Some Came Running

The McCarey Treatment: "An Affair to Remember," "Love Affair," And "Sleepless in Seattle"

Some time after my book Made Men: The Story of 'Goodfellas' was published, my editor at Hnover Square Press and I were discussing a followup, and I thought it would be fun to do something counterintuitive. The 30th anniversary of the release of Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle was nigh. The movie interested me for a number of reasons, not least of them being its links to classical Hollywood. Specifically the way the whole plot hinges on that of two prior films directed by Leo McCarey. I also had a wonderful experience with Nick Pileggi, the patriarch of Goodfellas who had been Ephron's husband until her death in 2012. He thought the project a good idea, gave me a couple of contacts, and stepped aside. He insisted that his and Ephron's professional activities had almost no crossover. (This despite Ephron taking enthusiastic interest in Nick's mob-chronicling work, and crafting the script of My Blue Heaven around her own personal experience of Henry Hill.)

The project was fun for a little while, and then less fun, and then a bit nightmarish. I'm not inclined to detail it here. Well — one thing was that nobody in the cast would speak with me and every behind-the-scenes individual I did interview had an axe or two to grind with respect to Ephron. The best part of the process was interviewing Calvin Trillin, a hero of mine who has a small role in Sleepless, and who said to me, unprompted, about his friend, "Nora was bossy."

Anyway, At a certain point I gave it up and started work on what has recently been published as The World Is Yours: The Story of 'Scarface.' Fun! 

But I shouldn't let what work I did do on the Sleepless project go to waste, and I have been neglecting this poor blog for quite some time (although a new Blu-ray-4K Ultra Consumer Guide is in fact in the works and should be up before the end of August). So I give you my chapter on the McCarey films, keeping the bracketed source citations that would have gone in the back of the actual book intact just so you can see how scrupulous I am. 

 

            One of the most affectionately cited scenes in Sleepless in Seattle is the one on which it’s the guys’ turn to talk about An Affair to Remember. It may indeed have had an inordinate and not salutary effect on mainstream intragender movie discourse

            “It’s a chick movie” is how Sam describes it. That’s enough, in his mind, and the mind of his brother-in-law Greg, played by Victor Garber, to dismiss it entirely. Not in a malicious, shoot-it-into-the-sun way; they just would prefer it not sully their consciousnesses too much. They’ll sit through such an item if necessary — it’s a generous gesture on date night — but that’s it. After sister-in-law Suzy, played by Rita Wilson, Hanks’ wife in real life, goes through an elaborate, emotional monologue on the heartbreaking qualities of Affair — one that we have been primed for by the conversations between Annie and Becky about the picture — Sam and Greg jokingly describe their emotional responses to mid-60s action blockbuster. “I cried at the end of The Dirty Dozen,” Victor Garber’s Greg says of the Robert-Aldrich-directed World War II picture about a suicide squad of largely psychotic misfits, most of whom indeed do buy it by the picture’s end. Tom Hanks’ Sam invokes cast member Trini Lopez as having endured a particularly poignant end. Lopez, a pop star who rocketed to superstardom playing Latin-tinged fare, was one of two bits of stunt casting in Dozen; the other was record-breaking fullback Jim Brown, who of course was obliged to show off his remarkable running-with-something-in-his-hands skills (in this case a series of grenades rather than a football) for the movie’s thrilling climax.

            “Stop it you guys,“ Suzy says after a bit, still sniffling. The banter, however, is good natured; not the out-for-blood culture war stuff you see too frequently on social media nowadays.

            If you’ve read Nora Ephron’s essays, and seen the movies she made, the casual allusions they contain would incline you to believe that weaving An Affair to Remember into the narrative of Sleepless in Seattle was her idea. I myself was a little surprised to learn from Jeff Arch that the device was indeed his, and that it went back to an experience he had in his late teens, watching Affair on television with his girlfriend. The movie, he says, struck him as improbably sentimental drivel throughout. And yet at the end he found himself reduced to tears. And that’s the difference between Arch and the Sleepless guys: they do not melt at the end of Affair. (Nor, we can confidently infer, do they cry at the end of The Dirty Dozen.)

            Arch recalls: “I was watching on TV with a girlfriend in college, in 1974. At one point I was just so fed up and I thought this was so hokey. I was cynical and I turned to her – I'm a Sagittarius, and we’re known for not knowing when to shut up. I was about to make the biggest crack about what a crock of shit this thing is, and I saw she was crying like Niagara Falls. One of the few times in my life where I didn’t say the thing I was going to say because I saw the power of that. And then I got kind of into the device — you know, it is a very powerful structurally thing. And then we talked. While we were really close, I had the girlfriend out of town and she had the boyfriend out at a different college.   And I said to her, “Look, if our lives don't work out, we’ll meet at the top of the Empire State Building on New Years’ Day of 1980,” which seems — when you’re in 1974 and you’re 19 or 20 years old — like a really, really long time.

            “She said, ‘Sure.’ And we didn’t meet, because things…worked out differently. Then at some point, had an idea to write a play about two people who only speak to each other on the phone for business, and then eventually meet. I couldn’t figure out how to do that. I just had this visual of their desks on stage starting at extreme ends and as the play moved on, their debts were going to move closer. So I had an idea of people falling in love before they met each other, with that pretext.”

