It Happened in Hollywood (1937), Harry Lachman.

Fay Wray in It Happened in Hollywood.  She's broke, so she wears it constantly, but I love love love this outfit.

Many films, especially Hollywood products, allow viewers to escape their drab lives and immerse themselves in another (often more glamorous) reality. It Happened in Hollywood, on the other hand, shows you the underside of the movie biz right at the peak of the studio era.  Richard Dix plays a cowboy hero on the silver screen who can't make the leap into talking pictures and Fay Wray is his leading woman whose career is slowly fizzling into oblivion.  Morally opposed to playing gangsters (the studio's remaining offer), Dix decides to pack it in but his transition back to ordinary life is interrupted when a hero-worshiping kid appears on his doorstep.  Dix attempts one last hurrah by hosting a big blow-out party for the kid, Billy, at the ranch he used to own during his heyday.  In an effort to impress the child on a limited budget, Dix invites a host of impersonators of famous Hollywood stars, who manage to fool Billy into believing he's dining with the crème de la crème of the movie industry.

Now, impersonators.  I have not yet been able to locate much biographical information about the impersonators in It Happened in Hollywood (I'm very curious about Carol Dietrich!), but some sites have indicated that the actors filling these roles were in fact the industry doubles or stand-ins for the stars.  What a wonderful, weird, underbelly that's not often talked about yet alone depicted onscreen.  Stars need fill-ins?  Even today they don't often admit they need them, as if it's embarrassing to admit that there might be someone else out there that physically resembles you but is worth less and can be paid to stand on a mark for hours, or maybe jump out of a plane for you, because it's cheaper.  I remember one distinct description of a double and that is of Bruce Willis' (an apparent life-long colleague to Willis); he is discussed in Julie Salomon's The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood.  To imitate someone whose entire self is a brand, to dress like them, affect their mannerisms, to use their catch-phrases -- can there be any profession more debasing than to completely sink one's own identity and adopt another's?  Even when delightful and impressive, there's always something just slightly off, even off-putting, about observing an impersonator.  We scrutinize them for flaws and inaccuracies.  Failing pretty badly at 1930s movie trivia, I couldn't identify half of the impersonators in It Happened in Hollywood.  The May West double (she even gets a bit of dialogue) was terrible but I couldn't take my eyes off the Chaplin one because he was just spot-on.  Anyway, happy whatever, Billy - here's a pile of second-rate imitations!  Luckily Billy gets conked out in a subsequent scene and seems to have been impressed enough and polite enough a child not to ask for anything in addition to the single, "star"-filled lunch.

This is from The Samuel Fuller Collection box set which contains quite a number of films where he contributed to the script (as in It Happened in Hollywood) however, if you're looking for films he may have directed (you know, like sitting in a director's chair, like in the cover art on this box set)  and upon which he made a firm stamp, watch out because this collection does not include many of those.

Just look at that imitation Joe E Brown wolf down ice cream! 

The Hand (1981), Oliver Stone.

This is a majestic sequence where cartoonist Jonathan Landsdale loses his hand in a car accident, streaking the entire side of a tractor trailer with blood and continuing to play blood fountain all over his macrobiotic,  loft-lovin' New York wife!  Enjoy!  Because that's as good as it gets.  

Once upon a time, A&E was a fancy new cable channel --- and yet, it played The Hand constantly.   But really, The Hand is one of the lesser "murderous hands on the loose" films.  The characters are all quite static, and there's no tension - we know he's a mental case that blames his severed hand for all his problems.  Having lost his source of income to the guy who later played the voice of Roger Rabbit, Caine escapes to California, which is depicted as a dreary place where it pours rain constantly and is populated entirely by country music loving rednecks!  The scene between Oscar winning Caine and Bruce McGill (below, left) who starts every sentence with "Ah reckon" is quite the thing.  Just off him already!  This disk had commentary by the director, Oliver Stone, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.  This isn't as bad as "Manos" Hands of Fate in the hand-related B-movies but next time you're hankering for something of quality from this specific genre, I'd highly recommend The Beast With Five Fingers (1946) instead.  

This trunk is roomy, Ah Reckon.

Baby Doll (1956), Elia Kazan.

"I don't eat a nut that's been cracked by a man's mouth."

Technically, this is a "he walked out of the room" movie, not a "movie he made me turn off."  It's just a shade over the top, ridiculous, out there, nose-wrinkling.  I guess there's a reason the Catholic Church had it banned.  I reveled in it.  It's got genuinely good acting, a bafflingly grotesque depiction of southerners and the awesomeness of awesomeness: Eli Wallach (El Cattivo!) cast as a seductive Sicilian in trimly belted trousers, holding a fly-whip and breathing all close and heavy like on our titular Baby Doll (played by Carroll Baker), the 19-year old icy virgin wife of Karl Malden.  

