in a very cool documentary, Soul Power, out now on DVD and Blu-ray disc from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema. The excellent disc represents, among other things, a broadening of the MOC mission, and is the subject of today's Foreign DVD Report, at The Auteurs'.
This, recently released on DVD, really is a must-see, a terrific piece of cinematic storytelling and a key early Hollywood work from the great Sirk. Dave Kehr gave it a nice write-up in the Times last Sunday, but I was so thoroughly impressed when I sat down to watch it that I began thinking that Dave's praise was curiously faint. I don't think it actually was, mind you, merely describing my own strong response to the movie. As Dave says on his website, the DVD transfer, from VCI, is merely passable—the screen caps here show its softness—but passable is good enough for the film to put itself over, and what the picture has to put over is very special.
One of those things is, I think, what could be George Sanders' very best performance, as Petroff, a respected judge in pre-revolutionary Russia who falls very hard—and he's hardly the only one—for grasping peasant beauty Olga. He's at once the embodiment of civilized ideals and a kind of species of rot—exactly the sort of contradictory character that Anton Chekhov excelled at creating. Of course, Chekhov's The Shooting Party, on which this picture was based, was written and set further back in Russia's history than when this film is set; the adaptation, by Rowland Leigh, is a smart one and the time shift is hardly inapt. In any event, Sanders' Petroff is pitched at perfect levels of both self-regard and self-loathing, but never approaches the arch; it's a thoroughly considered piece of work. As is that of Edward Everett Horton, playing a rather buffoonish Count Volsky, aka "Piggy" (see Gentleman Prefer Blondes, almost ten years later), and reaching emotional depths that his bountiful comic performances never even glanced at. (According to the book Sirk on Sirk, Horton proclaimed the part as the best he ever had, and Sirk the best director he ever worked with.)
The whole cast is so superb that after a few minutes or so no one cares that everybody in the picture, down to Sig Ruman and Hugo Haas, is speaking in a different accent; Sirk locks down the tone so deftly that Hollywood convention becomes its own law here and you just go with it. It seems particularly right that Linda Darnell plays Olga pretty much as a vulgar young American would-be starlet, pouting and saying things like "Huh?" and such. But make no mistake, the film does not disdain her; it rather sees her as a kid who's just trying to get somewhere, and using what she's got to make it happen. She's rather moving in several scenes, especially one when she talks about her fear of lightning and her belief that everyone who dies as a result of "the heavenly electricity" is automatically sent to paradise. I should not forget Anna Lee, as a spurned fianceé, who is nicely understated in her decency and sports a distinct resemblance to Diane Keaton in her final scenes in the film.
Dave Kehr rightly notes that the film, a relatively low-budget production for the time, "does not display the baroque stylistics of the Technicolor melodramas Sirk later made for Universal," and that's true. What it does display is Sirk's storytelling economy and his highly developed sense of emotional nuance. This is not a picture with a lot of camera movements, but as Spencer Tracy said in Pat and Mike, what's there is "cherce." Particularly in the scene of the wedding banquet, after Olga willfully marries the overseer of Volsky's estate, in which a couple of deft sweeps over and around the table limn the very pronounced class distinctions of the various guests.
Oh, and did I mention Linda Darnell is in it? I did? Okay. Still.
As they say...what the fuck is up?
Also, the film's punchline is absolutely devastating and quite elegantly phrased. Do not miss this.
Note: above image not representative. Well, not wholly representative, anyway. I'll get to that in a moment.
One of the many salutory features of Warners' new Blu-ray disc of Gone With The Wind is the specific quality of its restoration, which I believe brings it closer to the version David O. Selznick signed off on and moviegoers swooned over in 1939. As Richard W. Haines notes in his extremely useful book Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing, "Selznick attempted a sepiatone look for two of his productions of the '30s. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, released in 1937, the entire feature was printed with a saturated sepia hue that utilized few primary colors...For Gone With The Wind, a similar sepia look was used in the early sequences of the prewar South. After the Civil War broke out, the yellows and reds were emphasized during the burning of Atlanta scenes. Fleshtones were richly tanned and saturated throughout."
The various re-releases of GWTW make a mini-history of how not to preserve/restore a film. Haines cites a 1988 Eastmancolor so-called-restoration as "completely inaccurate...printed with 'cold' desaturated fleshtones, distorting Selznick's look." He also tells of the film being reissued in something of a "widescreen" version: "A 1.66 X 1 masking was used by MGM for their 'flat" films (including reissues of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind)...apparent grain was increased and sharpness decreased when films were cropped and enlarged in this manner." Now imagine the disaster potential when going into the next step of transferring to video...
We live in more enlightened times today, and this new version of GWTW has more of that sepia feel in the first half than any version I've seen. The above snapshot from my plasma screen, while absolutely less than ideal, conveys, I think, some of that; as does the below rip from DVD Beaver's review of the disc.