            An Affair to Remember, a lush, widescreen and color affair made for 20^th Century Fox, is arguably a swan song of American romantic cinema, or comedy, or tragicomedy. The 1957 movie and its original Love Affair, from 1939, were both conceived, co-written and directed by Leo McCarey, a director elevated to reassessment in the 1960s when Andrew Sarris pronounced him a “Far Side of Paradise” auteur in The American Cinema: Directors and Direction 1929 to 1968 and Peter Bogdanovich recorded an oral history with McCarey for the American Film Institute. McCarey’s movies ran the gamut; he began as a director of Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts, gave the Marx Brothers their collective anarchic heads in Duck Soup, waved the flag in a heartwarming and funny fashion in Ruggles of Red Gap, made romantic comedy a little less screwball than Howard Hawks did with The Awful Truth.

            An Affair to Remember at least in part exists because of a regret that Cary Grant carried with him for a couple of decades. In 1937 Grant worked with director Leo McCarey on the classic screwball comedy The Awful Truth, co-starring with Irene Dunne. Grant’s experience was, from his perspective, less than ideal. McCarey had an improvisational approach that Grant wasn’t used to. He visited the set of the 1939 Love Affair and saw what wonders the McCarey touch achieved with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne and pictured himself in the Boyer role.

            On an audio commentary recorded for a DVD edition of Sleepless in Seattle, Nora Ephron says “film snobs think Love Affair is better than An Affair to Remember but nothing to me is as good as Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.” You can’t call Leo McCarey a film snob, but he too preferred Love Affair to Affair to Remember. Displaying what F. Scott Fitzgerald considered the hallmark of a first-rate intelligence (that is, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head and still retain the ability to function), McCarey also allowed, in his way, that Cary Grant was the ideal star to sell this tale. He had written the role of Nicky for Charles Boyer, yes. But, as he told Peter Bogdanovich: “Boyer came out much better than Cary. But Cary meant a lot more at the box office.” One could argue in the case of An Affair To Remember, that this wasn’t merely reflexive; watching Love Affair today, there’s a sense in which Boyer’s performance feels less than contemporary, while Grant (possibly in part because his persona is still considered and experienced as archetypal) has more enduring credibility. To be more specific, Boyer’s stateliness is particularly to pertinent to the religiosity of Love Affair which is largely absent in Affair to Remember and, let’s be frank, would have likely been a turn off to the characters in Sleepless.

            McCarey and Grant worked together again twice after Truth, on the Garson Kanin-directed My Favorite Wife (which McCarey developed, helped write, and was set to direct; an automobile accident put him, according to second female lead Gail Patrick, “at death’s door,” [James Bawden, Films in Review, 1981] but he remained as producer) and Once Upon A Honeymoon.  As much as McCarey and Grant had not gotten along on Truth, it’s been argued that McCarey, a dapper dresser who could be hilarious and insouciant before the film industry and alcoholism stressed him out of shape, helped shape what became known as the Grant persona. The confidence, the swings between understatement and manic comic indignation, the style, the walk — all these aspects of what we consider the quintessential Grant persona are honed to perfection in Grant’s performance in The Awful Truth. Director Alfred Hitchcock, whom McCarey is on the record as admiring, refined these aspects of Grant’s screen personality even further.

            And except for the clothes sense, apparently few if any of the personality traits we see in Grant on screen were manifested by Grant in real life. In his sometimes acid memoir, Dropped Names, Frank Langella recalls dining with Tony Curtis, who had idolized Grant growing up and eventually worked with him on Blake Edwards’ 1959 Operation Petticoat. Because it was a “huge hit” Curtis allowed that he would have worked with Grant again anytime, he was astonished at the gap between the man and his screen persona. “The guy turns out to be a fucking bore,” Langella quotes Curtis. “He knew better than all of us where to put the camera, how to say the line, how to play the scene. He had no humor and no charm. I would do anything to avoid having lunch with him.” Langella had heard similarly from Mel Brooks. “I thought I’d kill myself if I had to eat a meal with this guy again.”  [Langella pg. 308]

            McCarey responded “Impossible” to Bogdanovich when asked what Grant was like to work with on The Awful Truth. By the same token, at this point in his career, Grant might have considered McCarey similarly. In the second volume of his biography of Bing Crosby — whose public persona was humongously enhanced by his portrayal of kindly but hip priest Father O’Malley in McCarey’s hit Going My Way and its sequel The Bells of Saint Mary’s — Gary Giddins writes: “McCarey’s method of shooting […] demanded more concentration than memorizing a script. Leo’s actors related similar anecdotes attesting to the mood on his sets. George Burns wrote of W.C. Fields sitting by himself in a corner, learning his lines during the filming of Six of a Kind; he had given up learning them at home the night before after he realized they changed every day. Ralph Bellamy groused that on The Awful Truth, nobody but McCarey knew what was going on. On The Milky Way, McCarey acted out for Adolph Menjou a long, illogical speech he wanted him to deliver for his big scene with Harold Lloyd. After he ‘did it for me with all the gestures,’ Menjou wrote, McCarey asked, ‘Why not adlib it,’ as it’s all ‘hocus pocus’ anyway? ‘Maybe,’ Leo joked, ‘we’ve discovered a new technique…. The McCarey system, the ultimate in the true are of making motion pictures.’ Menjou summed it up: ‘He was kidding about the new technique [but] he wasn’t kidding about adlibbing the scene.’” [pg 344, Giddins]

            The set of An Affair To Remember was not so confusing, in part because Grant and Kerr already had a template to work from: the original Love Affair. Both films hinge on two substantial plot components: the ocean cruise on which the lovers, separated from their land-based obligations, romantic and otherwise, and locked in a kind of romantic isolation that’s only enhanced by a visit to a venerated relation, and the proposed rendezvous at the Empire State Building.