Baby Doll is very stagey and, in parts, shouty.  I do sometimes find that a photographed play can sometimes be a mis-use of film - it's by no means an interpretation of a written work for film, it's simply capturing a stage performance.  But there is something to savour there, and it's the acting style and the general approach towards Tennessee Williams from when his material made it big.  Karl Malden gets the low marks for doing nothing but yelling.  He's very monotone.  But to see him sweat and struggle and pull on his sad, diamond-shaped thatch of what passes for hair in extreme frustration allows a few gems like, "WHAT IS THIS, GRASS?" to pass by.  Malden's character is the ultimate loser, perhaps the biggest loser ever encountered onscreen.  He fails at everything.  His crime is even discovered in the first act, and is even obvious to his thumb-sucking bride with her fourth-grade education.  He can't even yell at Aunt Rose (who looks like Harpo in a tea towel) very effectively.  Yes, the black farm-hands and Chinese workers constantly giggling at him from the edges of every scene do make a slightly distasteful margin illustration, but again, it also just echoes what we in the audience are doing.

I loved the greasy details and for a purely visual medium like film, Baby Doll just about has a stink.  The floors are rotting and slippery with melted icebox trays.  There's a pigpen in the front yard (how scenic) and  all they eat for breakfast is a Coke.  Sure, today, Baby Doll looks kinda hokey but I bet you if anyone made such a bluntly rude picture about the lack of sophistication in rural Quebec, or Alberta bible-thumpers, well, sign me up because I would be laughing all the way through that one, too.  

The Naked City (1948), Jules Dassin.

The Naked City takes deep focus to another level:  every face in the background is part of the story and worth following, if only for half a moment.  The film is deeply detailed, filled with hats, hand-lettered shop windows, subtle gestures.  This is a vanished time and place where kids amble along unchaperoned holding corn dogs and jump ropes.  The Naked City comes alive in street scenes.  When leads exchange dialogue, it's a little less captivating except for the final quarter when our young detective Halloran finally finds his main suspect Willie Garzah (above).  Interrupted from his prison-style exercise routine, Garzah struts in his crummy apartment, sweaty and arrogant.  Halloran, played by Don Taylor, is so perfectly vulnerable and unsure, a thin kid in an grown-up's fedora and baggy suit.  

Older detective Dan Muldoon (played by Barry Fitzgerald) shows Halloran the ropes as they struggle to piece together why a young model was murdered.  Everything from Dragnet to Law & Order is a bit of an echo of The Naked City which makes it feel somewhat dated rather than groundbreaking, as it surely once was.  The original cliche!

Mexican poster for Invisible Ghost

   

Cleansed of Leeches!

The Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures, 1934.

You'd think working in Hollywood in the 30s might be pretty cool, but apparently for Ed Kuykendall, it the last two years were a NIGHTMARE!

Maniac Cop (1988), William Lustig.

You got the wrong guy!  The mighty Bruce Campbell is stuck in a lame duck B-movie.

This movie is under arrest for boring the crap out of me.  Yes, this film is basically as stale as that joke.  Maniac Cop isn't a bad premise: someone in New York is on a killing spree dressed in police uniform -- is it an angry, rogue cop?  But it ambles along at a codger's pace.  It was written by Larry Cohen, who also wrote Black Caesar, and it features Richard Roundtree (Shaft) as a police commissioner.  Hey, this film is blaxploitation offspring!  Weirdest shower fight scene until Eastern Promises and keystone cops that say "ewwwwww" at the sight of a dead body.  I can't believe they made this in 1988!  

A Third Face (2002), Samuel Fuller.

Samuel Fuller and Don Ameche in Hollywood, 1941:  the writer-type and the actor-type.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.  The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.  The opposite of faith is not faith, it's indifference.  The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. 

- Eli Weisel, quoted by Samuel Fuller in The Third Face.  

If you told me up front that one third of Sam Fuller's autobiography was going to describe his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, I might have given this book a pass - which would have been a real shame.  Sam Fuller's understanding of war allowed him to call bullshit when he saw it.   "Heroes?  No such damned thing!  You moved your ass one way, and you didn't get hit.  You moved it another way, you were blown to bits.  When the battle was underway, experience and intuition, not heroics, were useful," Fuller writes, recounting his experience at Omaha Beach.  He later expresses his disdain for the phoney patriotism of John Wayne movies.  While reading The Third Face, it struck me that Fuller's Hollywood neighbour and friend Quentin Tarantino must have heard some of these yarns before they made it to print.  As he lays them out cinematically, Fuller's anecdotes seem hardly real.  Nazis dressed as mourners and priests, holding a fake funeral in a vacated town, praying over four empty infants' coffins as an ambush strategy?  Unbelievable!  A soldier muttering "I love action movies," mesmerized by a cowboys and Indians movie poster he spotted on the wall during a bloody shootout with Nazis in a cinema in Aachen?  This is right out of Inglorious Basterds!   

Fuller's oeuvre is one of a man who wasn't afraid to say no.  He refused to direct Patton, because he disliked the man.  He wouldn't allow the studio to cast John Wayne as his sergeant in The Big Red One, his most personal work based on his wartime experiences (luckily he was later able to go ahead with the project, with Lee Marvin in the central role).  But as Fuller himself points out, his films were never just about war -- he wrote thrillers, crime films and exotic love stories.  Fuller's inability to compromise lead to B-movie territory.   After the studio system completely dissolved, Fuller was left to drift professionally and the psychedelic 60s just seemed to puzzle (or at least depress) him.  In 1982 his film White Dog was so controversial that it was shelved, at which point Fuller and his family decamped to Paris.  Luckily, Fuller lived long enough (he died in 1997 in his 80s) to find himself well-appreciated by a new generation of directors that included Wim Wenders, Martin Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino and others.        

