Some Came Running

Brash "Blessed"

Mrs. Kenny didn't raise no fool (relatively speaking); when friend Daniel Kasman sent out an e-mail to various and sundry contributors to the very fine MUBI Notebook he oversees, asking for contributions to a guide to the Film Forum's summer Essential Pre-Code series, Mrs. Kenny's son jumped right on the great newsie comedy Blessed Event, knowing that EVERYBODY ELSE would be bidding to get in a paragraph on it: it's just that kind of film. Hence, out of a kind of spite for dibs comes the first thing I've written for the Notebook in a while, but don't get too excited, it's pretty short. On the other hand, do get excited, as other contributors to the guide include such sharpies as Gina Telaroli, Ben Sachs, Jaime Christley, Davids Cairns and Phelps, the always pleasant and easy-to-get-along-with Craig Keller, and others. Good reading, good viewing. I'm curious as to whether the print Film Forum is showing restores a couple of Jewish-baiting jokes uttered by Lee Tracy's gossip columnist character that were disappeared from the film in the bad old days of Turner tampering. Also, the movie' ALWAYS worth seeing again, and Warner Archive hasn't yet put it on disc, so, if you're in the tri-state area, you ought to go too. 

Image of the day, 4/22/11

Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, some extras, and various Feelies (visible: Dave Weckerman, Stanley Demeski, the top of Bill Million's hair) in Something Wild, Jonathan Demme, 1986. As much as I loved the fact that the Feelies were in this film as "The Willies," the high-school reunion band, I didn't think their music was represented as "accurately" as it might have been, even though that IS them playing; as galvanic as the sight of Dave singing Bowie's "Fame" is, it's not really what the group's about. I had forgotten, though, something very clever that Demme does at this point in the scene, right before villain Ray Liotta turns up; the lights go down, and the band starts in on the very evocative intro to the song "Loveless Love," which begins on a note of tentative lyricism and then grows more tense and propulsive. The music, and the people, change the mood even as the shot itself stays the same; Daniels and Griffith kiss, it's a magical moment, but then the sinister Liotta enters, frame right, circles behind and sidles into Griffith, just as Bill and Glenn Mercer's guitars are meshing and strumming just a little tighter and a little denser. Very cool. Olivier Assayas uses the same song to similar effect in Carlos.

The Feelies have an absolutely superb new album out (on both CD and vinyl), called Here Before; the Criterion edition of Something Wild comes out on standard-def DVD and Blu-ray on May 10.

Audrey Hitchcock

How To Steal A Million, William Wyler, 1966

Tales From The Warner Archives #9: "Stranger on the Third Floor" (Ingster, 1940) and "The Outfit" (Flynn, 1973); an Elisha Cook, Jr. double feature (sort of)

The ineffable Mr. Cook, Jr., does not spend a whole lot of his brief screen time in this exceptionally engaging RKO B-picture looking so chipper. Rather, up until precisely this point, he has been kicking and screaming and kicking and screaming and insisting "I didn't kill anybody!" and kicking and screaming some more. And then, in a lengthy German-Expressionist-inflected dream sequence, he sneers and snickers at the film's hero, who's about to get the chair for the murder that he himself accused Cook's character of, getting a bit of his own back with some "How YOU doin'?" sarcastic insolence. Cook plays a cabbie who's fingered by stolid but apparently insufficiently attentive hero John McGuire (and the character's a reporter, too; damn sloppy journalists...) and is not-quite-cooling his heels in the death house as McGuire's cutie girlfriend is menaced by the real killer and title character, played by Peter Lorre in one of his most seriously weirdly menacing turns. Proudly showing off his seriously bad teeth, indolently draping his long gray scarf around his neck, lunging for our heroine as if in the slow-motion of a smack-induced trance, his work here is part of why this picture is sometimes referred to as "the first true film noir" (and that is the quoted blurb on the back of the Warner Archive box). An arguable claim, for a lot of fairly obvious reasons we needn't get into here. As enjoyable as this picture is, it is not what you'd call an incredibly inspired piece of work. Which is part of what makes it so enjoyable. There is certainly some brilliance here, but also a lot of expedience, and it's the combination of the two that make this a kind of surreal experience. Because it's a B-picture and it's got to get its work done in like an hour and change, its narrative traffics in a kind of ruthless efficiency (to use the wonderful phrase from the Monty Python "Spanish Inquisition" sketch) that creates, among other effects, breakneck, seemingly arbitrary changes in tone, as when the hero's interior monologue begins, 19 minutes into the action. (Said monologue features the immortal reflection, "Lotta people live in Brooklyn. Why couldn't I?") These shifts give the picture as a whole a peculiarly, and I'd say largely uninitentional, alienated surreal feel. Nothing is weirder, however...and I guess this should be classified as a spoiler...than Cook's transformation at the end. The once surly and manic fellow—not that he didn't have a damn good reason to be—has had his name cleared, and his job as a taxi driver (!) reinstated. Waiting outside the diner where the newlywed hero and heroine have said their goodbyes to the neighborhood, he's genuinely eager to show the man who almost had him executed that he doesn't hold anything even resembling a grudge. Offering the couple a ride, he practically screeches, "This one's...ON THE HOUSE!" The pause there indicates that maybe all is not as well as he would like it to look, and that maybe he's gonna drive them all off of a bridge after they get in. We never do find out. 