            These were visions that occurred to McCarey while returning from a European vacation with his wife Stella. The time off — they departed from Hollywood in October of 1937 — was well-deserved and much needed. McCarey had not one but two masterpieces out that year, one being The Awful Truth and the other the heartbreaking tragedy of old age Make Way For Tomorrow, a still-devastating picture about the inverse of parental neglect of children that reportedly inspired the Yasuhiro Ozu classic Tokyo Story. McCarey was fond of both pictures but held Tomorrow closest to his heart — he was to remark, when accepting the Best Director award for Truth in March of 1938, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”

            As much as he needed, and got, some rest and relaxation his trip, on the cruise back to the States something was gnawing at him. And Stella noticed. McCarey recalled to Bogdanovich his wife saying, “You’re always at you lowest ebb when you’re trying to get a new idea.” [Bog pg 417] After a period of stewing, he got the new idea. Here’s how he put it to Stella: “Suppose you and I were talking to each other when the boat sailed from England and we got to know each other on the trip. We felt ourselves inseparable. By the time the trip was over, we were madly in love with each other but by the time the boat docked we have found out that each is obligated to somebody else.” [Bog.pg 417]

            The Empire State Building idea came later. At the end of the cruise, when McCarey looked at the Manhattan skyline (the same skyline, minus the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, that inspired Fritz Lang to concoct Metropolis; Lang’s first sight of it was in 1924). And from there he concocted the twist: Terri’s inability to make the rendezvous there because of being incapacitated in an auto accident. “I have a theory,” McCarey told Bogdanovich, “which I call the ineluctability of incidents. The idea is that if something happens, some other thing inevitable flows from it — like night follows day; events are linked together. I always develop my stories that way, in a series of events that succeed and provoke each other. I never really have intrigues.” [Bog., pg 416] Terri’s disappearance is certainly a provoking incident. But it’s one that Nicky takes to be an intrigue, freezing him — and her — up when they run into each other at a concert, before their painful and glorious rediscovery of each other and reconciliation.  

            With these ideas in place, McCarey fleshed out the story with Mildred Cram, then turned over screenwriting duties to Donald Ogden Stewart (who helped adapt Holiday, the Philip Barry play which George Cukor filmed with Grant and Katharine Hepburn) and Delmar Daves. It would take almost a year for McCarey’s notions to hit a soundstage: The shooting of the film then titled Love Match commenced on October 3, 1938. While gossip columnists reported that the female lead was coveted by actresses ranging from Greta Garbo to Helen Hayes [Gehring, pg. 139] McCarey had,” hand-tailored” for Love Affair his Awful Truth star Irene Dunne, “which included making her a nightclub entertainer in order that Irene could sing during the picture.” [Bog pg 417] He did not tailor Nicky to Cary Grant. Indeed, the ebullience inherent in Dunne notwithstanding, McCarey biographer Wes D. Gehring sees in the creation of Love Affair McCarey steering to a more overtly and comprehensive sincerity: “Romantic comedy’s one-foot-in-reality-base suited McCarey better than the ludicrousness of screwball farce,” he avers.

            The resultant film was received rhapsodically, and not just by film snobs, either. Gehring cites a characteristic contemporary review from Clark Wales of the trade publication Screen and Radio Weekly: “Recommending a Leo McCarey production is something like recommending a million dollars or beauty or a long and happy life. Any of these is a very fine thing to have and the only trouble is that there are not enough of them.” While box-office figures are not readily available, the movie proved to be the second-most popular to be produced and distributed by RKO Pictures, the first having been George Stevens’ Kipling-inspired adventure picture Gunga Din, which starred…Cary Grant.

            McCarey’s 1940s were defined by the two blockbusters Going My Way and The Bells of Saint Mary’s, after which he made Good Sam, another fantasia of Catholic faith (“Sam,” besides being the name of the lead character played by Gary Cooper, stood for “Samaritan”). It was less well-received and indeed has not been subjected to any meaningful critical reassessment. One can picture McCarey at that low ebb, looking for ideas as the 1950s commenced. Gehring speculates about the reasons for McCarey’s reduced productivity. Alcoholism, and an increasing dependence on painkillers that he began using in the wake of the 1939 auto accident that had taken him out of the director’s chair on My Favorite Wife. McCarey also suffered a terrible personal loss in the months after the release of Good Sam: the suicide death of his younger brother, Ray, with whom he had been close. And of course there was what film historian Joseph McBride has called (with respect to McCarey’s friend and colleague Frank Capra) “the catastrophe of success.” Going My Way and Bells had been such monumental, zeitgeist-defining hits that McCarey was very possibly torn between the impulse to try to duplicate them and the desire to break free of them. Hence, as Gehring puts it, he pursued “some very odd unrealized film proposals.” One being a picture about Adam and Eve — he’d privately hatched the idea in the thirties — starring Bells female lead Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne. McCarey spent a lot of money on research, and on the talents of songwriter Harry Warren, developing a musical about Marco Polo. He also wanted his friend Alfred Hitchcock to act for him, in a picture in which the Master of Suspense would “get away with the perfect crime.” [Gehring, pg. 219].