Movie lovers who enjoy disappearing into the MGM fantasyland of film may find Fuller's works too gritty to enjoy.  In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thompson even goes so far as to question whether Fuller was aware of what he was doing as a director.  Fuller's autobiography makes it very clear that he was completely aware of what he is doing.  Sure, sometimes money, junior editors and cowardly studio execs made things difficult but he was very strongly propelled by a personal vision and managed to translate that into film time and again.  "People continued trying to pigeonhole me as a lefty or a righty, and my work as being liberal or conservative, projecting their own notion on me.  I wouldn't let them affect my deeply held belief system.  Peace and ethics were my beacons."  

The Naked Kiss (1964), Samuel Fuller.

Shoving dirty money into Candy the Madame's mouth.

Love.  This film swings wildly between hysterical violence (infamous opening sequence where hooker Kelly whales on her pimp until her wig flies off) and sickly sweet schmaltz (Kelly singing "The Bluebird of Happiness" to a room full of polio tots on crutches).  The tonal result is CAMP.  

"Life is sweet, tender and complete..."

Nevertheless, I loved this film's crazy mood swings.  This is one whacked out film.  Fuller has one thing right on, and that's the hypocrisy surrounding prostitution.  The town's cop Griff has a go at Kelly right off the bat -even though it's his job to keep prostitution out of his town - and then he's personally disgusted when his wealthy but oblivious buddy Grant takes a shine to her.  The women in the film are more ambiguous in their attitude towards Kelly and once her past becomes common knowledge, everyone gets the knives out.  

Mark of the Vampire (1935), Tod Browning.

Check us out, likeable leads in jaw-droppingly gorgeous tweeds!

Clever and beautifully crafted, directed by Tod Browning with cinematography by James Wong Howe.  I think I have a crush on the little lady vampire!  Let's just enjoy some screenshots here.

Wonderful staging of a conversation between our heroine and her legal guardian:  dialogue necessary to move the plot along in the background, with butterball maid inspecting delicious vittles in the foreground.

We don't even see vampires until fifteen minutes in.  Their stately, slow walking is creepy enough to set us on edge - brilliant!  

The Player (1992), Robert Altman.

Ugh.  Let's forget what we know about Altman and start from scratch here.  This film is banal, wanders endlessly, beats dead horses and has a very amateur visual aesthetic.  I dunno, when all those voices are talking on top of each other but the story is dragging, I found it hard to convince myself that this was the same guy that made McCabe and Mrs Miller.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's an eight minute opening tracking shot where everyone's talking about films that had tracking shots.  It later shoves your nose in obvious film references, as in:

film poster in the background

 cutting soon after to 

Ooooooh, a sitting for "Mr M."

This is about one hour, forty five minutes after we see Tim Robbins drown a guy in a puddle.  We get it!  Altman does make a decent sketch of what jerks resembled circa 1990.  Tim Robbins, despite his gangly skinny bod and boyish face, manages to pull enough asshole vibe out of the air to fit the part.  Greta Scacchi's character loves to take polaroids and manipulates them.  This is hilarious, because it's so nineties and such a lame pseudo craft practiced by bored middle-class, middle-aged women (one notch up from scrapbooking) so not a bad way of indicating that she's a poser, not an artist.   I.E.,

Brion James ("what's a tortoise"!) looks like he's been swabbed in orange paint (he's a sun loving movie mogul, get it?).  Then there's the sex scene, which is a gut-buster.  Scacchi and Robbins are drenched (in what, sweat?  hot tub fumes?), lit in hellish reds and the sounds of jungle drums beat erratically in the background while Robbins sputters some cornball dialogue.  We had read the running time wrong and had a major debate as to whether this would become a "film he made me turn off" but mercifully it ended at the two hour mark and the remaining minutes were just DVD extras.  There is a God!        

The Lodger (1944), John Brahm.

While creatively photographed, I strongly disliked The Lodger.  I found it unbelievable and adolescent in the approach towards its subject matter.  In the words of David Thompson, lead actor Laird Cregar "had a short hour at the feast."  Dead of a heart attack at 31, he is much lamented as a talented actor whose burgeoning career seemed so promising.  Watching The Lodger, a relatively humourless film, I could see a bit of the young Vincent Price in Cregar - only in that Cregar was also willing to lend nobility to characters that are large and menacing (and more than a bit hammy).   Cregar seems the type who could have later turned his image on its head, played it campy and had a few good laughs.  The Lodger, however, didn't really add up in my books.  Its depiction of women is naive to the point of being insulting.  None of these women could sniff out that there was something not quite right about Mr Slate?  Why is the most beautiful stage actress in London drawn to a loner misfit?  Why does she want to comfort him?  The landlady simply offers him accommodations without references?  The film does depict Whitechapel as poor and riddled with prostitutes and thieves.  But by making the central female character a popular music-hall performer with perfect teeth, the "other" murders just become exotic backdrop rather than part of the story.  George Sanders' small role is delightful -- but how could we expect anything less from the adventuresome womanizer who married two Gabor sisters!  