 

Cook is somewhat more consistently low-key in his even smaller part in John Flynn's 1973 The Outfit, a particular aspect of which was discussed here. Playing the counterman at a rural diner overseen by Joe Don Baker's character, he expresses very Cook-ish suspicion at the two bogus "hunters" who ooze in looking for his boss. Baker makes quick work of the pair (not in the way you might think, though; one of the ways this is such a refreshing film is the resourcefulness shown by its criminal class—part and parcel, of course, of the Richard Stark "Parker" novels, one of which is the source material for this picture). This post-noir picture features a really exemplary group of glorious classic presences in bit and supporting roles: aside from Cook, there's Jane Greer from Out of the Past, Marie Windsor, who did Cook very wrong in The Killing, Robert Ryan, Timothy Carey (also in The Killing, as you'll recall),Henry frigging Jones, and more, and more still. (And Army Archerd as Ryan's butler!) Despite this near-parade of seemingly referential cameos, one never gets the feeling of being winked at, as one often does in the post-Tarantino age of supporting-role stunt/homage casting; all of these pros act like they belong. Because they do.

In any event, a better-than-solid anti-policier, happily replete with scenes and dialogue snatches very well transplanted from the book, and one or two zingers that the filmmakers appear to have come up with themselves. One favorite in the latter category: "Goddamn you, why'd you have to kill him?" "He owed me money."

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.

More dissolves

My post below, inspired by a happenstance viewing of Michael Curtiz's great 1939 Dodge City, inspired some astute commentary both on and off its thread. Some readers were moved to cite their own favorite dissolves. A particularly persuasive citation, drawn from Orson Welles' 1941 Citizen Kane, by commenter Charles Hartney:

"The scene in question occurs during Kane's first encounter with Susan Alexander, when she provides him hot water and he the necessary comic relief to alleviate her toothache. He starts to question her about her age, her occupation, what she wanted to be when she was little - "A singer," she responds sheepishly - and then asks that she sing for him in the parlor.

Susan begins to sing as Kane regards her approvingly, though her voice is tinny and her piano-playing unintentionally dissonant. It is here where Welles inserts a dissolve, and the resulting scene is very familiar: Susan at the piano, singing the same song, and Kane rapt with attention. But the scenery is changed: we are no longer in Susan's claustrophobic parlor, but in a more refined, capacious environment. Susan has changed as well: her dress is more elegant, her piano playing and singing smoother, more melodic, confident.

These elements suggest a number of narrative developments: a significant passage of time; that Susan has been given the freedom (see: money) to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a singer; and not only the continuation but the deepening of the relationship between Susan and Charles - he has obviously moved her into more luxurious surroundings.

Watching Kane for the I-don't-know-how-many-th time, it struck me what a formal marvel this transition was. To communicate so much with so little...astonishing."