Selznick's strategy of changing the film's color scheme after the war, and the concurrent fall of the South, seems almost...meta, doesn't it? I imagine it certainly informed Martin Scorsese's "Technicolor" mutations over narrative time in The Aviator.
John Woo's frequently breathtaking Red Cliff opens in the U.S. soon in a 140-minute-or-so "international version" that severely abridges the original two-part, almost five-hour epic. I've seen both, and you, too, can see the grand two-parter if you're got a multi-region DVD player or a domestic Blu-ray machine—the BR discs of the film are not region-coded. Details are at The Auteurs', as the two-part Cliff is the subject of today's Foreign DVD Report.
Roman Polanski's return to the headlines garnered quite a bit of diverse reaction. It also got me and a friend thinking—"Just how bad is that weird thing he made at Carlo Ponti's villa in 1972?" The Foreign Region DVD Report was made for just such questions, and coincidentally enough, an excellent British disc of What?—which might be more fun to refer to as Che?, now that I think of it—has just come out. Among many other things, it is not the first item I'd put in a box of evidence to prove what a nice guy the director is. A look at the film and a gratuitous slap at The Onion's Nathan Rabin await you at The Auteurs'.
By the way—try as I might, I can't quite place the actor above. A little help?
Previous installments here, here, and here.
Farber: "Howard Hawks's science-fiction quickie directed by Christian Nyby; fast, crisp and cheap, without any progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness in the atomic age; good airplane take-offs and landings; wonderful shock effects (the plants that cry for human blood as human babies cry for milk); Kenneth Tobey's fine, unpolished performance as a nice, clean, lecherous American air-force officer; well-cast story, as raw and ferocious as Hawks' Scarface, about a battle of wits near the North Pole between a screaming banshee of a vegetable and an air-force crew that jabbers away as sharply and sporadically as Jimmy Cagney moves."
Those plants are still pretty unsettling.
I presume that this film needs no introduction. And I'm hardly the first person to note what an exhilaration it is to go through Farber on Film and read his smart, plain, piety-free analyses of future classics—stuff that became the building blocks not just of auteurism but of film studies in general. And stuff that's still crisp and enjoyable. The Thing From Another World remains one of the most engaging and watchable pictures of its kind. A lot of it has to do with the atmosphere. While Hawks is credited only as producer here, and never attempted to wrest any credit from director Nyby in interviews, that atmosphere has Hawks' stamp all over it. There are stretches here that make this, like the previously discussed His Kind of Woman, something of a great "hangout picture." The weather outside may be frightful at the Arctic outpost where most of the picture takes place, but inside there's cards and booze and banter (the sharp jabbering Farber evokes) and a very warm stove. The group dynamic remains pretty cozy even as the tension generated by the film's murderous alien visitor ratchets up. (It's interesting to that when Hawks idolizer John Carpenter essayed his own version of this story, that warmth was pretty much sucked out of the scenario straight away.)
One might expect that the one-girl-for-every-ten-or-so-boys ratio at the camp might generate some discontent, but no. The primary male-female relationship in the picture is between Tobey's Captain Hendry (as superb as Farber says) and Margaret Sheridan's Nikki, secretary to science crew chief Dr. Carrington. Their flirtation leads to the above bit, really a legendary episode in the Hawksian saga of the battle of the sexes, in which Nikki tries to elude Hendry's wandering hands by tying them behind his back before making cocktails for two. The open secret that is this relationship does little more than elicit some good-natured ribbing of Hendry from his men.
What splits the group up is...ideoogy. "The central conflict in The Thing is not between humanity and a destructive invader, but between two opposed concepts of value embodied in the two opposed groups whose clash the Thing precipitates." But by the picture's end it's Hendry's tough-minded pragmatism that wins the day and reunites the group, with only head scientist Carrington still insisting that there's too much to learn from the Thing to allow its destruction. His final pleading with the brutish being really makes him look like one of the cinema's Great Simps, but the film sorta/kinda forgives him—key line: "Good for you, Scotty."
This is all quite fascinating, and kudos to Charles Lederer's tight, unobtrusively smart script for evoking pretty complex philosophical/existential dilemmas so deftly. The sensationalism of the "frying" of the Thing at the end tends to make one forget about all the intellectual stuff (the special effects are simplicity itself, and yet it's still a striking, one-of-a-kind sequence). But don't forget that the film ends not on a note of triumphalism but with an admonition: "Keep watching the skies!" No, not exactly "progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness." (Jeez, can you imagine what a Mark Steyn could come up with if somebody reminded him of this film's existence?)
In the "You Know You're Old When..." department, you know you're old when you watch this film and you look at the guy above left and the phrase "Say the secret word" pops into your head. DIscuss in comments. The guy above right, by the way, is Paul Frees—second week in a row he's turned up in this Farber series!
The picture's available, for a ridiculously low price, in a good-looking but extras-free DVD from Warner.
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