Best Worst Movie (2009), Michael Stephenson.

Last night I got to meet one of the actors of the Worst Movies of All Time!  George Hardy runs a successful dental practice in eastern Alabama and also played the dad in Troll 2, a film made in 1990 and rated by IMDB as one of the "bottom 100" -- currently it's ranked #59 out of the 100 worst films ever made.  Last night he was invited to our local rep theatre to introduce Best Worst Movie, a kindly look at Troll 2, its cult fanbase and the whereabouts of its cast and makers.   George is used as the documentary's focus.  A personable ham, he wonders whether he could have been more - a true working actor -- heck, maybe a star.  The surprise latent popularity of Troll 2 seems to have given him just enough of a taste of fame to understand the tedium that comes along with it.  Spouting a silly catch phrase, "you don't piss on hospitality!" and spending hours on end at a booth at conventions talking to people he doesn't really "get," George reflects on his blessings.

George Hardy and Michael Stephenson in Troll 2.

Throughout this journey, he and Michael Stephenson, who played his son in Troll 2, track down all the cast members many of whom seem to be personally disillusioned with their own inability to find success in acting (at least George has his dental practice)!  Utah, despite the  majestic mountains,  looks shabby and downcast.   The most fascinating character might be Claudio Fragasso, the film's Italian director.  Unable to admit his movie was a low-budget bundle of confusion, he is completely unable to enjoy the ironic hilarity people get from his work.  He grumbles in the background, calling the actors dogs and the fans idiots!  So why is Troll 2 and not the original Troll a cult favourite?  You'll just have to see for yourself - because I completely agree with all the film's fans that praise its loveable oddness.  Best Worst Movie shows how the public is never just a passive recipient of mass-media products.  We sometimes derive great joy from these products in ways their creators could never have anticipated.

Loveable oddness:  a corn on the cob makeout scene! 

Get your hands off the classics! How modern technology is making my life as a classic movie fan hell.

I'm stuck in the Snake Pit of rights issues & feel like I'm going CRAZY!

OK, I like to think I am a somewhat informed citizen of the world, but I feel like I'm drowning in a world of unnecessarily complicated rights issues.  One huge beef I have as someone living north of 49 who just digs old movies is how difficult it is to see some films.  Without having to hire a 1-800 lawyer, I'd like to know why this is.  Suggestions welcome!

Problem #1:  HDTV without the HD or, Canadians Can Go Screw Themselves.
I'm a cheap bastard but we caved.  We got a lovely Sony flatscreen with HDTV.  OK, I theorized, now I could see the glistening globs of brylcreem in George Raft's hair, what's not to like.  But, wait.

TCM is obviously my channel of choice (though props to CHCH and TVO for filling the gaps with even more well chosen and uncut classics).  Yet I quickly noticed that while I do receive TCM in HD, I often get this on my screen:  Blackout in Effect.  Sure, the movie is on in non-HD, but if you switch to the HD channel - bupkis.  WHAT!  I am paying for HDTV and not even getting it?  I'm not the only one who's noticed this.  There's a few online discussions but none of them have been able to clearly explain who I should get angry with.  http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=117585  Should I be shaking my fist at my HD provider, or with TCM?  Is this not a sad world where we can't even figure out who we need to complain to?  At this point, I don't even understand if I should slowly tear up my Robert Osborne Fan Club card or be writing the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).  What is Radio-television, by the way?  It's 2010, man, do you think maybe Canada needs someone to help sort out digital issues rather than figure out which way to dial the AM/FM knob?

Problem #2:  I Want to Buy Your Product, But You Won't Let Me.
Over the summer I read a great article about services where film archives will create DVD-Rs on-demand-- they'll make you one off pressings of out-of-print films.  WOW!  You can either go directly to the company's site (as in Warner's shop:  http://www.wbshop.com).  Amazon also makes their products available, too (admittedly, Amazon buries these offerings pretty deeply, with extra long URLs like http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2204702011).  MGM products are also available.   When I tried purchasing one of these items through the Warner shop, I was denied!  DENIED!  Again, they played the "foreigner" card. In their response to me, they wrote:

We are very sorry, but we cannot ship DVD or Blu Ray discs outside of the US due to licensing and distribution regulations. These products are also formatted differently for different regions of the world and the version that we sell would not play on DVD systems built for your region.


We apologize, but we do not have international release information. Please contact your local retailer for this information. Again, we are sorry for the inconvenience, but we hope you will look at the many other items that we have that are able to ship internationally.

OK - I realize I do live in a separate, sovereign nation (even if we put Canadian films in the "foreign" section in rental stores... we're kind of self-loathing).  What I don't really understand is the rights restrictions.  What licensing and distribution regulations?  (Citation?)  OK, so even if there's some truth in that statement, what do they mean "the version we sell would not play on DVD systems built for you region."  Really?  Do I live in North Korea?  Jeesh!