Here are screen captures of the, let's say two-and-a-half shots in question:

 

 

 

Indeed, a whole dissertation could be written on the change of interior lighting apparatuses alone...

In an e-mail, my friend Joseph Failla notes quite a few things: "One of my favorite dissolves (can you believe I have favorite dissolves?) is in SEVEN CHANCES [1925] when Keaton gets behind the wheel of his auto and instead of driving off, the background dissolves to the location of his destination without any movement at all. It's a weird moment that at first feels very disorienting but actually makes plenty of sense in an absurd kind of way..."

 

  
"...If this simple technique doesn't get one to think of the possibilities of the medium, I don't know what would." Joe continues: 

Buñuel and Buster

Buster Keaton in College, 1927

"Much has been said about technique in films like Metropolis and Napoleon. No one ever talks about technique in films like College, and that is because the achievements are so indissolubly mixed with other elements that we aren't even aware of them, just as we don't give thought to the strength ratings of the building materials for a house we are living in. The super-films serve as a lesson to technicians; Keaton's films give lessons to reality itself, with or without the techniques of reality." 

—Luis Buñuel, "Buster Keaton's College," Cahiers d'art, no.10, 1927, reprinted in An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, University of California Press, 2000

Robert Hommet in Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel, 1929

Image of the day, 5/26/10

Got alienation? 

From Antonioni's 1964 Red Desert, of course; grabbed off of the standard-def version of the new Criterion edition, which will also be on Blu-ray. Screen capture courtesy of the new CD/DVD drive installed to my computer by the fine and fast fellows at The Mac Support Store, a real godsend for Brooklyn-based Mac users who are like to have a stroke at the prospect of hauling their desktop over to Manhattan's TekServe. Anyway, they got the job done beautifully, and in what seemed the blink of an eye. As for price, well, with Mac stuff it is what it is, and even taking that into consideration I hardly feel ripped off. Still, it was an unanticipated expense that impels me to sheepishly mention that there's a tip jar module in the right column of this blog. And let me thank, by the way, the wonderful folks who've already thrown some coin in there; the consideration is much appreciated.

Posting will be on the light-ish side heading into the holiday weekend, in part due to the holiday weekend, in part due to Other Professional Demands, and in part due to the bigger-than-I-had-anticipated (and I anticipated pretty big) job of doing this site's first ever Blu-ray Consumer Guide. Which I hope to unveil by this time next week.

UPDATE: The particular qualities of the above image worry our friend David Hare, who in comments confesses to being "terrified" that Criterion applied "a whole lot of digital cleanup" to the film, which displays plenty of what we aficionados call "good grain" in the BFI-issued edition. As I said, I haven't looked at the Criterion Desert entire, nor done a side-by-side comparison with the other version, but here's another screen cap from later in the same scene that I hope gives David a little bit of an answer:

Comrades, let us seize the time

What tumultuous, nay, can we say even even revolutionary event, could compel the elusive and brilliant Self-Styled Siren to reveal her true, or, rather, her civilian identity? You know it's got to be big, you weepy old Bolshy. Get all the news here and here, go set your DVR, and fix yourself a White Russian. Nostrovia! And congrats to the Siren and her co-conspirator Lou Lumenick.

Bearded in his own den

Here's Dominique Thomas and Ella Creton in Catherine Breillat's imaginative, provocative, shocking, and hilarious adaptation of Perrault's fairy tale, Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard). I caught it at the New York Film Festival and think it a stone masterpiece, a film Breillat was absolutely born to make. (I remember the producer Jeremy Thomas once asking me, "Don't you want to see David Cronenberg make a film of Ballard's Crash?" and replying, "Oh yes, please;" I can imagine giving a similar response had someone asked me about wanting to see a Breillat Bluebeard. Sometimes dreams DO come true!) The picture's being released in the U.S. by Strand some time next year, the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned. I spoke with Breillat, always one of my favorite interview subjects, about the film when she was in New York earlier this month, and she was fascinating and fierce as always. Here is the interview, courtesy of The Auteurs'.