Some Came Running

Displacement by wardrobe in Douglas Sirk's "Written on the Wind" (1956)

For the Self Styled Siren. 

Lauren Bacall's first costume. ("First" in this case meaning with respect to the actual diegetic chronology; the picture actually begins after this scene, which is part of a lengthy flashback.) With Robert Stack.

Dorothy Malone's first costume. With John Larch as "Roy Carter."

Lauren Bacall's final costume. With Maidie Norman and Rock Hudson.

Dorothy Malone's final costume. With portrait of Robert Keith.

Hat tip: Claire Kenny and Big Screen Classics, which ran the film yesterday at the mighty Lafayette Theatre. 

"Bridge" work

If you're a regular visitor to Jeffrey Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere site, you already know how I spent my Saturday—making the trek to Suffern, New York to pay a visit to my pals at the majestic Lafayette Theater, and check out their inaugural offering for the new season of its Big Screen Classics rep series, a new digital restoration of David Lean's 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai. I did not bring my camera, but I should have, because the reason the season started a little late this year is because the theater was undergoing some significant restoration, particularly on its gorgeous main hall ceiling, and it's really a sight. Jeff put up some video on his site, but I'll get some more shots when I go back for...well, I'll get to that in a bit.

Apparently the new digital restoration of Kwai is mostly for dissemination in the digital domain (the Blu-ray comes out on November 2). A variety of circumstances led to Lafayette projectionist Pete Apruzesse projecting the picture digitally, from a hard drive, more or less. Wells was not thrilled with the new version; I thought it looked very mixed, but really shone in certain scenes, particularly the jungle pursuit of the Japanese soldier by Jack Hawkins and Geoffrey Horne (Jeff had left the screening by this point). But as good as it could look, there was no escaping its, well, digitalness; the film grain in the low-angle shots of the sun-blasted blue sky (a lot of these perspectives reminded me of Black Narcissus, by Lean's old collaborators and masters Powell and Pressburger) looked like the expert reproduction of film grain rather than, you know, the real thing. As my friend Kent Jones commented in a below post apropos the various projections of Olivier Assayas' shot-on-35mm/projected-in-the-U.S.-only-in-digital Carlos, everything's in a state of transition now. Flux is the name of the game. We're gonna get a lot of good with the bad, and for the most part we're gonna get a lot of mixed, for a while. On the whole I wasn't displeased with how this look. 

And I was really thrilled to re-experience the film on such a big screen and such a willing-to-receive-cinematic-bliss atmosphere, which is a real intangible of theater viewing experience and one that the Lafayette delivers every time. Truth to tell, it's been decades since I've seen Kwai in its entirety, and I was really blown away by what a marvel of cinematic engineering and construction it is. Once William Holden's Shears makes his escape, the film moves along two parallel narrative tracks that eventuallym, and of course tragically, converge. Neither of those narratives—the building of the bridge and the mission to infiltrate its site and destroy is—is an inordinately complex one in and of itself, but Lean and screenwriters Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, working from Pierre Boulle's novel, build in all these modules in the form of set pieces that enrich the film's characterizations and tensions beautifully, highlights of course including the failed dinner negotiation scene between sad Japanese martinet Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) and his seemingly masochistic but (or is it "and"?) actually crazy-like-a-fox defier Nicholson (Alec Guinness), and the aforementioned jungle chase. The actual "story" of Kwai could have been cinematically told in ninety or 110 minutes; the two hours and forty minutes or so that the film actually takes feel absolutely necessary, because what looks to be added-value material actually comprises the nervous system and guts of the film.

In any case, an amazing pleasure. One glitch was that the cavernous house was a trifle chilly, which so discomfited my companion Mr. Wells that he had to split early, as he relates in one of his posts. As Pete and myself point out there, this was truly by accident rather than design—a furnace malfunction that cropped up suddenly and couldn't be fixed in such short order—and future Big Screen Classics events, including its frankly incredible three-day Horror-thon coming November 5, 6, and 7, which I'll be drooling about further in the near future, promise to be fully heated. I'm sorry Jeff was uncomfortable, but I'm glad he got the chance to check out the venue, which I know impressed him. I give the guy kind of a hard time about a lot of stuff; much of it is internet theater, but the fact is that we do have strong opinions and strong personalities and we hold to those things. But Jeff is a true believer in the cinema, and a trip to this joint is good for the true believer's soul. And it was fun hanging with him; he blusters a lot on his site (as I, of course, do here), and at his most eccentric he can come off like a character out of The Bonfire of the Vanities as rewritten by P.G. Wodehouse, but he's the real deal. It was fun to have this excursion and I hope he comes out again. 