What I don't understand is the larger issue.  Is there an unwillingness to provide these products widely without further compensation?  Is it outdated copyright legislation?  Is it poorly written (industry-friendly) copyright legislation?  At the moment, bill C-32 is going through a second reading in the Canadian House of Commons  http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5439/135.  Balanced copyright advocates such as the author of that attached post (Michael Geist) do see major weaknesses in the proposed legislation, mainly because of the anti-circumvention provision that prohibits the breaking of digital locks.  I think that what this means is that the legislation is attempting to take away your right to alter a product you've fairly bought.  Like when my little sister recorded herself singing on top of her Dr Seuss cassette.  ILLEGAL!

Red (2010), Robert Schwentke.

When I moved out of Toronto it felt like a bit of a relief only because I had always felt adrift, unsettled and unfulfilled while living there.  Recognizing that it was not the city's fault, I made a mental inventory of everything about it that delighted me:  the Hungarian schnitzel, the rep theatres... and the Toronto Reference Library!  If you ask me, the Toronto Reference Library is Canada's unofficial national library: a funky 70s design by architect Raymond Moriyama lined in cozy orange carpeting and draped with spider plants (plants!), it features Logan's Run elevators and an infinite spots to sit and ogle.  The collection is massive and accessible.  For the most part, nobody has to go and get anything for you from behind closed doors (through it's also primarily non-circulating, so you can't take anything home).  It's a living cover spread of Architectural Digest from 1977, complete with anything you'd ever want to read -- and the air is fresh!    

 The Toronto Reference Library.  Photo by Scienceduck, 2007.

Red is a sweet-natured, fun, if slightly predictable adventure movie.  They also went out of their way (scenes were filmed on location in New Orleans, New York and Chicago) to shoot one weenie library scene in the Toronto Reference Library (which they needed to disguise as an American library - why would the CIA agents be looking for Bruce Willis in Canada?).  Clearly, these are location scouts that know their stuff!

Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), Brian De Palma.

Total Corky St Clair brainwave today:  Bonfire of the Vanities, a stage production acted with just three people:  an African American, a Jew and a WASP!  OK, that might be a little too Springtime for Hitler for some people.  (Whatever, I'm so sure my community theatre company can pull this off!)

Bonfire of the Vanities was the first "adult" book I bought, at about age 14.  New York was about 3000 miles away, an imaginary place I knew about only through movies like Ghostbusters and Margaret Bourke White photographs.  I didn't get what fuggedaboutit was supposed to mean, and there were only two black families with kids in my high school so to say that I was culturally naive would be a huge understatement.  But Bonfire had a flashy cover, weighed about 2 pounds and looked pretty impressive to carry around, way cooler than It (for spazzes) or Les Miserables (for snotty rich kids who'd get to go out of town to see the musical and wear that obnoxious sweatshirt for months afterwards).  The Brian De Palma film (the production of which was documented in the brilliant book The Devil's Candy, by Julie Salamon) seemed to have been created with the same level of sophistication as the grade nine me.  It's also a complete hoot to watch now, as an adult.  What the HELL were they thinking!

First, let's talk bad casting and terrible performances.  Kim Cattrall's artificial but indeterminate "socialite" accent is nose wrinklingly bad.  But choosing Tom Hanks as the central character was probably one of the decisions that ensured that even if everything else went right about this movie, it would still be doomed to failure.  Hanks is completely unable to conjure arrogance, privilege or anything other than rubber-faced consternation.  The only exception to his one expression is found in one later scene, when his world collapses around him and he chases a crowd of ass-kissing guests from his apartment with a rifle.

 Tom Hanks expresses mild discomfort at being introduced to an HIV-positive poet.

LATER, Tom Hanks expresses complete shock when he realizes his mistress is talking with his wife!

THEN, Tom Hanks is reflective, as he hears the poet recite lines about Don Juan and realizes how he might actually be talking about him.

EVENTUALLY, Oscar moment! (?),  Tom Hanks goes batshit with a rifle.

Like a very low-budget production whose fake props or cheap sets betray the illusion of the medium, this film is anti-film:  I couldn't for one moment stop thinking that I was watching a film.  I couldn't hear the dialogue, I couldn't follow the story.  The music blared unsubtly.  Every camera shot is obtrusively a worm's eye view (WHY)?  Unrealistic details that you might normally not care about stood out like a sore thumb.  (Why is Kim Cattrall preparing appetizers on the tray in the kitchen, wouldn't her staff do that)? The only convincing scene in the entire film, the only time you forget you're watching a film and start listening to what some guy is talking about -- is when the lovely Alan King has his one brief scene talking about animals crapping on an airplane!  Why?  Because he's playing it like a comedy!

I'll be your trophy wife, Alan.  At least you have a damn personality (if, by the end of this scene, no pulse).

The ultimate act of cowardice is the casting of Morgan Freeman as the judge (it was supposed to be Alan Arkin, but De Palma thought that he would be too... Jewish.  You know, exactly like in the book, and that could have have potentially been offensive to African Americans).

Is this offensive to African Americans?  'S OK, we got Morgan Freeman.

Freeman wraps up everything up neatly by dismissing the case and lecturing everyone in the courtroom:  the sunglasses wearing community activist, the black community, the WASPs, the Jewish lawyers, the journalists, about dignity.