            In any event, his first realized picture of the 1950s was 1952’s My Son John, a HUAC-boosting anti-Communist family melodrama whose production was highly inconvenienced by the death of leading man Robert Walker prior to the end of principal photography. McCarey was forced to cobble together his finale, in which John sees the error of his Red ways, from footage in his friend Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and to contemporary eyes the hedging and splicing is very plain to see, and somewhat cringe-inducing. Would the picture have been less so had Walker lived to complete his performance? Difficult to say. To these eyes, John is the movie in which the patriotism of Ruggles of Red Gap curdles into paranoia. Its my-country-right-or-wrong ethos is blunt to the point of bathos, and as the critic Robin Wood has pointed out, it’s almost completely contradicted in the late McCarey film Rally Round The Flag, Boys, which just underscores how impossible it is to expect coherent politics out of a lot of classical Hollywood filmmakers. John got a bit of a shellacking from the press but was placed in the top ten films of 1952 list by the ever-mysterious National Board of Review, and got an award from the Catholic Institute of the Press because of course it did. Its box office was low.

            1952 was also the year in which rumors of a Love Affair remake began circulating: in November of that year, syndicated columnist Joe Hyams reported that Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl, who would marry in 1952 (and present the world with future prime time soap sensation Lorenzo Lamas four years later) were interested in starring in a new version of the picture. But it was Twentieth Century Fox and Cary Grant who were the motors for the 1957 movie. In his 1984 biography of Grant, Haunted Idol, Geoffrey Wansell writes that Grant “could still remember visiting the set of the original to talk with Irene Dunne and wishing he had been playing in it.”

            In McCarey’s estimation, Grant went from “impossible” to “terrific” in An Affair to Remember. The remake, as was customary from Twentieth Century Fox since its introduction of the format in 1953, was in breathtaking widescreen CinemaScope and glorious DeLuxe Color (this was a one-strip variant of Technicolor, which required three strips of film being exposed at once, in synch with each other). The sound was Westrex stereo, showcasing the sumptuous voice of Vic Damone singing the title song, music by Harry Warren and lyrics in part by McCarey himself. This was McCarey’s first time out with color and widescreen, and ace cinematographer Milton Krasner, who’d been working in the CinemaScope format since its beginnings — lensing the melodrama/romantic travelogue Three Coins in the Fountain and the sword-and-sandal Christianity epic Demetrius and the Gladiators (directed, as it happens, by Delmer Daves) practically back to back for 1954 releases — grounded the visuals beautifully. The technical “improvements” aside, McCarey saw the remake as an opportunity to reach a new audience. He told Bogdanovich, “A lot of people said it was the best love story they ever saw on screen — and it’s also my favorite love story. Two decades had passed; a lot of young people couldn’t have seen the first version, so I felt I should tell the story again — for them.” Prior to shooting the picture, he told the New York Times that contemporary Hollywood was “afraid of honest emotion. It’s considered old-fashioned if a fellow takes his hat off to kiss a girl. They all seem to be trying to find a trick way to say ‘I love you.’ What are they trying to prove? Love is the oldest and noblest emotion.” (Eventually, when asked to name his favorites among his pictures, McCarey would reflect, “Well, I guess Make Way For Tomorrow, Love Affair, An Affair to Remember, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s. There are moments I like in all the films. I’ve always said, if only I could make a picture out of just the favorite moments.”)

            If leading lady Deborah Kerr was hard-pressed to reproduce the ebullience of Irene Dunne (and indeed, while Terry remains a singer in the remake, she’s an altogether more subdued kind than Dunne — not quite lounge as opposed to nightclub, but certainly more of a natural balladeer in attitude; her singing voice was dubbed by the perennial Marni Nixon), she certainly could sell nobility without breaking a sweat.

            As for Cary Grant, he was, as he entered his early fifties, arguably at his apogee as a screen star. If we agree that Affair was his peak as a romantic lead, we can note that in North By Northwest, produced a few years after Affair, represented his apotheosis as a Hitchcock lead. These achievements help explain why, for Ephron, Affair was the Hollywood Romantic Film and a superior iteration of Love Affair. Affair to Remember starred an all-caps Cary Grant. As much as Boyer had been in vogue after Pepe Le Moko and Algiers, he never quite made it to all-caps status. (By 1957 Boyer had moved into supporting roles in film; see his work as a fatherly but not quite competent sanitarium administrator in Vincente Minnelli’s 1955 The Cobweb. He had also made himself a tidy sum in television production.)