Hitchcock's scenes from a marriage: "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)

I had the privilege and pleasure over the weekend of revisiting this, a Hitchcock film to which one can justifiably apply the three "U"s of cinephilia: underseen, underrated, underappreciated. This is not a picture that begins with a bang (more on that later), and that its conclusion is a punchline (albeit a very good, funny punchline) rather than a conventionally satisfying tying-up of emotional loose ends is a little disappointing, but for all that, this Man (remade by Hitchcock from his considerably sparser 1934 version; as Hitchcock said to François Truffaut, "the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional") is a remarkably rich and engaging film containing some of the most bravura filmmaking of the maestro's career.

I have to say, though, what really struck me throughout the first half was the nuanced but unsparing depiction of a marriage that could, frankly, go either way given a change of circumstance or two. The film's first scene, with Dr. Ben McKenna (James Stewart), wife Jo (Doris Day), and lively, precocious son Hank (Christopher Olsen), being all normal on the bus to Marakech and having the local ways explained to them by seemingly helpful Frenchman Louis Bernard (Daniel Gelin, Maria Schneider's dad, whose character here notes "The Muslim religion allows for very few accidents") establishes a veneer that starts to crack pretty much as soon as the family disembarks at their station. Jo—later established as "the famous Jo Conway," a stage star who gave up her career for family life—aggressively has at Ben apropos the Frenchman's seemingly intrusive inquisitiveness. She's got a point, as it turns out, but her approach to the issue verges on the paranoid. Subsequently, each little encounter with people or customs that irk the McKennas immediately leads to them lashing out at each other, or acting out in a way designed to embarrass the partner. "Is this going to be our monthly fight?" asks Jo pointedly at one juncture. Ben's worries about Bernard—planted their by Jo—prompt him to pick on Jo in the middle of a restaurant meal, and then tear into his chicken dish in a way that's expressly...well, frowned upon by the locals. And so on. When real trouble happens, the good doctor actually sedates his wife before telling her. On giving her a few pills, Jo looks at them in her hand and says, "Six months ago you said I took too many of these." Whoa. 

The marital discord was to continue throughout, but its depiction was trumped by Hitchcock's formal concerns. The picture's huge set piece is, of course, the prevention of an assassination attempt during the middle of a musical performance in London's Albert Hall. The script (an excellent one, by John Michael Hayes and Angus MacPhail, from Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham Lewis' story) had Ben and Jo meeting up at the Hall and exchanging any number of cross words before the climactic action occurs. But Hitchcock balked at the dialogue. "I'm not hearing the London Symphony," he apparently groused to Stewart. So, continues Jack Sullivan in his superb book Hitchcock's Music, "[w]hen Ben and Jo find each other, they talk excitedly—but we hear nothing; all speech is obliterated by music, which refuses to recede to the background. Hitchcock's sound notes for the reel are emphatic: 'The main sound will remain exactly as the existing music track from beginning to end.' [...][T]he audience was to hear Ben and Jo's abrasive exchange, as well as other dialogue in the lobby. But during shooting, Hitchcock asked everyone to stop talking: 'Why don't you cut the dialogue and let us hear the music?' Everyone on the set thought he had lost his judgment, if not his marbles, but once the talk was eliminated the sequence became strangely compelling."

Indeed. But it is also here that the film loses that particular thematic thread, Ben and Jo's troubled marriage, and brings definitively to the fore the finding-the-kidnapped-child theme, executed to such wrenching effect in what is, after all, the film's final movement. It is, as Robin Wood notes (in Hitchcock's Films Revisited), the "real climax" of this version, and Wood goes on: "Middle-aged academics are not supposed to admit that they burst into tears every time Doris Day begins 'Che sera, sera,' but in my case it is a fact." Same here, although for me it's actually when Hank returns the singing with a whistle that this middle-aged non-academic chokes up. It's a supremely upsetting moment, and this moment, as well as her entire performance here, represents a career high for Day, who is herself a supremely undervalued performer whose versatility and wit underlies everything she does.

I saw the film at Suffern, N.Y.'s fabulous Lafayette Theater, as part of its Big Screen Classics series. The print was a gorgeous vault print from Universal, featuring the original Paramount logo. While the current DVD begins with a hard cut after the opening credits to the bus ride, this correct version has a nice fade-in from that. It's also more detailed and less loud, color-wise, than the current disc; I would hope that someday a new version might be made (in Blu-ray, even) from the materials that generated this superb print. My next trip to the theater, which I most recently wrote about here, will be on May 8 for the newly-restored version of The Red Shoes. You should totally check it out if you're in the tri-state area.