"Dignity is what your grandmother taught you!"  (Seriously, that's what he says).

FIN

Whoa!  I've never re-read Bonfire; as I got older I learned in school about Tom Wolfe and his place in contemporary fiction (and first-person journalism).  I heard the satire in I am Charlotte Simmons wasn't on target, and I gave it a pass.  Now that I'm older, I read a lot of great writing on filmmaking and other topics.  But there's one thing missing from my menu and that's some kind of analysis of failure.  Salamon's book never really answered that question for me -- or, she offered too many little reasons that this particular project failed.  Movies are massive undertakings but reflect what many of us are faced with in our adult lives.  Whether we are bosses, parents, teachers or chefs:  we get some cash together, find some people to help us out, and we execute projects.  How is it that movie missteps are catastrophes that manage to waste the equivalent of a small country's GDP and insult our intelligence?  

Le Cercle Rouge (1970), Jean-Pierre Melville.

Le Cercle Rouge struck me as strikingly close to Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes) by Jules Dassin.  Le Cercle Rouge also has a jewelry heist as its climactic scene, and like Rififi, it is an extended scene filmed in near silence.  A beautiful neo-noir, it unfolds slowly and carefully.  Melville clearly delights in the planning and mechanics of the break and enter and justly so, as what is the point of such a film if executed unbelievably?  The strange tone, in part due to being filmed in isolated locations (the empty winter countryside, at night in an abandoned apartment, or along empty early morning streets) makes it seem as though the film's thieves are the only crooks in all of Paris - or France, for that matter.  Paris' top detective is on just one trail: theirs.  Our anti-hero Corey has a tendency to fondle standing racks of pool cues and offers a red rose to his partner in crime.  

Gangster's Boy (1938) William Nigh.

Sorry to break it to you, but Larry Kelly is an insufferable bore of a central character:  a do-gooder high schooler, class valedictorian and aspiring West Point scholar.  When his absentee dad settles back home and it's revealed he was in the can for running beer during Prohibition, Larry becomes a pariah with his square pals.  Another Monogram dud drenched in morose sanctimoniousness, with wimpy Irish caricatures like steadfast wife Molly Kelly (!), filmed in the style of your local public access cinematographer (aka The Tripod).  Good clean fun for dingbats!

Essanay rejection slip

Thought this Essanay Studios rejection slip was amusing (remember, this is what Louella Parsons used to do for a living!)  From Old Hollywood, a tumblr site: http://oldhollywood.tumblr.com/post/1374666427/the-rejection-slip-essanay-film-manufacturing

I Want to Live! (1958), Robert Wise.

"Masterpiece art," wrote Manny Farber in his essay "White Elephant Art VS. Termite Art", "reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity."

I'm pretty confident Farber would call I Want to Live white elephant art. Susan Hayward's Oscar-winning performance was obnoxiously one-note. David Thompson hits it on the head when he says of Hayward, "If, as I feel, she is largely devoid of appeal, it is a credit to her determination and uncompromising directness that she lasted so long." I Want to Live almost taunts you with its A-film values. You like the nightclub scenes from shoddy B-noirs? Well, we hired Art Farmer! This film sucks the zest from a B-noir, jettisons the illicit fun that can be had from a pulp plot and crams middle class values down your throat. But to finish with Farber (this time from his essay "Underground Films": "this prize picture... has every reason to be successful. It has been made for that purpose. Thus, the year's winner is a perfect film made up of solely of holes and evasions, covered up by all types of padding and plush." Plus, they use a baseball bat to pound in life lessons that you learned in kindergarten. Beware of sanctimonious bullshit, friends!

L.A. Noir (2009), John Buntin.

In sketching the career of LA police chief William H Parker, John Buntin has written a history book that reveals that the real-life shenanigans of politicians, cops and crooks in LA would make most contemporary noir films appear as fake as a bowl of wax fruit.  Yes, with a cast of characters that includes strippers named Candy Barr, secret intelligence files full of juicy details and an indelible description of the killing of Bugsy Siegel, the material is instantly compelling.  But Buntin has constructed his book intelligently and with purpose; as he states in the acknowledgments section, his central figure Parker was "a controversial police chief whom criminologists associated with what they call 'the professional model' of policing" but was seen at the same time as "'an arrogant racist' who nearly destroyed the west's greatest city".  He delved deep into the original source material, even tracking down de-accessioned LAPD records in an effort to write an objective history of Parker's impact on the LAPD.  Interestingly, while the book's focus is on Parker's career and so offers more details about the years between the 20s and 60s, Buntin ultimately uses Parker's carefully crafted protection of the position of police chief (which he achieved by proposing changes to legislation) to illustrate the failure of the LAPD to contain the riots in 1992 after the beating of Rodney King.

L.A. Noir demonstrates the complex tug-of-war between empowering police with tougher tactics and striking down such measures to allow individuals greater personal freedoms.  What techniques were considered appropriate and inappropriate by society and towards what segment of the population?  In the 20s and 30s, "rousting," or continually arresting target groups as a form of short-term harassment was considered unlawful even when practiced against professional criminals such as run runners yet likely continues to this day as a legitimate tactic.  The knowledge of how to use some technologies (like wiretapping) grew quickly and the regulation of its appropriate use as a police tool lagged for years.