A few words on "The Arrangement"

Kirk and Kirk

On May 25th I had the honor of presenting, at the great NY moviehouse The Metrograph, Elia Kazan's 1969 The Arrangement. These are the program notes for the show: 

“Plastic people! Oh baby now you’re such a drag!” So bellowed The Mothers of Invention in 1967. That same year Elia Kazan issued a not dissimilar cri de coeur in his doorstop-size novel “The Arrangement,” which he adapted into a film two years later. In Kazan’s complaint,  Kirk Douglas’ compulsively adulterous ad exec mounts his own rebellion against a values system that has made him affluent but empty. Is this a frantic, truculent indulgence? A film maudit of monumental proportions? Kazan’s own Skidoo? You have see this rarely-screened curio to find out.

A few of you out there have been kind enough to inquire if I could make my pre-screening remarks available in prose form. I worked from what I regard as loose notes, but I cleaned them up into something resembling what I said and/or an actual text. See below. 

In my program notes I quoted Frank Zappa’s “Plastic People.” Here’s another Zappa quote: “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

Why The Arrangement? Why now?

This screening came about as a result of some casual conversations I had with Jake Perlin, one of the programmers here. I had a book idea I’d been toying with, about the Great Hollywood Directors— Hitchcock, Preminger, Wyler, Kazan, and more — and the ways that they, and their work, reacted beginning in the early ‘60s when (and Preminger’s efforts had a lot to do with this in the first place) the Production Code imploded and these filmmakers had the freedom to do things that they’d never been allowed to do. In Hitchcock’s case, for instance, you have the morbidly explicit rape scene of Frenzy. With Preminger you have the explorations of Skidoo and the Burgess Meredith nude scene in Such Good Friends. With Kazan, you have The Arrangement.

Now this movie didn’t start with a compulsion to break boundaries in filmmaking. Kazan, in the mid ‘60s, had what he considered a profound sense of dissatisfaction in his life which he channeled into a novel, which happened to coincide with a shifting zeitgeist. His marriage to Molly Kazan had ended with her death in 1963; he subsequently married Barbara Loden in 1967. He had a lot of tortured feelings concerning both relationships, which he details in his fascinating autobiography. In The Arrangement he wrestles with not just those feelings but a larger disgust with the phoniness of American life. Status symbols, affluence, their stifling influence on interpersonal relationships, particularly those of love. Which were coming into collision with the counterculture, which believed love should be free.

Now you’re wondering if Jake and I were discussing these issues. No.

This program was supposed to have been a double feature. The second feature was to have been 1960’s Strangers When We Meet, directed by Richard Quine and starring Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Barbara Rush, Ernie Kovacs and Walter Matthau. Written by Evan Hunter, whose estate, we have discovered, now retains the rights to the film.

Quine is what a friend of mine has called a  “major minor” Hollywood director and Strangers is one of his best, a work of great sensitivity and prescience. While The Arrangement knocks over its metaphors like a drunk entering a darkened living room and stumbling over the furniture, Strangers brings a real deftness to the whole work/love/integrity theme. And its treatment of insidious sexism —Kim Novak’s character is all but persecuted for looking like, well, Kim Novak — is also very sharp.

So that was supposed to be the idea — the sexual revolution, 1960 and 1969, with Kirk Douglas the iconic bracketing. But we could not find a 35 print of Strangers, so here we are.

One of the rather nastier features of The Arrangement is its treatment of Deborah Kerr. If you thought her having to almost yodel “Doodle me James” in the 1966  Casino Royale was undignified, get a load of what she goes through here.  Kazan’s novel put across a certain amount of complexity on top of its baseline sexism, but in the film this too often translates into an attitude of  “Why must I, a new man with new ideas, be saddled with an OLD WIFE?”

The movie’s pre-echoes of Network are not limited to a particular manifestation of misogyny, but with Faye Dunaway as the object of desire that quality is hard to ignore. Neither film bothers to recognize that it’s the male-constructed power structures that help make the bitches that so bewitch the hapless middle-aged male. At least Strangers tries to bust its characters out of circumscribed gender roles, recognizes the oppression.

Michael Higgins, later  of Wanda, plays the Douglas character’s brother Michael; look for an uncredited Barry Sullivan…Richard Boone, six months younger than Douglas, plays Douglas’ dad, and look, there’s practically teenage Michael Murphy as a priest!

Just when you think it’s peaked, the movie  gets weirder. When Dunaway is setting a table for Douglas and Boone you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

Joni Mitchell was commissioned to write a song for the movie, and she did. It wasn’t used in the film, but the song “The Arrangement” appears on Court and Spark and bemoans the “credit card and the swimming pool in the backyard.”

REACTIONS

From the NYPL Perf Arts clippings file…

Judith Crist: “126 minutes of sturm, drang and banality and about as turgid a job of soap-suds cinema to be found outside of Peyton Place reruns”

“The sight of a 44-year-old wallowing in self-searchings that would embarrass today’s 14-year-old by its simple-mindedness is simply boring”

“As a neophyte novelist, Kazan was entitled to a trash wallow, but his spreading The Arrangement over the big screen is inexcusable”  — New York mag Nov 24, 1969

John Simon: “ a senseless and banal story that reels from platitude to platitude”

My old friend Joseph Failla wrote to me:  “You sure don't pick the easy ones to present, I've seen THE ARRANGEMENT and thought it was great. I know late Kazan becomes difficult but I've never understood Maltin's bomb rating either.Compelling from the opening moments till it's dreamy, hallucinatory conclusion. My favorite touch, Kirk's Batman style punch up in a bar.”