Your messiah, now

Great news that I ought to have blogged about earlier: the visionary theater manager Nelson Page and his sound and vision ace Pete Apruzzese are, after a brief hiatus, back in charge at Suffern, N.Y.'s Lafayette Theater, a beautiful old-time movie palace built in the late '20s and maintained in palatial splendor, complete with a fully-functioning and truly mighty Wurlitzer organ. Which means, among other things, that the Saturday morning special screenings of classic films—Big Screen Classics, as the series (which operates at three theaters, in fact) is called, is also back. I revisited the site yesterday, Holy Saturday to us Catholics, for a particularly apropos screening: Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 rethink of his silent 1923 The Ten Commandments.

More about the movie in a moment. First, I want to rhapsodize a bit about the house itself, which I wrote about for the first time here. It's one of the few movie emporiums wherein one feels thrilled to be just sitting there before the lights go down. Look in front of you, and there's the gorgeous curtain.  Look behind you and there's the lovely chandelier.   It's just a spectacular atmosphere. And when the Wurlitzer's really going—you can see its percussion array in a nook stage left—the atmosphere is like nothing else out there. Just transportive. 

I also hugely admire Nelson's attention to detail. During the actual screenings, he has the sound from the movies piped into the rest rooms, so incontinent viewers can somewhat follow what's going on. I haven't been in a theater that sported such a feature since the old Palace in Dumont, New Jersey in the mid-'60s, and even now I think I might be mixing that house up with a long-gone theater in Fort Lee.  With typical wit, Nelson doesn't just pipe the audio into the men's room—he's got the speaker secreted in the body of an old-school radio, a nice touch.

In short, it feels like a privilege to watch a film at the Lafayette, and I implore those of a similar bent to mine to make an effort to check it out, even for a showing of the new Clash of The Titans, which is the theater's first-run feature at the moment. 

But it was a special treat to see Commandments there. The critic J. Hoberman once pronounced, "Bluntly put, to not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures," and while I thoroughly agree with that notion, I also think it applies equally to DeMille, who some might conceive as Bresson's directly opposite number. DeMille's is a cinema of utmost and utter spectacle (something Bresson actually had an appreciation of, as witness his admiration for Goldfinger), and what's interesting to note when watching this VistaVision-shot film, in glorious color and such, is how very much it resembles a silent picture. DeMille stages a number of sequences practically as tableaux, having some characters hold poses when not in action (I was particularly struck by the frozen mournful attitude of Nina Foch's Bithiah, Moses' adoptive mother, as the Pharaoh Seti (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) pronounces the banishment of Moses). The cutting is not fast. The camera doesn't move a whole lot, and when it does, the director makes you feel it; as, for instance the way the camera backs up as the mist of pestilence creeps into the labyrinthian dwelling place of the Hebrew slaves, while John Derek's Joshua make his way to the house of Moses.

All pretty great stuff, I think. And as screened at the Lafayette, pretty wide: 

 

Yep, that's a 2.20 aspect ratio, wider than VistaVision's 1.85. This version is the full "roadshow" length, but the print was a "Super VistaVision" version created for a revival of the film in 1989.    The studio transferred the picture to 70mm, and cropped the image for a wider frame. (This creates some issues with the title crawl at the beginning, which projectionist Pete Apruzzese had to re-rack throughout so folks could actually read the whole thing.) After the screening, Pete came out with my old friend Joseph Failla and I for a brief repast, and I asked Pete why he and Nelson had chosen to screen this particular version. He answered that it wasn't a choice. Rather, this was the only print Paramount had for theatrical screenings. An odd state of affairs, particularly given that in 1999 the picture was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress—you'd think a studio might be proud of this fact and, you know, do part of its part. Well, now that Paramount seems to be taking a slightly more active interest in preservation and restoration (see its really terrific new DVD and Blu-ray disc of The African Queen, which Dave Kehr wrote evocatively about a few weeks ago), perhaps we shall see some positive action on the Commandments front. In the meantime, a few weeks hence the Lafayette will be screening that newly restored print of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes that I'm sure many of you have heard about. I'm sure to be there. And I'm tempted to see Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much there in about two weeks. Heck, if Suffern weren't such a challenging trek from Brooklyn, I'd be there every Saturday this season. 

BTW, the title of this post is, of course, a reference to the famous line that Edward G. Robinson, in fact, never actually says in the film. The word his treacherous character Dathan (and every other character in the film) uses is "deliverer." Which isn't as catchy as "messiah," is it.