Always returning to Parker, the humourless hardass, the commie-paranoid honky, the staunchest anti-corruption cop on record, Buntin's narrative takes many on-topic detours.  The principle detour is that of the life of Mickey Cohen.  Buntin purposefully twinned colourful gangster's life story with that of the LA Police Chief Parker to give his story an antagonist.  Cohen's life, unknown to me, was continually surprising and highly entertaining.  I stopped tallying the number of hot-water heaters obsessive-compulsive Cohen had installed in his temporary lodgings to accommodate his habit of multiple showers.  How did this guy live so high off the hog for so long, a minor celebrity in his own right?  So many details about him are hilarious and fascinating (and many were captured by screenwriter Ben Hecht over a series of interviews that grew into what seems to be a somewhat close personal relationship).  

Despite its title, setting and its ability to churn up film imagery in the mind of the reader (for example, introducing real-life characters such as Nick "the Greek" Dandolos - a likely inspiration for Edward G Robinson's character in Smart Money), L.A. Noir doesn't delve into the entertainment industry until it's directly relevant to its theme of Parker's career arc.  Parker was proficient in honing the tools of his trade - statistics was one of them - but he also came to recognize the benefit of good PR.  In the 50s he partnered with the creators of Dragnet to see that the show came to act as the voice of the LAPD; certain episodes were even crafted to justify some of Parker's more questionable tactics.  

No book has even drawn a clear line between an exotic noir backdrop and events my own lifetime - for me, Buntin's book has made his history of the LAPD resonant and relevant.  The history of surveillance, wild and crazy southern preachers trying to convert Jewish gangsters-- OK, enough from me - just get out there and read this thing! 

The Rogues Tavern (1936), Robert F Hill.

Lazy, lazy, lazy!  Indistinct characters, corny jokes and someone running around with a puppet made from a stuffed dog!  Aside from the decent finale in which one of our B-actresses is allowed to chew the scenery to her heart's content, this one's a dud.  The foley artist was on the ball though, I definitely heard every shoe step.

American Grindhouse (2010), Elijah Drenner.

American Grindhouse is Exploitation Films 101: a good overview of movies that fall outside the realm of good taste, movies that were generally excluded from the mainstream viewing experience.  It explores the evolution of the genre from the first moments of nudity caught on film, to the educational sex pictures, to women-in-prison movies, to gore and eventually porn.  American Grindhouse posits that there's often been a great, productive relationship between the taboo and the mainstream and at times often not much difference between the methods of an exploitation film dismissed as trash (Blood Feast, Last House on the Left) and methods used by directors who couldn't be more revered (Psycho's Hitchcock, Jaws's Spielberg).

John Landis, one of the interviewees, is delightfully entertaining to listen to as is Kim Morgan, film writer and author of Sunset Gun blog:  http://sunsetgun.typepad.com.  In Sunset Gun she appears fully immersed in the long lost world of the Hollywood golden era, speaking intimately of stylish, long gone film icons.  I would suggest she may even be depicting herself as a character who could have walked out of a film noir:  sexy L.A. blonde with a taste for classic cars.  I got a big kick out of Morgan because in American Grindhouse she's surprisingly funny.  Big noir thinker Eddie Muller also appears and many of the ideas he expressed in his 1996 book Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema gives American Grindhouse its intellectual backbone.  Hey, don't skip over this - picking through trash can be quite revealing.

Dear Boris: the life of William Henry Pratt a.k.a. Boris Karloff (1975), Cynthia Lindsay.

Boris Karloff (far right) and his brothers, London 1933.

It must be next to impossible these days to build yourself up from scratch, successfully effacing all things you did that wish you could forget about.  Did you marry the wrong guy and don't want anyone to know?  Want a more appealing surname?  Seems like most of our favourite personalities from the golden age of Hollywood transformed themselves into whatever they wished; recordkeeping was perhaps less reliable (especially in frontier territories) and of course google didn't exist to put everything you ever did or said in stone for all to see, forever.  Boris Karloff is a great example.  Born the very English William Henry Pratt, he spent several years in British Columbia performing in theatre troupes and doing odd jobs.  He's remembered fondly in Regina for pitching in when a tornado blew through town in 1912, leaving the streets strewn with planks and debris.  (The tornado also bankrupted the troupe he had been associated with, the Jean Russell Company). 

Author Cynthia Lindsay was a friend of Karloff's (godmother to his daughter) and this book has a chummy if undisciplined tone.  She calls herself a detective as she attempts to sniff out facts like how many times he really was married (we never find out).   While not prudish, she's polite, yet her insertion of herself into this biography has little value.  When interviewing Karloff's ex-wife Dorothy (and an old friend), she describes herself as somewhat uncomfortable in the role of biographer:  "we both immediately got the giggles," she writes, "and it wasn't easy forcing myself into the role of 'Brenda Starr, reporter.'"    The book is more of a scrapbook than true a biography, scattered with amusing anecdotes and family photos.  But for all her detective work, Lindsay digs up very little on Karloff's pre-Hollywood years.