Not in a bar, as it happens, but imagined by Kurt as he looks into Dunaway’s NYC apartment window and sees a man (future Lars von Trier day player John Randolph Jones) in there.  

The myth of the consecrated movie theater

Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton, 1955

The digital guru and blogger Anil Dash has raised hackles in cinephile circles today with a lengthy and rhetorically free-wheeling (to say the least) post called "Sushers: Wrong about movies. Wrong about the world." In this post he expresses a good deal of disapprobation against "regressive resistance to cultural challenges." (One of Dash's most lively rhetorical devices involves unpacking a lot of sophisticated language, which reflects well on his sophistication and vocabulary, but showing an extreme disinterest in what that language might imply against his argument, as in, for instance, what constitutes the difference between a "culture" and a "civilization," or what the difference might be between those entities and a "society" or even, heavens to Betsy, a "civil society." But, you know, if I drag Heideggerean concepts such as "authentic being" versus "inauthentic being" into this argument, we're gonna be here all day, so let's just table the observation for now.) In this case the regressive resistance is to people who want to pay money to go into a movie theater and treat the place like their living room: talk, text, do pretty much anything except engage with what's on screen. OK, Dash is cool if they wanna engage with what's on screen; he expresses almost awed delight, if not exactly pure solidarity, with an ostnsibly adult male who stood up and cheered at a robot's announcement of self-hood during a Transformers picture. Later, Dash sniffs, "When I saw Jiro Dreams of Sushi [sic] in a theater with only a handful of others in the audience, there was considerably less of that kind of dramatic response, but I liked that film very much as well. It’s fine for there to be movies that encourage quiet contemplation, too. If someone had pulled out a phone during the screening, it wouldn’t have bothered me at all. Maybe someone did, and I didn’t notice." It's great for Dash that he's capable of being so, you know, Zen. and I'm not being entirely sarcastic here; by the end of this piece I'll be recommending that you, too, adapt a similar approach. The good news for ME, personally, is that if Jiro Dreams of Sushi is Amil Dash's idea of an ideal quietly contemplative sinematic experience, there's little chance that I'm going to be sharing cinema theater space with the guy anytime soon. 

Back when he was expressing doubts about the viability of home video equipment to reproduce cinematic experiences, Steven Spielberg compared the movie theater to a church, or perhaps a cathedral; I can't find the quote, but I feel pretty solid on it. In the recent book of Henry Jaglom's conversations with the great filmmaker Orson Welles, Welles, who throughout the book makes small jabs at young filmmakers for whom film culture is the only culture, recalls a much less sacrosanct age of moviegoing as it was done in New York City in the 1930s. "In my real moviegoing ays, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night. Like you'd go in to have a drink at the bar. Every movie theater was partially empty. We never asked what time the movie began. We used to go after we went to the theater. We'd go to the Paramount where they had a double bill, and see the B-pictures, and go to laugh at bad acting in the Bs. You know, childish, stupid things. [...] We'd leave when we'd realize, "This is where we came in.' Everybody said that. I loved movies for that reason. They didn't cost that much, so if you didn't like one, it was, 'Let's do something else. Go to another movie.' And that's what made it habitual to such an extent that walking out of a movie was what for people now is like turning off the television set." You also see, in the film writing by the French Surrealists, descriptions of how guys like Breton or Eluard would walk in during the middle of a picture, with no idea of what it was, the better to bring on the "derangement of the senses" they were in a Grail-like search for. None of which is the same thing as talking or texting during a movie, but bear with me for a moment. 

I am not a historian so I cannot even begin to pinpoint the time during which the notion of the movie theater as a consecrated space came into being. But given certain cultural signifiers—the movie line confrontation scene in Annie Hall, for instance, and that movie's lead character Alvie Singer's neurotic refusal to enter a theater once the opening credits of a picture have begun—I infer that the art film, the repertory cinema, and the counterculture all had something to do with it. As for the end of the idea of the movie theater as a consecrated space, I could guess that future historians will pinpoint Susan Sontag's 1996 New York Times Magazine piece "The Decay of Cinema" as the green flag in the race to the end of it all. What Sontag experienced as the death of cinephilia has become, for a generation more than once removed from her own, a miniaturization and privatization, as it were, of cinephilia, with the theatrical experience and all its multiform glories and discontents being just one aspect of it. I'm old enough to have experienced both kinds, and while in many respect I prefer the thing that Sontag lamented, I'm not entirely discontent with the other. What one misses, increasingly, is something that may have always been a kind of willed delusion anyway: that in giving over our rapt attention to a screen we were engaging in a form of actual cultural communion rather than merely consuming a product. It's pretty clear from my reading of Dash that in his world, what constitutes culture is ONLY product, and that really is the thing that gives him an airtight case. Ah, materialism.