Lindsay does discuss the ghettoization of actors by ethnic background in early Hollywood.  Though Karloff left England to escape its class-based rigidity, he seems to have projected a thoroughly English persona while in the actors' colony:  he played cricket, posed for a portrait with a cup of tea, and used distinctively English words and phrases.  Karloff cites Bela Lugosi's inability to launch a mainstream career as stemming from his difficulties assimilating completely into American culture.  "He spent a great deal of time with the Hungarian colony in Los Angeles, and this isolated him," Karloff is quoted as having said to an interviewer.   Karloff cleverly adopted an exotic mystique (and surname) but was never saddled with it, as was a truly foreign actor.  Like fellow Englishman Cary Grant, Karloff went out of his way to obfuscate his past; yet still I would have preferred something richer than this picture book.

The Jazz Singer (1927), Alan Crosland.

Oh, it gets worse.  WAY WORSE!

HILARIOUS. People will tell you this is boring and mainly just a landmark because it's one of the first films to use synchronized sound.  Wrong!  The sound segments pop out and grab you.  They move faster.  To my eyes the differences were stunning - I can only imagine the impact on its contemporary audiences.  

Gut reaction:  Al Jolson's eternal fame is a total fluke.  He doesn't have much screen presence, he talks through his "jazz songs" and he's no looker.  Like mama Rabinowitz, I don't get it.  The scene (pictured above) where he readies himself for his blackface act was oddly protracted as he methodically applied all that facepaint.  What really gave me the creeps was the little scrap of fabric he pulls over his hair to complete his look.  What the eff was that made out of? 

I think it's time for a 2011 reboot.

AAAAAAAAAA!

American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now (2006), Phillip Lopate, ed.

Having come from a place of (sometimes deliberate) not-knowing,  I have been walking around telling anyone I run into the amazing things I learned from this collection of essays.  Did you know Carl Sandburg wrote movie reviews for the Chicago Daily News in the 20s?  Did you know, did you know?  I feel like a ten year old that just got the first volume of the World Book in the mail.

Lopate's choices are marvelous; bold ideas resonate throughout the book.  I feel as though I should have been acquainted with Manny Farber years ago, who touts the "toughest, most authentic native talents" in his essay "Underground Films."  And why I haven't read Pauline Kael's fundamental piece "Trash, Art and the Movies," until now-- augh!   How did she know why I never wanted a PhD in film studies?  "We shouldn't convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of other arts," she writes.  "If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment, it's even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition."  As one that sighs deeply at Analysis of the Obvious:  Turning Common Sense into Academese I'd like to quietly applaud Kael for her words.  (Sadly, Susan Sontag's offering "The Imagination of Disaster" is the kind of dull analysis that seems to have spawned even more dull analysis).  Yes, I prefer the tacky, from-the-gut reactions to film, the ghostwritten autobiography, the Million Monkey film blogs to the overblown, dry jargon laden junk found in the cranky peer reviewed cliques.  American Movie Critic's strength is that the authors talk film, but are not all film theorists or academics.  They are writers first.

Nightfall (1957), Jacques Tourneur.

Insurance adjuster James Gregory is keeping the wife up.

Hot damn!  He's got thugs and insurance fraud investigators on his tail.  Aldo Ray is keeping the lowest profile possible, making a few bucks sketching ad concepts in a crummy walk up.  Why's he laying so low - did he just pull off a bank job?  Stiff his crook buddies?  Maybe it's the ripple effect of Double Indemnity, but whisper "insurance fraud" and I'm there; it's one of those premises used to press down hard on a character, revealing his moral code and whether his hide is tough.  Nightfall --who pulled this title randomly out of their arse, by the way?-- takes off running and doesn't stop 'til the last frame.  Loved it.  A bit talky, yeah, but grown up talk and succinct overall, taking us from neon-lit LA to snow-capped peaks in "Moose, Wyoming" all beautifully photographed precisely as I'd expect from Jacques Tourneur. Tiny cast is perfect with hulking Aldo Ray linking up with little cropped-hair beauty Anne Bancroft, and James Gregory using his everyday looks to blend in with the wallpaper and take notes. 

The Coen brothers must have seen this one-- there were shades of Fargo throughout Nightfall -- stumbling through snow, the cozy ordinariness of our pseudo public servant Gregory, the wildcard psychopath that casually flicks chaos all over the place.  Gosh, I had no idea that the dad from The Parent Trap (Brian Keith, who's just about ubiquitous in these Columbia noirs) was such a freaky deak in the 50s.

The olden days: let me help you choose from this mind-boggling number of newspaper titles, sir.

Shockproof (1947), Douglas Sirk.

Good heavens, that is a lot of pattern.

My first taste of Sam Fuller's writing, which may have been diluted/mangled by co-writer Helen Deutsch.  Shockproof has an interesting premise:  that parole officer Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde) falls for his pretty new parolee Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight).  But each step forward in the unfolding of the story I thought to myself, as if!  I did get the sense that some old biddy crossed out a lot of passages from a pulp novel while shaking her head & clicking her tongue.  But there's too much gone haywire with this script for me to think we can blame it all on co-writers.

  A passerby catches sight of a suicide.