In his impatience with the "shushers," Dash unpacks what I'll call a fuckload of baggage in order to demonstrate that the moviegoers who believe that they are entitled to expect a modicum of what they understand to be polite behavior don't just not "get" today's groovy plugged-in world, but that they're racist, too. One of his straw men (he never directly quotes anyone) is of the opinion that talking and texting in movie theaters happens "because [those doing it] are of a race/class that does not know how to behave. (These days, people say 'acting ghetto' instead of 'I don’t like black people and their culture', or 'white trash' instead of 'I should be able to tell poor people how to act'.)" Hmm. Allow me to get a little "real" here. I've written more than once about my moviegoing experiences in Paterson, New Jersey in the late '70s, and in Manhattan's Times Square in the '70s and '80s. (Harlan Ellison, too, has some particularly vivid talking-back-to-the-screen anecdotes from his Times Square moviegoing days.) At my beloved Plaza Theater in Paterson, particularly, patrons, most of them African-American, came in during afternoon Kung Fu triple features with their boom boxes on, and left them on; they talked back to the screen with no compunction; some even got into knife fights with each other, halted, called a truce, and sat down and caught a bit of the movie. I didn't object to any of this, and it wasn't because I feared for my safety if I spoke up. It wasn't even because I felt like it would be presumptuous of me to do so because I was a "guest" in "their space." I kept my mouth shut because I understood the tacit social contract governing this theater was an entirely different one than the one that governed, say, Cinema Village, which at that time had a smoking semi-balcony in which My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ and I could sit and puff madly at our Winstons while staring in silent concentration at Syberberg's Hitler: A Film From Germany or maybe a David Cronenberg triple feature. But as far as the Plaza was concerned, it was not a case of my judging or generalizing with respect to some hostile "they." It was exercising a little amiable common sense.

Dash later gleefully announces, "The most popular film industry in the world by viewers is Bollywood, with twice as many tickets sold in a given year there as in the United States. And the thing is, my people do not give a damn about what’s on the screen." Dash is Indian, you see, that's why he calls them "my people." Goddamn John Wayne had a point about "the hyphen." OK, that's a bad joke (well, I don't actually think it's that bad), but Dash does, while thoroughly uncollegial likely does not lie with respect to what is, for lack of a better term, "cultural difference." Although how you even KNOW there is a baptism scene in The Godfather if it's on screen while you're comparing cricket scores is beyond me. Some multi-tasking I don't get, and also, how does Dash watch a cricket match? But still: Dash's description of an Indian cinema brought to mind the critically reviled Pirates of the Caribbean movies. These pictures do not function as coherent narratives but rather as environments; they in a sense encourage a mildly disinterested consumption. One can text and talk through it without actually "missing" anything. It's designed that way. As are, in a sense, the Transformers movies. Yes, they do contain elements that will satisfy the deeply passionate follower of Optimus Prime (Jesus Horatio Christ), but they are also, not to sound patronizing, eminently ignorable. This is not the future of moviegoing; it is contemporary moviegoing. 

And while we're facing facts...well, I want to say "let's admit," but I hate that kind of writing, so instead I'll say that the lost Golden Age of Cultural Communion was not always all that. Before there were talkers and texters to complain about there were the inappropriate laughers; well I remember a rep screening of Laughton's Night of the Hunter that was all but ruined for me and the other sensitive soul I saw it with when what seemed like at least eighty percent of an admitedly packed house roared with derisive laughter at what my sensitive companion and I took to be one of the film's most touchingly lyrical moments, when the boat piloted by the two kids who are running from Robert Mitchum for their lives floats quietly past a lily pad and frog. Remember how we used to bitch about the insecure folks who signalled their "getting" every obscure cultural reference that showed up in a Godard film subtitle by ostentatiously chortling at it? Yeah, those guys were fun. (See today's excellent Film.com piece by Calum Marsh on "Watching Movies Ironically.")

So,while Dash's I-Am-The-Future triumphalism is hard to stomach, there are many ways in which he is, technologically and sociologically, not wrong. New generations used to get themselves noticed by trying to change the society that they lived in; now they affect a societal change by the way they choose to define experience. I think that Jason Bailey's recent Flavorwire piece, "The Only Way To Solve Movie Theaters' Talking And Texting Problem Is To Give In to It" makes good sense. (And it's not as defeatist as you might gather from its title.)  I mean, let's remember a few things. First, unless you want to engage people directly, which runs the risk of leading to a confrontation that could get physical, you really can't control other peoples' behavior. Second, "rules" only go so far. And if a theater's management cannot make its rules count, you're out of luck. (Look up and memorize the Serenity Prayer, people.) Third, some people really are pretty awful about not caring whether your behavior is bothering them or not. Dash himself ends his post with a taunt to the shushers: " [Y]ou could do that thing where you turn around and glare really fiercely—it seems to be working great!" 

Actually, that brings to mind a story I am not particularly proud to recount, but heck, I'll do it anyway, as it took place an awfully long time ago: 1987 or 88 if I'm  not mistaken. I was with a friend at the very short-lived downtown arm of the Thalia repertory theater, and we were watching a picture. The Thalia was a small house, with terrible sightlines and a low ceiling with visible piping, but what were you gonna do. Some guy a few rows in front of us was chattering to a friend very, very loudly and very very constantly, and I said, "Would you mind keeping it down a little up there?" And the guy shot back, "What if I don't," and I glared, fiercely, and I said, "Maybe I'll break your fucking neck."

He shut up.

And the thing was, the movie was Beyond The fucking Valley Of The Dolls. 

"To Save And Project" and Raoul Walsh's "Wild Girl" (1932)

Joan Bennett and moppets, Wild Girl, image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

I experienced a really lovely privilege yesterday: to attend the screening of a rare, restored Raoul Walsh picture from 1932 called Wild Girl. It's one of many treasures screening in this year's "To Save And Project", New York's Museum Of Modern Art's film preservation festival. The slate this year is co-programmed by the great critic J. Hoberman and the spectrum of material is gratifyingly wide, ranging from pre-code Hollywood pictures such as this one and the Clara Bow talkie Call Her Savage to Peter Brooks' seminal quasi-doc London time capsule Tell Me Lies to the latest expansion of Once Upon A Time In America to anarchist films of the Spanish Civil War.

As to Wild Girl, it's an odd delight. A near-immediate predecessor to the better-known Walsh picture For Me And My Gal (which coincidentally played on TCM last night), it stars a gorgeous and delicate (and blonde!) Joan Bennett, who would subsequently play opposite Spencer Tracy in Gal. She's paired against silent hunk and future My Little Margie dad Charles Farrell, who, his work in pictures for both Borzage and Murnau notwithstanding, is a rather limited performer. "He's kind of got this proto-Joel McCrea thing going," I idly observed in conversation after the screening; "Make sure you emphasize 'proto' there," a friend responded. Based on a play that was in turn based on a Bret Harte story and was put to film in the '20s, Wild Girl's story is a hoary pocket Western in which local child-of-nature-vixen/virgin Salomy Jen (Bennett) is competed over by a semi-noble gambler (Ralph Bellamy with a waxed moustache), a plain lout (too-weird-looking-for-movies [by Carlos Clarens' estimation] Irving Pichel) and an outright slimy fake-pious politico (Morgan Wallace), and eventually swept off her feet by a vengeful-but-sweet stranger played by Farrell. There are a few other plot threads in this very brisk 80-minute picture, including the sad tale of a poverty-stricken dad by the name of Red Pete, and the movie has an ever-bouncing momentum that keeps it entertaining. While not exactly what you'd call a Great semi-lost picture, its biggest points of interest are visual: the movie is framed as being told from a photo album, and the opening has each of the main characters introducing him or her self from the frame of a large turning page, e.g., "I'm Salomy Jen, and I like trees better than men. Because trees are straight..." And subsequent scene transitions are done with the page-turning effect where a wipe might have been. An interesting optical. The peculiar mountain town Salomy and her dad live in is set and shot in California's Sequoia National Park, and there's some staggering footage of Salomy Jen and her mammy running around the giant trees and scaring bear cubs. The forest setting gives a weird lyrical fairy-tale feel to some scenes, particularly those such as the one pictured above, with Jen and the bevy of kids poor Red Pete is so worried about feeding. Then there's Bennett's nude pond swim (nude swimming is pretty big in pre-code pictures, see also Borzage's The River and DeMille's Sign Of The Cross...I'm feeling a trend piece here, if I can find a time machine), and the great Eugene Pallette's imitation of various horse-mouth noises, a routine the movie pretty much stops dead for. For a non-Great film, that's a lot of value, and if any of it sounds attractive to you I doubt you'll be disappointed if you go and see the picture on the 11th or 18th of this month. 

"I knew Raoul Walsh, knew him well," Pierre Rissient remarked in a conversation with a few other invitees after the screening. Rissient, the great French cinephile and programmer, is in town presenting a great sidebar at this year's New York Film Festival, "Men Of Cinema: Pierre Rissient And The Cinema MacMahon." This screening was scheduled at Rissient's behest, and I thank Gabe Klinger, whose working this event for MOMA, for including me in the invites for it. (It was also wonderful to meet Mr. K., with whom I've had several on-line exchanges, some slightly fur-flying, in person, finally.) "Walsh told me that when he was a boy, he witnessed an acual lynching, and it was something he remembered when making this film." Wild Girl's lynching scene is noteworthy indeed; it's the only sequence of the film executed in a series of quick cuts, and it's startlingly effective. Before Wild Girl we also saw, at Rissient's request, an Irving Lerner/Joseph Strick short in the Museum's collection, Muscle Beach, a 1948 tone-poem with proto-Beat rambling folk-song accompaniment, set at the title locale. Rissient, now in his seventies, still clearly lives for the excavation and experience of the cinematic tokens, the tendrils of which form a kind of secret history of the larger culture in all its implications (one particular point of interest in Muscle Beach, for Rissient, is that its music was by Earl Robinson, also the composer of "The House I Live In" and a Hollywood blacklist victim). And that, my friends, is MY kind of cinephilia. 

(It should go without saying, of course, that everybody at this hoity-toity event was wearing a bow-tie, and as each of us entered, humming Mozart, we were handed a long pin and asked to stick it into a voodoo doll of Josh Joss Whedon. It was a peaceful event for the most part except for a brief incident in which Andrew O'Hehir stormed into the projection room with a DVD box set of Season Six of Psych, screaming, "You're doing it WRONG!" and had to be forcibly restrained. And since we're on the subject, alas, I ought to point out that the estimable Vadim Rizov is making sense here. )